I know—and on looking, knew—that I’d never seen the ocean’s shapes from these angles. But I was well aware that their immensity and depths would swallow anyone up without remorse. After she left me, I felt like I was skimming the bottom of the Pacific with rotting whales and polar bear bones.

I rose out of it, but was infused with the way these things decayed. I made my own home brew with this decomposition as its base. I drank cases and cases.

I floated in the Atlantic, but from the coast of South Carolina.

Now as I float, I understand why she left, but when I dry off, my dryness causes me to forget.

I have a picture in my mind, but I don’t know if the smiles we had on our faces were real. And if anything exists in 0–9, it must be true.

***

1) I’m standing on a street in Amsterdam, leaning against the canal wall, staring at row houses. I can’t discern which building was Otto Frank’s store.

“Which one is the annex?” I ask my best friend. “They all look the same.”

“No,” she says, “they don’t.” She crosses her arms. I look again.

One house has a triangular roof. Another nine windows. The last concrete steps that lead up to its entrance. The sun is setting now.

“The dusk sets over them all the same,” I say.

We stand for a minute that turns into two. I’m looking into the canal and see the building’s reflections. I’m not looking close enough. I feel I have committed a crime. This not knowing.

Looking back on this image, I realize that it comes from a postcard I bought in the gift shop. I used the postcard as a bookmark on and off for a year until I set it down in a coffee shop or the university’s library. Perhaps I left it on a patch of grass under the tree I sat beneath in the commons.

The image on the postcard was easy enough to find online. The answer to my question was easy enough to find, too. A blogger had taken the time to highlight the store in blue, the horrible blue of a highlighter. That blue revoked the sun. It revoked the water in the canal. It revoked the black and white photographs of the movie stars that Anne had hung while in hiding.

***

2) I’ve read two memoirs in my life, one being Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz. In Europe, they call it If This Is a Man, and it is a man. Man is a pretty pitiful thing to be.

I’ve read Survival in Auschwitz, but not If This Is a Man. I won’t be able to read it until I can read Italian. I can guess why it’s altered. American books need heroes, and since Levi survived, he was good enough to be named one.

Our publishers wanted to tattoo the name Auschwitz on the cover. A title with Auschwitz in it is far more interesting than some philosophical meandering. We want the details that make us grimace, but also titillate us. So in the way that Americans do, the publishers pushed aside Levi’s title. This is not for us, this philosophy.

But don’t you think he earned the right to name the book what he wanted?

***

3) The second memoir I’ve read is Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, in which she writes, “This record lays a claim to being historical—that is, much of it can be checked. If there is more fiction in it than I know, I should like to be set right.” McCarthy is one of the few who took the time to acknowledge that there is fiction in nonfiction. She invites correction. She wants her fiction set straight.

What is the difference between fiction and nonfiction? The nonfiction writer chooses subject matter from the real world. Its defenders say that the story being told does not originate from invention, but from people who once lived and are living. These people are not characters.

But what if I take the written words, the things I have recorded, and place them in a tiger’s mouth? It is subject matter from the real world. The words that the tiger speaks are not fictional. I have them recorded on a Dictaphone.

You can have your mother speak, your abusive stepfather scream, but they are reconstructions in
your head. They are primary players. They are the actors you set in motion in your play.

The tiger speaks truth.

***

4) Nonfiction from found autobiographical moments (note: not created).

Tara, my ex, experienced suicide at the age of twelve. Her boyfriend Steven tied a sheet around the metal bar in his closet and hung himself, leaving his little brother Robbie and his mother, now half-crazed, behind. One Christmas, long after Steven died, Robbie gave Tara an ice cream scoop with a polar bear handle.

At the age of sixteen, Robbie went quarry diving. He and his friends made it through the first jump. One of them said, “Let’s go one more time.” Of course, we know what one more time means. We’ve seen this before. Robbie broke his neck. Robbie drowned.

My uncle went to a park and shot himself in the head. However, he pinned a piece of notebook paper with his name and phone
number on it so that the police would immediately know who he was. But what is interesting about a man shooting himself? Stories like this have been suffocating me since my uncle’s death. Here’s the proof of the suffocation.

Three weeks ago, a classmate of mine sealed herself in her car. She took sheets and jammed them in places where air might find its way inside. When I heard she was dead, I thought of her at the end of a rope, a bloated face, her glasses fallen off. But she lit a small gas grill and suffocated as the carbon monoxide gathered in her car. A friend told me what my classmate looked like when she found her lying dead in the backseat of her car. She’d made a small bed and was lying on her back. My friend said she looked like herself, but her face was a bit purple.

***

5) Fiction that is nonfiction.

See all of the above.

Also known as realism: Madame Bovary, etc.

Also known as This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen in English or Farewell to Maria in Polish, written by Tadeusz Borowski. The stories in the text were inspired by the author’s concentration-camp experience, “inspired” meaning “historical subject matter chosen from the real world.”

***

6) Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

***

7) Primo. Weisel, on the day of Levi’s death, informed his audience that Levi died forty years earlier in Auschwitz. If Weisel is correct, Primo Levi’s writings are the act of a living corpse. I could write this six different ways, but why bother with oxymora?

Primo threw himself down the stairs (according to the coroner and three of his biographers). He fell (according to one good friend and an Oxford sociologist). Why two possibilities? Memory, survivor’s guilt, aging mother-in-law, no suicide note, discussions of feeling dizzy, plans for the future. He was a chemist, his friend said. It would have been a hell of a lot easier for him to poison himself. “You stupid fucking bastards, it would have been easier.”

***

8) I will map out the last year.

Uncle’s suicide

↓

Grandfather’s death

↓

Grandfather’s death

↓

Classmate’s suicide…

→ → Further, my mother’s mother had a stroke right at Christmas. A few weeks later, my mom wrote me a note with two cards in it, one for my father’s mother and one for hers. On Grandma Carolyn’s write a note telling her how you are, how the weather is. Tell her to have a Happy Birthday. On the one for my mom just write hi and your name. I’m not sure she’s with it.

I did what she asked and turned back to her note. This note with a bit of commentary could make a good short-short.

I can’t write that story though. We are used to hearing that our loved ones have forgotten. There has to be a metaphorical way to fictionalize it, but I would rather meditate on what has happened. She does not remember me → I remember her → When I think about calling, I remember that she has forgotten me.

What is this gap between her erased memory and mine that is intact? “It just happens when you get old,” my wife said. “People get dementia, get Alzheimer’s.”

You can call it these things. You can provide the scientific explanation. But what is the name of that space between choosing to forget and a seizure choosing for us?

***

9) Now the question is: Does it mean more if Primo Levi committed suicide? Do his books mean more, that is? Or if he accidentally fell down the stairs, does the fall stem from the weight of memory? Did he choose to forget and only know one way to do it? Or did he want to remember and accidentally fall down the stairs? It’s more moving, more tragic, if Levi made the choice. No, it’s more moving if we listen to Wiesel: Levi died forty years ago at Auschwitz.

Elie Weisel (Night)…living. Bruno Schulz (The Street of Crocodiles)…killed in the Warsaw Ghetto. Robert Desnos (État de veille)…killed in Theresienstadt. Tadeusz Borowski (This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen)…suicide after the war. Primo Levi (Survival In Auschwitz/Se questo è un uomo)…suicide? Accidental? Suicide—

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So when I heard that the terminology around acts that our culture considers to be “sexually deviant” was being changed in the May update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), I was curious. The DSM-5 is a field guide for the mental health community and it was being updated this month for the first time in thirteen years. There was considerable noise in the press over how the DSM-5 might newly characterize healthy sex versus deviant sex.

I looked around to understand what appeared to be a very confusing run-up to the May update, and found the activist and author Susan Wright to be the most eloquent commentator on the topic. Susan founded the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), a national advocacy organization for the BDSM, swing, and polyamory communities, in 1997. I asked if we could talk for an assignment I’d gotten for Details on the subject. But what I was chiefly interested in was writing a book that looked at women and sex in a way that might be counterintuitive.

We spoke on the phone at length one night in April, after my son went to sleep. Our conversation left me humbled. In 1991, when Susan got into the kink community, she got a lucky break to get her first book published. But when her editor discovered she was in a kinky triad with a married couple, he told her that if she wanted to get her book published, she would have to sleep with him, too. “I stood up and walked out,” she said. “It was one of the defining moments of my life, and it sparked the activist inside of me.”

I wanted to get her voice out in the world to color the hard-facts reporting that didn’t dig into the issues deeply enough. Susan had smart things to say about consent versus rape not just in “fringe” communities, but in the sexual lives of people of every persuasion. Her sharply-worded thoughts of media influence on the persecution of alternative sexuality gave me a serious education. But what hit me most was how much we yielded to contemporary notions about sexuality. Sexual deviance is a subjective thing. What was considered deviant decades ago (homosexuality) is no longer so. What’s still unacceptable in some countries and communities (pre-marital sex) is a given in the West.

What is our cultural moment, I wonder. Whatever it is, Susan makes it clear that talking about sex yields a different kind of intimacy than most of us have come to expect.

 ***

The Rumpus: Since the third edition of the DSM, the manual defined “non-normative” sexual behavior as “paraphilias,” or sexual deviation. Back then, a “sexual disorder” included homosexuality—and that was removed in 1973. So there are different opinions about what’s considered “deviant” at each cultural moment. The American Psychiatric Association (APA) said they may add “paraphiliac disorder” to the manual to differentiate between healthy people who enjoy kinky sex and those who are mentally ill. How does that sit with you?

Susan Wright: The DSM’s rationale section for each diagnosis includes the APA’s thinking and possible language on paraphilia: clear non-normative sexual behavior that’s practiced by healthy people.” Paraphilia in general has been defined as “non-normative sexual behavior that is not solely focused on the genitals or breasts.” By itself, it doesn’t require psychiatric intervention. That’s different from what they call “paraphiliac disorder,” which is when someone is causing severe distress or inflicting harm upon themselves or others.

Rumpus: The language is cloaked in secrecy until May. What is the main issue?

Wright: How they’re going to define “distress” is the issue. There’s a lot of societal pressure because of the stigma around kinky sex.

Rumpus: How would you define distress or harm, say, if you’re in a dominant/submissive relationship? Is it distress or harm, say, if you’re a sub and your partner spanks and bruises you consensually? What is distress?

Wright: Distress is about the person who’s actually doing it. This is how the APA would like to diagnose mental illnesses: “Is this person suffering distress over the fact that this is happening?” Some people don’t at all, and some may overlap with sexual sadism, such as psychopaths who don’t suffer any sort of distress over what they’re doing. Those people also suffer “impairment” to themselves in that they can’t have real relationships with people and don’t have the social skills to form bonds.

The other important part concerns harm to others. I’m not sure if that should fall under mental illness, but that’s what sexual sadism as a paraphiliac disorder would be: someone who harms other people. And either they do it non-consensually or in a way that’s so extreme, that it actually causes damage to the other person.

Rumpus: So the language in the DSM-IV (TR), the 2000 update to the 1994 fourth edition, was vague?

Wright: The line wasn’t drawn before regarding what is mental illness. They had a vague criteria, four out of five, that could have applied to anyone who was suffering some kind of distress because they weren’t out. Or distress because they hadn’t found the kink community yet. Or because they felt alone, ashamed, or confused about what they were doing. That kind of shame is not mental illness.

Unfortunately such diagnoses were used not only by psychiatrists but by people in the legal field who used the DSM without the qualifications to interpret what it really said. We need that hard, bright line and that’s what the APA said they were going to give us. A lot of persecution comes because people think that kinky people might be mentally ill. If we can disprove that, it gives them no reason to have a problem with us.

Rumpus: What did you wean from your conversations with the APA?

Wright: On behalf of NCSF, I was able to talk to the paraphilias sub-working group and educate them about the discrimination and persecution that’s going on because of the DSM. Frankly, they were quite surprised, and they didn’t want the DSM to engender that sort of discrimination. So I think the information that the APA released to the public—the distinction between paraphilia and paraphiliac disorders was a response to that. It was a way of saying: “Hey, listen, we’re not talking about healthy kinky people. They shouldn’t be discriminated against because they’re not mentally ill.” I’m really hoping they follow through.

Rumpus: Are there legal repercussions around the language they include in the manual? You mentioned that laws around “bodily harm” vary from state to state.

Wright: A good example is family court, when you’re trying to get child custody. The judge evaluates the parents and if an accusation is made that one of the parents is kinky and that they’re not a fit parent, the judge will turn to the DSM. Then he might say, wow, you won’t give up your sex partner who happens to be kinky, so therefore you require this and you are mentally ill.

The language included in this new edition will have repercussions across the board—in psychiatry, in legal settings, and also in our understanding of what kinky sex is. It already has an impact. One out of three people in NCSF’s surveys say they have been persecuted. Some were attacked, some discriminated against. That’s a huge number.

Rumpus: What about accusations that kink can go too far? Since highly emotional events often take place around kink, what happens when someone goes over the edge? How do people differentiate within these gray areas?

Wright: If we can take away some of the stigma of this, it’s easier for someone to report something inappropriate. Say you meet someone and decide to have kinky sex and you get assaulted. Right now it’s difficult for the person to report that to the police because of the stigma around kink. They’re also afraid they’re not going to be believed. Removing the stigma will give us more access to the judicial and legal framework that’s in place so we can protect ourselves and get the education we need around this.

Of course there are limits. And there will always be legal limits in terms of what you can do to another person. If you enter somebody, and you damage them in way that injures an organ or you impair a limb, that’s absolutely harm. Even if it’s consensual, it’s harm. If you tie someone up and cause nerve damage in somebody’s arm, you harm them. And there are questions about the liability involved—and there have been cases about things like this. I’m sure in the future, as the stigma’s removed, we’ll be able to deal with these in the right setting and really grapple with these questions.

Rumpus: You’d prefer states follow the American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code.

Wright: When people go to court over things like this, it varies from state to state. Some states already follow the Model Penal Code. Then you’ve got a legal interpretation regarding what is “serious bodily injury.” In appellate court cases, which set precedent, things like using a riding crop or dripping candle wax on somebody have, in the past, been considered serious bodily injury. But those are very old cases and I don’t believe that a judge or jury today would rule that a crop or candle wax used consensually is assault.

There are gray areas in all of this regarding consent. None of these court cases are clear-cut. That’s the problem when they create precedent—we’re left not knowing where those lines are. But the Model Penal Code lays out a very good framework for looking at these issues in terms of actual physical injury.

That said, most people who are kinky are not even into the extreme, intense things that people who do body piercing like to do with their bodies. Most want to be kinky in a power exchange kind of way, or they want to cross-dress or engage in some sort of role play. Others are kinky in a BDSM or S&M kind of way. Those people like really intense sensations. They are not harming each other—they’re giving each other intense pleasure through intense sensation. That’s the goal of BDSM. The people who do it non-consensually, they should be arrested. And the people who go over the edge, well, there are going to be penalties because they’ve harmed somebody and they, too, should be arrested.

Rumpus: An earlier piece in Salon addressed rape and sexual assault at “play spaces” in San Francisco’s kink and bondage community. It quoted Carol Queen, the co-founder of the Center for Sex and Culture, saying she doesn’t go to commercial dungeons anymore because of this issue.

Wright: These kinds of stories are why NCSF has Consent Counts, an activism program we’re doing to decriminalize consensual BDSM that doesn’t result in serious bodily injury. We did surveys on consent in BDSM because we believe that’s the most important thing for the kink community to be talking about right now. We need to understand consent: what is it? What is it in a legal sense, in an ethical sense, and where do you cross that line?

For example, we put out a guide, which we call a “fact,” called “Is This Assault?” “Was I assaulted” is a fact—people really have this question—that explains questions such as, “Was it assault if I said yes right up until I said no?”

These are basic questions that are not being explained to people—kinky or vanilla. Unfortunately there’s a gap in the sexual education of adults in America. The kink community is trying to fill that gap. There’s a lot of date rape out there. It’s often someone you know who crosses the line in a small way or in a major way. We need to do a lot more education to teach people this is the line you can’t cross. And we need to do more than teach people how to protect themselves. We need to draw the line ourselves.

At NCSF, we also have a Guide for Groups with a consent policy we’d love to see BDSM groups and clubs use—it says you don’t touch anyone or anything without the other person’s permission, you respect it when somebody says “no,” and you don’t renegotiate in the middle of a scene when someone’s all happy and will say yes to anything. We’re hoping that if we create hardcore lines, it will help form boundaries for people and give us all the education we need.

Rumpus: Besides the DSM-5 update, is there a larger cultural issue that needs to be addressed?

Wright: There’s not a single person out there whose life hasn’t been touched by the issue of consent. When do you consent, when are you coerced, pressured, or manipulated into doing things you don’t want to do sexually? We all need sex education about consent, and safe sex is what it comes down to. Perhaps the kink community is ahead of the curve because we do such complicated, interested games, that we have to understand each other and need to have a way to follow the rules in order to do this—because millions of people are doing this millions of times. That is important for everyone to hear because we aren’t hearing it from anyone else.

Rumpus: Has the Fifty Shades of Gray phenomenon helped make these issues more prominent? The book sold seventy-million copies worldwide.

Wright: You know why Fifty Shades of Gray is so popular? Because it’s barely kinky. It’s popular because they talked the entire time about what they wanted sexually. They negotiated, they compromised. It was a real lesson. Most people don’t even talk about it before they have sex. They don’t know what’s really turning on the other person. To be able to communicate in that way creates an intimacy like no other. And that’s what we have to teach other people. This is something that needed to be said and shown—here’s how you have a great sex life. And you get to confess your deepest, darkest secrets.

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As befitting the first movements of an origin story, Skin Shift opens with the apocryphally titled “Orange Colored Sky,” a poem that serves to introduce some of the poet’s obsessions, namely with femininity, mythology and childhood. Hittinger writes:

Hittinger sees Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, as a model for his own blossoming femininity, and thus goes about mimicking Lynda Carter, who portrayed the character on television, with the accoutrements of his childhood bedroom. All this interest in Wonder Woman stems from the grace and ease of her metamorphosis from normal woman to super woman—the speaker of the poem craves the same transformation, both for its ease and for the final product. Superheroes are considered to be the modern equivalent to mythological figures in some circles, and Wonder Woman, whose mythology is indelibly linked with the Greek Pantheon (she’s the daughter of Hippolyta in the comics) seems like an appropriate to guide the speaker’s nascent queer urges from a “leaning toward” into a “learning toward.”

If the young speaker of Hittinger’s first poem wants to transform into Wonder Woman, to harness her power, it comes as no surprise that one of the poet’s chief modes of writing is through persona. This tendency to dive into the skins of others helps us to parse the book’s title—Skin Shift isn’t simply about transforming from human to superhuman, it’s about shifting into another flesh altogether. The movement can be horizontal as much as it is vertical. Some of the personas adopted by Hittinger’s speakers include an astronomer, an ornithologist, a geologist, and an alchemist. The poet enjoys stepping into their skins because they offer both a specialized eye and subject, and a way to “Laugh. Clear the jam. [And] Start again.” Other poems in the book—such as “Circe’s Letterpress” and “Samson in Reverse”—collapse the distance between biography and persona, mimicking some of the impetus behind Skin Shift’s opening poem, but no other poems collapse this distance as effectively as the poems in the book’s third section, “Narcissus Resists.”

“Narcissus Resists” is split up into five smaller sections, each headed by five “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poems, and containing three poems that each start with the letter “C,” the lone exception being the fifth “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poem, which ends the third section. It seems to be no accident that all the poems in this section are fourteen lines long, though they do not bare the qualities (meter, rhyme) of traditional sonnets, they seem inflected (or provoked) by the spirit of the “sonnets” in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf. These “sonnets” are far more naked in their content than Cole’s, recounting the troubled adventures of Hittinger’s Narcissus, a young gay man who idolizes a Madonna-like pop star and hosts an online strip show. These poems cleverly repurpose both pop culture and the myth of the Greek figure, exploring the way shifting from one skin into another can be destructive. In “Metamorphosis of Narcissus IV,” Hittinger explores the collective ire of Narcissus’s spurned suitor:

Transformation isn’t a key to self-discovery for Narcissus, it’s a way of avoiding himself and the havoc he’s wreaked, intentional or not, in the lives of others. Narcissus wants to escape, his guilt manifesting in this ghost dog image, but cannot because Narcissus, much as he might resist, only sees himself. The poems in Skin Shift do not shy away from the implications of shifting from one’s skin to another—they do not indulge in the fantasy such role change can bring, but also in the ways shifting can feed into revising history, denying the reality that the self imposes, or as a means for coping with trauma. Hittinger’s poems are ambitious in their scope and in how artfully they balance raw emotional language with thoughtfully constructed conceits. Ultimately its hard not to find another skin for yourself nestled somewhere between these pages.

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What it is is this: I have no idea what Speedboat is about because Speedboat isn’t about anything, at least not in the sense of quick-pitch, ready-for-back-cover exposition. And this, weird as it seems, is a big part of, or at least inseparable from, the immense, startling pleasure this book offers.

But to say that Speedboat has nothing going on, plot-wise, isn’t quite right. There is in fact a great deal of goings-on; it’s just that none of it is organized/structured via any of the more “standard” literary methods and schemata. The book has no narrative arc, no traditional storyline, no build-up or denouement or climax, no obvious character development or big-C Conflict. Speedboat is, rather, a series of… something I don’t quite know the word for, but whatever it is, it encompasses observations, anecdotes, pensees, diatribes, jokes, tragedies, mini set pieces, monologues, and etc. I am, both for convenience’s sake and in homage, going to call these units ‘renatas.’

Most renatas are only a few paragraphs long; plenty of them are a single sentence. Though some are snapshots of a larger setting/scene (the pathetic, hilarious politics/machinations at a small university for one), most are connected to each other only in the sense that they’re told from the perspective of an ultra-neurotic female journalist (whom I suppose we can call the protagonist); or they occur in her stunningly, meticulously observed universe; or, at the very, very least, are relayed in her splendid, brilliant, weirdly reportorial, off-in-the-best-possible-way voice.

Such is Speedboat’s astonishing consistency that literally any renata could demonstrate what I’m talking about; I’ll pick one short enough to quote in its entirety:

In the bar of his father’s hotel, with the leather chairs that give one the feeling of sitting in a wallet, Dommy has introduced a new drink, Last Mango in Paris. A steep decline.

If Dommy, Dommy’s father, Last Mango in Paris, the bar or its chairs are mentioned anywhere else in the book, I missed it.

Renata Adler

There isn’t any apparent map here. To illustrate, I’ll open the book to random pages and briefly describe what’s there. Here we go: a bit about the portentous Christmas rituals of some German family; a boy who can’t afford to pay his barber; a stirring salute to the laconic; a writer named Manley Dubois whom women can’t help but confess to; a school principal admonishing his students for mispronouncing “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on. It seems weird and off-putting, I know, but each renata is sublime, and the aggregate is magical, something that should, according to our standard model of literary physics be impossible–a book of perpetual surprise and delight. Yes, Speedboat may be confusing, but it’s confusing in a warm, comfortable, lovely way.

I know what you’re thinking, you lit mag-overloaded Lydia Davis-philes. So listen: This is not a book of stories. There’s a genius here not just to the content but also to the content’s orchestration, to the renatas’ calculated interplay and combined effect. The book is held together masterfully, and it’s held together by something much deeper, if sneakier, than plot.

Because Speedboat somehow does without plot all the stuff that is usually plot’s responsibility. Let’s talk about this for a second. Plot is, I think, a misunderstood device (and it most certainly is a device). There is a tendency – most sharply felt in, of course, writing workshops – to approach, measure, and criticize literature primarily via plot. But man, what a boring way to read (and what a superficial way to write). Literature, to get cute about it, isn’t about the story; it’s about the telling – the whole point of the fictive exercise is to impart feeling, not knowledge, or, because that really is too cute a sum-up, to effect some sort of emotional/spiritual response in the reader. It’s true that we’re hardwired in some infinitely mysterious way to tell, listen, and relate to stories, but at their core, stories are vehicles to smuggle the more real but less tangible stuff in – suspense, heartbreak, triumph, sympathy, beauty, sublimity, defeat, ennui, whatever it is that gets you off. (I think this is why your college buddy’s acid trips and your bedmate’s dreams are always horribly, suicidally boring to listen to – it’s all meaningless, consequence-less, arbitrary bullshit.) I read somewhere once, and I wish I could remember where, this definition: Literature is that which cannot be summarized. All I’m saying is that literature isn’t as much about the story as it is about creating the space where the story happens. And Speedboat has, in the fullest, most praiseworthy sense, created a space, one dictated and propelled by an emotional, not a narrative, engine.

The pleasures and satisfactions of Speedboat don’t arrive as payoff; the book is a constant, sentence-to-sentence joy. Adler is a breathtakingly precise writer. She can do more with a bunch of commas than most can do with entire books: “Edith, from Kiev, twice divorced, and in New York, in her own words, a “terrapist,” was stealing a bonbon from one of the trays on the Steinway grand.”

///

If over these past few weeks you’ve somehow missed the publicity and hoopla and what seems like several thousand Renata Adler readings (you should really try and catch one, by the way – they’re fun and light in a way readings almost never are), Adler’s two books of fiction, Speedboat and Pitch Dark, have recently been republished by the New York Review of Books’s Classics imprint, which I guess sort of canonizes them, which is all kinds of wonderful: these are gorgeous books that deserve every ounce of their recent readership and respect.

When released (or rereleased) in bulk, an artist or author’s disparate works become, for better or worse, some sort of holistic corpus, and is critically approached as such. Sometimes the works will be seen to complement each other, to display a progression/regression, some sort thematic or stylistic continuity or break. But two books as similar on the surface as Pitch Dark and Speedboat are, inevitably, in competition.

Pitch Dark, published seven years after Speedboat, is great, and you should, of course, totally read it. Like Speedboat, it’s comprised of magnificently written renatas. Pitch Dark, though, does have a wisp of a plot, and it’s a relatively standard love-had/love-lost sort of thing – female journalist travels to Ireland in the name of an affair; things do not go well; she’s gotta hightail it out of there – but told in a hyper-fragmented style that scrambles up time, place, memory, anecdote. (Admission: I wasn’t 100% sure what the core story was until I read Muriel Spark’s characteristically spot-on afterword.) There are beautiful literary refrains, conversation-snippets and phrases that keep repeating and function as a sort of emotional echo that reverberates throughout the book. “Did I throw the most important thing perhaps, by accident, away?”

Pitch Dark is flawed, but it’s interestingly flawed in the sense that its shortcomings highlight just how sparkling a masterpiece Speedboat is. (For what it’s worth, Adler herself, as I heard her report at a reading, is far fonder of Pitch Dark than she is of Speedboat. Which discourages me not one whit.) Pitch Dark is beautiful, but it’s also confusing in a less welcoming way than Speedboat is; the traces of plot make it, weirdly enough, less accessible. I suppose that’s forgivable – such is the price of extreme originality…? – but I was continually distracted by my non-knowledge. It’s also less playful than Speedboat: I found myself longing for Speedboat’s limitless creation, that constant delight and surprise.

I’ll put it like this: If there’s what’s going on, I want to know, and I will be annoyed when I don’t. And if there isn’t, well, then I will be ecstatically ignorant.

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Following in the steps of such modern day masters of this intricate form, including Lydia Davis and Kim Chinquee, Scott Garson has embraced it, bringing his own brand of American disharmony often seen in those forbears. The majority of stories in his second collection Is That You, John Wayne? run from a page long to three, and they are the crux of this collection bent on exploring the sadness of life, the missed or missing opportunities, and the stasis our collective cultures seemed to have emotionally entered while we fly and speed about with technology that probably has not made us treat each other any better. His static pathos is exemplified by the first sentence of “Say My Name”: “The sex had been artless and rushed, like drinking down water.” The “sex” grabs of course, but to call sex “artless” makes one swerve the fictional dream onto a dangerous avenue, while the simile “like drinking down water” stamps the described act with a filigree reinforcing the “rushed” by the consonance of “drinking down,” an action that is all slake, with no pleasure or sensuality about it.

Scott Garson

In this terrain of broken homes containing single parents, step parents, ex’s (one story is called “Note to Dickwad Ex-Stepdad”), and ugly uncles, people are trying to stay together, trying to make their children happy, trying to manage enough money to live, and are looking to escape the desperation that comes from too much yearning—all major entanglements of middle and lower-middle class America (Carver country). The story “Interstate” is barely three pages but it speaks more to the concerns of sacrificing oneself to something greater than many shelves of self-centric fiction published in the last few years. Here a father takes his sick boy to a hotel off the freeway. The child is going to miss Halloween so he wants to talk with his grandmother, in lieu of a mother that seems absent. The father makes to tell him a story about camping with the boy’s mother, but the boy doesn’t want a story with her as the subject—all we know is that whatever mother there is, it’s complicated. After the grandmother calls them the father goes out to smoke but leaves the door open, “so [the boy] could see [his] shoulder”—a poignant detailing of what would give comfort. The boy asks if there’s anything out there and the father says, “Not really,” but then adds in his narrative voice:

But it wasn’t so. There was a moon, big and round, and telephone wires. An intersection, vehicles swishing. There was a sky. It was huge. Slow yellows and grays. I watched as if it was my duty.

These details would seemingly be unimportant to a child. It’s the life he’ll one day have to get used to—the sky he’ll have to lean on. Why concern him with it now? The father needs a reprieve. What is he getting out of the moon, the “vehicles swishing” and the “slow yellows and grays?” He gets as much as he needs, but the “as if” steers the “duty” somewhere away from the meaning such a stark word nominally carries. The “duty” here is pock-marked and a little bent out of shape. Perhaps it isn’t so much the glue that holds families, but the pull that continually remakes them and enables them to go on.

In “Kiss of the Underachiever” Garson turns the familiar “desire in a bar” story into something uniquely propelled by the sound of the words. Describing the narrator’s kiss with the bartender, he says:

The kiss wasn’t heavy or too high-stakes. It had come, I’d have said, in a natural way, just part of the conversation: a kiss that was really a thought of itself, if thought was a factor at all.

By saying it “wasn’t heavy or too high-stakes” the repetitions grab like the kiss itself, no matter if it was “natural.” After the loaded “come,” Garson gets to the real triggering clause, “a kiss that was really a thought of itself,” that tempers the lust and pulls one out of the sometimes glorious, sometimes vainglorious science of two strange sets of lips meeting—an idea reinforced two lines later with, “Isn’t that grace? All foresight taken from you. You’re nothing, just sticks of chance.” The sacred and profane meet existentialism here—this pair’s stasis doesn’t lead to light, only to something asunder.

Since 2008 Garson has edited the internet journal Wigleaf, which has set a standard for quality flash fiction and has been the force behind the Top 50 Flash Fictions of the Year—one of the few regular prizes bestowed on this challenging form that can suffer no extra word, no extra comma to stain so brief a picture. In this collection of many prizes, words and punctuation artfully placed adhere to Pater’s dictum and, as great poems do, encourage multiple readings, as we feel the unhinged souls of the characters try to find a way to make things right when most everything tells them they can’t.

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In the Puschart Prize-winning story “Cowboys,” for instance, you get a taste of how she uses repetition in a powerful way:

There are no more details to tell.

There is no reason to go into the why of my father.

Or the why of madness, which I cannot answer.

Or the why of addiction, which I also cannot answer.

Or the why of poor, which I also cannot answer.

Suffice it to say it’s always about a loss of something. Then a loss of some things. Then a loss of all things.

Her writing is a hymn to the broken but also to hope. In “Signifier,” for instance, she opens the story with, “Because words are about desire and desire is about the long-tailed birds in the trees.”

I spoke with her via e-mail about the latest VIDA statistics, the lyric essay, and her writing process.

***

The Rumpus: The stories in Spectacle share a lot in common with prose poems. There’s a repetition and a rhythm to your writing that entrances the reader. There’s a rawness to your work, too. Where would you say this comes from? Are you drawn to cross-genres?

Susan Steinberg: I’ve been asked to discuss my formal and stylistic decisions/tendencies a lot since the book came out, and it’s helping me to better understand why I write how I do. The best I can do for now is to say I was a painter before I started writing, and my stories grew directly out of this. I hadn’t studied literature in any traditional sense, only the visual arts, and I incorporated writing into my paintings before I moved to writing on the page. I’ve never written what one would call “conventional” fiction, and there was a time I didn’t even understand the distinction.

And I am drawn to some cross-genre work, particularly the lyric essay.

Rumpus: What made you transition from painting to writing? Do you still paint?

Steinberg: The transition was mostly seamless—for a few years, I was trying to do both, then writing took over. I liked that it was non-toxic and free and that I could do it anywhere. I haven’t been painting lately, but last summer I bought a box of colored pencils, and I’ve been drawing my legs and shoes.

Rumpus: How is writing similar to painting?

Steinberg: The process is very similar for me: in both, I first put a lot on the page/canvas, then scrape most of it off, or pare it down, to get to what I want to say. And I always work on several pieces at once.

Rumpus: The women in your stories are full of desire, but often broken in some fundamental way. There’s a tremendous strength beneath their fragility, though. You write about a woman deciding whether to take her father off of life-support, for example, and a woman who steals the radio out of the car of a boy she likes. These are women who are trying to find their way in this world. Is their desire born out of your own desire?

Steinberg: I want to say no, but I think the answer is yes. I mean, I don’t have a desire to steal a car stereo, but, like my narrators, I have a desire to confront and to connect and to make sense of things. I suppose I’m saying that in my writing, I push these basic desires to more extreme places. But perhaps that’s just differentiating between life and art.

Rumpus: You’re a founding chair of VIDA. What are your thoughts on the recent VIDA statistics?

Steinberg: I just took a look at the new numbers; they look a lot like the old numbers. That is to say, they’re disappointing, but not surprising.

Rumpus: It seems like the VIDA statistics are circulated, and many people get upset, but enough changes aren’t made. Yet there’s hope; particularly with recent announcements, like Pamela Paul being named editor of the New York Times Book Review. Are you hopeful?

Steinberg: When I was working with VIDA—I was on the board until last year—we were concerned with starting, or restarting, a dialogue about gender disparity in the literary arts. And you’re right to suggest that people have entered the dialogue, but that not enough has changed. At this point, perhaps it goes without saying that the magazines whose numbers are the most imbalanced don’t actually want to change. If that’s the case, then is it time to start dismissing them in the way they’ve dismissed us and focus on those places that actually support women? Because those places do exist. And I am hopeful.

Rumpus: Who are some of the female writers who have most influenced you?

Steinberg: I was initially influenced by visual artists, especially some of my female peers in art school.  The work I liked most was just brutal and fearless and vulnerable, and it inspired me to take more risks in my own art. As for published writers, I love Woolf and Duras, though I came to them late.

Rumpus: Virginia Woolf is my favorite writer! I don’t think it’s ever too late to read Woolf. What’s your favorite Virginia Woolf book, and why?

Steinberg: To the Lighthouse. I love everything from the line-by-line writing to the structure of the book as a whole. And Mr. Ramsay is the perfect narcissist.

Rumpus: You wrote a fantastic essay about experimental writing for Publishers Weekly. I was struck by this passage:

I’ve learned that the term experimental makes some people uneasy. I try to imagine what they imagine. Words scattered violently across a page. Numbers instead of letters. Violated punctuation. And I guess I understand why there could be resistance; there often is to that which goes against our expectations. But in art, I often want my expectations, which are generally low, to be shattered.

Why are your expectations often low when it comes to art?

Steinberg: This is going to sound negative, but I’ve come to expect a lot of formula and imitation. And then I encounter work that pushes past all this, and I remember why I keep at it.

Rumpus: Why have you come to expect a lot of writers are copying others? Is that the status quo these days? Are we not seeing many original writers?

Steinberg: I’m not saying artists shouldn’t borrow from or quote or be influenced by other artists. On the contrary, this is often where great art begins. And I’m not even sure where I stand on the idea of originality. I’m speaking more of certain, often-changing trends in the arts: shortcuts and tired approaches that are overused, or not well-used, or not understood by the users, and yet somehow accepted, perhaps because of the comfort in their predictability. I feel like I keep running into that. But again, I’m just talking about formula. It’s where art dead-ends.

But there are a lot of great things happening both in the visual arts and in writing.

Rumpus: What is it about the lyric essay that you like? Do you plan to write a book of lyric essays at some point?

Steinberg: In addition to its attention to language and/or form, I like that it automatically upends the expectation that the essay has an obligation to deliver fact, as opposed to some version of truth.

I guess it’s possible that I could write some lyric essays in the future.  I think I’m too much of a coward, at this point.

Rumpus: I don’t think you’re a coward. What makes you feel like a coward?

Steinberg: My cowardliness has to do with the essay part, not the lyric part.  I haven’t written much nonfiction.

Rumpus: What kind of risks do you take with your writing?

Steinberg: There are risks involved in formal experimentation and risks involved in writing confrontational or provocative or vulnerable female narrators. One risk of each is that my work is often re-categorized as poetry (because of the former) or nonfiction (because of the latter).

Rumpus: You have a way of making a gritty detail seem attractive and even visually pleasing. In “Supernova,” for instance, you talk about how “the mechanic was beautiful, with black beneath every nail.” Do you find yourself looking for the beauty in things other people might find ugly?

Steinberg: I don’t find myself looking for it, but I always see it.

Rumpus: Do you ever think about working on a book in which you incorporate some of your artwork?

Steinberg: I used to work on pieces that incorporated both written text and images. I wrote on my paintings, and I used to make these books with water-soluble crayons and ink on this torn up rice paper—they were a mix of drawing and writing. I could see doing more of that.

Rumpus: What are you currently working on?

Steinberg: I’m working on a collection of short stories.

Rumpus: You’re the author of three short story collections. Do you plan on writing a novel at some point? Why are you drawn to short stories?

Steinberg: I prefer writing and reading short stories. There’s something about working in a series. And something about the size. I feel like I have control over the form. And it’s satisfying to complete things.

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In “Poem Capitalism” she describes how she practices

this thing I call Objectless
Objectivism. Like: I face the thing, but also
am the thing—so we aren’t. Once, I was content to find
the marble hollow. Filled with a giant star. Now

laved in grease, I rub again against
that dry nubbin in the great warehouse Archyron—(this is not
some reference you’re supposed to get, it’s just this
weird feeling I had.) The yellow frame darkens. I live

in the light but perish in the industrial warehouse,
under the specter of marriage, of hip. Again I wrote
a meaningless poem! and left me
with all the burden of meaning. He died, and she—

We carried her through

Following John Berryman’s lead, Ted Berrigan, in both life and “the poems” succinctly nailed the riff “he died” (“dear Berrigan. He died/ Back to books. I read.” Berrigan’s “Sonnet #2”) Božičević drops in the reference, but then goes further, opening up the question of what about her? And, with the help of claiming a plurality, i.e. “we”, takes the poem beyond where they left off, into a further doorway. Carrying (in fact, rescuing) the speaker of the poem, the body itself, away from the trap that consumed both previous male poets, in life as well as in the work.

Not that death isn’t seemingly everywhere for Božičević. Born in Croatia in 1977, Božičević has been on the fringes at least—if not in the middle of—violent war torn situations. I don’t feel it is poetic fancy when she writes in “Casual Elegy for Luka Skračić”: “I / study from Luka’s textbooks, later he / gets blown up walking to film school, Luka / dies for his art.”

Božičević’s poems are diatribes that refuse become didactic. She’s too busy interrogating herself as much as she is the world, for the poem to slide into meeting easy expectations. In “War on a Lunchbreak” her own gendered sexuality, and that of her friends and the larger society, alongside her past history and current nationality status, caught up between her homeland and her adopted United States, surges to the surface as she reflects upon the hellish clerical job she’s stuck working just to get by. She asks, “What’s war?”

Eternal countrylessness.
Lady poets writing about cock,
not thinking about gender. My friends married in Vegas
to good-ol’-boys or hipster drummers, just ‘cos they can, or
when I contemplate
starving myself
so I’d be “the bomb,” or. I’m sorry
I keep tossing and turning. My livelihood here

depends on people who’ve never tasted
war, and act offended when one leaves work
on time. Not that I ever lay hiding

dying in a ditch, but if I had, I think I’d
know much about dry grass, the incredible value of it:
Simply to see the stalks
move would be enough.

I’d like to have time to type this,
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.

Where the poems in Rise in the Fallmay appear to be going in search of death, Božičević is in fact only drawing attention towards realizing life. These poems are affirming her concern with how to live, what’s required, where to find it. As dark as the subject matter gets at times, the over-riding encouragement that this is life, get on with it, is ever just as insistent. Be brave is the message. There’s nothing to fear once you look at things head on.

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and the disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake moves through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swum in it. See what I mean?
(“Death, Is All”)

Božičević does not mince words. “I’ll tell you straight up: / you don’t get to talk about Mayakovsky: / take that skateboard and go back to the suburbs. And talk about them.” (“About Mayakovsky”) It is totally great to have poems by a relatively young poet so directly address everyday reality while remaining free of pretension. There’s no placating search after any
specific lingo of MFA craft or other academic jargon. Božičević is all-poet, crystal clear about what she wants to say and who her audience is. The humor is rampant. After reading, “A Poem for You” it’s ridiculously difficult (if you could manage it before) to ever look at any My Little Pony with a straight face again:

I want to write a nice long poem for all you straight girls.
Your religion’s rose and glass castles
hold no place for me, I’m out of my princess phase.
Your pink pony wants to fuck you
She’s limp with longing from being
always touched and hollow,
comb-tugged right out of her field:

Oh I’m too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness.
For years my emptiness echoed into yours: Oh Hai!
For years I’ve been your pony, and I wanted to fuck you

without your pink dress, the glitter and the organs,
all colorless—

But Božičević is not at all just about putting down “straight girls”. As she goes on to say, “I’m over it.” The poem continues unfolding, complicating its own intentions which are, and never should be, entirely clear.

I love someone now, she’s teaching a class,
she had a bad dream & threw the lotion
at the hurtful door, and I love her, there’s nothing hollow there.
There’s no void in the straight girls either, not really.

This yard is in you, ladies,
green and monn-lit, where you prance like difficult adult Bambis:
that’s not desperate, that’s beauty. I only wanted
to have my fill, as I fill her:

undo you first, then balance out the void in a weighted way
so then you’ll know: How
do you do a Barbie?
With meaning. Women, I’ll defend
your beauty

when no-one else will: when you’re lacerated with IVs
and wrinkles, I’ll say how I filled you with Awwww.
When you’re a crazy-eyed teen who hears voices & sings them
out at an American Idol
audition, a sparrow

aping the starsong ringtone–
I’ll get it. I love you when you’re not quite right.

Božičević opens the possibility that poets might strive to be heroes. Not necessarily ‘saving the day’ kind of heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

Look
at any object & see
the shimmer of philosophers playing inside…And they’re
what you want. And it takes a show-off, sacred whore
you say you don’t
believe in, but ecto-drool over, to make
them emanate: and I don’t got that, babe. I’m sitting here,
wet from my run and
know that somewhere among these ducks and squirrels and,
reflected in the car hood, ducks
and leaf silhouettes
is a way for me to manage
the pain of:
all I ever wanted was to serve.
(“We’re the Aliens We’ve Been Looking For”)

That’s not to say that Božičević doesn’t call ‘Bullshit’ on playing out that role. Still, she does both get the girl and is the girl. Plus, she writes it down always telling it straight. No apologies. She’s not expecting anything further from poetry than the opportunity of the poem itself.

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The playful, tortuous subtitle of Mooallem’s first book, Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America makes no secret of this human-centric focus. But as Mooallem narrates the inspiring, heartbreaking, and often just plain strange efforts of people who’ve devoted their lives to saving endangered species, the question of who exactly the “wild ones” are in the book becomes uncomfortably hard to answer.

Mooallem was kind enough to take a break from caring for his newborn second child to talk about Wild Ones at a cafe near his home in San Francisco.

***

The Rumpus: I had to remind myself several times as I was reading your book that it was nonfiction. Some of the things you describe are really bizarre. You’ve got Martha Stewart chasing polar bears around the Canadian tundra. You’ve got men dressing up like whooping cranes and flying in little planes with them. You even describe something called a “copulation hat.”

Jon Mooallem: In the ’70s, people started realizing that DDT was thinning out bird’s eggs. Peregrine falcons were one of the birds affected by this, so they created a captive breeding stock. But breeding animals can be a lot harder than you might think, and they found, through this weird process of trial and error, that they could wear this leather helmet. It looks kind of like a cross between a rugby helmet and maybe the helmets they wear in the Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back. The male bird would land on the hat and be coaxed to ejaculate by the human handler into the hat so that they could inseminate other birds. Somehow, I find it weirdly symbolic of a lot of the work I’ve written about, both in its ingenuity and its total absurdity.

Rumpus: And yet it worked.

Mooallem: It did. There are peregrine falcons around now. We have them here in San Francisco, in large part due to the persistence of some very brave ornithologists wearing the copulation hat for more than a decade.

I think there are two levels of these sorts of interventions. You’ve got the very hands-on manipulations, like the copulation hat and like Operation Migration, where they’re reintroducing whooping cranes. Whooping cranes are the largest birds in North America. In the 1940s, they were down to the teens in terms of number of birds left, and so people started breeding them in captivity, which had its own copulation hat-esque obstacles, but then they realized, how are we going to get these birds back in the wild? They usually learn migration from their parents, but their parents were bred in the lab, too. So they hit upon this solution of training the birds to fly behind men flying ultralight airplanes. But the men have to do it in costume, so that the birds won’t get acclimated to people.

Then there’s this other kind of intervention, which is more of a psychic intervention, where the way we talk about these animals and feel about these animals can really play into their ecological situation. It’s more abstract, but that was the case with the Martha Stewart thing. I was in Churchill, Manitoba where there’s an NGO trying to spread the word about climate change, and they’re using polar bears as a symbol of the problem. And we wound up chasing Martha Stewart in these little buggy-like vehicles across the tundra so that they could make sure that she was interviewing the right scientists and putting across the right talking points on her show. The polar bears have PR handlers these days. And I’m sure that, for them, that kind of intervention is just as important as the copulation hat was for peregrine falcons.

Rumpus: You write that animals’ survival in this day and age depends “more on Barnum than Darwin.” What do you mean by that?

Mooallem: The level of compassion and persistence and passion that we dedicate to these species is going to do more for them than any ecological force. Our imaginations are an ecological force now. And to stir that up, you need salesmanship, whether it’s as extreme as the Martha Stewart example or something as simple as putting the panda on the logo of the World Wildlife Federation. There are certain creatures that we care about and certain ones that we simply don’t care about.

Rumpus: We don’t care about the Hawaiian blue-tailed skink, for example.

Mooallem: No. It’s gone. And I didn’t know that. Here I am writing a book on this subject, and I didn’t even know what it was until like two years into the process.

Rumpus: So there’s this kind of species-ism, where we put our energies into saving so-called “charismatic megafauna” like polar bears or pandas or bald eagles.

Mooallem: Yes. And I’m not necessarily criticizing that. I think it’s miraculous that we care about any of these animals. We don’t have to. And for most of human history, we didn’t. So I think it’s a little funny when you have these conservationists saying, “Pity the poor reptile or the poor insect that humanity can’t be bothered to care about.” I mean, isn’t it amazing that we care about all of the things that we do care about? But we don’t really acknowledge that our interest in an animal is vital to its survival. That’s literally the case scientifically and legally, in tons of different ways. Human interest is the key to survival now on earth.

Rumpus: At one point in the book, you call the efforts of Operation Migration—the guys flying planes in whooping crane costumes—”sublime,” but you say you meant the word in a different way than the philosophers meant by the term.

Mooallem: Well, I didn’t actually know what the philosophers meant…but I checked it out on Wikipedia and I think that it was originally applied to natural landscapes like waterfalls and mountains, and being overwhelmed by the grandeur of the natural world. I had a similar feeling watching these airplanes fly in front of a flock of birds. I think a lot of people do. You feel a kind of wonder, an excitement. You can’t believe it’s happening, so I used the term “sublime” even though I was looking at something that is not natural at all, and is in fact meant to make up for the fact that we’ve destroyed what was natural.

Rumpus: Isn’t that wonder also about connecting with something so different than us, so other?

Mooallem: Yeah. I think there is a real craving for that kind of experience of otherness in the world right now, even if it’s just a hike on a nature trail. There’s a hunger to be in the presence of something that’s beyond you and beyond your grasp.

Rumpus: I think that craving might be called anxiety. We’re anxious to connect to the otherness of the natural world because we’re terrified that we’ve fucked it up beyond repair.

Mooallem: Without a doubt. I think that motivates a lot of the recovery efforts I was writing about. It’s not just the particular species at stake but that, if we let go of this one, where does that leave us? Each battle becomes a battle of principle that cannot be lost.

Rumpus: This anxiety seems to be especially pronounced here in America, and I think it’s no accident that you made sure to include the phrase “in America” in the subtitle of the book, even though a good chunk of it is actually set in Canada. Our identity as Americans is so connected to the bounty and grandeur of our wilderness, and I think people are really freaked out that we’ve spoiled it. I see that anxiety reflected in all the reality shows on TV these days about Alaska and survivalists. People are desperate to believe that we still have that wildness in us.

Mooallem: As soon as something is almost gone, people grasp onto it the hardest. [America] was the place where people came after all the Old World countries had already extinguished their wildlife. It was a fresh start, where wildlife was so abundant that colonists were writing ad copy back to Europe about how they could sweep fish out of the ocean with a broom. You could make an argument that that’s where the American dream starts. It wasn’t just this vague belief. It was actually a matter of math. There were X amount of animals and so much fewer people, you could get by just by showing up.

Rumpus: Speaking of colonial America and its relationship to nature, another point in the book where I had to remind myself that I was reading nonfiction was the story of Thomas Jefferson and the mammoth.

Mooallem: Mammoth fossils were being discovered around the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Thomas Jefferson and some other Founding Fathers figured they must still be out there somewhere in the whole two-thirds of North America we hadn’t set foot in yet. In fact, when Lewis and Clark set out, they had instructions to keep their eyes peeled.

Rumpus: For mammoths.

Mooallem: Yes. The mammoth became kind of the first bald eagle, the first species people really identified with America because it was so big and powerful. It was everything that a new country wanted to see itself as. And it hit people hard when more and more evidence started emerging that mammoths were, in fact, extinct. They had to change the mammoth story and rewrite their feelings about it. The new story went that instead of America being so magnificent that it was filled with mammoths, it was actually an empty place just waiting for white settlers to take it over. God had wiped the mammoth out to clear the way for us. It’s another example of the narratives we build around creatures.

Rumpus: And the real irony is that, according to some theories at least, the mammoth was wiped out by people.

Mooallem: That’s right. People wiped the shit out of this place long before any European settlers came. There were all sorts of Pleistocene megafauna walking around, and then humans developed a new kind of stone point that enabled them to bring down bigger and bigger animals. So, basically, we’re living in this impoverished ecosystem that preceded the wasteful, reckless white man that is so easy to vilify. We were already down to the dregs before any of our grandparents or great-great-great grandparents got here.

Rumpus: So this cycle of people damaging the natural world and causing extinction goes back a long way.

Mooallem: That’s always the big question and a giant hole in a lot of the reasoning. If you’re going to say that things aren’t like they used to be, when exactly are you referring to?

Rumpus: It complicates the whole idea of “saving” one species or another.

Mooallem: Exactly. As does the other stuff we were talking about, this kind of perpetual intervention. Can we really say that we’re saving the whooping crane if we’re breeding it in a lab and then flying it around with planes? I mean, we’ve saved it from disappearing. But it’s not the same thing.

Rumpus: The best example of this dilemma comes in the second part of the book, where you focus on the Lange’s metalmark butterfly. This is a very fragile creature that only lays its eggs on a specific plant growing on sand dunes near Antioch, California. But the sand dunes are almost all gone. There’s a drywall factory there. And yet, the federal government has spent millions trying to keep this particular butterfly from going extinct.

Mooallem: There is a strong case to make for keeping that butterfly where it is, but it’s not scientific. I could not find a scientific justification for it. It just doesn’t matter. And even if it did matter, the context in which it did matter is completely gone. This butterfly is not like the panda bear or the California condor. But the people involved with it are very passionate and it’s the policy of the U.S. government to save it. It has all the same protections as a whale or grizzly bear.

Rumpus: That brings me to the word “wild.” As the book goes on, the definition of that word starts to get slipperier and slipperier. The creatures we want so badly to keep wild, like polar bears or whooping cranes or certain butterflies, need such finely-tuned environmental conditions that, without constant human intervention, they would perish.

Mooallem: We’re in a very paradoxical place. If wildness is the thing we’re passionate about keeping in the world, it’s up to us to preserve it. That doesn’t seem to make any sense. But then again, that’s where we’re at. It’s not going to change.

These animals are not necessarily hard to save. They’re just hard to save in a way that conforms with our romantic ideas about their wildness. You could take the plant that the Lange’s metalmark butterfly lays its eggs on and grow it in pots in my backyard, and then bring the butterflies and I’m pretty sure they’d be just fine. You could do that anywhere. You could do it in Central Park, in Golden Gate Park, in Asia. As long as that plant is there, the butterflies will be there. But they’re not going to live at Antioch Dunes, which is the one place they lived before humans showed up. But why isn’t that option on the table? Is saving the butterfly in that way better than doing all the backbreaking work we’re doing now?

The fact is that a lot of the people working on these recoveries are career conservationists. And a lot of time, it takes an outsider to say, “Hey, what are we really doing here?” I felt like I was engaging a lot of these people in conversations they had been dying to have for a long time, but they  just haven’t had the opportunity to. They’re just not prompted to think this way within the bureaucracies of their work.

Rumpus: A lot of the older conservationists you profile have become disillusioned. They started off young and idealistic. But as their careers have gone on, they’ve lost a fair amount of hope and drive.

Mooallem: I tracked down some battle-scarred conservationists and for the most part, they weren’t cheery. A lot of them failed to do what they set out to do. And even the ones that had success, it was often indirect. So I don’t blame them for feeling that way, but I’m glad I could write about them in a different context and show what role they did play.

And I will say that even though some of them told me they had given up, they really hadn’t given up. That kind of moral energy doesn’t go away just because you get beaten to shit trying to exert it on the world, and that’s an amazing thing. It makes me proud to be a human being. I would talk to all these sour old men and women, and I would leave feeling exhilarated to see how this process plays out every generation. People start out full of energy, they meet obstacles, but then someone else comes and they pick up the baton and keep going.

Rumpus: Is that the “weirdly reassuring” part of the story you refer to in the title?

Mooallem: Yeah. It goes back to this idea of the sublime. For the people who have worked on Operation Migration or the guy who spent fifty years at Antioch Dunes with the Lange’s metalmark, these things can be completely dispiriting. But then you zoom out and you see the that there is this fight that we’re all in together. I find that incredibly reassuring. Humankind can’t control the entire world and solve all of its problems, but we’re engaged in this big ecological bar fight where we’re trying to do this stuff.

Rumpus: Isn’t the bar fight really within ourselves, though? Isn’t it really a fight over what kind of animals we are? I just read today that carbon levels in the atmosphere are higher than they’ve been in at least 800,000 years.

Mooallem: Stuff is fucked up. I’m not trying to be rosy about it. I can’t explain why but being around these people, despite their imperfections and disagreements, who are engaged in questions of how humanity should exist in the world, is completely life-affirming.

I don’t have the most optimistic outlook on the future. Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I had just brought a kid into the world and it got me thinking about these things in a different way. That doesn’t mean I think things are going to turn out great. I can still be pessimistic but at least I can feel better about being pessimistic sometimes. That strikes me as the secret to a lot of things in life, being able to sit with your fear.

I hope I’m not mistaken for a kind of Pollyanna, but I think there’s a big space between feeling like the world is coming to an end and feeling like we don’t have to worry at all. And I think I’m getting better at occupying that space.

Rumpus: Getting back to the American relationship to wilderness. We exterminated thirty-million buffalo—or bison, to be more precise. It struck me that the guy who led the effort to save them is a perfect embodiment of our conflicted relationship with nature and animals.

Mooallem: William Temple Hornaday. I want to write a whole book about him. He was a taxidermist at the Smithsonian, a young guy, maybe thirty-two. And he finds out there’s only three hundred or so buffalo left, and he says, “I’ve got to do something about this—I have to go to Montana and kill a bunch of them!” He decides to stuff these things so that his children and grandchildren can know them after they’re gone. But a few years down the line he realizes that, hey, maybe we can save these things instead of just preserving them.

His story is such a great microcosm of a lot of what we’re struggling with in trying to expand the bounds of our compassion and what we think is possible. It was a moment where people were inventing environmentalism. He was a fascinating figure. He was also a total racist and a really disgusting figure in a lot of ways.

Rumpus: He called the buffalo stupid, didn’t he?

Mooallem: Yes. He blamed their extinction on their stupidity, which you would never hear an environmentalist say now. It dates him to his time. There wasn’t this gushy sympathy for animals. He was one of America’s first wildlife conservationists but he hated wolves. He wrote an entire section of a book that was a fake trial where he was a prosecutor and he sentenced wolves to death because they ate chickens and livestock.

Rumpus: And yet, some modern-day conservationists have seemed shockingly callous, too. You write about a particularly grisly incident where someone filmed polar bear cubs starving to death.

Mooallem: It was a horrible video. And this person put it online because he thought it had a chance to be iconic and stir up emotions. But nobody would watch it, and some people got really angry at [the videographer]. They said, why are you just standing there with a camera? Why didn’t you feed these bears? And that’s a debate that been going on a lot more lately.

There’s a whole slew of logistical questions involved [in feeding polar bears], but I think the more interesting argument is the emotional or the philosophical one. Do we want a world in which polar bears survive because we’re tossing them road kill? That makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but we’ve been doing similar things with other species for decades.

Rumpus: The bears themselves have become purely symbolic. They’re being used by these well-meaning activists to make a larger point about climate change.

Mooallem: They’re mascots.

Rumpus: You tell the stories of several local people in Churchill, Manitoba. Even though many of them don’t believe in climate change or don’t care about the issue, they seem to have more of a connection with the bears than the environmentalists who are supposedly campaigning to save them.

Mooallem: A lot of these guys spend months at a time out on the ice living in ice shelters and hunting and trapping, and it’s hard for them to conceive of a big, menacing polar bear as a victim, which is the story that the environmentalists are telling.

The videographer thought the video would get people outraged and motivated to help polar bears. The locals saw a video of someone not helping polar bears. They saw a video by someone who should have put down his camera and thrown the bears some meat. With all the arguments and compelling ideas about polar bears that everyone gets bombarded with, it’s easy to forget that they’re actual animals living in time and space.

Rumpus: That tension between the townspeople and the environmentalists shows how complex these issues are. It’s so easy to caricature attitudes about nature and animals. You’re either Ted Nugent or some kind of tree-sitting hippie. But it’s just not that simple, is it?

Mooallem: No. My editor said that this is not a book that ties everything up in a neat ribbon. It actually unties what we think are neat ribbons and then asks us to deal with the big mess on the floor. Not the greatest sales pitch, perhaps. I don’t think Oprah is going to go for that.

Rumpus: Or Martha Stewart.

Mooallem: Or Martha Stewart. But I think our job right now as people is to deal with the complexity, and to see through the catchphrases or [simplistic] ideas like “wilderness good, people bad” or “polar bears good, hunters bad.” We’re not going to get solutions to any of these problems thinking of them in clichéd terms.

Rumpus: I don’t want to ask you something trite like, “where do you think things will go from here,” but where do you think things will go from here?

Mooallem: Maybe in ten years somebody will write a book like this with more answers. But right now, I feel like we’re at a point where we just need to pull back the curtain and say this is where wild animals are now and this is where conservation is.

I remember right after I started working on this book, my daughter was two years old, and she was sitting in her highchair having a fit. There was a bowl of food in front of her and she threw it on the floor. It smashed, food spilled everywhere, and she suddenly shut up. I don’t know what she was thinking but it seemed pretty clear to me that she was astonished at the kind of wreckage she had created, the power she had exerted. She was just staring at this thing she had broken. I think that’s where we’re at.

WILD ONES book trailer from Jon Mooallem on Vimeo.

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If pith is the mode of the automaton and the worker bee, then Desolation: Souvenir, Hoover’s latest work, puts smoke in the hive. His work is the interruption to the monotony of habituation, deadly as Schlovsky claims. It calls attention to the anemic patterns of habit, using pain and courage to carve through.

Though Hoover is relatively prolific, his writing is capable of traversing, if not discovering within itself, new measures of emotional depth and conceptual difficulty. The entire volume of his published work should be the call to invent new concepts in the prizing of poetic superheroes that acknowledges the sustained lift of a long-fighting heavy weight. Scars and blows all gorgeously legible.

Desolation: Souvenir starts at the point where language fails (as maybe it is supposed to if it is to show it is capable of meaning anything that would touch us): the death of a child. The brief poems piece aphorisms into elegy. The awkward junctures function as attempts at connection, solace, that instead show the gaps – of what is unknown, of what is suffering, of what’s been lost. In “the dream and now a field,” Hoover’s speaker identifies the “vain remedy” of language in the aftermath of emotional evacuation: “the consolations pour/ those unseen wither/ thinking’s like a wind/ tying knots in twine” (14).

These elegies are not only for the loss of a person, but address the sense of impermanence inherent in language in the moment it seeks to comfort, to close a gap or cover an open wound. Hoover writes in “and what is last in us”: “touch is a form of speech/close your eyes to imagine/open them to remember/forms are firm, shapes shift” (29). Where the contradictions do not result in a zero sum, instead verify the irrational logic of the heart suffering what is ultimately unthinkable, impossible.

The language is colloquial; occasionally literary references crop up, and then recede back into the subtle mixture of short lines, references to the personal and to cycles of earth, and transient, lithe meditations on the nature of words, and reality.

In a short section at the end of the book, called “The Windows (The Actual Acts)” Hoover spends twenty four pages on an exercise which seems to be for the purpose of trying to get language to be something real. They are propositions. If propositions are meant to illustrate the things of the world that are, and that can be said, all else is nonsense. In “The Windows” Hoover is carving even more depth to his unnamed speaker. In a move to fix language to say and to be what is, to imply permanence, and, therefore, the propositions function to claim the unchangeable immortal truths of the world. They are a gorgeous defense to the metaphysics and splayed logic of language when confronted by death.

Hoover’s propositions, however, shape what is with humor and a lush bleed of the illogical into what is: “A new species of clam being eaten by a new species of bird./ And there’s no new man to record it./ To imagine a world is to clean it./ Hard to conceive of a dirty new world.” And, here he leaves us, in a dirty new world – with perfect half-finished lives, sentences, thoughts, and sort of made beds. Where people and words suffer and die, or survive and maybe get shocked hard enough into having to be something new.

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Sterry’s memoir, Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent, sold for six figures one lucky afternoon in 2000 and became an international best seller that was translated into ten languages. Not only is Chicken a heart-punching story about seventeen-year-old Sterry getting sucked into the sex industry while attending a fancy, private high school, it is also about a homeless kid in Hollywood with acting aspirations and negligent parents, digging food out of a trash can to eat. It’s a story that kicks with loneliness, vulnerability, humor, and terror. Chicken doesn’t read like a confession, but sings its redemptive heartbeat.

I expected Sterry to be brittle after reading his stories, but he is everything but. While discussing the publishing industry, words like “Zen” and “karma” came up. “After Chicken happened,” Sterry said, “I swore I would help anyone who asked.” Another rare, beautiful thing about Sterry is that decades after he left the sex industry, he remains dedicated to the stories of sex workers. His first anthology, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex, was featured on the front cover of the Sunday edition of the New York Times Book Review, and his follow-up to that book, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other, contains stories by people who have bought and sold sex (including one by me, “The Man I Gave A Handjob in West Hollywood Will Surely Blow His Brains Out Before I See Him Again,” which was snatched up from my blog by Stephen Elliott in 2010 and appeared in a different form on The Rumpus at that time).

In addition to being a writer, Sterry is a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, and book doctor. He also authored The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published with his ex-agent and current wife, and his novella, Confessions of a Sex Maniac, was a finalist for the Henry Miller Award. He has written books about working at Chippendales Male Strip Club, the teenaged brain, how to throw a great pajama party if you’re a tween girl, a patricidal mama’s boy, and World Cup soccer.

Sterry and I talked on the phone about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the sex industry and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex. We discussed the possibility of being loved and the necessity of giving voice to our secrets, even when the probability of being reviled is high—especially because it is so.

 ***

The Rumpus: Your first anthology, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other, a collection of essays by sex workers and clients, is a follow up anthology to Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Sex (now in its fifth printing). How did you procure so many essays from clients and sex workers?

David Henry Sterry: When we did Hos and Hookers, it came out of two different avenues I was pursuing. First, I was doing a workshop in [San Francisco] centered on sex workers who had been arrested. Many were former drug addicts and street people. Every Tuesday for two years, we did this workshop. At the same time, I was being introduced into the sex worker artist/activist world because of my book Chicken. I did a one-man show in SF and Annie Sprinkle was in the audience. I was floored she came. Then I toured with the Sex Workers Art Show, where I meet this huge community of people. Hos are good networkers—you have to be. Very generous people in that world.

The two worlds had similarities: educated organizers, artists, and hard workers. And others were high school dropouts. The stories they told were very different. There is a great chasm—the abolitionists and the decriminalizationist. They hate each other. There are five-dollar blowjob-givers and five-thousand-dollar-a-night courtesans who get flown to Dubai in one book. I wanted to create that book. Once we put that book out, it blew up. So, I started a reading series called Sex Worker Literati, every month in NYC. I met a whole other crop of writers. People contacted me bummed that they weren’t included in the first book. So, people came to me after I put the word out and I thought, Wouldn’t it be great to have a book of people who sold sex with people who bought sex together in one book?

Rumpus: Why do you think it’s so hard for people to admit they have paid for sex? What does this mean culturally? Emotionally? Personally? I think that in the U.S., there is underlying respect towards anyone who hustles because of the materialistic nature of our culture, but also, historically, women mostly occupy the adult industry, so the current of sexism and disrespect also runs deep.

Sterry: I didn’t realize the enormous stigma attached to the statement to say, “Yes, I hire someone to have sex with me.” Easier to get people to admit they are a “whore” than to get people to admit they hired a whore. So I was looking for those stories.

I posted everywhere. I asked my friends. They were liberals, pro-sex artists, and yet none of them would admit it. I thought, Interesting. Here’s a billion dollar industry with no clients. A few gay men would say it publicly. It’s more accepted in the gay male culture for some reason, maybe because it’s so hard to be gay to begin with, they already are used to taking risk rejection in society to some degree. The worst thing you can say in any culture is “your mother is a whore,” but I agree with you that there is a certain respect for the hustler, somewhat begrudging towards someone who can make a living with their wits and their body.

Rumpus: Isn’t it interesting that early feminism embraced sexual freedoms and birth control, but kind of left sex workers out to rot? And what about the archaic shame that johns have? Should more clients speak out about their positive experiences with sex workers? What effect would this have?

Sterry: There were consciousness-raising groups in my parents’ generation and that empowerment has bled into the sex industry. Whereas you never hear yes, I have this empowered beautiful prostitute who made me cry when she gave me a blowjob and has opened my third eye. The shame surprised me. The only people who were heteronormal men who admitted to hiring pros used fake names. I mean, I am in touch with like 10,000 writers! Hardly any men would say they paid for sex and here’s my real name.

Rumpus: Have you ever paid for sex?

Sterry: Many, many, many times. I spent many years binging on sex. I was a problematic hypersexual. A sex addict. I would structure my days around when I could binge. I would work hard all week as a professional actor and screenwriter in LA and NY, and I would be off at five p.m. on Friday and I would line up a series of dates—some free and some paid for.

Rumpus: What kind of client were you as an ex-sex worker?

Sterry: Because I sold sex first in my life as a young man, I always wanted to be extra nice because I had clients who were mean to me. So, I was a competitive client. I wanted to be clear and nice—the nicest client. I didn’t want them to do a job with me if they were uncomfortable. At the same time, there were certain things I wanted to do and wanted done to me and I would tip nicely.

Rumpus: What types of things did you want from a sex worker?

Sterry: I liked to be more in control and dominating and I liked to have hard sex, not to the point of causing pain, but a little bit rough. So, that’s what I was looking for. I hired people from the top end—Beverly Hills, Park Avenue courtesans—to crack addicts in MacArthur Park and the Bronx. I’d get coked up and go on these benders. What’s interesting is that there are thieves on both ends that are masquerading as sex workers. Then there are beautiful, incredible sexual athletes at both ends. I did find that people at the lower end of the food chain tended to be more physically violent, but also more appreciative, as well.

Rumpus: Have you ever fallen in love or had a crush on a sex worker or a client of yours?

Sterry: I met this woman in the East Village. At twenty paces, she was a gorgeous blonde with a great body, and closer, she was beaten by life. She talked like a chainsaw, was so skinny and scarred. She was sweet, so I picked her up and she took me to her squat in Alphabet City. She was a crackhead, so she wanted to buy some crack first. “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do some crack.” She smoked and mellowed and she was really into the sex.

So, I asked her, “Do you have any friends that want to join us next week?” Then she wrote my phone number on her wall. She put a star next to my name and I felt so good about that. This beautiful, fallen crack angel, writing my name on her wall with a star.

She called me the next day, and said she had some beautiful girl with her and she wanted a woman to make out with. We had this crazy threesome. I ended up painting her walls in her apartment and we became close friends. She kept saying she wanted a job.  She was so nice and so sweet, smart and funny. I hooked her up with a job. All she had to do was walk in the door and she would have a job. I even helped her pick out an outfit. But, she didn’t show up and I didn’t push her after that. I knew she was scared. Then I showed up one day and she was gone.

When I was a rent boy, I also had a big crush on a client who was a tantric sex practitioner. I was so untethered from reality in a certain way, I thought maybe I could just move in with her and be with her and her yoga friends. I wanted to be her son and her lover. I had a kind of love for the crackhead. It was a complicated relationship. I wanted to help her and I wanted to be with her, too.

Rumpus: It’s common for sex workers to leave “the life” and shut the door on their past. You have done the exact opposite. How and why did you end up in the sex industry? How long did you do sex work?

Sterry: I only sold sex for nine months, when I was living in a tiny apartment in Hollywood when I was in college at Immaculate Heart College. I was studying with nuns and focused on existentialism. They had no dorms and I had nowhere to stay and no money. So I wandered on Hollywood Boulevard. At that moment, I was on the streets. This guy had a t-shirt on that said “Sexy” and he asked me out to steak dinner. Of course I went. The steak was drugged, and he sexually assaulted me viciously, and I whacked him with my elbow and escaped. I was seventeen.

There I was at four a.m. on Hollywood Boulevard, where the predators were. I found a dumpster with a container full of fried chicken. A guy watched me and asked me, “Are you hungry? Are you looking for a job?” He was the manager of the chicken place, but also was the procurer of the sex industry in Hollywood at that time. He turned me onto the Hollywood employment agency on Sunset. This place was the most generic office you’ve ever seen in your life. Like, the secretary that worked there was so generic, you forgot her the second you looked at her. The man I met with was like Bob Newhart. The exact opposite of the pimp look—he was like a soft-boiled egg. And his specialty was underaged kids. So, he sent me out on my first job and the manager of the chicken place said if I pissed off the Bob Newhart guy, they would kill me.

The hardest thing about being a male hustler is that there are many things you can fake, but an erection is not one of them. I was very nervous that I would not be able to perform. This woman was very thin and very rich. She was mean. She would lay in a bed like she was in a coma. I was supposed to crawl under the covers and have oral sex with her. She didn’t move a muscle. And then she wanted my eyes closed. She was going to be on top of me. I was very nervous about that part of it. But I managed to do it. I found a mental porn movie. I would get into my personal porn in my head and disappear, and that’s how I was able to perform.

Sunny, my fairy godfather/employment counselor/pimp had me work for a week frying chicken. It’s horrible, miserable, greasy, stink work. After a week he gave me my paycheck. It was so small, it was horrifying. When he offered me real money to have professional sex, only a moron would turn down that money.

Rumpus: Where were your parents at the time? Did they ever read Chicken? What was their reaction to it?

Sterry: My mother had four kids and had just come out as a lesbian. My father had a mental breakdown and could not admit it. My mom was supposed to come live with me in LA but she never showed up. She decided to live in Oregon. I thought I could do all of this myself, which is typical innocent arrogance of a seventeen-year-old. My mother never read my book. My father read my book and didn’t speak to me for five years. He was angry. I never told anyone about my book until I had my deal. So I sent my family a galley of the book thinking they would be proud of me. My father called me, livid. “How dare you?” he said. He was screaming and shouting, completely beside himself.

Rumpus: How did you leave the sex industry?

Sterry: I wanted to stop working. It wasn’t making me happy anymore. The cash was intoxicating, so I couldn’t stop. I was scared. One day my pimp said to me: “I got you this job: it’s not sex, but you show up and smack this guy around and talk dirty to him.” What is sex? If it didn’t involve my genitals it was not sex to me, but it was a sexual exchange. The client was very presumptuous and told me to sit in his lap. He was sucking on my hair. It was revolting. My stomach turned over. I was so angry. All of the anger and rage came out and I beat the shit out of the guy. I thought maybe I killed him.

After that, I could not go back to working for those people. It was like I was a caged animal who lashed out. I hid out and left LA three weeks later. They never found me. I escaped to Oregon to where my mom was living with her lesbian lover. They accepted me back and I went back to school, Reed College for three years, and got my degree.

Rumpus: One thing I have heard a lot from people—from clients to people who are pro-sex and have a liberal view of the sex industry—is that it’s cool to be a stripper or escort as long as you don’t make a “career” out of it. Well, I did make a “career” out of it for twenty-plus years. The great thing about stripping is showing up with an empty gas tank and fifty cents, and leaving with four hundred bucks or more. Why do you think people say that? From where do these comments stem?

Sterry: The underlying assumption is the idea that it’s bad and bad for you. Another assumption is that the end result will not be a positive thing. If you ask a parent about their son or daughter—if they want their kids to be sex workers—they would never say, “Yes, I’d love for my kid to grow up to be a prostitute.” People believe it’s okay to dabble but not to get sucked in too deep. That shame is in our cultural DNA. I have friends who have sold sex, porn stars, strippers, surrogates, and some are very happy making their money doing this and some are looking to get out. The fact is, being a sex worker is a difficult job that is high-risk and high-reward, like my friend who works in the ER. Lots of people would not be able to do that job, or do the job of a firefighter. Not everyone is cut out to run into that building on fire. Sometimes you walk into someone’s life and his or her life is on fire, but you’re built for that job.

Rumpus: I am built for that job. I run through the fire of people’s lives all the time. Sometimes I forget to carry a hose.

Sterry: Important to remember your hose. It’s not for everyone, but for some people, it’s the best part-time job in the world if you are cut out for it. Meaning, you are emotionally and physically equipped to handle it.

Rumpus: Do you ever miss it? Would you ever go back to it? Have your views changed about the sex industry over the years?

Sterry: I was made an offer and I talked about it with my partner, and we discussed it and I decided to not do it. But, I seriously considered it. I never carried any shame about doing sex and getting money for it. The only immoral thing about the sex industry is when there is the lack of choice. That’s slavery. My main ideas about the industry have not changed. I feel sorry for those who try to shame sex workers. I feel bad for them for being an unenlightened, uninformed person.

Rumpus: I am currently heartbroken. Men I have dated seem to love my independence and sexiness, but eventually, they wind up using the fact that I have done sex work as a weapon against me, to hurt me or push me away. Is it a mistake to tell men I date about my history? Will I ever be loved and accepted? Male opinion, please.

Sterry: I never told anyone about myself for twenty years. But all of my secrets ate at me from the inside. Eventually, it consumed me. From the outside, I looked great: I had sold screenplays, I had a red sports car and all the trappings. And I was dying inside. I was married to this beautiful woman who was not very capable of giving love. I hated acting. I was a cog in a machine. My thought process was, Oh, you’re not happy? Buy a bigger TV.

I was a dancing monkey and I hated it. My addictions got bigger and my binges more intense. I found this beautiful woman in Harlem who asked me for a date. She took me to this crack house in Harlem, and her hands were big and her Adam’s apple, huge. In that dump, one crackhead hit me with a pipe and stole my money. Luckily, I come from a long line of hardheaded coalminers. They [the crackheads] all looked funny to me and I started laughing. Soon, we were all laughing. I just walked out.

That was my bottom. I vowed that I was going to tell my true story if anyone asked me and I was never going to hide again. Soon after, I went on a date with this literary agent, who liked a book I wrote, but then I told her my real story that became Chicken: Portrait of a Young Man for Rent.  I thought it would make people run from me, but that night, this woman—who was a well-educated, Jewish woman—thought it was so interesting. She told me, “This is the book you should write.” And, I did.

I believe that you telling your story will lead to someone giving you unconditional support and love. Antonia, you will find love.

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Photograph of David Henry Sterry © 2004 by Lothian Photography.

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Click here to read the first of four interviews by David Henry Sterry with some of the contributing writers from Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients Writing About Each Other.

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