I Think You're Totally Wrong (18 page)

CALEB:
My parents were blind to my drug use. Terry's parents aren't so naive.

DAVID:
Have you ever tried LSD?

CALEB:
Yeah. Have you?

David shakes his head
.

CALEB:
It creates an illusion of self-knowledge, but—

DAVID:
If someone has dropped acid more than, say, a dozen times, I can tell in an instant.

CALEB:
It's a laser show: your pixels and rods and cones blend and your mind forms images, hallucinations. Your subconscious creates shapes. It's not like you see an elephant walk out of the forest, but the colors and images merge with your subconscious.

DAVID:
You're protesting too much.

CALEB:
No, really.

DAVID:
I've never taken any hallucinogenic drugs.

CALEB:
I've done cocaine maybe four or five times in my life.

DAVID:
Me, too.

CALEB:
It was like strong coffee.

DAVID:
I didn't get it.

CALEB:
Lasts for twenty minutes at twenty times the price. I had a friend who loved it. I said why? He said I'd never had “good” coke, so he and another guy got this “great” coke. After a couple hours I went to bed. I mean, it was okay, but I didn't get it, either. I woke up in the morning and they were in the same place, loving every minute of it. They went through two hundred dollars' worth in one night and then passed out.

DAVID:
Laurie smoked pot in high school, did some coke in college, tried acid a couple of times. You might think I'd be the more—

CALEB:
Experimental?

DAVID:
Maybe, but she's a little out there in a good way.

CALEB:
I did LSD with my two closest friends in high school, Vince and Mark, right after Mark's father died. And then Mark said he never did it.

DAVID:
That's what I would have done: pretended to take it and pocket it instead.

DAVID:
Sometimes, at a hotel, I'll call and say, “Could you send up an extra pillow?” And they'll say, “We're happy to do that, ma'am.”

Caleb laughs
.

DAVID:
I'll get so mad. It's not their fault. But I'm a man. My voice isn't that high, is it?

CALEB:
Try speaking lower.

DAVID:
If I consciously try, I can get low—pretty
deeeeep
.

CALEB:
You're not that low—not soprano, but maybe alto. Certainly not a sexy female voice, mind you. Some women have deep, throaty, sexy voices. You don't. It's a bad woman's voice.

DAVID:
Certain times my voice can just deepen.
Deeeeep
. For some reason, on the phone or on tape, it comes out a little higher than it is.

CALEB:
Practice
lowwwww
. I think I can hit tenor—
baaaaysss
.

DAVID:
Sometimes in class I'll feel very relaxed, very authoritative, and my voice will deepen.

CALEB:
One last chance, for the DVR.

DAVID:
Grrreeeeeeoaaarrr!
There. Low enough?

CALEB:
Hmm.

DAVID:
That's maybe a segue to this: I'm curious how students, including you, processed my stuttering. Was that something students talked about?

CALEB:
Not really. Even twenty years ago, it was barely noticeable.

DAVID:
That's good to hear. A lot of people say it's no big deal. To me, though, it is.

CALEB:
Disfluent speech, to me, is when I try to speak in a foreign language.

DAVID:
You tend to stutter?

CALEB:
I feel incredibly self-conscious. I fake competence. I can function one-on-one, but not in groups. I ask the speaker to slow down or speak clearly or use simple sentences. When I developed friendships, the friend would learn how to converse and compensate for my weaknesses. I couldn't worry about nailing grammar or pronunciation. I'd just butcher language and make communication the priority.
¿Puedes hablar español?

DAVID:
No muy bien
.

CALEB:
We're going to an all-inclusive, in Mexico, in a couple of months.

DAVID:
What does that mean—“all-inclusive”? Hotel, the flight?

CALEB:
The price includes hotel, all meals and beverages,
including liquor. It's heaven. Primarily because they have day care.

DAVID:
Is there a pool?

CALEB:
Adult pools, kid pools, pools where you swim up to a bar. Cafeteria and sit-down dining.

DAVID:
All in the same site? And it's all paid for?

CALEB:
Except tips. We'll bring a few hundred for tips. Eight days, family of five, direct flight to Cabo: $2,500. I sound like an advertisement, but if you include airport shuttle and tips, it's still a vacation for less than three thousand bucks.… Oh, hi. How you doing? Congrats.

FEMALE HIKER:
(with baby in front pack)
Thanks.

CALEB:
I did this trail with my wife and newborn. Great hike.

MALE HIKER:
Definitely.

CALEB AND DAVID:
Take care.

FEMALE HIKER AND MALE HIKER:
Bye.

CALEB:
In my
Notes of a Sexist Stay-at-Home Father
blog, when I wrote about one of our vacations, I called it “A Supposedly Fun Thing the Powell Family Will Do Again.” One of the segments I titled “All-Inclusive Jest.” I “rail” against greedy capitalists creating local jobs outside the drug trade.

DAVID:
It's not that unusual of an idea to me—the stay-at-home dad—but maybe it could be an idea for a book.

CALEB:
Half of all stay-at-home parents (or it seems like half) blog.

DAVID:
Terry likes the blog a lot?

CALEB:
Sometimes. I make fun of us. Well, her. I think she's soft on punishing the kids. I call her method “Crime and Reward.”

DAVID:
You're more the disciplinarian?

CALEB:
Yes and no. She wants to be the treat-giver, so she gets on me for buying them doughnuts, but then she makes brownies for dinner.

DAVID:
I know what you mean. Competition between the parents. Laurie and I do that. Did you want to have a boy?

CALEB:
I didn't want a boy bad enough to push for a fourth.

DAVID:
I very much wanted a girl. Xenogenesis: the greater likelihood that your offspring will be completely different from you if they are of the opposite sex.

CALEB:
You want to stand by the Dorothy Lake sign?

DAVID:
I can't believe that was only a mile and a half.

DAVID:
How about if tonight we watch
My Dinner with André
? They worked together at two facing typewriters: “Okay, André, you go off on that long aria about your friends mock-burying you on Long Island. And I'll write about how addicted I am to my electric blanket.” I love when Wally has had enough. He pushes back and says, “Surely, life is not like that. Surely, if life is interesting at all, you can find majesty at the local cigar shop as easily as you can in a Peruvian rain forest.”

CALEB:
Or in the Polish countryside.

DAVID:
And then, at the very end, Wally is talking about how all the streets look magical, and André is saying, Yes, I really love my wife and kids. There's a very subtle changing of
the guard. Which I think is crucial to this genre.
Sideways
,
My Dinner with André
,
The Trip
: at the end the characters switch roles in a way that feels credible. Something we should obviously aim for. I thought we did that a little as we were arguing about Bush.

CALEB:
That's all great, but I don't know if I'm willing to flip, or make a gesture, because of “art.” I don't want to be David Lipsky to your David Foster Wallace.

CALEB:
In
Bowling for Columbine
, Michael Moore goes across Lake Michigan to Toronto, knocking on doors and checking to see if they're locked. Moore would say, “I'm sorry, I'm just filming a movie, and I'm checking to see why Canadians don't lock their doors.” Brian Fawcett opened one of the doors.

DAVID:
Moore just happened to be in Fawcett's neighborhood?

CALEB:
Yup. I liked the movie and I'm against gun ownership, but Moore's like Oliver Stone in that, whether you agree or not, it's propaganda and straw-man arguments.

DAVID:
But you're obviously capable of a certain amount of political posturing yourself. I actually like Michael Moore and I can sort of tolerate Oliver Stone.

CALEB:
Today's artists too often adopt the same liberal ideologies. I'm disillusioned with the left.

DAVID:
In what areas are you moving away from the left?

CALEB:
Too often, I just find the left absolutist and delusional.

DAVID:
Any particular issues you find the left wrong on?

CALEB:
Unions. The film
Waiting for “Superman”
does a good job on how unions protect incompetent public school teachers. In Chicago the union is so strong they put three waste-disposal employees on every truck. In every other municipality in the U.S., each truck has two employees. Rahm Emanuel has been trying to clean up Richard Daley's mess, and the union won't let him fire anyone. Go to South Korea or Taiwan or Thailand: you got workers on the job twelve hours a day, six days a week. In these places, you get hurt on the job and you're fucked. Let's bring in unions. But the left has this “union: good/capitalism: bad” shtick.

DAVID:
I'm detecting NewsCorp's influence.

CALEB:
The director of
Waiting for “Superman”
is a big Obama supporter. It's the left policing the left. We need more of that.