I Think You're Totally Wrong (13 page)

CALEB:
You want to see a video of [Terry's sister] Tracy telling a dirty joke?

DAVID:
What do you think?

CALEB:
Okay, context: This is last May. We're in Mexico for Tracy's wedding and telling jokes at dinner.

YouTube video:

Caleb: Lights, camera, action
.

Tracy: Why are girls so bad at math?

Jan (mother-in-law): Girls?

Tracy: (holds index finger two inches from her thumb) Because men keep telling them this is eight inches
.

All: (laughter)

DAVID:
Do Terry and Tracy get along?

CALEB:
Best friends. Terry has three friends: her mom, her sister, and my sister. Tracy's always over.

WAITRESS:
(giving David the bill and credit card)
Here you go. This one's for us and this one can be your souvenir.

DAVID:
Thanks a lot.

WAITRESS:
You're welcome a lot.

She leaves
.

DAVID:
So if we came into town for lunch again, or dinner, would this be where we go? I liked it. They're really friendly.

DAVID:
The waitress saying, “Pie like grandma makes it,” the American flag, the salute to our troops, the motorcycles parked like horses outside—I dig it all.

CALEB:
Imagine that's your house.

DAVID:
I could do it. My neighbor, Sandy, is a lawyer in her mid-sixties. Her daughter has a lesbian partner, and the two of them are raising a kid in Bloomington, Indiana. Sandy is selling her house and moving there to be a grandmother. I could do that. If Natalie were living in Indiana, raising a family, and Laurie and I decided to move there to be near her, I'd be fine. Part of me pretends to crave New York, but I really don't. I'm an incredibly simple person. This is beautiful country.

CALEB:
Eula Biss dedicated
Notes from No Man's Land
to her future son. After the interview, we chatted and I asked if she had had the son yet. She had. I asked if she was going to have another. She was leaning toward no. She teaches at Northwestern and feared she wouldn't have time to write. The more successful the writer becomes, the less time for other things. I wondered if I could make these sacrifices for my art. Publication, attention, success—how does it change you?

DAVID:
To be honest, the last thing I ever feel is “successful.” There's no guarantee; every book is—

CALEB:
You win the NBCC award, like Eula did: your next book's guaranteed.

DAVID:
Not really.

CALEB:
You may say “no guarantee.” Let me tell you about “no guarantee.”

DAVID:
When Laurie and I had the debate whether to have a second child, I had published four books.
Remote
had just come out. It's not as if
Remote
set the world on fire, but it did get a lot of attention. I was an associate professor, with tenure, at the UW. I had found my métier: I was working on
Black Planet
and I thought, man—

Train whistle blows
.

DAVID:
Baroooouh!

CALEB:
You want the kid entering the world to a welcome.

DAVID:
I'm sure, if we had had a second child, it would have brought greater complexity and joy into our lives. It was mainly a financial thing.

CALEB:
If you knew you'd be making a hundred and twenty-five grand in the future—

DAVID:
I was making about thirty-five, and Laurie was making twenty-five, and I wanted to be able to pay for Natalie's education.… Ah, here's the meth lab house.

DAVID:
I can see how, in the construction business, cocaine must be a bit of an occupational hazard.

CALEB:
I worked in Snohomish with this Coupeville guy who blew almost his entire paycheck on crack. He'd cook rock on the job. Smart guy, though. I'm in college and by the time I graduate he's leading a crew, youngest guy on the job, but loved the drug. Then got into meth. He's now doing time in Monroe. Barouh's stayed away from that kind of trouble.… Okay, we got Barouh's map. Let's see, Highway 2—this trail takes us to Dorothy Lake.

DAVID:
We have to drive, then hike?

CALEB:
Seven miles of bad dirt road, then an hour hike. Here's my Washington State Parks pass.

DAVID:
Is it a tough hike?

CALEB:
A lot of up and down.

DAVID:
That's fine.

CALEB:
A man's hike!

DAVID:
A mile each way?

CALEB:
Two.

DAVID:
Basically, with my back, I can't do a lot of bending, but I'm up for exploring.

CALEB:
How do you say it?

DAVID:
Deus ex machina—god from the machine. In ancient Greek plays, a god would descend from above the stage and come to the rescue.

CALEB:
Sometimes I watch TV with Terry, and every time a deus ex machina pops up to save the day and get the writer out of a jam, I point this out. She tells me to shut up and enjoy the show.
(phone rings)
Speak of the devil.

CALEB:
Did my mother hug you yesterday?

DAVID:
Maybe she craves touch.

CALEB:
Terry's parents are divorced and remarried, so I have two fathers-in-law. My mother freaks them both out with her hugging.

DAVID:
Don't they give her a little leeway?

CALEB:
It still freaks them out.

CALEB:
George Bush is not really evil.

DAVID:
He's not?

CALEB:
I would say not.

DAVID:
You don't think what he did in Iraq is evil?

CALEB:
And I imagine you think Cheney is even—

DAVID:
Of course.

CALEB:
My friend Vince and I were talking about George Bush. He listed the usual: no weapons of mass destruction, oil, Halliburton, revenge for his father, and then he said that even though he's against capital punishment, he would have liked to see George Bush assassinated. That's just odd.

DAVID:
I very strongly want Bush to feel the awfulness of what he's done. I wanted
Checkpoint
—

CALEB:
—
Checkpoint
?

DAVID:
—Nicholson Baker's fantasy about Bush getting assassinated. I wanted it to end with Bush dead.

CALEB:
Hillary Clinton signed on. The U.S. didn't do it alone. It was multilateral; a lot of nations signed on.

DAVID:
Not really.

CALEB:
Bush is many things, but he ain't “evil.”

DAVID:
He's the embodiment of evil.

CALEB:
In that chapter of yours, you portray him as likable on the airplane.

DAVID:
I say that someone else found him likable, and in another chapter I try to find a connection between some of his minor character flaws and my own. It's a literary gesture.… Do you know the names of these mountains? They're so beautiful.

CALEB:
We'd have to grab the map.

DAVID:
I just don't see how the killing of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians—how is George Bush not evil? Do you think the Iraq War was justified?

CALEB:
Was Hillary Clinton evil for supporting the Iraq War?

DAVID:
I see what you mean. At what point does it go all the way down?

CALEB:
For George Bush to be evil you have to assume that he knew, with absolute certainty, that they were all straw-man arguments. That some aide said, “Mr. President, we've found no weapons.” And Bush said, “Then we have to lie so we can go to war against Iraq and I don't care how many Iraqi civilians we kill.”

DAVID:
I would say that's pretty close to what happened, although of course it would never be spelled out that explicitly. I'm sure you've seen the supposedly funny video [that the Bush administration produced for a White House correspondents' dinner] of Bush trying and failing to find weapons of mass destruction. Looking in a closet: “Can't find any weapons of mass destruction here!” Looking under the bed: “Can't find any weapons there!” Ha ha. You don't think there was at a bare minimum a willful ignorance on Bush's part? The moment 9/11 happened, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld went to the CIA and said, almost literally, “Find us evidence to link Saddam to this event. Just find it.” It's pretty clear to me Bush doesn't have a conscience.

CALEB:
Do you think he's a psychopath?

DAVID:
I wrote that Bush chapter as a conscious attempt to understand a person who daily just absolutely made me crazy. I tried to ask myself, “What points of connection can I make with him?” Because he's unable to make any points of connection with any person who's not in his very gilded cage. Would you at least agree that he's a very, very immoral politician?

CALEB:
There's ambiguity and dubiousness to his moral character.

DAVID:
Did you vote for him?

CALEB:
Gore. Kerry. Obama.

DAVID:
You see Bush as simply misguided?

CALEB:
I find him genuine.

DAVID:
Remember Karla Faye Tucker?

CALEB:
Executed when Bush was governor.

DAVID:
Bush was asked, “What do you think Karla Faye Tucker would say if she could speak to you?” Bush said,
(nasal tone)
“Help me! Help me!” That, to me, is evil.

CALEB:
How familiar are you with that case?

DAVID:
Not very.

CALEB:
She did it.

DAVID:
She did? How do you know?

CALEB:
Death penalty cases rivet me. She and her boyfriend went to rob a house and ended up killing this guy with a hammer and a pickaxe. After noticing a girl hiding in the room, Karla killed her with the pickaxe; she embedded multiple blows. Later she said the killing made her feel multiple orgasms.

DAVID:
Thank god for small pleasures.

CALEB:
She was into drugs and prostitution. Now, she should be in prison for life, sentenced to death by old age, no perks, but that's a different argument. Everything they brought up afterward—her redemption, her conversion to Christianity—is all bullshit. There was no debate of guilt or innocence, and if that issue's gone, then if you're for the death penalty, you should have no remorse. And if you're
against it, then come up with better reasons than “she converted” or “she truly feels sorry.”