I write history—another way of saying half my life I live in the past.
It’s not a bad place to live, either. Anything good that’s ever happened is there.
That life I live at a desk halfway between two posters, both gifts from my dad. Behind me is a wall-size reproduction of Otto Dix’s Sailor and Girl, the cover art of a favorite novel, the mad and carnal Sabbath’s Theater, won at auction from the estate of the author, Philip Roth. On the opposite wall hangs a considerably smaller poster of Jim Bailey, the greatest Judy Garland impersonator who ever lived. I’m in the middle.
My job, simply stated, to turn back the clocks, to raise the dead, is impossible.
Facts alone don’t do it. Even when you’re fortunate enough to believe you “know” what happened, you can only “know” it in quotes.
There are facts, and then there is truth. And then there is writing the truth. You can’t even know your own past. I’m supposed to write someone else’s?
I love the epigraph from Roth’s The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, in which Roth quotes one of his characters, Nathan Zuckerman, who serves as the author’s fictional alter ego: “And as he spoke, I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.”
My dad piled the whole family—me, mom, younger sister—into the car and drove us east down Sunset. He didn’t tell any of us where we were going. Leaving Brentwood, all we knew was he was grinning mischievously and we were heading to dinner. But the farther east he drove—a new driver myself, I didn’t know there was anything “after” Beverly Hills—the fewer restaurants I could identify, until finally we crossed La Brea on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Hollywood.”
Of course, it didn’t look like Hollywood, at least not how I had imagined it. In the 1990s, the Walk of Fame was shadowed and lurid and forbidden, a noir sideshow you wouldn’t want to visit with your parents. Which is to say, it was beginning to look like my father—a Dada Clark Griswold—was taking us, his family, to pick up a hooker.
We pleaded for him to tell us where we were going, but he kept his mouth shut from the parked car to the front of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. “This is where they had the first Oscars,” he said as we entered the lobby, before, following his lead, we turned a hard left (or was it right?) into a dark room with about a dozen lamplit bistro tables and one small
