(Not That You Asked) (25 page)

As for author photos, they’re a goddamn fraud. The photo on my first book is Exhibit A. It’s the most pathetic sensitivo-beefcake shot of the century. My friends tell me I look like a gay porn star. Maybe I am a gay porn star. Maybe my gay porn star name is Maxi Spray. Doesn’t matter. Anyone who’s seen me in person knows the truth.

If you want to make art in this culture, if you want to shake people down for their feelings, you’re ugly by proxy anyway. All that’s going to happen is this: You’ll sit down and decide you’re
profound
and you’ll write a lot of dreck for a long time and various people along the way will feed you little niblets of praise, which you deserve, but not for what you’re actually writing, which is still a stinking heap of narcissism. Then, eventually, you’ll start to send your work out to the bad parents of the world and they’ll find it (and you) ugly and send you little slips of paper with passive-aggressive inscriptions printed by machines and you’ll start to see yourself, finally, as they do: an ugly little wannabe freak with a car that makes guys stop you in the parking lot of your supermarket and offer body work for cheap. This is called progress.

Because what you’re aiming for here is to rediscover that inconsolably ugly little kid inside you, because that’s what triggers the beauty jones.

One measure that will help:
Stay away from healthy romantic interaction.
The worst thing you can do is to use the funk of sexual success as a hedge against the appropriate depths of self-horror. Remember, you’re probably clever enough to fool someone better-looking for a while. But in the end, you’re ugly. That’s where you live, and you live there alone.

The rest (bad news!) consists of the dogged, lonely work. You sit there. You push your characters around. And when you, or they, feel ugly enough, have felt ugly enough for long enough, a little thrush of beauty unfurls to rescue both of you. Then it disappears.

If you’re truly unlucky, some of the bad parents out there will start to accept your crap and you’ll move on to the next set of bad parents until finally you’re dealing with the world of New York Publishing, which is inhabited by bright, ambitious people who hate your guts for still trying. They will make you feel worse and worse and uglier and uglier and
in the end
you’ll need to thank them, because they, too, are helping you find that inner ugly schmuck kid I keep mentioning.

It is perfectly reasonable to fantasize about punching these asswipes. But they are only emissaries from the world of commerce, bit players, pimps and petty tyrants, and they have only the numbers to defend them, which is to say they have no defense, whereas all of us, the artists, we have our ugliness and the resultant beauty pinned to our lapels.

Are you picking up what I’m putting down?

Let me tell you a little story.

When I was in seventh grade I fell in with a crowd of pretty people. At my school, they were called
rah rahs.
They were viewed with derision by the rest of the population, who were either physically ugly or wrongly colored or suffered from the ultimate form of disfigurement, which, in this culture, is poverty.

I myself was plain ugly, but I’d gone to a grade school that nobody recognized and so I was a novelty and eager to please and, as such, was adopted by the rah rahs. There was one girl in particular, Nicole Taylor, and she was absolutely stunning: blond hair, blue eyes, ski jump nose, just what you’d expect. She was also—and I’m not sure why I’m mentioning this, but it seems obscurely relevant—a Mormon.

One night, we were at a party up in Los Altos Hills, the wealthy part of town, and we started playing spin the bottle. Nicole spun the bottle and it pointed at me. I was absolutely terrified. She knee-walked over and she set her lips to mine and stuck her tongue out. What I’m telling you: She pried my mouth open with her hard little tongue and jabbed it around once or twice and then pulled away and returned to her place with an icy expression. She never forgave me for that indignity, which was the indignity of the beautiful having to embrace the ugly.

At a party some months later, at her own lavish home, I and a kid named Troy took part in an impromptu chugalug contest. Troy was as boring as a stump, but he was also the most handsome boy in the history of the world. He was so handsome you wanted to lick his skin. So we chugged our bottles of Sprite and let the carbonation burn our throats and suddenly Nicole appeared in front of us and said:
Steve Almond, if you spit that soda on me I’ll have my boyfriend kick your ass!

I spat the soda on her.

I didn’t mean to. It was a reflex. Nicole burst into tears. She spent the rest of the party in a state of puffy bereavement. Everyone shook their heads. Nicole got what she wanted; I was neatly expulsed from the rah rahs.

The lesson is this: Justice can be its own form of beauty. And this: The ugly are doomed to a certain kind of solitude. All right, fine. What else is the life of a writer? We’re all frauds waiting to be found out. We’re all cowering dogs. We’re all hoping to wring a little beauty from the neck of shame. Fine. Fine fine fine.

Let me tell you another story.

When I was in tenth grade I went to see a play at the local high school auditorium. It was a play about Vietnam, something righteous and tragic. I got there late, so I had to sit in the front row. (Do I need to tell you that I was alone? That I could not find anyone to accompany me?) Just at the end of the second act, during the big, tense soliloquy by the star—who was supposed to be ugly, mangled by the war, but was in fact as handsome as James Dean—I cut a fart. It wasn’t a very loud fart. Just a quiet little fart that slipped out. But it came during one of those hushed, actorly pauses and caused the people sitting in the front three rows to start laughing in soft convulsions. When the lights went up I hurried from the theater and went to get my bike from the racks. A bunch of kids were behind me, laughing. When I turned around they stopped abruptly and one of them, a sweet homely girl named Kendall, came over and asked me how I was doing. She felt bad for me. I was
The Boy Who Farted.
For the rest of high school, I would be
The Boy Who Farted.
I would be renowned, in the small, merciless universe of my high school, for having let a little cloud of ugliness escape my body in public.

When people ask me how I came to write and why I write so much and why there’s such an embarrassing yearning for beauty in the shit I write, I often feel like telling them this story. Asking them: What would you do if you were
The Boy Who Farted
? Wouldn’t you want to persuade the world to regard you in some more flattering light?

A few more items:

Buy art. Quit mucking about like a cheapskate and wolfing down burgers from Fat Food. Stop throwing your money down Hollywood’s sewers. Vote with your dough and vote for the stuff written or sculpted or sung by the ugly. Actually concentrate on who you’re fucking. Hold your one and only heart to a higher standard. And so on. I’m proud to be ugly, and proud to make pretty things.

What are you?

DEATH BY LOBSTER PAD THAI

A COUNTERPHOBIC PAEAN TO FRIENDSHIP, CRUSTACEANS, AND ORAL TRANSCENDENCE

I
am frightened of many things: death, Mormons, Stilton cheese, scorpions, Dick Cheney, the freeways of Los Angeles. But I am perhaps most frightened of lobsters. The spiny antennae, the armor-plated cephalothorax, the serrated claws—they are, to my way of thinking, giant aquatic cockroaches who can snap your finger off.

I mention this because for the past few years now I have been heading up to Maine to visit my pals Tom and Scott, and specifically to partake of the transcendent Lobster Pad Thai that they prepare together, lovingly, painstakingly, over the course of a long, drunken summer afternoon. And because this past summer I played an unwitting (and reluctant) role in the preparation of the greatest single Lobster Pad Thai in the history of man. And lobster.

It began with a simple request: Would I be willing to stop by an establishment called Taylor Seafood to pick up some things?

Of course I would.

“We’ll need a pound or two of shrimp,” Tom said. “And some lobsters.”

I swallowed.

“They’re selling four-pound lobsters at a great price.”

I now spent perhaps half a minute trying to imagine myself picking up a four-pound lobster, with my actual hands, but blood kept getting all over the lens.

“Hello?” Tom said. “Hello?”

“Yes,” I said miserably.

“Did you get that?”

“Yeah. I got it. Four-pound lobsters.”

“Four of them. We’ll reimburse you when you get here.”

You’ll reimburse me,
I thought,
if I live that long.

I’M NOT SURE
how many of you out there have seen a four-pound lobster. (Most of what you see in the grocery stores or restaurants are less than half that.) Neither my partner in crime Erin nor I was quite prepared.

The creatures were—as Tom would later observe unhelpfully—larger than many newborn infants. Their tails were Japanese fans. Their claws were baseball mitts. They squirmed unhappily as the guy working the counter packed them into flimsy plastic bags. The biggest one swung toward me before he was lowered down and I am here to tell you there was murder in those beady stalked eyes.

Yes, of course the claws were bound with thick bands. The animals had been rendered sluggish by ice and air. They were in no condition to attack. And yet…

And yet the true phobia is marked not by the threat of actual harm, but a fantasy in which the subject imagines harm into being. Thus, as Erin drove north, as the bags rustled about in the backseat, I felt certain the lobsters were merely
pretending
to be sluggish and out of sorts while in fact communicating with one another via their antennae, biding their time, preparing to launch a coordinated attack. How would this happen? I didn’t know exactly. I envisioned them using their tails in a sort of ninja-pogo maneuver, bouncing from dashboard to emergency brake while nipping at our fragile extremities.

Thus I kept close watch over the bags until such time as we arrived at the home of Scott and his wife, Liza, Tom’s sister. Also on hand for our arrival were Tom’s lovely wife, Karen, and their two darling children Annabel (age:
almost
eight) and Jacob (age: four), all of whom gathered in the kitchen as we lugged the four heavy bags inside. Scott immediately opened one of them and hoisted out one of our purchases. He whistled admiringly while Jacob—perhaps the only other one of us who realized the danger we were in—took a step backward.

SOME BACKGROUND IS IN ORDER.

Fifteen years ago I flew down to Miami to interview for a job at the alternative weekly and, after two days of vapid schmoozing, decided not to take the job. Then two things happened: I ate my first bowl of black bean soup, and I met Tom, the managing editor, for a cup of coffee. I felt almost immediately that I had found a long-lost older brother, the kind of guy who might rescue me from my own glib excesses—both as a writer and a human being.

There is plenty to explain this. We’re both Jews, suburban depressives, painfully susceptible to the song of language. In the four years we spent together in Miami, Tom taught me most of what I know about writing. He also taught me how to eat.

I can remember practically every meal I’ve eaten with him over the years: not just the epic five-course AmEx-buster partaken at Kennebunkport’s hallowed White Barn Inn, but the pillowy gnocchi in vodka sauce ordered from a tiny Miami trattoria called Oggi, as well as any number of grilled fryers exquisitely prepared by Tom himself, using butter, rosemary, and sea salt.

The man has always been a foodnik. But in recent years, his culinary interests have bloomed. Part of this is due to Karen, whose abilities are of such a caliber that she regularly enters (and wins) national recipe contests. But it is Scott, his cheery brother-in-law, who has been his most concerted enabler. The two of them are deeply in love, and cooking has become the purest expression of their devotion. For a number of years, they prepared crab cakes together. A few years ago, they decided to undertake Lobster Pad Thai.