*****************

The Talent Myth

Yesterday I was talking about talent. I was with a dominatrix I’d met at the L.A. bookfair. She has a friend who likes my books and she said, I’m going to beat you and she’s going to make you muffins. We have plans to go to a movie premiere and she modeled the latex dress she was going to wear.

After, I made my way to Josh’s house in Echo Park. We met in late 2003 and traveled to Iowa and New Hampshire together for the caucuses and the primaries. He was the comic relief in my book, Looking Forward To It. I would put words in his mouth and have him showing up to political events dressed like a salmon.

I was on the road all of 2004, traveling the county in campaign busses. I was locked in a difficult relationship with Patty and I remember talking to her on the phone during a John Kerry rally in January. I was wearing cargo pants and it felt like I was being dragged across the floor.

Later that year I was sitting on her kitchen floor, home for  a week or two. She had taken my earrings out and they were sitting in a cap full of hydrogen peroxide while she scrubbed my ears, and she said, I’ve got to give my other relationship a chance.

Years later she would blame me for the man she almost married and lost. She said he made over a hundred thousand dollars a year.

I’ve never been in anything resembling a healthy romantic relationship. Like, one day you see the woman you loved most in the world holding hands with another guy on Bryant Street. You’re finishing up a burrito and they’re coming to the restaurant where you’re sitting outside alone. In fact, you introduced her to this restaurant and he’s shorter than you and clean shaven. His hair is cut to say that he’s nice, just walking through the world not looking for trouble and hoping for a promotion, like most of us. Your bike is locked to a wood pole protecting a small tree and you hug by leaning forward instead of pressing your stomachs together and resting your chins on one another’s collar bone. And the next day she calls. But she never calls. In the year and a half you were together she called maybe ten times. She likes talking on the phone but not as much as being pursued. But the day after you see her with the other man she calls, out of the blue. You haven’t spoken in months but now she’s near your house and she wants to know how you’re doing. And the subtext is she might have hurt you so you’re carrying something she wants.

Which is to say that nobody’s talented, not when it comes to prose, and if they are it wouldn’t matter. If you read a story by 100 beginning writers you would have no idea who was going to be a better writer in a year. If you encouraged one of them because they had promise, an odd sensibility, a skeptics view of their interior life, maybe even a hint of poetry as if they were listening to Pink Floyd while they wrote, then you are mistaken. A year later you would be shocked who was showing improvement. Still, nobody would be writing anything too advanced. But you might think you could see a trajectory with the ones who weren’t leaning so hard on adjectives, beginning to trust the reader. You’d still be wrong. Only after maybe five, probably ten years would you have any idea if any of them were going to write a great short story. Almost guaranteed the ones you thought had talent would be nowhere to be found, if they were writing at all, which is unlikely. Because what you thought was talent was actually promise, and promise isn’t an indicator of anything. Among the people that had spent ten years writing in their free time you might now see who has “talent”, but by then it’s a meaningless designation. They’ve already put in the time.

That’s why I don’t believe in talent.

It’s nine in the morning and I’m writing this listening to “10a.m.” by The Black Keys. It’s Los Angeles and you can hear the derivative twang of The White Stripes. “You got veins like an addict/I’m leaving you.” It’s one of the songs recommended by an undergraduate class I visited to talk about honesty.

Josh has become a movie producer, a TV show creator, since the tragic presidential campaign of 2004. He has two shows at HBO, studio deals, phone meetings. He has a hot tub he can sit in and read the paper with a view of downtown; a friend living on the property down the hill; a wife. I was talking about Josh with E. later in the evening, after we’d put the toys away and washed the latex and the San Francisco Giants had won the World Series. I explained that I’d come to stay with Josh in June 2007 while Paris Hilton was serving her sentence. Ostensibly I was in LA to report on celebrity culture, but in truth I was having a breakdown. It happens every year or two, some more serious than others. The most serious was when I was twenty-three and showed up at the hospital in Evanston at midnight. And the next, earlier this year when I had to sneak out of a psychiatrist’s office in New York while she phoned the police in the other room.

I came to stay with Josh that year because so many people had the key to his apartment and I could sleep on the couch and there would always be someone there watching television.

The night that Paris got out I was with a throng of paparazzi at the county jail. It was just after midnight and I thought she looked better in person. The bubble she’d lived in all her life was good for her skin. The walls came down, the cones overturned, the guards overwhelmed, as her ankle disappeared into the black truck. A photographer gripped the hood of the car during the stampede. I followed the spotlight from the helicopter blazing on the highway. Yes Yes Yes, I thought. This is being alive.

**

Today The Rumpus goes meta with an article by Seth Fisher, our Sunday editor, about the state of The Rumpus.

Ted Wilson reviews Halloween.

Michelle Orange interviews Megan Stack, who spent six years in the Middle East reporting for the LA Times, about her new book Every Man In This Village Is A Liar.

**

I tried to be faithful but they were playing The National on the radio.

Yours from Los Angeles,

Stephen Elliott

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“Are you a masochist?” It’s the first thing Bosco asks me. He’s 14 years old now, almost my height, 5′ 8″, creamy white skin, and a small, German nose from my stepmother’s side of the family. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and my father’s green bomber jacket. We’re in a cab returning from the airport. He’s here to stay with me for ten days. And I’m realizing I’ve made a terrible mistake.

“Why would you think that?” I ask. I’m tired myself. I just flew into San Francisco two hours earlier. I haven’t been home in weeks.

“Dad says you’re a masochist. He read it.”

“I’m a fiction writer,” I say. “It’s fiction.”

“Sure it is,” he says.

We go to a party for people from the university. Bosco grabs two beers from the fridge and hands me one. “He’s a little young to be drinking, isn’t he?” Claire asks. Claire’s a poet from Georgia. The house is filled with poets and short story writers. Jackets are piled on the bed in the bedroom and people are laying on them or on the floor telling stories about losing their virginity. Everybody has an MFA so every story has a small inappropriate observation. “He put his hand between my legs at the movie theater. I was wearing my mother’s skirt…” “I was 15 she was 19. It was the day after my best friend committed suicide.” My brother hangs on the front steps with Kaui’s boyfriend Andy and Andy tells him not to do heroin. “Everything else is OK,” Andy says.

“That guy was cool,” Bosco says.

I don’t know my little brother as well as I should. I left home before I was his age. I ran away just after my mother died and slept on rooftops and hallways for all of eighth grade. I ate from the garbage behind Dominicks, food thrown away just past due date. The state took custody of me and charged my father with abuse and neglect.

My father and I never really mended our relationship. He remarried, made money, moved to the suburbs, had children. I wrote a book about growing up in group homes and the violence there. My father thinks I have exaggerated my victimhood at his expense. We get along for months at a time and then I’ll get some note explaining how he wasn’t that bad of a father, how he didn’t shave my head, he gave me haircuts and I’ll remember waking up to my father’s fists and being dragged along the floor into the kitchen. My father likes to joke that he only handcuffed me to a pipe that one time and look how many stories I’ve written about it. He thinks he should have been a worse father because it would have helped my writing. Some times I tell my father it’s best we don’t talk for a while. So I was surprised when he suggested Bosco come out and stay with me. I was more surprised, when, after saying yes, I found out the ticket was for ten days.

What I have to keep telling myself is that Bosco is a kid and being a kid is hard. I’m not jealous that he’s growing up with two parents in a big house in the suburbs. I want to be a good brother but the truth is that I don’t have the skills. I’ve borrowed a sleeping bag for him; my studio is so small. He sleeps on the wooden floor his feet inches from my head.  His feet smell and I’m going to have to tell him about that.

“Stop walking into me,” I say. We’re on 16^th Street and Bosco keeps brushing against me and I keep moving further away until I am against the buildings.

“I’m not. You’re walking into me.”

“From now on I’m going to call you Underfoot,” I say. “You see these lines on the sidewalk? Stay on your side of the line.”

“You stay on your side of the line.” The streets are crowded and the fruit vendors are out so it’s hard for either of us to stick to our grids. We pass the Victoria Theater where Hedgewig and the Angry Inch is in its final week.

“It’s like my feet are magnets and you have a metal head.”

We try, we try. We watch a basketball game at my friend’s house and I lose fifty dollars. “What were you thinking?” Bosco asks. “Syracuse is sooo much better.”

“You’re fourteen years old. You don’t know anything about college basketball.”

“Neither do you, apparently.”

We head to the Orbit Room where my ex-girlfriend is getting drunk with her friends. I worry that my brother will think I drink too much. Then I worry that maybe I do drink too much.

Theresa is wearing blue jeans and a torn black shirt. It’s always tough to see an ex-girlfriend and realize she’s getting better looking. Theresa has been at the protests all day in Oakland. “They fired rubber bullets at us,” she says proudly. “It was amazing.”

The Orbit room has round cement tables that are four feet high and people sit around them on tall stools. Bosco is off talking to someone. I say to Theresa, “This is awful. It’s like coming face to face with a part of yourself you had no interest in knowing.”

“You’ll do fine,” she says.

“No,” I tell her. “I don’t like children. Also, my apartment is too small. And I’ve been sick recently, I have this ringing in my ears.”

“Don’t think about yourself,” Theresa says. “Think about you brother.”

“Why do I have to think about him?” I ask. “He has everything. Can we stay with you?”

“No. I’m getting on with my life.”

It’s almost one in the morning and we’re walking home. “Why’d you break up with her?” Bosco asks. “She’s the whole package.” He sounds like my father. My father always spoke of women as if they were frozen meat.

“Yeah, she’s great,” I say, and I think of how if I hadn’t broken up with her we would be at her place now. Bosco would be in her extra bedroom and I would be on the inside of the spoon.

“You’ll never get a girlfriend like that again.”

A child sleeps on my floor. The morning is full of rain.  I watch my hands as I type. I have scars up and down my wrist from all of my suicide attempts.

My father writes to say that my fourteen-year-old cousin went to a concert once and became a doper and now my uncle is going to throw him out. I hate email for this reason. I tell my father that I was doing dope long before my first concert and that maybe my uncle should be a little more thoughtful in assigning blame. My father tells me my uncle has a family to think about. It’s my father’s favorite notion. The situation where the family must abandon one of its own for the good of the whole. That’s why he moved while I was living on the streets at 14, he says. Because I was a drug addict and he had to think of the family. Which is why, when the police found me, after a year on the streets, lying in a hallway, shivering and bleeding, and asked where my parents were, I answered I didn’t know. Honestly, I didn’t. But my family was just two people then, my father and my sister. So I’ve always been skeptical of that argument. I’ve always been skeptical of parents who abandon children for the good of the family.

I introduce Bosco to Amber, a 16-year-old girl from the writing program where I volunteer as a tutor. We go to a movie which isn’t very good and then desert at an overpriced coffee shop. “So how long are you here for?” Amber asks Bosco.

“Until next Sunday.”

“Wow. A whole week more.” Amber is young and pretty. She’s an A student, the editor of her school newspaper. She can make Bosco into a better person. Young boys are so easy to manipulate. They only think of one thing. Someday when he’s older Bosco will also think of his place in the world and how people don’t appreciate him enough. He’ll worry about how hard it is to make a living. He’ll feel jealous and angry when he is passed over for a promotion and then self-loathing for his own small-mindedness.

Amber takes Bosco back to her home in the Haight District. I take the opportunity to get some work done, push his things into the back of the studio and do the dishes. When he comes home we both have one of those Smirnoff Ice drinks that I have in my fridge.

“What did you guys talk about?” I ask.

“Drugs mostly.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. She likes to do mushrooms.”

“Oh. Yeah, mushrooms are good. When I was your age I loved acid.”

“My friend does acid,” he says.

“Acid is bad for you,” I tell him. Though I know I’m too late. I can tell he’s going to become a horrible drug addict and the next time he visits he’ll steal my laptop and sell it for crack.

“She said I was weird.” He’s leaning against the wall, below the lip of the window. I live on a busy street. Dirt from exhaust pipes builds up along the base. My little brother has something more to say. He has that kid smile. He thinks he’s so cool. I raise my eyebrow.

“I shook her hand but she wanted a hug,” he says. “I might have been able to score but I didn’t try.”

My brother and I have a card-playing ancestry. Our grandfather played cards every day of his adult life. He was an absentee father. He worked during the day and played cards at night. My uncle said he nearly gambled away their house. Because I’m the best euchre player at Stanford people are always trying to take me down a peg. I get paired up with my brother.

“That’s a spade,” I say, pointing to the jack of clubs.

“No it isn’t.” He’s on his third beer. He’s sucking them down like water. He’ll be an alcoholic before he turns eighteen. Everybody’s half drunk and they holler at Bosco to bring them drinks. He’s become the beer boy.

“It is a fucking spade.”

“Why are you swearing at your brother?”

“When spades are trump the jack of the same color becomes the second highest trump.”

“You should have told me,” he says. He turns everything back that way.

“I did tell you.”
“No you didn’t.”

“Why don’t you just admit you’re wrong,” I say. “Why don’t you take responsibility for your actions?”

“Why don’t you admit you’re wrong?”

“Your grandfather would turn over in his grave if he saw you playing cards that way.”

After one more beer apiece, Bosco and I stumble home arm in arm. The restaurants are closed; the world is asleep. “That’s nothing,” Bosco says, peeing on the wall of a live-work loft building. “Me and my friend Jimmy drank a whole bottle of whiskey. I don’t get hung-over.”

“That’s one more thing you can look forward to.”

He’ll be leaving in a few days and we haven’t done anything. We haven’t seen either bridge, Golden Gate Park, the ocean or the bay. We haven’t been to any museums. We haven’t hiked the Lands End or gone rock climbing. When people ask him what he did in San Francisco Bosco will say he got drunk. But the thing is, I don’t have a television. I don’t have Playstation. I don’t have Internet. There is absolutely nothing to do in my apartment except read, write and get drunk. There’s a message on the machine from my father. “I just wanted to check in on my boys, make sure you’re having a good time.” Anyway, there’s only a few days left and I’m counting them off. Walking near Polk street I offer to pay for Bosco to go to bed with a transvestite prostitute.

“Shutup,” he says.

“You won’t notice the difference,” I tell him.

“You’re sick.”

“I’m going to tell everybody you did it anyway, and they’ll believe me because I’m older than you.”

It’s late on Thursday night and there’s been a party at the tutoring center with raffles and piñatas. Friends of mine are drinking at the bar but they won’t let Bosco in. Bosco says I should go without him; he’ll wonder the Mission District. I tell him I don’t think that’s a good idea. We stop to see Theresa at a reading in a used bookstore.

“I’m leaving him with you. I’m going out.”

“Like hell you are.” She’s wearing a charcoal grey skirt. Her legs are tight and tanned, swimmers legs. I slip my foot under her foot, which dangles off the armrest of a comfy chair. She moves it away. There’s a blond boy with her, smiling awkwardly.

“Let’s all go back to your place,” I say. “I’ll buy.”

“You’ll buy what?”

“Anything. I don’t care.”

“No. I’m doing things.”

“What kind of things?”

“This is Sherman.”

“Hello Sherman.”

Later, at the Pakistani restaurant near Guerrero, we split rice, nan, and an order of chicken ticka masala. “I take back what I said about her,” Bosco says. “She’s not that nice.” He’s on my side.

Bosco wants to go to a concert with Amber and her friends but I say no, not unless I chaperone. Bosco says please so I tell him we’ll have to ask his parents. We call and they say no. He calls my stepmother back and begs her. “Why,” he says. “That’s stupid. But mom. But mom.” He hangs up the phone.

“Did you just hang up on your mother?”

“Yes.”

We meet the girls at the station and I find myself wanting to impress them, but I can’t. Young girls talk a lot, act dramatic, dance around and sing inside trains. I feel so old.

The club is near the warehouses and the waterfront. Teenagers are sprawled across the sidewalk. I go inside, sway to the punk music. I want to dance but I don’t want to be the old dancing guy.

The first band poured motor oil on the floor so people can slide while they listen to music. I help the clean up crew mop the mess and Bosco disappears with some of the girls. When he comes back he’s smiling and I think he’s stoned.

“Don’t worry,” Amber says. “We’ll take care of him. You can leave him with us.”

I say no, I’ll stick around. I go to the bar across the street for a drink.

On the way to the train Bosco walks with his new friend Mickey. It makes me happy to see him bonding. These are good kids, except that they are stoners and two years older than him. They are very kind children, environmentalists. They don’t think guns are cool. And that’s what I want for Bosco, to introduce him to kids who don’t think violence is a good thing. Because his uncle has closets full of guns and swastika tattoos and his cousin was given a shotgun for his 14th birthday. It’s after midnight now, and parents are calling these children, who are out so late, on their cell phones. The children say they are doing fine.

I think of my own mother who died painfully for five years on the living room couch. She used to pee in a bucket and I would have to walk her pee to the bathroom and flush it in the toilet. “Give me money,” I would tell her. And she would refuse, so I would yell and scream. And then she would give in, because she was too ill and weak to fight. Then my father stopped giving her money. Sometimes I would yell at her and other times I would curl up with her, laying my head on the quilted blanket covering her legs. I remember loving her and hating her. I remember how often she cried. Despite what people might say I don’t think she liked me very much in the end. Children are horrible. Children are monsters.

And yet most people my age have them. I do too, in a way. I was a sperm donor for about a year when I was living in my car. I checked the box that said they could look me up when they turn eighteen. Fifteen years from now I expect to meet the genetic experiment I made at $45 a toss.

Bosco says he wants to stay out and I say OK. It’s an impulse decision. I give him forty dollars and tell him to take a cab home. It’s one in the morning. He asked and I said yes. The second he gets off the train I wonder if I would say yes if asked again. The city is a dangerous place.

Back in the apartment I watch the dangerous city from my window. I can see a chocolate factory and the Twin Peaks and the lights of the cars driving up the hills. Bosco calls. He’s having a good time. His friends are having dinner in a twenty-four hour diner. I used to wait tables in a place like that. I know the kind of kids that come in at two in the morning. They have too much freedom. “We’re going to Liz’s place in the West Portal,” Bosco tells me.

“No,” I tell him.

“C’mon.”

“Use the money I gave you to get in a cab. It’s time to come home.”

On Bosco’s last night we go to Andrew’s to play cards. First we watch Orgazmo at Ben’s house. Then we walk Valencia to Dolores Park and I point across my adopted city to the Oakland Bay Bridge. “You see,” I say. “It’s so much more colorful here than in Chicago.”

“And that’s a good thing?”

“There are more parks. Did you know there’s more park per square foot than in any other major city?”

“I’m hungry. When are we going to eat?”

“Did you have fun while you were here?”

“It beats being in school.”

At Andrew’s, there are so many people that we have to split into two games of cards. I tell Bosco I’m going to set a good example for him by not drinking tonight, but I have a few beers anyway. Bosco wants to know if he can drink too and I tell him he can have a beer if more than half the people in attendance say it’s OK. “This is democracy,” I say. He’s too shy to ask.

Bosco partners with Adam and I partner with Geoff. He wins every game and I win every game and in the end it’s Geoff and I against Adam, my brother, and Tom. The score’s nine to six. Geoff and I are in the barn. “Should I call it?” Bosco asks Adam and Adam spreads his large hands and says, “Last time you called that you got euchred.”

“I think we should,” Bosco says. He’s got that look in his eye, the look of a gambler. We’re not playing for money but somewhere inside his head the little synapses are firing. He has a keen understanding of the game for his age, a rational mind, an ability to learn from his mistakes but he does not have the ability to read other people and he doesn’t take instruction well. I slowplay a king of trump and when Geoff takes it with the left bower I lay down the rest of my cards. Game over.

“That’s a great game,” Bosco says on the way home. “I only lost to you tonight.”

“You’ll never beat me in cards,” I tell him. “It’s your burden to bear.”

I wanted to steer my brother in the right direction. Instead we drank and played cards. Sunday morning the streets are still wet.

“Is there anything I can do to convince you to stay?” I ask.

“You’d have to give me more money.”

“You’ve already spent all my money.”

“Oh,” he says. “Thanks.”

When the big red van pulls up we put his bag in the back. I go to hug and he goes to slap hands and we end up in this awkward embrace with our biceps against each other’s necks. “You choked me,” he says climbing into his seat. I point my index finger at him with my thumb up, as if that was some kind of cool sign. The driver gives me a small nod and closes the door. My little brother looks into his lap, fiddling with his CD Walkman. I step back toward the metal grating of my entryway. The driver smiles at me like everything is going to be OK. Like he knows this is my little brother and he understands my concern and will take good care of him and get him to the airport safely and once at the airport the boy will board a plane that will not crash and he will get home fine. And then, Bosco will tell the whole world how cool his big brother is, and his father will leave me messages saying how much better I am at this child raising thing than he was. And I won’t return his messages because my father and I still have so many unresolved issues, but I’ll know and he’ll know I’m right and I’ve been right all along. I see all of this in the driver’s calming placid eyes. But he doesn’t know anything, he’s just a van driver.

**

My Little Brother Ruined My Life is a Rumpus Reprint. We reprint essays that we love (or wrote) that are not available online. It was originally published in Maisonneuve and Best American Non-Required Reading 2005.

The top photo is by Beau Maes. The bottom picture is by Lussqueittt.

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In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing, then editing, the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. You can read earlier oral histories here.

Judy — Mother

My dad has a lot of money and he’s a lot older than my mom. She didn’t have any family and when she met him she thought she hit the jackpot. He was living with his mother, my grandmother, and devoid of social skills. I don’t think he had even been on a date and she was a really attractive young woman.

Things didn’t work out the way my mother wanted. My father refused to ever spend money. He was pathologically cheap. My mother was bitter with resentment, always drunk, passed out around the house naked after calling my father every name she could think of. Periodically he would snap and beat the shit out of her until she was bloody. Every so often she would leave but always came back. Sometimes she would take us with her, like when she took us to Florida for a couple of years. Sometimes she just left and we wouldn’t hear from her for months at a time. Some years there was Christmas, some years there wasn’t. It depended if they were separated or not. They got divorced at least twice.

We were living on Lake Shore Drive, which is a fancy address, and dressed in thrift store clothes with holes in our shoes because my father wouldn’t spend money from his trust fund and my mother didn’t make a lot working as a secretary. She would slap us and call us names. She would wake me in the middle of the night, turning over my drawers and making me fold clothes until dawn, slurring that I was a slob, a lying whore, etc., all while saying I better never sign a pre-nup. It was madness.

The violence escalated as I grew older and my father locked himself in his room and hardly came out when she was home. She would bang on his door and try to provoke fights. When that didn’t work she would start fights with me instead. She lived in the living room, passing out nightly on the couch where I would put a blanket over her.

I started talking back when I was fourteen and it became very violent very fast with both of them. My father once whipped me with a belt until I couldn’t move anymore and just lay on the floor motionless. My mother, the last time I ever lived with them, held a kitchen knife against my throat and threatened to kill me. My father, for the first time in his life, stood up for me. He came out of his room, threw her down, and gave me twenty dollars while wrestling with her and told me to run. It was two in the morning. There was a church nearby and I knew one of the youth ministers lived there. He let me in, let me cry, rubbed my back. It happened so fast. He was on top of me. I didn’t scream. I didn’t do anything. No one would have heard anyway.

by Ronit Mitchell

The police arrested me as a runaway. I was placed with my ninety-year-old grandmother, who was told I was on drugs, even though I wasn’t, and instructed not to let me out of the house. Then I was sent to an aunt on the east coast. We were driving up the coast to visit her daughter at a boarding school in New York but it wasn’t a boarding school, it was a drug rehab. She left me there. I went nuts because I’d never taken drugs in my life. The director concurred and made my aunt come back and get me. My parents said they had washed their hands of me. My aunt didn’t have any money and after a few months took me to a children’s shelter. After thirty days were up I had to leave the shelter; my aunt helped me go to an adolescent psychiatric hospital because I was still on my father’s insurance. The head doctor found placement for me in JCB. People feel sorry for me for living in a group home, but it was a blessing.

You were the first person I met when I got there. I was fifteen and I came out of my room and the girls stared at me and you were there with Fat Mike. He didn’t look particularly friendly. You kind of smiled so I talked to you and asked where I could buy cigarettes. You offered to walk me to the gas station but I said, No thank you.

Your group home was run by the same agency as mine. You lived in the front room of the girl’s home, practically. You were like our puppy dog. You roamed around and tried to get affection from all the girls. You weren’t aggressive. You were actually pretty quiet. You always had a journal. I’d say, What are you writing? And you’d say you were just writing a poem about me. Then I’d give you a hug. You wanted affection real bad.

At the group home school you sat in the little lunchroom and read the same book every day, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. You wore tie-dyed t-shirts. You peeled potatoes before school at a hot dog place called Freedy’s and your fingers were cut. I knew you were different because I worked too, I had work study. A lot of the kids wouldn’t go to school or work. They’d sit and watch soaps.

Nobody in Price ever talked about about why we were there. There were twelve girls on two floors with four bedrooms. The girl who had seniority had the single room. At the end I got my own room.

I was one of the only girls that didn’t get into any fights, though a fight could break out at any moment. It took me a long time just to speak up or stand up for myself  Once, in a club, a girl attacked me when I was with a few girls from the home. They beat her so badly that her nose was broken and I had to beg them to stop.

Staff in Price was always coming and going. Every so often there would be a staff member who would be caring and maternal and when they left it hurt. And they always left. The kids too. They ran away or were moved to different placements. After I got hurt a couple of times I never got close to another staff member. I’m still like that. Other than my family relationships I can only get so close. I care about people but I keep them at arm’s distance.

There was a lot of sleeping around in the group homes. At Price there were baskets of condoms in the bathrooms. We were given birth control pills every morning. Boys from another home, yours or Spaulding House, were stealing our panties. We don’t know who it was. Some staff member called and said they had found our underwear.

While at Price I always had two lovers. My long time boyfriend, who was a bit older, and Ty from the Spaulding House. Ty was my backup boyfriend because I always needed to be with someone. Later, the roles switched. Ty became my primary lover and my ex became the backup when Ty wasn’t there. It was about trying to find a moment of feeling loved, wanted, held, cherished. Anything. Whatever I told myself it was at the time. No romance required, just someone that would play a certain role. Two lovers kept me from getting too attached and from ever being alone. One or the other was always in a state of frenzy or jealousy or rage. I always felt wanted in the fucked up dysfunctional triangle that I had created. That was my drug.

I saw you sporadically after the group home. I’d see you here or there. You’d call and have a thing and I’d be your date. You’d take me for a motorcycle ride. You always pop into my life. I read one of your books every few years.

The worst effect my past has as a parent/wife is the lack of confidence I have in my parenting due to my lack of role models. I sometimes realize that I compare myself to fictional mothers and wives like Carol Brady or Mrs. C in happy days. You know what I mean. I have a fantasy of what I am supposed to be like and my expectations are pretty unrealistic. I make my kids cucumber sushi for their lunches for Gods sake. I get beaten down by my guilt when I raise my voice on occasion or make mistakes and have to tell myself that I am trying the best I can. I just don’t know what normal is really supposed to look like. But I think the way mine looks now is a lot better than it did so I guess its okay. I just have to remind myself that. I’m just very grateful for a supportive husband and kids that give me wonderful feedback. It helps. My house is loud and full of kids most of the time. Some of my daughter’s friends playfully refer to me as mom when they come over, so I know they must be pretty comfortable and I know my past is not my present and isn’t going to be my kids future. When I was little, all I ever wanted was a real family. Now I have one.

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 13. Mato
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• An Oral History of Myself: 11. Ronit
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 10. Jenni
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 9. Joe

***

Mato — Actor

I went to a Catholic school. I was a shy kid and got beat up by girls. I would express myself through drawings; that’s how I made friends. So when I transferred to the public school in fifth grade I had this chip on my shoulder.

You were the biggest kid in class. On the first day of school we were writing notes about all this violent shit we were going to do to each other. Mrs. Scott found the notes and kind of talked it over with us. We ended up becoming really good friends. The other kids knew not to mess with us, because we would fight.

We got into pornography very young. I think we were ten. You showed me a porno of a naked amputee. You were obsessed with black women. I was too. Maybe every white guy is. You said you had this fantasy about black nurses and asked if I ever had fantasies like that. And I said, Now that you’ve put it in my head…

I remember coming to your house to meet your mom. She had an English accent. I met  your dad too. He didn’t say much to me. He had that brown leather jacket and always wore sunglasses, even indoors.

Your dad cheated on your mom and I thought it was weird that you knew that. You would repeat things he said to you, like, Well, a guy’s got to do his thing. You didn’t sound like it bothered you terribly but I think it did. This was right before your mom died.

We ditched school to see a ninja movie. We were the only white kids there. It was downtown and people were smoking weed in the theater. I think it was called American Ninja.

The French teacher lost his voice and was using a microphone and he left the room and we took his microphone we were doing imitations of him for the class. He came back and kicked me out. We were always getting kicked out of class for being disruptive.

Pretty much all of our friends were from broken homes. My home was probably the most stable and we weren’t even allowed to have friends. None of our parents were really involved in our lives. My parents tried but they were both working hard and they had too many boys. I ran away for three days and my parents didn’t even notice. I don’t think any of us were into sports. We were into punk rock.

In eighth grade I was wearing a Mettalica shirt. No one knew who they were. We were the youngest of our group, always hanging out with older kids, like Pat, who were more up on music. We would have roof parties at my house because my mom was working every night. We were drinking, doing acid, smoking pot. It was dangerous actually because the roof was angled. We would shoot off fireworks. We were like wild animals.

You were a mess when your mom passed away. You internalized a lot of it. I remember jumping roofs. We’d jump from roof to roof, tagging stuff late at night. I distinctly remember you were going to kill yourself. That was eighth grade. You came over and you were bleeding and had this fucked-up mohawk. Your dad had handcuffed you to a chair or radiator, I’m not sure, and had tried to shave your head, but you had ducked down or something and made it difficult and your hair was all fucked up.

At the end of eighth grade we moved to Arizona. My mother was very unstable. She’d been hospitalized before for a nervous breakdown. She was incredibly depressed. I got some of that from her. So we moved to Arizona and it actually made a difference for a little while.

There’s that line in There Will Be Blood, “You can run away from your past, but will it let you?” All of a sudden, in Arizona, all the ghosts from our past showed up. First MB. He showed up after we had been there a month. He might have drove. He was the most screwed up person I ever met. His father had left him when he was a baby. His mom was an alcoholic lesbian so he hated lesbians. If we were odd he was the oddest. He would stick his finger down his throat in the middle of a store and throw up just to get a reaction. He arrived with a shitload of acid, maybe forty or sixty hits. He was doing incredible amounts of acid at the time. He had a battery in his ear as an earring. I think it was a 9-volt. He was always talking about revenge.

Toward the end of the summer you and John showed up in a limo. You looked like you were in a band or something. You said the limo was the cheapest way from the airport. My parents weren’t too happy about it. They told you you had to leave. You broke into the house and they kicked you out. I gave you $20. I remember you saying you were going to get to Los Angeles and live on the beach and write poetry. Then you left.

We came to Chicago the next year and stayed with my cousin. By that point you were in group homes. You said, “The shit that goes on in there you wouldn’t believe.”

Next time I saw you was 1994 or 1995. I wasn’t married to my first wife yet. She was just my girlfriend. You were in college, on a scholarship. Then I saw you in 1998 and I was divorced and living with my dad. You knew I wanted to be and actor. You were talking about writing a play about a gay guy and said I’d be perfect for it. My dad wanted to know what the hell you were talking about.

I stayed in Chicago, bought a three-flat with my dad and mother-in-law. We bought another a block away. Now we rent these two properties. We got saved by Obama’s loan modification. That’s helped us move to California where I’m pursuing an acting career.

In acting, you’re kind of at the mercy of what’s thrown your way. You want to do stuff that interests you. I like strange stuff, like weird comedies. My wife works for a mortgage company and I go out on auditions. I was playing a terrorist for a student film. I got a promotion. I went from the guy who was playing a follower to playing the Osama bin Laden type, the guy who’s giving the orders.

***

Rumpus original art by Kevin Thomas.

This is the thirteenth interview, you can read the other oral histories here.

Related Posts:

• An Oral History of Myself: 14. Judy
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 12. Wendi
• An Oral History of Myself: 11. Ronit
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 10. Jenni
• AN ORAL HISTORY OF MYSELF: 9. Joe

We didn’t raise that much money, or register that many voters, but we tried. I went into the Cleveland ghetto with Jonathan Ames, clipboards full of voter registration forms. With McSweeney’s we offered reminder phone calls on election day from your favorite authors, a personal call reminding you to vote. The problem wasn’t that authors didn’t care, more the other way around.

At the same time, the events in Egypt are just unfolding. How much do most Americans know about ElBaradei? The fear is that the Muslim Brotherhood will come to power but the people spreading that fear don’t necessarily know much about the Islamists in Egypt, and where the Muslim Brotherhood might be on that line. Not everyone who believes in Shariah supports al-Qaeda, or wants war with Israel. Still, you see educated people worrying openly about democracy taking hold, fearing the end of an authoritarian regime.

I’m afraid of any revolution. History tells us that history tells us nothing. Everything’s going fine in Lebanon (except for the pools of blood, the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, in fact things were not well at all) until one day when Bashir is assassinated and then, on the death of one man, everything changes. If Syria doesn’t coordinate Bashir’s assassination there is no Hezbollah. Whatever happened to Kerensky and the Duma, when the February revolution gave way to October? And then later, when Nikolai Bukharin sent a note pleading with Stalin, Do I also have to die? How did 1789 lead to Danton, and then the Terror, and then Napoleon? If not for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, safe in London, Iran could be Marxist. And if America had been less greedy, played the right side 25 years earlier when they nationalized the oil fields…

And if not for bin-Laden, al-Qaeda never flies a plane into the twin towers. And if not for George W. Bush, America doesn’t respond by invading Iraq. History is not inevitable.

A revolution is a role of the dice. To be in favor of revolution is to be in favor of risk, to determine that anything that comes is better than what came before. The odds are good in Egypt. Hosni Mubarak was ranked fifteen in a list of the world’s worst rulers. Foreign Policy called him “a senile and paranoid autocrat whose sole preoccupation is self-perpetuation in office.”

But what I think HTMLGIANT is talking about, at least tangentially, has something to do with the internet. Why isn’t everybody writing about what’s happening in Egypt RIGHT NOW? There’s no time to get up to speed, to fasten your observations to fact. The internet has changed our expectations, illuminated our thirst for opinions, and rights to them.

I used to joke that I was to the left of the Haymarket Riots. I believe in taxing the rich but I’m willing to compromise at 50% of everything after the first two million. There’s a certain amount you can’t work for. I don’t hate rich people but I believe they are in debt to the rest of us. Corporate Personhood makes me sweat and cry at night. I believe in trying children as children. I like the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, your rights extend exactly as far as my rights. But I’ll put up with less freedom to avoid violence. I’ll vote for ability and competence over Kucinich.

I don’t know what I’m saying except that I hope the dice land softly in Egypt. Or wait, here’s what I’m saying. I was in the Hard Rock in Vegas with my publisher. He gambled too much, so much that he was able to get three large rooms for me and my friends in the hotel. He left me with $2,000 on the table. He said, Play it out. I had never shot craps with money like that. I played exactly as he played, which I don’t even remember now because craps is a sucker’s game. I always let it ride. I played the come line. My cities were burning. A crowd formed around me. I had a hot hand. Security came and watched carefully for thieves. Hookers wanted to blow on the dice. The better dressed ones were let through, the ones the hotel staff recognized. It went on for hours and when it was done I had won $15,000. This is a true story. I went back to my room and woke up my friends. I threw money on the bed and rolled around in it while they took pictures. It was about as much fun as I’d ever had. Then I gave the winnings to my publisher. He probably should have split them with me but gave me $2,000 instead. It was fine. He had paid for our room service. The point is when you’re winning at the table and you leave your chips and your chips start growing chips, and you play your winnings to their conclusion, it’s said your cities are burning, or maybe I made that up. Maybe we’re waiting for the dealer’s OK before buying in. I hope Egypt has a streak like that night and that the future of Egypt is still at the table come four in the morning, sober as a freshly minted coin, surrounded by good looking hookers, winning their own bets and also winning the bets for everyone who has decided to place money on their streak. And then, when it’s over, they’re so happy and full of love they go back to their rooms and roll around in their newfound freedoms and take pictures and post them to Facebook.

Related Posts:

• An Egypt/Arab Spring Roundup
• The Revolution Is Incomplete
• Get These Authors on Your Shelves!
• Rafah Crossing
• On Friday, April 8th

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• Harnessed to Flesh
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Today they were standing on the street watching through the windows because they couldn’t all fit inside. Waiters who weren’t really waiters brought the people on the sidewalk eggs and coffee. And there was Germany, methodically pushing the ball up the field, their best player a Turkish striker that looks like Peter Lorrie. In the worst moments it was like World War II and Argentina was Belgium. Except, World War II Germany wouldn’t have a Turkish player on the national team. Or a black player…

It seemed like the Germans always had one more player in position, and they didn’t need to look around to know where their teammates were; they had run drills. Perhaps they had been training blindfolded. And Argentina, all blue and white and long haired and beautiful…

Last night, in preparation, his younger brother and sister and her boyfriend and their parents and all their friends filled the front of our apartment. There was a cake and someone cooked empanadas. Someone else brought pizza. The younger brother and his friends had been working the bar with him since the beginning of the tournament, the owners never arrived and the story of how my roommate convinced a bar owner to turn over his bar to my roommate (who is sober) and his alcoholic younger brother and his college friends is a story I’ll never understand. They’ve been sleeping on the floor and the couches. I step over them in the middle of the night. When I see them at the bar they don’t charge me for Ginger-ale or nachos. I think they were afraid I wouldn’t want eight people sleeping in the living room, but I liked it.

When the game was over all the girls surrounded my roommate’s younger brother. He had been out all night drinking and hadn’t gone to sleep. They wanted to comfort him. He was smiling, because he’s always smiling, well adjusted and happy. Different from my roommate, who is wonderful but also slightly tense, who is hard on himself sometimes. In a couple of years the younger brother will have to start going to meetings or he’ll wind up in a bad place, but right now he’s young and handsome and doesn’t seem to feel the strain. The girls huddled around him, older women as well. They wanted to hug him. They wanted to get their picture taken.

My roommate stood by the door to the bar smoking a cigarette. He’d been crying. Just three weeks ago or something he’d stood in our kitchen talking about what a “good team” they were. He said, “we’ve got a good team,” and he meant my other roommate and his brother and also his younger sister who was bartending and probably too young to drink. Everybody else was drunk and this morning when I hugged him after he had stopped crying, though his face was still wet and red and the tears seemed to have dug canals in his cheeks exaggerating the lines on the side of his mouth, I told him he was the drunk whisperer. He was able to take drunks and persuade them to run a bar. He was like a one-armed general leading an army of misfits. He’d created the best bar in the state of California to watch a soccer game, particularly if you were an Argentina fan, and they came. The sidewalks were thick with them, their faces painted blue and white, holding flags. Some wore blue button shirts, or wigs. The walls had tourney brackets pasted and deliberately filled out. There was a section for sitting and a section for standing crushed together, which is of course the best way to watch a game, and he had built this from nothing and for no other reason except the World Cup was the most important thing in his life.

I should say, I don’t understand why that is. Why soccer could be so important that someone would tattoo a team logo in full color on their forearm. But it doesn’t matter. It makes more sense than war. And it makes more sense than tax breaks for the rich. It probably makes more sense than writing a book, but I’m not ready to think about that. To love something that much, or even to watch someone so in love, is a sight. I thought I should film my roommate at the glass door. It was so hot outside, and inside. Everything felt like a construction site. I had even set my alarm for the game on a Saturday. Because that kind of passion is contagious. And it made me think that it’s worth it to build things and I felt good about something having to do with people in general even if I wasn’t sure what that thing I felt good about was. And then I went home and I went back to sleep.

xoxox

stephen

p.s. Saturday is one of the best days to make a donation.

**

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It’s cold and blowing and someone in Los Angeles said San Francisco is a city that doesn’t want to admit it’s cold. Others talk about the lack of seasons, how time passes, the summer of love, the speed addicts, Altamont, the sexual revolution, the pro-sex feminists. Lots of people have said San Francisco will make you soft and nobody ever disagreed with that. It’s a gentrified city, the city of Vesuvio and City Lights, though North Beach has become touristy and overpriced. It’s a white city with a huge Chinatown, a one time banking capital, the tip of the dot-com needle. See Leland Stanford’s orange bricks, the Southwest architectural style, the Mavericks looming over Half Moon Bay. All the parks and pastels. Whatever happened here? Everything and nothing. It’s a quiet town at night. The “hipsters” ride up and down the Mission on fixed speed bicycles. People drink single origin medium roasted coffee brewed by the cup. There are mid-priced restaurants that don’t serve anything not grown within thirty miles. The personal is political, gay marriage is a given, relationships have rules but they’re never what you expect. People celebrate naked and don’t wear much makeup. The clubs don’t make you wait to get in.

It’s a colder city than we care to admit. Soon they’ll close down all or some of Dolores Park for renovations. It’s a small place, seven by seven miles, made larger by the hills, but easy to bicycle because every hill has a valley. Only 800,000 people live here but the population density is high. It’s the center of the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country.

I’ve been here 12 years but have only ever gone to one museum. I was fighting with my girlfriend at the time and she asked me not to say anything so we walked around the de Young holding hands, looking at paintings without speaking.

Once the cloud cover’s complete the rain comes. It’s a city with high rents and small apartments. The population is over-educated, teaching jobs are hard to come by. The major newspaper is said to be on the verge of bankruptcy. There are perhaps more well known writers than any city other than New York. It’s a literary town, an art film town. They play a Wurlitzer pipe organ before showings at the Castro Theater. There are hundreds, thousands of places in city limits with views so stunning they steal your breath. The weather is worse than we think but the public transportation is better than we give it credit for. The food is generally good.

When the rain stops the sun comes out glaring across the wet streets. Sometimes I forget we’re on the edge of the country, or why I came here. I remember the first time, when I ended up buying a slice of pie on Union Street and noticing how clean the air was blowing in off the ocean. And the second time with my fiance when the car ran out of gas on the Oakland Bay Bridge. And the third time when I didn’t leave and parked above the Castro wandering down to 18th to hustle drinks. It could have worked out differently, but I didn’t have anywhere better to go at the time.

San Francisco recycles more than any other city in America. The grocery near my house charges upward of $2 an apple. There’s a lot of art and a lot of galleries. It’s expensive, and hard to find an apartment, but it’s an easy city to live in. You don’t need a car, everything’s close by. It’s the birthplace of Burning Man and burner culture and the Folsom Street Fair. Perhaps where I’m going with this is obvious, but not to me. There’s only the east end of the city, below the ball park, the last place left for any real development. It’s the times. They’ve added a muni track and passed propositions and sold off the land. There’s always provisions for below market rate housing, but it doesn’t work so well, though we probably try harder than most other cities would. It’s almost beside the point. Anyway, over time, if you allow yourself to forget, you can stop noticing how beautiful the city is. And it’s so easy to forget in San Francisco, because there are no seasons. If there’s no revolutions or earthquakes and if nobody burns down your apartment, and even then, time just passes without markers. I guess what I’m saying is it’s hard to keep track.

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I should say up front that Nick Flynn and I have become friends in recent years, after I championed his first memoir (it’s easy to like someone who loves your writing). And that I also wrote a memoir, so of course I’m biased. If I didn’t think memoir was a legitimate art form I wouldn’t have written one.

Antrim doesn’t think of memoir as a legitimate art form. Here’s the money quote from Antrim: “Memoir writing is cheating.”

And here’s another:

So, what’s with all the memoirs? Are they somehow… easier? Is the storytelling bar set lower? Too often, memoir seems to me an excuse to be fragmentary, incomplete, narratively non-rigorous.

Antrim feels the memoir has less value than the novel. He thinks memoirs are easy. Left out of his commentary is a discussion of the reader. Why would a reader care if a book is easy or difficult to write? Or if the author cheated? Of course there are many bad memoirs, and probably as many bad novels. It’s easy (speaking of easy) to find one you don’t like and use it as a cudgel against a genre. A great memoir has to hold up to the higher standards we hold novels to, a point I made in my review of Nick Flynn’s first memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City.

Antrim doesn’t like Nick’s new memoir, and that’s relevant criticism if written well and explored. But what makes Antrim’s criticism irrelevant is that rather than criticizing the book he criticizes the form. He doesn’t like these new works because they are memoirs.

But what about This Boy’s Life, or any of Joan Didion’s personal work? What about Edmund White? I disagree with Antrim’s assessment of The Ticking Is The Bomb, but that’s not the problem. The problem is Antrim’s dismissal of memoir in general.

There is only one rule in writing a memoir, but it’s an important one: You can’t intentionally lie. This one rule has the effect of form on poetry, setting up a challenge that often forces creativity and makes the work more powerful than free verse.

Antrim writes:

Flynn’s book is maddeningly free-form, pointillist, a childhood memory here, a Buddhist revelation there. We all have a darkness inside us; we’re all bewildered citizens of the world.

Rather than calling this a failed memoir (which it isn’t, in my opinion, I loved the book, which reads as a series of images building on one another, leaving the reader with a feeling of revelation, the book is an experience) he makes the case that the flaws he perceives arise because the book is a memoir. In fact there are many novels that could be criticized in a similar vein.

Antrim champions the author-protagonist novel, books such as The Bell Jar. It would be more interesting if he acknowledged how those books have also been attacked by critics making claims similar to Antrim’s, that they are indulgent, or easy. Jonathan Lethem used to be proud that he made up every doorknob, every brick in every building. And then he wrote Fortress of Solitude, his finest work.

Journalism is hard, underpaid work, and attacking memoir is low hanging fruit, especially when it’s so tied to the celebrity memoir and the platform writer, the worst impulses of the publishing industry. The Daily Beast has a history with this topic, here they talk about Michael Chabon and Sarah Palin as if they were part of the same literary movement (though they liked my memoir, thank you Daily Beast!).

Antrim is likely to get a lot of clicks on his provocative piece. A lot of those clicks will be people who agree with him, people who have similar preferences and would like to believe that their preferences for one kind of art are superior to someone else’s preferences for another.

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I’m on a train again, rambling north into New England, contemplating the east coast, the football playoffs (I have $20 on Minnesota). Last night I thought, while watching a reading, He has an energetic wife, so he has to find his own energy.

And the night before, when The Rumpus had our one year anniversary party (written up here), and Justin Taylor read a short, tight story from his new collection, I remembered writing stories, and thought it would be nice to write a story again.

But somewhere in there I heard about the founding of Politico, like a fragment of static, a piece of information flying down Fifth Avenue among the overpriced clothing shops, the same in every city, the J. Crew, the Banana Republic. I guess I was reading a magazine and walking at the same time. I was sick, so sick I had to be put on anti-biotics. I woke up and it was like someone was pressing as hard as they could on my forehead and I thought the bone would split to relieve the tension. It was happening every morning but by early afternoon I would feel better. I wasn’t yet at the part of the magazine that explained the ants, what the Steamside colony did to the Trailhead colony (Good God what a beautiful story!). But there it was, a brief history of Politico.com, which now gets 3 million unique users a month. Politico was started by John Harris and Jim VandeHei,  political reporters at the Washington Post. They had originally tried to sell the Post on the wisdom of starting an online political site but the Post turned them down. It was like Xerox whose engineers created the graphics interface but they didn’t think it was worth anything so they gave it to Apple.

I had been on the campaign bus with VandeHei in 2004. I liked him quite a bit. And I had a memory of him in shorts and a t-shirt exercising in the hotel gym which was just a nautilus machine and a treadmill and I thought, “Organized.” He was older than me, I think, and he was healthy, and he had his life together. I’m pretty sure I spoke to him about his wife and a child at some point. I was strung out, poor, directionless, and having a lot of fun. I was popping various amounts of Adderall, traveling on a $50,000 book advance, standing on the floor of the Fleet Center, 20 feet away (maybe more, maybe less) when Obama delivered his convention speech. That election was a better time than most of us remember, until it became a glass rod that swung into our chest and shattered. 17,000 copies of that book (maybe more, maybe less) are in a warehouse somewhere. In the end nobody wanted to read a funny book about John Kerry winning the Democratic nomination after he lost the race that really mattered. Nobody wanted to hear his name again.

Politics is like writing that way. You start out with beliefs. You lead Vietnam Veterans Against The War. It’s risky, but true. Then you make small compromises. You don’t even notice you’re making them. It’s rarely a big decision, just a little thing that starts you down the hill as if reaching for a strawberry before tumbling into a valley.

I’m not sure of the point I’m making, or if I’m making one, except on balance it’s better to be like VandeHei. Stay up and have a beer, talk to the other reporters, figure out what’s going on. Be a nice guy. Wake up in the morning, pull on your white t-shirt and blue shorts, go downstairs and run a mile or two, Nothing crazy, just remember to take a break and fill your lungs and move your legs a little bit. Make time for family. Have family. Stuff like that.

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