I Think You're Totally Wrong (9 page)

DAVID:
Obviously, it was a serious misstep.

CALEB:
I can see us as eighty-year-old grandparents and she'll say, “Remember when I miscarried and you chose beer with Tyrone over coming home to me?”

DAVID:
To me, the most interesting aspect of the whole thing is your obsession with entrée into black culture. You wanted to drink a beer with Tyrone, so you shunned Terry. If it had been a white guy, you wouldn't have gone. You wouldn't have felt the same pressure.

CALEB:
I've thought about that. I made a conscious decision to get into the culture. I became a regular at Green Lake. I started pushing back. I got sick of the way white guys
would get bullied and took it. I didn't want to be like that. When I first started playing there, they're choosing teams and no one picks me, so I call next, and this other guy says, “No, I got next.” I say, “We'll run together, then.” He says no. Fourteen guys in the gym and ten are playing. I say, “You're not going to pick me up? My game ain't that bad.” He says no. This one guy, Nando, says, “Hey, some guys don't pick up white guys.” I say, “What if I was six-foot-six?” Nando says, “Wouldn't matter.”

DAVID:
Nando just pulled you aside and told you this?

CALEB:
Yeah. He and I are still cool. So, after a while, I got aggressive, in other people's face. When you get challenged, you puff up and challenge back. I've almost come to blows with Ed Jones. He was talking trash, I called him out, and Ed started threatening me, saying he'd get his piece and leave my daughters without a father. Tyrone and some others got my back, got between us and started threatening Ed. Ed backed down.

CALEB:
Immediately after graduating from the UW with a degree in poli-sci, Terry worked in supermarkets, hanging up advertising, and she's still with the same company. She became a vice president, then a director of retail sales accounts.

DAVID:
What's the company?

CALEB:
It became News America Marketing when it was bought by NewsCorp.

DAVID:
In other words, Murdoch.

CALEB:
In LA she's worked out of the Fox Studios building. She travels a lot: LA, San Fran, New York. She met Henry Kissinger at a party, has ridden in an elevator with Bill O'Reilly.

DAVID:
So on some level she's working for Fox News?

CALEB:
No. Both her company and Fox News belong to NewsCorp. She negotiates advertising between producers and retailers. If Sara Lee wants product placement in Albertsons, they talk to someone like her.

DAVID:
Sure. Just like publishers pay to have books displayed in the front of the store. Is she someone who likes to work?

CALEB:
She says no, but if she's not working, she gets restless. She likes aspects of the job, the responsibility and satisfaction. She feels that, well, my friends and I are artists and have relatively stunted careers, but we made a choice not to get a job that demands a certain commitment. I've got friends close to fifty, and they have the typical liberal take: they want the government to pay for their health care and so forth.

DAVID:
That's a right-wing caricature of the typical liberal take.

CALEB:
They think corporations are greedy and predatory, whereas, to Terry, corporations employ thousands of people, and these people work hard but are well compensated. We have health insurance and security because of her, and it was a choice she made.

DAVID:
She thinks you guys are a bunch of spoiled brats?

CALEB:
She tells me, “I wanted financial security. That was important to me, and I work my ass off.” And she does. She's the ant and we artists are grasshoppers, writing songs and poems and novels as we curse this cold and dark planet.

DAVID:
Got it in one.

CALEB:
Her job is hard. It's fatiguing and stressful, so she deserves to come home and watch mindless TV and relax with a glass or two of wine.

DAVID:
Does she make a good salary?

CALEB:
Around one twenty-five, counting bonuses. She flies a lot, so we can take vacations on her frequent flyer miles. What do you make at the UW?

DAVID:
Same.

CALEB:
One twenty-five and you work six months of the year?

DAVID:
I teach two quarters a year. It's more like five months a year.

CALEB:
You have to read and prepare, but still, $125,000?

DAVID:
Does that seem like a lot?

CALEB:
Yes. And you were worried about money in 1996?

DAVID:
When I first came to the UW, I was making twenty-seven. Salaries at the UW are pretty bad, due to state cutbacks. The only reason I have a decent salary is I keep getting recruited by other schools. It's like anything: you become more desirable when someone else desires you. My salary went up considerably, from sixty to ninety. Then I got another offer and it went from ninety to one-ten.

CALEB:
Amazing.

DAVID:
That's what Laurie says. She thinks I have the cushiest job in the world, but I've worked unbelievably—

CALEB:
Heard it. Heard it.

CALEB:
In business journals, when a writer touts a company or stock, at the end of the article there's usually a disclosure saying whether the writer, the writer's employer, or the writer's family members own the stock, so if there's a conflict of interest it's transparent. The lit world should be so forthcoming. The lit community praises the lit community, there's a dearth of constructive criticism, and there's a fuck of a lot of praise for boring books.

DAVID:
You're preachin' to the choir, brother.

CALEB:
We need more of Dale Peck's
Hatchet Jobs
and Anis Shivani's “The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers.” Shivani went after Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Díaz and Sharon Olds.

DAVID:
That would be just the beginning of my critique.

CALEB:
If we can't criticize, we stay in the muck, and the literary world shrinks proportionately to the culture. Who trusts or even reads positive reviews? Would you rather have a positive review read by a hundred people, or a negative review read by a thousand? You wrote about how painful negative reviews were in the past, and now you don't care. You were inferring, almost, that it's more painful if some intimate shows disinterest.

DAVID:
One of the accomplishments for me of middle age is, boy, can I shrug off criticism. It used to be, I'd get a bad review in the
Orlando Sentinel
, and I'd dwell on it inordinately. Now I literally don't have time. Somebody writes a six-thousand-word attack on
Reality Hunger
? I'm thrilled the book got so deeply under his skin.

DAVID:
How's Scott Driscoll doing?

CALEB:
He read
Reality Hunger
. He's a very good critic. He loves fiction.

DAVID:
Yeah, and?

CALEB:
He's responsible for that opening of our interview in the
Rumpus
, when I asked, “You began writing fiction; it turned out not to be your forte. Why the attack? Isn't that like an impotent man vowing abstinence?”

DAVID:
Only about fifty other reviewers used the same trope. I'd say I'm more like a man in love pointing out to the man on Viagra that he's fucking a sex doll.

CALEB:
How long have you been rehearsing that one?

DAVID:
You're a funny intersection of hippie and military.

CALEB:
My dad was in Saigon for a year, and my parents
were in Asia for eight years. He has no clue about art, and she's creative, quasi-bohemian. She knew I smoked pot and kept it from him. My dad won't watch movies about genocide, anything negative, anything “depressing.” He's “Who cares about the Holocaust? It's over. Who cares?”

DAVID:
He's anti-intellectual, but is he smart?

CALEB:
After Cooper Union he got a master's from NYU in engineering. He's very organized.

DAVID:
Is your mom intellectual at all?

CALEB:
She used to be well-read and big into art. Completely stopped.

DAVID:
What books would they be reading? She was reading something when I stopped by.

CALEB:
Probably
People
magazine. Their house is a museum. Every
National Geographic
since before 1920. Four sets of encyclopedias. There are probably over five thousand books. The classics: Homer, Shakespeare, Melville. I remember being forced to listen to
Beowulf
when I was ten. My dad, though, has a huge collection of Carter Brown mysteries, Alistair MacLean spy novels, and romance novels. He's addicted to romance.