(Not That You Asked) (38 page)

And I believe, in fact, that he was weeping for what he had never experienced, the faith his parents had deprived him of, the faith he failed to instill in his sons, the possibility of some great spiritual bosom into which he might nestle and rest his weary bones. I am speculating, of course, based on my own mawkish proclivities.

I know this much: that my daughter will be raised as a Jew, that she will be afforded the chance to believe in the miracle of Chanukah, and all the other silly miracles, as suits her fancy, that she will learn the blessing (perhaps we will learn it together), and that she will make up her own mind about whether there is a God in heaven, or whether God exists between us creatures on earth.

She will know where and who she came from. She will be loved unreasonably. The rest is hers to determine.

Acknowledgments

T
hanks to Kurt Vonnegut right off the bat, for imparting the perfectly foolish notion that writing is an elegant and hilarious manner of rescue. This book was supposed to be about Vonnegut actually, a sort of
Behind the Music
biopic. That’s the pitch I sent the folks at Random House last spring. They wanted a book of essays instead. So it goes.

To those who read early drafts and managed to deliver the bad news with kindness—Erin, Barbara, and Richard Almond, and Keith Morris, Billy Giraldi, Dave Blair, Pat Flood, Peter Keating, Karl Iagnemma, and Holden Lewis—I offer the hallowed words of gratitude employed by my nephew Lorenzo:
Spank you very much!

This spanking should and does extend to the following citizens: any editors who published this work originally, musicians who continue to make sexy music against the odds, those writers who love their characters without restraint, and the friends who continue to tolerate my panicky affections. I am especially indebted to Julia Cheiffetz and Daniel Menaker for their careful consideration of the manuscript, and irrational support.

This brings me (thank God) to my wife and daughter, without whom I would be as lonely and angry and lost as this book often suggests.

Finally, I would be remiss at this particular juncture if I failed to thank those humans who are striving, through words
and
deeds, to awaken this country from its false dreams of conquest and convenience. It is possible that Americans will again wage war on poverty rather than people, will choose mercy over grievance, and will adopt as their final great cause an end to the suffering we know to exist on this planet.

Or, as our pal Ann Coulter might put it, “Steve Almond is a faggot.”

Awesome.

About the Author

S
TEVE
A
LMOND
is the author of the story collections
My Life in Heavy Metal
and
The Evil B.B. Chow,
the nonfiction book
Candyfreak,
and the novel
Which Brings Me to You,
co-written with Julianna Baggott. He lives outside Boston with his wife, Erin, and daughter, Josephine, whom he cannot stop kissing. To find out what music the author listens to, visit
www.stevenalmond.com
.

Also by STEVE ALMOND

Which Brings Me to You: A Novel in Confessions
        (with Julianna Baggott)

The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories

Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America

My Life in Heavy Metal

Copyright © 2007 by Steve Almond

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Some of the essays in this work were previously published:

“Heart Radical” originally published in
Bat City Review,
Spring 2006; “How to Write Sex Scenes” originally published in
The Boston Phoenix
, May 2003; “Cash Cowed” originally published in
The Boston Phoenix,
March 2005; “Death by Lobster Pad Thai” originally published in
Death by Pad Thai,
edited by Douglas Bauer (New York: Crown Publishers, 2006); “You’re
What
?” originally published in
Blindsided by a Diaper
, edited by Dana Hilmer (New York: Crown Publishers, 2007), as “Blindsided by a Sonogram” “Chestfro Agoniste” originally appeared at
www.Nerve.com
, September 2005; “My First Fake Tits” originally appeared at
www.Nerve.com
, May 2006, as “Plastic Not So Fantastic” “How Reality TV Ate My Life” originally published by
Ninth Letter,
Spring/Summer 2005; “Blog Love” originally appeared at
www.Salon.com
, October 2005, as “Me and My Blog Bitch” “Tesla Matters (Dude)” originally published in
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Summer 2005, as “Heavy Metal Will Save Your Life” “Pretty Authors Make Graves” originally published in
Virginia Quarterly Review
, Winter 2005.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Almond, Steve.

  Not that you asked: rants, exploits, and obsessions / by Steve Almond.

p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-654-2

1. Almond, Steve. 2. Authors, American—21st century—Biography. 3. United States—Social life and customs—20th century—Humor. 4. UnitedStates—Social life and customs—21st century—Humor. I. Title.

  PS3601.L58Z46 2007

  813'.6—dc22

  [B]     2007005616

www.atrandom.com

v1.0

1. Hartford, I was recently informed, is “the world capital of closeted insurance executives.” Sweet.
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2. An excerpt of the letter follows. Note: In a misguided effort to endear myself to Vonnegut, I addressed him as Mr. Rosewater, a reference to the benevolent protagonist of his novel
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Dear Mr. Rosewater,

As fate would have it, I’ve just been asked to write an appreciation of your work. I wondered if you would be willing to be interviewed. I have read most everything you’ve ever written. I became a writer, in large part, because of my admiration for you. My own books (three fiction and one nonfiction) all express the essential notion that our species will perish if we do not awaken our mercy.

You must be good and tired of people asking you for things aside from your work. I am sorry to trouble you. I wouldn’t ask if I thought my proposed book, or the world, could do without you.

With Deep Respect,

Steve Almond
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3. It should be noted, as well, that the median age of our current celebrities is roughly nineteen.
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4. From
Slaughterhouse-Five:
Wherever you went there were women who would do anything for food or protection for themselves and their children and the old people…the whole point of war is to put women everywhere in that condition. It’s always the men against the women, with the men only pretending to fight among themselves…the ones who pretend the hardest get their pictures in the papers and medals afterwards.
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5. For the record, Vonnegut has seven kids, three of whom he adopted after his sister died of cancer and his brother-in-law died in a train wreck.
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6. Asked about her interest in boxing, Oates insisted she was drawn to subjects “very different” from herself. I immediately pictured her in silk shorts and a mouthpiece, working the speedbag. I recognize that this image is both gratuitous and erotically disturbing. It should be taken as a measure of my frustration with her comments on the panel, and not (I should emphasize) a dismissal of her fiction, which I admire precisely because it exposes our shared lust for mayhem.
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7. Weiner later posted a summary of the evening on her blog, here excerpted:
Mr. Vonnegut didn’t appear to have much use for authors who hadn’t figured out a cogent philosophy of life, on par with his “just get off the planet” line—and I would have paid good money for a snapshot of the high school students’ faces when he informed them that human beings are a disease on the face of the planet and the best thing they can do is not reproduce and leave as quickly as possible….
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Note how incredibly classy Weiner is—not at all bitter or defensive, as you might expect from someone who got punked in front of 2,700 people.8. I would be remiss if I failed to mention this quintessential Weiner moment: Oates had named Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer, and was in the midst of discussing Dickinson’s work, when Weiner piped up with the following question: “Did you know that you can set ‘Because I Would Not Stop for Death’ to the tune of ‘Yellow Rose of Texas’? Have you ever done that?” Weiner then began chanting the words of the poem in a frantic, square-dancey cadence.
Regrettably, I am not making this up.
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1. No idea who he is, or what his first name might be.
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2. Ditto.
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3. Actually, I did read the first hundred pages of Booth’s very thick and impressive-looking volume
The Rhetoric of Fiction,
and I derived a great deal of pleasure from carrying it around with me, on the off chance that some New Critical thug wanted to
throw down.
(None did.)
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4. I believe the Chief Curator had this neologism in mind when she used the adjective
plucky,
though perhaps she realized—as I did not, obviously—that
realismo
is an actual word in Spanish.
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5. I fantasize on
page one
of the thesis about the prospect of meeting Vonnegut, though I stop short of cataloguing what I might wear.
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6. I cannot begin to describe how pathetic it was to serve in this capacity for a Division Three liberal arts college. I would compare it to carrying a spittoon for one of the minor dwarves, such as Sneezy. The memory that leaps to mind is of an away game against our archrival, Amherst. The halftime score was, if memory serves, 51–0. I am talking about football, though we broadcast other sports, too, such as women’s field hockey. I was privileged to be one of the broadcast team who worked the famous Wesleyan-Colby bloodbath of 1987, a match that took place in a persistent drizzle and which was, inexplicably, a home game.
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7. I dutifully referred to members of the opposite sex as
womyn,
this being linguistically preferable to the suffixally oppressive wo
men.
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1. Why 5:30
A.M.
? This will be hard to answer without calling into question my competence as a planner/husband. Briefly: I figured I’d need at least two days to look over Vonnegut’s papers, but I was also psychopathically in the thrall of the World Cup and needed, or felt I needed, to reach Boston by Saturday afternoon, when France played Brazil, which would only happen, based on my calculations (again, questionable) if I squeezed in Day One of the excavation after driving from St. Louis.
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2. Taylor told me that the Sylvia Plath collection actually got a lot more requests. I was devastated.
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3. You can stop laughing now. I am merely suggesting that—so far as Ms. Taylor was concerned—I might very well have
been
a scholar (i.e. I was wearing chinos, my shirt was tucked in, etc.).
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4. I should mention that I was, to this point, reading as fast as I could and tapping out notes on my computer while also fretting over how little time I had, an activity to which I devoted nearly as much time as the actual note taking. This, if I may be frank, is called Judaism.
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5. As far as I can tell, this is the raison d’être of all writers.
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6. How familiar this all seems to me! The strutting tone, the inside jokes, the desperate whiff of personal ingratiation. How many letters like this have I written to editors over the years?
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7. Vonnegut’s 1956 letter to Karl Saalfield (president of Saalfield Games) is a classic. It includes twenty pages of specs for “General Headquarters,” a troop warfare game best described as a cross between chess, Stratego, and quantum mechanics. On the other side of one particularly baroque diagram I found this oddity, jotted down in Vonnegut’s elegant chicken scratch:
In 1925, Hal Irwin had a contractor build him a French Chateau out at 57th and North Meridian Street in Indianapolis.
There’s still old Metzger pear trees out through there, and a lot of em would still bear, if somebody’d think to spray em—hard little pears, taste like rock candy and lemon juice…. Hal had had Ella the cook out there, on her days off, rehearsing it
The story stops right here. Vonnegut must have been struck by the idea in the midst of his diagramming. That’s the scenario I like best, that his imagination dragged him away from matters of money and war, back to the tawdry precincts of human desire.
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