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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
But Flynt at that time was going through his religious conversion, with Jimmy Carter's sister [evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton], and a few months after that, when we'd moved to Los Angeles, somebody blew a hole in him with a .357. Larry had things on Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese and all the rest of the Moral Majority, so it isn't surprising somebody tried to take him out. I always liked the guy, though. He had a re-creation of the shotgun shack he grew up in constructed in the basement of his home in Beckley, this ultra-swanky section of Columbus. He was like Horatio Alger with pussy.
You've taken on a lot of colorful assignments over the years.
This was back in the waning days of gonzo journalism, when you put yourself in grotesque situations in order to write about what it felt like being there high out of your mind. So I'd end up at a nude singles retreat at Elysian Fields, in Topanga Canyon, dancing naked to "Fame" (not the David Bowie song, but the theme to the old TV show) until the DJ stopped the music and you had to "hug the three people next to you!" Which in my case generally involved some guy named Irv from Reseda and a couple of saucy blue-hairs.
I've been on burial-at-sea ships, where a father-son team unloaded shoeboxes full of "cremains" into the ocean. This was memorable because, as they were dumping a batch, they were eating Big Macs, and a squall came up and blew all the formerly human grit back onto their burgers. One thing I didn't know: What's left after they cremate you isn't powder, like in the movies. It's more like kitty litter or gravel. In fact, when I go, I'd like to have myself scattered on somebody's driveway.
That kind of stuff. Tons of weird encounters. My heroes were guys who cranked out some weird hybrid that was more than nonfiction and more than fiction, but not just criticism or commentary either, the weird and the hysterical and massively felt or researched or hallucinated, the Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Gay Talese, Nick Tosches, Lester Bangs continuum which was journalism that was really fiction but not, sometimes making your own weird sensations the real focus of whatever you're writing about, sometimes going deep into genius parallels, the Tom Wolfe thing of finding comparison between the evangelical Christians and the sans-culottes or whatever.
I'm not a guy who's kept meticulous records and files. I've moved around a lot, voluntarily or otherwise, so all that magazine stuff becomes a blur, and there are dozens of stories that have disappeared into the mist. Still, for your basic introverted, chemically altered aspiring novelist, being plunged into these arcane situations -- whether it's covering the Miss America Pageant, the Republican Convention or Puerto Rican midget wrestling -- is not the worst way to see the world.
What happened to you after the success of "Permanent Midnight"? Was that a difficult period?
It was a weird time. You learn how to deal with catastrophe, but I wasn't prepared for success. I mean, seeing the worst moments of your life projected nine feet high by people that vaguely resemble you -- it's like years of therapy in 90 minutes. I think everybody should have a movie made of their most mortifying moments and have it shown around the country in rooms full of strangers. Then you get you see how people react to them.
Before that got made, the money fell through, so I ended up hanging out for a year with Ben Stiller and working on "What Makes Sammy Run?" I went from abject poverty to taking a private jet down to St. Bart's, writing scripts and eating Sly Stallone's leftover tuna sandwiches on the plane. It was bizarre after living so long with a Depression mentality.
"Permanent Midnight" was filled with loathing about the TV writing you were doing a decade ago. But you seem to have come to terms with it.
Well, I was much more pretentious back then. You know, it was like "Gee, Samuel Beckett didn't write 'ALF,'" but then again, nobody asked him to. For all everyone knows Beckett could have had his own HBO series. It's a balancing act and you have to know when to jump off the train. I got to do the 100th episode of "CSI," and that's great. It's instant gratification and I have no contempt for it, but if that's all I did I'd go nuts.
I didn't know what the fuck I was doing back then, and it was a long time ago. I'll still probably have "He only wrote three 'ALF's" engraved on my tombstone, but I don't take myself that seriously anymore.
