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September 17, 2005
This Happened (Featuring: Gossip, Celebrity, Books)
Last night (Tuesday night, as it is still though just barely Wednesday as I write this), Brett and I hauled it out to Danville after work to catch Nick's reading by its tail. I left my office at oh about 5:40 and proceeded to make at least three wrong turns on my way to pluck Brett from the Googolplex-- an entire seven miles away from my office. We got lost a few more times, and, too, Danville was much farther than I had expected.
Last night (Tuesday night, as it is still though just barely Wednesday as I begin to write this), Brett and I hauled it out to Danville after work to catch Nick's reading by its tail. I left my office at oh about 5:40 and proceeded to make at least three wrong turns on my way to pluck Brett from the Googolplex-- an entire seven miles away from my office. We got lost a few more times, and, too, Danville was much farther than I had expected.
The drive took us past the most intensely Siliconey part of the Valley, where there is nothing but one glass and concrete office building after another, so repetitive they could have been plopped out of sandcastle molds. Each building had the name of a company stuck on its front in big, colorful letters like kitchen magnets. Huge companies, apparently, and even Brett hadn't heard of most of them. I felt like Oedipa Maas, lost in the grids of California highway and the state's many Yoyodines.
East out of the valley, past the mountainettes the land switches with alarming and sudden decisiveness from sterile office sprawl to farmland. There was an office building that seemed to have gotten lost on the way to Silicon Valley, one last mega tech office plex with renegade livestock-- goats and cattle-- grazing on its shocking, sod-tiled lawn. Then there were rickety clapboard Victorians, free-roaming cattle on hillsides, Tracy, and a scattering of post-Levvitown exurb outposts. Brett said we were no longer in the Bay Area. Past the hills, he said, is where Dublin and Pleasanton are, and it's too East to be Bay. I hadn't realized these places did not count as Bay Area: they are always listed on the Bay Area Craigslist.
By the time we found Rakestraw books, it was past 7:30. The reading started at 7:00. Rakestraw was an unexpectedly endearing youngster-oriented bookshop in a town unexpectedly charming in spite of its obviousness newness. Its strip-malls, noted Brett, were elfin. The event was set up with Nick at a podium about ten feet from the door but facing away, so that the only way to get in was to walk across what served, essentially, as a stage and circle past the check-out desk to get to the seats. We were rude and disruptive.
The audience was half nerdy high-school students and half parents. A Q&A was in progress when we got there. Nick was fielding questions from the eager, nerdy nerds asking him (and writing down) favorite books and recommendations ("Could you recommend some books with plain language. We read a lot of complicated things at school and I want to know what books that are very straight-forward you would recommend," one girl asked). Nick was incredibly gracious, I thought, and the students (best word to characterize the crowd) were certainly receptive. Nick's answers were thoughtful and humble, but what most impressed me was that Nick asked questions back. One kid asked about writing; Nick answered, then asked the if he, too, was a writer, what sort of thing he enjoyed writing and so forth. Yes, it was all very sweet.
When the Q&A was done, Nick signed autographs and Brett and I, somewhat awkwardly, browsed books with pictures of pirate ships and cats until the kids went home and we could talk to Nick. I always feel uncomfortable when I am around people I haven't seen in a long time. Plus, of course, there is this thing with Nick that when long amounts of time pass and I don't see him, I start believing that I dislike him. Especially when he is publishing novels while I am caged in an office that smells, like most of the spaces I inhabit, like gently rotting fruit. But then I see him and I remember, oh, Nick is a nice, nifty guy.
Nick needed a lift to the city, and the three of us ended up going to Tosca, a tony bar in North Beach once frequented by Hunter Thompson crowd. In the car, I nervously talked about my cat and Google and the circumstance whereby I and everyone I know are employed in the world o'tech. Nick seemed intrigued by the Googolplex. Next time, Nick, next time. At the bar, I drank on an empty stomach, then Brett popped across the street to order bucket loads of sushi. A bartender Nick chatted with pointed us towards a back room with a pool table where smoking and eating were permissible. "It's where all the writers and smokers end up," he said, and though I realize the two are far from mutually exclusive, I wondered which one I was, whether I was being led back to the inner sanctum because I was a writer or because I was a smoker. The answer, of course, is smoker.
A few scotch & sodas later, two women arrived-- one a younger woman who was, I believe, Nick's West Coast distributor, the other, and old woman, who was proprietress of the bar. The younger woman handed Nick a small stack of books, including, I noticed, a galley of a new novel by Katherine Noel, who, coincidentally, was my writing instructor at Stanford last fall (I have my share of reservations about the benefits of workshops in general, but Katherine was, no question, an excellent teacher as well as probably the best reader I've ever had; meaning, she was a sympathetic reader in that she was skilled at picking up on the author's goals and intentions, the nature of a particular project; as a result her criticisms were extremely productive, as her recommendations directed me towards my goals, not her own. Oh, she's also a babe (why are a disproportionate number of the Stegner Fellows totally hot and obscenely hipster?)). Then came my three coolest seconds of the night, where I got to say, "oh, did you say Katherine Noel? I know her from Stanford." It was the only time all night when I could contribute anything on the topic of Famous Literary People That Are So Our Homies. Of course, I then found out that Nick would be lunching Miss Katherine soon, and then I was suddenly uncool again. I made one last pathetic grasp at 'in'ness: "oh, tell her I say congratulations and hello." As though she is going to remember an undergrad student from one of her workshops. And as though if she did remember it would be for some reason other than said student's habitual tardiness and absences and honest yet nevertheless bizarre explanation that at the time, said student's father was in the midst of going mad. Yeah, I'm sure they all saw right through me. (At the end of the night, I somehow managed to accidentally steal Nick's books (and it was an accident, I swear). He left them in Brett's car, lucky me). (Sorry about the parenthesis frenzy. Totally uncalled for, I know).
The old woman, Jeanette, talked about how she couldn't even deal with going to the memorials for Hunter, so tacky, especially that shit at The Bottom of the Hill, full of young people who never even, like, knew him. She talked about Jan Wenner ("that little homunculus," put in the younger woman, Elise) is totally selling Hunter out by writing a book about him ("so pathetic, so disgusting, writing a book about Hunter now"). I learned, also, that because Rolling Stone's anniversary, or maybe Hunter S. Thompson's anniversary at Rolling Stone, or some other occasion, had been approaching, a couple of weeks before his death Hunter had, apparently, called up "everyone" to say that if RS called to talk about him, to not say a damn thing, then he died, leaving "everyone" unsure as to the proper etiquette. How after the last big earthquake, during which she was trapped at a Giants ballgame with the Copallettes ("I had to call Rome to tell Francis, 'your children and your building are ok. Ha. That's what he cares about.") she decided she needed to pack an emergency kit, namely, a Channel bag with some clothes and a knife from France. I learned that Francis' restaurants are something of an embarrassment. ("I ate there the other day," said Nick. "Ugh," said Jeanette. Tom Waits' apartment is ugly ("every time I'm there, I ask him, 'Did you buy this place in the dark?'").
I sat there with my jaw in my lap, periodically kicking Brett under the table every time another first name that needs no last name was mentioned. Yeah.
I got drunkish. It got late and Brett got tired and wanted to go home. I went with Nick to get a drink at the hotel bar, which was closed, so we went up to his room and emptied the mini-fridge on Morgan Entrenkin's dime instead. We gossiped mostly about mutual friends, people we knew from high school. We started yawning. Nick had an early flight (I had early work, of course, but somehow that wasn't ever a factor). I'd lost my wallet so he lent me the cab money home.
At one point, as we were talking about people we know or used to know, I mentioned that the one person I am most in touch with is Joel, a revered history teacher from Riverdale. "You are in touch with Mr. Doerfler?" Nick gawked. "How? How do you get him to respond to you? I've tried, Jeff's tried, Trina's tried. He won't talk to any of us. I mean, I was writing an article on protesters at the Republican convention, and I called to interview him, and he still would not return my calls. How do you do it-- tell me the secret of getting Mr. Doerfler-- oh, sorry, I guess you call him 'Joel'-- to be friends with you?"
I just smiled, perhaps a little smug. Sure, Nick may be publishing novel number two. Nick may be like this with Francis and P.J. and Sean and Jan and Hunter and Jim. Yes, Nick covers the protesters of the Republican National Convention, and travels to Africa with big money GOP donors, and surfs in Hawaii. He has all that, sure. But I have one thing on Nick.
Joel Doerfler returns my calls.
Posted by hissycat at September 17, 2005 10:30 AM
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