Dark victory

Are you able to read books at all, or can you only listen to them on tape?

Actually, I do carry a book and a magnifying glass with me at all times, and I can get through maybe a page or a page and a half at a time. The other day I just finished something that surprised me, an old novel by Stanislaw Lem called "The Investigation" about a guy trying to figure out a case involving revived corpses. It was brilliant, it surprised the hell out of me.

That sounds like that old TV show you like so much --

Yes, "Kolchak: The Night Stalker." It was on for two seasons in 1973 and 1974. It's about a rumpled, world-weary journalist in Chicago who every week uncovers evidence of monster activity in town and tries to simultaneously thwart the monsters and get the story past a perpetually skeptical editor. I liked it as a kid because it was scary and there wasn't much else on then that was scary. The monsters attracted me. Now I look at it -- I have a handful of tapes -- and I see other things. The main character was one of the main inspirations for me to become a journalist.

Really?

Sure, I thought I'd be covering monster stories, though there isn't much activity around here.

I would have thought New York would be the place to find them.

Well, there are plenty around here, but all of the human variety. The place to go for monsters is India or Russia. They have all sorts of sightings and encounters. We're just about to get into the monkey-men season in India right now. Every summer the monkey men supposedly come back and there's mass hysteria that travels from village to village and everyone becomes convinced that they've seen the monkey men, with different descriptions as to what they look like. Some even have different magic powers. The monkey men don't hurt anyone but people do get hurt jumping off roofs trying to run away from them. Or they get trampled by a mob or get hurt by other people who think their neighbor is a monkey man.

There was a murderous Bigfoot in Russia a few months ago. Lots of UFO sightings there, too. Also -- this took place in Iraq prior to the war -- but I read off a Russian news wire that there were reports Saddam had contacted aliens and managed to combine alien DNA with scorpion DNA and breed giant scorpions that were guarding his palaces. We haven't heard much about that since the troops moved in, but they're probably still out there.

Most of my career decisions as a child were made for me by the movies. I wanted to be a seismologist after "Earthquake," I wanted to be an ichthyologist after "Jaws." I wanted to be a theoretical physicist after watching "Cosmos." Those other things didn't pan out, and after about six weeks at University of Chicago I found out I wasn't cut out for theoretical physics. So I decided to take a much easier route and took philosophy instead.

This is an obnoxious question, but do you see yourself as part of any literary tradition?

There are a lot of authors I love, a lot of authors I have the greatest respect for. My library is filled with books that I go back to whenever I can. I think this is true for anybody: When a person starts writing, you have these authors that you love, so when you start out writing you imitate them. I was mimicking a whole slew of people in my 20s: Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski. Whatever the other angry drunken white people were reading in those days.

In the late '80s I got a job in Philly writing a column and I was being somebody different every week. Once a guy stopped me at a party and he could tell me exactly what I had been reading the week before from what I'd written in my column. He could tell me obscure things like "you were reading this essay from Norman Mailer last week" or "you were reading this section of this book." He was just a guy who read a lot but it was astonishing and it actually put the fear of God into me. I didn't realize it'd been that obvious but we rarely do until somebody points it out to us.

Have you gotten better at the publicity demands of your writing career?

I hate to say it's become old hat, but I'm much more comfortable. I do much, much less publicity as time goes on. The first time I had a book come out, they sent me out on a 10-city tour. Putting a blind man on a plane to 10 cities he's never been to before stuck me as cruel and funny. It was exhausting. Everything went fine but I never want to do something like that again.

It was like an ongoing episode of "This Is Your Life." I didn't think I knew anyone going into these towns, but I'd get to these readings and people from grade school and junior high school would pop up afterwards. People I hated. It was never people that I liked. I was like, "Ugh, why are you bothering me this way?" I had no idea they'd remember me. In Milwaukee a guy that used to beat the shit out of me in junior high school showed up afterwards. It turned out he was an ophthalmologist. Also a couple of creepy people came: One woman who found out where I was staying and left a 20-minute phone message that had nothing to do with me, it was just a long rambling message. I was glad I wasn't there to pick up the phone.

Then at the end, when I thought I was finally going back home to Brooklyn, they sent me down to L.A. -- and I hate L.A. -- to talk to these two TV people about making "Slackjaw" into a television series, which was mortifying. So I went down there, and in describing how cutting-edge the show would be, one of the TV people said that it would be "like that 'Ally McBeal' show!" It was totally demoralizing.

Are you satisfied with what you've done or, like many writers, do you feel a frustrating lack of completion with anything you do?

I've never really been satisfied with any of the books I've done. I think back to them and cringe. If I could -- but I wouldn't want to at this point -- I would completely rewrite them. I just don't fret about them as much. I'd still redo it if I could, but my favorite is the second one ["Quitting the Nairobi Trio"]. It's a singular story. I hate to use terms like "narrative arc," but it's one story and I wrote it straight through. I think it holds up.

Was it difficult writing about that -- the suicide attempts? Some of it's pretty grim material.

Actually, I thought it was pretty funny myself. No, it's not difficult for me. I've been through it so many times and I've gone over it so many times with people that it wasn't a big deal. I can't explain why I [attempted suicide] so many times, and how I did such a horrible job of it.

That particular time, I was living in Minneapolis and one night I tried to hang myself, which I did badly and it didn't work, and then I tried to O.D. by gobbling a double handful of pills and washing them down with a fifth of Scotch, which I did a little better and which almost worked. I was in my apartment at the time and I stumbled out into the hallway and made such a commotion that the cops came and they ended up beating me up. As suicide scenes go, I thought it was pretty funny.

After that you spent time in a mental hospital. You've obviously written about it, but what do you remember now when you think about your time there?

When I think of the hospital I think of my first night there. It sounds like fiction, but my very first night there I had a roommate and we never spoke to each other. He was a very nervous sort. I went to bed and I was awakened in the middle of the night by some maintenance guys in there swabbing big pools of blood off the bathroom floor. I asked them what happened and they said it was none of my business. There's a huge pool of blood on the bathroom floor and it's none of my business? If he'd had a twitch three synapses over, my roommate would have been cutting me up instead. The next morning the doctor wouldn't give me my electric razor, fearing that I would try to do myself in with it.

But there wasn't much violence there except for that -- well, that's not really right. There were other times, but nothing like that first night. Mostly, life there is boring and slow. You learn a lot about waiting. You wait for the breakfast cart or for a doctor to show up once every two weeks. Those are the things I remember.

What future writing plans do you have?

I'd like to do more novels. I had so much fun writing the first one. I've written a couple since "The Buzzing," but they haven't gone over very well with the publisher. I'd like to take a little -- or a long -- break from the memoir game, mostly because I'm kind of tired of talking about myself. At least I'll have to wait until something else horrible and funny happens to me that I think I could get a book out of.

Sounds like you're feeling pretty good.

When I look at myself now, every day is pretty much OK. I think part of it too is that -- and I know writers who do this -- I can't pretend to still be so angry and still be pissed at everything anymore. You can never pull that off. It's just sad. So I'm not going to pretend.

In a way, my eyesight is something I grew into. With anything, we take a look at what we have to work with. I don't have eyesight, but I have plenty of other things. I work around the eyesight. Look at Ray Charles, he couldn't see, but he could play the piano. We deal with what we've got, we make do. I go through bitter phases. There's nothing noble about this; it's like if I'd been left-handed or born an idiot, you deal with it. You do what you can.

For the most part, I sit in my apartment or I sit in my office and write my stories. My dealings with the publishing industry have been for the most part been very good. And I've been very lucky in that I've always had another project lined up to work on. I've always had something to do. I mean, it's no way to make a living -- you're never going to make a ton of money except in very rare exceptions -- but I get paid to write stupid stories. I'm happy with that. It's a rare opportunity.

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