And the Imaginary Intern said, “I don’t know…that seems to me to be about nonprocreative desire, about autophagy as the apotheosis of self-love. The husband catches his wife in an act of masturbatory self-consumption and he’s reflexively pissed about it, but then the last shot of the commercial reveals both of them in the closet eating the potato chips (i.e., masturbating), so…I think that’s really about overcoming heteronormative shame, whereas Twizzlers World is all about monism. To me, it’s all about turning everything into, or everything being made out of, a kind of unitary material…It’s about all things originating from a single source. That’s what I was saying before about Gone with the Mind…It should be all red Twizzlers.”
I’m paraphrasing the Imaginary Intern, who was extremely plainspoken…I mean, he never used any kind of academic or poststructuralist or psychoanalytic jargon…He expressed himself in a very, very simple, very childlike way, actually. In fact, he did a lot of phumphering, a lot of stammering…but in all his unguarded speech disfluencies, in all his uhs and ums, sometimes I thought I discerned some sort of encrypted content. My grandmother Rose (my dad’s mom) was a blinker. She had this cute, coy way of blinking when she talked that always made me think of Betty Boop for some reason. I think that’s probably why, when I was ten years old, I became so obsessed with that American POW who, during a televised press conference in North Vietnam, blinked his eyes in Morse code spelling out the word T-O-R-T-U-R-E. So I kind of suspected that the Imaginary Intern’s uhs and ums constituted some kind of code too, but he left before I could determine what that code actually was, if there even was one in the first place. (My grandmother, who became very mischievous when she had even the slightest bit of alcohol, once told me that she saw a man climb into my mother’s bedroom window when my father was away on a business trip about nine months before I was born. And she said that she suspected that this man was my real, biological father.
“What did this guy look like?” I asked her.
And she said, “He was a short, pudgy, mustachioed Italian man in a red shirt and blue overalls.”
“Was he wearing a red cap, white gloves, and brown shoes?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“And was there a red M in a white circle on the front of his hat and gold buttons on his overalls?”
“Yeah!”
And I was like, “Nana, that’s Mario, from Super Mario Brothers, the video game.”
And she gave me that double Betty Boop blink-blink.
Now that I think of it, it was a kind of feigned daffiness, a kind of playing dumb. She really was absolutely brilliant at playing dumb, a virtuoso, and she was capable of just driving people to distraction with that, particularly my dad. It never bothered me really, I just sort of went with it. In the last few years of her life, when she was living at a…what do you call those places?…not a nursing home…an assisted-living facility…on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City out in California…I used to call her every week or so, and she’d always ask me how my Mexican wife was, knowing full well that my wife, Mercedes, is Ecuadorean, not Mexican. But I’d just go with it and I’d tell her how she was doing. And once, I called her and, over the course of maybe an hour-long conversation, she insisted on speaking to me as if I were my dad’s brother, my uncle Richie. And again, I just went along with it. But I knew that she knew it was me, because at one point she asked “Richie” how his Mexican wife was.)
While we were working on Gone with the Mind, I was extremely superstitious about anything remotely related to the book. I work out at the gym (NYSC on Fourteenth and Garden) every other day lifting weights and I run for about an hour or so along the Hudson River on my off days from the weight training, and the midpoint of my run is the train station, Hoboken Terminal, and there’s a sign in stenciled letters on the windowpane of the door to the waiting room that reads:
WAITING ROOM
CLOSED BETWEEN
1:00 A.M.–5:30 A.M.
DAILY
And each and every single time I’d reach that door, panting and floridly OCD, I’d press the appropriate letters — as if I were keying in a password on an ATM touchscreen — to form the acronym for Gone with the Mind: The g in Waiting, the w in Between, the t in Between, and the m in 5:30 a.m.
Also, if I made a decision about the book and within the next couple of hours I saw a woman’s exposed armpit, I would take that to be a mystical ratification of that decision. (I’m not really talking about an armpit with encrypted content — more like a yea-saying armpit.) For example: Once, when I was in my early twenties, my father got drunk at a dinner party, and said something extremely cruel and derisive about me to a guest whom he very much admired and, I think, emulated to a significant degree — he was an advertising executive who was becoming very rich and politically influential. (He’s dead now.) I was having a lot of problems at the time — feeling very unfulfilled, rootless, un-actualized, unemployable, I guess feeling sort of worthless, and having all sorts of debilitating and undiagnosable and probably psychosomatic stomach ailments…so I was particularly vulnerable, and I remember thinking an instant after the slur came out of his mouth, Hitler, where art thou? I was so hurt and so exquisitely humiliated, and I remember thinking at that moment that if the Gestapo had shown up (we were living in West Orange, New Jersey, at the time) looking for Jews, I would have led them straight into the dining room and said, “There’s a big one right there — the drunk guy playing the clarinet.” (I remember this so clearly. Injured — in this case, mutilated—pride leaves extraordinarily eidetic, graven memories.) It was a singular aberration for my father, who’s an extremely principled and scrupulously considerate person — none of which, I suppose, would make him immune to a mother-besotted boy’s Oedipal fantasies of patricide. (In traditional folktales, the revenge of the father for his son’s Oedipal ideation is, of course, to pass along to that son a genetic predisposition for prostate cancer, which is precisely what my father, in fact, did.) I can’t remember my dad being either that drunk or unthinkingly nasty ever again. I, on the other hand, have been drunk and unthinkingly nasty thousands of times — a pattern which began when I was very young, like five. I had a big, nearly life-size stuffed orangutan that my uncle Richie had given me, with fur and a rubber face and hands and feet (I think my mom might have mentioned him in her introduction), and I’d prop him up next to me on my bed, and I’d pretend that we were at a bar together, and I’d sip from a bottle of Novahistine Elixir, a decongestant/antihistamine the color of green crème de menthe, until I was pretty fucked up. There were always bottles of it in my room because (as my mom said) I was prone to colds and earaches. This was obviously before the advent of child-resistant packaging and safety caps. And I remember I’d get very loud and very irascible and aggressive with the orangutan, and say some really awful, insulting things to him…it wasn’t funny. It would start off amicably enough, my arm around his shoulders (the way I’d seen guys on TV do it), joking around, telling him stories, singing (mostly Civil War songs I’d learned from an album my parents had gotten me, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” things like that), but after a while my mood would sour, I’d take something the wrong way, a look, a completely innocuous gesture, and my temper would flare, and I’d end up flinging him down the stairs. In my memory, the orangutan sort of floated through the air — I don’t know, maybe he had an unusually high lift-to-drag ratio for a stuffed animal or something — but he’d hit the floor at the bottom of the stairs with an awful thud, and my mother would come frantically running from wherever she was in the house, breathless and flushed, thinking I’d fallen down the stairs. (I never named the orangutan. I think even at that age I somehow intuitively understood that all names are slave names, that the absolute fixity of a name constitutes a form of captivity.)