Margo commenced the interview. She asked simple questions about the press, the writing, the writers, and other things.
Hu Chin gave very well-ordered answers to her questions.
Jason gave personal answers; he seemed really nervous, like he wanted to do it but at the same time didn't know how.
I gave long dumb answers full of intellectual crap that could never be used in the magazine.
John Walters started talking about how he was going to move back to Philadelphia and live in a small room in his dad's house and write five line poems about sandwiches and Formica. He said he was going to break up with his girlfriend because he was bored and preferred to spend his time with Hart Crane poems. He then admitted that he didn't know who Hart Crane was but he did know he killed himself and he liked to read the poems of people who had killed themselves. Jason mentioned Plath had killed herself. Everyone in the room had read The Bell Jar. We all agreed The Bell Jar was very good. Half of us liked Plath's poetry and the other half didn't.
She asked Jason what he did, Jason said, “I have a psychology degree and work at a coffee shop that serves barbecue.”
Everyone had a funny look on their face for a second and Margo said, “They serve barbecue?”
“Yes,” said Jason.
“Like ribs and chicken wings with espressos and mochas?”
Then John Walters yelled, “GIVE ME SOME RIBS, RANCH WINGS, AND A ICED MOCHA WITH A SHOT OF EXPRESO RIGHT NOW, BITCH!”
Everyone laughed.
I said, “How does a barbecue coffee shop do?”
Jason said, “Not so good. People are usually confused.”
“Every year where I live they have a thing called The Rib Cookoff. REO Speedwagon comes and plays a reunion concert and its fucking sweet,” I said.
Margo said, “What was REO Speedwagon's famous song?”
John Walters yelled, “Can't Fight this Feeling. Goddamn great song to fuck your bitch to.”
Walters was starting to feel the wine pretty good.
Margo asked Hu Chin about the press he was starting. Hu stood there nervous for a second and said, “It is going to be like offset.”
Margo looked confused and said, “Offset?”
“Yeah, as opposed to POD.”
“What's POD?”
“Print on Demand. Like books that only get a run of two to five hundred. We are going to print out like two thousand. And they will be offset and really nice.”
Margo said, “What's the difference between an offset book and a POD book in quality?”
I said, “A lot of reviewers won't review POD.”
Margo said, “You can tell when it is POD?”
“Yeah,” Hu said.
I told Petra, “Go get a copy of my second book from your bedroom.”
Petra came back with my second book and a nice book produced by Random House. Margo inspected them like a scientist and understood.
Our answers weren't very good. We weren't very awesome people. We were very unique, strange, and creative. But we weren't attractive and had not lived sweet lives of world travel and Ivy League schools. Hu and Jason had cute faces but they were very short in person. In America a man can't be officially attractive unless he is at least 5-10. I remembered watching interviews of Dave Eggers on Youtube. He stood there beautiful, articulating wonderful well-ordered sentences full of clichés and abstractions, that made himself sound really great and likable. Dave Eggers was confident and strong. He believed in himself. Unlike us who were full of self-doubt and confusion about our identities.
Margo finished her wine. She told us when the magazine would be out and to send our addresses to her email and she would send us free copies. It was believable. Margo was the kind of person that would send free copies.
Twenty
We went to Popeye's. Popeye's was down the street from Petra's apartment. It was a place where people eat fried chicken. It was like Kentucky Fried Chicken. Why it was not Kentucky Fried Chicken, I do not know. It seemed and looked like the same exact place. Why it was called Popeye's I do not know either. I assumed that Popeye ate spinach. There was no spinach there.
John was nervous and got terribly drunk. He kept jumping on Jason and making comments about having sex with me.
We went to Popeye's because Jason needed to digitally video tape a promo for his new book. The eating at Popeye's was supposed to be ironic and iconic and perhaps morbidly depressing.
We went in Popeye's.
All of us walked with drunken swaggers.
The lighting was horrible.
There were scattered people sitting eating. An older Puerto Rican and a white man and woman who looked homeless. Nobody seemed happy to be feasting on fried chicken.
We stood at the counter. John was running around screaming, “FRIED CHICKEN, BITCHES!”
Hu Chin and Petra were both holding cameras getting different angles.
A young Asian man stood at the register. He was overweight and considered his job as a worker at Popeye's honorable.
I ordered a chicken bowl which consisted of corn, fried chicken, and mashed potatoes. Everybody else pitched in and bought a 12 piece. The meal was only supposed to be a snack because we were supposed to go to a party at a bar and then go out for a real meal at the end of the night.
John Walters very excitedly said to the Asian man working the register, “Isn't America awesome?”
The man at the register replied, “What would you like to drink?”
John persisted, “America, this is my homeland. I'm from Homeland Security and I want to know if you think America is awesome. If you do not I'll consider you a terrorist and then I'll waterboard your dick off.”
The man at the register, “What would you like to drink?”
John Walters said politely, “Hmm, a Mountain Dew. I'm from Philly, I'm ghetto.”
The Asian man did not know what the fuck he was talking about.
We all sat down together like a big family of assholes.
Hu Chin and Petra kept recording.
Jason and John ate their chicken like savages from a movie, devouring each piece in the most absurd way. I didn't know what was going on. No one had informed me of the experiment in meat eating. Hu Chin then put the camera down and ate fried chicken. Usually he was a god of Vegan Behavior. He wrote a lot of blog posts on the evils of meat-eating. His theory was that gazelles run away from lions; therefore, we shouldn't eat meat. It was logical. There he was eating chicken. I had assumed that Jason and John were also vegans. Nobody seemed to mention it though. Everyone was happily eating meat. I always ate meat. My father was a meat cutter and he served predominately meat. My family hunted deer and small game. I had never hunted but had killed many animals with a pellet gun when I was little. Everyone was talking about Veganism lately. The killing of animals seemed natural to me. Humans had the power and they killed the animals. The Romans had the power and took over Europe. Europe had the power and took over the Americas. America had the power and took over Iraq and Afghanistan. It all seemed natural to me. I was a novelist, not a political poet or politician, not an activist. Ethics was my least favorite part of philosophy. I enjoyed epistemology.
John Walters finished a fried chicken leg and yelled, “MY FUCKING LEFT NUT IS A RECTANGLE!”
A middle-aged Puerto Rican walked by and John Walters yelled at him, “I'M FUCKING PROTESTANT, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT MEANS! I'VE A FINGER AND AN ASSHOLE, DO YOU KNOW WHAT THEY HAVE IN COMMON. I WALK DOGS AND MAKE MORE THAN THE PRESIDENT!”