NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY JESSE PEARSON
PORTRAIT BY TARA SINN, WITH A PHOTO BY JOHN ZEULI PHOTOGRAPHY


Last time we talked on the phone, you told me that you’re very ill.

Yeah, I’m really ill. But I don’t want to talk about it much. I’m all right.

I guess a lot of great writers have worked while seriously ill.

Flannery O’Connor was dying the whole time she was writing, and I can name a number of other writers who were dying the whole time they were writing. Look, Flannery got to this place where she could only write three hours a day. The doctors told her: You can write three hours a day. You can’t write any more. What a shit thing to tell somebody. Goddamn. Anyway, the worst thing for me now is the pain. Pain will humiliate you and humble you and I’m not used to being humiliated and humbled. I don’t like it. It offends my notion of who the fuck I am and what I am and everything else. I’d rather do just about anything, up to and including cutting my fuckin’ throat.

Speaking of which, you told me about a recent fight you got in. You got sliced up the belly and it left a massive scar.

It’s really a beautiful scar. It starts right in my pubes and it goes up through my navel to my sternum, where it is equidistant between my nipples. I was gutted, man. I had my guts in my hands.

And it happened at a fish camp, you said?

It did indeed.

Kind of ironic, getting gutted at a fish camp.

Well, yes and no. This is a fish camp that’s more a sort of drinking and fighting bar that just happens to be on a nice lake where a lot of fish swim. You can get a boat there and you can go out and fish or you can drink beer and shoot pool and fight and fuck and whatever else you can find to do. But it is a great fishing place. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s old house, Cross Creek, is not far from where I live. On one side of the road is Orange Lake—10,000 acres of water—and on the other side is Lake Lochloosa, which is 18,000 acres of water. And then there’s the creek which runs from Orange to Lochloosa, right across the road near where her house is.

What’s in there, catfish?

There’s catfish in there, but there’s catfish in every body of water around here. These lakes have got great bass, great brim, speck… You got a bunch of good panfish in there. Good bass lake, if you like to fish bass. But the bass get too big. The ones that are good to catch are not very good to eat. A bass that gets very big, it’s too gamey. Too fishy. Not very tasty. Little bass are the ones you want to eat, but they aren’t very fun to catch because they don’t put up a fight. Anyway, whatever.

Yeah, but can you tell me how you ended up getting split open?

I’ve known this guy for a very long time and there’s been bad blood between us. This was not the first fight we’ve been in with each other. There have been times when he went to the hospital and times when I went to the hospital and this time both of us went to the hospital. And I told about a million lies to keep him out of jail. I don’t want the son of a bitch in jail.

What is it with this guy and you?

We’re like a couple of fuckin’ dogs. I drove up to the fish camp and I thought I could smell the son of a bitch. I said, “Goddamn, I oughta turn right around and go home. That son of a bitch is out here just as sure as I’m alive.” And he was. When we lay eyes on each other it’s like two goddamn pit-bull dogs looking at each other from their corners, you know? They scratch and go. And there it is.

How long ago was this?

Oh, I haven’t been out of the hospital very long. I was in there over a month. I was in ICU. I couldn’t talk. I had a trach tube in and I had to get food and water through a tube too. My son teaches at a university for a bunch of Yankee kids up north, and he came home and that was good. I don’t see him as much I’d like to and he’s just a great fuckin’ kid. He’s about 6'3", 220, all lean and righteous. Good athlete. He’s very bright—writes plays, and they’re produced. He’s a good writer. I don’t know how he got started with plays, but he did. His wife is the head of the drama department at that university. She directs the plays he writes, at least initially, to get the kinks out of them. So they got a thing going and it gives them a life they tell me they love, and I don’t doubt it. But he rarely gets home.

But he came back when you got hurt.

He stayed by my bed forever. I was in there over a month. I was in the ICU for 16 days and then I went to rehab. The surgeon had to sew me up and all that good shit. Now I’ve been out for about four and a half months. It’s a short enough time that the goddamn scar is sore. When you get a really big, wide one… I’ve never had a scar like this. Now, I’ve got scars on me all over and I’ve broken damn near everything you can think of at one time or another, including my neck. At my age, whatever you broke growing up, however you nicked yourself, in that place of course, you’re arthritic. And arthritis ain’t a fuckin’ joke.

It’s an evil, evil thing.

It really is. I broke my neck diving off the Main Street bridge in Jacksonville, Florida. It’s a really high bridge that boats go under and shit. Nobody had a gun to my head saying I had to dive off that son of a bitch. And the water is deep enough that I shouldn’t have been hurt.

Were you drinking or something?

No, no. I was just young. I was with a bunch of other guys and somebody went off it and so I went off it. I just did it wrong. I broke a vertebra in my neck and I had to wear one of those halos. Had to sleep in the son of a bitch.

So now you’ve got an arthritic neck. That’s the kind of stuff that makes me feel terrified of growing old.

You oughta be terrified of growing old! It’s a motherfucker. What you’ve got to do is to just have no respect for it whatsoever. Cuss it a lot and kick and raise hell. Spit and scratch your ass and do all the things you can do when you’re an old guy. And don’t suck up and suck around when you’re an old guy. Fuck it. So you’re old, so what else is new?

So don’t behave like a senior citizen, basically.

Anger has gotten me through a lot of things in my life and I have to confess—and I don’t recommend it really to anybody else—but hell, I stay mad. Mad as a motherfucker.

And that’s just the way you’ve always been?

Yeah, for one reason or another. If I can’t finish a book, I’m mad. If I’m not writing a book, I’m mad. If I am writing a book, I’m mad. It don’t matter. I just got a very short fuse. I try to be polite and civil and decent and whatever, but I’m not very good at it. I’m just not.

Did you ever think that anger would go away if you reached some kind of a brass ring, like finishing a certain amount of novels or finding the right woman?

No. All the males in my family are like this. They’re like a bunch of goddamn sore-tailed cats. They just walk around looking for pussy and a fight. I was the light heavyweight champion of the first marine division. My nose has been broken I think six times. For a long time I never knew which side of my face it was gonna be on from year to year. But I liked boxing for a long, long time and I like karate and I like blood sports. I like a lot of things that are really not fashionable and really not very nice and which finally, if you’ve got any sense at all, you know, are totally indefensible. Anybody who is going to defend much of the way I’ve spent my life is mad. Crazy. It’s just that there’s so much horseshit in the world. How can you live through it without being madder than hell?

You can set yourself aside from it.

Well, yeah, you can, but getting away from the world means getting away from bars, getting away from women, getting away from all the stuff that’s been good in my life. I, curiously, don’t drink at all anymore. I haven’t had a drink in ten years. Not a drop of anything. But goddamn, I drank my share in my life and I’m not a bit ashamed of it.

I wish I could say the same.

Well, do you regret much of it?

Some, but I also know that it would have gotten way worse if I’d kept going.

Alcohol was good to me and good for me. I swear to God. But I swear on my dead mother’s eyes, man—and my dead son’s eyes—I ain’t had a drop in ten years. I put it down for the very reason you said. I thought, Well man, this is gonna get really sloppy and really bad if you go on with it. You’re just not strong enough to do this anymore so you’ve got to put it down. I was thinking yesterday about Hemingway killing himself. Did you know the things that were wrong with Hemingway when he shot himself?

I read a biography of him, but it was a long time ago.

You know how he drank all his life. He drank like a European drinks. Sometimes he drank wine for fuckin’ breakfast, and usually at lunch and dinner he drank a bottle of fuckin’ wine. He drank, period. A lot, his whole life.

Right.

And then he went down there to that clinic, that psychiatric clinic, and they told him he could have one eight-ounce glass of wine a day, all right. He weighed about 220, 225, his whole fuckin’ life, and they told him he had to go down to 180 pounds. So he couldn’t eat the way he did. There was something wrong with his ejaculatory duct, whatever the fuck that is, so he couldn’t have conjugal relations with Miss Mary anymore. So check that one off—he couldn’t fuck anymore. So now we got a guy that can’t eat, can’t drink, can’t fuck… and whether or not he could write then, he thought he couldn’t. He tried and it made him sick—he just couldn’t stand what came out of his pen. Sixty-two fuckin’ years old and he puts what was called an English bulldog—it’s a short double-barreled shotgun—in his friggin’ mouth and that was the end of him.

Because he had too much taken away from him.

Well, I don’t know, man. He just got mad enough with it. But there’s a number of things you can do. Something with your ejaculatory duct and you can’t fuck? Well, who says I can’t fuck? I’ll find another way to get off. Damn, do something. You say I can’t drink anymore—the hell I can’t. I might die, but I can drink. Listen, if I can’t have but one glass of wine, I don’t want any at all.

There’s no point in getting part of the way there.

And it was the Mayo Clinic, that’s where it was. And while he was up there those fucking shrinks would take him home on the weekend and have a cookout in the backyard and invite all their shrink friends over and show him off. “Look who we’ve got as a houseguest—Hemingway. Look at this.” And he was just old—well, not old, 62—but he was hurt and confused. It was terrible. Just awful.

Maybe he did the right thing at the end then.

Maybe so, man. I don’t know.

Why do so many writers end up being drunks?

I’ve thought about it a lot, and I don’t know.

A lot of people seem to think it goes hand in hand with the solitary life a writer needs to lead to get their work done.

Well, that may be true. I don’t know what it is, but it would seem to be a true thing. Alcohol is the writer’s friend or enemy or something, and they do a lot of it.


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