The Mona Lisa, Musée du Louvre. It actually kind of sucks. There are a hundred more interesting paintings in the same hall. But I went and took the picture and stood there with all the other fools and pretended to think it was amazing. And I believe the conspiracy that the painting on the wall isn’t even the real one. Just a good copy, that the real one is in a vault somewhere covered with a tarp, away from lights, away from flashbulbs, away from all the idiots, myself included, gawking at it, away from the world, protected. But the Louvre itself is amazing. The most magnificent building in existence. The idea that it was someone’s house is absurd to me. Like telling me the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower was someone’s house. Kind of makes you understand the Revolution. If I had to eat rats and mud every day and I saw someone living in a building as vast and beautiful as the Louvre, I’d want their fucking head as well.
The Grave of Charles Baudelaire. Montparnasse Cemetery. Alcoholic, opium addict, whoremonger, maniac. Wrote Les Fleurs du mal. Wrote Paris Spleen, which crushes me every time I read it. Wrote The Painter of Modern Life. The utmost respect.
Los Angeles, 2017
* * *
Lunch with my agent. We’re at the restaurant next to the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The sun is out, sky is blue. The walls and awnings are pink and the tables and umbrellas are white. Everyone is beautiful and rich and they’re all having a wonderful time, picking at tuna tartare, drinking lemonade (also pink), taking selfies, doing incredibly important things and taking them very seriously. My agent is thirty-five years old, wears a $5,000 suit and a $50,000 Rolex. He works for a big, fancy agency, and he represents me and my company, which publishes commercial fiction and creates intellectual property for large media companies. He’s smart and cool and works hard and has the patience of a saint. I’m in a pair of light-blue pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt. We meet here once a month, talk about my business. I like him, and appreciate how hard he works and how much he cares, but the idea that I’m a business makes me sick to my fucking stomach.
How’d the Spielberg job go?
I think well. Ask the producers.
Next steps?
Ask them.
The studio read it?
Yes.
Like it?
They said they did.
Network read it?
They have it now. Waiting.
I’ll follow up, set a call.
Can’t wait.
He laughs, takes a sip of lemonade.
What’s next?
What’s out there?
What do you want to do?
Nothing.
I don’t believe that.
It’s true.
Company have any new IP?
We have two books coming out this month. Doing a video game. Working on a bunch of new series treatments.
You going to the office?
A couple times a week.
You should be there every day.
They don’t need me.
Yes, they do.
They really don’t.
The books any good?
Usual.
You write any of them?
You know how it works.
I know sometimes you write parts of them, or rewrite them.
In the beginning. Now I just come up with the ideas, the editors find the writers, I don’t even read them.
You should.
I know.
There’s business to be done with them.
If they sell.
Even if they don’t. Plenty of massive franchises didn’t sell at first. You never know when something will hit.
I’m tired of talking about franchises.
That’s our business now.
I miss the old days.
When everyone was an artist?
When everything didn’t have to make a billion dollars or it’s a failure.
The world has changed. You changed with it.
I didn’t become a writer to talk about franchises and business.
I didn’t become an agent to listen to rich writers complain.
I laugh.
Touché, David.
He smiles.
Go write one of your books.
Is that really what you want me to do?
No. I want you to talk to me about the offers we have for you, and after you decide which to take, go create a huge fucking franchise.
I don’t think I could write a book now anyway. Not a real one.
Why?
I wish I knew.
You know.
You my fucking therapist now?
It’s definitely part of my job description.
I laugh.
Maybe I’ve lost confidence. Maybe I lack motivation. Maybe I’m just tired. I know I don’t feel shit the way I used to feel it, don’t really feel anything anymore. And I need to feel to write.
You scaled that mountain, Jay. You were the most famous writer in the world. The Bad Boy of American Letters. You did it and grew up and moved on to other things. You became an adult. What I think you actually miss is being young.
No, I was terrible at being young.
He laughs.
You sure?
I nod.
I miss the struggle. I miss not knowing. I miss the being alone and lonely and desperately wanting something and being willing to hurt for it. I miss the climb up the mountain. Getting there wasn’t the point. And I didn’t give a fuck once I got there. It was going up that meant something.
So go write a book, go struggle, go be an artist. Or we can go over the offers I have and you can make yourself some money. It’s your call.
I take a deep breath, look across the restaurant, past the pool and all the beautiful people in it, at the sun, at the sky so perfect and blue. Sisyphus spent eternity pushing a boulder up a hill. If the legend is true, he’s still pushing it. A good part of my life I did the same. Push the fucking rock, every day, day after day, push the fucking rock. Unlike King Sisyphus, I got my boulder over the hill and I rode it down, rode it until it crashed, rode it through the wreckage of the crash until it stopped, once it stopped I got off. I had a choice, walk away or do it again. I made the wrong choice. I walked away. I should have found a new boulder, a bigger boulder, the biggest boulder I could fucking find, and I should have started back up the fucking hill.
History
* * *
I was born in Cleveland. My father was a lawyer, my mother stayed at home to raise my brother and me. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor. We lived in a nice house on a nice street in a nice town. The first suburb on the border of East Cleveland. The town was half black, half white, half of the white kids were Jewish. We were all friends, played together, went to school together, fought together, and fought against each other. I didn’t learn until I was older that we were all supposed to hate each other. That in America you stick with your own. When I did learn it, like many of the things I have learned in my life, I thought it was stupid. Blood is blood and it’s all red. Show me what’s in your heart and your eyes. I don’t give a fuck about the color of your skin or the God you worship.
My parents were good people. They both worked hard. My dad worked for a company that made steering gears and auto parts, my mom cooked and cleaned and played tennis and bridge. They loved each other and us. Tried to instill morals and values in me. Tried to make me go to church and become a productive member of society. My brother was a good kid. Four years older than me. He did well in school, listened to our parents, never got in trouble. He was a great brother. Never beat me up or bullied me. Always included me in things he did with his friends. Helped me when I needed help, stayed out of my way when I didn’t. I was not a good kid. I went to school but didn’t pay attention. I didn’t care about grades. I got into fights, with both my fists and my mouth. I talked back and said no. Starting at a relatively young age, my favorite activity was vandalism. There is joy in destruction, great joy. Be it with a spray-paint can or a bat on a mailbox or an o
verturned garbage can or ten of them. Other joys were girls, cigarettes, stolen liquor, drugs, reading books, and sports. I was a good athlete. Good enough that kicking a ball into a goal got me into college, despite my 2.2 high school grade point average. My college career was unremarkable. I viewed it as a long vacation. As long as I showed up at class I would pass. I didn’t want to be a lawyer or a doctor or a teacher or a businessman. I didn’t want to market anything. Or make anything. Or sell anything. Or buy anything. I didn’t want to wear a suit or get quarterly review reports. I played ball and read books and chased girls and got drunk and snorted cocaine. In the summers I mowed lawns and pulled weeds and went to the beach. Three years in I broke my leg, and my sports career ended. It was a relief. No more practice, no more pretending I cared about it. I went to class, read books, though rarely the ones assigned. I spent my free time with Kerouac and Bukowski and Hunter Thompson. With Knut Hamsun and John Dos Passos and William Saroyan. Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg and Tom Wolfe. Tim O’Brien and John Kennedy Toole and William Burroughs. I kept drinking, kept doing blow, started doing enough of it that I started selling it to support my habit. I’d buy half an ounce, which is 14 grams, for $1,000. Sell 10 grams for $100 each and have 4 for myself. Sometimes I’d cut the drug with NoDoz and 14 grams would become 18 and I’d keep the extra $400, buy drinks for my friends, books, flowers for girls I liked, I’d take a car full of people to Taco Bell and order one of everything on the menu. I kept reading. James Joyce and Oscar Wilde and Henry James. I read The Awakening by Kate Chopin and it made me cry. I read Don Quixote and howled with laughter. I read Hugo and Dumas, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and Gogol. My senior year started. I didn’t think about what I was going to do when it ended. My father wanted me to go to law school or get a job on Wall Street. He suggested a job in advertising because I was creative. My brother had gone to law school and become a lawyer and gotten married and was well on his way to becoming a productive and respectable citizen. I was happy for him. And I knew the same was expected of me. It made me want to drive into a tree. Or snort cocaine until my heart exploded. Or walk into the water and keep going.
I read and drank and used cocaine and dealt cocaine and ate tacos and bought flowers for girls and occasionally fell in love with one for an hour or two or a night or two, occasionally had one fall in love with me for an hour or two or a night or two. I met her and fell in love for real, or what I thought was real, and life was simple and beautiful and all-consuming. I stopped dealing and slowed down my drinking and the books I read took on new meaning, as I felt like I was living in one, some great romance, some love story deep and true. I loved everything about her. Her voice, her eyes, the words she choose when she spoke, her handwriting, how she laughed and smiled, how she smoked, the books she read (as many women as I read men), and the conversations we had about them, the clothes she wore, how she was when she wasn’t wearing them. She was as respectable and decent as I was not. Her father was an executive at a defense company, she had grown up in San Francisco, had gone to private schools. She was going to go back and work in tech and wanted to start her own company. I imagined going with her, imagined, for the first time, that I could be normal, get a job, wear a suit, go to the office every day, pay taxes. Be a husband. Be a man, or be our society’s definition of a man. Love is a crazy thing. Can give you life or take it. Make you something you aren’t, for better or worse. Make you dream and think and speak and act in ways that aren’t normal for you, or at least for me. We had two great months. Falling asleep and waking up together, quiet dinners and long talks about the future. Eyes, hands, lips, and tongues. Bodies. Hearts. I thought they were great, but maybe I was just delusional. We kissed good-bye and each went home for Christmas break. We spoke on the phone every day. We sent each other presents, a pair of earrings for her, a first edition of Executioner’s Song for me. We planned our spring break, a couples trip to the Bahamas with a few of her friends and their boyfriends. I stayed in and stayed mostly sober, which shocked my parents. They had never met her, but loved the effect she had on me. I went to church with them on Christmas morning, and though I didn’t pray or sing any songs or take communion, I went. I put on a sport coat and went to their country club. I smiled and greeted their friends when they came over. I went to bed early, woke up early. I talked about a career, and maybe going to business school, my dad said he had a friend on the board of UC-Berkeley and could help me get in. It was a long month. I just wanted to get back. To see her again. Kiss her, taste her. Feel her breath against my neck in the morning. Hear her say my name in the dark. Watch her get dressed. Listen to her thoughts on whatever she was reading, or watching. Smile when she teased me about the shitty food I ate, or about smoking too many cigarettes. I left a day early. Drove my truck through a snowstorm. A five-hour trip took eight, but at least I was closer. And I would be there when she arrived. I got to the house I lived in, went inside, I was the only one back. I went to my room and there was a book on my bed, a note on top of the book from my roommate Andy, who was from Los Angeles, it said
Merry Christmas.
I meant to give you this before you left.
I think you’ll enjoy it.
It was a battered old hardback, a sky-blue dustjacket, bold black lettering across the front, it read:
Henry Miller
Tropic
of
Cancer
I set down my bag, kicked off my shoes, lay down on my bed, picked up the book, opened it.
And from the first sentence.
I am living at the Villa Borghese.
First paragraph.
There is not a crumb of dirt anywhere, nor a chair misplaced. We are all alone here and we are dead.
First page.
Last night Boris discovered that he was lousy. I had to shave his armpits and even then the itching did not stop. How can one get lousy in a beautiful place like this? But no matter. We might never have known each other so intimately, Boris and I, had it not been for the lice.
I was transfixed.
Boris has just given me a summary of his views.…There will be more calamities, more death, more despair. Not the slightest indication of a change anywhere. The cancer of time is eating us away. Our heroes have killed themselves, or are killing themselves. The hero, then, is not Time, but Timelessness. We must get in step, a lock step, toward the prison of death. There is no escape. The weather will not change.
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. What Henry Miller said, how he said it.
It is now the fall of my second year in Paris. I was sent here for a reason I have not yet been able to fathom.
I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God.
It felt like a lightbulb was turned on, a lightbulb in my mind, a lightbulb in my heart, a lightbulb in my soul.
This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty…what you will.
I smiled, read the page again, again, again. It made me laugh, shocked me, spoke to me. Simple and direct. No pretension. No bullshit. Where most writers tried to impress with their brains, with their skill, with their virtuosity, Henry Miller did not. It felt like he was talking, talking to me, sitting inside me telling me things I had always wanted to hear but never had. All the books I had read in my life, I had never imagined I could write one. The writers were always smarter than me, more gifted, went to better schools, had traveled more, experienced more, seen and felt and done more. They had some magic that I did not have. They did things with words that I never believed I could do. They sat and worked day after day after day after day telling stories that I didn’t think I could tell. They were so
mething I was not. They were writers. Mysterious and talented and educated and beyond me. I was a fuck-up. A punk and a vandal who got shitty grades and liked to get drunk and snort cocaine. I never believed I could be one of them.
Until.
Until.
Until.
I kept reading. A book about fucking walking eating reading writing wanting, about the beauty of rage, the serenity of loneliness, the power of not giving a fuck, and the nobility in deeply caring. I kept reading a book about love, love of everything and nothing, love of women, of art, literature, friends, a hot meal a strong drink a cigarette on a sunny day, an empty park bench, a full bar, a couple bucks in your pocket or nothing at all. I kept reading this book about a man who freed himself from the bullshit of society and did and said and lived and loved and wrote as he felt and as he pleased and as was right for him and him alone, without regard to rules, laws, conventions, or expectations. If it felt right he did it. If it felt wrong he walked away, never looked back, didn’t apologize for who he was or how he lived, didn’t regret anything. I kept reading throughout that day, I smoked and drank a bottle of cheap wine and the world disappeared, there was my bed my pillow my hands turning pages my eyes on the words my mind spinning my heart beating my soul lit.
My soul was lit.
Lit.
I fell asleep reading. Woke up with the book in my hand. Made some coffee lit a cigarette kept reading. My mind was filled with Paris, with women, with loneliness, with heartbreak and hunger and joy and rage, with a life unhinged, away from everything we are supposed to be and part of everything we want. Henry said:
I made up my mind that I would hold onto nothing, that I would expect nothing.
Henry said:
I’ve lived out my melancholy youth. I don’t give a fuck anymore what’s behind me, or what’s ahead of me.
Henry said:
Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy.
Henry said:
For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off.