MARK
Something like that…Anyway, this guy Eli comes back from the bathroom, and he catches me reading it, which he’s perfectly cool with, and he says, “Y’know, that’s just the first draft, would you like to read the second draft?” And I said, “Yes, sure.” And here’s the interesting part of the story — there was a total, bewildering discrepancy between the first draft and the second draft which was this unfailingly decorous, almost Chekhovian twenty-five-page story about an aging spinster who sang Schubert lieder in her attic, a handsome young parson with a humiliating stutter, a pair of Yorkshire terriers, and an heirloom cupboard. So I said to him — and, in retrospect, probably should have just kept my mouth shut — that I preferred the first draft (which I genuinely did; yes, the second draft was very sad in that artisanal way that makes a certain kind of sophisticated reader very happy, and yes, the first draft was a bit adolescent and unrepentantly stupid — sometimes stupidity is the only “way out” for the mind — but it had a certain flip brio to it that I appreciated a lot, and from which I took no small degree of inspiration). And this just really baffled Eli, really perplexed him. And we ended up talking about it for the rest of the night…I think we went out for burgers and shots and beer somewhere in the neighborhood and had this long, very congenial, super-earnest-undergrad kind of debate about the relative merits of draft one and draft two and how they might be analogous to certain sociopolitical currents, etc. And I remember saying…we’d left the bar and were out on the street somewhere…and I was so wasted…I was swaying back and forth…I had to grab onto a…a…telephone pole to stay upright…and I remember saying: “If we’ve learned anything from Lévi-Strauss, it’s that individual motifs mean nothing in any abstract sense until they are placed in a structural relationship with other motifs.” And then I passed out. And I don’t remember anything else from that night…Actually the whole rest of that senior year is a kind of blur after that. And then years later, my dad calls me one night and he says, “Do you remember your cousin Eli?” And I go, “Yeah…” And he says, “Well, you did him a big favor by insulting him about his writing.” And I say, “Dad, I never insulted him about his writing, I just told him I preferred one draft of a story to another.” And my father says, “Well, whatever you said to him, you did him the biggest favor in the world, because after that he gave up wanting to be a writer, and he went to medical school, and he became some kind of research scientist for a series of very prestigious institutions and big biotech companies, and I just learned from his mother that he exercised his stock options and that he’s retired, and that he and his wife bought a penthouse at 15 Central Park West and a huge, gorgeous estate in a gated community out in Calabasas, and that they’re traveling and skiing and scuba diving and spelunking all over the world.” And he says, “I’m really surprised he hasn’t called you in all these years and thanked you for insulting his story.” And I say, “Well, he’s probably too busy spelunking to call, and anyway the cell-phone coverage in caves is pretty shitty.” And my dad says, “You’re probably right.”
And when the Imaginary Intern and I were working on this (and actually we eventually decided not to use it at all because we were becoming increasingly militant about not including any extended anecdotes or vignettes that had any “form”—we were always complaining about the “inanity of form” because, to us, that smacked of “literature” and of “novels,” which we were both dead set against, I guess because of the unspeakable things that had happened to us in our lives)…the Imaginary Intern said, “You know what my favorite part of that story is? When you say to your father, ‘The cell-phone coverage in caves is pretty shitty,’ and he says, ‘You’re probably right.’ I don’t know why, or even if this is what you intended, but I thought that was really quite poignant…almost in an artisanal way.” And I quoted from Mao’s Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art: “Discard what is backward and develop what is revolutionary,” and so that’s just what we did, we discarded the whole story. And that’s why it’s not in the book and that’s why you won’t be hearing it later tonight.
P.S. When I think back now to Eli’s drab, cinder-block dorm room at Tufts, I see a third presence of whom I was unaware when I was actually present there forty years ago. And now the presence persistently haunts this memory…a kind of spectral roommate to whom I was oblivious in the empirically verifiable “real world”…a small, round young man with waxy, translucent skin who sat motionless on the edge of his tautly made bed, staring mutely out into space, like a piece of bric-a-brac on a shelf, like a tutelary deity in the bardo world…whose one eye, when I think about it now, was like an aperture into another world…
I finally asked the Imaginary Intern — I think this was about a week or so before he left for good — what exactly he found so moving about that conversation with my father about the cell-phone service in the caves, and he said that sometimes an aging father just doesn’t want to argue or have even the mildest disagreement with his son, he just wants everything to feel amiable and copacetic, and if you’re being sort of flip and sarcastic, just trying to goad him, and you say something like…and I’m just making this up off the top of my head…something like… “Y’know, Dad, Saint Angela of Foligno drank water contaminated by the putrefying flesh of lepers. Catherine of Siena occasionally sipped pus from cancerous sores. But a Jew? A Jew would never drink putrefying leper-water or sip pus from a cancerous sore. Never happen. Trust me on that. So if we’re just talking about the dramaturgy of self-mortification, you’d have to say that Catholicism is, like, light-years ahead of Judaism.” And the aging father, who’s sort of half listening at this point, will simply say something very anodyne in response, something very conciliatory, something like “You’re probably right.” And the Imaginary Intern said, “I just think that’s very sweet…again, I just find that to be very poignant…Because it’s about someone who just wants to be loving.”
This was a side of the Imaginary Intern that you could very easily forget, because he was capable of saying things that were so…what’s a good word, uh…so puerile. Well, they would seem puerile at first and then later — sometimes much, much later — you’d realize that they weren’t puerile at all. He used to always talk about going to a place called Studio Mizuhō, and I just assumed that it was some kind of bar or club or hair salon or something, but I’ve realized since he left — because I tend to rehash a lot of things he said to me over and over in my head — that Studio Mizuhō is not a place at all, it’s a state of heightened awareness and cognition, a state of…of optimized neuroplasticity, memory, focus, computation, analytical ability…a capacity for deep abstraction. So “Let’s go to Studio Mizuhō” is really an invitation to sort of jack into this kind of transcendent cognitive nexus where you have, like, total recall and the ability to analyze hundreds of millions of moves per second. But he’d also call this state “Around the Corner Where Fudge Is Made,” which is from some silly, scatological rhyme he liked, but it doesn’t seem silly or scatological to me at all anymore. It describes to me now a certain specific state of rapture, the state of ecstasy in its original Greek meaning—ekstasis, a displacement, a state of being beside one’s self or rapt out of one’s self. And I use the term at the end of the autobiography — and I’m a little worried that this is something people might not completely get or might misconstrue entirely — when Mussolini comes and picks me up at the mall in the flying balcony, and he asks me where I want to go, I say, “Around the corner where fudge is made.” And I don’t mean by that up into my self. I mean exactly the opposite. I mean that I want to be taken out of my self. It describes a way out…as I said, a way out for the mind.