Writer’s Festival
Joshua Ferris’ first novel Then We Came To The End was exactly the kind of over-clever (it’s written in the first-person-plural, as in: We roll our eyes at the debut novelists anxious bid for critical attention) fiction with a heart of gold that was my bread and butter in second year. And his follow-up The Unnamed was an uncompromising nod to Samuel Beckett that showed the author was interested in more than just proving how quirky-smart he was. The healthy respect I now have for Mr. Ferris was then a weird kind of idolatry. In a publishing industry that too often values lyrical realism over any genuine attempt to make a reader feel estranged, or uncomfortable, or at least sweaty in a way that calls for a new layer of deodorant, Mr. Ferris was proof positive that it was still possible to pursue weird artistic projects without sacrificing the kind of book sales that allow you to, say, provide for anyone other than yourself and maybe a pocket-sized pet with a Vitamin D deficiency. So, when I heard that he was coming to Ottawa for the Writer’s Festival I was understandably excited. But to tell this story properly, I have to begin at the beginning.
I had been seeing a girl who worked nights at a call center. Since I had classes all day long, we missed each other coming and going. And so we started leaving sticky notes for one another as a cute way to stall for time while we thought of better ways to fix this mess. But the little, yellow pad became the launch site for a passive-aggressive Cold War. Little land mines left on any surface that would stick, these notes got more and more barbed and prickly as we both got madder at our situation. Our mutual friends, as well intentioned and inept as UN peacekeepers, would cordon off the weekend as a zone of Swiss neutrality. But you’d be surprised the level of trauma you can fit in one sunny inch squared. Especially since she quickly made herself a master of the medium, writing what has to be the Citizen Kane of subtly recriminating casual reminders. Stuck to one corner of my laptop’s jet-black screen, the missive: “If you want to connect you have to pay your part”. Although perfectly innocuous to anyone looking in from outside, it’s slightly cheesy subtext, with that lilting suggestion of “play your part”, was all too clear to me. And of course she would be beautiful as she penned her attack. I can still imagine it so clearly. With the eraser head’s pink nub resting on her lips (she had a taste for everything), looking out the window with the light at just the right angle to suggest a eureka moment. Legs crossed with the outstretched foot bobbing, and the pendulant shoe threatening, like the executioner’s axe, to fall. The whole back-and-forth was like playing chess through the mail with a convict, if this jailbird happened to be a Grand Master with a genius for psychological deconstruction.
And yet if she was wearing a jumpsuit of black-and-white stripes, I had on a much darker costume. Maybe green skin and neck bolts are most fitting, ‘cause I’d Frankenstein-ed myself into a Milton-spouting mess of muddled ideas. Fresh off the cusp of some disease, (at one point weighing in at a whopping ninety-five) I had abstracted myself straight out of the land of the living, and in many ways, although bodily recovered, my mind was still stuck in the prism of a sick man’s solipsism. And there’s nothing like weakness to make a boy want to pick a fight. Think of Captain Ahab, no doubt with his spindly peg leg on his mind, shouting: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!” I’d been stalking conflict in a similar way, intuiting menace in everything that breathed.
Now my roommate at the time was the spitting image of the young Robert De Niro. If all the people of the world were marked a spot in one universal crayon box, he would be the burnt umber to the Raging Bull’s Falu red, which is to say, right there, shoulder to shoulder in the wax rod role call. And he was just as aggressively charming. So seeing me in a slump he all but forced me to go to the Writer’s Festival event that he knew I’d been interested in. A thimble of whiskey, and a kick in the butt were his gifts to me, and they were enough to screw my courage to the sticking place.
Arriving at the Mayfair I was slightly shocked to find that you could count those in attendance on two hands. And we all sat so far apart that it had the distinct feeling of some X-Rated theatre. Which ended up being a stunningly appropriate comparison because the questions at these types of thing tend to be a squirmy kind of intellectual masturbation. “Mr. Ferret, I liked your book but it seems you forgot to include my pet project in the plot, would you agree that this was a gross mistake?” This couldn’t bother me though; readers have always been a cast of clowns that I can’t help but love. What really got me in jitters was the entrance of Ferris himself. He sat an aisle over and the quick contraction of book flap photo to flesh and blood figure made me almost queasy with nervousness. I had one of those moments where you see yourself from a third-person perspective and become acutely aware, on an almost Buddhist-like level, of your own body. Sweaty and shaking, why didn’t I shave before leaving the house – will I look like a crazy person with slight scruff on my chin – how’s my breath – can I talk to him? Suddenly it felt as if someone had laid anchor on my lap and exchanged my feet for cement blocks. I came to talk to him, I have to talk to him. The better angels of my nature jackhammered my cobblestone shoes and I waddled Charlie Chaplin-style over to flagellate myself in front of the rex at rest.
“Hey, uhm, I’m a big fan” (Really?!)
A smile. His hand is offered as he stands. I am six foot three and looking up. This man is a giant.
“That’s so nice of you to say, thanks for coming out.”
“Do you, well, would it be possible. If you have time, could I maybe talk to you after?”
“Oh sure, who are you with?”
…
…
“The Charlatan, for the university down the road” (This is a lie, and all the worse because he was about to find out just what caliber of journalist I was)
“Oh okay, cool. Sure, I should have time for that.”
Don’t ask me about the actual event. I spent the whole time scribbling questions down in a tiny notepad (that’ll look professional right?) in anticipation of the now much-more-formal-than-intended conversation to come. A disclaimer: like most people, I consider myself at my intellectual prime at 3am while drunk out of my mind in the corner of some alleyway pizza place, growing pustule-like out of the side of some bigger host building. Y’know the type that wears the greasy smudge of smog from its ovens on the wallpaper with pride. Only there and then, in my personal urban Eden, does the crippling self-awareness disappear. And this was no pizza parlor. So as Ferris’ felt folding seat squeaked into a right angle beside me, I swear my insides liquefied and came gushing out my mouth.
I tried to ask him questions, but I ended up just name-dropping trendy authors with the kind of insecurity that others might wear while flashing the relevant documents for a gallon-hat wearing border guard. I’m one of you, I swear. Part of the problem was that I came in search of a conversation and somehow slipped my way into an interview, which I was frantically underprepared for. But another issue, and this’ll sound strange, was how nice he was. His curious smile (no doubt as surprised by my presence there as I was) just felt more welcoming than the situation warranted. If he had been a stoic Kilimanjaro, over whom you could only gain purchase with the icy violence of a pickaxe, I might have settled into the role of some wounded fanboy. But he seemed genuinely happy to sit and speak with me, which made me even more grateful, which made me even more nervous about living up to his kindness.
About four or five questions in he gave me a sidelong glance and said: “Shouldn’t you be writing this down?” Of course. Real interviewers take note of the answers they receive. But they never taught me that at imaginary journalist school, yet another example of the failure of our educational system. Mr. Ferris might now have realized how open he was to misquotation, and might have been imagining, with no small amount of dread, the fraudulent headlines of the university dailies to come: Joshua Ferris Not All That Opposed To Certain Kinds Of Bestiality, but if he was, it didn’t show, and he guided me through his own mock-trial and out the door where he wished me well and to: “Be safe.”
I jogged, stumble-sprinted my way home. The poor boy thinks he can outrun shame. And threw my body down on residence bed. Faux-De Niro had flown the coop, no doubt off to encourage other Evel Knievels into jumping that extra bus that’d leave them (like me) in a pulpy heap, with axle rod wed round the spine like blushing bride’s blood diamond ring. But seeing my signed books, I just could not stay mad at him. If this debacle had in some way shown me the distance between myself and my ideal, it had at least become clear that these two worlds do intersect. And the fuzzy violence of my crossing over, for a moment to haunt that other world, made me aware of something that I had been neglecting for an unseemly long amount of time. Mr. Ferris’ willingness to acknowledge me as someone who deserved his attention forced me to come to terms with how circumscribed my own consciousness had become. I suppose it is a symptom of my penchant for getting lost inside my own head that I can easily convince myself that I don’t orbit other people. And even if I don’t intend to isolate myself from the rest of the world, it doesn’t change the fact that out of a much-derided but still all-powerful kind of insecurity, which operates like a hunchbacked, shady power player, running the government from a smoky backroom, I undercut other peoples’ efforts to connect with me. Every (wo)man is an island, but the brave ones build bridges.
I called her later on that night. I need to see you. Face to face.