Check for yourself. The ads are there. The greatest writers of the twentieth century weren’t above hawking products. Why should I be?
It’s not like I live in a cave. When Anthony Bourdain’s people emailed my people and suggested I escort Tony—insiders called him Tony—on a tour of Portland, Oregon, sights, I agreed. Trouble is, to be on location with Tony was to find yourself a small float-y bubble in the surging sea of energy that rushed and broke around Mr. Bourdain. As we walked past restaurants, the wait staff would rush out and grab him, dragging him bodily in, settling him into a seat and delivering every item on the menu.
If you watch the reruns you might notice me hovering in the edge of some frame. If you look closer you can tell I’ve taken two 600-milligram Vicodins, and I’m high as a kite to deal with the stress. I stumble and mumble, and when we visit Voodoo Doughnut and they present me with a huge penis-shaped doughnut that spurts goopy custard all over my face, well, I’m unfazed.
In my defense, the next time Tony’s people called and asked if I’d do an encore on his new show I sidestepped. Vicodin was in short supply so I suggested they contact the thriller writer Chelsea Cain, a friend of mine who knows Portland much better. Chelsea is smart and funny and telegenic, and they Googled her, and they opted not to book her for the show. Their reason? Chelsea didn’t deliver a male demographic, aged eighteen to thirty-five. Something like that. As it turns out I do deliver those eyeballs. It wasn’t me they wanted, not me, it was my readers.
And it’s not as if I hadn’t made a huge effort to whore myself already. One lunch in Chicago, my publisher set me beside Terry Gross with the specific instructions to captivate her and earn myself a slot on her popular National Public Radio show. All through that lunch I feigned interest in her cats, yes, cats, while psychically begging her to love me and interview me. Now, my guess is that show will never happen. Big sigh.
And it’s not like I didn’t accept some money along the way. In the year 2000 or 2001, Chevrolet offered me five thousand dollars for the right to mention Fight Club in a television commercial for the Ram pickup truck. Small potatoes since once my agent’s commission was subtracted, as well as taxes, the payday amounted to less than I’d forked over for my first used car in 1978. A Chevy Bobcat (look it up). It seemed karmic, like Chevy paying me back.
Then Jaguar/Land Rover came calling. They offered me a half million dollars to write a story that could be made into a film that would feature a Land Rover in some crucial, high-profile way. A half million dollars. I thought of throwing myself at Terry Gross over lunch. I’d done worse things for money. And maybe I was stupid, but I still said no.
Not a year after that, the Super Bowl came calling.
It was flattering. Had Cheever ever gotten a Super Bowl spot? For that matter, had Shakespeare?
The advertising agency considered my idea for all of two minutes. It would mean paying me a licensing fee for the book excerpt. And it would mean paying me an additional fee to perform. And without batting an eye, they withdrew the proposal.
That’s why you did not see me midway through the 2016 Super Bowl. It’s not that I was too dignified or my principles were too high. It’s that I asked for too much money, I don’t deliver enough eyeballs.
But I still sit here. I’m not young, not anymore, but my phone is turned on. Just in case Volvo or Jaguar or Terry Gross calls. I’m begging: Please tell me, again, about your cats.
Authority: Using Physical Sensation
to Create Reality
Consider that your body has a memory of its own. And your body can tell stories. We love forensic science programs, where an expert walks into a crime scene and “reads” the clues. Under the scrutiny of Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple, details that seemed innocuous take on importance. In the same way, a doctor can read a mole or a twitch and diagnose something ominous.
Most stories engage the reader’s mind or heart, his intellect or emotions, but few also pull in the reader’s entire body. Stories that do elicit a physical reaction—horror, pornography—are seen as low culture. But if you were my student I’d ask, Why can’t a high-culture story engage the mind, the heart, and the body?
Years back, a reporter for USA Today was interviewing me at The Ivy in Los Angeles. We sat on the patio screened by latticework and bougainvillea, drinking iced tea. She was friends with Tom Hayden, the political radical and second husband of Jane Fonda, and said Tom wanted me to come up after lunch and talk anarchy. He was fascinated by Fight Club and wanted to discuss it over a game of croquet. Yes, croquet. And the entire time the reporter pitched me on radical political lawn games she continually used the fingers of one hand to circle the slender wrist of her opposite hand. She’d pinch the wrist, making her fingers like a tight bracelet around it.
At a lull in the conversation, I called her attention to the mannerism. She looked down, surprised, as if her hands belonged to a stranger. She hadn’t been aware of the behavior. As a teenager, she explained, she’d been anorexic. And as her body’s percentage of fat decreased she’d determined little tests to measure it. At 2 percent body fat, she’d been able to feel the hollows between the ligaments in her wrist. This is what her hand had been doing: gauging her body fat. It had become such an automatic behavior that she still caught herself doing it. Or in this case, I had.
This is the kind of physical “tell” that, if you depict it
