Unaware of the fact or fiction section of the Watford Public Library

I feel a little bit bad for Mike Daisey. Slightly on a per­son­al level, mainly because he’s a neigh­bor of mine. I think I had a brief bodega dis­cus­sion with him once, a long time ago, around the time maybe he first moved into the neigh­bor­hood, def­in­itely after a run of that Dog Years thing fin­ished, and it was reas­on­ably ami­able, but it did­n’t lead to any kind of con­nec­tion or even acknow­ledgable acquaint­ance. So after that I would see him around the neigh­bor­hood and I’d think, “Oh, there’s that guy,” and then, on this past Sunday even­ing, I saw him get­ting out of a cab on Court Street, and I thought “Ooh, there’s THAT guy,” which was an inter­est­ing phe­nomen­o­lo­gic­al exper­i­ence I guess. 

But on bal­ance, I have to say I’m kind of on the side of the out­raged or at least irrit­ated. Although I’m not inclined to get on board with Jack Schafer’s tedi­ous con­tinu­ation of his largely ginned-up“what’s good for Stephen Glass should be good for A.J. Liebling” argu­ment. And when a guy as thor­oughly smug and pro­lix as Michael Woolf is telling me “nev­er mind the facts, focus on the writ­ing,” he’s just giv­ing me anoth­er good reas­on to ignore him. But even giv­en the ostens­ible por­ous­ness of formats that Daisey is cit­ing in order to absolve the fact that he just made shit up, I think he’s being pretty god­damn disin­genu­ous, and his crouch­ing behind a “cause” is not likely to help him or his cause a whole lot in the long run. Daisey’s case does dif­fer from James Frey’s largely in that he made shit up for a lar­ger pur­pose, rather than to make him­self look more badass/sad/pathetic; and the fact that Frey talked so much shit about oth­er writers before his sins were dis­covered made his fall rather uniquely sat­is­fy­ing. One thing that makes the Daisey case so, um, fas­cin­at­ing for me is my own exper­i­ence of hav­ing stood by and vet­ted the pub­lic­a­tion of a piece of writ­ing that I was fully aware con­tained a large num­ber of fac­tu­al inac­curacies, and that I con­vinced the leg­al depart­ment of the pub­lic­a­tion’s par­ent com­pany that doing this was a good idea. 

This is an odd thing to admit because of some­thing that I’m reas­on­ably sure a lot of this blo­g’s read­ers are unaware of. That is, while I was at Première magazine, besides writ­ing film reviews and occa­sion­al thumb­suck­ers and edit­ing top-drawer lit­er­ary types, I also worked on a num­ber of invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism pieces and such. One of my first edit­ing jobs was shep­herd­ing a piece by Mark Ebner about the act­or Peter Greene’s struggles with drug addic­tion. This was a more sens­it­ive piece than I was even aware of at the time, but that’s anoth­er story. I also edited all but one of the pieces John Connolly (of late work­ing for Vanity Fair) wrote for Première between 1997 and 2001, includ­ing a well-known art­icle called “Arnold the Barbarian.” One piece I worked on with John was so fraught that it took eight months between pitch and pub­lic­a­tion and was punc­tu­ated by reg­u­lar con­fabs with very expens­ive law­yers. Lots of them.  My atti­tude toward this kind of work was not atyp­ic­al of an indi­vidu­al of my tem­pera­ment at the time, e.g., I could be (and was) a com­plete fuckup in every oth­er respect of my per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al life, but THIS I was going to get RIGHT. And I did, even while over­play­ing my only-guy-in-a-roomful-of-suits-wearing-a-Tex-Avery-t-shirt schtick.

And it’s here that I’d like to dir­ect the read­er to a piece I wrote a little less than a year ago about David Foster Wallace’s posthum­ously pub­lished unfin­ished nov­el The Pale King. If you’re dis­in­clined to read the whole thing, as they say, a par­tic­u­larly per­tin­ent pas­sage is below: 

Reading Wallace or someone like him assert that a clear fic­tion is in fact “really true” brought to mind work­ing with him on the piece that was ini­tially pub­lished as “Neither Adult Nor Entertainment, It Turns Out” in the September 1998 edi­tion of Première, and then prin­ted in expan­ded and unbowd­ler­ized form under its ori­gin­al inten­ded title “Big Red Son” in the essay com­pil­a­tion Consider The Lobster. Here is a pas­sage from the begin­ning of the piece:

Let us not for­get Vegas’s syn­ec­doche and beat­ing heart. It’s kitty-corner from Bally’s: Caesars Palace. The grand­daddy. As big as 20 Wal-Marts end to end. Real marble and fake marble, car­pet­ing you can pass on without con­tu­sion, 130,000 square feet of casino alone. Domed ceil­ings, clerestor­ies, bar­rel vaults. In Caesars Palace is America con­ceived as a new kind of Rome: con­quer­or of its own people. An empire of Self. It’s breath­tak­ing. The winter’s light rain makes all the neon bleed.

Consider for a moment the phrase “syn­ec­doche and beat­ing heart.” (By the way, the “Rome, conquer­er of its own people” riff is repeated, as it hap­pens, in The Pale King.) Wallace just dashes it off, but its implic­a­tions are kind of mind-boggling, par­tic­u­larly because of the use of “and” instead of “or.” We’re not just talk­ing about a part refer­ring to a whole, but that part being the driv­ing, essen­tial organ of the whole. It’s sig­ni­fic­ant, but that phrase isn’t the reas­on I’m repro­du­cing that par­tic­u­lar pas­sage; the reas­on is that one piece of data, that Caesars Palace con­tains “130,000 square feet of casino alone.” As it hap­pens dur­ing the fact-checking pro­cess lead­ing up to the pub­lic­a­tion of the art­icle, we couldn’t veri­fy that inform­a­tion. Dave didn’t give us a source for it, we couldn’t find a source, and so on. There were plenty of oth­er pieces of data in the art­icle that were entirely empir­ic­ally veri­fi­able for instance, the num­ber of men that Stephanie Swift per­forms ana­lin­gus on in Gang Bang Angels 1, and the num­ber of gobs of spit she takes in the face from those men some moments after. You could sit there in front of the TV watch­ing the tape and just tick them off. But the actions and the tales told by the fic­tion­al­ized com­pos­ite char­ac­ters Dick Filth and Harold Hecuba (based on myself and Evan Wright, then writ­ing for Hustler magazine and quite miser­able about it) were not entirely above board in the actu­al fact depart­ment; the whole bit about Hecuba get­ting throttled by porn star Jasmin St. Clair and his “spe­cial autotint tri­foc­als” dis­ap­pear­ing into the “for­bid­ding décol­letage of Ms. Christy Canyon, nev­er to be recovered (the glasses) or even seen ever again” becom­ing a source of par­tic­u­lar con­cern and con­fu­sion for our unusu­ally help­ful and coöper­at­ive leg­al depart­ment, mem­bers of which I did not pester with rationales con­cern­ing post­mod­ern prac­tice or ten­sions between prov­able fact and lar­ger truth or any such thing but merely said, “The author of this piece is a really big deal, it’ll be okay.”

I admit that I was not in fact QUITE that cava­lier with the Hachette leg­al depart­ment when they raised an eye­brow at the piece that was then, and would again be, titled “Big Red Son.” The two top vet­ters in that depart­ment were astute gen­er­al read­ers as well as sharp leg­al minds, and they were well aware that, say, glasses that sink into a woman’s exposed cleav­age do not dema­ter­i­al­ize, that even in the con­text of a career in adult enter­tain­ment no indi­vidu­al named Richard Filth would go by “Dick Filth,” and so on. They were kind of non­plussed by the piece in gen­er­al; “What IS this?” is a ques­tion I heard early on.

I’ve dis­cussed the fact-checking pro­cess on the piece with someone who’s work­ing with D.T. Max on that writer­’s forth­com­ing bio­graphy of Wallace, and I don’t want to step on her or his or its toes, but the Daisey affair reminded me of work­ing on this art­icle for a bunch of reas­ons, not least of which was that Daisey’s prot­est­a­tion “I’m not a journ­al­ist” is some­thing I heard a lot from Dave dur­ing the pro­cess. (The vari­ant was “I’m not a report­er.” By the same token, I’ve nev­er seen any­one, journalist/reporter or oth­er­wise, take obser­va­tion­al notes with the furi­ous intens­ity with which Dave did.) The way we were able to get the piece pub­lished in more or less the form in which it was writ­ten was, frankly, via what some would call col­lu­sion. The fact of the false first-person-plural nar­rat­ive voice was a func­tion of the art­icle bear­ing a dual pseud­onym­ous byline. Now, Première had agreed that Wallace was gonna write and pub­lish the piece under a pseud­onym any­way, so two psuedonyms was­n’t a big deal. As for the fic­tion­al constructs/characters named “Harold Hecuba” and “Dick Filth,” adult-industry journ­al­ists who were “guides and docents” for Matt Rundlet and Willem deGroot (for such were the dual pseud­onyms of Wallace); well, as I note above, they were stand-ins for Evan Wright (the future Generation Kill author was, again as I note above, then at Hustler magazine) and myself. And Evan and I made it very clear to leg­al that we were not going to object in any way to our char­ac­ter­iz­a­tions by proxy, as it were. I don’t think we were asked to sign any­thing to that effect; I was, after all, a full-time employ­ee at Hachette, and Evan aspired to freel­ance for Première. But I do remem­ber hav­ing to reas­sure leg­al more than once that Evan and I were “cool.”

Still, there were at least two things in the piece that could con­ceiv­ably be con­sidered as poten­tially action­able, the first being the above cited throt­tling of fic­tion­al con­struct Harold Hecuba by real albeit pseud­onym­ous porn per­former Jasmin St. Clair. Well, Evan had in fact been accos­ted in a sim­il­ar fash­ion and for the cited sin of hav­ing gone pub­lic with St. Clair’s get-rich-quick scheme con­cern­ing por­no­graph­ic gum­ball machines, so when push came to shove he said he’d be will­ing to back that up. The oth­er pos­sible prob­lem point was this state­ment attrib­uted to Dick Filth, per­tain­ing to the actu­al integ­rity of the AVN Awards them­selves: “The best per­cep­tion, backed up by tons of anec­dot­al evid­ence, is that they are totally, totally fixed and rigged.” Now you don’t need a law degree to ascer­tain just how much leg­al wiggle room is already built into that stat­ment. But just in case, I believe I was gonna volun­teer to be the fall guy on that one. Although my default first pos­i­tion in the event of any saber-rattling on the part of the aggrieved parties was gonna be to say, “Oh, come on, guys.” (Some kinda-sorta saber-rattling DID in fact come to pass, and a per­son at the Wallace-enthusiast web­site The Howling Fantods was kind enough to pre­serve it; see here.)

And hand-in-hand with the inven­tion was a par­tic­u­lar con­scien­tious­ness. Wallace had an innate under­stand­ing of the mar­gins he was play­ing with. When Evan poin­ted out that the pseud­onym­ous porn per­former Vince Vouyer had a real name that was, in a sense, even more ridicu­lous than his stage handle, Dave was dober­manesque in his determ­in­a­tion to pin down that said name WAS in fact John LaForme, although this was a group effort and I do believe it was Evan who was able to track down the rel­ev­ant doc­u­ment­a­tion. When the piece was mak­ing the trans­ition to book form, Dave was crestfallen/irritated at hav­ing learned that he had pos­sibly misid­en­ti­fied one of the char­ac­ters on the Felliniesque Adult Software exhib­i­tion floor as dir­ect­or Gregory Dark, and hedged a bit by men­tion­ing Jeff “Hatman” Marton, and so on. There’s also the mat­ter of the fleet­ing moments that he got right in a way that’s kind of scary, as in this pas­sage: “Tom Byron, who is 36 and has pre­cisely one attrib­ute, affect the air of a Mafia don at the Sands’ bar’s nightly porn parties, extend­ing his hand knuckles-up as if for obeis­ance.” Yes, I was there, stand­ing next to him (Wallace), we saw it, and it was exactly that. And on the oth­er hand, no, Dick Filth was­n’t drink­ing Grand Marnier, it was Jack Daniel’s, and he did­n’t HECTOR any waiters for change, that he remem­bers, and dozens of oth­er not-quite little details that did­n’t actu­ally happen.

But for all that, well…I have become what I beheld and I am con­tent that I have done right. We stand by our story.