As a child, I was a huge, obsessive Yankees fan. And I remember, especially when we were at that summerhouse in Deal, that house on Neptune Avenue…I could only stay up until about the fifth inning, so my mom would listen to the rest of the game on the radio, the whole game, even if it went into extra innings, and then in the morning, as soon as she woke up and came downstairs for breakfast (I’d have been up for hours waiting impatiently, listening for her instantly recognizable footsteps on the creaky stairs), she’d narrate those last innings for me, pitch by pitch, play by play…with all her Proustian divagations and endlessly ramifying digressions, tangents splitting off into other tangents…with all her allusion and analogies…the bad hop of a ground ball to Bobby Richardson or Tony Kubek or maybe Joe Pepitone conjuring up the story of a second cousin who was hit in the forehead by a stone expelled by a power mower, causing a gash that required plastic surgery which was, of course, botched by an incompetent doctor, resulting in an endless lawsuit (medical malpractice being a favorite subject of my mom and myself). An inning could easily take an hour. My mom has formidable, world-class raconteurial skills. She really does. She’s a consummate, virtuosic storyteller. The fastidious descriptions, the lavish scene-setting, perfectly punctured by some choice vulgarity or solecism…the vivid, impeccably pitched portrayals of disparate characters, the timing, the accents and intonations, the shifting registers of body language…she can make a trip to the dry cleaner seem like The Ring of the Nibelung. And because my mother is such a good and loving person, a woman of such unparalleled magnanimity, these stories were never ultimately disparaging or censorious, however heinous the protagonist’s behavior had been. There was always some redemptive concluding note, some flourish of sympathy and approbation. Whether the person had deliberately drowned her own dog or fucked her dying husband’s oncologist, my mom would somehow find a way to append some sort of favorable coda to it all. “The woman’s become the most devoted grandmother I’ve ever seen,” she’ll remark. “My God, how she dotes on those grandkids with the Ice Capades and the Nutcracker tickets and the PoshTots ball gowns, the uh…the Petit Bateau rain slickers, those adorable little fuchsia Stella McCartney bomber jackets…She spends a fortune on those kids!”
And would these kids even care that their grandmother carried on with their late grandfather’s doctor in his office at Sloan Kettering a couple of times a week? I seriously doubt it. Good for her! they’d probably say. We love Grandma. She takes us to all kinds of cool places and buys us all kinds of cool stuff. She can fuck whomever she wants to…Grandpa didn’t really do shit with us. He always seemed too busy and preoccupied with work…or too sick.
When you’re a child, you’re just doing everything intuitively, you’re just using what the Imaginary Intern and I used to call Inuit Intuition (we both loved all things Arctic)…you’re just joyriding with your id at the wheel, thrashing around in a continuous tumult of what South Korean director Kim Jee-woon calls “the good, the bad, and the weird”…which is what life is back then…you’re just acting (I don’t mean in the sense of theater, although that too), you’re just doing things, committing random deeds…And it’s only much later in life that we try to retrospectively map out, to plot all the traumas and the triumphs, the lucky breaks and lost opportunities, all the decisions and their ramifying consequences. And I tend to believe that this inclination to look back on one’s life and superimpose a teleological narrative of cause and effect is probably itself a symptom of incipient dementia, caused by some prion disease or the clumping of beta-amyloid plaques. Certainly as we get older, we begin to compulsively revise, re-edit, and rearrange — like screenwriters thumbtacking index cards to a bulletin board — the same finite repertoire of autobiographical scenes in our memory to see if perhaps the latest rehash might provide any new answers to those fundamental and persistently intractable questions like: How the fuck did this all happen? How the fuck did things ever get to this point? How the fuck did I end up becoming the person I am now? Especially, this…this particularly baroque, grotesque version of the person I am now? To properly answer questions like these would probably require a prolonged period of masochistic self-absorption. But I suppose, in a way, that’s why we’re all here tonight…Am I right, folks? (PANDA EXPRESS WORKER and SBARRO WORKER remain oblivious, one bobbing his head to something he’s listening to on his headphones, the other watching a Snapchat on his cell phone of his girlfriend making fart bubbles in a bathtub.)
MARK
Jeffrey Hammerbacher, a professor of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, wrote something very interesting when he was seven years old. He wrote, My favorite hobby is doing math while I’m eating. I like doing this because math is my favorite subject and I like to eat.
Well, doing this is my favorite subject, and I like to eat too. So it’s extremely gratifying to be here tonight, reading Gone with the Mind at the food court.
I think I mentioned before that the Imaginary Intern sometimes functioned like a…like a kind of trainer for me. So before we started actually working on the autobiography, for about the first three months, he just had me playing video games and eating cookie dough. And then one night he posted a winky face on my Facebook, and it was like “Game on.” And the first thing we started working on, which was completely out of sequence, was something that happened back in my senior year at Brandeis. My dad had called and told me that Eli — a second cousin of mine, whom I didn’t really know particularly well — was going to…to Tufts, I think it was…starting at Tufts as a freshman…and that it would be nice if I visited him. Eli also wanted to be a writer, according to my dad, and we might have a lot to talk about, and it would just be a nice thing to do. So, I go to visit this guy in his dorm room at Tufts, and we’re drinking some beer and talking about this and that, and at some point he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, and he’s in there for a while, so I’m snooping around his room, checking out his books, rifling through his albums, and I find, on his desk, a draft of a short story he’s working on, this very, very short, Lydia Davis — length story, and I read it, and…obviously I can’t remember the story, this was almost forty years ago…but I distinctly remember its tenor, which I can try to give you at least some flavor of…I mean, I’m just making this up off the top of my head to try to convey the tone…
When the Red Army breached the German front in 1945, Nazi propaganda minister Don Draper would try to lighten the mood in the bunker by fucking a microwaved Bacon Cheddar Hot Pocket. (The PANDA EXPRESS WORKER actually looks up for a moment here.)