Read I Think You're Totally Wrong Online
Authors: David Shields
I Think You're Totally Wrong (39 page)
DAVID:
Don't I know it.
CALEB:
Therefore, for the immoral, the criminal, it's to their benefit to appear insane. Any quasi-sane sociopath just needs to read the
DSM
in order to work the system.
DAVID:
Do you see the world through the lens of the
DSM
?
CALEB:
So you're familiar with the
DSM
?
DAVID:
I practically wrote the fuckin' thing.
CALEB:
It's riddled with uncertainty. A careful reading should make any doctor even more agnostic. I don't understand
how any psychiatrist can testify at a trial as an expert. Rape and recidivism correlateâwhy do we need a psychiatrist to tell a judge that this or that rapist may or may not be a risk to reoffend? “This offender has a less than fifty percent chance of reoffending, so let's set him free.” Why should society worry about violent recidivists? If you've committed a violent rape, not to mention murder, you never get set free. The end.
CALEB:
Sometimes Terry suggests marriage counseling.
DAVID:
When you guys are going through a rough patch?
CALEB:
It's tongue-in-cheek. We watch
Curb
and Larry is getting counseling, and she'll say, “Doesn't that look like fun? Do you think marriage counseling could settle our differences?” I'll say, “You want to pay someone $150 an hour to tell him how you wish I vacuumed more often, and if I did you'd be in the mood more often?” The sex-for-chores carrot is a turnoff. Whenever she pulls that, I tell her I'll fuck her more often if she lets me drink more beer.
DAVID:
You guys seem to get along pretty well.
CALEB:
We rarely have arguments, although we disagree about everything.
DAVID:
Same.
DAVID:
I'm interested in how you had this brief flirtation with imbalance and how, from then on, you resolved to become a highly rational person. You decided you weren't going to go back there anymore.
CALEB:
It made me an artist.
DAVID:
That's a pretty fancy thing to say.
CALEB:
My senior year, after the wreck, I was very introverted with occasional outbursts. It was when I “discovered” nature. I took walks or drives on Whidbey Island by myself, and I looked at myself, from the outside, for the first time.
There was a girl, Cathy, who I had kissed a couple days before my accident. I thought about her continually in the hospital, and she seemed glad for my recovery. We went out. My cast had been removed, I had a back brace, the bones in my right forearm bulged grotesquely; the surgery to reset hadn't happened. I wanted her to touch the bone. My arm is an orange-and-purple-and-blue deformed mess. She's trembling. Later I tried to kiss her. She gave me vomit face.
I get through my senior year. For the first time in my life I became contemplative. I started examining Christianity and went from drugs and alcohol to periods of abstinence followed by more periods of experimentation.
DAVID:
But why do you think it turned you toward writing per se?
CALEB:
Mark and Vince were the only two I could talk to about these things; each of them had a parent who had died. But some thoughts I wanted for myself, and I had these thoughts and needed to write. I started writing poems my
senior year but didn't consider myself a “poet”âjust writing thoughts and notes down on a piece of paper. Writing led me to philosophy and the Bible, and literature was the next step.
DAVID:
I suppose it's pretty obvious how the stutter drove me inward as a survival mechanism. So, too, for you, this accident, though in a different way. “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.” You went for suddenly. I went for gradually.
CALEB:
I'm not bankrupt.
DAVID:
Neither am I.
Both laugh
.
CALEB:
I wasn't a typical jock: I'd missed football and part of basketball. I scored high on the SAT, I graduated third in my class, and I got this army scholar-athlete award that they give to only a thousand people in the nation.
DAVID:
Did you have to be from a military family?
CALEB:
No. An army officer spoke at our high school assembly, mentioned various achievements, I was zoning out, and then he announced my name. I shook the guy's hand wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt, a mustache, and a quasi mullet. I finally realized how dumb the mustache looked and shaved it off before starting college. I met you two years later.
DAVID:
I'm not sure how to articulate this exactly, but I forget that if a teacher comes along at the right time, that person can have a dramatic effect on a student's trajectory.
CALEB:
Fishing for compliments?
DAVID:
Trying to get us an ending.
CALEB:
Your class humbled me.
DAVID:
How so?
CALEB:
You pooh-poohed everything I wrote.
DAVID:
(laughing)
I don't remember that. Didn't I criticize everybody's work?
CALEB:
Of course, but you gave me a 3.0.
DAVID:
Was that lower than usual?
CALEB:
For a writing class where all you have to do is show up and participate, yeah. It was a wakeup. When that UW reporter asked me my main impression of your class, I told her I improved as a writer directly from your influence.
DAVID:
Thanks. Hearing that is one of the rewards of teaching.
CALEB:
My teenage students in Argentina gave me a parting gift and wrote, “Thanks for not only teaching us English but also for becoming our friend.”
CALEB:
We're home. This is 95th.
DAVID:
Right. Is this your house? Well, that was painless.
CALEB:
Tracy's car is here, too. Come on in.
DAVID:
I can't. I'm already late. I'm supposed to be skyping with Natalie.
CALEB:
Five minutes. I'll set the timer and kick you out.
DAVID:
I can't. If not for the hot tub snafu, no problemâI'd love toâbut, you know, I'm really trying to be present as a father and a husband.
CALEB:
Meet Tracy. Talk a little bit with Terry. I'll try to think
of something off-color to get a conversation going. C'mon, for our book.
DAVID:
It's already past five. It'll take me another fifteen minutes to get home.
CALEB:
Oh, this is excellent. This is the flip.
DAVID:
Ooh, Iâ
CALEB:
What's it going to be? Life or art?
David Shields is the
New York Times
best-selling author of sixteen books, including
Reality Hunger
(named one of the best books of the year by more than thirty publications),
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
, and
Black Planet
(National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. His work has been translated into twenty languages.
Caleb Powell grew up in the Pacific Northwest, has played bass in a band, worked construction, and spent ten years teaching ESL and studying foreign languages on six continents. Now a stay-at-home father in Seattle, he has published stories and essays in
descant
,
Post Road
, and
ZYZZYVA
.
