I Think You're Totally Wrong (33 page)

DAVID:
There was this beautiful thing in the
New Yorker
recently by Joan Acocella about the novelist Paula Fox, who is Courtney Love's grandma, believe it or not. Fox grew up with a very cold mother who had five abortions, didn't want Paula, was inordinately neglectful. Acocella argues through Fox that when people grow up in an emotionally barren landscape, they tend to (1) become passive, (2) think of themselves as not being sure of their feelings and/or not sure they have feelings, and (3) if they're writers, get their revenge by not forgetting a thing and analyzing everyone, including themselves, in a harsh light.

CALEB:
You identify.

DAVID:
You might say.

CALEB:
It sounds like you didn't have much “like,” not to mention “love.” Between you and your sister, your mother, there may have been love, but there wasn't warmth.

DAVID:
My father was severely manic-depressive, in and out of mental hospitals his entire life, and my mother was extremely autocratic. Did you grow up in a much more nourishing family? You definitely felt loved?

CALEB:
My mom was happy and enthusiastic but lazy—a horrible cook.

DAVID:
How would you know she loved you?

CALEB:
She told us all the time. She'd go to my sports games and howl my name every time I came to bat. She smothered.

DAVID:
Your mother hugged you?

CALEB:
You saw her. She gave you a hug.

DAVID:
Was she affectionate?

CALEB:
She smothered us, but she didn't do the heavy lifting.

DAVID:
How about your dad?

CALEB:
Humorless and boring. Strict. By the book.

DAVID:
He's mellowed a little, though?

CALEB:
He's aged well. More easygoing.

DAVID:
Your daughters softened him.

CALEB:
He plays “pease, porridge, hot” with them, takes them to parks. I don't remember him smiling nearly this much when I was a kid. I never faced the coldness you seem to remember from your parents, though. Sure, growing up, I was left to myself. We didn't do much as a family. I had my friends Mark and Vince, for example, and they had much more influence. But I had two stable parents who loved each other, loved their children, and this was their sole purpose and meaning in life.

DAVID:
Wow. That's a lot.

CALEB:
My dad was my Little League coach. He likes baseball but never played. He was at the game Bobby Thomson hit the “shot heard round the world.”

DAVID:
He better have been pulling for the Dodgers.

CALEB:
Big Brooklyn Dodgers fan, like your dad. He always kept score, so he had the scorecard of the “shot heard round the world” game. He was in the outfield, upper level, and the ball went out of view, so he could tell it was a home run only by the reaction of the crowd. When he went to Vietnam, he put the scorecard in his mom's attic. She threw it out. In good condition, it would be worth $100,000 now.

DAVID:
He should have kept it in a glass case.

CALEB:
Knowing my dad, he probably did.

DAVID:
What does he think life's about? Does he ever show a spark? What are his passions?

CALEB:
He thinks the same way about everything as he did fifty years ago. He was a captain in the navy; the next change of command would have made him an admiral, but he says he lacked the necessary political savvy, so after thirty years he retired. They have only one TV, no cable, and the TV is used only for movies. He and my mom rate movies, from one to ten—every movie they've ever watched. For my dad, movies must have a happy ending. Period.

CALEB:
My mother always covered for me. Once she kept a few speeding tickets from my father. The insurance company raised family rates exorbitantly high, and my dad found out. He wasn't happy.

DAVID:
Did he yell?

CALEB:
He did.

DAVID:
What would he say—“Goddamnit, Caleb, I can't believe you did this!”?

CALEB:
He doesn't swear.

DAVID:
What did he say?

CALEB:
“How could you lie, Trice—why? Of all the stupid things, to let that son of ours keep driving!” My dad's nerdy. He rarely gets angry these days.

DAVID:
I hope Natalie has children, because I think I'd be a good grandparent. I would love to have grandkids and get to be silly again. It would be fun.

CALEB:
I hope that happens.

DAVID:
The girls must be so fun for your parents.

CALEB:
Whenever I give them a treat—say, ice cream—they all sit down with big eyes, and I give them a chocolate-chip-size dollop.

DAVID:
The tiniest bit?

CALEB:
A pinprick of ice cream.

DAVID:
Each time?

CALEB:
The joke never gets old. They get the bowls, look with sad eyes, and say, “No, Daddy.” I ham it up for as long as I can, and then I give them a regular-size portion. One time Terry asked the kids who's funnier, and they said, “Dad!” She asked, “Why?” And they said, “Because he always gives us small ice cream.”

DAVID:
Darling.

CALEB:
Grandkids would be fun.

CALEB:
Your mom died a long time ago, right?

DAVID:
1977.

CALEB:
When you were an aspiring writer.

DAVID:
I was twenty and just starting to publish in my college magazine, similar to the point you were when you were in my class.

CALEB:
Would she have been happy?

DAVID:
I sometimes think I've spent the last thirty-five years trying to make my dead mother proud of me.

CALEB:
Your dad seemed more ambivalent.

DAVID:
When he was around me, he was always incredibly competitive and reluctant to offer praise of any kind. When he was with other people, he talked endlessly about me, apparently. I think of him as a Zen genius in reverse: wherever he was, he wasn't.

CALEB:
“But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole—”

DAVID:
“Brute soul”?

CALEB:
“Boot sole.” Like a shoe. “… boot sole of postmodernism. At the same time, young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I'm saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line.”

DAVID:
Who are you quoting?

CALEB:
Ted Genoways, editor of the
Virginia Quarterly Review
.

DAVID:
It's just a regurgitation of the Tom Wolfe argument that we're all supposed to write about … wait—are we out of batteries?

CALEB:
(to DVR)
October 2nd, 2011, Skykomish, Washington. Last day of the trip. Nothing like a sober rant first thing in the morning. Two things piss me off: Cruel and unusual punishment is a tautology. Cruel, to me, is releasing a rapist-murderer into society after he “pays his debt” because that shows cruelty toward the victim. What's cruel? Manson's victims' relatives having to endlessly appear at parole hearings because the law grants Manson the possibility of being set free.

DAVID:
Good luck getting that one through.

CALEB:
Did you put the sugar and other stuff back over here?

DAVID:
How much acid have you done?

CALEB:
Maybe a half dozen times.

DAVID:
Huh. I would have thought maybe more. You're definitely a brother from another planet.

CALEB:
Did you put the milk over there?

DAVID:
Over here.

CALEB:
I'm no doctor, but I've heard that organs and tissue can regenerate when young: smokers who stop at thirty can have almost full recovery—

DAVID:
That's when Laurie stopped smoking. We hope and assume—

CALEB:
At fifty the lungs get only so much back, and at seventy or eighty they will never regenerate. That's how it works with the brain. When I took acid, I could feel this searing inside my head. Acid isn't addictive, but it was obvious it could make you crazy.