The Disappointment Artist (17 page)

This wasn’t who I really was, or am now. Nor, necessarily, was it true of my beards. If Michael became the most enduring and versatile of these friendships-as-auditions-for-self, it might be partly because, like me, he wanted a woman near him almost all the time, and maybe even liked their company as friends better than he liked men. But at this moment forgetting my mother seemed to entail forgetting my father, forgetting childhood (I became weirdly blind to the existence of my younger siblings, whose sadness would have mirrored mine back to me), and possibly even forgetting women per se. I threw out most of human life in favor of a handful of unconventional men of the kind I felt I needed to be.

My identification with the figure of the artist was total, yet I couldn’t make safe use of the primary totem available to me: my own father. I had to define my distance from Richard Lethem, not only because of the usual reasons but because he was a parent and I refused to be a child. Or perhaps those are the usual reasons, only amplified to a scream. So, in the beards, I found versions of my father that were also problematic enough to make my real father suspicious. Michael, Paul, and Ian seemed dangerous, and not only because they gave me drugs. They must have unnerved him precisely because they resembled him and his friends, yet I was running from our family. If I’d brought the beards home they’d have likely charmed and reassured my father, but if I’d brought them home they’d have lost their charge, so I kept them in fierce quarantine.

But the beards were also a keeping faith with my mother. That all three smoked pot and were enchanting talkers wasn’t an accident. In different ways they resembled Judith, and Judith would have liked them. In the period before my mother’s worst illness, and her death, each of my parents’ lives was populated with members of the opposite sex who fascinated me. My friendships with their various lovers was a projection, a coping mechanism, and a strange richness in my life. So I refused to let it end with Judith’s death. In collecting the beards I was providing a supply of imaginary boyfriends for my (now imaginary) mother.

Fear of Music (1970–present, mom well/sick/dead)

I read all the Narnia books. I read
The Lord of the Rings
. I read every book by Ray Bradbury. I read every book by Raymond Chandler. I reread every book by Raymond Chandler. I read every book by Kurt Vonnegut, including
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
. I read every book by Richard Brautigan and Norman Mailer. I kept a complete set of the stories of Guy de Maupassant on the edge of my loft bed, and tried to read one a night until I finished it (I failed). I saw every movie by Stanley Kubrick, except for
Killer’s Kiss
. (Later, when I ran the film society at my college, I arranged a screening of
Killer’s Kiss
there.) I tried, hopelessly, to see every movie by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, sitting alone at afternoon showings of
Tout va bien
and
Jules and Jim
and
The Bride Wore Black
in the repertory houses of Manhattan. I watched
Star Wars
twenty-one times in a single summer, largely alone. I sat alone at the Thalia, on West Ninety-Fifth Street, and watched
2001: A Space Odyssey
three times in one day. Philip K. Dick became my favorite writer, and, spellbound by forty-odd titles listed in the front of a Bantam edition of
Ubik
, I swore to find and read them all, and succeeded. I read
Ubik
itself four or five times. When I was twenty-five I had a miniaturized version of the dust-jacket design of the first edition of
Ubik
tattooed on my left arm. Italo Calvino became my favorite author and I read every book by Italo Calvino. Don DeLillo, same thing. Patricia Highsmith, same thing. Thomas Berger, same thing. I know I’ve told you some or all of this before.

I played the third album by Talking Heads, called
Fear of Music
, to the point of destroying the vinyl, then replaced it with a new copy. I memorized the lyrics, memorized the lyrics to other Talking Heads albums, saw Talking Heads play any chance I got, and when I arrived at college put up a sign in the wing of my dormitory with an arrow pointing down the hall where some Grateful Dead fans lived, reading DEAD HEADS, and an arrow pointing in the direction of the room I shared with my simpatico roommate, reading TALKING HEADS. At the peak, in 1980 or 1981, my identification was so complete that I might have wished to wear the album
Fear of Music
in place of my head so as to be more clearly seen by those around me.

I turned John Ford’s
The Searchers
into a ritual and a cause. I bought approximately two hundred Bob Dylan bootlegs. I tried to see every Howard Hawks movie, every Orson Welles movie, every film listed in the
Film Noir Encyclopedia
. For years I calibrated my record collection against the grades in
Christgau’s Record Guide: Rock Albums of the
Seventies
, jotting dissenting views in pencil in the margins: Marvin Gaye’s
Here, My Dear
, given a B plus by Robert Christgau, got an A from me.
Here, My Dear
, a tormented account of Marvin Gaye’s divorce, was a record I was introduced to by someone who thought it was only pathetic and funny—I began defending it from scorn before I’d finished listening to the first side, a response similar to my proprietary defiance on behalf of John Ford’s
The Searchers
, which I humiliated myself defending the first time I ever saw it. I regularly fell asleep to a cassette of
Here, My Dear
on Walkman headphones for a few years in college. In my late twenties I lulled myself to sleep to Chet Baker records for a while, and at the peak of my Chet Baker obsession I owned more than fifty Chet Baker CDs, though I was never satisfied because I knew someone who had more than a hundred Chet Baker CDs.

I rarely listen to Chet Baker anymore. I haven’t read Vonnegut or Bradbury or Brautigan since I was a child, partly because I’m afraid of what I’ll find, partly because they have become inscribed on the interior surface of the eyes through which I read others. I rarely read Don DeLillo, since the binge years when I feverishly read and reread every one of his novels, and when I do now I find myself stirred but confused. The moment DeLillo became in any way fallible to me I experienced a rupture I’m still traumatized by, one which colors my ability to situate him reasonably in my internal landscape of “contemporary letters”—he’s either as great as I thought he was when I thought he made all other writing look silly or he’s a total disaster. I still think
Barry Lyndon
and
2001: A Space
Odyssey
are great films, and
The Killing
a terrific noir, but my notion of Kubrick-as-favorite-director became bewildering after I allowed myself to feel my disappointment in
A Clockwork Orange
,
Lolita
, and
Full Metal
Jacket
. Impossible to place in relation to my “grown-up” pantheon of favorites like Kurosawa, Ford, or Cassavetes, Kubrick floats unfixed in my sky, mooning my awestruck teenaged projections back at me.

I couldn’t bear to listen to Talking Heads records, even the ones I’d previously revered, after
Naked
, and after David Byrne’s early solo records. That subsequent music seemed to my fierce acolyte’s heart a betrayal of the idea of Talking Heads, as though David Byrne were an unworthy steward of the art he’d partly created. All their music became poisonously embarrassing to me the moment I realized it wasn’t as good as I’d claimed it was (and no band is as good as I’d claimed Talking Heads were in the years I adored them). I suffered other similar, if milder, divorces: from the surrealist painters Magritte and De Chirico, from Jean-Luc Godard, from Brian Eno and David Bowie. These disappointments I managed to modulate: the artists are less like ex-lovers than like friends I keep in my address book but call less often than I used to. It was my splits from Talking Heads and Stanley Kubrick and Don DeLillo that left me as indignant, ashamed, and unmoored as breakups with a girlfriend or wife, wondering who’d failed whom.

Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art. When I first began to write fiction, at eighteen, I conceived that I would write the novels Philip K. Dick hadn’t lived to write—that I would continue his work rather than begin my own. Of course, I now think that Philip K. Dick probably lived to write any novel he was capable of writing, as well as a few he wasn’t, but at the time it seemed to me tragic that dozens more didn’t exist for me to read. That was the sort of tragedy I could allow myself to dwell on, as a teenager: that Philip K. Dick had died, not that my mother had died.

Nightly wearing headphones to memorize Robert Fripp’s twenty-one minute guitar solo wasn’t finally so different from watching
The Searchers
a dozen times, though one activity was meditative and put me to sleep and the other was busy and made me enraged. In either case, and in dozens of others, I wanted to submit and submerge, even to die a little. I developed a preference, among others, for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers. By ignoring my hunger or need to use the bathroom during a three-hour movie by Kubrick or Tarkovsky I’d voted against my body, with its undeniable pangs and griefs, in favor of a self comprised of eyeballs and brain, floating in the void of pure art. If I wasn’t afraid of this kind of dissolution I shouldn’t be afraid of death, so I’d be an evolutionary step ahead. I downloaded art into myself, but I was also downloading myself out of my family, my body, and my life, onto a bookshelf of Complete Works, or into the ether of music or film.

By trying to export myself into a place that didn’t fully exist I asked works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. In fact, I believe they are, and do. My life is dedicated to that belief. But still, I asked too much of them: I asked them also to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That they couldn’t give. At the depths I’d plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art would become thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water.

This was especially true of anything that assumed a posture of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur. Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Talking Heads. The artists who’d seemed to promise the most were the ones who’d created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk—so these were the ones capable of failing my needs most violently. When I discovered their imperfections, my own hope of absenting myself from emotional risk seemed imperiled. It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I’d asked them to feel on my behalf. I blamed them, anyway. My declaring a writer or musician or director my favorite, it seemed, contained a kind of suicide pact for my enthusiasm. The disappointment artist was me.

Slow Train Coming (1979–81, mom dead)

Bob Dylan belonged to my parents, specifically to my mother, who’d even known him very slightly in her days in the folk scene. He was as obvious and omnipresent in our house as the Beatles, but, for a child, nowhere near as alluring as the Beatles. Dylan’s songs spoke to me without my paying attention, until my mother’s death forced me to parse her record collection for her traces. Then he became crucial in a series of ceremonies that extended also to Nina Simone, Cream, and Carly Simon.

In the same year I befriended Michael, who loved Dylan in the manner he loved his favorite writers, with the same ready disdain for anyone who didn’t get it. This was 1979, when Dylan was seen by most liberals to be in dishonor for his born-again Christianity, another sixties illusion smashed. Anyway, for teenagers, Dylan was a part of what punk had supposedly swept away. So listening to Dylan became a token of the perversity of my tastes, something like wearing jodhpurs or earmuffs to school in order to be branded eccentric. I championed him ironically to my peers, who’d shake their heads. In this way I brandished Dylan as a fetish until it was safe for me to love him honestly.

Philip K. Dick was even more of a stealth operator. Amid my fondness for Borges, Eno,
The Twilight Zone
, Orwell’s
1984
, Talking Heads, and Kubrick, Dick seemed to be the writer I was waiting for. I liked science fiction but the science fiction I’d located to that point wasn’t hip or funny or, mostly, dark enough for my tastes. Dick’s profile as King of the Paranoids, which is how I understood it from the jackets of his books, suited me so well that he was almost my official favorite writer before I’d finished a single book. Yet he was no Eno or Kubrick, no David Byrne. Dick’s work had a yearning and homely undertow, a self-doubting quality, that made him infinitely richer and more disturbing than I’d assumed. Franz Kafka, another idol who survived my teenage years, was like Dick in concealing personal art within a Trojan horse of paradox and paranoia. As with Dick, I came for the dystopian worldview, and stayed for the self-disclosure.

Oddly enough, Philip K. Dick was also publicly converting to what seemed to me some creepy version of Christianity at that very moment, at the start of the eighties. His spiritual desires, like Dylan’s, on one hand repulsed me. Yet in both cases the work that resulted from their religious questioning embedded such elegant uncertainty as to the likelihood of a life’s full sustenance in art and ego that my own solipsism was slightly eroded. Before long, too, I’d identified the many points of contact between Philip K. Dick’s characters and situations from his own life. The extent and transparency of autobiographical influence made his work as awkwardly confessional as that of Philip Roth, who was exactly the type of writer I thought I’d decided not to admire or become. Dick had urged me past my biases, after it was too late to reject him.