—Come here, you have to see this.
—What is it?
—This is…wowee, come here.
They’re in the kitchen, the two of them. He is sitting at the table watching the small black and white Sanyo. There are dozens of people sat on the wall. Dozens more are chipping at it with sledgehammers, regular hammers, one man throws a sickle at the concrete barrier.
—Look at this, my father says and points to the small screen.
It’s David Hasselhoff with some sort of bandanna singing some awful shit into a microphone on top of the wall. Below him people are giving the peace or freedom sign and smoking cigarettes.
—We’re next, my mum says from the sink. She’s washing cups and forks.
—Wait for me to wipe the grease off them first, my father says, eyes glued to the television.
He’s always had a practical, peasant sense about him despite the unpractical peasant that he is. He is a product made by a country of contradictions.
—Mmda, he says. We’re next.
Although I realize this is a momentous spot in history, I really don’t care. Empires are built. Empires crumble. Whether they’re taken down by financial pyramid schemes, coups, or sledgehammers, it’s the same thing to me.
—We’re next, eh?
—We gotta be, I say watching them all try to dismantle the wall. There’s a weird futility about all this. Little people with cigarettes hanging from their lips running around with little hammers trying to take down a concrete and steel ideological divider. We’re right. You’re wrong. I say something about that. I don’t remember how I phrase it, though.
—Pfft, eh.
And then:
—Let me wipe off the grease before you wash the dishes.
Mum doesn’t pay attention to him.
—It’s all because of Reagan.
Mum agrees.
—Gorby might’ve had something to do with it too, I say.
—Eh, pfft.
I hate when he makes that sound. The Condescending Cock sound. The You’re An Idiot Who Doesn’t Know What He’s Talking About sound.
—Look.
Hasselhoff again.
—That’s that guy from ah…that movie with the car, he says.
Mum looks over at the small screen for a few moments, then goes back to the dishes.
—The grease’ll clog the, uh…
He’s hooked to the images.
Perestroika.
Glasnost.
Гласность
And then there’s the giant graffiti on the abandoned water tower just off New York Avenue, as your train inches into the District of Columbia: Solidarność
Movements and counter-movements. It all seems so silly.
—This is something, eh? This is…wowee, it’s…I mean…just it’s…eh? He looks at me. He looks at my mum. I’ve never seen my father on the brink of tears.
It doesn’t matter to me. Any of this. It doesn’t matter if I am here, there, anywhere. We are stupid. I think this now, even at age twenty. We are all so stupid. So little. So petty.
—Eh?
Yes. Eh.
Within three months I’ll be able to buy chunks of the wall from vendors down on Canal Street in Manhattan. K-Street in D.C.
Capitalism will have eaten Communism.
Will have outspent it.
—The grease’ll clog up the pipes if you don’t wipe…
I leave them both there. The house smells like old people. Mildew or…something foul that only old people give off.

Something is weird.
I wake up sitting at a table outside. In a courtyard. There is a glass of water, a coffee, a pack of menthols, and a book. I know this book. Have read it. Some other time.
It’s written by that guy who got eviscerated on national television by that talk show host after she found out the book was fiction. They murdered him. All of them got their turn. Hung before millions of angry viewers.
Readers.
They cut him up savagely and made him crawl on his knees and lick the floor. I like that guy. He came back later and blew them all out of the water. Even the New York Times kissed his feet. Second acts can sometimes redeem you. Sometimes sink you even further.
Twenty or thirty feet away from my table there is a little girl. She’s maybe 6. Cute with long hair. She’s standing in the middle of this courtyard and does the splits. Over and over, she does the splits. She gets up. Does the splits. Gets up. Does the splits.
Hey buddy.
A man with tattoos and a grey goatee.
Buddy?
I don’t say anything. The girl does the splits. Gets up. Splits. She smiles.
Hey buddy.
I don’t say anything.
Slick! You’re sitting at my table.
Splits. And up. And splits.
You’re at my table chief.
I don’t say anything. The little girl does her move over and over. There is smooth jazz on the speakers. Outside, in this courtyard.
Are you deaf? You’re sitting at my table.
I feel unstable. I can’t talk to him. Can’t get up. The book on the table has a frayed cover. In the corner, I have written my full name in sloppy penmanship.
YOU’RE AT MY FUCKIN’ TABLE!
In information theory entropy represents the potential for disorder in a system. When a system has more degrees of freedom and more constituents, there are more possible states for it to occupy.
Splits. Smiles.
I feel myself being lifted under the arms by the tattoos. He ejects me from the chair onto the slate tile. I can’t move. Can’t get up. I hear him light a cigarette. Thumbs through the book.
Laughs. Splits. More child laughter.
He laughs.
You’re lucky. I could’ve kicked your sorry ass.
On the tiny speakers, in the courtyard, there he is: Najee. Kenny-G. David Sanborn.
Kicked it from here to China.
I am still face down on the slate rock. I can hear him inhale the tobacco. The little girl does her trick. Over and over. And over.
Something is weird.

When I was fifteen I wrote my first film script. Wrote it out by hand in pencil in a two hundred and fifty page spiral notebook. It was a grand achievement, believe me. It was a full feature. A war epic with explosions and a melodramatic airplane crash, locations in Africa, Morocco, Ankara. And a love story, too. I mean I was fifteen for fuck’s sake. Most of my friends were walking to the mall, hanging out and scratching their balls, looking at girls or drinking Natty Bo’ on a hill every Friday night, firing bottle rockets at one another. So give me that, at least. Give me the Pink Floyd on the boom box, too. I played out The Wall and The Final Cut while writing this masterpiece.

I called it “The House of God” and it was basically an adaptation of Papa Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro.” Some stuff I adapted, other stuff I lifted straight out of his Nick Adams short stories, from his days up in Michigan. Word for word sometimes. I didn’t care about copyright. I never wanted to actually make the film, just write one. Anyway, those Nick Adams scenes were written as flashbacks. As Harry was dying on the flat, dry earth of Africa. They worked well, too. I mean, after all…Hemingway wrote them. Really.

If you know “Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I’ve always loved the name Compton. Compton as an angel coming to airlift Harry to a hospital somewhere beyond the mountain. Shuttling him up and above the snow-capped top. Compton as an angel wearing a tweed jacket. I still have that scene in my head. I was in love with death at fifteen. But not from angst or that mumbo jumbo psycho babble teenage shit they give you in books and university courses. I just liked the idea of all of us having a finite chunk of time to foul things up. Preferably shorter rather than longer. Death could be anyone. Your mailman, your milkman. Only we don’t have milkmen, but you know what I mean. There’s an old picture of a milkman in the mid 40s carrying a load of bottles, walking through a ruined city. I had that pasted on my wall in my room while I was writing then. It’s on the Internet, you can probably find it easily now. Someone already has before and sent it to me.
That guy, carrying the milk…that guy could’ve been death. Death bringing you milk.

I sort of fucked up the script, though. Was tripped up by history. Got my world wars mixed up. In Kilimanjaro, Hemingway writes flashbacks to The Great War. World War I. I misunderstood that. I had these dead Turks with their bloody skirts and upturned shoes piled up on quays, rotting away in putrefied states and awful stench…and my story took place in 19 fucking 43.

Well, I tried. And then I joined the rest of the fellows on the hill downing shit beer and smashing cans against my forehead. In the end, that calling was stronger and more attractive than spending more of my summer weeks shut in a basement room with Floyd rolling on a loop.

I struggle with this. Now. The stories. I struggle with the morality of the whole thing. With living the stories. Or having to. The made up stories. The idea that to write them well, you have to live them. Papa fucked it up for me. First he fucked it up by making me think I can write like him. Simple sentences. Easy peasy. And then he fucked it up by saying: “fiction is truer than the truth.” So…then…living the stories in order to write them well. Like how the method actors have to do the shit before they can channel it. To experience it. There’s a great ditty about Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier while they were filming Marathon Man and Olivier’s character was supposed to torture Hoffman by digging into his molars with an electric drill; poking the nerves in his mandible. It’s a famous scene in film history. Olivier drills and keeps asking: Is it safe? Is it safe? Anyway, and so the story goes that Hoffman actually went and got his teeth drilled down to the nerves without anesthesia so he could recall the pain, channel the experience during the filming of the scene. And when Olivier heard what Hoffman had done he looked at him strangely, incredulously, and said: Dustin. You’re an actor. ACT!

I always think of that when I struggle with the morality of writing stories and deceiving people or at least confusing them. There’s Olivier standing there next to me saying: you’re a bloody fiction writer: don’t live it. MAKE IT THE FUCK UP. Only he doesn’t use the F-word. He’s much more eloquent than that. I mean, he’s Lawrence Olivier, fuck’s sakes.

My time in rehab has yielded nothing on paper. Not even a false start. I think if you get caught up in virtue and morals and honesty and all that altruistic, good citizen bullshit you might as well burn everything and go grab a state 9 to fiver working for a mediocre wage with shitty people ordering you around and shop-talking numbers, quotas, projections…all that bile that breaks you down year by year until you become a soul-less nothing with nothing to say, waiting for your Compton in a tweed jacket to come whisk you away and around mount fucking Kilimanjaro. Only if your imagination’s been eviscerated down to that, chances are Compie’s gonna drop you off at lot #46 in Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow cemetery across the street from the Wal-Mart, not some majestic mountain in Tanzania.

That’s what I think.