Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself

by David Lipsky

  So nice to get back to hotel and call someone?

  Yeah, it’s weird. You know—

  I haven’t had a girlfriend for quite a few months, and I haven’t missed it that much. I’ve missed it the last couple of weeks. But I’m also—I mean, I’m aware that you don’t just get a girlfriend, so that you can have that. [The being close, the call from a hotel.] I mean, to get somebody in that sort of position takes some work, and you have to sacrifice some of your own stuff to get close enough with them so that they could do that. So I don’t really feel all that sorry for myself. But it is a problem.

  Nice to have your borders redefined, though, by physical contact with another person … I’m not just a set of anxieties and ambitions. I’m a person confined to a limited range, realize your head is only a half-foot-long space, etc.

  Yeah, there’s other, I mean that kind of experience is gettable in a lot of ways. Through really hard exercise, where you learn all over again what it is to be a body. It’s gettable in a piece of music that’s so transcendently beautiful that you forget who and where you are.

  Although, like anything else, if it’s done in the right spirit and with the right head. In certain ways it can be even lonelier. If it’s more like, “Oh—you know, if I do this, will it have this effect on this person?”

  I remember hearing in New York, I forget who it was who was tellin’ this joke: What does a writer say after sex? Was it as good for me as it was for you?

  [We laugh: then I realize I’m not completely sure.]

  And what is funny about that?

  Well, why did you just laugh so hard? I think that there is, in writing, a certain blend of absolute naked sincerity and manipulation. And a certain way of trying always to gauge what the particular effect of something is gonna be.

  That’s a very precious asset that really needs to be turned off sometimes. And one of the reasons why I think I’ve had such a hard time with females, you know, when I’ve been doing long work like this book, is that I think I’m sort of in that head that makes it, um—where I can be both spontaneous and very very very very self-conscious.

  Do you think writers make bad bed partners then?

  My guess as a private citizen is that writers probably make really fun, skilled, satisfactory, and seemingly considerate bed partners for other people. But that the experience for them is often rather lonely. And if you’re thinking of Orin in the book a little bit, that’s fine.

  Tell me about the bandanna stuff we were talking about yesterday.

  I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it’s really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in ’87, because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I was gonna get a shock.

  And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I for a while dated a woman who was—she was actually a Sufi Muslim, but she knew a lot about, she was like a ’60s lady, and she knew all about all kinds of different stuff. And she said that there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. [He demonstrates where it is, the dolphin and whale spot.] And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know?

  I mean, I don’t wear it all the time. I wear it—I know it’s a security blanket for me—whenever I’m nervous. Or whenever I feel like I have to be prepared, or keep myself together, I tend to wear it. It makes me—like last night we laughed, but it made me feel kinda creepy that people view it as an affectation or a trademark or something. It’s more just a foible, it’s the recognition of a weakness, which is that I’m just kind of worried my head’s gonna explode.

  People just think it’s a way you’re trying to connect with the younger reading audience.

  I don’t know very many Gen-Xers who wear headbands. The worst thing about here is—I mean in the Southwest, people wear ’em all the time. And in New York, there’s a certain kind of hip way to dress that involves them. Here, one reason I got these plain-white ones is that people thought I was a biker. Here, it spells affiliation with Harley clubs. And I just don’t need that shit, you know? It’s hard enough to get a cab as it is.

  But people thinking it’s a commercial gesture …

  No. I don’t know what to say. I guess in a way I don’t even want you to have brought this up. [Like the “Borges and I” story.] Because now, I’m now worrying that it’s going to be intentional. Like if I don’t wear it, then am I not wearing it because I am bowing to other people’s perception that it’s a commercial choice? Or do I do what I want, even though it’s perceived as commercial—and it’s just like one more crazy circle to go around.

  Another crazy circle: one of many crazy circles of this?

  I guess. But once again, starting in about two hours, this is over. And I’m back, you know, to knowing about twenty people.

  Do you feel your fame here? I mean, forget that I’m here, and I’m sure you felt it in New York and L.A.; but you’re sitting here with your two dogs?

  I think it’s the sort of thing that you feel a lot more when there are other people around treating you differently. Like this FedEx guy came to the door. Whole different FedEx guy: You were maybe still in bed. To give me this Village Voice thing. He goes, “So how does it feel to be famous?” And that threw me. Because I like—this is my place not to have to deal with that stuff. So things may be weird here for a few months.

  People here know? The FedEx guy knows?

  Tell you man, Time and Newsweek. That’s, that’s—I hadn’t understood this, but that’s a whole different fucking level. That’s not the literary world, that’s the—and you know, I don’t know when the last person from Bloomington, y’know, who got mentioned in Time was, so it goes through the town like wildfire. You know, all my students’ parents had called them, to tell them about it … I mean, it was just like, your cover’s totally blown.

  [Starts drumming on table; this makes him anxious.]

  Not people in Walgreen’s or McDonald’s, but the FedEx guy. Did you feel invaded somehow?

  Yeah, it was a creepy feeling.

  And how’d you answer him?

  I said, “My dogs don’t give me any more respect.” The thing about it is, yeah, when people say something like that, there’s this requirement always to be witty and on, and I feel it kinda now with you. Like there’s this, um—people expect a kind of witty, covering answer, that will allow everyone to walk away feeling good and chuckling. And there’s something, there’s something I resent about that, you know? That I should get to choose, when I’m on and when I’m not. Like with you, I don’t mind it, because this is all set up. But that, that I minded. And I guess, I guess the solution is just to systematically disappoint people so often that they’ll quit asking.

  What time?

  It was like ten fifteen. The guy was forty. He also said, he also said he was coming to the reading at Borders, and I panicked, because I didn’t know about any reading at Borders. But he meant Barnes and Noble later this month.

  Did he smile?

  He smiled, but we were both looking down at the thing that I had to sign.

  Are you at the point you wanted right now?

  Expand on that.

  Your book has been received well, you’ve gone out and promoted it. You’ve got other books to write. You’re back at Bloomington. Your dogs are here, you’re at home, about to finish your book of essays, you now are someone whose words—I mean, they’ve been taken seriously for years—but they’re now guaranteed to always be …

  I think I’m where I want to be because I need to—we talked about this last night. There’s things about this that are good. But there are things that are hard, and things that are dangerous. And I’m gonna have to work ’em out. And I’m gonna have to work them out by mysel
f. You know, nobody else is gonna help me work them out. And this is a good place to do it. ’Cause, ’cause I’m left alone here. And I also have a set of friends who like me for reasons that don’t have anything to do with this. Which is a real precious thing. Yeah, there’s nowhere else I’d rather be.

  Are you pleased about where you are professionally?

  I don’t know, no, I’m not where I want to be artistically. I wanna—I feel like I shoulda done, I could’ve done a whole lot more original work in this last year, and I’ve been sort of jacklighted by all this stuff. I’m worried about this book of essays, and that a couple of these things are gonna have to be rewritten, or that Michael is going to have really smart editorial suggestions.

  You typed this book, the whole thing, three times?

  Yeah—except the first two times of typing there were also big changes, sticking stuff in.

  The whole time you’re doing this, you don’t know how it’s gonna be taken. And then everything goes about as well as it can go.

  Well, the Times dumped on it.

  Well, forgetting the Times, this is one of the few cases when the Times didn’t matter—

  I guess—again, my big worry, I mean, I have a problem with a diminished capacity to enjoy stuff that’s goin’ on. My big worry is that I won’t enjoy this. But it’ll just up my expectations for myself. Which … and expectations of ourselves are a very fine line. Because up to a certain point, they can be motivating, and inspiring, and can be kind of a flame thrower held to our ass, get us moving. And past that point they’re toxic and paralyzing. And—it’s another reason it’s very good I live here. Because New York would not help me work this out. And you know, you can’t help me work this out, nobody can.

  And when I walk out of here after I pack up, you’re here with the dogs, and no more touring—

  Well, I’ve got fact-checker phone conversations, but it’s essentially over.

  [I want something positive from him, some sense of the achievement: he moved from football to tennis, to writing, to McLean’s, to writing again, rebuilding himself, a huge thing to have brought off, and now he’s become who he from now on is going to be. I can’t find it. He’s looking at it as a tennis player: The match is still on, it’s just late in the set; he’s eyeing the alleys, where the sun is shining on the court, how his serve is falling, what’s on the other side of the net.]

  I think it’s going to be really scary. I think I’ve kind of unplugged myself for the last three weeks. And I’m going to have to sit and kind of feel it. The question will be whether I have the balls to do it. I mean, I could just go to the movie theater for three straight days and just sit there. And I may do that for a while. The thing about living here, shit eventually catches up with you.

  Still, this place is a nice place to be, isn’t it? I mean, this house, that you own, and your dogs …

  This is a good place. This is a good place. It’s been so long since I’ve gotten excited—like last night when we were in the car, pulling into town, or the big thing is in airplanes coming back to Bloomington. I can remember, not since I was at college and would come home for vacations, there’s this weird warm full excitement of coming home. And I feel like this place is home. And I know in so many ways I’m so lucky. I mean, if this, if all this stuff had happened five or six years ago, I think it would have torn me to shreds.

  Why?

  Because I didn’t have a home. And I didn’t have—I didn’t have the equipment to treat myself even marginally like a friend. Or to take care of myself, at all. And now I have at least the rudiments of it.

  [He nods and turns off the tape.]

  • • •

  PICKUP

  TOURING HIS HOUSE

  A MUSEUM TOUR OF THE WALLACE ENVIRONS

  THE WALL DECORATIONS, BOOKS

  LIVING ROOM

  Alanis Morissette cover from Spin, her taking a photograph in a grocery aisle. Um, American flag. Some weird surrealist posters. The guest room is like a trophy room or fortress of solitude: his books in different languages and editions. Magazines where essays by him have appeared. A Swiss version of Broom of the System. Lots of big, ingot-sized copies of Infinite Jest.

  A Barney towel in his bedroom.

  Dog stuff. Dogs have chewed everywhere, gnawed the edges off chairs and tables. Fur, crap stains on the carpet, crate for the dog. Chewed-up stuff all over the place. A shark doll—he’s a great white fan—on the bookcase. Globes from old cartography thing. Three bookshelves. Um … low chandelier he keeps bumping his head on when he forgets to duck. How much it hurt that he refers to me on the phone a second ago as “this guy.”

  [Not even the “Rolling Stone reporter”—“this guy is over right now.”]

  Photographs of the dogs. Scottish calvary charge poster on the wall: he is, after all, a proud Scot. His dad gave him that.

  Some sort of coal-burning fireplace set in the living room. Brick wall. Fake wood paneling. Soda cans. It’s like a frat’s first floor: the bookish frat. Curtains. One-story house, five, six rooms with a basement. Postcard of Updike. A cartoon: Comparative anatomy; Brains—Male, Female, Dog. Fra Filippo Lippi painting. “Sign of the Killer Cow” card on wall.

  Jeeves’s throw-toys everywhere. Living room: Nothing except three stuffed, crammed bookcases and dog stuff. It’s a living area for bibliophile dogs.

  The Barney towel is a curtain of one window in his room. Over his head there’s a photograph of some German philosophers who he says—he has German ancestry, “These guys tend to be paunchy, bearded, scowling, wooly, they resemble ways I could have turned out really badly, physically.” Over his dresser, in his room, photo collage of his family. Like the kind of collage kids pin on dorm walls. Photographs of his sister and stuff like that on the wall. [His house is an exhibit of separate stages of his life: dorm stage, work stage, Illinois stage, success stage (oddly enough, the guest room). Just books and dogs. His sister is pretty, and looks like a female him.]

  Clothes everywhere. The closet looks like the closet of a dorm: a lot of sneakers, stuff on the floor, warm-up stuff, rolled-up stuff. It’s like the kitchen of a restaurant, at the end of a long, Friday night rush. This is the swinging door, the equivalent of the full sink, the crusted pots, the sliced chives on the floor. Things draped on things. A lot of draped stuff—-draping is the best descriptor for his organizing approach, how he’s keeping his clothes. Aquaish lighting: blue gray. The light comes through semiclean windows, giving everything the feel of an afternoon in winter.

  Bathroom.

  [He tells me, “You might not want to go in, I just wreaked a little havoc.”]

  The padded toilet seat. Postcards: baboons crawling. The Clintons. St. Ignatius Prayer that sounds very like the AA prayer. (“Lord, teach me to be generous. / … to give and not to count the cost, / to toil and not seek for rest / to labor and not to ask for reward …”) Baby climbing up the stairs by its head.

  Tapes and CDs by the stereo, and a Botticelli calendar, Birth of Venus. Gold and silver chess set.

  [I walk to the garage. Dave has reverted to Illinois Dave, the Midwesterner who has a relationship with his scraper. He’s chipping an entire Antarctica off his car. It’s encased in ice, like something that’s come packed that way from the manufacturer. I mean, it’s total.]

  It’s my poor, shitbox car.

  What’s the make on this? It’s a Nissan?

  (Like prisoner reciting his numbers) 1985 Nissan Sentra. I know it dudn’t look like much, man, but this thing starts. This thing never breaks, it starts all the time. It’s actually a terrible problem: ’cause I gotta get a new one. But I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I can’t junk this.

  Why?

  Because it’s like, it’s my friend. I’ve had this thing all … but I can’t really leave it in the garage, I mean, that’s just sick.

  Although riding in that—[He indicates my forest-green Pontiac Grand Am—like Tower Books, Dutton’s, the book circuit, the Whitney Hotel, a car that a
lso no longer exists]—made me realize that I’m, that there are whole vistas of driving experience that I am not getting.

  [He did the driving home and to McDonald’s.]

  The feeling of gliding when you’re driving, instead of … I mean my car dudn’t even have shock absorbers, it’s like riding a power lawn mower.

  A pile of the tobacco things against the window … [Gives me a level look; I’m still saying things into the tape machine, which makes him laugh, then me.]

  Who drew the kid’s drawing? On the shelves: the “chickenhead David Wallace”?

  Um, one of my friend’s daughters calls me Chickenhead, and I call her Chickenhead. This is her latest salvo in the war.

  [There was a poster—written schedule—of tour in Eastern Europe.]

  You went to Eastern Europe?

  No. My parents are there right now.

  They gave you an itinerary? That’s cool.

  Yeah.

  [Surrealist image, floating and piping: bent over, sort of Rasta hair, flute.]

  That’s that Hopi flute god. Um, that my parents have statues of. And then a friend sent me that postcard. I keep trying to get Harper’s to run that painting. I think it looks good.

  Paradox: Do you think that kind of attention comes to people who want it very much. Or do you think that it comes paradoxically when you’ve ceased trying to get it …?

  I don’t know, because you know there are real good writers who I think have always wanted to be—I mean, I think Mailer wanted to be superfamous. And he did become … It’s just, I think part of it just has to do with your constitution. I think if you’re not a real strong person, it’s pretty hard to get any work done, you know, when you want that, because there’s not room for anything else. I mean, do you want to be famous?