INTERVIEW WITH ROY KESEY

TEV: Welcome back! When was the last time you were here in the U.S.? What's different? What's the same?

RK: Boy, I could ramble on about this forever.

And probably will.

Let's see. The last time I was in the States was three years ago, on our way from Peru to my wife's posting in China. She'd gone on ahead to get an apartment and such straightened out, so I was here with our two kids--our daughter was two years old at the time and our son was only nine months--so my cultural observations were limited to the socio-historical fields of Diapers, Bottles, and Will You Please Please PLEASE Stop Pinching Grandma With the Salad Tongs.

That said, of course, lots of things have changed. Or, better, lots of things surprise me now, whether or not they've actually changed. I didn't expect everything to be so green and beautiful. Three years in Beijing just makes you forget how green green can be, you know? Now, in some ways that surprise is just a function of me being lucky enough to come in late spring, but it's also a function of how much space we have here, and how gorgeous so much of it is. That drive from D.C. to New York, two hundred and fifty miles, a hundred thousand acres all dressed up green for me, and I thought, this must have been a good part of what they were hoping for, all the millions who've come here looking to stay, a land as beautiful as this one.

I also wasn't ready for strangers to be kind to me. You depend on that to a certain extent when you're abroad--sometimes there's no other way for things to get done--but here at home I tend to think I won't have to count on it. Then this morning, of course, I got lost, and had to ask someone for directions, and this seven-foot guy covered in tattoos, modern-day urban Judge Holden, tells me which way to go, sees that I don't understand, and walks me to the corner to show me. (There were maybe fifteen hundred other people I could have asked directions of, but once I made eye-contact with him, it had to be him, because, you know, I didn't want to make him feel like he was just too tall and tattooed...)

Then there's the other side of surprise.

I wasn't ready for gasoline to cost the same as yellowcake.

I wasn't ready-and my apologies in advance for going all soapboxy here-to find my country feeling quite so much like East Germany in the seventies, albeit with better clothes and great coffee, by which I mean I didn't expect to find almost all of our major communications companies basically working as subcontractors for the NSA.

And while there are about as many yellow ribbons saying "We Support Our Troops" as I expected, I thought I'd see at least a few ribbons saying "We Wholeheartedly Support Our Troops on the Line, and We Don't Want Any More of Them to Die, and We Especially Love and Respect That Kid Out on Point Who's So Scared He Can't Get His Hands to Stop Shaking But Somehow Still Gets His Job Done. On the Other Hand, We Have Nothing But Contempt For All the Old Men With Stars on Their Shoulders Who Thought This Whole Grisly Farce Was a Good Idea to Begin With, and Nothing But Abiding Hatred for the Members of the Current Administration Who Lied in Order to Convince Those Old Men, and a Majority of the American Public, That This War Was Necessary or Just." Where are those ribbons? And what color are they?

TEV: I think the kids are calling it "pink mist."

After years of living in Peru and China, are there particular food items that you crave and bring back home with you?

RK: We're lucky in that China is long on extremely tasty, extremely varied foodstuffs, but sure, there's lots of stuff from Peru and/or the States that either you can't get at all or that is hard to find, very expensive, or both. Avocados! Man, I love me some avocados, but in China you can only find them in the specialty shops, four bucks apiece, with the taste and texture of limestone. Mangos! Starfruit! Fresh tortillas! Hamburgers the size of my head!

Again, though, I'm usually too busy stuffing my face at this new duck place we just found-breath-taking-to lament the foods I'm missing.

TEV: How was the KGB reading?

RK: It was fantastic. KGB is such a great place to read-great acoustics, really responsive audience right up close, terrific low light. The only thing missing was thick clouds of cigarette smoke, but the Ghosts of Smokers Past were hanging out up in the corners of the ceiling, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves too.

(Except, hold on. As long as I'm on the topic of the Demon Weed, there's something I have to get off my chest. SEVEN DOLLARS???!!! Yes: in New York City, a pack of cigarettes now costs seven dollars. Holy god. When the guy said that, I honestly thought he meant for a carton-that's about what they cost in China-and I said, No, I just want the one pack.

And he said, Yeah.

And I swear to god, if I lived full time in a city where cigarettes cost that much, I would switch to heroin in protest.)

But back to your actual question. Suzanne Dottino, the manager there at KGB, did an excellent job getting the word out, and the place was packed-there were people out the door, down the stairs, everywhere. Of course, I imagine most of them were there to see Peter Carey, but in the hidden recesses of the mind of the brain of my head, I secretly pretended that they were mine, all mine! And there actually were a goodly number of known and loved faces, and to them all I say: thanks.

The other two readers were great as well-an English guy named Wesley Stace who read a very funny sex-to-death passage from his first novel, and then Peter Carey hit clean-up, and clubbed it clear over the creek-very funny, very sharp, at once risky and tight.

TEV: What was the Opium reading like?

RK: If possible, it was even better. It was at a tremendously cool bar owned (partially? wholly?) by Tim Robbins called The Back Room-post-apocalyptic on the outside, pre-Raphaelite on the inside-with a secret room behind a sliding bookcase (and how come none of my apartments has ever had a secret room behind a sliding bookcase? No, really, how come?). The manager was a great guy named Tim who once played with Dr. J for the Nets in the ABA, and who, thanks purely to the goodness of the tremendous heart in his 6'10”, 350-pound body, did not smack my bony ass straight up through the roof when, after several glasses of refreshment, I for some reason felt led to demonstrate on him exactly how I would go about making space for myself down low in the post.

So, a very cool locale, and an unusual reading in that there were thirteen of us presenting work. All of the others were writers I've “known” electronically for years, and I've been waiting all that time to meet them in the flesh, and at last it happened. And they were spectacular people, and each of their pieces was fast and smart and right. And there were door prizes and book exchanges and all manner of other excellent oddnesses dreamt up by our host, Todd Zuniga, editor of the very fine Opium Magazine.

A terrific night, all the way around.

TEV: What do you look forward to on your visit to SoCal?

RK: Tons of things. Catching up with a bunch of old friends I haven't seen in years. Reading to new crowds. Meeting some more writers in the flesh that until now I've only known as pixels on my computer screen. Driving down the Los Angeles River bed at a hundred-and-ten and pretending I'm some guy in a movie, preferably not the guy who dies first. Going to the Museum of Jurassic Technology. And whatever else comes my way.

TEV: Taco or burrito?

RK: For the record: I'm a burrito-man from way, way back.

TEV: What are you working on now?

RK: At the moment I'm just enjoying the trip, getting some reading done, making some loose notes that may or may not ever turn into anything. But when I get back to Beijing, well, there's a fairly odd novella that I'm two drafts into, about a house with no doors to the outside and opaque windows and fifty thousand inhabitants. And there's an even odder short story that I'm one draft into about universal television turner-offers and the Gospel of Judas and birds catching fire for no clear reason. And there's one bigger thing as well, but it's not yet clear enough in my head to really talk about.

TEV: Say, that husband-of-a-diplomat deal looks pretty sweet. Do you spend a fortune on tuxedo rentals? Do you get to drive like a jerk-off? How can I get a gig like that?

RK: Oh, no question, it's the best of all possible gigs in many ways, and it's as easy to land as, well, marrying a current or future diplomat. You get almost all of the perks (free donuts, free burritos, free tattoos) but suffer few of the restrictions (having to watch what you say so as not to cause nuclear war) of being an actual diplomat-type diplomat.

As it happens, I had a tux made for my wedding in Peru six years ago, and had a couple sets of bow-tie-with-vest combinations made up, so I'm fairly well covered on that front.

The deal with driving like a jerk-off is that the police can still pull you over and ticket you, but the courts can't force you to pay the tickets. As I prefer my conflicts to be ones I invent for stories rather than ones I live through, I generally drive fairly sanely. I do park like a jerk-off, though. Then again, I always did.

TEV: You were a Hoya; I was a Highlander. I still managed to spend some time on M Street. What were some of your haunts? I remember dining and dashing at The Tombs.

RK: Ballsy! I don't have any Georgetown-based eat-and-run stories to speak of. Then again, I was only a Hoya from 1986 to 1988, all thanks to (Um… this would be a good time to strap on your oxygen mask, sentence-length-wise) Black Whatever Day of the Week It Was, when the stock market crashed, taking with it all of my money, or, I guess, technically, not so much my money as Georgetown's money: I was working full time as a legislative aid to a congressman to pay my way at GU, and my salary was just enough for tuition but not really enough for, you know, well, let's call it 'spending' money, so I came up with the ingenious scheme of not actually paying my tuition-of, instead, deferring my tuition payments and investing my salary in the stock market-and that was an excellent scheme except insofar as I lost everything in the Crash and then had to tell the Georgetown finance office and they were Not Actually Too Happy About It.

Sorry, what was the question?

Right, sorry, haunts. Well. So, for those two years, between work and study I didn't actually have haunts. Lame, I know. What I had instead was just a few hours each week that I could dedicate to serious, um, entertainment, which usually entailed bottles and shot glasses in somebody's dorm room, and then certain places on the sidewalk where I would fall down on the way to potential future haunts, and then I would stay there until whoever I'd gone out with came back. Do sidewalks count, haunt-wise?

That said, I did spend a few hundred enjoyable hours at The Pub, an on-campus bar that used to be down in the basement of Healy Hall. I remember several of those hours distinctly, and all of them with great fondness.

TEV: How did a California boy who went to school in Washington, D.C., started a family in Peru, and now lives in China, come to write about Croatia?

RK: Boy, the long version of the answer to that would take a few months to tell, but the short version is: it was 1990, and I was chasing a girl. She was in Prague and I was in England, and she sent me a postcard saying she was going to spend part of the summer on the coast of Croatia with the family of a friend of hers, and since I planned to be in the neighborhood anyway, give or take a thousand miles, I went down there to see her. Stuff ended up not so much working out between us, but I stayed in touch with the friends I'd made through her. And I went back to see them and poke around a little more in 1992-things were still warm at that point, shooting-wise, though not white-hot like in late '91-and again in 1993 when the lines were stable, though the Serbs held on to maybe a third of Croatia until the big Croat push in 1995. And the original story that became the novel that became the novella “Nothing in the World” came out of things that I saw and heard and read about and thought about in the course of those three trips.

Comments

[Richard]

Great interview with a terrific writer. Thanks!

I guess the only thing I'd disagree with is I think most Old Men With Stars on Their Shoulders Thought This Whole Grisly Farce Was a Bad Idea to Begin With.

[Susan Henderson]

Kesey's NY readings were amazing. And his sore throat added a real sexiness to it, even though he was reading about a severed head.

Sorry to miss out on the vermin.

[Claire Zulkey]

I was a waitress at the Tombs!