I’ve never bought a tote bag in my life.
But I’ve still got about twenty hanging in my kitchen.
One of them says BOOKS.
I knew what Literary Death Match was.
I abhorred it.
And I still said yes.
That’s how desperate I was.
Summer of 2014 AD was particularly bad.
I’d finished writing the manuscript for I Hate the Internet and two things had become apparent: (1) it was the most significant piece of work that I’d done and (2) absolutely no one would publish it.
When I was offered Literary Death Match, these two things had left me beyond debased.
I was thinking, honestly, that if I won the thing, it’d at least give me another meaningless credential to put in query emails to agents who would refuse to represent my manuscript.
The iteration of Literary Death Match to which I’d been invited occurred on July 10th, 2014 AD, and it was held at Largo at Coronet on La Cienaga Boulevard.
Largo is one of those venues that people who aren’t from Los Angeles can’t possibly understand. It’s where the Celebrity branch of American governance entertains itself in a 280-seat venue.
If your response to the existential horror of Donald J. Trump is a desire to have your liberal pieties reinforced with a joke about Star Trek, then you should fly to Los Angeles and go to Largo.
The comedian Patton Oswalt will be waiting with your chuckles.
The other writers who were performing at Literary Death Match were Aimee Bender, Jay Martel, and Annabelle Gurwitch.
Jay Martel was the producer of Key & Peele, which was a popular sketch comedy show in which two African-American actors who’d grown up as members of the middle classes performed skits based around the hilarity inherent in the accents of poor African-Americans.
Annabelle Gurwitch was an actress who’d found some success as a writer of books about her sex drive as she approached the age of fifty.
Aimee Bender was a literary writer. She taught creative writing at the University of Southern California, and was director of that university’s Creative Writing PhD program.
I’ve never read her work, but my friend Dean Smith was in the audience at Largo with his boyfriend Mike Kitchell, and Dean Smith said that he’d read Aimee Bender’s book The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake.
The judges at Literary Death Match were Amber Tamblyn, Jody Hill, and Dana Gould.
Amber Tamblyn was an actor and a poet with several volumes of published poetry. She’d done a lot of good in the world, having convinced people to give money to the poet Diane di Prima when Diane di Prima had serious healthcare issues and needed help with the costs.
At the time of Literary Death Match, Amber Tamblyn was just coming off a starring role in Season Eleven of the sitcom Two and a Half Men, which was the highest-rated television show in America.
Jody Hill was a director and writer of films and television. Through the terrible magic of Los Angeles, we’d met about eight years earlier, but neither of us could remember where.
Dana Gould was a stand-up comedian and a former writer for The Simpsons.
To state the bleedingly obvious: I was the freak.
Everyone else at Literary Death Match had significant amounts of money and significant amounts of success, and with the exception of Aimee Bender, all of them were representatives from the Celebrity branch of American governance.
I was poor and I wrote psychedelic biographies of Islamic-themed terrorists.
Thanks, Dorthe!
The first round of Literary Death Match was Aimee Bender versus Jay Martel.
I was in Largo’s green room with Annabelle Gurwitch.
She was charming.
When Aimee Bender and Jay Martel stopped reading, the judges chimed in and offered opinions on their work. The judges ended up going with Aimee Bender.
I should say that I had never been to a Literary Death Match.
So I had no idea what the judges’ critiques would be like.
I certainly wasn’t expecting what I saw during the first round, which was a rah-rah all-in-together-now malice masked by a layer of bonhomie.
If you want to imagine an analogue, think about Celebrity Roasts, which are spectacles where a celebrity will attend an event that honors the celebrity by having other celebrities say cruel things about the honored celebrity.
Literary Death Match wasn’t anywhere as cruel as a Celebrity Roast.
But it was the same atmosphere.
Somewhere in the middle of this, when Amber Tamblyn was talking, she mentioned that she was drunk.
The next round happened.
Annabelle Gurwitch and I had decided in the green room that she’d read first.
She did.
And then I read.
My appearance at Literary Death Match occurred after years of countless San Francisco literary readings. If I’d learned anything, it was how to work an audience.
I fucking killed.
And then it was time to hear from the judges.
Annabelle Gurwitch and I sat in chairs. Stage right.
The judges were seated stage left.
We watched as our performances were dissected with the jokey malice of a Celebrity Roast. In front of an audience of 280 people.
You’ll forgive me, but I can’t remember a word of what anyone said about Annabelle Gurwitch.
And you’ll forgive me when I say that I can barely remember what Jody Hill and Dana Gould said about me, although I do remember that one of them talked about how innovative it was that I read my piece off an iPad.
It wasn’t an iPad.
It was an Android tablet.
The last judge to comment on my piece was Amber Tamblyn.
She’d been taking notes throughout the event, and she began by reading one of her notes. This is what her note said, give or take: “This guy is wearing white pants. That’s hot.”
She was a person who was infinitely more successful than me, with infinitely more money. She was on America’s highest rated television show. She was published by serious New York presses. And she was in a position of actual, literal judgment on my merit as a writer, and that judgment, if positive, could affect the success of my work and my future.
And she was drunk and making sexualized comments.
In front of an audience of 280 laughing people.
And all I could do was sit there, take it, and pretend to laugh.
While my friends watched.
By any conceivable metric used during #MeToo, this was sexual harassment.
But, seriously, who fucking cares?
Amber Tamblyn wasn’t even the worst.
One time, I was assaulted by a rabid fan outside of the Echo Park Film Center, and another time, I received unsolicited emails from a beloved elder statesman of the literary scene fantasizing about sucking my cock.
He remains a friend.
And I know that as a society we’ve descended into revenge narratives in which a lesser figure remembers some stray incident from the past and uses it to attack someone who’s significantly more famous.
Speak bitterness!
This is our entertainment.
And I realize how uncomfortably close this chapter reads to those narratives.
But that’s not what this is.
Because here is an everlasting truth: if you get Diane di Prima money, you should be allowed to sexually harass the living shit out of everyone in the world.
If I were to give advice to anyone who wants to enter the public sphere, this is what I would say: don’t.