True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 330: Grief Is A Witch-Hag (Part 1)
Aired: 2023-11-02
Duration: 01:38:40


=== Harper's Twitter Message (14:48) ===

[00:00:00]  Hello, everyone.
[00:00:01]  Hello.
[00:00:02]  I know that wasn't addressed to me, but hello, Liz.
[00:00:04]  It was.
[00:00:04]  I said, everyone, which includes you.
[00:00:07]  Hello.
[00:00:07]  And you.
[00:00:09]  I'm Liz.
[00:00:10]  My name is Brace.
[00:00:11]  We are, of course, as always, joined by producer Young Chomsky, and the podcast is called.
[00:00:16]  It's called True Non.
[00:00:17]  Hello.
[00:00:18]  Hello.
[00:00:19]  So we've done this a lot recently where I'm like, we need to pull our listeners behind the curtain.
[00:00:25]  I'm forgetting we're not pulling them behind the curtain.
[00:00:27]  Well, we could pull them behind the curtain open and they can see.
[00:00:30]  I don't want them to come back.
[00:00:31]  We could pull them back there.
[00:00:33]  Physically get a little weird.
[00:00:34]  There's a proximity I'm not a big fan of.
[00:00:37]  So when was it?
[00:00:39]  Like a week or two ago?
[00:00:41]  Two weeks ago.
[00:00:42]  I'm going to say.
[00:00:42]  Two weeks ago.
[00:00:43]  Thank you.
[00:00:45]  I received a direct message on Twitter.
[00:00:49]  Excuse me.
[00:00:50]  X formerly known as Twitter.com.
[00:00:53]  Now, I want to interrupt you right here, Liz.
[00:00:55]  That is not an invitation to our male listeners out there.
[00:01:01]  No.
[00:01:01]  To repeat this magic trick that happened.
[00:01:04]  No, no, no, no.
[00:01:05]  But what did you do when you got this message?
[00:01:07]  I received a message and I went, and I immediately, as you will know, screenshot it and dropped it in the old Trunon group chat.
[00:01:21]  Dropped it like a mic, no comment, just dropped it there.
[00:01:26]  And you replied, oh my God.
[00:01:28]  I did.
[00:01:28]  I said that.
[00:01:29]  And I want to be clear too, to stave off any criticism of us as hypocrites.
[00:01:35]  We don't believe in group chats, but this one is necessary.
[00:01:37]  And it's only a thrupple style group chat.
[00:01:40]  It's just the three of us.
[00:01:42]  There's no extraneous members in it.
[00:01:44]  But yeah, it was a message from the magazine Harpers.
[00:01:48]  Yes.
[00:01:48]  Harper's emailed.
[00:01:53]  Harper's messaged us on Twitter, which is crazy.
[00:01:56]  I didn't know magazines could do that, by the way.
[00:01:58]  It's not the physical magazine.
[00:02:01]  Don't ruin it for me.
[00:02:03]  And also, I didn't know that a legacy meeting.
[00:02:07]  Are they legacy media?
[00:02:08]  I would call it that.
[00:02:09]  Why not?
[00:02:09]  I don't really know what that means, but they're old.
[00:02:11]  Legacy Media Publication had even heard of us, let alone wanted to talk to us, considering that it's very difficult for us to get any one of those guys to pay attention to anything we do.
[00:02:24]  No, it's the past week we'll show.
[00:02:26]  Maybe we don't want them to pay attention to the things we do, but go on.
[00:02:28]  Well, yeah, no, we're either too fascist or not fascist enough for the New York media.
[00:02:33]  It depends on what mood they're in.
[00:02:35]  But we received a message from Harper's Magazine, not Harper's Bazaar, Harper's Magazine, Literary Magazine, inviting us basically to interview an author who recently published an essay in their little magazine.
[00:02:55]  And it just so happens that they were aware that you were a big, that you, Brace, were a big fan of this author because in their little message, they say, I hear Brace Belden is a big fan of William T. Vollman.
[00:03:11]  True.
[00:03:13]  And we are wondering if you would like to speak to him.
[00:03:16]  No, I'm going to stop you right there.
[00:03:18]  What Liz is saying is absolutely, well, she's relaying, you know, historical facts there over the past two weeks, but what she is saying there is absolutely correct.
[00:03:27]  And what Harper's diagnosed as my extreme fandom of William Vollman is also very much correct.
[00:03:34]  Big, big, listen, in my opinion, I'm not saying that he's never going to listen to this.
[00:03:40]  I don't think he's ever.
[00:03:41]  He'd have to burn a CD on a USB stick.
[00:03:47]  But I'm not, so I'm not sucking his dick.
[00:03:49]  He'll never hear this shit.
[00:03:51]  I think William Vollman is probably, I would say, to me, the greatest living writer.
[00:03:59]  When did you first read him, Brace?
[00:04:03]  When I was either 17 or 18, a guy whose last name I will not say, but he knows who he is named Eric, who used to bring back little bags, stamped bags of heroin in his underwear from work trips to New York.
[00:04:17]  He, which was great.
[00:04:20]  It was the only time I was ever able to do powdered dope, which let me tell you, a whole different experience.
[00:04:24]  He had this book, which I have right here, actually, by Ken Miller called Open All Night, which is a photo book.
[00:04:32]  In that photo book are various photographs that Ken Miller took of prostitutes, of skinheads, of drunks and whinos in San Francisco in the 1980s.
[00:04:44]  And it says with text by William Vollman.
[00:04:47]  Throughout that book, Vollman sort of adds commentary or commentary is taken from Vollman's works and sort of put alongside these pictures.
[00:04:55]  Oftentimes, what his writing is about, the people who are in the actual photographs.
[00:05:00]  I was entranced by this book.
[00:05:02]  And Eric told me, like, hey, listen, there's a there's an accompanying volume or not accompanying volume, but there's sort of a connected book called The Rainbow Stories, which I think you might like.
[00:05:13]  And he gave it to me for my birthday.
[00:05:16]  I read that book and I flipped out.
[00:05:19]  I mean, I liked a lot of, I've always been big into novels.
[00:05:22]  I liked, you know, kind of out there, not out there stuff, but, you know, like I was, I was, I liked a lot of a lot of stuff.
[00:05:30]  And this just fucking, it flipped my wig.
[00:05:32]  And so I, over the intervening years, have read, I'm going to say like 10 of his books, I think 10 about all kinds of different subjects.
[00:05:46]  And I have just been, I mean, he is, he has written a lot more than most writers, I would say.
[00:05:52]  Books page count wise in his books and then just total books.
[00:05:55]  Yes.
[00:05:56]  Yeah.
[00:05:56]  His books are either, well, he's got some medium-sized ones, but his books are either like 200 pages long or like 5,000 pages long.
[00:06:04]  Well, yeah, he has a very famous book called Rising Up and Rising Down, which the original version of was, I think, 34, 3,300 or 3,400 pages.
[00:06:16]  And it was, it's basically like a treatise on the morality of violence.
[00:06:21]  So just to give our listeners a sense, I think that some of our listeners might be familiar with his work.
[00:06:26]  Yeah.
[00:06:28]  He, you know, has like, I think, I don't know what, how many books you would say.
[00:06:33]  I have no idea actually how many books he's written, maybe 15, 20?
[00:06:37]  I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm going to go towards 20 on that.
[00:06:40]  Yeah.
[00:06:41]  His first big nonfiction book was called An Afghanistan Picture Show, where he kind of relayed his story of him actually going to Afghanistan and attempting to join the Mujahideen, basically.
[00:06:57]  Yes.
[00:06:58]  And failing.
[00:06:59]  Yeah.
[00:07:00]  Kind of failing.
[00:07:02]  And from there, I think, you know, one thing that you kind of constantly see in his work is that it sort of bridges the kind of like tenuous gap between author and subject.
[00:07:15]  He kind of likes to pervert that relationship, I would say.
[00:07:18]  And so he's got a lot of books where he goes and kind of like communes with the subject of his books, whether that's like, you know, crackheads or poor people or trans prostitutes or the homeless.
[00:07:35]  I mean, and people that I think he would say are kind of like discarded or forgotten by society.
[00:07:42]  And he goes out and he lives with them and follows them around.
[00:07:46]  And, you know, oftentimes, and I think people sometimes get mad at him for this.
[00:07:50]  He like pays them for their time.
[00:07:53]  And he then uses them as subjects for his books.
[00:07:56]  He also kind of writes himself into those books as well.
[00:07:59]  Yeah.
[00:08:00]  Yeah.
[00:08:00]  I mean, I think that's what was sort of blew my shit out when I read The Rainbow Stories for the first time.
[00:08:06]  And I think I've read it like four or five times is that he is very present in that.
[00:08:10]  And when I read You Bright and Risen Angels, which was his first novel, I just remember, especially the first section of that, where he's like sort of talking about the characters and himself.
[00:08:20]  It's just like, I had never read anything like that.
[00:08:23]  I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not exactly a literary scholar or nothing, but I've read a lot of novels.
[00:08:28]  And I was just, I'd never, I never encountered anybody who can write the way that he writes because even in like his, his, I guess what you could call like minor works are like sentences that I'm just, I mean, they like, they bowl me over.
[00:08:42]  There's a fucking, I mean, he writes like nobody else can write.
[00:08:45]  And, You know, it's funny because I think especially what attracted me to his books about prostitution.
[00:08:53]  Um, well, it's kind of like loosely called like the prostitution trilogy.
[00:08:56]  They're not all about prostitution, but they involve a lot of prostitutes.
[00:09:00]  Is that first, so many of these were places that I had been in the tenderloin.
[00:09:04]  I lived in the tenderloin for a number of years.
[00:09:06]  I spent some dark years in the tenderloin.
[00:09:09]  I spent some kind of normalist years in the tenderloin, but I spent a lot of time in the tenderloin.
[00:09:13]  And, you know, the bars, the streets, the kind of people that are out there, it was just so it was really real to me.
[00:09:20]  But the ability that he has to show, I mean, and this is kind of trite or whatever as a description, but it's really something else when you actually read it.
[00:09:30]  But like the humanity and the beauty in which he writes about these people and some of the maybe not so beautiful things they do or some of the beautiful things they do do is just it's something else.
[00:09:41]  And it's not just, and it's not just, you know, he's not just writing about hookers and nothing like that or crackheads or anything.
[00:09:47]  I mean, he's got, he's got the Seven Dreams series, which are largely these huge volumes, mostly huge volumes, which is him telling the story of early settlers' contact with natives in the Americas.
[00:10:02]  He's got Europe Central, which won the National Book Award in 2005, which is, I would say, by far and away the absolute best book about the Second World War I've ever read.
[00:10:16]  I mean, it's just really something else.
[00:10:20]  I mean, he is an incredible range.
[00:10:23]  And I mean, yeah, he's my favorite writer.
[00:10:25]  And so for years, you know, I've known he's elusive.
[00:10:31]  He's, he's sort of a notoriously kind of not, he's not a shut-in necessarily, but he's not like, you know, one of those guys who's like out there on TV giving interviews or like, you know, guest lecturing at colleges or anything like that.
[00:10:46]  Well, and he doesn't have the internet.
[00:10:48]  That's the other thing.
[00:10:49]  He doesn't have the internet.
[00:10:50]  In fact, he does not use the internet at all.
[00:10:52]  I've read, and I don't know if I actually meant to ask him this, but I don't think we did.
[00:10:56]  I heard these never use the internet, which would be wild, but he doesn't have a cell phone.
[00:11:02]  He does have a phone number that connects to a phone that, as we saw, is kept in a very secure closet in his studio that you can only hear if he takes it out of the closet.
[00:11:19]  And so I've been wanting to interview him for years.
[00:11:24]  I think I wrote on Twitter in like March of 2020, like I need to speak to William Vohlman.
[00:11:31]  Cause I was like, hell, that'd be a great guy.
[00:11:33]  Interview.
[00:11:35]  I was able to get his phone number and spoke to him very briefly back then.
[00:11:40]  But at the time, I think he was working.
[00:11:41]  He was like, I'm not really doing any interviews.
[00:11:43]  Maybe you can send me a postcard or something.
[00:11:45]  I was, and I'll admit this to you now.
[00:11:48]  I was too afraid to write him a postcard because I was, I was, I don't know why.
[00:11:56]  It's one of those things where it's like, he's like my literary hero.
[00:12:00]  And funnily enough, I have this thing about that because I had written a letter to Harry Cruz, who was one of my favorite living writers.
[00:12:08]  And about three days after I sent that letter, he died like a fan letter.
[00:12:13]  And I had the same thing.
[00:12:16]  I wrote a letter to Dennis Johnson asking him about something in one of his books, like a specific thing.
[00:12:22]  And about two days later, he also died.
[00:12:24]  I think probably before that letter got there.
[00:12:27]  So you've got kind of like a Robert Todd Lincoln situation of postmodern literature.
[00:12:32]  I just think that like, I'm like, if I contact these guys, they'll perish via writing.
[00:12:39]  And so Robert Todd Lincoln thought that he was cursed.
[00:12:42]  Really?
[00:12:43]  Because he was present at all three of the first assassinations.
[00:12:49]  Of who?
[00:12:50]  Lincoln.
[00:12:51]  Lincoln.
[00:12:52]  Yeah.
[00:12:52]  But who else?
[00:12:53]  McKinley.
[00:12:54]  What was he doing there?
[00:12:56]  He was like catching the train or something.
[00:12:58]  I can't remember.
[00:12:58]  There was a whole he was just there?
[00:13:00]  Yeah.
[00:13:00]  It was very weird.
[00:13:01]  And he was very tortured by this whole, yeah.
[00:13:05]  And there was another attempt.
[00:13:06]  I can't remember what it was.
[00:13:08]  Sometimes I think I'm cursed, but then I also, I have tremendous luck.
[00:13:12]  I think that if you're cursed, then you've been also like second cursed to like reverse that curse.
[00:13:18]  But instead of, it doesn't like reverse a curse.
[00:13:20]  It's like two competing curses.
[00:13:22]  Yeah, that's no, that isn't.
[00:13:24]  Sometimes one wins out, but the other one will prevail because we, we know the, you know, the, the arc of, you know, curses is Ben's.
[00:13:32]  And the arc of Bell then bends towards luck, frankly.
[00:13:36]  Tremendous luck.
[00:13:37]  But go.
[00:13:37]  Everyone, we got set up for this interview.
[00:13:41]  We flew to Sacramento.
[00:13:43]  We got on a little plane, all three of us, in our little bags.
[00:13:47]  Regular size plane, to be clear.
[00:13:49]  But yeah.
[00:13:50]  Regular size bags, too.
[00:13:52]  We're not exposing ourselves completely as hypocrites here.
[00:13:55]  Got on the only direct flight we could find.
[00:13:59]  Yes.
[00:14:00]  And ended up in Sacramento for like 48 hours.
[00:14:04]  We went to William Volman's studio, which was as fucking cool as you could imagine or not imagine it to be.
[00:14:13]  And we hung out for like four hours or something.
[00:14:18]  Yeah.
[00:14:19]  It was he did get, well, that's not, to be fair to Monsieur Vohlman, getting Liz drunk could a thimble full of alcohol could do it.
[00:14:31]  Yeah.
[00:14:31]  Well, it was like very, you know, intense whiskey.
[00:14:34]  But, but I will say, you had been our point of contact with him, calling him, which I'm very grateful for.
[00:14:42]  But he had, I've heard about his studio, and I will say this too.

=== Bunker Talk Sorts (06:50) ===

[00:14:48]  This is a, I guess, a loose true and on rule because it probably doesn't really apply to many of our listeners.
[00:14:53]  But if you are a renowned author, you got to have the bunker.
[00:14:58]  Oh, yeah.
[00:14:59]  You know, Burroughs had the bunker.
[00:15:00]  I think Faulkner had whatever motherfucking, I'm sure, crazy looking house in Oxford.
[00:15:06]  You need a headquarters.
[00:15:07]  Yeah, everyone needs an HQ.
[00:15:10]  And I'd heard that.
[00:15:11]  I'd heard about his headquarters.
[00:15:15]  And I'd spoken to Jordan Rothaker, who does a podcast called Volmania, which it's really good.
[00:15:22]  But he had worked as his assistant for, well, he's been friends with him for a while.
[00:15:26]  And he sort of gave me the rundown of what to expect.
[00:15:29]  But walking there, he was like, you know, avoid this particular street near it because it can get a little dicey.
[00:15:38]  Which, yeah, it was a lot of energy on the street.
[00:15:45]  But he had said that he has a, what did he call it?
[00:15:49]  It wasn't a guard.
[00:15:51]  His enforcers.
[00:15:52]  His enforcers.
[00:15:53]  Yeah.
[00:15:54]  T-Bone, right?
[00:15:55]  Was one of them?
[00:15:56]  No, it's T-Bone Seven.
[00:15:57]  Seven.
[00:15:58]  Yeah.
[00:15:58]  I remember seven.
[00:16:00]  And we get out front, and sure enough, at about 11 a.m., there is a guy mid-chug of like a 32-ouncer.
[00:16:08]  And we're like, is Bill here?
[00:16:11]  And he just sort of jerks his head.
[00:16:13]  Nods towards the back.
[00:16:14]  And this is a windowless, I believe, former, maybe it was, was it a restaurant or was it a store?
[00:16:22]  I think it was like a grocery store, maybe.
[00:16:26]  Yeah, maybe a small, it was a windowless, small, well, not small, medium-sized, converted, not industrial, but commercial space with surrounded by barbed wire and a fence with no doorbell.
[00:16:41]  Yeah.
[00:16:42]  Which I am enthralled by.
[00:16:45]  I love that.
[00:16:45]  No, yeah, no windows.
[00:16:46]  This is my dream.
[00:16:48]  And the studio, I mean, my God, it is something.
[00:16:52]  Really, really incredible.
[00:16:54]  Can't do it justice describing it, but it is massive and filled with his art.
[00:17:00]  He's also a very, it's an accomplished artist, too.
[00:17:03]  He actually just has, he has two new art books out, Shadows of Love and Shadows of Loneliness, that I think came out this month.
[00:17:10]  He's done a ton of books of photography.
[00:17:11]  There's a full dark room in there.
[00:17:13]  I was sort of astounded at the volume of work that he had.
[00:17:17]  Yeah.
[00:17:20]  But yeah, I mean, he was very nice.
[00:17:21]  He'd just been injured, which I believe there's a few references made.
[00:17:24]  I'm not sure if he tells the story on Mike, but a guy was trying to break into his studio from the roof to saw in through the from the roof.
[00:17:32]  And he and Seven chased the guy through traffic and hit by a car.
[00:17:37]  Yeah.
[00:17:38]  And so he was in a little pain.
[00:17:42]  He was, you know, a little leg brace and a little, I think he cracked a few vertebrae.
[00:17:46]  And so he was wearing some kind of chest brace.
[00:17:51]  But he was, I mean, he, he, yeah, he offered us, he was a very gracious host.
[00:17:56]  Yeah.
[00:17:56]  I think, um, I think he had a, if I do say so myself, I think he had a great time.
[00:18:02]  I think he had a great time too.
[00:18:04]  And we had a great time.
[00:18:06]  We, you know, it's a very wide-ranging conversation.
[00:18:10]  Yeah.
[00:18:11]  We talk about all sorts of things.
[00:18:12]  It's a little different for us for a lot of reasons.
[00:18:17]  But I think, you know, we had a lot of fun doing it.
[00:18:21]  And it's very compelling listening to him.
[00:18:25]  I think our listeners are going to enjoy it.
[00:18:27]  We should say that we talk a lot about this new essay that he has in Harper's, which is called Four Men, and we'll link to it in the notes.
[00:18:36]  And I really, really cannot recommend enough this essay.
[00:18:40]  Like you gotta, you guys gotta click the link and read this piece, maybe before, maybe after, maybe both, you know, before and after listening to this interview, because it is just absolutely devastating, I have to say.
[00:18:57]  Really, a really, really beautiful and intense piece that is, I guess, ostensibly about four different men.
[00:19:10]  Three of them are homeless in Reno.
[00:19:15]  And then one would be Volman himself, or he calls himself an indoor person.
[00:19:21]  But it's about more than that.
[00:19:22]  I mean, it's like, you know, it's very much about the death of his daughter and about coming to terms with what he kind of sees as the end of his career.
[00:19:32]  And it's difficult.
[00:19:37]  I just, you know, you guys got to read this piece.
[00:19:41]  It's really, really something.
[00:19:43]  I would say, I would say if you are able to read it prior to the interview, because that'll, that'll slot a lot of kind of the tone of the conversation in place.
[00:19:53]  You know, it is, it's a really affecting piece.
[00:19:56]  And it's especially, I've, you know, I've read so much of his work about homeless people prior to this.
[00:20:02]  It really puts a lot of that in, or it elevates, I guess, a lot of that.
[00:20:08]  It brings it up almost to a new level.
[00:20:10]  But it's really, yeah, it's heartbreaking for sure.
[00:20:15]  You know, he's also, he's written, we didn't mention this before, one of his bigger recent nonfiction books, he wrote both novels and nonfiction books, is a two-volume set on climate change.
[00:20:30]  Very, both very long books.
[00:20:31]  And so we talk about that.
[00:20:32]  I mean, we talk about all sorts of things in this interview.
[00:20:37]  It's really, I mean, I will say more than anything else, this is really like much of it is a kind of a recorded conversation because he himself is very, very inquisitive.
[00:20:46]  And, you know, I mean, obviously, he interviews people all the time.
[00:20:49]  I mean, he's probably interviewed 10 million motherfucking people.
[00:20:52]  But, you know, we talk a lot, you know, about all sorts of things.
[00:20:56]  We also talk about his, I believe, completed, but as of yet, unreleased novel, which is a rumored to be one million-word book about the CIA, which I probably want to read more than anything else that's ever been written.
[00:21:15]  So maybe to tee us up here, we can, I'll just go ahead and read a quote, a little bit from this essay in Harper's to kind of set the mood and give everyone a sense of who isn't familiar with his work, some of his writing.
[00:21:31]  How about that?
[00:21:32]  What do you think?
[00:21:33]  I think it's a great idea.
[00:21:36]  So I had found my three men and paid them.

=== Reduce Demand, Help People (11:20) ===

[00:21:38]  Hadn't I been good?
[00:21:40]  What else could I have done?
[00:21:42]  I am an evil person.
[00:21:45]  I tried this on to see if I believed it.
[00:21:47]  If that was so, then what about the indoor man at the coffee shop who had long since run out of pity for the homeless?
[00:21:54]  Maybe I was better because I paid for their stories and tried to raise other indoor people's so-called awareness.
[00:22:01]  Or maybe I was worse because I knew that the system was against them, yet did not help them more than I did.
[00:22:09]  I considered this matter some more.
[00:22:12]  Then, at least for five minutes, I stopped caring.
[00:22:17]  So with that, I think we should get to Sacramento, right?
[00:22:49]  You came to understanding climate stuff late though, right?
[00:22:53]  Yes.
[00:22:55]  I was reading an interview with you where you said, like, you didn't really believe this stuff for a while until you started looking into it.
[00:23:01]  I was very resistant.
[00:23:04]  You know, I've always loved science fiction and various attempts to project in the real world too.
[00:23:12]  So, I remember like in the 70s, there was this book by Paul Ehrlich called Famine 75.
[00:23:21]  Yeah.
[00:23:21]  The oceans were supposed to die by then, all this stuff.
[00:23:25]  And then I started thinking, well, you know, are they crying wolf?
[00:23:30]  What's the big deal?
[00:23:31]  And then I started wondering about, you know, global warming, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a pamphlet explaining that it was all impossible.
[00:23:46]  And I thought, well, you know, the government scientists say so.
[00:23:49]  And then I started thinking about my daughter.
[00:23:55]  And whenever I'd go to Japan, this was before Fukushima.
[00:24:02]  They would always be saying, oh, yeah, you know, you barbarians, you know, with your petrochemical economy and look how green we are with nuclear power.
[00:24:15]  After Fukushima, you know, these people admitted that they were wrong, but they didn't know what to put in his place.
[00:24:24]  Ultimately, they went to coal mining.
[00:24:26]  But I just started thinking, why is this happening?
[00:24:30]  How much can we change it?
[00:24:32]  And so forth.
[00:24:33]  And the truth is, there's very little that citizens can do about it.
[00:24:39]  The awful truth, you know, the various greenhouse gas pollution from industry, for instance, can only be reduced if all of these various steps are micro-regulated.
[00:24:59]  So, like, one of the most common industrial chemicals is nitric acid.
[00:25:05]  There are various ways of making it, but, you know, the English might make it one way, the Greeks another, and the Americans a third way.
[00:25:15]  And some of these ways are going to release a lot more carbon dioxide.
[00:25:21]  So you have to go in there and say, nope, you can't make nitric acid this way anymore.
[00:25:27]  You have to make it that way.
[00:25:29]  You're going to have to come up with this whole bureaucratic skeleton, and everything's going to be out of whack, you know, because it's a bureaucracy.
[00:25:39]  All the companies are going to be fighting.
[00:25:43]  And it's very, very discouraging, really.
[00:25:50]  The only simple solution that I can see is reduce demand for everything.
[00:25:58]  And so, you know, there's a huge amount of waste just from ready lights in electronic devices.
[00:26:06]  You know, I can look at my computer and I see a little glow to know that it's charged.
[00:26:14]  Or things like ice makers that are essentially passive, but they take a tremendous amount of energy to keep this stuff going all the time.
[00:26:25]  And so why not just say, you know, let's reduce the demand for refrigerators, for all these things.
[00:26:34]  And nobody wants to do that.
[00:26:36]  So then the obvious answer is to reduce population.
[00:26:40]  And then they call me Adolph, you know, so, but what can you do?
[00:26:44]  Something's got to give.
[00:26:46]  I feel like when I was reading Carbon Ideologies, it was so tough for me.
[00:26:50]  I mean, there's just an impressive amount of details in the book.
[00:26:54]  I mean, it's like a catalog of details.
[00:26:57]  But I mean, sometimes I feel like I wonder, it's can do you get lost in those details sometimes?
[00:27:06]  Sometimes I wonder if like going so deep in that stuff, for me, I get, it almost like abstracts the problem even more.
[00:27:13]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:27:15]  Yeah.
[00:27:15]  But I'll tell you what the other danger is that somebody talks about climate change.
[00:27:23]  Oh, it's so terrible.
[00:27:25]  What can we do?
[00:27:26]  This and this and this.
[00:27:28]  And they don't say anything specific.
[00:27:30]  Like, what's the most terrible part of it?
[00:27:33]  How can we stop it?
[00:27:34]  And so in that primer I wrote at the beginning, you know, I tried to break it down.
[00:27:43]  And then if you want to know more, you can look at these tables.
[00:27:47]  And I've tried to make the tables as helpful as I can, but you don't have to look at them.
[00:27:52]  It's just a way of saying, well, let's see, is Bill honest or has anything changed since Bill thought this or that?
[00:28:01]  And hopefully it's a way of helping people.
[00:28:05]  And the conversions part at the end of volume one is so that if someone really wanted to think about, am I better off or is the environment better off if I have a gas stove or an electric stove?
[00:28:18]  And what does it mean if they're talking BTUs and something else is in jewels?
[00:28:24]  All this stuff will help people who want to.
[00:28:27]  Anybody with, you know, a high school education in math can do it.
[00:28:31]  So hopefully that's helpful, but you don't need to do it.
[00:28:34]  And then all the case studies, those are, you know, more about the way that people think and the way things look and so forth.
[00:28:46]  So, you know, I personally like those more, but I had to do my best in the math department.
[00:28:52]  So.
[00:28:54]  I remember there's a part of Poor People where you go to, I think it's Kazakhstan.
[00:28:58]  Oh, yeah.
[00:28:59]  And I'm not even going to try to pronounce the name of the town and I can't fully remember, but it starts with an S. Serikumnis.
[00:29:06]  Yeah.
[00:29:06]  Yeah.
[00:29:06]  And your sort of descriptions of driving around there and seeing like, like understanding that something was like off and it was like an unsettling feeling to the town.
[00:29:15]  That was so creepy.
[00:29:16]  Yeah.
[00:29:17]  Yeah.
[00:29:17]  I mean, can you talk about that a little bit?
[00:29:18]  Just, I mean, because I feel like that gives like a really good, I guess like the reader a good impression of like what the actual like immediate damage of a lot of this stuff is.
[00:29:29]  Right.
[00:29:30]  Well, Usually when I go somewhere on assignment, I try to keep the assignment non-specific, you know, because as Thoreau always said, you know, it's important not to let our knowledge get in the way of the important thing, which is our ignorance.
[00:29:51]  As long as I know that I'm ignorant, I'm not going to make up some phony baloney story.
[00:29:57]  So when I got to the Caspian Sea and the city of Atirau, I thought, well, why not talk to people about the difference between Soviet and post-Soviet work?
[00:30:13]  Something I always wondered.
[00:30:16]  And yeah, sorry, I keep rubbing my nose.
[00:30:19]  It's the opioids that make the problem.
[00:30:20]  Oh, I'm well aware.
[00:30:23]  It's the best time to scratch yourself.
[00:30:25]  That's right, yeah.
[00:30:26]  At least I don't have a runny nose and constantly duck into the bathroom, right?
[00:30:30]  And spend 30 minutes in there.
[00:30:31]  Yeah, yeah, that's right.
[00:30:32]  This is a PSA to our listeners.
[00:30:34]  If any of your friends is spending a little too long in the bathroom and don't stink afterwards, they're shooting dope.
[00:30:39]  Yeah, so go get your share.
[00:30:40]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:30:41]  Yeah.
[00:30:43]  So anyway, the biggest post-Soviet industry there was oil with Chevron.
[00:30:51]  So I got in touch with them and asked permission to go and interview their workers and so forth.
[00:30:57]  And I figured it was a no-brainer.
[00:30:59]  They made me wait.
[00:31:00]  They said, permission denied.
[00:31:03]  So then I got kind of curious.
[00:31:06]  Well, if they don't want me there, I better try to go there.
[00:31:10]  And then it was difficult to find anyone who was willing to go with me.
[00:31:16]  I finally met this nice young woman who was a student there, spoke good English, and had not been there very long.
[00:31:24]  So she didn't understand that you weren't supposed to go there.
[00:31:27]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:28]  Yeah.
[00:31:29]  So I hired a taxi and we went there.
[00:31:32]  And it was really, really creepy, you know, not to find anybody around.
[00:31:41]  So we went to the hospital and they didn't want to talk.
[00:31:46]  The administrators were terrified.
[00:31:49]  They told us to go talk to the doctor, you know, who set a dog on me.
[00:31:53]  She didn't want to talk.
[00:31:54]  And so I asked, where's the, you know, the community elder's place?
[00:31:59]  He's the guy in charge, like the mayor.
[00:32:01]  And he wasn't there, but fortunately, his kids were there.
[00:32:05]  And they were not practiced in not talking to strangers, you know.
[00:32:10]  So then I started finding out, oh, they're going to bulldoze the whole town.
[00:32:14]  Supposedly 90% of the population already has anemia, you know, people dropping dead in their 40s and 50s.
[00:32:25]  And they were all for it.
[00:32:27]  They said, look, we don't care.
[00:32:29]  We have to have this.
[00:32:30]  We have nothing going on.
[00:32:31]  We need to support our families.
[00:32:33]  And that's what you hear from anybody in West Virginia.
[00:32:39]  Well, without the coal, we're in trouble.
[00:32:45]  And besides, we're doing you a favor.
[00:32:47]  We keep the lights on, as they always say.
[00:32:50]  And Hillary was so stupid when she was going on and on about basket of deplorable slows.

=== Clumsy Phrases and Physical Limitations (04:09) ===

[00:32:59]  I got to tell you this.
[00:33:01]  I don't know how you feel about this as a writer, but probably one of the clumsiest phrases I've ever heard in my life.
[00:33:07]  You're trying to be like, oh, I got these.
[00:33:08]  But you know what's funny is it's such a clumsy phrase, and yet it's stuck in everyone's cross.
[00:33:13]  You know what?
[00:33:14]  Like a rock in my head.
[00:33:15]  Yeah.
[00:33:15]  Yeah.
[00:33:16]  I mean, the way to talk to those people is we want to thank you for having kept the lights on for so long.
[00:33:24]  And we want to reward you and compensate you.
[00:33:28]  And let's help you build some all-American solar collectors, you know, with an American flag on everyone made out of patriotic West Virginia hardwood.
[00:33:41]  Honestly, you know.
[00:33:42]  Was it the train rumbling by?
[00:33:44]  Yeah.
[00:33:45]  It's very easy to catch out on the freights from here.
[00:33:48]  Yeah.
[00:33:48]  Although my freight hopping days may be over now.
[00:33:50]  We'll see.
[00:33:51]  When was the last time you did it?
[00:33:53]  About a year ago.
[00:33:54]  Okay.
[00:33:54]  Where'd you go?
[00:33:58]  Up to Mount Shasta and this fishing camp in Dunsmere.
[00:34:04]  It's always great.
[00:34:06]  My friend Steve and I would go on the train and then we'd wave to people coming into town.
[00:34:12]  We'd jump off and Jim would pick us up in his truck and we'd go off to the fishing camp.
[00:34:16]  It was quite fun.
[00:34:17]  Yeah, I mean, so I was going to say, that's, I've known a number of train hoppers in my time.
[00:34:24]  And I'm not cast, I'm not saying no judgments here, but they're often very young and not saying you're not spry.
[00:34:31]  But they were extremely spry until a few of them lost some parts of them that made them spry.
[00:34:37]  Right.
[00:34:38]  But you started hopping trains what age?
[00:34:44]  Let's see, probably in my early 40s.
[00:34:48]  Early 40s.
[00:34:49]  Yeah.
[00:34:52]  How's your back with that?
[00:34:54]  Well, it was okay for quite a while.
[00:34:56]  Yeah.
[00:34:57]  Quite a while.
[00:34:58]  But the other thing is I know that I have physical limitations.
[00:35:04]  I can only see out of one eye at a time, so I can't see depth.
[00:35:08]  But how?
[00:35:11]  I was born with a severe astigmatism.
[00:35:15]  You know, it's partially corrected cosmetically, but my parents didn't know to patch my eye.
[00:35:21]  So I can choose whatever eye to look through, but I can't see through them both.
[00:35:26]  Anyway, so, You know, my friends always say, Bill, you don't realize how that's affected your whole life, which I'm sure it has.
[00:35:35]  There are all kinds of things that everyone takes for granted that I can't do.
[00:35:39]  Like, I can't drive a nail in straight because everything looks like a two-dimensional, like a photograph.
[00:35:47]  So, if you look at a photograph of a nail, it's got to look like this or this or this.
[00:35:52]  You can't see it, you know, because you need a third dimension.
[00:35:55]  I forget what that had to do with hopping trains, but oh, yeah, I don't know either, but it man, that's that's it must have been a learning curve for yeah, yeah, that's right.
[00:36:05]  Oh, yeah, so anyway, so I know that, and I know that um, I'm sort of clumsy, and so um, when I hop afraid, I think I would rather get arrested than get my legs cut off.
[00:36:19]  Yeah, so that's what I'm gonna do.
[00:36:21]  If the train is moving more than very, very slowly, I don't get on.
[00:36:28]  And coming into a yard, and if you can see some railroad bulls ahead, if it's going, you know, about as fast as a run, you know, then what I do is I curl myself into a ball and try to land on top of my backpack on the gravel.
[00:36:47]  Okay, okay, that's put on knee pads, you know.
[00:36:49]  Yeah, then it's okay, yeah.
[00:36:51]  Um, have any of you done it?
[00:36:54]  No, no, I never have.
[00:36:56]  You know, I always knew a lot of people who did, and you know, I guess I had the opportunity, but I was always like, I'll take the bus.
[00:37:04]  I'm really good at riding buses, and I've ridden them.
[00:37:06]  But it's a different thing, it's a definitely a different thing.

=== People Would Look Fearfully (15:25) ===

[00:37:08]  Yeah, because it's not really about the track.
[00:37:09]  I would say the bus is more dangerous if we're being greyhound, could be, yeah, that's right.
[00:37:15]  Well, I guess the things that you learn from it are, first of all, self-reliance.
[00:37:25]  Yeah.
[00:37:25]  And there's a real thrill, say, if you're hiding outside in the darkness near the tracks, and here comes somebody from the Union Pacific swinging his lantern, and he can be like close enough to touch, and he won't see me because his eyes are not adjusted.
[00:37:49]  So that's kind of a neat thing to know.
[00:37:51]  And then if you ever wanted to feel like Lewis and Clark, you get on these trains, and because it's more efficient for a train to go a mile out of the way than go an extra foot up and down in altitude, so they don't go the way that the roads go.
[00:38:12]  And so you can see eagles and antelope and coyotes and all kinds of things.
[00:38:19]  And it's really wild and beautiful a lot of the time.
[00:38:23]  Is that why you do it?
[00:38:25]  Yeah.
[00:38:26]  One time, this old hobo said that, you know, you ain't never seen America until you've seen it from a boxcar.
[00:38:35]  And when I was writing Royal Family, that's when I first decided to start doing it.
[00:38:41]  I was doing it by myself then.
[00:38:42]  I remember meeting a homeless woman up here by the river.
[00:38:47]  And she was telling me what it was like as a runaway the first time she got in a boxcar.
[00:38:55]  She was about 11, and she said she instantly had one of the best orgasms of her life.
[00:39:02]  Weird.
[00:39:03]  Well, you know, that's the thing, like with, you know, little girls and horses and all this stuff, you know, they're more talented than little boys at that stage.
[00:39:12]  Wow.
[00:39:12]  But so you, when you got on the like, what inspired you to get on trains in the first place?
[00:39:21]  Well, when I was writing Royal Family, I was imagining, you know, the disintegration of this failing private detective.
[00:39:32]  Yeah.
[00:39:33]  But often when you disintegrate, you also become more free in a way.
[00:39:41]  When you accept your own powerlessness, and it's, I don't know, sort of a Buddhist thing in a way.
[00:39:50]  And so my protagonist, Henry Tyler, eventually has nothing left, you know, but to become homeless and ride the freights.
[00:40:01]  And so I started doing it to see what it would be like for him.
[00:40:04]  And it turned out that I loved a lot about it.
[00:40:11]  What I don't like is, you know, being in fear of every Tom, Dick, and Harry and a hard hat.
[00:40:21]  I've only gotten caught and fined once.
[00:40:26]  But my friend Steve and I and these two women, we caught out in Sacramento and it was a summer night, high 90s at around maybe 10.30 at night.
[00:40:41]  And we got on this train, got it between these two greeners, these little balcony-like things.
[00:40:49]  And we kept going up and up into the Sierras and around sunrise.
[00:40:56]  It was really, really cold and beautiful, lots of frost.
[00:41:02]  And then we got to look back on all the boxcars behind us.
[00:41:07]  And they all said, danger, high explosives.
[00:41:10]  So we felt really good.
[00:41:13]  And Steve, I think he was the one who got us in trouble.
[00:41:17]  He was like dancing around, singing, and somebody saw us from an overpass.
[00:41:22]  So he And the woman he was with just watched.
[00:41:28]  My friend and I went up the stairs and we got busted right away.
[00:41:34]  I said, oh, yes, yes, officer.
[00:41:36]  Yeah, we're guilty as hell.
[00:41:38]  And we love riding the trains.
[00:41:40]  It's so fun.
[00:41:41]  And by the end, they were saying, we're really sorry.
[00:41:44]  We have to give you a ticket.
[00:41:46]  You know, it sounds so romantic.
[00:41:47]  They were so charmed by it.
[00:41:48]  How much is the ticket for?
[00:41:51]  Let's see.
[00:41:51]  It was from the UP.
[00:41:53]  So the first time it was $350 each.
[00:42:00]  They say the second time, I spend the night in jail.
[00:42:03]  But we'll see.
[00:42:04]  It's a night in jail.
[00:42:04]  It's not so bad.
[00:42:05]  Maybe they forgot.
[00:42:07]  Yeah.
[00:42:07]  I don't know how they organize those kind of things.
[00:42:19]  Yeah, I mean, that is something you wrote.
[00:42:21]  You eventually wrote a book about your time hopping trains, too.
[00:42:25]  Yeah.
[00:42:25]  Yeah.
[00:42:27]  My father was coming to the end of his life.
[00:42:30]  And in some ways, you know, he was almost like some libertarian Heinlein character.
[00:42:38]  And he also, like Heinlein, you know, he instilled in me an extreme hatred of all authority.
[00:42:45]  Yeah.
[00:42:47]  And after September 11th, you know, like they were living in Europe.
[00:42:54]  When he would say goodbye to me, he'd try to wave.
[00:42:57]  And the TSA would say, put your hands right down now.
[00:43:00]  Don't do that.
[00:43:00]  You know, all this crap.
[00:43:02]  And I didn't know yet about my FBI file.
[00:43:06]  I just kept telling him, you know, dad, I feel like I'm being watched.
[00:43:11]  He always thought I was paranoid, but all these things made me kind of want to be a little bit more of an outlaw.
[00:43:18]  Yeah.
[00:43:19]  And it felt very, very freeing to be on the train.
[00:43:23]  Yeah, I got to say, I mean, I think I've picked up on that from just like, I guess you could call it your public persona, but also the way that you portray yourselves in the book or yourself in books and stuff, is there is like this sort of like gleefulness at an outlaw lifestyle.
[00:43:43]  Yeah, I like to think that, you know, that the things that I advocate are harmless, you know, like legalizing cocaine and heroin.
[00:43:53]  I'm sure most people would agree with me there.
[00:43:57]  Legalizing prostitution, all this stuff.
[00:44:00]  Oh, well.
[00:44:02]  We were just, we should tell our listeners, we were just talking about Heinlein before we started recording.
[00:44:06]  Yeah.
[00:44:07]  Because we were looking at all your books here.
[00:44:09]  That's like one of our favorite things to do when we come.
[00:44:11]  We really like being.
[00:44:13]  Thank you very much for inviting us into your place.
[00:44:16]  But it's just really great to kind of be in people's spaces.
[00:44:21]  One of my most, I can't tell if people get annoyed by it, but I can't stop doing this.
[00:44:25]  Whenever I go to anyone's house, I just start looking at their like.
[00:44:28]  I know you do it at my house.
[00:44:29]  I know.
[00:44:30]  I frequently do it instead of talking to them.
[00:44:32]  I think it's a nice way of getting to know a person.
[00:44:35]  I do the same.
[00:44:36]  Yeah.
[00:44:38]  And yeah.
[00:44:41]  My contractor friends, when they come in, they always go straight for the porn.
[00:44:47]  And it's always nice watching them like turning the pages and unconsciously licking their lips.
[00:44:54]  What do you think someone would learn about you by coming in here and looking at these fucking books?
[00:45:00]  Oh, well, I mean, I guess the burglar who got in a few years ago learned that I had nothing worth taking.
[00:45:12]  So that was a good thing.
[00:45:13]  Yeah, it'd be tough for a burglar in here.
[00:45:16]  Yeah.
[00:45:18]  Yeah.
[00:45:18]  Books are valueless now.
[00:45:21]  Well, there's some that have some, but yeah, I guess it'd be hard to pick that out from just trying to stealthily walk around in here.
[00:45:29]  Right.
[00:45:31]  Yeah, I've had this studio since I think about 2004.
[00:45:36]  And I love being able to just paint on the walls or do whatever I want.
[00:45:43]  And the trade-off, I guess it's always the trade-off for any kind of freedom.
[00:45:50]  You are more subject to fear.
[00:45:53]  Like my friend Klaus out in the Delta, he's been out in his barges for 15 or 16 years now.
[00:46:01]  And he's a big character actually in Table for Fortune, that book about the CIA.
[00:46:07]  But he's been robbed at gunpoint, shotgun point, like several different times.
[00:46:14]  On the barge.
[00:46:15]  Yeah, on the barge, in the middle of the night.
[00:46:17]  Does that technically qualify as piracy?
[00:46:19]  Yeah, I guess so.
[00:46:20]  Yeah.
[00:46:22]  And so, you know, I have this space here, you know, that means I'm a little bit strange.
[00:46:31]  And I used to have the windows open.
[00:46:34]  And if I'd be dressing up as Dolores and dancing around, cooking myself something, people might start throwing rocks at that.
[00:46:43]  Well, I better seal that off.
[00:46:46]  Wait, where were the windows?
[00:46:47]  See where that bookcase is?
[00:46:49]  Yeah.
[00:46:49]  There's one there.
[00:46:50]  One behind there.
[00:46:51]  Two behind the workbench.
[00:46:53]  And then these two big things there, those are windows too.
[00:46:56]  Oh, okay.
[00:46:57]  When I first got it, they always had bars.
[00:47:00]  And then sometimes I'd look and there'd be a hand reaching through.
[00:47:04]  So then I put bars over the bars.
[00:47:07]  And then I did that.
[00:47:08]  I remember I live and I lived in, I used to live in the Tenderloin.
[00:47:12]  And I lived on a hill, but I lived in a basement apartment.
[00:47:16]  So I was like very much street level.
[00:47:18]  And I was in my room listening to records, and a guy put his hand through my window and touched the top of my head.
[00:47:24]  Excellent.
[00:47:25]  Yeah.
[00:47:26]  What did you do?
[00:47:28]  I think I just jumped up and started trying to stamp it.
[00:47:31]  Well, you had a lot of problems.
[00:47:33]  The window, like we had, there were bars on my window, but there weren't bars on my no, there weren't bars on my window.
[00:47:39]  That's why, huh?
[00:47:39]  That's why.
[00:47:40]  And but we had a lot of tension between a lot of the people who walked by and us that ended up badly several times.
[00:47:48]  What was your corner?
[00:47:49]  I lived on Post in Leavenworth, so like right above the Tenderloin, but it was still that short was still, people get blowjobs in the little entryway thing next to me.
[00:47:58]  So qualify that as Tenderloin.
[00:48:00]  Yeah.
[00:48:00]  Oh, I'd call that Tenderloin for sure.
[00:48:02]  But yeah, I lived there for a number of years.
[00:48:04]  And there was a frequently, people would like look in sometimes.
[00:48:08]  Yeah.
[00:48:09]  Yeah.
[00:48:10]  And that's kind of a drag.
[00:48:12]  But, you know, if you have nothing at all, then you're still at risk.
[00:48:21]  I still have nothing.
[00:48:22]  I mean, what do you take?
[00:48:22]  My 45, nothing.
[00:48:24]  You know?
[00:48:25]  Yeah, I mean, this place, I mean, listeners, obviously, you're listening to this.
[00:48:28]  You can't see it, but you're pretty well sealed off.
[00:48:30]  I was surprised that there was, there was, I mean, I guess they shouldn't be.
[00:48:33]  There's barbed wire on the outside.
[00:48:34]  Right.
[00:48:35]  You're sort of ringed in.
[00:48:35]  There's like a, there's a fence.
[00:48:37]  You had a, what I would call a security guard of sorts.
[00:48:42]  You call them your enforcers, right?
[00:48:43]  Yeah, yeah, that's right.
[00:48:44]  Did you, did he chat with them?
[00:48:46]  Yeah.
[00:48:46]  Well, he was mid-swig of a beer when we walked up.
[00:48:51]  That was probably my friend Seven.
[00:48:52]  Yeah.
[00:48:53]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:53]  And we said we're here to see Bill, and he just sort of jerked his head back.
[00:48:57]  Oh, that's good.
[00:48:58]  Yeah.
[00:48:58]  I saw Concepcion was chatting with him, and it could have also been his nephew, Ricardo.
[00:49:03]  Yeah.
[00:49:03]  So do you know everybody around here?
[00:49:05]  Because we're in, how would you talk?
[00:49:07]  How would you say?
[00:49:07]  I mean, obviously, we're going to say where we are exactly, but this section of Sacramento, what would you say?
[00:49:13]  This is Alkali Flat.
[00:49:15]  And somebody told me, I've never, never verified it, that the first mayor of Sacramento was murdered by a homeless guy from Alkali Flat.
[00:49:29]  Really?
[00:49:29]  I've always been curious to see if that's true.
[00:49:32]  So I guess that adds some luster to the neighborhood.
[00:49:35]  But it's a big homeless neighborhood.
[00:49:38]  Yeah.
[00:49:39]  Just down that hill there, there's an adult store.
[00:49:44]  And then past that is this fairly large complex called Loaves and Fishes.
[00:49:50]  And they serve a lot of the homeless population.
[00:49:53]  And so they're quite hated by a lot of the business people and so forth.
[00:50:02]  They do really good work.
[00:50:03]  Yeah.
[00:50:05]  And 12th Street there is kind of a hard corridor because of people hanging out at the light rail stops.
[00:50:17]  And it used to be, it still can be a little threatening at night.
[00:50:24]  I've been attacked a couple times and so forth.
[00:50:28]  But things are a lot better now.
[00:50:30]  And maybe it is that people know me.
[00:50:36]  I don't have the greatest memory for faces, but often someone will come up to me now and say, oh, I'm so glad you're better because they see that I'm not with the walker anymore.
[00:50:48]  And I would say, you know, I'm probably prouder of the fact that a lot of these folks are fond of me, you know, than I am of my National Book Award, you know, because that was, sure, it was a great break.
[00:51:05]  I'm grateful, but it could have gone anyway.
[00:51:07]  And I don't know, they both seem kind of undeserved, and it makes me feel really lucky.
[00:51:13]  You think it's undeserved that the people around here take kindly to you?
[00:51:17]  Yeah.
[00:51:17]  I mean, you know, I try to be a good person, but I'm not that great, you know, and I have more than most of them have.
[00:51:26]  So why wouldn't they hate me?
[00:51:28]  You know, so I feel lucky that they don't.
[00:51:32]  Yeah, I mean, that's been, I would say, a large part of your career has been, I guess, I don't know what I would call it, but has involved a lot of homeless people.
[00:51:44]  I guess I'll say it in the most broad sense.
[00:51:46]  I got Rainbow Stories when I was 17.
[00:51:49]  And, you know, obviously there's a lot about the skinheads and the prostitutes in there, but there's also a lot about just like homeless people in there.
[00:51:55]  And homelessness kind of runs through all the rest of it, too.
[00:51:57]  Like, all the skinheads, I don't actually, I think this is in the book, but I just know this from San Francisco.
[00:52:03]  And I know they all used to live in that school on Vaness, this big squat there.
[00:52:07]  Yeah, which is, I mean, that's basically homelessness.
[00:52:09]  You're not a street person, but you live in an abandoned building.
[00:52:14]  And what is it like?
[00:52:15]  What, I mean, did you, you always have been, I don't know what I would even phrase this, but like you, you're kind of drawn to homelessness.
[00:52:22]  So that's like run, I've been a running theme through all your stuff from like basically the very beginning.
[00:52:27]  Well, you know, we humans, we're all homeless, you know, in a way.

=== Homelessness And Motives (04:08) ===

[00:52:34]  We're all alone and we suffer alone.
[00:52:41]  We learn things that come to us in solitude.
[00:52:44]  When we die, we're dying alone as more and more of our senses fail, you know.
[00:52:51]  And so I feel a certain kinship with those folks.
[00:52:58]  And also, I've always wanted to try to help people in any way I can, in part maybe, you know, out of guilt for my little sister's death or who knows?
[00:53:16]  Maybe I had other motives too, but all that stuff comes from mixed motives.
[00:53:20]  But anyway, it's pretty hard, really hard to help people.
[00:53:25]  And I found with homeless, for instance, that it doesn't take that long before people just give up forever.
[00:53:37]  I had a friend named William, really, really brilliant guy.
[00:53:41]  He went to the San Francisco Art Institute and he loved taking pictures.
[00:53:47]  My 1114 camera he gave me.
[00:53:51]  And he read all kinds of stuff and he made some bad choices and became homeless.
[00:54:01]  And after about a year, he couldn't help himself.
[00:54:08]  He was just completely passive.
[00:54:12]  He didn't want to save money for the next day or do anything.
[00:54:17]  Because it's true.
[00:54:19]  It's like what the psychologists call learned helplessness.
[00:54:23]  You know, you do something to someone enough, and after a while, even if the person's being tortured, you just give up.
[00:54:30]  There's nothing you can do.
[00:54:33]  And I was thinking about that, you know, when I was writing the Harper's article, I was having a very miserable time.
[00:54:46]  I was worried about money, and I thought, okay, let's go up to Reno and figure out something to write about.
[00:54:54]  And then there were these homeless guys, and I was feeling terrible about myself anyway as a result of my daughter's death.
[00:55:04]  But also, I thought, well, Bill, why don't you call a spade a spade and see what, if anything, you can really do for them and acknowledge what they do for you.
[00:55:17]  And so, you know, then the article took on a somewhat cynical or ironic tinge.
[00:55:29]  And it doesn't mean that it has to be that way, but I think it usually is that way.
[00:55:38]  You know, my friend Ken Miller and I kidnapped a child prostitute in southern Thailand and put her into a school.
[00:55:50]  And then I got a squad of Thai soldiers.
[00:55:53]  And we went to visit the father to find out, you know, why he sold his daughters.
[00:55:57]  And we terrorized him a little.
[00:56:00]  And he said, oh, he just did it to get a new roof.
[00:56:02]  And he had these other daughters.
[00:56:04]  And I said, well, what would you need to not sell any more daughters?
[00:56:10]  He said, for $100, he could establish a pig farm.
[00:56:14]  So I gave him $100, went back a year later.
[00:56:17]  Of course, he gambled it all away.
[00:56:19]  So, but did I do any good for the guy?
[00:56:22]  I'm sure I did.
[00:56:24]  I'm sure he and his daughters ate a little better before he sold the next one, you know, but it's those guys that I talked to in Reno, you know, the ones who were schizophrenic, delusional, whatever, and they thought they were okay.

=== Dime for a Better Life (05:48) ===

[00:56:43]  Yeah.
[00:56:44]  And so they were okay, I guess.
[00:56:47]  And then the other guy, you know, who was probably just constantly trying to scam me, you know, was actually living in the casino, I actually gave him more than I gave the other guys.
[00:57:01]  And still, it felt like I was doing the wrong thing.
[00:57:04]  This is the one that constantly wanted the blanket.
[00:57:07]  Yeah.
[00:57:07]  Yeah.
[00:57:08]  When the blanket cost less than the $20 I was giving him, you know.
[00:57:14]  But it was like that with Lisa, too, that I would tear my heart out trying to figure out how to help her.
[00:57:24]  And she was homeless right out here sometimes, and she used to be at Loaves and Fish's.
[00:57:34]  And the first time she went there, the first night, she was in this group shelter and this demented woman was trying to kill her all night, you know.
[00:57:44]  And then, well, he said, don't you want to try to stop drinking, you know, so that you're not going to pass out all the time and we have to call the ambulance.
[00:57:59]  You're not going to, you know, soak your bed with urine.
[00:58:02]  No, no, I'd rather stay out here.
[00:58:04]  I'd rather die.
[00:58:06]  And it just went on and on.
[00:58:11]  And, you know, my poor wife, in a way, it's probably even worse for her than for me because she's Korean and they tend to be more buttoned down and not talk about their emotions.
[00:58:30]  So she's very, very strong physically and always very driven.
[00:58:34]  She works hard.
[00:58:37]  But she tried her best.
[00:58:39]  We all tried our best and it didn't work.
[00:58:43]  So did I try my best with those people in Reno and given that I had very little money and didn't know whether Harper's was going to take this story and so forth.
[00:59:00]  And I did my best.
[00:59:02]  I mean, maybe I could have given them a little bit more, but I feel like I couldn't have helped them any more than I did given the resources and the understanding that I had.
[00:59:15]  So then I think, well, hopefully I did help them a little bit.
[00:59:20]  And would I rather keep doing what I do, which is to make somebody feel seen and say, oh, I'm sorry, and give them some money, a little bit of money.
[00:59:32]  Or do I want to pick my battle and try to get one thing, one really important thing done?
[00:59:39]  That's one reason why I thought you might enjoy talking to Mark because he has a lot of resources and he's done quite a bit for those people.
[00:59:53]  That lot across the street, he wanted to have a so-called staked out where they could just stay for a couple days and there'd be some teach-ins and this and that.
[01:00:05]  So the city made him put a fence around it and then hook up electricity, you know, just like it cost him, I don't know, $50,000 probably to let people stay there for those couple of days.
[01:00:19]  So they do whatever they can to make it difficult.
[01:00:25]  I had a really wonderful woman stay in my parking lot for two years.
[01:00:34]  She was a black prostitute named Mississippi.
[01:00:37]  And she built herself a neat little wooden house.
[01:00:42]  And she'd have this or that boyfriend.
[01:00:45]  And they had little houses too.
[01:00:48]  And she would poop in kitty litter, take it and put it in the garbage can.
[01:00:53]  Kind of a novel idea.
[01:00:54]  Yeah, very good.
[01:00:56]  And I used to pay her five bucks a week to sweep the parking lot.
[01:01:04]  And my friends would say, yeah, what's wrong with this picture?
[01:01:07]  You have a homeless woman who's throwing trash down, so you'll pay her $5 to pick it up.
[01:01:13]  I said, oh, well, after a few months, Mississippi realized that I would never ask her to leave.
[01:01:21]  And suddenly, she had an interest in keeping this place clean.
[01:01:26]  And so she was there for two years.
[01:01:29]  And her mother actually came all the way out from Mississippi to sleep in my parking lot in the rain because that was better than where she came from.
[01:01:40]  Can you imagine that?
[01:01:42]  And then Oprah did some story about homelessness.
[01:01:47]  Wind free.
[01:01:48]  Yeah.
[01:01:49]  So she came.
[01:01:52]  Oprah came up here?
[01:01:53]  Yeah, to SAC.
[01:01:55]  And there was a big tent city up by the river on the levee.
[01:02:02]  So she filmed it and said, shame on you, Sacramento, for treating these people so badly.
[01:02:09]  So as soon as they left, the city took care of the problem, naturally.
[01:02:16]  Sweeps.
[01:02:16]  Yeah.
[01:02:18]  I remember right before it happened, you know, some reporter was wandering around and wanted to talk to the people in my lot.
[01:02:27]  And so they were telling him, oh, yeah, you know, he's let us stay here for a couple of years.

=== Wanted Something Else (09:38) ===

[01:02:32]  He's a good guy and this and this.
[01:02:34]  And so the next day, the police came.
[01:02:38]  and they smashed everything.
[01:02:40]  They kicked them off and they told her that I dropped a dime on her.
[01:02:45]  So she doesn't talk to me to this day.
[01:02:48]  And then they started citing me for being a slum lord and blighting the neighborhood.
[01:02:59]  And they were going to make me put in sprinklers and all this stuff, you know, just to harass me.
[01:03:05]  And that's when I met Mark.
[01:03:09]  And Mark got the city off my back, so I never had to pay anything.
[01:03:16]  And he then donated this huge shelter, you know, that we're going to put in the parking lot.
[01:03:25]  The guys who own the billboard, they're kind people too.
[01:03:28]  And I said, could we set up some stuff under the billboard?
[01:03:32]  And they were delighted to help because most people are kind and will do something for others unless they're afraid of punishment.
[01:03:42]  Well, you know, Mark's tarp immediately got stolen.
[01:03:47]  The authorities, you know, discouraged the billboard company and so on and so forth.
[01:03:52]  So that's what I mean.
[01:03:54]  You rack your brains, you know, and it's, you just have to keep trying.
[01:03:59]  That's all.
[01:04:11]  In that essay in Harper's, you called it Four Men, and you profile these three guys that you meet.
[01:04:18]  But so the...
[01:04:19]  But then you're the fourth.
[01:04:21]  Right.
[01:04:21]  So what is it that you saw about yourself in them or vice versa?
[01:04:27]  Well.
[01:04:27]  Because you're the indoor man to the outdoor guys, right?
[01:04:30]  Right.
[01:04:31]  Well, I just started thinking, all right, for once, Bill, let's go underneath the skin and be ruthlessly honest about these transactions.
[01:04:50]  So, sure, yeah, of course, I'm trying to do a good thing, and I do want to help.
[01:04:57]  And at the same time, the way, at least that I've convinced myself, that I can afford to do it, is by monetizing what I do.
[01:05:08]  And some people think that's wrong.
[01:05:12]  I'm often told that I shouldn't pay for interviews, which I usually do, all this kind of thing.
[01:05:18]  But so what was I really trying to do and get out of it?
[01:05:23]  Yeah, let's talk about the fact that I wanted to make money from this story.
[01:05:27]  And the reason I wanted to make money was because I was in trouble because of this and that and Lisa's death and so forth.
[01:05:34]  And then these guys, of course, they, well, the first two, they were so out of it that they didn't even really try to scam me.
[01:05:44]  But of course, they wanted something too, which they got.
[01:05:47]  And then the third guy wanted something, which he got.
[01:05:51]  And so in a way, we're all equals.
[01:05:54]  And I don't want to be considered good or noble, you know, because I'm not.
[01:06:02]  I want to do what good I can.
[01:06:04]  But yeah, but, you know, I do feel like I'm fundamentally an evil person.
[01:06:10]  You say that in the essay.
[01:06:11]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:06:12]  I think it's almost you say that you try it on.
[01:06:16]  You try to tell yourself that, but it doesn't quite fit.
[01:06:19]  Even now, I feel like, I feel like, because I think this too about me sometimes.
[01:06:24]  Yeah.
[01:06:24]  But it's not, I don't think it's actually true.
[01:06:27]  It just feels like the right thing to say or think maybe.
[01:06:30]  Right, yeah.
[01:06:31]  Well, do you think you're an evil person?
[01:06:34]  You know, I don't think that I'm religious.
[01:06:41]  You know, I was baptized as a Lutheran and I have a very hard time believing in a benevolent personal God.
[01:06:51]  On the other hand, you know, all the stuff about original sin and repentance and so forth, it probably gets beaten into us along with toilet training, you know, and then we don't feel so good about ourselves.
[01:07:07]  But if I can entertain the idea that I'm evil, then I might be careful about what I do.
[01:07:15]  And I don't want to entertain the idea that I'm good, just as I wouldn't want to say, oh, this is the best book that I've ever written.
[01:07:27]  No, I want to think, I did the best I could, and here are the flaws in it, and let me try to do better.
[01:07:35]  I think that's a healthier way, at least for me.
[01:07:38]  It is funny because I would view if someone told me that they're like, I think I'm like a really good person.
[01:07:45]  I can't, it's like hard to take that.
[01:07:46]  Even though I feel like I know a lot of really good people.
[01:07:49]  Right.
[01:07:50]  If someone says that, or if I know someone thinks that about themselves, I'll think like, there's something wrong here.
[01:07:56]  But if someone I know tells me, like, I feel like I'm evil, then I'm like, it's like, well, maybe that almost speaks to a desire.
[01:08:03]  Although I've known some truly evil motherfuckers too.
[01:08:05]  But I feel like that thought, I think, speaks to a desire to do good, which I think is in large part what the essay is about.
[01:08:14]  And I think it really contrasts some of your other work too, because I will say this, in a lot of your other work, like in poor people or even like in, you know, like Rainbow Story stuff, like, you know, you kind of portray yourself as like almost like a dopey guy, being like, you know, sort of sitting here like, you know, eagerly.
[01:08:37]  A little wide-eyed.
[01:08:38]  A little wide-eyed, which is what works for me.
[01:08:41]  Yeah.
[01:08:42]  Also, maybe you were then.
[01:08:43]  Yeah.
[01:08:44]  Oh, I was.
[01:08:44]  And I still am.
[01:08:46]  You know, like every time my exterminator comes, I follow him around like a puppy because I'm so interested.
[01:08:51]  Yeah.
[01:08:52]  That's so crazy.
[01:08:53]  What are you, William Burroughs?
[01:08:54]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:08:55]  Huh?
[01:08:55]  Yeah.
[01:08:55]  But sorry, I cut you off.
[01:08:56]  No, I mean, I just think that like this, I think the reason a lot of this essay stuck out to me is because you do get under the skin of that.
[01:09:06]  And like you do sort of, it almost is like a different approach to yourself in the way that you kind of portray yourself in the Harper's essay.
[01:09:15]  Yeah.
[01:09:15]  And, you know, while I'm mourning the loss of my child and facing my own failure, you know, why not look at other things through that lens, especially because, you know, if you have some problem with another person and you decide it's the other person's fault, then all you can do is hope the other person will change.
[01:09:45]  But if you can say, well, this at least is my fault, then when I can do that, then I have hope.
[01:09:54]  Then I actually have a chance of being able to repair or improve this situation.
[01:10:00]  So why not, you know, I've always been interested in helping people and, you know, and I've done not as good a job as I wanted to, even though I try.
[01:10:12]  And what am I doing wrong?
[01:10:14]  And so that was, I think, one of the things at the back of my mind.
[01:10:19]  And maybe what I'm doing is not the best way to help people.
[01:10:24]  I don't know.
[01:10:25]  I mean, I give 700 bucks a month, and it's great for him and great for me.
[01:10:35]  And it saves wear and tear on the neighbors.
[01:10:39]  They get so tired of me letting people stay when they make a mess.
[01:10:44]  But I mean, I wouldn't call that even doing good.
[01:10:48]  It's like we're friends and it's a good business relationship.
[01:10:54]  So, but is there something that I could do that I haven't thought about yet, something where I could really make a big difference?
[01:11:05]  Like maybe if I taught some class to an elementary school and got something across about tolerance or climate change or whatever it is, but if I can do better before I die, then I would like to.
[01:11:24]  Yeah, you've talked about how you like you can think of like maybe one of your books will like change someone's mind 5% about one thing.
[01:11:33]  I think it was in reference to somebody writing on Iraq.
[01:11:36]  Yeah.
[01:11:37]  And, you know, sometimes I'll get some nice feedback.
[01:11:42]  Surprisingly enough, probably the one that touched people the most was butterfly stories.
[01:11:50]  There were all these guys coming up and saying, oh, I'm dying from AIDS because I slept with too many prostitutes and I could see myself in your character.
[01:11:58]  So that was really nice.
[01:12:01]  With carbon ideology, there actually was one guy from West Virginia.
[01:12:06]  He said his father actually changed his mind about coal.

=== Guilt's Collective Escape Valve (02:25) ===

[01:12:10]  I thought that's amazing, but improbable.
[01:12:13]  Yes.
[01:12:14]  Yeah.
[01:12:15]  Yeah.
[01:12:15]  I was just thinking there was, you know, I always do this because I'm a woman, but I was thinking Freud had this thing when he was like on his deathbed, basically.
[01:12:24]  And he was like warning about, you know, where he saw like civilization going.
[01:12:29]  Oh, yeah.
[01:12:30]  You know, and everyone kind of was like dismissing its ravings of a madman, basically, which they say about a lot.
[01:12:35]  I mean, some people say about a lot of his work.
[01:12:37]  But he's saying that like collectively and individually that like, you know, you have to build an escape valve for guilt.
[01:12:45]  Right.
[01:12:46]  Because it will just, it'll, you know, hem you in from all angles.
[01:12:52]  Like it, it's sort of like guilt is kind of this like backstop behind everything.
[01:12:58]  And you have to sort of be able to build something for it to escape or it will crush you.
[01:13:03]  Right.
[01:13:03]  Well, that's definitely the case, you know, with my Germano Scandinavian background.
[01:13:09]  Yeah.
[01:13:10]  That we're all, you know, kind of strict self-haters.
[01:13:17]  But I wonder if it's that way everywhere.
[01:13:21]  You know, I'd say like in Thailand, it's probably in a way the most alien culture.
[01:13:31]  Maybe because for me, because they were never actually conquered by any of the Europeans.
[01:13:38]  And there's just a different feeling about it.
[01:13:41]  And it's as if there's less guilt.
[01:13:46]  It's not that it's a better culture, it's just different.
[01:13:48]  But what do you think?
[01:13:50]  About What Freud said, that you have to have an outlet for your guilt, or do you think there are people who don't need that outlet?
[01:13:59]  No, I think we all, I think it's like something that we're all sort of, I think that's one of the things that I always found very touching about psychoanalysis is that it kind of we're all sort of in this together, right?
[01:14:15]  Like we're all sort of born into this world that we have to make sense of and that we're all kind of you know, we're limited, right?
[01:14:23]  We're all kind of grasping at each other.
[01:14:27]  And so there's a way in which, you know, you're talking about how we're all alone, we'll die alone, well, whatever, but then that's true for all of us.

=== Grasping At Each Other (05:01) ===

[01:14:35]  Right.
[01:14:35]  Right?
[01:14:36]  And so there's, it's sort of, there's two sides to this.
[01:14:39]  You're absolutely right.
[01:14:40]  And that's why we can read something that's written by somebody long dead from another culture, and we feel it, you know?
[01:14:51]  Yeah.
[01:14:51]  And it would be really sad if we couldn't.
[01:14:56]  Yeah.
[01:14:57]  Yeah.
[01:14:57]  I mean, it's, it's, it's interesting because I, I mean, I haven't read all your books, but I've read a number of them.
[01:15:06]  And there is sort of like this theme of guilt that runs through a few of them, especially Afghanistan Picture Show.
[01:15:13]  For sure.
[01:15:15]  And I would say that of the ones I've read, probably the most.
[01:15:19]  Do you feel like that, has that been like a, I mean, I know with the death of your sister when you were young, like you, you know, you've talked about that at length.
[01:15:27]  Like that is the guilt from that has been a motivating factor in some way throughout your life.
[01:15:32]  In some way.
[01:15:34]  And then over time, you know, I feel that I've somewhat recovered from that.
[01:15:44]  When I broke my pelvis, I think it was in 2004.
[01:15:48]  I was on a bike and this woman in a car hit me.
[01:15:51]  How many times have you been hit by a car?
[01:15:53]  Yeah, kind of crazy, huh?
[01:15:55]  But anyway, and so my mother would always say, oh, you know, it's August 3rd.
[01:16:05]  You know what day it is?
[01:16:06]  That was the day that Julie drowned.
[01:16:08]  Or it was October 29th, her birthday.
[01:16:11]  And even after I left home, I would wake up on August 3rd, you know, with kind of a lump in my throat and feeling really, really sad.
[01:16:21]  And I had this really nice friend named Michelle, who she's since hanged herself, but she'd always be coming over and, you know, telling me all the latest about this girlfriend and that girlfriend.
[01:16:39]  And one day she came over and, you know, I was lying in bed, couldn't get up.
[01:16:45]  She helped herself to a couple of my Vicodin, and we chewed them up together.
[01:16:50]  We had a really nice time.
[01:16:52]  And suddenly I realized, oh, it's August 3rd and I'm having a good day.
[01:16:56]  Yeah.
[01:16:57]  You know, and so, but that doesn't mean that the guilt or whatever it created is not some kind of a habit.
[01:17:08]  Yeah.
[01:17:09]  You know, that's what I was going to say.
[01:17:10]  It becomes a habit.
[01:17:11]  Right.
[01:17:12]  And then, and I think it's basically a good habit.
[01:17:16]  If I just keep reminding myself, I don't know what's best for others.
[01:17:22]  I'm not going to tell somebody, oh, you have false consciousness.
[01:17:27]  At the same time, I do know that, you know, that I could do more for people.
[01:17:33]  And if there's something I can do, it makes me feel better.
[01:17:39]  Some of the darkest days after Lisa's death, I would come down and one of my homeless buddies would say, oh, here, have a puff of a joint with me.
[01:17:49]  And he was giving me the best thing that he had.
[01:17:53]  Or I'd see my demented friend Michael and he'd come running and hug me.
[01:17:58]  And suddenly I would feel so much better.
[01:18:03]  So you're right.
[01:18:04]  You know, we're alone, but also together.
[01:18:07]  And it's good to be both.
[01:18:29]  I feel like the other thing that's kind of run through a lot of your work, this kind of obsession with the other, I guess I would say, or trying to understand and get inside the other, you know?
[01:18:42]  And that there being a kind of limit to being able to do that.
[01:18:46]  And that's part of the kind of being alone, right?
[01:18:49]  Is that we actually can't know each other.
[01:18:52]  But it seems like you're sort of, you've always been kind of consumed with trying to get inside another person or get into the other.
[01:19:01]  It's strange sometimes even just looking at myself in the mirror, you know, that person, is that me?
[01:19:10]  Especially because you only see yourself two-dimensionally.
[01:19:12]  Exactly.
[01:19:13]  And, you know, and my face is reversed and so forth.
[01:19:18]  So, yeah, two of the reasons I got into cross-dressing, I think, you know, one was, yeah, because was there any way I could get closer to feel what a woman feels?
[01:19:34]  And the answer is, yeah, a little bit.

=== Dolores' First Cross-Dress Experience (03:36) ===

[01:19:37]  You know, like I got to know in my heart, instead of just know intellectually, what it's like to go out in your tottering high heels when it's dark, you know, and have men in cars like throw things at you and yell obscenities and so forth.
[01:19:57]  So that was a good experience.
[01:19:59]  Yeah, was Dolores the first time you'd cross-dressed before?
[01:20:04]  Because you've been hanging out.
[01:20:05]  I mean, it's hard to not run into cross-dressers in the tenderloin.
[01:20:11]  I don't know if Aunt Charlie's was around back.
[01:20:13]  Oh, it was.
[01:20:14]  I used to hang out there a lot.
[01:20:15]  Yeah.
[01:20:16]  Yeah, actually, that is part of the setting for the bar called The Lucky Star in my novel.
[01:20:27]  Oh, okay.
[01:20:27]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:20:30]  Was Dolores the first time you dressed up as a woman?
[01:20:33]  No, the first time, actually, have you seen those two new books that Unnamed and Rare Worth?
[01:20:40]  Yeah, I saw them.
[01:20:41]  Oh, okay.
[01:20:42]  Well, on one of them, there's a picture of, I guess you could say Dolores on the back, but I was writing The Ice Shirt, and there's an Inuit myth about two brothers, and one of them is turned into a woman.
[01:20:59]  So then those two produce a bunch of dogs who give birth to humans.
[01:21:05]  And so I thought, well, if I'm writing about this myth, what would it be like to be turned into a woman?
[01:21:13]  So in the Tenderline, there were these two, they called themselves Transvestites then, who I knew, Miss J and Miss Giddings.
[01:21:26]  Miss J was only a light positive, so she said it wouldn't do me any harm.
[01:21:31]  But I said, no, I need to keep my virginity, Jay.
[01:21:34]  Sorry about that.
[01:21:35]  But they gave me dried orange peels for the breast forms.
[01:21:41]  Interesting.
[01:21:42]  And then just, you know, modest.
[01:21:43]  Yeah.
[01:21:44]  And put on, you know, some of their slinky stuff.
[01:21:48]  And my friend Ken took some pictures.
[01:21:51]  And I was really surprised.
[01:21:55]  You know, I've always disliked my appearance.
[01:21:59]  And I actually, for a minute, felt a little vanity and thought, wow, I look good.
[01:22:04]  You know, and it was such a ridiculous emotion.
[01:22:07]  I still kind of enjoy the memory of it.
[01:22:10]  Does it feel indulgent?
[01:22:14]  Vanity is such a funny thing to experience.
[01:22:17]  Right.
[01:22:17]  Well, consciously, I mean.
[01:22:19]  Yeah.
[01:22:20]  You know, kind of coming into it consciously.
[01:22:22]  Right.
[01:22:22]  Well, it was just that one time, and it hasn't happened since.
[01:22:26]  You know, when I wrote Book of Dolores, if I was going to be painting myself, I'd take off my glasses, and then Dolores would look more the way that I wanted her to.
[01:22:41]  And when I was photographing her, then, well, I had to actually see later on, I was focusing sharply.
[01:22:50]  Oh, yeah.
[01:22:52]  Well, you know, it was a very good lesson in vanity.
[01:22:58]  And I learned a lot from doing it.
[01:23:02]  Yeah, I mean, I think that's like another easily identifiable theme throughout your work is that like you do, and this is why I kind of always liked your book so much, is because I'm relatively stupid.

=== Choices and Sharper Fantasies (06:10) ===

[01:23:13]  And so I have to kind of experience something in order to even begin to understand it.
[01:23:19]  Right.
[01:23:20]  And that seemed to be like, like, kind of what Liz was saying is like, you do it.
[01:23:26]  And I've done this many different times in my life, but like, you do run up against a limit.
[01:23:31]  And then the rest of it, you sort of have to fill in from like what's just like in you and like what you can think of and what you can learn from other people.
[01:23:38]  Or even fantasy.
[01:23:39]  Or fantasy.
[01:23:40]  I think that's like such an important part.
[01:23:42]  Fantasy is such an important part or illusion, whatever you want to call it, that that helps us sort of fill in the gaps of connection, right?
[01:23:50]  Yeah.
[01:23:51]  That's very true.
[01:23:54]  And reading, you know, older stuff and you see how the paradigms have changed, that helps to shake me up.
[01:24:07]  And just if anyone ever says, okay, this is it, we're going to cancel everyone else who came before us and we have it all right.
[01:24:17]  Yeah.
[01:24:17]  Then you know they're wrong.
[01:24:19]  Well, that's what makes the Harper's essay really, I think, stand out too, is that like, you know, you sort of almost like poke fun at yourself.
[01:24:29]  Like I'm doing the usual like Volume thing of I'm talking to a few bums and giving them some money.
[01:24:35]  Right.
[01:24:35]  Yeah, of course.
[01:24:36]  You know, I couldn't help but just look at myself and say, Bill, you know, you're just going through the motions just as they are.
[01:24:46]  So let's talk about it.
[01:24:48]  Yeah, but the big difference there is that like it's it feels, especially when, you know, when talking about your daughter, it feels really, really personal.
[01:24:55]  And like you, it seems like it's like the essay gets sharper and sharper and sharper.
[01:24:58]  I don't mean like more astute.
[01:25:00]  I mean like it like sort of like an edge.
[01:25:03]  Right, yeah.
[01:25:04]  I thought that if I could sort of lead people gradually into this idea that if someone's homeless by choice, then that's fine and we don't have to do anything for them.
[01:25:19]  And if they're really homeless by choice and we can't do anything for them, then we should acknowledge it.
[01:25:25]  Sure.
[01:25:26]  Lisa was homeless by choice, and I kept trying and trying.
[01:25:30]  You know, that's what you do.
[01:25:33]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:25:34]  It is.
[01:25:34]  I mean, it's especially when dealing with addiction with other people.
[01:25:39]  For sure, yeah.
[01:25:39]  You know, that's one of the most difficult things that in my experience, because I've had multiple friends be homeless and alcoholic or drug addicts.
[01:25:47]  And one of the things that you run into, or I've had people call me and be like, you know, my brother or my boyfriend or whatever is like, is in this state.
[01:25:55]  And it's one of the most hard things to tell people, but all you can tell people is like, you know, be there for them and like tell them that, you know, you will help them and try to help them.
[01:26:04]  But like it's a situation, I kind of, I guess, like homelessness just, you know, writ large is that like you have to like, you can help someone as much as possible.
[01:26:13]  And then they have to like get to that other end themselves with drug addiction.
[01:26:18]  That makes sense.
[01:26:19]  Yeah.
[01:26:20]  Well, the other thing about addiction, you know, is that it is another way of being alone, really alone.
[01:26:30]  You know, when, you know, there's somebody who you love and loves you, but the whole time is just thinking, oh, you know, I got to have my meth.
[01:26:41]  How can I get out of here?
[01:26:42]  How can I, you know, get a little money to get some meth, and then I'll be okay because then I'll be able to think about more meth.
[01:26:49]  And it's just like it's, it's so isolating.
[01:26:52]  Yeah.
[01:26:54]  It really is because you can be with people that, you know, your friends and family, people that love you, and you should look forward to looking to it all.
[01:27:00]  I mean, from my experience, it was precisely that.
[01:27:02]  Like, there is a real loneliness because you feel like everybody's also holding you back from getting what you, what you want.
[01:27:08]  Right.
[01:27:09]  Yeah.
[01:27:10]  But I mean, you've spent your entire career, you know, sort of surrounding yourself on purpose with people like that.
[01:27:18]  And more and more, I think that we're not all that different.
[01:27:26]  How do you mean?
[01:27:27]  Well, somebody who's like a jittering meth head is not that different from someone who's a driven business executive.
[01:27:45]  And they're both trying to get more and more and more of whatever positive reinforcement they're accustomed to.
[01:27:56]  And the more they do it, the more they want to do it.
[01:28:00]  And it's not exactly narcissism.
[01:28:04]  It's something else, I think.
[01:28:07]  Like a drive.
[01:28:08]  Yeah.
[01:28:09]  Yeah, I think so.
[01:28:10]  Or desire, maybe.
[01:28:11]  Right.
[01:28:11]  Yeah.
[01:28:12]  Even abstractly.
[01:28:13]  Yeah.
[01:28:14]  I have a friend who he calls himself an alcoholic, so I guess he is, although he's been sober for as long as I've known him, 40 years.
[01:28:24]  40 years?
[01:28:25]  Yeah.
[01:28:26]  And he, you know, he'll say things like, oh, I'm addicted to the smell of varnish.
[01:28:37]  You know, he was a commercial painter until he got cancer.
[01:28:42]  Or I'm addicted to doing all my business stuff and taxes every single month.
[01:28:49]  And that, you know, that's how he thinks of it.
[01:28:51]  So he is.
[01:28:52]  Yeah.
[01:28:52]  I mean, that's something a lot of alcoholics and addicts think of.
[01:28:55]  They'll sort of like reframe a lot of maybe the idiosyncrasies or the obsessions in their life, obsessions, which I think everybody has, but in terms of like, I'm acting alcoholically or I'm then if they own it, then I think it's about the same as I'm being very, very faithful to this lover or to this God.
[01:29:19]  Just like Lisa being faithful to her vodka, you know?

=== Tragedy's Reminder (09:15) ===

[01:29:24]  But doesn't that then complicate what you're saying about choice?
[01:29:28]  Well, what do you think, Liz?
[01:29:32]  I mean, how far can choice really get us, in your idea?
[01:29:40]  I tend to think that we do have some free will and some predestination.
[01:29:47]  I mean, how do you look at it?
[01:29:50]  I mean, I don't know.
[01:29:52]  I think that I think we are mostly unaware of the things that we choose and why we choose them.
[01:30:00]  And that like part of whatever the project is of being alive and kind of being social beings, you know, together is figuring out and kind of trying to piece together what we actually want to do.
[01:30:18]  Like I think that we're sort of blind to our own choices, if that makes sense.
[01:30:22]  Yeah, I think so.
[01:30:24]  And, you know, that's actually the good side of having some kind of reverse, even a tragedy, you know, that I've had.
[01:30:38]  Suddenly, you're not able to do the things that you did.
[01:30:44]  And you're looking at it and thinking, why did I care about this?
[01:30:49]  Is it worth it?
[01:30:50]  Should I care about it?
[01:30:51]  And then you find out what you really should care about.
[01:30:56]  You know, like the first time I came down here in a walker after my accident, and Seven came up and hugged me.
[01:31:06]  And I thought, that's something really good that came out of that accident, you know, and suddenly I really feel closer to this man.
[01:31:15]  You know, so.
[01:31:18]  Yeah, I mean, was after the death of your daughter, you know, I've never had a, I have had multiple family members die, but I've never had a daughter die, which I think is a different relation.
[01:31:32]  It can be, it can make the world seem very different.
[01:31:35]  Like it's like the world takes on like a different sheen or a different tone.
[01:31:38]  You kind of have to find your way around familiar things again.
[01:31:41]  And, you know, you talk about in the essay, like, oh, now I forget everything.
[01:31:44]  Right.
[01:31:46]  And having to sort of like rediscover kind of like what it's like a, it's like a weird sort of reset that it does on your psyche.
[01:31:54]  Yeah, yeah, that's right.
[01:31:55]  And so it's always a good thing, you know, to re-examine ourselves and what we do.
[01:32:04]  And maybe something that was appropriate for us before is bad for us now.
[01:32:12]  Or maybe it was never good for us and we thought it was.
[01:32:16]  And now we can see what it is.
[01:32:19]  Yeah, it's just interesting sometimes that like an unrelated sort of tragedy will make you re-examine another part of your life that maybe doesn't have a direct connection to that.
[01:32:28]  For sure, yeah.
[01:32:47]  What's the most physical pain you've ever been in?
[01:32:50]  I have, I would say heron withdrawals.
[01:32:57]  I was also, I've been beaten pretty badly a bunch of times in my life.
[01:33:03]  And one time in particular, I think was probably the most like technical pain I've been in.
[01:33:10]  I'm sorry.
[01:33:10]  It's awful to have pain associated with malice.
[01:33:14]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:33:16]  But, but yeah, I mean, I've actually, I've escaped being in like really bad physical pain.
[01:33:23]  You know what it was?
[01:33:24]  I had a fucking abscess in my goddamn mouth because of the dentist at Health Right.
[01:33:29]  Oh, that was miserable.
[01:33:31]  Let me tell you.
[01:33:31]  And that was the worst pain.
[01:33:33]  What's the worst pain you've ever been in?
[01:33:35]  Oh, this accident, the back pain.
[01:33:37]  The back pain.
[01:33:38]  Worse than colon cancer and the surgery and breaking my pelvis, all that stuff.
[01:33:43]  Yeah, fuck around with the back.
[01:33:44]  It's like, yeah.
[01:33:46]  It's literally the backbone.
[01:33:48]  For sure.
[01:33:48]  Yeah.
[01:33:49]  Yeah.
[01:33:49]  I think I'll be reminded for the rest of my life, but so what?
[01:33:54]  Yeah.
[01:33:55]  Well, you can walk with a sort of a wisened hunch.
[01:33:57]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:34:01]  I'm actually getting better by the week, too.
[01:34:03]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:34:05]  You seem like it's, this is a mending sort of outfit you've got on.
[01:34:08]  Yeah.
[01:34:09]  That's what I'd call it too.
[01:34:10]  Yeah.
[01:34:11]  I was reading, when I was reading your essay in Harper's, there's just, I was reminded of this quote from, or this part of Stefan Zweig's book, Beware of Pity.
[01:34:23]  Yeah, what a great book, huh?
[01:34:24]  Yeah.
[01:34:24]  Yeah.
[01:34:26]  And he wrote in it, he said, there are two kinds of pity.
[01:34:31]  One, the weak and sentimental kind, which is not compassion, but only instinctive desire to fortify one's own soul against the suffering of another.
[01:34:40]  The other, the only one that counts, the unsentimental but creative kind, which knows what it is about and is determined to hold out in patience and forbearance to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.
[01:34:52]  And I was really reminded of that because I feel like in that essay, you're sort of trying to, you're kind of talking about both.
[01:35:02]  Right.
[01:35:03]  Right?
[01:35:03]  I mean, there's a sense in which, you know, it seems a bit, you know, it has that reflexive portion where you're really kind of looking back at yourself and how you've, you know, I wouldn't say used people, but kind of, you know, have kind of throughout the years.
[01:35:20]  Right.
[01:35:21]  You know.
[01:35:23]  And yeah, that first kind of pity is probably not too different from the emotion that the mother of Lisa's fellow student felt when she, oh, she was so scared of this homeless man sleeping down on the sidewalk and she was up on the second or third story.
[01:35:43]  And so she had to dump boiling water on him because she was so scared.
[01:35:47]  It's much like that, just trying to insulate yourself from feeling the suffering.
[01:35:53]  But in a kind of like, you know, self, like in a kind of like, you know, self-important way almost or self-congratulatory way.
[01:36:01]  Yeah, right.
[01:36:01]  Yeah.
[01:36:02]  Yeah.
[01:36:03]  Anytime people tell me that, oh, something's that someone said makes them scared or makes them triggered or something, I feel that's how it is, yeah.
[01:36:14]  But I want to talk about that second kind because I think that's the really tough one, right?
[01:36:18]  The creative one.
[01:36:20]  Well, and I think we're all socialized to, even if it's not so much about our ego that we want to get stroked for doing good, that we're sort of used to checking in with some authority figure.
[01:36:42]  And so, you know, I've had times where I thought, okay, did I do this right?
[01:36:47]  Did I help this person?
[01:36:49]  Can I ask him?
[01:36:50]  Did I do it right?
[01:36:51]  You know, and that's, you need that kind of validation, as they say.
[01:36:56]  And now I think, I don't even really need to do that.
[01:37:01]  You know, I don't need to talk to the person.
[01:37:05]  If there's somebody who's falling down, okay, I'll pick the person up and I don't have to make a big deal out of it.
[01:37:13]  And that seems like a better way to go about it.
[01:37:19]  I always have a very hard time receiving help.
[01:37:23]  Often is that people are one way or the other.
[01:37:28]  Yeah.
[01:37:29]  My alcoholic friend has a terrible time receiving, and he'll always say, if you give me a present, make sure I can consume it, lose it, or break it.
[01:37:41]  Yeah, I think that's a smart way to go about it.
[01:37:44]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:37:45]  Yeah, I think with a lot of, at least with a lot of alcoholics I know, receiving help feels like, I don't know how to describe it, but it feels like dirty in some way, whereas giving it feels like clean and pure.
[01:38:01]  Right.
[01:38:02]  And like, it's funny because I think that's kind of how a lot of people kind of unconsciously view, well, giving people help is a very, I guess, a fraught, muddled thing.
[01:38:11]  But like, at least for me, I know, I'll speak for myself.
[01:38:15]  It's like when I help somebody in like a small way, which is almost always how it is, I feel good, you know?
[01:38:24]  I mean, that's a very basic human thing.
[01:38:27]  And there is like a purity to it and like a cleanliness to it that I don't think anything else in life really offers.
[01:38:35]  Maybe love, I guess, in some way.
[01:38:39]  That makes a lot of sense.