Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Jerry Stahl, the cult author of "Permanent Midnight" and "I, Fatty," faces sudden respectability, and ponders the drug rumors swirling around Ann Coulter and George W. Bush.
Dec 6, 2004 | Jerry Stahl became a cult figure of sorts in the mid-'90s, when his memoir "Permanent Midnight" achieved legendary status among downwardly mobile members of the creative class. That archetypal drugs-and-downfall confessional recounted Stahl's Herculean ingestion of opiates while careening through a TV scriptwriting career. It's a grossly funny and squirmingly accurate depiction of colossal degradation, the grim photo negative of a literary Horatio Alger tale.
Stahl's story didn't start out that way. He moved from his childhood home in Pittsburgh to New York and Columbia University, where he began a promising writing career. He did a stint writing for porn king Larry Flint and then moved on to Hollywood, where he penned episodes for "ALF," "Moonlighting" and "Thirtysomething."
Like so many writers before him, he found television a harsh mistress, and his heroin habit rapidly got out of control. He once submitted a script to the producers of "Twin Peaks" that was covered with his own blood and hair. At age 38, he found himself taking orders at a McDonald's, where his adolescent co-workers believed he was mentally disabled.
"All my heroes were dope fiends," Stahl says. "Keith Richards, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Charlie Parker. The thing is, when you're kicking dope, Keith isn't there with a warm towel to press against your forehead."
The success of "Permanent Midnight" got Stahl out of the fast-food industry, as did the resulting film version. (Ben Stiller played our pincushion antihero, and the two became friends.) Two novels appeared, "Perv: A Love Story" (2001) and "Plainclothes Naked" (2002), both of which boasted fictionalized western Pennsylvania settings and recounted the type of drug-induced chaos and whacked-out characters that had apparently become his forte. Both were warmly reviewed and devoured by fans, but didn't break through to a wider audience.
Last summer Stahl published "I, Fatty," a faux-memoir by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who rose to be one of the most famous silent movie stars of his day. The 300-pound comic, revered as the inventor of the pie fight, was the first star to earn a million dollars a year, and then became the object of the first celebrity tabloid scandal when he was falsely accused of rape and murder and vilified by the press. It is a far more empathetic novel than anything Stahl has written before, and to his surprise it was reviewed in the New Yorker, with a high note of enigmatic praise: that "Stahl remains a writer who delivers, every few pages, a bit more than a reader expects." Attention from the New York Times, People and other media followed.
Recently Stahl wrote the 100th episode of the top-rated TV series "CSI," which drew more viewers than the last game of this year's World Series. "I, Fatty" was just published in Britain and will soon be translated into Italian and French. He's also working on adapting the novel into a film, which is being developed by indie producers This Is That (formerly known as Good Machine, which made films such as "21 Grams," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "American Splendor") .
"I've begun to realize that some books confirm your view of the world, some shatter it -- but the great ones do both," he wrote in a recent e-mail. "That's what I'm going for, in whatever genre I happen to be disguising what, for lack of a better term, might be called my particular art."
The following interview is a pastiche that took place over the space of several months, by e-mail and in phone conversations.
What's it like getting major attention from the New Yorker? That's a novelist's wet dream.
Thanks to Ben Stiller being attacked by a puppet while shooting smack in "Permanent Midnight," I've pretty much been pegged for life as "that junkie who wrote 'ALF.'" So I have few illusions -- or concerns -- about my place on the literary food chain. Child molesters can actually do their time and reenter the community, but write a sitcom to pay the rent, and you're pretty much doomed to literary-adjacent status for all eternity.
I have always felt like an outsider, on the page and off, so I can hardly say I was expecting to turn up in the wet, palpitating heart of mainstream respectability that is the New Yorker. That said, being the subject of a Thomas Mallon New Yorker critique was as gratifying as it was alarming. You had the feeling, reading his piece, that he felt the need to get up a few times and spray his laptop with Lysol while he was writing. But I give him credit for subjecting his tender sensibility to mine. I mean, I know what I've been cooking up all these years, and if somebody from the world of Quality Lit, as Terry Southern used to put it, wants to pop his head in the door, that's swell.
