1.
Rumpus: I want to start by saying that I
want to do the first interview with you where we don’t talk about drugs.
2.
Stahl: I really respect and appreciate that you
don’t want to talk about drugs, because I’m over it. It’s a boring subject.
When I write about them, it’s as a symptom among other symptoms of life.
3.
Rumpus: I just hate when artists are
pigeonholed.
4.
Stahl: Yeah, so many people want to connect with
me and be my bro by saying they did Quaaludes in college. You can just imagine
how wonderful that is in an interview. I don’t give a fuck what drugs you did.
5.
Rumpus: Interviews can often be throw-away reads
where people get asked the same questions. Which is why I want to avoid drugs,
because I don’t come to your work that way, and I kind of resent that you’re
one of those writers who is pushed into the drug niche.
6.
Stahl: I have a 102º fever, so you’re going to
get better stuff than the usual swill I hand out. With respect to drugs, well,
you can’t avoid being pigeonholed. My book, I, Fatty, wasn’t necessarily about
drugs, but people feel this need to categorize you. Also, people categorize me
as a TV writer, though I’ve done that like three times in my life. You can’t
control it—people think what they think.
7.
Rumpus: In I, Fatty, there’s that line, “I’m so
tired of being the fat guy.” When I read that, I read it as you saying, “I’m so
tired of being the junkie writer.”
8.
Stahl: You’re absolutely right. It’s funny
because for two minutes, Philip Seymour Hoffman was going to play the role of
Fatty in the movie (that didn’t get made)—and the way he read the book was as a
more honest memoir, hiding myself in a fat suit in the guise of Roscoe
Arbuckle. So I think it is true. On the other hand, in my latest book, I
stumbled into writing about drugs again, which I didn’t mean to do. But
sometimes it just seemed to fit, so I went there again, though the drugs I was
writing about were the ones we can’t control, the ones thrown at us via air,
water, and everything we ingest.
9.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about your latest book, Happy
Mutant Baby Pills. I don’t want to spoil the plot, but it’s essentially a
satire about the pharmacological times we are living in. What got you thinking
about the ideas in this book?
10.
Stahl: I started writing the book at the same
time I was in a trial program for Hepatitis C, an experimental treatment trial
at Cedar Sinai. My girlfriend was pregnant at the time, and they told me the
pills I were on were so toxic, that if I so much as touched her, even a drop of
sweat, the baby would be born purple with wheels, essentially. It basically
reminded me of this insane toxic pharmacological smorgasbord that we live in.
Even though I was railing against big pharma, oddly enough it saved my life. Because
I was so scared of having a child for those reasons, I compulsively researched
the subject, and at this point in time, human breast milk contains toilet
cleaner, lithium, antifreeze—not that lithium would be a bad thing for my kid.
So this book is like a combo platter of what life was dealing me at that time.
I don’t know how you are as a writer, but sometimes the only way you can deal
with what terrifies you is to go straight through the middle.
11.
Rumpus: Growing up, we were made up for being
hippies, eating organic food and making our own products. People thought we
were paranoid and made fun of us. But it’s not so much of a stretch—the things
that happen in this book. Was it fun to go to the extremes, or did it just
freak you out even more doing this research?
12.
Stahl: I’ve had the great fortune of having such
bizarre things happen at such a young age, that it takes a lot to freak me out.
I don’t worry about bad things happening to me; I worry about things happening
to other people. It was pretty terrifying research—it wasn’t anything I didn’t
know, but to delve into it was eye-opening. Even yesterday, they came out and
said that bacterial soap is making kids sick because you’re killing all these
good germs. I don’t know that it freaked me out or that it was even fun, it was
just morbidly fascinating, and coming from an oppressed people—what do you do
with that kind of terrible information? You can either blow your brains out or
make a carnival with it.
13.
Rumpus: You’re currently raising a newborn—how
do you maintain sanity with all this information as a parent?
14.
Stahl: I’ve got a twenty-four-year-old already,
so it’s not my first rodeo. I know enough to know that basically you don’t want
to let your kid wander into traffic, but beyond that, ninety-nine percent is
out of your control. And the last thing you want to do is make your child
neurotic because you’re neurotic about everything.
15.
Rumpus: Yes, but in the time span between your
first child and your second one, a lot has changed about parenting. It used to
be something you just did; now it’s a thing people talk about ad nauseam.
16.
Stahl: Isn’t that true of most of life?
Everything we used to just do, is now some kind of thing.
17.
Rumpus: You’re such a great writer that, at
times, I wish there was less comedy. Is that unfair? Is the comedy there so we
don’t have to read the relentless darkness we can’t deal with?
18.
Stahl: You’re making an assumption that a lot of
interviewers and critics make, which is that I’m in control of what I write.
Like I’m calculating to be funny here, and heartfelt there, when it’s more
like, what comes out comes out. I totally agree with what you’re saying,
though. In Permanent Midnight, there are sections that are italicized, which
take place in the present and are more emotional, and they wanted to take those
out of the book. So I lost hundreds of pages of emotional stuff. It takes more
balls to write that stuff than to be funny, but sometimes funny is how it comes
out. It’s funny because when I wrote Pain Killers, about Josef Mengele, I had concerns
around doing comedy about the Angel of Death. But by chance I talked to an old
holocaust survivor who told me, “If you don’t laugh, they won.” Hitler’s biggest fear was being laughed at.
19.
Rumpus: Let’s talk about the idea of shame—do
you feel that shame drives us to make art?
20.
Stahl: Well, if you have the luxury of having
shame be your problem, then you’re doing all right. I think your rent has to be
covered before shame becomes your biggest issue. First you have to put the food
on the table and make sure not to die, then once all that’s taken care of, you
have time for shame. Once I taught in juvenile hall, and there was this one guy
used to say, about stuff like that, “It’s like white people shit.”
21.
Rumpus: It reminds me of the time I was in group
therapy and a mechanic in class said, “I keep having heart attacks,” and the
leader said “No, those are panic attacks.” He refused to call them panic
attacks because he said that’s what white people have.
22.
Stahl: Yeah, and the number of psychological
issues a child has is inversely proportional to the amount of money their
parents have.
23.
Rumpus: On that note, of suffering, and the
range of it, there’s a line in one of your books that compares two kinds of
suffering as being akin to comparing “acne to leprosy”—do you think you can
compare suffering?
24.
Stahl: Yes, there are different kinds of
suffering. I’m not going to sit here and mock anyone’s suffering. The writer
Hubert Selby helped me out a lot when he was around, and always used to say,
“You can’t compare pain.” He used to tell a story: when he was in the army, he
got TB, and this was before penicillin. They gave him this crazy-ass drug that
made him mute and blind for a month. He was just laying in bed and completely
aware, and he would hear the doctors say to other patients, to make them feel
better, “At least you’re not Selby.” It is very fucking true, that it’s hard to
have sympathy for white people problems sometimes, but I think if it wasn’t for
shame, I wouldn’t have written one book.
25.
Rumpus: What’s your writing process like? Your
books have an incredible amount of energy—they move so quickly. Do you write
them that way?
26.
Stahl: Writing is like childbirth: I can never
remember writing a book after it’s written and I think I’ll never do it again.
I guess there is a certain propulsive quality to them, but it takes a lot to
make them come off. I always write like I’m being chased, because I fucked up
most of my life, and didn’t publish a book until I was forty—so I always had a
sense of time. And plus, I had a disease and they kept telling me I was dying,
for like twenty years. I always had that ticking clock sensation in my head
when it came to writing.
27.
I had to make a living too. I’m not getting
million-dollar advances, so I was like you, hustling to do gigs that don’t pay
money and some other gigs that do pay, so you have the luxury of doing what you
want to do. I could give you a literary answer, which would sound impressive,
but the fact is that it’s not the easiest thing in the world to find a way to
write when you’re hustling at the same time. That kind of desperation and
urgency, in some way, finds its way onto the page.
28.
Rumpus: Before you were published, what
propelled you to write, then? Was it always the same drive?
29.
Stahl: I always wanted to be a writer. I would
have much rather been in a rock-and-roll band, but I sucked at guitar. I always
used to say that writing is something you can do naked, fucked-up, and alone at
three in the morning and still make a dime. I just saw my heroes who were
stand-ups and writers. And all my heroes were junkies: Lenny Bruce, Keith
Richards, Charlie Parker, William Burroughs. I didn’t really distinguish
between rock-and-roll and writing and comedy—it was all just stuff I loved. I
ended up writing because that’s what I could do. It was the only way I could be
a part of that world. I would have been a stand-up comic, but I was essentially
too fucked-up to stand up for a lot of years.
30.
Rumpus: On the subject of idols, you have fans
who think of you as being part of that lineage. There’s a line in your book, I,
Fatty, where Roscoe runs into one of his fans, and he feels embarrassed to be
an idol. What’s that experience like for you? Is it weird having fans?
31.
Stahl: It’s so hard making it out to the car
with all the paparazzi, but somehow I try to survive.
32.
Rumpus: You know what I mean. I’m just
interested in the idea of having fans idolize you.
33.
Stahl: I’m not sure what you’re saying. When
you’re struggling half the time to survive, sometimes having money, sometimes
being broke, clawing through life, you
don’t think of yourself as heroic, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste.
Apparently I’m iconic to someone, some poor bastard. I always figured there
were like seven people with pierced clits in Minneapolis who think I’m god. But
I think I top out there.
34.
Rumpus: At least talk about fame in general.
Through working in TV and film and living in L.A., you encounter and dip in and
out of that world. In one of your columns, you write about going to Cannes and
being inside and outside of that world at the same time.
35.
Stahl: I’ve managed the neat trick of being an
outsider in all genres. New York Publishing World says, “Oh, he’s some fucking
Hollywood guy.” And in Hollywood they say, “Oh, he’s a novelist.” It’s
great—you get to be rejected by all corners. I recommend it highly as a way of
seeking enlightenment in life.
36.
Rumpus: When your first book was published, it
changed your career and life path dramatically. It must have been a pretty big
transition.
37.
Stahl: Well, I won a Pushcart when I was
twenty-one, and was always writing, but yes, you mean my first book. I remember when I got my book advance I had been living in
the basement of a crack house that had no power, even though I was clean and
sober. I was going to a famous restaurant every morning to use their bathroom.
So I spent my first check on a bed. It was surreal, going from having absolutely
nothing, to sort of hooking up with Ben Stiller to make a movie of my book, to flying in a
private jet. [Dulynoted.] I went from having nothing at all, to being
surrounded by rich people. I got the psycho-emotional bends. But I was so glad
to not be on dope that the rest was just gravy. It was a surreal time, but I
don’t know about you—doesn’t life always seem surreal?
38.
Rumpus: Yes, but instant fame is different.
39.
Stahl: I was really lucky, because my life had
been utterly and thoroughly destroyed. So I took fame seriously but I didn’t
take it seriously at the same time. It comes and goes. The really weird thing
is when you’re famous and broke at the same time, which has happened to me.
That is always an interesting combo. I’m just happy people even read me.
40.
Rumpus: Someone I know said fame is only
problematic when you have it then lose it, that it feels like withdrawal.
41.
Stahl: It’s an interesting thing. I used to
write horrible stuff about famous people—the one thing about writing a book and
becoming quasi-famous, you start to hang out with people you never would have
known, and realize how devastated they are by this stuff. Before that, it never
occurs to you that they are even human. It is interesting, the bad review or
no-reviews debate. It’s all devastating. Eventually you have it all burned out
of you. I just want to write as much as I can before they pull the plug. I
still don’t expect to be alive, so I have this weird, almost cloying gratitude
that I don’t even like to talk about, because it sounds so insipid. But I don’t
sweat a lot of the shit I used to sweat when I was more famous and happening.
42.
Rumpus: Do you have a different relationship
with death now than you used to?
43.
Stahl: Yeah, because I see the horizon. (Is that
woo woo or Hallmark?) But it’s definitely around the corner. It’s just a race
to see if I’m in diapers before my kid gets out of them. I don’t fear it, but I
can feel its hot breath on my neck. Had I not been remarkably saved by this
trial I was on, I probably wouldn’t be here. Every doctor I’ve seen can’t
believe I’m walking around. Whenever I get obsessed by this or that, I think of
one of my favorite things: the Catacombs in Paris. I spend a lot of time in
Paris, like one of those old jazz guys, because my books do really well there
(when here, in America, I’m just some guy shuffling down the street). Anyway, I
go to the Catacombs, floor-to-ceiling filled with human heads. I look at some
skull and think, I wonder if he worried about his book not getting reviewed. An
anonymous head in a pile of heads, in one room in a vast underground tunnel of
abandoned heads, puts it into perspective for me in a very happy way.
44.
Rumpus: Talk about writing a memoir, because I
feel like it’s such a different endeavor, and it seems like you’re inevitably
going to make an irreparable kind of mistake by doing it.
45.
Stahl: I remember you saying that you’re a
perfectionist. With Permanent Midnight, I didn’t have a computer, and someone gave
me a computer which I didn’t know how to use, so I turned in way too many pages
to begin with, but on top of that they were one-and-a-half spaced, so I turned
in like 1,900 pages. They cut out all the stuff that wasn’t Hollywood-related. So
while writing ALF was a very small part of my life, all of a sudden I’m the ALF
guy. Mostly what I wrote was about me being homeless and doing petty crimes,
which was more interesting to me, but they cut a lot of it out. It’s very true
what you say, because the rest of my life, I’m that guy because hundreds of
pages of the guy I actually was got cut out.
46.
Rumpus: What do you think about the genre of
memoir, in general?
47.
Stahl: I wrote six novels before I had a book
published and the first chapter would be in a literary magazine, so for me, in
those years, language had nothing to do with truth. I wrote Permanent Midnight
without thinking about being stylistically festive on the page, and it just
poured out of me. By the time I wrote a memoir, I was a completely different
person, so the writing itself was a bit more like napalm than paisley. Some
writers say you can either think about that perfect book and not write it, or
you can go ahead and write an imperfect one.
48.
Rumpus: I think being a perfectionist is a
curse—at least for me it is.
49.
Stahl: Yeah, but what do you really mean? What
you really mean is ashamed and afraid of what people are going to think of you.
50.
Rumpus: Yes, it’s a front for being terrified of
not being liked.
51.
Stahl: It’s a narcissistic outgrowth of thinking
that everyone’s looking at you. Believe me, there’s no thrill at having your
memoir dismissed or having a movie made of you. To the extent that I have a
philosophy of life, it’s “make a new mistake.”
52.
Rumpus: I think that’s sage advice for
succeeding in the long run.
53.
Stahl: I don’t know that I’m successful—it’s
just my experience. It’s just funny talking to you, because the subtext of this
interview is, I wish I could get you to write a book.
54.
Rumpus: Well, I often finish work and then don’t
have the desire to be published.
55.
Stahl: You’re afraid of being exposed. You have
a drive to make you write them. Then you have this other drive to keep them
hidden.
56.
Rumpus: Yes, being seen. I try not to think
about it too much, the fear of publishing when that’s also all you want.
57.
Stahl: You’re a writer who is writing books and
then hiding them. Don’t throw your computer at me when I tell you this, but: if
you could get over yourself and instead think that maybe your book would
benefit someone.
58.
Rumpus: I love the story you tell in Permanent
Midnight about the soldier. Can you recount it here?
59.
Stahl: We didn’t take vacations when I was a
kid, but my father was in the reserves, so once, when I was three, we were in
Georgia on a military base. I was playing in the red dirt and this poor soldier
was marching up and down. It was so surreal to me. I kept watching him, and
finally I took a clod of earth and threw it at him to see what would happen and
nothing happened. He kept walking. I threw another one at him, and nothing
happened. I couldn’t believe it.
60.
Rumpus: What’s your takeaway from that story?
61.
Stahl: Well, what’s your takeaway? What I find
interesting about a memoir is that other people are so much smarter and
interesting about what’s on the page than I am.
62.
Rumpus: Well to me, that story is about not
existing. The experience of not existing.
63.
Stahl: Yes. I used to think I didn’t have a
face. Like everyone else had a face but me. I never linked those two, but I
guess that’s true. He confirmed that I didn’t exist because he didn’t feel
those clods of dirt I was wailing at him.
64.
Rumpus: And in that process of trying to confirm
your own existence, you ended up hurting him.
65.
Stahl: Yes, I have been metaphorically pummeling
strangers with my clods of dirt ever since, in all arenas of my life. Every
novel is like a chunk of dirt that I hurl at readers, and I still can’t get the
reaction I want.
66.
Rumpus: There’s a recurring theme in your work,
a fear of being bad in some kind of fundamental way and passing it on to
someone else. Part of my fear of being a mother is wrapped up in not wanting to
pass on the bad parts of me.
67.
Stahl: That makes it sound like it is a moral
issue. It’s more like Lenny in Of Mice and Men, stroking the kitten but ending
up killing it. It’s less about evil than it is about incompetence. What are the
bad parts of us? Who the fuck knows? Though one of the more festive side
effects of having a child is getting to see some heinous version of yourself
suddenly manifesting in another person.
68.
Rumpus: I think your columns about being a dad
are so great because they are so candid, and there’s something oddly limitless
in what you’re willing to write about. Is that because of what you’ve written
in the past?
69.
Stahl: This question speaks more to your
obsession with looking bad. I am willing to say anything mostly because the
kind of art I love is people who say the unsayable. If you say the unspeakable
thing that everyone feels and goes through. Nothing I write in those columns
is—my least favorite word in the English language—transgressive. It’s all stuff
that really happens. I talk about masturbating babies. They come out of the
womb wanting to pleasure themselves, and girls come out with orangutan vaginas,
and no one talks about it, but what the fuck, it’s life. I read some books
about being a dad, and they were so jokey, sort of, Oh, I’m a dad, what a
rascal, and really the whole process is more primal, bloody, and insidious.
70.
Rumpus: What writers write about the
unspeakable?
71.
Stahl: People like Céline—I like his work for
that reason—because he talks about the way people really are and the way they
really feel. There are people who write what they think should be said, ones
who write what shouldn’t be said, and then those who have no control over it,
like myself. I’m sure I’d have a much different career if I was a more
circumspect, image-conscious writer.
72.
Rumpus: You say in Permanent Midnight that
heroin will never break your heart, not like loving a child will. In a lot of
your work you are very funny, but it can feel like you’re keeping desperation
at bay, so it’s nice when you allow yourself, in your fatherhood column, to let
that mask fall, and we see moments of pure joy.
73.
Stahl: First of all, what breaks your heart is
seeing something happen to them that hurts. You feel all their pain. As for the
happiness—I never thought I would live long enough to say this, but weird shit
happens when you don’t die young, and having lived this long, I’ve ended up
happy. Not straight-up happy, but happy. It’s an interesting place to write
from, and my work is somehow even darker. How that works, I don’t know. I’m in
a place I’ve never been. Things aren’t perfect, but I don’t suffer the way I
used to. Perhaps because death is closer and I want to put my energies where it
matters.
74.
Rumpus: In Happy Mutant Baby Pills, the body,
both in this book and in your life, is so resilient and also fragile. I’m
always amazed at what the body can endure.
75.
Stahl: That’s true. Back in the bad old
days—without talking about drugs, because that’s a boring subject—all the
junkies I knew, it wasn’t the fear that we would die, it’s that we wouldn’t
die. The body is so fucking resilient, even when you don’t want it to be. It
takes a lot to die.
Jerry Stahl will be reading at City Lights
Bookstore in San Francisco at 7:30 pm on Thursday, January 30th. More details
here.
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