The next day I walked through the blizzard to meet a friend who was deeply depressed. I told her she needed to admit other people might know her better than she knows herself. She said, Powerlessness is a big thing with you.

It isn’t, I said. I mean sexually yes. But I was talking about taking responsibility, recognizing a problem and doing something about it. Letting go of all the little reasons you have for being miserable. It’s not advice I always take, but I wasn’t giving myself advice.

Then yesterday Alina and I took a train to Nick and Lily’s farm house. Here, from the upstairs window, I can see the pond and the naked trees and three deer running along a ridge. In the kitchen, in the cupboard, there are glue traps to catch mice. When a mouse gets stuck you have to drown the mouse in the soup pot then throw the dead mouse into a bag in the entryway. I told Alina that was her job. I would take care of the dishes. She said she didn’t want to drown mice. She’s a vegetarian. I told her it was the only humane thing to do.

When you go on your book tour here is some advice: Read in people’s homes, create a lecture you can give around your book, do at least two events in every town because the hardest part is getting there. It’s more fun to do events with other people but you sell more books when you’re alone, when it’s all about you.

If you read in a person’s home that person is throwing you a party. If they don’t look at it that way, if they’re just loaning you some space, then don’t do it. What you need is a commitment. They should promise at least 20 people. Tell them you prefer the living room to the cafe.

Have more than one book to sell. If you only have one hardcover book you might only sell 12 copies, but if you also have two earlier paperbacks you’ll sell 20 books.

If you read at a university you have to get some money, even just a little. You’ll sell more books reading in a soup kitchen than you will to students in a private college.

Stay as long as you can. People buy books on the way out. In a reading, in someone’s home, they won’t buy the book when you’re done reading. But at some point they think, the hell with it.

When people say they forgot their money I tell them to mail it to me later. I write my mailing address inside the cover. I write, Don’t Forget, and, Please Remit $20.

At my last reading from my book tour I was zipping up my bag and someone said, Is it too late to buy a book? It’s never too late to buy a book. I sold three more books at that point. I sold eleven hardcovers and five paperbacks at my last home reading, the last event of my book tour, which started September 15 and finished December 19. After that reading I was trudging to the train station, dragging my roller bag through the snow, worried the remaining books would get wet. I thought, I hope this isn’t a metaphor. The snow was coming in sheets. I thought, This is the opposite of glamorous. But I was OK with that.

The book tour. I read at or participated in 73 events in 33 cities in 95 days. I sold 700 copies of The Adderall Diaries which I bought wholesale, as well as 150 copies of Happy Baby and 80 copies of My Girlfriend Comes To The City and Beats Me Up. Roughly. But that doesn’t count all the books the bookstores sold. At maybe 20 events, or more, a bookstore was selling the books. It’s safe to say I hand-sold around a thousand copies of The Adderall Diaries. It’s safe to say I generated more sales than that indirectly from write-ups in local newspapers and blogs, interviews with small radio stations. 500 more. 300 more. 1,000 more? Hard to say. It depends what you mean.

For why? For the same reason I wrote it.

Lily and Nick were there to meet us when we arrived at the farm house. I cut sumac with Nick and went for a winter hike with Lily. At night we downloaded Paper Moon and projected the film on a wall. In the morning they left with Nick’s brother taking the cats and the dog and the baby, leaving Alina and I to work until Christmas.

**

Like all Notes From Book Tour this went out originally as a Daily Rumpus. Most of these do not get reprinted on The Rumpus so you’re encouraged to join the mail list.

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It’s morning in Los Angeles and it’s raining. All the low wet houses and then the Sony film studio.  I’m near the ocean, but not that near, and my book tour is over. Not really, I still have eight events in the next eight days, five in San Francisco, three in New York. After that I’m on a farm for a while.

Last night, in Los Angeles, I gave a lecture on using your life in your writing. There were more than thirty people and I sold at least 40 books. It was tremendously efficient. After, we were standing in front, and two policemen walked by. They were walking very quickly, one holding a pistol in both hands, the other with a large shotgun. We stood out of the way as they passed. They were like animals. We watched them move slowly down the street, shining a light in store fronts. Then a helicopter appeared overhead, casting its own light, the size of a car, on the boulevard.

Back up for a moment to the night before in the Hustler Club. A man dressed like Jesus, the host in what looked like a white suit splattered with paint, the crowd full of porn stars. I was with a woman who has a book coming out. She’s married to a famous musician and is herself a kind of beautiful that defies description, though you only get to say that so many times. “A beauty that defies description.” Why? She has long dark hair, two small nose rings, a tattoo on her belly that I asked to see. So, there is a description of her beauty. She’s average height, settled into her life with her house and baby. Well dressed but modest. An easy beauty that doesn’t require make-up. Tattoos along her arms you can see when she leans forward and her sleeves ride up her wrist. A small hole above her lip where she used to have a piercing, or else a remnant of something else.

But there were other beautiful women at the Hustler club, all of them describable. There was the host’s girlfriend, a thin, Asian woman in a collared white shirt buttoned to her chin and a long black skirt. There was a message in her clothes, well pressed and forbidding. Her skirt, which ended past her waist, accented, or created, a vision of an hourglass. She had a long face, black and white patent heels with clasp buckles across the top of her feet. She was taking pictures with a large camera, like something from the fifties, though it was probably digital and cost thousands of dollars. And when I first saw her I thought she was a journalist, or an intern, maybe a graduate student.

Near the back doorway stood a porn star or a stripper or a well kept wife in high heels with a smooth, fake (or real, or painted on) tan. Her breasts were the products of excellent surgery, or else a special bra. She wore her clothes like packaging and was with her boyfriend, or her husband, or her boss. One of several similar looking men wearing tucked-in black t-shirts and expensive jeans and tan cowboy boots, with craggy faces, faces that looked like they had been beat on for fifty years, and long white hair. These older men with their thick, tough skin. Why did they have so much hair? They weren’t wearing wigs but they had as much hair as children.

There were more than three describably beautiful women in the Hustler club. The one I was with, the writer, wanted to know about marketing her book. She would be on television but was interested in actually connecting with her readers. I understand that desire, even if it doesn’t add up. It’s a desire that is also like writing. We talked about doing readings in people’s homes. She would have to bring her child. I should have encouraged her to create a lecture or a class around her book. But then it’s her first book, so that might be difficult. Maybe a class that has nothing to do with the book but includes a copy in the price of admission? We talked about book trailers (worthless, unless you have your own vision and make it yourself, and still of dubious value) and the point of flying to three or four cities where you have a lot of friends and hoping to get some attention in the local newspapers (a poor choice as far as investments go, but maybe if you can do two or three events in the same area…).

And then, yesterday, with my friend Josh, I was talking about this very thing, but from a different angle. I had found out, while I was in San Antonio, that The Adderall Diaries was very close to a National Book Award Nomination. It was awful. I woke in the middle of the night imagining my life if I had been nominated for a big award. But Josh said it probably wouldn’t have meant that much and I knew he was right. Things only really matter when you imagine them, or in anticipation, or in retrospect when you’ve had enough time to suss out the true meaning behind a series of events. For the most part it’s cumulative. A notice in the newspaper, someone reviews your book on their blog, a television actress with 30,000 twitter followers mentions a reading you are going to give. And then, early in the day, you add it all up. You don’t get a number, you get a hypothesis. You continue anyway. Why? Because writers are optimists.

***

art by Laurenn McCubbin

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I got a note from someone who had tried to buy my book at a store where I had given a reading. They didn’t have any, the person said. I got another note from a professor who liked my book. Those notes mean a lot to me (also notes about The Daily Rumpus). I got a note from a friend asking if I would tell her the truth if she asked. I said probably. People take the truth for granted, as if we all had perfect knowledge of ourselves and telling the truth was just as easy as turning a faucet. And like a faucet there is only hot and cold as opposed to thousands of faucets located in strange places, located all over, and painted different colors.

I’m sick with something. A minor case of the common cold. I got a note asking if I could stay somewhere else instead of where I was planning to stay next week. I’m reading tonight in Pittsburgh. I really like Pittsburgh. Then five days off for the holiday. Then two events in Missoula, Seattle…

Last night I went to Moody’s Burgers with an old friend. “How’s it going,” he asked. I said fine, except for the sickness. Before that I saw my real sister. She said, “Your expression’s not changing.” “I’m tired,” I told her. I hope that’s all it is, tired and sick, though sometimes I suspect it’s something else. Before that I watched some football with my little brother.

I waited until my foster sister and her roommate were asleep then snuck into the apartment and laid quietly on the couch. Sometimes, when I wear out my welcome, I get what I can out of what’s left. It’s like driving on fumes, I guess, or sucking one of those plastic slivers of listerine between beer and onion rings. Anyway, I kept my jacket over my face when my foster sister got up in the morning. She gets up early and I figured if I didn’t move or say anything she’d be happy to see me in two weeks. Then she left and I really fell back to sleep and missed my flight. An expensive mistake but bound to happen sometimes.

So here I am, on a United jet from O’Hare to Pittsburgh where I’ll do a reading in an art gallery. I can feel my common cold leaving me, or at least I hope. Because usually I like people but when I’m sick I don’t like anybody. My sickness is misanthropic. I try to engage but just want to be alone so I can think about my ex-girlfriend. I focus on how she looked and walked and the games we would play, instead of the conversations we had. Because I never understood what she was saying, and I didn’t understand her goals. Still, I’d rather see a movie with my hand resting between her thighs (not moving or doing anything dirty, just caught there). And we once spent four days in bed together until finally, on the fourth day, she broke up with me and left to meet her husband in the mall.

**

All book tour notes go out originally in The Daily Rumpus email, some of which don’t end up on The Rumpus (some of which do not). To subscribe, click here.

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Steve Almond was there and he gave me a small, self-published book comprised of one section of very short essays about writing and one section of short-short stories, micro-fiction. His book is called This Won’t Take But A Minute, Honey and it has two covers and you have to turn it upside down when changing between the fiction and the essays. One cover, the essays, is a nurse gripping a large hypodermic as if it were a knife, while the cover for the fiction displays the legs and hand of a woman holding a whip. I haven’t read the stories yet.  The essays are almost all less than a page with titles like, “Metaphors Almost Always Suck” and “Fuck Style, Tell The Truth” and “Excessive Emotional Involvement is the Whole Point.” I’ve been paging through, between reading The Savage Detectives, which is clearly going to take a very long time. In other words I have two books, a book full of writing and a book about writing. Still, I like Steve Almond, maybe too much, and it’s comforting to hear his voice. I have excellent taste in father figures and male role models. I’m attracted to kind men who donate their time to good causes, and brutal, inconsistent women, often needlessly cruel and selfish or full of love that they yank like a rug or that switches without warning into a mindless and violent rage. I’m not talking about the women who are friends. I have very good taste in friends. And I’m sure that some Freudian could make sense of my attraction bordering on desire for the men who resemble my mother and the women who resemble my father, but they’d be making something up. Telling stories. And there are better stories than those.

I’m on an Amtrak, there’s a wood and the trees are naked and the ground covered in orange leaves. Then the wood becomes dense and, from high enough, all those trees probably resemble a lake, but on the ground, passing quickly, occasionally I can glimpse a house. And the sky is grey, winter grey, with no threat of rain. Outside the weather is cold and steady, at least based on the colors from inside this cabin.

And I was thinking last night about celebrity, and how you’re only famous to people that have heard of you, and how the majority of people will never care no matter how well known you become. The door to the green room said, “Artists Only” and I didn’t like that. I was thinking about celebrity as Rhett Miller from the Old 97s took the stage. He spoke for five minutes about how he really just wanted to impress AC Newman, who was also in attendance. And then he sang songs and his voice was so beautiful, especially when he was joined by the band and took off his guitar and crooned David Bowie’s Five Years. I thought, That man is a rockstar. His hair was almost feathered, the top of his shirt was slightly open, just enough to be accessible. He wore his clothes in a way that said, “I love you” and also “if you have a knife plunge it in,” (but only metaphorically). And AC Newman, whose band The New Pornographers is one of my favorite, was not really a rock star. Not in comparison. But it’s all intertwined and nobody was overshadowing anybody. I also had this thought, That we were grown men (there were no women on the bill) in our thirties and late thirties and forties, but we were behaving like children. Not bad children, but there we were. We had held onto our youth and it was best not to delude ourselves about what that meant. Some of us might even be re-patterning our youth into something less fierce, less dark, more forgiving, more sexual, like a redrawn comic (I only say that because of an image I have of a tight red skirt made of plastic or latex drawn by R. Crumb). And also, it was New York, so that accounts for a lot. In New York there’s always something to do so it’s just as easy not to do anything. But everyone, everywhere, is in awe of someone.

The pretty waitress complimented my reading and I traded her a copy of my book for a sloppy joe.

Today is a day spent mostly on a train, which is very relaxing. You can’t get online and there’s nothing to do but read and write and stare out the window contemplating the scenery. Now a row of log cabins, now a road with no cars, now a field waiting for the season to return.

I saw my agent in the subway this morning. I was on my way to Boston and he was on his way somewhere closer. He was reassuring me about something, probably the future. It was then I realized I didn’t need to be reassured. I was basically satisfied (if just for a moment). I liked my editor (of course, I wouldn’t say if I didn’t, I know the bastard reads these notes), I was proud of my book, I was giving readings in people’s living rooms, readings which felt, when things were going right, like an extension of the book itself.

And it’s right as I’m writing this that the train passes another field, an unlikely field in New England in the fall, that is so green it’s like a goddam wool Gap sweater. Green like flourescence, or algae, or a fucking frog.

**

All book tour notes go out originally in The Daily Rumpus email, some of which don’t end up on The Rumpus. To subscribe, click here.

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But maybe I should have asked them to Twitter The Adderall Diaries instead?

It was one hell of a lineup, and AC Newman from The New Pornographers made a surprise appearance. There was Todd Barry and Eugene Mirman. In the green room there was talk about Bolano and Sebald, and this morning Rick Moody got me thinking about connecting readers, widening the conversation. Which reminded me of the reading I did in a living room on the outskirts of Richmond to 20 people who had never been to a literary event before, and how fun that was, how full of life.

It makes me want to start a Rumpus discussion board. No, maybe a book club. A Rumpus editor could choose a book each month. But there would have to be a mandate. No conflict of interest, you can’t know the author. And the book has to be available in paperback. And ideally it shouldn’t be a book everybody’s heard of already. Something like that. There’s too much favoritism, too much insider baseball, too many friends reviewing friend’s books. It’s happened on The Rumpus at times, when no one was watching. And then the world of books becomes a clubhouse, a small dark room, and everyone’s sitting around in a towel with their mouths open and a tiny pool of sweat in their belly buttons. And the room gets quieter, our lungs like tubes being squeezed. Everything feels tighter and hotter and the world outside gets larger and further away.

Then, following the event, there was an after party but it was really just a bunch of people in a bar. It cost four dollars for a cranberry and soda. Starlee Kine and David Rees were there and I left them for a bit because I wanted to dance with anybody and when I came back Starlee had told David my life story and David said he was much more interested in me now, and I believed that I would also be interested in knowing who I was as seen through the eyes of Starlee Kine. Perhaps I should have stuck around longer, but instead I grabbed my roller bag full of books and slipped out the door.

I will say this, after giving readings in people’s living rooms, trying to convince them to buy my book, hand selling one at a time, and staying in their homes on their couch or air mattress or extra room, it was very easy to get in front of 300 people and introduce performers and tell jokes. It was absurdly easy. I was saying this is someone I respect deeply, someone whose art has moved me. It’s a comfort to shine a light on someone. And part of why I started The Rumpus is because I’m a chronic recommender of things I enjoy.

Tuesday

Last night I did a reading at Anna David‘s home in Manhattan. Well, not Anna’s home, but her friend’s home, who lives in the same building, and whose apartment has more of an open floor plan. There were homemade cookies. The attendees were bordering on absurdly good looking and stylish (these are only pictures of women and they make me look like a pimp, the men left earlier, but I can assure you the men were also very good looking). As usual I wore a t-shirt and blue jeans. An interesting thing about this reading was that Anna hadn’t read the book yet but wanted to host a party anyway. A risk taker!

It was the first “home reading” I’d done in someone’s home in a while. In Bethel I read in a cafe and Hudson was a bookstore and an art gallery, Rosendale was a diner, kind of. I enjoyed those readings in different ways and especially liked the people hosting the events, but there is simply no substitute for giving a reading in a person’s living room, people on couches asking interesting questions, glasses of wine. Last night’s event started at 8pm and, like many home readings, continued past midnight.

You spend years and countless hours crafting a narrative. If you’re like me, then you’re writing to connect. To sit in a living room with an interesting group of people discussing the work feels like an extension of the writing in a way that reading in a bookstore doesn’t, and when they read the book I think our conversation will enhance the experience. Imagine people lounging around the bookstore until midnight getting drunk, going outside for a smoke, making out in their car, then coming back to the bookstore to continue a discussion on identity, memory, and the elusiveness of truth.

As a group we talked about what it means to be honest in a memoir, the temptation to come to false conclusions, and the importance, at least to me, of resisting that urge to give the reader what the reader may want. For example, nobody wants to read a memoir about drugs that finishes with, “I cut down.” You can write a commercial work and sell a bunch of books, but only art endures. The false memoir will not endure. Or at least that’s what I choose to believe.

When you do a reading in a person’s home you really meet people, get to know who they are and what’s important to them. Last night I spoke for a long time with a criminal defense lawyer who used to be a prosecutor. At one point he published a novel and quit his job to write full time, but then realized that when you write full time it’s your job, so he went back to practicing law. Recently he defended a client whose alibi was bolstered by his Facebook status updates. The Facebook defense.

Here’s a couple of things: To write about oneself honestly is to present a character so complex and inconsistent that s/he couldn’t be contained in even the best novel. Further, no one holds up under a microscope.

Following the reading I walked down 7th Avenue. I found Anthony Swofford sitting in an Irish bar with a small group of barflys whittling away his Monday night. I don’t know what we talked about, but we laughed a lot. I know I told him about the woman I made out with in Ft. Lauderdale who wanted a free book and how, because we were making out, I thought she should buy it. “You’re both whores,” Tony said. “You needed a John.”

An hour later I was pulling my roller bag (I always bring too many books. Optimism?) down 14th back to where I was staying. It was quiet for Manhattan, but it wasn’t quiet for anywhere else. It was a well lit darkness. And I thought at one in the morning New York made sense.

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Last night I gave a reading at bookstore in Hudson with Daniel Nester and Nick Flynn. Actually, we read to each other and the bookstore owner and three friend’s of Daniel’s and also one of Daniel’s old students who happened to be walking by. Daniel grabbed the student and said something like, “So, you’re here for the reading.” The student said he wasn’t. That it all sounded very interesting but he was on his way to get something to eat. Daniel pointed out, correctly, that he could get something to eat and bring it back to the bookstore, which is also a bar. We would wait.

Then, we drove to Catskill, where we were also supposed to read. Nick called it the crack capital of America, but I thought it looked nice. But then, South Central also looks nice when you’re just passing through, all those low, colorful houses. It doesn’t resemble anything like a war zone. That was the great thing about Cabrini Green and the Robert Taylor homes in Chicago. You could see it, rising from the ground, daring you to walk inside. There was a density of population in those buildings that was undeniable, that spilled out into the court yards with its arms crossed and stood on the slabs of cement leading to the heavy doors. You knew intuitively the elevators didn’t work in those buildings. Though if you looked closer the people out front often seemed to be having a good time. But there was danger in those buildings, maybe not every day, but often enough. That the thing about violence, if you lived in a building where someone got shot a few times a year you would have a hard time sleeping, and the lack of sleep would take its toll, even if the majority of the time you were just hanging around. And you took one look at those buildings- the Taylor homes on the other side of the 94 staring bitterly across the highway, which was like a river (a man-made river built intentionally) separating them from Bridgeport, the South Side Irish, and Comisky Park, and the people that have run Chicago for decades, and the bars there where they didn’t serve black people. Imagine, a bar on the south side of Chicago that didn’t serve black people? It’s like opening a Klan office on the first floor of the NAACP headquarters.

Anyway, we were in Catskill, which is in the “lower Catskills” and there was a fundraiser for a new lo-fi radio station. They’d gotten a grant from the government, most likely the Department of Homeland Security, but they had to come up with some matching funds. There was a poet who did a kind of bebop thing while his daughter plucked away on a strange, tightly wound instrument (I think they call it “flux poetry” but I’m not sure). The poem he read had a certain rhythm and rhyme to it, but it reminded me a little bit of Earth Day one year in Grant Park when I was homeless and I got on a bus full of hippies and traded some of my acid for some of their vegetarian chili and one of the hippy girls, who was probably ten years older than me, but I was only fourteen, said something about taking me home and giving me a place to sleep for a while. But she didn’t. A lot of people failed to bring me home that year.

At the fundraiser there was also a video installation and all sorts of music. Sparrow was there doing his performance poetry. There were two separate rooms with two stages going at once. It was really a happening. A fantastic blend of art and performance. For some reason I was the last reader scheduled. I didn’t introduce my book except to say it was a memoir and that I was reading something new every time so if they didn’t like what I read they shouldn’t worry about it. Then I read a part toward the end where I’m dating three women and the trial is coming to a close and I’m talking about murder and I’m also describing S&M in heavy detail. And there is a line where the woman who has tied me up becomes my mother and my mother wraps her hand around my penis. Even as I was reading I was wondering what I would do when I reached that line. But I knew I had to look up, meet their eyes. Put it on them.

After, close to midnight, we found a place where we could get a large mushroom and anchovy pizza and a yoo-hoo chocolate drink. Which is how I ended up here on a farm thinking I could really get into this. Reading Bolano still (forever?). Thinking about the infrarealists and their manifesto. How Bolano committed to traveling (at least through his twenties, which, frankly, is nothing) and how Bolano kept losing teeth as he traveled. Like breadcrumbs, he said, so he could find his way home. And I think I don’t want to go home. I want to stay in this farm house. I could get some real writing done. But this is a life of leisure. Who would pay for it? I don’t want to fix the house up or deal with the mouse problem. But that’s writing anyway. You make your money here and there and what it pays for is stretches of time where you don’t work and the lower your expenses the longer the stretches of time. So you have to either marry well or stay childless and alone. Or you have to come from money, which is basically unforgivable, unless you go out of your way to marry a poor writer, preferably a poet.

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The reading had been written up in all the local newspapers but that turns out not to mean anything to anyone, unless you’re in New York, where it matters for a different reason, where a literary event can become a place to be. The only people in attendance were members of the poetry group that was sponsoring me, and they had been at war with the bookstore owner for some time.

When the reading was done we retreated to the pizzeria across the street for cheese pizza, wine, beer, and sprite. Then we went back to my host’s house and talked for awhile. Her husband is a fascinating man who makes his own bows and arrows to go hunting. He described waiting in a tree for his prey, a hawk landing in the branch next to him. He edits a magazine and, on the side, downloads patents and designs for antique guns which he makes copies of and sells on eBay. Everything he said was interesting.

The conversation in the living room revolved around a poetry anthology, sponsorship, and the bookstore owner. I wasn’t worried about the bookstore owner; I sold my books. But these were important conflicts in the Connecticut poetry world. The poets decided while still in the pizzeria they would no longer hold their events in the cafe next to the bookstore. It had gone too far. The bookstore owner was killing literature. It reminded me of Bolano.

Well, everything reminds me of Bolano now. I’m 200 pages into The Savage Detectives, following Nazi Literature in the Americas and 2666. It’s hard to imagine anything else. What’s at stake with Bolano’s poets? Everything. And the way these poets in Connecticut talked about the bookstore owner it was like the final battle between good and evil. Of course, I wanted them to win. I was given a history of the readings series, fifteen years, the longest running series in the state. In 1997 they hosted the National Poetry Slam Championships, a defining moment in the slam movement, attended, unhappily, by Marc Smith from Chicago, the creator of the original poetry slam. Recently, one of the poets had committed suicide. The Connecticut poets had wanted to distribute his books free of charge, but the bookstore owner had stopped them. How had she stopped them? The same way Lupe’s pimp laid siege in The Savage Detectives, by parking his camaro outside Quim Font’s house and waiting. It was surreal, actually, that a group of people could be stopped by one mean old lady, that it required meetings to decide how to fight back. In other words, surreal, but real. Matters of very large consequence. A small matter that loomed large over an entire region’s literary identity and the area’s next great writer, who would undoubtably pass through this group in one form or another.

Here’s something Bolano said in a talk called Literature + illness = illness:

While we search for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, the new, that which can only be found in the unknown, we must continue to turn to sex, books, and travel, even knowing they will lead us into the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place we can find the cure.

I read that and I think about Bolano and my quixotic journey back and forth across America funded by the difference between the wholesale price of my book and the reduced price I sell it for in people’s homes, and things start to make sense. It makes sense even that I went home with a woman the other night in New York, a young, beautiful writer who looked like she came from the ocean and could quote passages of my work back to me. She stood near the table following my event, forcing people to purchase my books. I had never met someone who loved my work so much. She said she was writing a paper about me and had planned to attend every reading I gave in New York, but that proved impossible so she approached me and later we took a cab to her apartment in Brooklyn where she lived with her two children, whom she had left upstairs with the neighbor.

She asked me what I wanted and why I came home with her. I said I didn’t know, and she had asked me to. Then we fell asleep. Then I woke up and we called a car service to take me back to my friend’s in Manhattan. There was some other world where I spent the rest of my life with the mermaid and her children, but that world is not this world. Still…

Something else from The Savage Detectives:

You can woo a girl with a poem, but you can’t hold on to her with a poem. Not even with a poetry movement.

The point is, this was just one girl, but that will probably never happen again. And I left without ever meeting her children, though I saw their drawings scattered on the living room floor. And Bolano wrote about the medicine of travel and the abyss but in fact his travels were over by the time he was my age. He was married and there were children and so he locked himself in a room and wrote all day. In other words, he had taken all he could take from the abyss and was living under death sentence from a liver disease. He was worried not about life but about what he would leave behind, the work and also the money for his family.

I’m not quite done with the abyss, though I approach with a familiarity that makes it easier, and a purpose, even if it’s meaningless, to sell a dozen books every night to a group of strangers. Driving north from Connecticut to Hudson the streets are cold and wet and full of leaves. And it’s quite beautiful, the grey fog on top of the mountains to the west and the farmhouses and green hills. But it’s not as beautiful as San Francisco.

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The thing is, you don’t sell a lot of books when you read in bars and when you do readings as a group anyway, so maybe that’s tip number two. Still, I sold five books and got to hang out with Melissa Febos, the curator. I could see a person falling in love with Melissa and trying to convince her, unsuccessfully, to move to a farm upstate. But not me, not now. It takes time to fall in love.

I remember Sonja, my first real girlfriend. We met in the parking lot of a TJ Max and had sex on our first night. In the morning she was getting dressed to leave but I grabbed her ankle, or something, and asked her to stay. “Let’s go see a movie,” I said. That’s what it takes to fall in love, enough time to spend the night and see a movie in the morning.

There was a kid at the reading. He told me several times that he was interested in my book because he was interested in Adderall. He would take a step toward me, then step away like he was contemplating something heavy, then move back in close. He had written a book, he said. Thirty or forty percent of the book was written on Adderall. The amphetamine had messed him up in a bad way. He asked me if I had ADD and I said it depends who you ask. He said I was the only reason he was there. And it must have been true because he was pounding away on his phone while the other authors were reading. He said he had an agent and several sections of his book were with publishers RIGHT NOW. I don’t know what he wanted from me. When I was done reading he asked Melissa if he could say a few words into the microphone about the pharmaceutical conspiracy. She said no.

After the reading I went to the Fleshbot Awards (NSFW). There were several worlds colliding there. Jonathan Ames was presenting and the editors of all the large blogs were in attendance. Of course there were tons of sex workers. And there were sex workers who were also artists and there were sex workers who were just sex workers. I won’t go into detail but lets say I knew more people than I thought I would. There was a woman there who represented stability and another who represented chaos, and also a third woman who was nice but represented neither chaos nor stability. We would just become friends.

At one point I ended up on my knees behind the woman that represented chaos, blood pouring from my nose, my hand inside her long black skirt while she typed into her cell phone a quick blog post about how this wasn’t really working for her. And the woman that represented stability, who was also a friend, was standing nearby, leaning against the railing, and our eyes met for a second and I thought I would never go on a date with that woman now. To my left was the photo gallery with the large light setup and stripper poles. Later, Ames and I ended up on either side of the third woman. I don’t remember what we were talking about but it was nice because they were both nice. We weren’t in a hurry. It was already one in the morning. A drink had been spilled and the couch was soaked so we sat close together to avoid the mess.

Of course, this doesn’t tell you much about book tours, but it does say something about New York and the kind of parties you can get into, even wearing gym shoes. And also about the link between sex workers, bloggers, and old media types as well as the people writing and acting in television shows and people who think of themselves as literary writers and why New York has nothing in common with the rest of the country except that every small town has lost a few to Gotham City.

**

picture from Mixer reading by Sean Doyle

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I’ve been thinking about that, about how many readers are also writers. When I’m doing readings in people’s homes I’m reaching people that are completely disconnected from the literary world, or literary scene if you’re looking for a more pejorative description, which I’m not. It’s slow going, reading to twenty-five people at a time, selling books like Tupperware. But it’s rewarding in ways that defy explanation.

But the other day I went an entirely different route. I did an event at the home of a friend who frequently teaches writing classes. It was called “On Creating The Adderall Diaries,” a ninety minute hybrid class/reading in which I lectured on the process of generating memoir using my own book as the jumping off point for discussion. I read from three relevant sections of the book, one that dealt with memory, another that introduced a character that didn’t want to be written about, and a third that engaged with the issue of false epiphanies.

Admission was the price of the book and included a copy. There were more than thirty people in my friend’s living room. They were all writers and they had come to the class to work on their own writing and now they all had my book. But how many of them would read it? I wasn’t sure. But they seemed to enjoy the class very much.

Then yesterday I went to a free clinic in Alameda for H1N1 vaccine. When I arrived there was a line that stretched for three blocks, thousands of people, almost everyone pushing a stroller or holding a baby against their collarbone. A woman behind me blew her nose and an old man coughed loudly. He looked like he was dying. I thought it would be ironic if I caught flu while waiting for the vaccine.

It was a crisp November morning and the children, the four and five year olds, ran screaming back and forth. The parents shared knowing looks. Between them moved a common language. They were justified, united by a desire to save their children.

We were herded into a giant courtyard. A security guard in dark blue called out for pregnant women. I had brought Roberto Bolano’s Nazi Literature in the Americas with me so I waited inside the controlled chaos of the pandemic reading about Argentinean soccer poets and John Lee Brook who died in Los Angeles in 1997. Brook was widely regarded as the best writer of the Aryan Brotherhood and, according to Bolano, one of the best California poets of the late 20th century.

It had been two-and-a-half hours, and by now my face was burned and the children were crying instead of running around and playing games. A woman in a tan shirt said something into a mega-phone but I couldn’t hear her. She moved closer and said it again. And then she came to where we were, still two hours away from the medical trailers. milling on the painted asphalt, waiting for life and survival but looking as if we had been rounded up for slaughter. She announced that there was no waiting at the Ira Jenkins Center. She said it was accessible by public transportation, which turned out not to be true. But it didn’t matter.

Soon I was at a table eight miles away. I snorted the mist, the nurse telling me when to breathe and when to exhale. I stepped back outside. I came across a Motel 6. I considered getting a room. Why not? I was vaccinated. But that didn’t make sense. I lived here. I continued past, noticing a prostitute in the parking lot. Her shirt started two inches above her belt, her curly hair died with streaks of orange as if her head was on fire. I supposed she was beautiful, but only from a distance. I passed a row of closed down hotels. I had developed irrational fears. There was a post-apocalyptic Holiday Inn. Its name still clearly etched in shadow on the cinder block relief. I realized I was close to the airport, but not that close. Then there was the sun at the top of a Days Hotel, followed by the Charlie Chan Café. I came out onto the main road, which was interrupted by a highway, as if the cement was fighting. It was like two dogs, the highway mounting the road before sprinting off into an underpass. I was walking, following signs written for cars. Then the stadium came into view and I knew I wasn’t far away.

**

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There were 40 students at the Cat in the Cream coffeehouse and maybe a couple of professors. It was a very young crowd, Oberlin is a liberal arts school, all undergraduate. I opened by reading about a Stanford student I had an affair with. I always  try to read something relevant to the audience. But it wasn’t that relevant; the student was already 24 when we started. She was a friend of former students of mine, but she had never taken my class. Our relationship was a farce, start to finish, but occasionally I wonder if I should have tried harder. I had met her after a reading in San Francisco three years ago. She’d worn a schoolgirl skirt, a wife beater, was covered in tattoos and jewelry, and waited for me as I came off the stage.

“When do we start dating?” she said.
“How about now?” I replied.

Later she got her life together. Cut her hair and took her earrings out, devoted her time to the pursuit of more important things.

There was something I liked very much about Oberlin, a small, liberal town with no pretensions to bigness. There was a history, plaques celebrating the underground railroad, of which Oberlin played a large part. I could imagine spending a long time in Oberlin, resting. There were co-ops, a couple of restaurants. Nothing much. I liked the architecture, the large cheap apartments.

Most of the students looked like they were in high school but there was one who bought a book. She had a firm grip and I asked her how old she was and she said she was just getting used to saying she was eighteen. Another student was waiting but the last student in line didn’t want to buy a book.

“I don’t have any money,” she said.
“That’s OK,” I said. “I’ll put my address inside and you can send me a check.”

She thought about it for a second. “No,” she said. She wasn’t going to have any money anytime soon. She wanted to know about exposing herself and writing from experience. She wanted to know if I could help her deal with writing, give her something ideological to hold onto so she could explain the morality of what she was doing to others. I gave her the answers I would give. Later it occurred to me that I should have said, “Art is selfish. Who are you kidding, acting like you’re making the world a better place? As if that was the writer’s motivation. That’s not a motivation, that’s a schtick.” These kids, I thought, at the private schools.

That night my host made me a CD of the Liz Phair demo tapes that preceded Exile in Guyville. We talked about what happened to Phair, how rather than confronting her desire she tried to bend and accommodate it and destroyed her art in the process. It’s just like writing. I know, because recently I’ve felt moments of jealousy and greed that are entirely unfamiliar to me. In the Oberlin town bookstore located inside the Ben Franklin I had sat in a chair reading an essay by John Updike about writer’s growing old. It was a failed essay, the kind that starts by staring into the truth but finishes by turning away. It was published by AARP Magazine and republished, perhaps as an homage, in the Best American Essay collection. In the good part of the essay, before he sold the reader down the river, Updike spoke about his later work being eclipsed by his earlier work, the vital energy that pours from youth, bleeding across the page. The stuff that can’t be mimicked by experience or skill. If he had kept going, if he had finished the short essay with “goddam it all motherfucker crap fuck!!!!!” he’d have really gotten at something. Instead he served it with a blue pill.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was we were talking about Liz Phair and her demo tapes, which even with the hiss and uneven recording are significantly more compelling than anything on Whitechocolatespaceegg, not to mention the monstrous cynicism of her self titled fourth album. And Chelsey asked about the book tour, or something, and I started to talk about a girl that wasn’t really my girlfriend anymore, and a note I had sent to a few people, not many, asking them to link to my book on their Facebook pages and encourage their friends to purchase it. I imagined this girl purchasing twenty copies of The Adderall Diaries on Amazon.com and pulping them because money and books don’t mean enough to her. I was leaning against the entry to the living room where Chelsey sat at the table. I couldn’t quite bring myself to say it. Instead, I said, “You know when you try to do something with integrity, and you just fail?”

Maybe I hadn’t slept enough, but I don’t think that’s what it was. I started laughing. Tears sprang from my eyes. I couldn’t stop laughing, the tears running down my cheek. I had to pick up a napkin and press it against my face. It was a moment that could have gone either way. Chelsey began laughing too. We dubbed it one of the great moments in the second person. I slept that night for a long time.

On Holloween I drove back to Ann Arbor where I had volunteered to teach a three hour seminar. There 50,000 students on the streets in various states of undress, a boy on the front porch of his fraternity house in just a pair of jeans, bellowing. I had a train to catch to Chicago.

***

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