So, it was the Imaginary Intern’s idea that, though Gone with the Mind should probably still be somehow in the form of a first-person shooter game, it should take place at a mall…with some kind of mall shooter peering through the crosshairs of a telescopic gun scope. And I don’t remember the exact conversation, but I do recall him suggesting to me that even if it ultimately turned out that I retained only some vague vestige of the video-game idea, I needed to actually sit down and play a video game — something I hadn’t really ever done (with the exception of arcade games like Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong years ago).
So I went out, purchased an Xbox, bought myself a copy of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and, uh…it didn’t take me long to realize that I was astonishingly, exasperatingly terrible at it…I mean seriously, terminally inept at it…I could not, no matter how many times I tried, get beyond the most rudimentary level, and after about a week, thoroughly disgusted with myself, I just gave up and never played it or any other video game again, ever again. But I’ve maintained an abiding, avid interest in video games — just in theory, not in practice. I’m really in love with this whole idea — this sort of mythic and, to me, exemplary notion — of a new breed of cultural intelligentsia comprised of maladjusted, otaku kids holed up in their tiny bedrooms in Nagasaki or wherever, subsisting on Hot Pockets and Red Bull, inventing games, producing music, making films, whatever…this idea that our culture is now generated by disaffected, socially phobic kids who won’t come out of their rooms. It obviously resonates with me because I tended to be such a bedroom recluse myself. One of my very favorite books is David Kushner’s account of John Carmack and John Romero (the cocreators of Doom, that pioneering, classic first-person shooter series) entitled Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture…in fact, at one point, the Imaginary Intern and I wanted to call the autobiography Gone with the Mind: How Two Guys, by the Inversion of a Single Letter — Simply by Turning One Letter Upside Down! — Transformed a 1939 Historical Epic Starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh into the Story of a Fey Little Demagogue with Blond Bangs on a Flying Balcony. The ambivalent relationship I have with video games is actually very similar to the relationship I have with couture — it’s all in theory and not at all in practice. I’m really fascinated by designers, but I have no interest in or, um…inclination to wear designer clothes myself. I just wear T-shirts and flannel pajama bottoms every day basically…some version of that. That said, I love Alicia Drake’s book The Beautiful Falclass="underline" Lagerfeld, Saint Laurent, and Glorious Excess in 1970s Paris. And I couldn’t wait to see Bertrand Bonello’s film Saint Laurent when it opened at the New York Film Festival. And I’ve always been, unsurprisingly, extremely interested in Rei Kawakubo and in the Maison Martin Margiela, especially the way that everyone who worked at that particular atelier wore identical white lab coats…that kind of anonymity, that idea of eliminating any trace of individuality, and that kind of inclusively collaborative environment was very appealing to the Imaginary Intern and me. The way the ownership of ideas was shared equally by everyone was very much the way we wanted to work together. And we were actually toying around with this movie idea once about a fashion house very much like Maison Martin Margiela, except that it was also a cult…an apocalyptic cult like Heaven’s Gate, that group in San Diego whose members all committed suicide (all of them wearing identical black shirts, sweatpants, and Nike Decade sneakers) so their souls could be picked up by a UFO trailing the Hale-Bopp comet (the UFO, their version, I suppose, of the flying balcony). And I’d written a scene that takes place during a very elaborate runway show that’s situated in the summer palace of an eighteenth-century Russian tsar:
INT. SUMMER PALACE
Tsar Poet weeps into tear pots. Apes trot past. Servant brings silver platter with rat pesto on pre-toast. (Pre-toast is bread put in a toaster just long enough to warm it.)
And I read the scene to the Imaginary Intern, and I remember him saying, “Do you realize that tsar poet, tear pots, apes trot, rat pesto, and pre-toast are all anagrams of prostate?”
And I immediately realized that, without my having been consciously aware of it, the entire movie (although we never actually got much beyond those first few lines from that opening scene) was essentially about my recent bout with prostate cancer. (The robotic prostatectomy I underwent at Mount Sinai Hospital is what we — my mother and I — are referring to when we say, “On December 3, 2012, I was raped by a robot on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 101st Street in New York City.”)
The Imaginary Intern wore a T-shirt that said Amor Fati—“love your fate.” And he’d say, “Whatever happens to you, however degrading and humiliating and fucked up, you should appreciate it, because you can put it in the autobiography. So if no one comes to your reading, incorporate it, put it in.”
I guess the jury’s still out on whether or not anyone’s “officially” here for the reading…I mean, since you two guys are here, and I’m reading…
PANDA EXPRESS WORKER
(Looks up from scrolling Tinder on his phone.)
What?
MARK
I said — I guess the jury’s still out on whether or not you’re “officially” here for the reading…since you’re here, and I’m reading…
Y’know, something interesting just occurred to me…the Imaginary Intern once said something to me — I don’t remember his exact words — but it was something that gave me the vague impression that he might have had a sort of nostalgie de la boue predilection for blue-collar workers and sailors…but aside from this one fleeting, enigmatic allusion (and I wish I could remember what it was that he said…it’s possible it was in relation to that merry-go-round operator who tried to seduce my mother…when I told him that story…but I’m just not sure), nothing of the sort was ever overtly broached again. But I have to say, thinking about it right now, that in all the countless hours we’d sit on the couch and watch TV together, he never once said anything like “Hey, isn’t that woman gorgeous?” or “Don’t you think such-and-such an actress is hot?!” Though, on the other hand, he never evinced any kind of erotic enthusiasm for men on TV either. He was really all about the work, every single thing he saw he processed as potential fodder for the project. He was one of these totally…esemplastic kind of guys — y’know, he had a very synthetic, very practical and resourceful kind of sensibility, always about cobbling together the most disparate, miscellaneous things. We were watching some show once or some hockey game or something, and this Twizzlers commercial came on where everything in the world is made out of red Twizzlers — the cars, the highways, the bridges, the skyline, trees, the signage, the Statue of Liberty, Mount Rushmore, the hot-air balloons, everything — and this really, really impressed the Imaginary Intern and he said, “That’s exactly what Gone with the Mind should be like! It should all be made out of the same thing!”
And I said it’s a little like that commercial for Lay’s potato chips where the Mr. Potato Head husband comes home from work and he says, “Sweetie, I’m home,” but he can’t find her, and he’s looking all around, and finally catches his Potato Head wife clandestinely eating potato chips in this closet, this pantry…and he’s appalled and he’s like, “But you’re a potato!” Here, it’s a world all made of potatoes. It’s potatoes eating potatoes.