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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
What about the brain lesion?
The brain lesion happened when I received a very bad concussion in 1985. I was walking down the street with my friend Grinch and I walked into steel lamppost. The next morning I couldn't move. After a battery of tests no one could say anything about what was wrong. Then in Philly I got an MRI and a doctor there pointed to a spot on my brain. I can't do anything about it but take lots of Tegratol, which is an anti-convulsive.
In other memoirs, parents are often the only source of definable evil in the universe. But you write very warmly about yours. Have you always been close to them?
We didn't have any of those teenage fights. The only things we ever argued about were religion and politics. They were a very Christian religious Republican family, German Lutherans, and I didn't last very long with that. When I went off to school and got into trouble, burning buildings and breaking things, I still talked to them but I mostly stayed out of touch. I wasn't going to call up and say, "Hey, a cop beat me today!" or "Guess what I stole this afternoon?" But after the suicide attempt, when they sat at my side in the intensive care unit, we've been exceptionally close.
One time I talked with Teller of Penn and Teller, who wrote some kind of biography of his parents. I was shocked that anyone else would admit that they liked their parents in this day and age. As to memoirs, you'd get the idea that we're a nation of victims, and to many people their parents are the source. That's been thick and heavy throughout the entire culture for the past 40 years. But not me. I had a great childhood.
Did the stories you told and heard during the not insignificant time you've spent in bars inspire the stories in your memoirs?
Most of them, yes. In fact, all of them. A lot of these stories that I tell, taken individually, are things that that I would tell to my girlfriend while the two of us were just talking and, you know, a story would come together. And if I have the chance I'll try it out on a few people and if the story gets a good response I'll write it down. A lot of these stories got their start from talking in bars.
Do you ever drink and write?
No, I do most of my writing as early as possible in the morning. I just work better that way. My brain starts to slow down around 3 in the afternoon. So I just cram in as much as I can in in seven and eight hours and then I stop. And then I start drinking.
What's your favorite New York bar?
I never divulge that.
Probably a wise idea. You'll have all these groupies all over you ...
No, no -- scary people.
Really?
Well, 99.99 percent of the people who come up and want to talk to me are great, but that teeny tiny percentage is totally insane, which I think you'll find is true of anything in life. I've had guys follow me home or hang around in front of the office or hang around in front of my apartment. They've gotten bad over the years. Every new receptionist [at the New York Press] has instructions from me that if I don't know them, I'm not expecting anyone.
People pop up on the street and try to talk to you?
Well, talking to me is fine, but a few would start following me and I can't get rid of them. And a few of them are very, very creepy. Very disturbed people. It starts off innocently -- they want to talk about a story or they want to talk about one of my books -- but then, I don't know, things start to get stranger and stranger. I'm not ever sure what it is that they want, other than to sap my energy. I'm an extraordinarily private person. The novels I write are basically about my private life, but when it comes to my private life I just want to be left alone. What I keep thinking is, Who am I? I mean, why don't they bother someone worthwhile?
You've said that you don't have much to do with literary events. How come?
Literary parties are the most miserable goddamn things in the world. I mean, I don't like parties anyway, but literary parties are the most boring, dry affairs, with all these egos in one room. There was a rash of book parties that friends of mine had, so I told my publicist that I didn't want a book party. He told me, "To be honest, we weren't planning on one." They preferred to spend the money on advertising or book copies. They throw book parties if they feel an author's ego needs it, if their ego is fragile enough that it needs that type of boost. I guess my ego is fine. In fact, if they'd had a book party for one of my books, I wouldn't have shown up.
Last time I went to a literary party, my girlfriend and I ended up getting into a fistfight with some little screwhead.
What? How did that happen?
Well, we were sitting at this party with some friends, and this youngster came up to us and he and his friend started hitting on this woman at our table in the most unimaginative, crude fashion imaginable. She eventually gets up and leaves, and after she's gone this guy sits down in our booth. Morgan, my girlfriend, and I are trying to figure this out. We asked him in a variety of ways, not too subtly, that we'd like him to leave, that he acted like a jerk and scared this woman away and that he was not welcome at this particular booth. But he just sat there. We had a few drinks in us, and he was a very rude young man, and Morgan finally stood up at one point and slapped the free martini out of his hand. I mean, this had been going on for some time and we had tried to be very rational. Clearly he didn't know the writer, he just saw the open bar. If you're going to be a party crasher, know how to do it. This wasn't how you do it.
So she slaps the martini glass out of his hand and he actually takes a swing at her. And that, I mean -- that just isn't done. So I listened to where his voice was and aimed a tad south and I ended up kneeling on his chest and I was choking him for a little while before we were broken apart. He threatened to call the police but he never did. I was kind of hoping he might. I'd love to hear the cop asking him, "So you were beat up by a blind man after you swung at a woman?"
