Last night was my second home reading, in Austin, Texas. There were close to 30 people. Amanda Eyre Ward brought brisket. I read at the front of the living room, near the kitchen. Doug Dorst opened for me and Book People, the local bookstore, sold books.

I did a long reading, quite a bit longer than I would do in a bookstore. Then there was a break where people mulled around and drank wine and bought books. I sold fifteen books, which presents an interesting math. Because there is airfare, which my publisher covers, and I’m not working on much else while I’m on tour. But then there’s the coverage in the local media, which amounts to some kind of something. And there’s the ride to and from the airport, the dinner, the bedroom (why is everybody else’s bed more comfortable than my own?). It’s certainly more people, and more books, than I would have sold if I read in the local bookstore. Also, we had a long discussion in the living room. People stayed. They were still drinking and talking when I went to bed around midnight.

The reading was fun. I mean really fun, like, life-affirming fun. A room packed with people (30 people feels pretty tight in someone’s living room), great conversation, food and drink.

The truth about reading in bookstores, in cities where you don’t live, is that they are often not fun. It’s fun meeting the bookstore owners and employees, who are usually lovers of literature, kindred, artistic souls. But often not many people show up, often they leave you feeling sterile and sad, and when the reading is done you go out with a friend or two, or go back to a hotel room. You don’t spend enough time with the audience to really connect. And last night, just like in Lincoln, many people told me they had never been to a book reading before.

Still, when I think about trying to get people to read a book, sometimes it’s like a thin rain, the kind that never wets the sidewalk. I don’t know if this is an effective way to sell books. I don’t know what that would look like. But here’s the other side of that coin. This is the best book I’ve ever written, and possibly ever will. You can’t work on something that long and just leave it out there to die.

I was talking to an author the other day, a very famous author. He said, controversy sells. He also said, sometimes it’s just about getting the book in the hands of one person, the right person. You don’t know who that person is.

So you hit the road, and you ask people to read your book. If they don’t like it, there’s nothing you can do. It’s not a job with great odds. But you’ve locked yourself in a room for two years to write it. I don’t look down on readers. I don’t think I’m entitled to readers. I always think readers are doing me a favor. I like what Emily Gould had to say here. At the same time, and this is maybe the most important thing, when asking people to read your book you should do so with as much integrity as you used to write the book. But you’ll have to figure out what that means for yourself.

Yesterday was my first house reading, in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was organized by Gunter Voelker, who read The Adderall Diaries through the lending library. The event was in Clawfoot House, which is really just his friend Ember’s apartment. She hosts bands that come through town and they play shows in her living room. She’s also a musician, a singer/songwriter, and before the reading she played me the most wonderful song, accompanied by Gunter on a second guitar, a song so good it can only be described in cliches about angels and airplanes and weeping clouds.

There were 30 people, about the same as the book store in Seattle, Washington, but they were more into it. And they bought more books, even though they were poor. I knew they were poor because we talked about where they worked. And they were young. I felt bad, like I should have told them to wait for the paperback, or for the time when you could get the book used on Amazon for a penny, plus four dollars shipping.

It was many levels of beautiful. Some told me this was the only book they bought this year, but they were looking forward to reading it. I read from the book and talked in the front of the living room for about 45 minutes. We talked about memoir, who owns the story, what your responsibility is to the people you write about. I explained that the answer to many of these questions fell into a gray area. That ultimately you had to decide what you felt was right, and stick to it, while understanding other people could feel differently. You wouldn’t be able to please everyone. Artists are selfish, but we should all try to be kind.

I felt very connected to the audience. For a good while after the event we stood around drinking beer and wine and eating Mexican pastries. There was a gay couple there and one of them worked in a Christian bookstore. He promised he would get them to sell my book. There were musicians and music fans who had never been to a reading before.

I slept in a comfortable room on a comfortable mattress set on the floor. There was a bag of coffee on the windowsill in the kitchen next to the machine. Gunter gave me a ride to and from the airport and I learned about his job and his wife who is very stylish and works in the vintage clothing store and how he met one of his closest friends because of a mutual love for the writer Dan Chaon.

I met the most interesting people in Lincoln, Nebraska. I wish I had a camera…

“Why are you doing these interviews?”

Wendi – Writer

We first met at a party at Lauren’s house. Pat brought you. I think you were in sixth grade, I was in seventh, he was in eighth. You were looking around the room, like your head was spinning, trying to take it all in, and there really wasn’t much to take in, just bowls of potato chips, nothing on TV. Pat said you were a good guy and if he vouched for someone that was fine. Because when Pat said someone wasn’t a good guy, that guy would walk off with my purse.

I tried to talk to you and you looked at me and said, “Why are we here? There’s so many better places to be right now.”

Pat was like, “Yeah, we could go get high somewhere.” I don’t really remember much of that particular night.

The next time I ran into you was at Pat’s. He was with Nicko and you and Nicko didn’t seem to get along. Nicko was acting like the pompous jerk he was and you were digging through this milk-crate full of books. You pulled something out and I said, “Oh yeah, that’s good.” You were like, “You read this?” We started talking about books and then you left. I said to Pat, “You have a smart friend?” He said, “One or two.” He told me you wrote poetry and I was impressed by that. He said I should hang out with you more. Pat said, “You’ve got a fucked up life and he’s got a fucked up life. You guys are the gold standard of fucked up lives.”

I started heroin really young. Because of my youth I didn’t have the big obvious tracks. I would use my knees and legs. Nicko was the one who caught me. I was in Brian’s room and Nicko came in and went running for Pat. Pat came and stood there and watched. He didn’t say a word. I finished, untied my arm, put everything away. He turned and walked out and the next time I saw him it was like nothing had ever happened. But all of a sudden everybody knew about it, which I think came from Nicko.

I heard stories about things you did. About you slitting your wrists. When your dad shaved your head everyone was talking about it. That was horrible. All the people we hung out with had long hair and getting your head shaved seemed like a way to cut you out of every group. Everyone was so proud of their hair. Fat Mike used to shoplift conditioner on a regular basis. Who shoplifts conditioner? Every guy got to hide behind his hair. You had to wear your troubles on the outside and that bothered me.

I was always hearing that you had killed yourself, then we had to call around to find out if it was true. I was fifteen and Iggy was living with me. He came home crying hysterically. He said, “Steve’s dead. He set himself on fire.” I called Brian and asked about you. “Steve’s in Pat’s room. You want to talk to him?” I told Iggy you were fine. But people were waiting for it.

Once my heroin use became known I was running on the death pool right along with you.

I took a lot of shit because of you. You didn’t have a place to stay and Iggy said I should let you stay at my house because I had the “cool” mom. But my mom was running a crack house and I didn’t want to take a chance, if the police came, of you getting caught.

I don’t think my mom called it a crack house. She said, “There were all kinds of drugs there.” It was a one bedroom on Sheridan and Thorndale.

None of us knew how to handle anything. No one could handle the stuff with me and the kiddie porn. No one could handle the stuff with you. We all ignored what happened to Brian and what was happening to Pat. It was so over all our heads, we just had no idea. Everybody wanted to come over to my house because there were all these drugs lying around. Iggy was there, Albert was there, Joe was there. I wouldn’t let Aaron and Kenwood over because they robbed housees. Tim slept with my mother, which was kind of strange. She would tell me about his curved penis. It used to drive me crazy that my friends would come over and get high with my mom. So I stopped being there. I stayed out as much as I could, spent my time in Albert’s garage, the kelly house, the laundromat.

My drug of choice was heroin and there wasn’t any heroin at my house so there wasn’t really any reason to stay there.

You were noticed. People would talk about you. People were interested. You were the walking freak show who was going to kill himself or this really smart guy who was throwing everything away. If you weren’t around people were upset and worried. They would look for you. It was one hell of a support system. You had people who cared about you but nobody knew how to show it. Also, people thought you were going to hurt them. Not in a violent way, but that you would say something. They were afraid you were going to insult them. You were great at that.

One night we were in the laundromat. I was the most desired female in the laundromat because my hands were small enough to reach inside the machines and pull things out. Brian was asleep on a bunch of washers. Iggy and Fat Mike were doing God knows what. Lynn asked me if you liked women. I said, “You’re asking me if he’s gay, or too self-absorbed to like women?” I said I thought you liked women.

“Do you think he’d like me?”
“Has he said anything?”
“He scares me.” She said Brian would hate her dating you.

A week later we were all hanging out at Boone and you showed up and Lynn just gawked at you. I think she thought you could protect her. But you were living on top of Quick Stop, so I’m not exactly sure what you could have protected her from.

All the girls were looking for someone to take care of them and the guys were looking for the same thing. All Pat wanted was someone who wasn’t going to throw shit at his head every ten minutes. All Brian wanted was someone to mother him and have sex with him. A whole group of people that wanted people to take care of them, I don’t know how any of us got through it. All anybody thought of was getting high. We tried to cover for each other but we never tried to help each other. Instead of saying something nice to someone we would just hand them a bottle or a joint.

When I was 17 I was dating a guy and he was 24 or 25. He was an amazing drunk and pill head and his idol was GG Allin. We were at a Ramones show at the Aragon and someone walked past wearing a Charles Manson jacket. I loved the jacket because I have a serial killer obsession and I walked over and said so. It was GG. He took off the jacket and let me wear it.

GG would just come in and out of my life. He’d send me articles on Joey Ramone, or things he thought I would like. I still have all these trinkets sitting in a box that GG sent me. When GG died in his video tape will he left me the Manson jacket. His brother tried to give it to me. I was like, “Bury him in it.”

I stopped doing heroin 11 years ago because I woke up and looked in the mirror and hated the way I looked. I had just split my first marriage. It took about a month and a half to kick the heroin. Worst time of my entire life. Then I started doing what I was comfortable with, which was writing and all that crap. And somehow it all worked out. I’m concentrating on writing. I had something in Cosmo but it was under a fake name.

My mom and I talk almost every day. We talk about the crack house. She thinks it’s all so funny, part of a great rich past. My dad is dead and I’m happy about it.

My husband and I have been together about seven years. I met him through work. Everybody was like, “Oh my God, he’s such a bad guy!” He was a drunk and I was psychotic and I got on Zoloft and he cut down on the alcohol and we haven’t had a fight in a long time. We haven’t had sex in a long time either.

I don’t freak out anymore. There used to be a whole bunch of violence. I whipped a phone through the third floor window, then I put my arm through it. Finally they just replaced it with plexiglass.

I have a very large pentagram tattooed on my back and I have a couple of God fearing friends who say the Lukemia is because of the whole devil thing. I became a Satanist because God didn’t help me. Satanism is run on the basic tenet that you are your own god.

I haven’t talked about a lot of this stuff in twenty years. My husband doesn’t know three quarters of this stuff. I remember people saying, “I don’t want to remember.” When you spend your life like most of us did the last thing you want is for someone to remind you what it’s like. Part of me feels the same weird responsibility I felt back then which is, ‘don’t tell.’ Everybody was hiding something. Hiding from the cops or robbing houses. Not one of us was doing anything particularly legal. We all had to keep secrets. Nobody cares anymore.

I had to deal with your book, A Life Without Consequences. Normally I would read it in a night, but it took me five days. You never came off to me as mean. You were always polite. You were smart and you used big words. But sometimes you would get these sad clouds. Lynn used to call it the Charlie Brown. All of a sudden you were sad about something. I would see Lynn and she would say, “Steve was so sad today.” I saw it a few times. It never seemed permanent. You wanted to do stuff. You wanted to learn stuff. You seemed like you were in a rush, a rush to get past everything and get to where you are now.

**

photo of Bryn Mawr and Ashland from Chicago Milexmile

Read the rest of the interviews here.

I put myself in the group home. I was in the therapist office with my mom and I said, “I give up. I’m not going to try anymore,” meaning getting along with my mom, and he suggested the group home. To me it was a terrific idea. …more

Jenni – Patient Account Representative

I treat people the way I’m treated, with the same respect. I’m not worried about your feelings. …more

In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. This is the ninth interview, you can read the interviews with Roger, John, Dan, Pat,  Aaron, Fat Mike, and Mr. Miller.

Joe – Business Owner

I believe I was one of your first friends at Boone. I think it was right when you get there in third grade. I remember you had this pissing match with my older brother about who knew more long division. That’s my first memory of you, the new kid in third grade with the funny accent.

Then I remember meeting your mother and father. Your mom was walking at the time. She wasn’t always in a wheel chair. After that you mostly came to my house or were by the school. But the next time I saw your mom she had deteriorated. I think I just blocked it all out. As a fourth grader I couldn’t process that.

I started getting into trouble early because my mother and stepfather were drug dealers. They decided not to hide it from me and my brother because we would eventually find out and being a liar is worse than being a druggy. I started dealing in seventh grade. I was stealing it from my stepfather. My father was not in the picture then. He was having a hard time finding work.

We generally went back to my place. You, and me, and Aaron, and whoever wanted to come because my parents were never home. I wasn’t really selling it so much as I was smoking everybody up. I mean, in seventh grade who had money? That one black kid, Brian Brammar, came back and stole my stepfather’s marijuana.

Kevin came into the picture around seventh grade. Kevin had a difficult childhood that he never shared with me. We had that gang. I forget what we were called. We used to breakdance. Kevin was a true friend but I burned my bridges with Kevin. I wish I could take that back.

In grammar school you were popular because you were interesting and you were different. I think most people don’t see themselves for who or what they are. You didn’t see yourself as popular. You had a lot of older friends from the high school and they would be waiting for you when school got out.

Eighth grade came around and you were basically on the run and the cops were looking for you. This was around the time we started breaking into parking meters. We were over by Freedy’s and the cops were looking for you and I ran with you. By chance I had a pocketful of nickels. They were looking for you and they were looking for kids breaking into meters. You said, “Stall them so I can get out of here.” They found all these nickels in my pocket and I was like, “Look, these are from home. The meters don’t take nickels.” They asked about you and I was like, “Yeah, I know him. You just missed him.”

You would pretty much do anything at that time. You were doing much stronger drugs, like tic (Ketamine) and wicked stick (PCP). In a sense you had nothing to lose. I remember the stories of you being locked in the basement, chained to a pipe or something. In hindsight it makes you feel like no matter how many friends you have or who you know ultimately you’re alone and you die alone. Even though I knew you and I loved you I couldn’t do anything for you.

Aaron, Sergio, and me robbed my landlord because they had a basement apartment and they didn’t lock it. We went down there and grabbed all this stuff. Aaron decides to take the TV, goes upstairs to my house, puts the TV on the table, and goes to take a shit. I guess the adrenaline was too much for him and he couldn’t finish the job. My stepfather comes home and sees this TV. We stored all the stolen good at Sergio’s. Then the landlord tells my parents their place was robbed. My stepfather turns us in. The cops say give the stuff back and nothing’s going to happen. So I tell them where the stuff is and we go to Sergio’s. They didn’t press charges. Sergio’s still mad at me because as a fourteen year old I had the cops come to his house to get the stolen stuff.

Aaron got more serious into robbing houses. I didn’t go down that path. I wasn’t much of a thief; I didn’t like stealing.

In high school you weren’t at Mather; you were across the street at the DCFS school. You were in the foster system by then and I ended up meeting all your friends. I used to wish that I could be more like you. I brought some beers to one of the foster houses. We’re drinking, smoking cigarettes, all that good stuff, and one of the counselors came in. “Who’s beer is this?” they said. “Somebody better claim it right now.” I didn’t say anything. You stood up, grabbed the beers, and walked out. I was like, why couldn’t I have done that? I realized I had to stop being such a pussy.

You had severe acne problems and you seemed like you were uncomfortable in your own skin. Of course, growing up the way you did and then having those changes in your life and going into foster care you must have felt like, Why me? Everybody else is living a normal life.

We were partying with Tom and Mary and someone got us a ride to pick up your mother’s guitar. You were so happy. I said, “Why are you so happy about this piece of shit guitar?” You gave me a look like, “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

I lived an innocent childhood except for the drugs and robbing houses.

In high school I worked at Venture and dated my manager, Sandy Engle. I called her San Diego because she was so big. She was twenty-six and I was sixteen. She was my first. But I don’t want to go there. We’re talking about you.

I had my own mental issues. I turned sixteen in a psych ward. I was on anti-depressants at a young age and I thought they were bullshit. I took a whole bottle and almost died. I had to get my stomach pumped. I had something of a mini-stroke where I lost feeling on one side of my body.

I don’t know why it was so crazy for us. When you think about it, where we grew up wasn’t that rough. I lived about four of five blocks from school. We would all walk to school without parental guidance. Nowadays in that neighborhood you don’t let your kids walk to school without parental control. I don’t know why being in a decent neighborhood like we were things got so crazy, so out of control. We didn’t have proper guidance. I think you had a legitimate issue in your life with your mother. You had issues coping with your mother and so did your father. The only thing is your father was a grown adult and he should know better and put his child first. But he had to deal with his wife’s death the same as you had to deal with your mother’s death. I had good parents. Except for my mom and stepfather smoking weed in front of us. I think they were good people.

I got kicked out of Mather for drugs. I went to Truman Middle College where they had a program for kids that got kicked out of high school. I ended up getting my diploma. I wanted to join the army but failed the physical. They wouldn’t take me.

My father became a cop when he was forty and I moved in with him. We were smoking in front of the school when a police car pulls up to us. Everybody’s throwing away all the weed but it’s just my dad asking if I’m coming home for dinner.

When I was sixteen I was hanging out with Doots and all those scumbags. They turned me on to crack. I remember I was tripping on acid watching (Pink Floyd’s) The Wall when they came over. My father worked nights and they liked to come over where they could do their crack without having to get a hotel room. I took a big jumbo hit of crack, which I probably didn’t need because I was tripping on acid. Man, that just rocked my world. From that point every paycheck went toward crack.

I’ve gone to rehab four times. First when I was fifteen. And then a year later when I tried to kill myself. Then when I was twenty-two and again when I was twenty-six. Crack is definitely the hardest drug that I ever encountered. It always leaves you wanting more, never gives you satisfaction. I don’t know how I finally kicked it. I think I was just so busy with work. I finally found something to fill the void.

Our worlds took different paths. We were never enemies. I remember I saw you at Erick’s North, that club on McCormick. We just run up to each other and hug. It wasn’t a quick hug. We hug for a minute. We look like flaming homos. It really meant a lot to me that it was mutual. We were so happy to see each other because we had our youth together. Everybody thought we were queers.

I followed some links this morning that brought me to this, Why I Write For Free, which is kind of an indictment of this, by Benjamin Kunkel, which is kind of an indictment of reading and writing for free online. And there’s this, from Gawker, equating writing for free with slave labor, and this approving tumblr post about turning down a no-pay writing gig and then getting paid to write an article about The Mets.

At the same time, the tumblr blogger says she, “doesn’t write for free,” but of course she does. She has a blog.

Emily Magazine goes on to say that by their own logic, without unpaid contributions nplusonemag.com, This Recording, and The Awl, would not exist. And the author tries to think of a meaningful way that “writing for free for these sites, w/r/t whether it devalues all online writing, is distinct from writing for free for the Huffington Post, and I sort of can’t.” But later she says, “I write for free because there seems to me to be no meaningful relationship between whether a publication pays me and whether it’s worthwhile for me to write for them.”

I think it’s worth pointing out that people have always written for free for literary publications, or close enough to free that there’s not really a difference. If you spend months on a short story, say six months on three short stories, and one of them gets picked up by McSweeney’s and they give you $500, you’re basically writing for free anyway. And if you’re publishing in The Alaska Quarterly, or Zyzzyva, you’re getting $50, or nothing.

So that’s the thing about writing for free. And the difference in writing for free for a good online publication and writing for free for The Huffington Post is that The Huffngton Post is a lower quality version of People Magazine. And nobody would write for People Magazine for free.

I went through a period of publishing for free, and then a period of being insulted that people wanted my work for free, and then back into a period of writing for free. And then I started The Rumpus. But that middle part, where you think people owe you something for your art, is very uncomfortable. And the woman that wrote about The Mets, I think, is missing something. You’re supposed to get paid for writing what other people want you to write, for being able to plug in and push out content, for widgeting. To only write what you want is a luxury.

There is also something else, that Richard Nash talks about a lot, the free economy, where people give each other art and performance to be part of something cool.

This goes back to earlier arguments I’ve made, that creative writers are confusing themselves with journalists and getting involved in arguments about making money that have nothing to do with them, when in reality the key to making a living as a creative writer is doing something else.

In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. What’s most interesting turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as the things we remember the same. This is the seventh interview, you can read the interviews with Roger, John, Dan,  Aaron, Kevin Pat and Fat Mike.

Eugene Miller – History Teacher, Retired

I guess I knew about you when you first applied to take my A.P. class in 1989/90, and they talked to me about whether or not you should be in the class room. They asked if I would take another kid with a rough background, that kind of thing. I said sure, whatever; he might be tough but I’ve had tough kids before.

You came to class with your piercings and tattoos and you had a mustache and beard. Not the type of child I’m used to having in an A.P. class. Especially at Mather. The A.P. kids at Mather are parentally self-motivated. They know that it’s important to their parents and that’s why they do it. You dressed in jeans and t-shirts then. Same way you dress now. One time you told me you were having an affair outside of school. I think she was a married woman and you were going to her house. I don’t know if it was true. But I thought, Why is he telling me this? Do I really want to know? But you didn’t cut my class to do it. I don’t think you ever missed a day. You had a lot of making up to do. I remember you also took the European A.P. test, even though we didn’t offer the class.

A.P. is much more difficult, more rigorous than other classes. At Mather you have 25 in an A.P. class, but maybe five should really be there. The rest are honors, or not even that. I knew there would never be more than five actually passing the test for college credit. But I always felt like it didn’t matter because if you take my class you’re going to raise yourself. You’ll be more prepared, you’ll have writing skills you didn’t have before, and you’ll be more ready for college. That’s the way I always ran it.

The average Mather kid was basically a good kid, but academically low. Our standardized test scores were always below average. I always thought that was unfair because for so many of our kids English was their second language. I tell my students, for some of you history is not going to do anything for you, but it’s a class you have to pass to get on to that next stop. Most of you, when you graduate, you are just going to get a job. Most people in the world just get a job. Most jobs just ask you to be there, do what you have to do, and that’s it. They’re not asking you to make something new. They’re not asking you to be Superman. They’re just asking you to do a job. That’s what I’m asking you to do. Just do this job. I promise no matter what level you are, if you work with me, if you do the work, you’ll see the difference. I know you will.

In college I didn’t know what I wanted to be. My parents wanted me to be an accountant. I took bookkeeping and stuff and I thought, this isn’t me. So I took stock and thought, what do I like? I like people. The subject I like best is history. So I’ll go into education and be a history teacher. And that’s what I did. I liked history more and liked it even more after I graduated. The more you find out the more you need to find out. I went to college in the city to be with my high school sweetheart. Junior year we got engaged. And we got married and all that. And got divorced and all that. That’s another story.

I remember saying to you once, You know, Steve, you’re going to be graduating soon. You could go either way. You could do something really good or you’re going to be on the front page of the news or something else. I also told you once I thought you were very good looking, that you probably had lots of girlfriends. You were just amazed by that. It seemed you had never thought of yourself that way.

It never bothered me that you lived in a group home. That’s just another way of living. And my cousin worked at that group home’s school. You were a good kid in a group home. So what? You weren’t a bully or a fighter. But you were tough in the sense of getting through all this shit. I knew you had a drug problem but you were dealing with it and doing exceptionally well. You channelled all of that into your schooling. You knew you had to get out and you were doing what you needed to do to get there. You had failed your first two years of high school but you wanted to graduate on time. I don’t know what made you change but you decided, I’m going to do this. I sort of admired you for it.

I would think that your old friends would have seen some of the same things I did. Even more so because they saw you at your lowest. And I would think maybe some of them were even a little mad at you. Were upset at you for doing this because they couldn’t do it. And also because it would pull you away from them. And that would be a normal kind of thing, for them to be resentful toward you.

You’re always working on it. Not just you, everybody. Like I always say. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I look at myself in the mirror, the inside feels so much different than than the outside looks.

I had my drug years too. It makes me happy to see you going along, taking responsibility for yourself. Not being a ward of the state anymore. Try not to downward slide again. Because things get harder to turn around the older you get.

In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. …more

I left home at thirteen and spent a year on the streets, more or less, and four years in group homes. Because of that my social network was significantly wider than average. In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with and transcribing the interviews, creating a kind of memoir but in other people’s words. What’s most interesting turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as the things we remember the same. This is the sixth interview, you can read the interviews with Roger, John, Dan,  Aaron, and Kevin.

**

Pat – Bartender

If you think about it, the stories we have about each other are some of the most awful things. Why is that what we remember?

The first time we hung out is when we broke into that comic book store together. The window had already been kicked in and all you had to do was give a little push. I remember you going straight for the valuables. But I was a collector so I was going through and putting stuff back and only taking what I wanted. You had the mind of a thief.

I used to show up at your school. I had already finished grammar school and was just starting high school. You were in seventh grade. I didn’t think anything of that, you being younger than me. I would meet you in the morning and I would have weed and you would say, “I really got to go to school today.” It was straight out of a drug commercial- I’m the older kid ruining your life, you’re begging to go to school.

Nobody went to school. All we did was do drugs or find people with drugs who would do them with us, or steal money from parking meters and buy drugs. We were bored urban teenagers. It’s no wonder we were all socially maladjusted.

We went into the grocery on Devon to buy a gallon of vodka in one of those plastic bottles. They asked you for I.D. and you got all huffy insisting you were 35. I think you were 14, at the most. But you had that beard. We drank the whole bottle. How do four teenagers drink a gallon of vodka and not die?

It was around that time I was walking down Devon with my big radio blasting heavy metal and the Assyrian kids hit me with a golf club.

I could never figure out why we all were so hell-bent on squandering our potential. Despite the circumstances most of us came from, we were a bunch of really bright and talented kids. It just seemed like we were more interested in deliberately pissing away our collective futures. The desire to be some kind of streetwise city kid was too strong for some…y’know, Aaron and Kevin and the rest of the house burgling clique, but I know at least for me I feel like it did me some good. Hardened me in a way that has served me well in life.

We were at that girl’s house the first time we took LSD together. I busted out the landlord’s window at her request because the landlord was giving her family problems.

A lot of us didn’t have relationships with our father. I stole my father’s weed everyday for ten years. Your dad shaved your head. I remember that. I couldn’t understand that anybody could be that adversarial. I was shocked that a father could be so brutal. It seemed like a brutal act, to violate you in that way. It affected me.

You moved around a lot that year you were homeless. I remember being like, “What the fuck?” You looked like shit. You said you were sleeping on top of the Quick Stop.

We had nothing going for us. Girls didn’t like us. We weren’t like these safe sanitized versions of ourselves I see walking around now. There were one or two girls, but they were troubled. They were the ones who could look at us and see a measure of stability. Girls aren’t into mindless vandalism, smoking pot all the time, stealing electrical meters off buildings. I remember Herb and I stole so many of those things. We kicked the meters off every building in the neighborhood. We would dump all of them at the burned down Wheels Warehouse. The place was full of those things.

We were really into vandalism. We were huge vandals. We were probably responsible for the downfall of our neighborhood.

I was living with my mom above the fruit market when you and Niko got in a fist fight in the apartment. I think it was Nik had an issue. You’re a guy with a certain level of charisma and people looked up to you and Nik didn’t like people not looking up to him. There was ego and tempers and then the ridiculousness.

I chose to live with my mom. I knew she was going to be more lenient. She let me smoke weed in the house. I would buy her weed for her. That’s always a weird scenario, having to buy drugs for your parent. You want to be the cool son, with the cool mom. Don’t be the cool mom, be the mom.

One of her friends turned me on to cocaine for the first time.

Then there was the jewelry heist. I probably shouldn’t go into details on that.

I started seeing you a lot again after you moved into the group home. Mike was there and we were jamming together. It was cool because Tom lived across the street. Tom was into bad drugs. They were doing crystal meth before I even knew what it was. (Tom passed away from a heroin overdose December, 2002 – se)

Maybe that’s what got us clean. We quit drugs together. You were sixteen and I was eighteen. You, me and Dan. It was the longest I’ve been clean. I lasted three years. It was not surprisingly the most productive period of my life.

During that time you and I were volunteering at the homeless shelter. You were a senior in high school then. There was that female priest and she would leave you and me there alone all night to run the place. Two kids and a hundred homeless people. We would stay up drinking coffee and we’d have to turn people away when the shelter was full. We were good kids at that point. We could have stayed good.

Then I started smoking pot again. I’ve smoked pot every day until now.

I dropped out of college, got divorced from my cop wife, and joined a punk rock band.

I’m a good bartender. I can trade on my personality and it translates into hard cash. Right now I’m doing catering bartending so I’m somewhere different all the time. It’s a lot of fun and if I don’t like the people I’m working with I never see them again.

If you subscribed to The Daily Rumpus, this is the email you would have received this morning:

**

HOW TO MARKET YOUR LIFE

It turns out there’s four table legs when it comes to getting people out to an event. This is just what I’m thinking, because The Rumpus is doing so many events that events are really becoming the model, the way we support ourselves and our fine online magazine.

1. Price. This is the big kahuna. The most important ingredient.
2. Act. What’s on offer. Performers, food, booze, place, DJ. Etc. Everything that a person gets for their money, including the cause their money is going to support. Last year, if you had a party to support Obama, you had to turn people away at the door. Everybody was looking for a reason to give Obama money.
3. Push. This is your personal drawing power, or the organization. Like in San Francisco a certain number of people will come to any event I’m hosting because they know that I host fun events. If an event is ongoing, like Charlie Anders’ Writers With Drinks you can build that crowd. But people are always leaving. “I used to go to that event every Wednesday, and one day I stopped.” It’s not unlike readership for a magazine.
4. Throw. How far the word gets out. Does everybody that might go to your event know about it.

That’s it. These are your table legs. And when you’re throwing an event this is what you take into consideration. I pass this wisdom on to you, free of charge. What I would caution against is a three legged table, if you know what I mean. And a one legged table, as everyone who’s ever eaten off one knows, is particularly precarious. I am available for consulting on your next event.

A review of Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pop. Question, is it OK to be rich, or is it morally abhorrent? Personally, I’m against it. I think it’s wrong to be rich. And it’s especially wrong to be especially rich, ala the Buckleys. And that’s part of what makes this review so interesting.

I should say that I have rich friends who I like very much. I have lots of friends who have done things I disagree with. And I have done things myself that I disagree with.

But deep down I’m a communist.

We have a new Morning Coffee guy.

Yesterday we had a guest blog editor, Jeremy Hatch, and he knocked it out of the park.

OK, I have to get back to work now. But I’m glad we got to spend this time together.

Yours,

stephen
www.therumpus.net

I spent the weekend in New York at Book Expo America and throwing a big fat party with McSweeney’s and SMITHMAG. The party was amazing, over 500 people, inspired performances.

But I want to say something about Book Expo.

Literature is not dying. People are worried about publishing houses and book advances. Their concerns are echoed in the New York Times. Big publishers are thankful for vampire novels but sad because there was no Harry Potter this year.

But here’s the thing, I don’t care about those books. I don’t care about the publishing industry that’s concerned with cookbooks and celebrity memoirs. And I don’t believe the people who say they’re publishing celebrity memoirs so they can publish great literature. And I don’t believe in the model that relies on monster hits. One day Stephen King is going to hire someone like Alvaro Villanueva, and that’ll be the end of that free ride; he’ll just keep it all for himself.

McSweeney’s seems to be doing fine, along with Graywolf and Two Dollar Radio. People buy books from these publishers written by authors they’ve never heard of. Just because. When was the last time someone bought a Random House book because it was published by Random House?

When all of that collapses, the small presses will still exist. There are too many people writing good books. If you write a good book, it’s easy to get published; it’s just hard to get paid. But everybody has a job when they write their first novel. And if they don’t, they should. And when you start writing for money, you’ve already turned a certain corner, and it can be hard to come back from there, though many people do come back. Many people remember why they wrote that first book, and how good that was, and they forget about the rest of it.

Someone said this weekend that when you are young, it’s about looks and access, and when you are old, it’s about money because you don’t have looks and access anymore. And that struck me as partially true, but that it didn’t have to be that way since after all you make your own choices. Someone asked me what I wanted this weekend, and I tried to tell her that we were into different things. “Tell me what you want,” she kept saying and finally I told her and she slapped me hard across the face. “I will fuck you up,” she said. She was drunk, otherwise I might have gone home with her. But you have to be careful with people who don’t know what they’re doing.

What I was saying was nothing seems different for writers of literary books. We’ve been thrown in with someone else’s arguments. This is not about us. This is about money, and there’s nothing wrong with money, but you should do something else to get it. Or you can write for TV. Or you can live very, very cheaply and promise yourself never to be jealous of your neighbors.

Sometimes I want to get old. I’m eager to put on a bathrobe and play bridge all day and live in a compound with all of my friends. Sometimes I’ll say to a woman, “I want to get old with you, right now.” And what I mean is I want to lie in bed with her and read a magazine, wake up and have breakfast. I want to skip all the other stuff and get post-passion. But that’s not how it works, it turns out. You have to be young first, all the way until the end.

So you see, literature, that beautiful self-destructive art is alive and well. And when novelists worry about the state of publishing, what they’re really worrying about is themselves, and the changing, collapsing world around them. It makes me think of Kerouac rushing off in a four-year manic bender, benzadrine dripping from his pores like soy sauce. And then years of alcoholic misery and decline. But he never lost his looks. And that book he wrote, from the notes he gathered on a single sheet of paper, was perfect. So where’s the harm?

In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with. Because I left home at thirteen and spent four years in group homes, my social network was significantly wider than most people of that age. What’s most interesting about these interviews turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as the things we remember the same. This is the fifth interview, you can read the interviews with Roger, John, Dan, and Aaron.

Kevin – Auto Mechanic

Don’t get married.

I see my mother once or twice a month. She’s doing OK.

My earliest memory of you is in eighth grade. I was the new kid. You were the outcast. You weren’t homeless when we started hanging out. I don’t think so. You gave me my first hit of acid. We used to stand on the fence outside your house and watch your dad and his girlfriend. I didn’t know your mother had just died.

We would eat instant coffee. Your room was covered in art and poems. Mostly poems. They were all over your walls.

My mom went on vacation and she sent me to my babysitter back in Indiana. My babysitter was a Christian group home. I had been there before. But this was just for a couple of weeks so I didn’t think of myself as a resident. I was fifteen years old but I was in eighth grade. I had failed a year. I was smoking a cigarette and they told me to put it out and I told them I wasn’t going to do that then I got in a fistfight with the counselor. I took all my stuff, slept in a cornfield, then got a Greyhound back to Chicago. You had run away by then and you were sleeping in a broom closet so I moved in with you. The broom closet became home.

That was the second time I ran away with you. The first time was when my mother hit me in the face with a phone.

We used to rob parking meters.

I remember you coming to my house with your wrists slit. You drank a whole bottle of Puerto Rican Rum and slit your wrist. This is all still eighth grade. You were getting hell from your dad. He handcuffed you and shaved your head. But even still I couldn’t understrand why someone would want to slit their wrists. To this day that just doesn’t compute in my head. Especially when you leave. I mean you left. It’s not like you stayed home. So I don’t know. Maybe you felt like nobody cared.

Don’t you want to forget this stuff?

I remember when you and John left for California. You had a duffle bag full of stuff. You called me from California. I was like, “How is it?” You were like, “It sucks. I have no clothes, no shoes, no money. I’ve got a can of tuna fish with no opener.” Where’d your clothes go? I can’t believe you guys made it to California. I mean, who would think some punk kids could hitchhike to California? That was too crazy for me. I wasn’t about to hitchhike to California. I knew where my food was.

Twice I went with Aaron on those little burglary things. I went with him one time, it was a basement apartment. The window was open and I got stuck. Another was a place right near the grammar school. Robbing the houses was a bigger rush than doing the drugs. A natural high. I remember Aaron busting the lock. I remember we did what every stupid criminal did, we ate. We went through the house, the drawers, looking for cash. Then, when we were done, we went in the kitchen and made sandwiches.

Even when my mom kicked me out I would climb back in through the porch. I had to climb over the ledge and get myself in my own windows. This was on the third floor. She put security bars on the windows to keep me out.

I went with John and your uncle to visit you in the mental hospital. There was some guy there, walking down the hallway picking cigarette butts out of the ashtray and eating them. After seeing that and then visiting John when he got put in Edison Park I remember thinking I don’t want to end up in these places. I started doing my own thing. It was time to work, make money. So you can get all this crap (gestures around. We’re in the basement of his house. His daughter is playing an educational game on the computer. Behind her is a fish tank with no fish. Kevin is holding a can of beer. The floors are white tile.)

I think in Freshman year I got suspended for tapping my gym teacher on the shoulder. She had me suspended for assault. So I go to school anyway, I don’t have anywhere else to go. Then I get arrested for trespassing. Of course I have pot on me so now I’m busted for possession. My mother wouldn’t pick me up. She called my dad, who I hadn’t seen since I was three years old. I’m waiting in the police station and I see this guy hobbling in on a cane and I’m thinking, Please don’t let that be him. Of course it is. That’s when I moved out by Diversey and California. It was like living with a stranger. I didn’t know him or what he was about. He had back problems. I moved in with him and his wife. They had to rent a bigger apartment. He would buy my cigarettes for me. I guess I liked him but we had a falling out too, somewhere about when I turned eighteen. Probably over staying out or something. Spending nights with Penny. Just being free. God I wish I could go through that again.

**

I’m with Roger and when we’re done talking we ask Kevin if he wants to go out to eat. He lives almost an hour away from the Chicago neighborhood we grew up in. He mentions restaurants nearby, all chains. He can’t go because his wife has snuck away and taken the van leaving Kevin with the two children, one thirteen, one three. He and his wife don’t talk anymore, haven’t talked in a while. They pass notes back and forth through the children.

“I’m simmering with rage now,” Kevin says, opening the garage door, standing inside in the giant square of light. The suburb is quiet.

In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with. Because I left home at thirteen and spent four years in group homes, my social network was significantly wider than most people of that age. What’s most interesting about these interviews turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as the things we remember the same.

Aaron – Unemployed

I’m shooting heroin again. I just shot a couple of hours ago. Did you know that dope enhances longterm memory?

We sat next to each other in third grade at Boone Elementary. I remember your costume. For Holloween you were a devil.

I moved with my dad to Arizona that year, then came back and lived with my mom, then back with my dad again. I was back in Boone again in sixth grade.

We didn’t hang out too much then. You were hanging out with older kids. Then in eighth grade we started to hang out. You were with Kevin sleeping in that hallway. One time Kevin and I ate a bud in class and we got so baked. You and I started hanging out in eighth grade because I started to get stoned a lot.

You had an argument with Mrs. Powell in eighth grade and she said, “I can never see your eyes because they’re always dilated,” and you said, “I can never see your eyes because you have too many moles on your face.”

You gave me my first hit of acid. I couldn’t stop laughing and you’re telling me to shutup. You don’t want your dad to hear us. So I went in the other room with John and Rudy. And they’re sitting in your bedroom. John is crinkling a piece of cellophane and saying the place was on fire. They’re watching the walls burn.

Later that night we went to a party at Harlem Irving and we had to walk home. It was the longest walk I’ve ever taken. We were at Cicero and Montrose and you conned a ride from some guys with a car. But there wasn’t enough room for everybody so you go out.

You couldn’t get into your house. I guess the doors were locked, so you and John slept on the side of your house that night in these lawn chairs.

Dude, let me tell you something. My life all starts, I trace it back to one moment. It’s when you hitchhike to California. You came back and we’re sitting in my hallway and you’re telling me of the Maxworks where you met those hippies and all the things you did in California. It’s the summer after eighth grade. And you have this great story to tell at such a young age. And I wanted to have stories. It all happened so quickly after that.

That’s when I started dosing a lot more.

You came to my house. It was crazy. I had ditched school as usual. You had broke into your house the night before. Your dad had moved and you didn’t know where he lived but your house was still there so you broke in so you didn’t have to sleep outside. He hadn’t sold it yet. So I remember, I’m sitting on the toilet, and the doorbell rings. I’m looking out my window. I see your walk but not your hair. So I yell, “Steve,” and you turn around. As you got closer I saw your head was shaved and your wrist was gashed, I mean like an inch wide, and there was all this meat. You were crying. I took you into the bathroom, wrapped you up, washed you and stuff. I remember you told me you pushed the razor all the way in and then you ripped it away real quick and you said you dropped to your knees because it hurt so bad. You had bought the razors with the five bucks your dad gave you after beating your ass and shaving your head.

I was very new to robbing houses. I was fifteen maybe. We’d just robbed a couple of houses. One of the houses we robbed was that crazy guy who had let you stay with him for like a week. We robbed a couple of others. What happened was we robbed a place, got a TV, put it in my basement waiting for Doots to wake up so we could fence it. I was living in my basement at the time. I had runaway but I was still living in the same building my dad lived in. Nobody knew. While waiting for Doots we went to Gigios to eat. Eric said, “Let’s go rob another house.” So we left Gigios and I saw a house where I could pick the lock. We get in the house and there’s a nice stereo system. I go into the kitchen to get some bags to wrap it up in and I hear Eric go, “Oh shit, oh shit!” I run in the bedroom and he’s holding fistfulls of cash. I snatched four bills from him. All hundreds. We ran out of there. I was so nervous I puked on the way home. It was $3,600 cash. We got a hotel room so we could shower. We got some clothes. We remembered William saying he wanted to go to Florida, to visit his mom, she was throwing this huge party. William’s mom was a stripper and her husband was black and his name was Spider. We got a cab and go to get William and he’s walking home from school with Fat Mike. We’re like, “get in the cab.” Fat Mike’s like, “I can’t go.” He was thinking long term.

We partied like crazy in Florida until we were out of cash then we came home. We robbed that same house like three times. They never changed the locks. In retrospect, I feel remorse for doing that.

The day I got busted they followed me from my house to the house I was going to rob. It was only like five blocks away. I was inside the house and I heard, “Come on out Aaron. We know you’re here.” Someone had ratted me out.

You never robbed a house with me. But Kevin did. He robbed like two.

Yesterday I pitched a television show. It was kind of accidental, like a lot of my life, like how I ended up in San Francisco. At the time I was just wandering around the country, fresh out of an engagement and out of cash. I parked on a hill above the Castro, went to sleep in the back seat of my car, and never left. That was eleven years ago.

The television show happened the same way. I never wanted to write for television. I know what it’s like to have lunch with people who work in Hollywood. Those people eat lunch all day long. That’s why they order salad and soda water. There’s too much sun and the heat makes people slow. And at some point the ambitious children who moved to Los Angeles disappear into houses somewhere in that sprawling suburb and they stop going outside.

I know I’m exaggerating because I know serious artists who live in Los Angeles, like Aimee Bender and Jerry Stahl. Jerry drives an old Cadillac with thick leather seats. He calls it a Jew limo. But you would never run into Jerry or Aimee walking down the street in L.A. You wouldn’t run into anybody.

I didn’t pitch my television show in Los Angeles; I pitched it in New York. That’s not the point. I’m not talking about Hollywood the place, I’m talking about Hollywood the thing, the idea, or lack of idea. I’m talking Zen Hollywood, clear your mind, whisper a prayer, and focus only on the numbers. Ask yourself these Hollywood Koans: How many eyeballs can I get on my product? How do I appeal to Suburban moms? What is the sound of one hand clapping in a mall?

Here’s the back-story on my television pitch: I was hanging out at a porn production facility and someone said, “We’d like to do a TV show.” And I responded, “You would do it like this.” Next thing you know, I’m the writer. And I will say, these people who want to do a television show, I like them very much.

Yesterday we pitched this show. I had written a detailed description of the show, including a photo essay. I explained it was a show about character; it was a character-driven show. The executive said nobody cares about character. They don’t want to see porn stars making dinner.

“It’s only the moment. We don’t remember anything else. We want sex, we don’t want whores placing presents under a Christmas tree.”

I’m trying to talk about a model for The Rumpus. Which is also a model for art and artists in general. It is becoming harder and harder not to see that money corrupts art and that art and numbers don’t mix. The question might be, how does the artist make a living? And the answer might be, they don’t? The answer might be, they hold out as long as they can and then they come inside and take their place at the dinner table. And those people, in the glass-walled restaurants on Sunset Boulevard wearing rumpled suits, chin disappearing into neck disappearing into shirt. This is why their hair is dry. It’s not because they are old, it’s because they are the opposite of young. It’s like an illness, an inability to connect with art. And without art there is no interior life, because art illuminates our search for self. Hollywood has nothing to do with that. And the publishing industry has nothing to do with that, either. And it’s true  there’s more money in other things, in almost every possible other thing.

But let me tell you how I felt walking out of that meeting. I didn’t feel dirty, or like I had “sold out.” I used to be a sex worker, so I’ve always been for sale. I just want to price things at what they’re worth. What I felt was this: like a weightlifter who used to curl thirty pounds but now can only curl twenty-five. Like I had lost a little something. Not forever. But still…

And the upside of this? Reader, there is no upside.

I heard a story about a man who won an Academy Award for a documentary. He was popular for a year but nobody invites him to parties anymore. He’s bitter. He thinks we owe him something. He can’t understand why he’s not more celebrated but he’s never made anybody a dime.

Still, there is this, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs, by Tobias Wolff. Mary, a teacher who has spent her life trying to please others, quoting, or paraphrasing Micah from the Old Testament,  tells the class, “Mend your lives. You have deceived yourselves in the pride of your hearts, and the strength of your arms. Though you soar aloft like the eagle, though your nest is set among the stars, thence I will bring you down, says the Lord. Turn from power to love. Be kind. Do justice. Walk humbly.”

**

illustration for the rumpus by miranda harter

Dan – Assistant Restaurant Manger

My earliest memories of you are on the bus, third grade. That’s where you stood out, gaining laughs through insulting others. I was the recipient of those insults. I can clearly remember you singing: Oh Dan don’t wear no socks/I saw him when he took them off/He through them in the sky/Now the birds refuse to fly.

You’ve told me before that you remember our first meeting was me kicking your bike and you punching me. But I don’t remember that.

In early childhood there was no chance of us hanging out. I was getting beat up a lot.

I moved away from the neighborhood in fifth grade, came back for high school. That’s where I meet John. We were all ditching school. He was a runaway and I let him move in with me. You were soon in the same boat. You and John had the common cause of rebelling against your parents and running away.

You lived with me a little bit. But my mom was getting sick of people staying over. You were the one that told me John was having sex with my sister.

You lived on the roof at California and Devon and drank lots of vodka. You were generally miserable at that time. Your father found you on the street and dragged you home and handcuffed you to a pipe. Nobody knew what to do with you then. You were drunk all the time, very self-absorbed.

You and John hitchhiked out to California. I gave you a flute to sell, to get some money. But it was too much so you threw it away along with everything else. After you guys came back there was this big group dynamic. Huge numbers of people hanging out. I always had the line on everybody. I would hang out with Albert and he would know what happened to you. You would know what happened to Tim. Everybody knew everything.

Then we split into two groups. There were the dirtbags and the overlords. I remember specifically a conversation we were having in the laundromat. You were talking about what would make a good leader and you elected me, but you were actually the leader. That was the perception. The overlords made a comic book about us. I still have it.

I remember you getting your first tattoo. That led to many sleeveless days. You wrote a lot. I would write too. You would pick two or three lines out of my various poems that you might like. I think you’ve always been one to tear down other people.

I was put in the hospital when I was sixteen. You and Joe and Pat wrote me letters. When I got out we were going in different directions. You were moving out of the drug scene, toward high school. We made a pact not to do drugs but I didn’t take it seriously.

In high school you were doing more things. You joined the chess team. You had your little side dramas because you were hooking up with one of the staff members in the group home you lived in. We didn’t hang out that much. You were reading all these books on Bhuddism. You were all about higher-consciousness. At some level you were probably more grounded. You were very quiet at that point. You did a lot more listening. Next time you were social was much later.

I remember you came to wake me up every day for my last few months of high school. I was about to be kicked out for truancy. You made it some kind of decision. Took some kind of responsibility that it had to be done. But you weren’t acting like a friend. You wouldn’t hang out. You were actually very parental, paternal at that time.

It was something I didn’t want to do. To this day I would never have done that. I didn’t want to graduate high school. I slept through finals and they still passed me. I shouldn’t have bothered with high school; I wasn’t into it. I didn’t learn anything. I should have just got a job. I enjoy work more than I enjoy school.

Overall, I would say most of what I like about you is who I knew in high school. Afterward there’s a lot less to relate to. Then you were into this idea of everybody. How can we help everybody. Now I would say over all the years a lot more of you is for self, Steve for Steve. This doesn’t include the last couple of years, where you’ve transitioned and become political.

John – X-Ray Technician

It was like third or fourth grade when we first met. It was you, me, your sister, and my brother. We were all into comics. Later, you and I would rob the comic store. We weren’t the only ones to rob the comic store. They were closing down. They had already been robbed. You kicked in the wood they had put over the window and we went in and took a bunch of comics. I think you got all the back issues of Daredevil. That was your favorite character. You were taking as many as you could get and I was picking just the ones I wanted. I was thumbing through them thinking: I have this one, I have this one… I wasn’t a very good thief. In hindsight we should have just taken boxes. That would have been smarter.

I remember meeting Roger for the first time. We went over to his grandparent’s house. He said I had to wear a Yamakuh, but he was just kidding. You guys were playing chess but you were way better than I was. You were out of my league.

You started taking speed. You would take your mom’s drugs. We talked about pot and stuff and you said you had smoked pot before but I was with you all the time and I didn’t remember that. I think you got me stoned for the first time. I think you got the weed from Pat.

I remember a lot about your mother. She was very nice. She still had her English accent. She was very skinny I remember her laying down a lot, watching that black and white TV. And you told me she couldn’t have a color TV because your dad thought it caused lukemia or something.

Your dad walked around naked a lot. He didn’t care. His manhood dangling around.

When we started getting in trouble is when we started sneaking out at night with Albert. Albert’s mom used to call me Diablo. The Prince of Darkness. We’d just run around, hook up with other kids that snuck out. Try to find stuff to do. Go to the public golf course and vandalize the greens. Then we started breaking into cars. We were trying to be bad boys but we weren’t. If we were really bad we would have stolen the cars. Which we probably would have done if we knew how.

I don’t know why we started sneaking out every night. Probably because I didn’t want to be at home. It was the only time I was able to go out because my father wouldn’t let me leave the house except to go to school. He used to beat me with a switch, broom handle, extension cords. My dad actually whipped me in front of you when he caught you hiding in my room. He made you watch.

My father hated you. He tried to run you over in his taxi, but that was much later. Probably the year before I went to high school, when you were in seventh grade.

After you told me my dad chased you with a gun I looked for that gun. I looked all over the house but I couldn’t find it. He probably kept it in his car.

I think we were just kids and we had these dreams and we’d talk about philosophical stuff, what our dreams were, how do you make out with a girl, what does the ideal girl look like. Kid stuff. That’s all before the drugs. Then we started taking drugs and we talked about stupid stoner stuff.

We used to rob parking meters. Herb showed us how to do it.

I became homeless way before you did. I started sleeping under your bed. Probably when I was around twelve or thirteen, so you were eleven or twelve. You had a lot of porn magazines under there. I’d run away for weeks at a time. I’d go home, get a beating, get a shower, get some clothes, take off again. Hopefully in that order.

In hindsight I always ran to you when I was in trouble. But how could you help? You were six months younger than I.

I remember you and Felix got in a fight. You fought in the alley and you were kicking his ass pretty good. I remember thinking you were more coordinated than I thought. After the fight he gained some respect for you.

Your father had mirrors all over his bedroom wall.

I remember you telling me you had this fantasy of being tied up by a woman. There was nothing we didn’t talk about.

I think at one point we stayed completely stoned and drunk for two months straight. I knew things took a turn for the worse the day I came over and saw puke running down the side of your house below your window.

It sucked when you ran away from home. Then I had to show you all my spots. Like the hallway, the laundromat, basements I would find. I’d show you where I stayed. You had a hard time getting on the roof of Quick Stop. That was the night you got bit by all those spiders across your stomach. I’ve never seen anything like that.

I showed you how to be homeless. I remember those cold winters. It was fucking cold. How bad could it have been at home for us to decide to be outside in that weather? We didn’t even have heavy jackets because we wanted to look cool. It was worst at three or four in the morning. You wake up shivering. I hate that period of my life. I look back on it now. If I’m walking from my car to work and I’m cold then I think, hell, I’ve been through worse. It was freezing cold. Those winters away from home were cold.

My parents caught me once and put me in a drug rehab. I was there like three months and was going to get out but then I got caught sniffing liquid paper so I ran away from the rehab. You and Dan came to meet me on the Southside at an ice cream place called the Purple Cow.

You and I were huffing spray paint. We were using paper bags to sniff black metallic paint. I said I’m hearing BeeWee and you said you were past that, you were on the BeeZee’s. I’m looking at you and you looked dead. There was nothing there. You had paint all over your face.

You had gone back home. I had a warrant out for my arrest. I was charged with breaking into a basement. I remember my dad flipping out. He beat me pretty good that day.

A narcotics officer interrupted us getting high. Bam, we were awake! We took off running. We’re jumping fences, cutting through yards. We must have ran in a half mile circle only to go back to your place and there’s the cop sitting on your stairs. He says he’s too old to chase us but he knows about me and says I should go back home. That’ when we decided to go to California.

That night you hid me under your bed. You went into your dad’s room and took a wad of cash from your dad’s pocket. He always carried cash so he could make bail. I went back home and grabbed some gear while my dad was sleeping. We packed up real heavy. It was ridiculous.

We got a ride from hippies and stayed our first night in a commune. They gave us acid. We spent all the money you stole on one way tickets to Phoenix where the Grbvacs had moved. Their mom kicked us out. She said, “We moved here to get away from you.”

We hitchhiked from Phoenix to L.A. We got picked up by this German guy. He was going like 100 miles per hour. He was driving with one hand, drinking beer with another, chucking beer bottles out the window. He was trashed. He gave you a bong hit. You tried to pass it to him after you took your hit. He told you it was a one-hitter, you were supposed to finish it. He bought us beer. He wouldn’t let us drink his beer because he had brought them with him from Germany. Halfway through the trip he came to a screeching halt. He goes to this emergency phone box and says he’s lost.

By rights we should have died on that trip. I would never let my son hitchhike across the country.

We were out of cash, out of smokes. We made it to Los Angeles. I remember you called Kevin and he said he just scored a quarter pound. You said, “Don’t do anything. We’re coming back.”

So we’re going back. We get picked up by that truck driver. You can ad-lib those details, I’m sure you remember. (We spent the night in his cab. In the morning he drops us at a donut shop in East L.A. He molested John while I was sleeping. He took everything we had left, which consisted of a small bag with some poetry and maps.)

I remember our clothes are tattered, covered in mud. We have nothing except our clothes, literally. We arrive at Ceasar’s Palace in Las Vegas. We probably haven’t showered in a week. We ask the cocktail waitress for some water and she gives it to us on a silver platter. It was like finding heaven. Then we go back to the highway and get picked up by the Nevada State Troopers and they lock us up in the juvenile detention center. You were fourteen, I was fifteen.

You got out after a couple of days but they kept me for three weeks. I remember they only had enough petty cash for you. Your last name started with an E and that’s how you got out before me. I remember you telling me, “Sorry John, I’m bailing on you.” After you, the caseworker took a vacation. So I sat in detention all that time. Then when I got off the bus in Chicago I’m busted for curfew and that’s when they find out I have a warrant for my arrest. So from one detention center, on a Greyhound bus, to a squad car, to another detention center. I was in Chicago Juvie for a long time. I was in there about six months. I was pretty angry.

My parents kept trying to continue the court case so I wouldn’t get out. Finally I asked to call DCFS, met with a social worker. I asked if the state would take custody and they said they couldn’t do anything unless there were two reports of physical abuse. I said, Go check your files. That’s how I became a ward of the state. If I had known it was that simple I probably would have done it sooner.

I was in the group home when you were put in the mental hospital and we talked on the phones. Then you were put in a group home too. We both became wards of the state.

I remember Aaron having like zero problems in his life but making problems to be more like us.

We were smart. We were a bunch of really smart kids. It makes me wonder where we would have been if we didn’t have drugs and alcohol in our life.

In 2005 I began interviewing people I grew up with. Because I left home at thirteen and spent four years in group homes, my social network was significantly wider than most people of that age. What’s most interesting about these interviews turns out not so much to be the things we remember differently as the things we remember the same. – Stephen Elliott

Roger – Graduate Student

I was walking down Washtenaw by myself. I was probably seven or eight and you were playing soccer with your dad. I stopped and observed and I think your dad saw me and invited me in so he could do something else. I have no idea what I was doing alone walking down the street at that age.

We were best friends. We had our routine where we would go to McDonalds on Western and talk about current events I remember we were talking about a satellite going past Pluto and some pissed off mother leaned in to tell us we weren’t as smart as we thought we were. Which is a strange thing for an adult to tell a couple of small children.

We did a lot of reflecting. These long conversations in your bedroom. We talked often about running way.

We would play chess for hours. Tournaments. Three out of five. Four out of seven. I think we were pretty evenly matched. We were very competetive. We competed in all these different things which is how we gave each other affection. We would race. I was faster than you.

I remember you seeing my mother naked.

We must have been eight or nine when we found your dad’s porn stuff. I was always more into the pictures and you were into the stories. You were particularly fond of the bondage type stuff. We’d read though the porn books on the shelf. I don’t think we knew that your dad had written a lot of those books.

Your grandmother would make us food. I remember your grandmother being very sweet, going out of her way. And I remember your father being very verbally abusive toward her. He would yell at her to shut up or get out. I remember him as a huge guy. Big, barrel chested. He would walk around with his shirt off. Imposing, threatening. He was very volatile. Sometimes he seemed very sweet, other times very explosive. I have lots of memories of him wearing his sheriff’s outfit. That’s kind of who he was, tough imposing bailiff sheriff type.

I remember learning about the money in the top drawer of your father’s dresser. I remember you taking money a number of times.

I remember your mom when she could walk, seeing her moving around the house. She never really liked me. She called me an alley kid. She criticized my clothes. Then I remember her slowly degrading and ending up on the couch and you having do more and more things for her. She had a piss bucket you had to empty out regularly. She shook when she talked. I don’t remember her having a ton of interaction with you or your sister who was always up in her room. Your interactions were all about getting chores done.

We had a fist fight once. I was pissed off at your for being selfish in some way. We got in some verbal fight. I made some comment about your mom being in a wheelchair. Then we started swinging.

Then my mother remarried and I moved to Florida when I was eleven and you were ten. We would send each other letters. We’d even send each other audio tapes because it was too expensive to talk on the phone. I would come back in the summers and see snapshots of you. Your hair was growing. You hit puberty early. You were the first to have armpit hair and a beard.

I remember sneaking out with you in the summer and learning how to open parking meters. There was a period of time we were robbing cars. I remember Albert had to sneak out by stepping over his sleeping mother. My grandparents caught me sneaking out once and forbid me to hang out with you.

One summer I came and you’re thirteen and experimenting with acid and whatever else. At that point I felt very much that you weren’t the same anymore. You were going down a path I couldn’t go down and it scared me.

The next year you’re homeless. You stay at my grandma’s with me for a little bit and my grandma calls your dad and gives him a hard time so he comes over screaming, “Where the fuck is my son.” You took off through the back door, ran down the alley. I thought your father was going to beat up my grandparents.

I moved back when I was sixteen and you were fifteen. My mother had broken up with that man who had been abusing me. You were in a group home by then and I would hang out with you and your friends.

Our neighborhood was overrepresented with violent kids with no sense of other people. I remember Pat getting hit with a golf club, Albert smacked in the head with a wooden board. We were just a violent, unempathic bunch. We had more than our share of socio-paths.

There was only one honest way to get attention and that was to be better than everybody else. There was no concept of loving each other. There was no parenting, no modeling. We were a safe-haven for the worst kids but the irony is that we were incapable of being supportive. We always saw things in terms of what people could do for us.

There were so many times we could have done more. Take Dave. His parents wouldn’t let him live with them so he got sent to live with his grandmother who was out of touch with reality. Early teens, he’s totally on his own. Now, if I knew a twelve year old in that situation today I would think it was fucked up. But we had a lot of situations like that.

I was trying to distill Austin, Texas and this giant music festival into nuggets of wisdom. Isn’t that what writing is, making sense of our experience? But how do you make sense of a good time? …more

It occurred to me this morning, because the hottest party in Austin is the Fader/Levi’s party (that’s not really true, it depends on your measurements, it’s complicated), but it reminded me that the people making money in 1849 weren’t digging for gold, they were making pants. The people making pants were bigger even than the people buying the gold. You want to make serious money— don’t publish books, corner the market on pens.

The most common phrase I heard coming out of AWP, the Associated Writing Programs Conference this year was “Ponzi scheme.” It might have been Berni Madoff in the headlines, or it might be the continuing recognition of what the whole MFA creative program machine is/has become, or it might be something else altogether. I didn’t do an MFA, David Foster Wallace did, and for that reason alone I shouldn’t criticize. So I won’t. But the people inside the system are criticizing. There was a queasy unease among some faculty that they were exploiting people’s dreams. Even if what they sold had some value, were they calling it by its name? I heard it from Scott Hutchins, I heard it from Charlie Baxter, and I heard it from someone else. Three sources, unrelated: “Ponzi scheme.” This was coming from people who  make a reasonable living teaching creative writing. Or some of them do, many writing teachers are just exploited adjunct faculty making pennies on the dollar with no insurance and a fuck-you note taped permanently to their office door. You learn it you teach it; you break it you bought it. They started out wanting to write, then they had a kid, or some other tragedy, and now there are bills to pay. Teaching seems vaguely related to those sinister dreams that got you into this mess to begin with. But most recognize that teaching and writing have nothing to do with each other. There are excellent teachers, writers who love to teach, and many teachers are excellent writers, and this is often the best job they can get. If Tobias Wolff and Jim Shepard and Aimee Bender are doing it, it can’t be all bad.

When people ask me if they should do an MFA, something I’m not qualified to comment on but something I get asked all the time, I tell them there’s nothing wrong with spending two years filling notebooks and not worrying about the rest of the world. It might also be helpful to meet other people who value writing above everything else, to realize you are not alone. But I say you don’t need an MFA to get published. That’s a myth. That’s the one reason you should never get an MFA for, to make connections. The professors in the creative writing programs don’t have the key to that door. There is no key and there is no door. If you went in for that reason try to get a refund. There’s no more gold in them hills.

Or so it seems from the outside. I didn’t go to AWP.

But South By Southwest is all about music. I watched a panel yesterday. Amanda Palmer and John Wesley Harding, and an agent from William Morris, and others. John Wesley Harding talked about going out on his own. The record companies didn’t have anything to offer him anymore. He sold 500 albums through his website. The album wasn’t recorded yet and the pre-sales funded it. He said it was the first time he’s ever made money from an album.

If you’re a huge star, a record guy pointed out, you need a big company to support you, a company with global reach. It’s the same for writers, I guess. But who cares about the monster celebrities, the books that sell a million copies, the seven-figure advance. What about the rest of us?

Harding talked about connecting with his fans, and creating music for the right reasons. If you don’t like making music, if it’s not an expression of something that has to get out of your head, then don’t do it. It reminded me of advice I’m always giving would-be-novelists. Don’t do it unless you love it. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Go to business school if money is more important than the book. But that advice is also self-serving. It justifies my life. It allows me to equate publishing eleven books, being thirty-seven, and living in a one-bedroom apartment with a kid ten years younger than me, with the moral high ground rather than failure. There’s nothing wrong with making a buck.

Amanda Palmer was luminous. She and the moderator, a guy named Ryan with skinny arms and loose greasy hair patterning out and across his shoulder, spoke of the rise of the middle-class artist. Soon there will be fewer monster hits. We may never see another U2. There will be more artist like John Wesley Harding (like me!) who make a reasonable living (define “reasonable”). They aren’t superstars, but they have their fans. Since distribution is all point and click John can now make $10 directly for every album. And maybe soon writers will make $10 on every book they sell. Or nothing at all. Because maybe soon no-one will pay for content. They won’t pay for music, and the record companies will be replaced by dozens, or hundreds, of agencies servicing the needs of the artist, getting their video on YouTube, postering for a show in Winsor, doing blog PR.

The danger, Harding said, was when the artist was spending so much time running his “business” that he didn’t have the mental leisure to make art.

A woman raised her hand. She wanted to talk about a friend, an artist “doing it himself.” She said her friend sent out a well-crafted fundraising letter and raised $2,400 to make his first album. She made it sound so easy and I wanted to throw something at this woman, or spit, or storm out of the room. Because if you have those kinds of friends helping you put out your first album, or your first book, then you have too much. You don’t know anything about the place most people live in. You grew up rich even by the terms standards of your own rich country. Which happens. But let’s not make assumptions.

There will be money, and it’ll be made the same way Levi’s made money, the same way creative writing departments at schools like Columbia make money. It will be made the ways it’s always been made— hand over fist. The facilitators will sell you back your dreams plus ten-percent. They’re like dealers at the poker table where there are winners and losers but the house always takes a cut.

The middle class artist will partner with these people. The artist will take the train to   houses populated with Facebook executives, funded by micro-ads. But there’s another catch too, one more reversal, after all would you rather be the man with a house on Bourbon Street and a cottage in Aspen, or would you rather be the bartender sleeping with his wife? Is the rise of the middle class artist a good thing? Who will moderate our desires? I don’t know, but I like it. I like the idea of fewer artists making huge cash and fewer artists starving and more artists just getting by.

All of that is to get here, Austin Texas. Amanda Palmer playing in a church on 8th Street last night, pounding the keyboard, shedding her jacket, pumping her fists, kicking her legs. She sings “Runs in the Family,” she sings ballads, hundreds watching from pews. I was there, I was backstage, I was in the front row and the balcony. I was on the guest list. I don’t mind being poor if I can get into the show. And after, in the hallway, before she steps outside to sign the “merch” and put in “face time” we’re introduced.

“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” she says, stopping for a minute. She looks at me and, I swear to god, puts her hand on my cheek.
“I really love your new album,” I say. “I’m such a fan.”

**

Special Editor’s Desk bonus track, John Wesley Harding and Amanda Palmer singing “Creep” in the hallway before the panel. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

In defense, and definition, of hipsters. (image by Gretchen Robinette) …more

Drama, at The Speed of Internet

Earlier today a friend and I had a fight. …more

I just finished “The Unfinished,” D.T. Max’ fantastic posthumous profile of David Foster Wallace. The article was so sad, but also profound. “His goal,” Max writes, “had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled and meaningful life.” It was also Wallace’s goal to lead that kind of life. But it was elusive. Wallace was engaged intimately with the question of meaning.

Some brief notes:

Wallace had been taking Nardil, an antidepressant, since college. “He worried that it muted his emotions, blocking the leap he was trying to make as a writer. He thought that removing the scrim of Nardil might help him see a way out of his creative impasse. Of course, as he recognized even then, maybe the drug wasn’t the problem; maybe he simply was distant.” To me, this is among the more important modern questions. Are we distant, or is it the drugs? We have no control group. We need clones to live our lives for us without pills so we can look at them and see if we were more or less, and what the trade-offs were.

The Broom of The System was published while Wallace was in the second year of an MFA program at the University of Arizona. “The day after he handed out copies of Broom he was upset to find one at the secondhand bookstore.” I’ve had this experience twice, both times with my novel What It Means To Love You, which I had inscribed to friends whose copies found their way into used bookstores.

Max also covers the disappointment Wallace felt when Girl with Curious Hair came out in August, 1989, to mixed reviews and little attention. “He thought he’d written a better book than Broom and then the publication was this big fat zero.” Almost every writer I know goes through this. You spend years on a book and nobody reads it. You lie to yourself, say it’s enough just to be published. But it isn’t. Because the book comes out and it doesn’t get reviewed, and it doesn’t sell. The honest writer knows that there are better books out there. Why would someone read their imperfect first novel or “really good” story collection when that person hasn’t read 1984 yet, or Slaughterhouse Five, or The White Album, Valencia, Catch-22, etc. There are very few books that demand to be on the top of the pile. So many writers become so resentful. All they see is the more undeserving books, i.e. The Nanny Diaries, that make some author millions of dollars. It’s never a question of admitting your book isn’t as good as On The Road. Instead the author asks, “Why is that other crappy book having more success than my ‘Really Good’ book?” I don’t think I’ve ever known an author who was happier after her book came out than before. I’m not referring to Wallace here. Wallace actually did write books that belonged on the top of the pile. Books that were unique to their time, generous, heavy with genius. Infinite Jest is many people’s favorite book, the ultimate goal of the serious writer. Consider The Lobster is my personal favorite non-fiction collection.

Referring to a time when the writing was going well, “I’d sit down and look up and it would be hours later there’d be this mess of filled up notebook paper and I just felt wrung out and well fucked and well blessed.”

I’m in love with Wallace’s relationship with Mary Karr. He tattooed her name on his arm inside a heart. They split up. “One day, according to Karr, he broke her coffee table. She billed him a hundred dollars. He paid her and said that the remains of the table were now his. Karr told him that she’d used them for firewood, and that all he’d bought was ‘the brokenness.’” Later, when Wallace meets his wife, he puts a line through Karr’s name and an asterisk and has his wife’s name tattooed further down, like a footnote.

Regarding Infinite Jest Wallace was uncomfortable with some of the attention. He wrote to Don DeLillo, he had, “tried my best best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the book and wanted only to discuss the ‘hype’ around the book and seemed willfully to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype.”

From a letter to Wallace from DeLillo: “Some writers may have to do 2, 3 books, say in midcareer, before they remember that writing can be fun.”

To DeLillo, “I do not know why the comparative ease and pleasure of writing nonfiction always confirms my intuition that fiction is really What I’m Supposed to Do, but it does.”

Toward the end of the profile Max quotes an early short story, “The Planet Trillaphon,” that Wallace wrote while still in college, about a character on antidepressants. “I’ve been on antidepressants for, what, about a year now, and I suppose I feel as if I’m pretty qualified to tell what they’re like. They’re fine, really, but they’re fine in the same way that, say, living on another planet that was warm and comfortable and had food and fresh water would be fine: it would be fine, but it wouldn’t be good old earth.”

**

More from The Rumpus on David Foster Wallace

A few days ago in Morning Coffee I linked to this: “Emotionally Unavailable Until Famous.” What was interesting about this short piece, the decision made by the author to love and be loved, is that it speaks so much to the artistic urge. I think in many artists, the urge to create comes from the belief that if they don’t create, they will not be loved. In other words, they don’t feel lovable, and so they (we? I?) create art rather than becoming lovable. Sometimes, in the process, we lose the ability to love. And then life is a game of show and tell, reducing us to an infantile state, like Daniel Bergner and I discussed when talking about his book The Other Side Of Desire. I understand what Daniel was getting at, that we all idealize the infantile state. That’s fine in fantasy. But connecting, I think, is more important. And that is something I wrote about more thoroughly in an earlier essay, which I linked to at the bottom of that conversation, “The Score.” “The Score” was a breakthrough essay for me, an essay that set me on an entirely different path, a bend in the road that led directly to my next book and then here, writing this. I think lots of us feel this way. Every couple of years we write something that crystallizes our experiences and our way of processing those experiences, and we grow toward who we’ve been striving to become.

I don’t like to moan too much about the fate of publishing, after all, one of our mottos is “Three Celebrations For Every Complaint,” but . . . this came up yesterday while compiling Random Media Notes. HarperCollins is creating a new imprint to publish celebrity-driven memoir and other garbage. And it reminded me of an argument I had a week or two ago with a woman who was telling me she would like to start her own publishing company. “There’s room,” she said. This was a person who already had a lot of success in this industry. And she asked for my advice. My advice was to publish quality. She didn’t agree with my definition of quality, and I told her she should publish according to her own definition of quality, as long as she stayed true to it. And she said something along the lines of, “But people who read mystery books buy two books a week.” She said she had to “publish that other stuff” to fund publishing books she loved. But HarperCollins’ new imprint really underscores the truth of that. The new imprint is called (sh)It Books (“sh” mine). And publishing shit is no way to fund literature. Every writer, or most, has another job while s/he writes her first novel. For me it was bartending or temping or working in a youth hostel or stripping or selling drugs or teaching LSAT classes. I had full-time (albeit crappy) jobs while writing my first three books. And I think maybe publishing houses should work a similar way. Just as writers shouldn’t expend a lot of energy writing (sh)It in order to fund the writing they care about, maybe publishers should just get into an entirely different line of work to fund their literary publishing. Maybe they should pack their trucks full of cocaine?

That reminds me of this link, to Francis Wilkinson’s “Is Writing Only For The Rich?” Francis Wilkinson is the executive editor of The Week and the framing of his question makes me think he may be rich himself. To be rich is a crime, though it’s a crime I’ve forgiven in many friends and a crime I wouldn’t necessarily mind committing, within reason. Still, people who are rich owe the rest of us a refund. (Can I define rich? Yes, if you’re in the top 5% income bracket. And I don’t mean in comparison to your neighbors, I mean in comparison to the rest of your country.) Plus, the question is absurd. To say only the rich will write mocks the very meaning of art. If you’re drawn to write, you will. You’ll tighten your belt, you’ll share a one-bedroom apartment, you’ll make certain sacrifices, and if the rewards aren’t enough, and they often aren’t, one day you will move on to something else, like real estate. Only a fool writes for money. If money is your chief concern, you’re better off going to business school. For as long as I’ve been writing, which would be since I was 10, there has never been enough money in it to justify doing it for anything less than an inate need, or for love, or to convince someone to sleep with you, or because you’re too thoroughly damaged and unemployable to contemplate a more social and healthy way to make a buck. Though I’m mostly talking about creative writing, and Francis is mostly talking about journalism. We’re probably staring at different oceans. Nontheless, nontheless . . . the question is better answered in The London Guardian (also linked to yesterday), which asked nine successful literary authors if writing for a living was a joy or a chore and got nine different answers. What else did they expect?

Narrative is charging $20 to submit to their online magazine. That’s for “unsolicited manuscripts.” In other words, if you’re already famous, they won’t charge you. Because really, Michael Chabon is not paying $20 to submit to a literary magazine. But seriously, there is something wrong here.

The upside is that Narrative pays writers. $150 for a Story of the Week, with $500 each for the annual Top Five Stories of the Week. $150-350 for 500-2,000 word manuscripts. $350-$1,000 for 2,000-10,000 word manuscripts. The downside is, that’s not real money. Or it is, but it’s not quit your job money. Take a step back. $1,000 for 10,000 words? That’s a dime a word. If that’s serious fiction or creative non-fiction that almost certainly took two months to write. If you sell it, and there’s a reasonable chance for a beginning author that you won’t, it’s still not enough to live off.

In the current issue of Narrative you have Ann Beatie reading a story and an excerpt of T.C. Boyle’s new novel. You can be certain neither Ann nor T.C. paid a $20 submission fee. Same for bestselling author Andrew Gross and literary legend Robert Stone. Is it fair that these authors are taking space away from writers who are paying for the opportunity?

The people publishing the best new fiction from unknown writers are not charging a fee. Places that take their slush piles seriously include The Sun Magazine, The Missouri Review, The Alaska Quarterly, McSweeney’s,and others. Some of these magazines are non-profit foundations, others are supported by universities, and others have Dave Eggers.

It’s hard breaking in as a writer. I say that as someone who didn’t do an MFA, published my first books by sending them to a new publisher that was accepting blind submissions. All of my earliest published work was picked up through the slushpile. Like this article on poker, which I sent blindly to Salon and an editor at GQ read and liked and then offered to publish something else of mine. I’ve always believed in the slushpile, but you shouldn’t have to pay for it. Times are hard. Money is always an issue. Then there are some very good magazines that don’t take their slush piles seriously, so don’t take it personally when a magazine you really like doesn’t respond. It can take a long time to get through the pile, to get an editor or agent’s attention from earlier published work. But in any case keep your money in your pocket.

Narrative’s winter issue editor’s note. (via the good people at HTMLGIANT which has quite a comments thread going)

Update: In the comments thread, Blake Butler who originally posted this on HTMLGIANT responds, “I guess here is the question: is it right to charge through the teeth to would be contributors for a chance at a spot to become published in a magazine that seems to have clearly solicited more than 50% of its work? Actually ‘right’ isn’t the right word, because in the end it is the submitter’s choice to pay the fee, but there just seems something doublefaced and weird about the whole process if you ask me. It leaves a bad taste, and is something usually I would just laugh at, though when it is passed around under the moniker ‘the gold standard of online publications,’ it seems even more out of whack.”

I don’t want to define The Rumpus by opposition. After all, one of our 22 mottos is, “Three Celebrations for Every Complaint.” Another of our mottos is, “Only Rich People Call Themselves Upper Middle Class.”

Still, here are some things we’re less interested in. You can tack this on to my previous rant, F*$@ Pop Culture.

Rants. The Rumpus doesn’t do rants, especially political rants. OK, that’s a lie, we do rants sometimes, but only me and Andrew. We’re an online daily culture magazine and there is a line between rant and cultural criticism. A book review is not a manifesto. This is a manifesto. The Huffington Post has rants more than covered. With 250 editorials every day, Huffpo has gone above and beyond proving that every celebrity has an opinion. Currently at the top of the page: Jamie Lee Curtis on art, climate change, steroids, and plastic surgery.

Lists: This is the laziest form of journalism. I mean, c’mon people. Examples of lists we’re not linking to: The Seattle PI’s ten best fiction. I mean, how many novels and short story collections published in 2008 were covered in the Seattle PI? Same with Timeout Chicago. I mean, if you’re going to do it, be a really cool book blog edited by a dozen people, including former book section editors, that love books. Admittedly, we’ve done some pieces that could be called lists, like Books That

Changed The World (our most popular article to date). But we’re not going to give you top ten lists of things we know nothing about, and we’re not going to link to other people’s lists.

Legos: Legos were interesting for a minute, until people figured out that legos were internet gold. Not quite as good as cute cats, but close. Lego art has become so ubiquitous online that it’s becoming a parody of itself, even when it’s good, and much of it is. Ultimately, when writers and artists think they’re co-opting pop culture, pop culture is usually co-opting them. It reminds me of They Live starring Rowdy Roddy Piper. You think you’re sleeping with some sexy man or woman but actually you’re in bed with a reptilian alien. The most recent example of cool lego art that we would link to if we weren’t sick of legos is the iPod Killer. (also, for cute cats, check out Josh Bearman and Superkitty).

OK, glad we got that out of the system.

When we say pop culture, what do we mean? John Story, in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, discusses six definitions. Do we mean culture that is popular, like Shakespeare or Dickens?

Or do we mean mass produced commercial culture, celebrity memoirs, pre-packaged music that intentionally sounds like music you’ve heard 1,000 times before, music you’ve already memorized? Are we talking about movies plotted out in marketing meetings meant to appeal to a segment of the population, instead of a segment of our brain? In other words, when we say pop culture, are we talking about the lowest common denominator, factory produced entertainment sucked down with soda pop and Kentucky Fried Chicken and everything else that’s making us fat? If that’s what we’re talking about, then I say fuck pop culture.

When did pop culture become cooler than regular culture? Was it when Britney replaced Madonna? When did we let the marketing executives into our living room? When did we stop being embarrassed by “guilty pleasures”?

But maybe that’s not what we mean. Maybe what we mean is pop culture appropriation, like Quentin Tarantino or Malcolm Gladwell. Or maybe we just mean anything popular. Maybe you think Jim Thompson’s The Getaway is pop culture. Maybe anything that’s fast-paced and fun, irrespective of where it originated or whether it makes you think or sheds light on the human condition. Maybe when I’m thinking of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, CSI, and American Idol, you’re thinking South Park, The Sopranos, Radiohead, and Flight of the Conchords. It gets complicated, especially when Kim Gordon starts designing for Urban Outfitters.

It’s possible that what we’re talking about is so undefined that the only thing we can actually discuss is the meaning of the word.

But that’s not what I mean. I love Quentin Tarantino, The Breeders, TV on the Radio, early Liz Phair. I’m looking forward to The Watchmen, the Tyson documentary, and the next great HBO series.

But when people write The Rumpus offering to cover “pop culture” I say, “We don’t cover pop culture, actually (Mainstream K. excepted).” We cover regular culture. We like books, art films, music that doesn’t sound like everything else. We will undoubtably write about things you consider pop culture. We will even write about things we consider pop culture. But not too much. All the other magazines already have that covered for us.

Fuck pop culture. We’re going to focus on everything else.

Last night was The Rumpus Launch Party at Crash Mansion in New York. I didn’t have enough volunteers. Actually, I didn’t have any volunteers. There were people that volunteer for The Rumpus, like Juliet Linderman and Thomas Seely. But they were there to see the show. Ainsley Drew was there with her family (note to Ainsley, I’m sorry I didn’t meet your family!). But I didn’t have any volunteers that were there to like, WATCH THE DOOR.

So I needed a cashier. Juliet stepped up, along with our esteemed books editor Andrew Altschul. So did James Frey and Davy Rothbart. If you came last night chances are you gave your money to the founder of Found Magazine or the author of Bright Shiny Morning. But that’s just the way it is at The Rumpus. Everybody does his or her part. The famous people work door lines in the freezing cold, the assistant editors of the world are paid exorbitant salaries, much more than the editor-in-chief. Here at The Rumpus, we’re turning everything upside down.

Wait, I have to tell you about last night. Because two things happened. There was Rumpus, and there was not so Rumpus. There was Will Sheff and Tim Bracy and Beth Wawerna, all crooning like the world was ending to a spellbound crowd rocking gently on vinyl sofas and sitting on the floor. There was Davy Rothbart threatening Jonathan Ames to say away from his girlfriend and Jonathan Ames interviewing people in the audience. Starlee Kine did her sticky notes and Michael Showalter showed a video he made and Kristen Shaal talked about the transformation she made when she joined Flight of the Conchords. Andrew Greer was drunk and jetlagged and kind of brilliant and so good looking. It was like he was an advertisement for why it’s better to be gay and Rick Moody was there, just hanging out.

But when I was on stage I didn’t talk about The Rumpus. I talked about what was going on in San Francisco. Over the last seventeen days my neighborhood had banded together to stop American Apparel from opening on Valencia Street. “What wrong with American Apparel?” you ask. And I say, “It’s not about American Apparel, it’s about formula retail. It’s about every street and mall in American looking the same, with the same stores and the same coffee shops.” I say, “Formula retail is the death of art and a whole lot of other things. And even if American Apparel is cool, it doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter. Because there are 250 of them in 20 countries. You can’t have an American Apparel on your street and any kind of character. And yes we have to deal with gentrification and save rent control and work harder and come together more. And we had to stop American Apparel, because they would have been a beachhead and then it would be Urban Outfitters and Gap and Starbucks and welcome to any street USA.”

And at the same time The Rumpus launch party was happening the planning commission was meeting in San Francisco. There were more people than had ever shown up for a planning meeting (or so I’ve been told). Hundreds of people, with two overflow rooms. The meeting extended into the evening. And I have to say here, because I want to give credit but also where it intersects with me, I started the Stop American Apparel campaign. I put up the posters and the website and got the local merchants together. I didn’t do the majority of the work. That would be Isaac Fitzgerald first and foremost, and the merchants along Valencia. And Chicken John. And tons of neighborhood groups and co-ops like Pirate Cat Radio and Artists Television Access. But I started it, I had a stake. It feels so good to care about something.

And at 9:33p.m., New York time, just before I introduced Will Sheff, the final act of an amazing night, (Will fucking Sheff, c’mon people!) I got the call (text, actually) that we had won. That with only 17 days (you have to put up your sign for the planning commission hearing 20 days before the hearing) we had stopped American Apparel. Stopped them cold. The planning commission had voted 7-0 against them. I started jumping on the stage. I was in New York, my fist hit the low ceiling. Everybody wanted to hear Will Sheff.

“We won we won we won!”

And then I explained a little. And I apologized for not talking about The Rumpus all night, which is what the whole event was really about. But then maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was about a whole lot more things. And Will Sheff, he came on the stage, and he rocked it out.

**
Video from the launch party:

**

Not related at all, an interview with Christina Maria on Cable Access.

Well, we’re getting ready to launch this bad boy. I know for a lot of regular readers the site is already launched, but things are going to be different around here once Obama is sworn in as president. For example, after Obama is sworn in there will be design on every page, not just the front page. When you click through to Rick Moody’s blog, for example, you’ll see other recent blog posts on the right. The site’s going to be more colorful and easier to navigate. Rumpy, The Rumpus mascot, will be wearing nicer clothes.

We’re also going to have a neat new easily accesible feature called “The River.” That’s basically for hard-core Rumpus readers, people who are seriously over-educated and under-employed, checking this site three or four times a day, who want to read The Rumpus in a continual stream of updated content right down the center of the page. The choice will be yours.

In addition to tons of new content (like Josh Mohr’s review of America America or Scott Hutchins interview with Steven Soderbergh, both coming this week) we’re going to republish a lot of our original content from this beta period. So don’t freak out when you see our interview with James Frey or Malcolm Gladwell in the feature box; this is not a rerun, it’s a starting over. The Morning Coffee will still be fresh every day at 6a.m.

We had our pre-launch party in San Francisco this week to a sold out crowd at The Makeout Room. Our launch party is in New York at Crash Mansion February 5 and we’ve just started selling tickets. Check out the incredible lineup featuring Will Sheff, James Frey, Kristen Shaal, Michael Showalter, Jonathan Ames, Starlee Kine, Timothy Bracy, Beth Wawerna, and Andrew Sean Greer. We encourage you to purchase tickets the way Chicago votes, early and often.

In the meantime, have fun while The Rumpus is still beta. Thanks for helping us put this thing together. We’re going to keep posting great content for you while anticipating Wednesday, when we’ll all wake up in a new and improved America.

- Stephen Elliott