Hugh left this morning to spend Thanksgiving with his mother, Joan, whom I’ve taken to calling Maw Hamrick. I’m on this kick lately where I pretend that she’s one of my closest personal friends. Whenever I hear Hugh’s key in the door, I pick up the phone and act like I’m in the middle of a conversation with her. “Well, sure,” I’ll say, “I know it’s hard, but we’ll get together some other time, when it can be just me and you, without Hugh to bother us. Oops, hold on…I think I hear him coming.” I claim to receive gifts and checks from her and have been writing fake letters in which she says she wishes I were her son instead of him.
It doesn’t get to him because it’s so ridiculous. In truth, she’d much rather hang out with Hugh than with me. Joan was here last month for a few days and spent her mornings drinking tea and reading the international section of the Times. It’s the last part I’m likely to turn to, but having lived in Africa and the Middle East, the Hamricks love nothing more than to discuss foreign policy. They’re forever mentioning some crisis in Karachi or Ghana, and they know the first and last names of countless ambassadors and attachés. They’re so far removed from my own family.
November 29, 1996
New York
I went to Amy’s apartment for Thanksgiving and left for home, drunk and stoned, at three a.m. She had a good-size crowd, and charged her guests $5 for the chance to wear a Pilgrim hat and have their picture taken with her rabbit, Tattle Tail. Eight people took her up on it, but in the end, not one of them paid. Lately I’m trying to be a better listener. This involves asking questions such as “Tell me, Louis, do you have a lot of candles in your house?”
Louis works with Amy at Marion’s and his thing is to tell huge lies and then allow himself to be interrogated. Last night he said he was the world’s first rapper.
“Really, the first?”
“Yes,” he said. “And it was hard because no one believed that it would catch on and grow into this big sensation.”
“Did people make fun of you?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, everyone.”
“And did that hurt?”
“It hurt a lot. An awful lot.”
An old neighbor of Lisa’s was recently caught having sex with his Labrador retriever, and when I told Louis about it, he asked if the dog could get pregnant.
“Are you serious?” I said. “How old are you?” That’s one of those things you think about when you’re a child, the possibility of a half boy/half pony. If it were possible to crossbreed like that, the world would be full of talking goats and sheep who could shear their own wool.
November 30, 1996
New York
Helen called offering me some gravy. I told her our refrigerator was full and she launched into her suspicion that our seventy-five-year-old neighbor is creeping into her apartment while she’s asleep. It makes no sense, but she’s convinced that something is going on. She then recounted her recent fights with the people at the corner grocery and the construction crew renovating the apartment upstairs from her. After that, she talked about her nephew and the reasons she didn’t go to her daughter’s house for Thanksgiving. Her monologue went on for twenty minutes and ended with “So if you don’t want my gravy, go fuck yourself.”
December 18, 1996
New York
We met last night for the first read-through of the play (The Little Frieda Mysteries) and I felt bad for everyone in the room. What I’d written was so clunky and full of exposition, I wouldn’t blame any of them for trying to back out. One scene between Amy and Chuck (Coggins) has potential, but the rest will have to be scrapped.
At the copy shop on Prince Street an hour or so before our meeting, I stood in line behind a woman with dyed-black hair. She was taking forever, color-Xeroxing photos of herself, and said to the guy behind the counter that though she pays next to nothing in rent, she’s looking for a new apartment. “I’ve got two lizards on Thompson Street, but they’re not getting any light.”
1997
January 29, 1997
New York
On Monday, The New Yorker arranged for Amy and me to have our picture taken by Duane Michals. This so they can run it in the Goings On About Town section. I was a big fan of his when I was in my early twenties, all those photos with the cursive writing along the bottoms of them. Amy and I promised ourselves we wouldn’t do anything stupid, and an hour later we were sitting on top of a battered piano with our arms in slings.
Mr. Michals was what you might call a wild card, and at the end of the session, our mouths ached from fake laughing. “Did you know that Flaubert had a second career as a gynecologist? He wrote a book about it called Madame Ovary.”
Years back he had been shooting an upside-down model who accidentally kicked him in the head with his heavy boots and crushed his skull. Now there are metal plates in it.
February 3, 1997
New York
The New Yorker is taking the Shouts and Murmurs piece I wrote for Valentine’s Day. Chris sent the galleys by messenger, and, reading them over, I noticed four repetitions of the phrase “we’re hoping.” I pointed this out on the phone yesterday and he said, “Man, you’re like a self-cleaning oven!”
February 4, 1997
New York
I had a horrible experience today with a photographer named Chris, who’d come to take my picture for some magazine. We were trying to prepare a tech rehearsal of the play, and because we were so busy, I asked if we could meet at the theater. Chris thought it might be nice to use the basement hallway so we went downstairs, where he and his assistant set up their lights and umbrellas. I’m finding it progressively more difficult to have my picture taken, especially now, when there always has to be a gimmick. The idea is that you have to be humiliated in order for your personality to shine through. You need to hang from the ceiling by a hook or crawl on your hands and knees through a puddle of something.
Chris started the session by handing me a package of stage cigarettes he wanted me to cram into my mouth—the entire thing. “I’m catching some reflection off the packaging,” he said. “So can you lower your head a little?”
Normally I just do what they tell me, figuring the quicker I surrender, the sooner I’ll get out of there. Today, though, I snapped. “I can’t do this,” I said after taking the package out of my mouth. “It makes me feel silly.”
“If it makes you feel silly,” he said, “you need to find another way to do it. If I give you a wacky idea, you should give me one that’s even wackier.”
I told him it wasn’t my job to out-wacky him, that I’m not a comedian or even an actor, for that matter, and that I saw nothing wrong with just a normal photo of me standing up or sitting in a chair.
And that was pretty much the end of that. He told me about some other “difficult people” he’d worked with, and I defended them all. I mean, really. How is it that someone wants to tie you to the railroad tracks, and refusing makes you the bad guy?
I told him about the photographer I had last week who wanted me to spit onto a pane of glass and then press my face against it.
“That sounds interesting,” Chris said. “What was his name?”
I told him I didn’t remember, and he nodded, saying, “That tells me everything I need to know.”
February 15, 1997