Watching Evil Dead

SEX IN A HOLY PLACE

Allison and I are still just falling in love when she tells me she hasn’t seen The Evil Dead.

I’m not the kind of cowboy who judges anybody on what they have and have not seen. If you’re short on travel, drugs, sex, or art, you’ll likely make up for it in the coming years. Maybe you’ll even overcompensate. Some courses are fun to overcorrect.

We’ve all got gaps. Inexplicable holes in our history of movie-watching, book-reading, band-knowing, and painting-seeing. Who cares why? Most gaps aren’t the result of planting a dogmatic flag in the sand; usually they’re just there . . . because. But gaps are fun. Because, come one ordinary night, with no indication of anything special in the sky, you find yourself filling one. You’re suddenly, spontaneously experiencing a work of art long lauded by the people you trust. You’re inside it now, finally, living the legend, packing dirt into the gap that’s forever marred your lawn. More often than not, you get why the thing was praised so highly and for so long. The real thrill, though, is this: you’re so entranced by the work itself, you don’t ask yourself what took you so long.

You just enjoy it.

Who cares if you’re late to the party?

You’re partying. Put a hat on.

Consider: there was once a day I didn’t know what the word fork meant. Mom or Dad taught me, and from that moment forward I owned the word. When I use the word today, nobody accuses me of having once been ignorant. Art is no different. The seventy-year-old woman who reads Faulkner for the first time knows him as well as the seventy-year-old who read him at twenty. Once you fill the gap, there’s no sign of fresh grass or a recently filled hole. Whatever you learn, whatever you experience, no matter when it occurs, it’s then yours; you then own it. The same goes for what you create: If you don’t make a movie till you’re sixty? You’re every bit the filmmaker as someone who started at sixteen. That’s true even if you wanted to make a movie all those years but just never got around to it. That’s true even if you were too scared, too broke, too bereft of ideas, too occupied with existence. It’s also true if the notion had never crossed your mind, not once, in those sixty years prior to you suddenly wanting to do it and then seeing that desire through.

If you want to be an artist, you gotta finish works of art.

Once you do, you are.

And because all art is subjective (you don’t need anyone to tell you that), it doesn’t matter if what you create is good or bad. These words aren’t truths. No more than intelligence can be measured by how much you know. Like the fork example. What you learned yesterday is as much yours as it is anybody else’s. There is no when in the artistic life, only before and after. Before: you hadn’t done it. After: you have. And so now . . . you are. What you want and what you do, these are the Pillars of You. Go find a dictionary of rare words and learn a few and use the words tomorrow. And the first person who asks if you just learned the word, you tell them, “Eudaemonia is just as much mine as spoon.” Then you tell them eudaemonia is the contentedness you feel when broadening your horizons.

Maybe it’ll inspire them to do just that.

And now that word is yours. And mine too. One day maybe I’ll use it in a book.

So, when Allison tells me she hasn’t seen The Evil Dead, all I see is the potential for a viewing party. I imagine the two of us sitting on the one piece of furniture we have in the small apartment we share; a faux-stylish white love seat thing I mistook for minimalism and later learned was more “antisocial monk who’d taken a vow of silence.” The apartment was already monkish when I’d met Allison: a single end table, two orange lamps, two oval mirrors on the wall, a box of six horror soundtracks, and an army cot I called a bed. I had just enough money to pay for the place, but nowhere near enough to fill the two tiny rooms. I met my agent, Kristin Nelson, for the first time in that apartment, via Zoom or whatever it was called in those days, and I wondered if she was taking note of the empty space behind me. Did she think I was a minimalist? Well, I’m sure she drew her own conclusion when, after she asked who I banked with, I told her I’d kept all my money in a hardcover copy of The Witches of Eastwick.

I’d written some fourteen books by the time I met Allison Laakko, but I hadn’t shopped one. Hadn’t been accepted or rejected. Didn’t know where to begin and anyway believed I’d already begun by writing the books themselves. There was a growing stack of rough drafts, enough of them that I kept them in an old wooden crate, this crate being one of only three items in the second small room of that little apartment. I wrote half of those books while riding in the passenger seat of the tour van for my band, the High Strung, some freehand, some not. I was (and still am) in a band with my best friends, who toured the United States and Canada for some 250 shows a year for close to six and a half years. We played to an average of twenty people a night. If you multiply the number of shows (close to 1,625) by twenty, you get one hell of a crowd. Over 30,000 people. As our drummer Derek Berk once said, “We didn’t play stadiums . . . we played stadium.” But even without the math, I found the nightly numbers fantastic, and so who could fault me for feeling fulfilled? And who could fault me for having no plan for the books when I was singing songs in a different city every night, getting paid in pizza and booze?

Yet, I did carry with me fantasies, delusions perhaps, in which I’d debate story changes with fictitious editors, have imaginary interviews as if faced with The New York Times. I imagined the books, all of them, on a shelf, all lined up, each with a solid, scary spine. You could say I believed it would all come to pass, I just had no idea how something like that occurred.

But an incredible thing happened soon after I met Allison at a rock show in Michigan: I got a book deal. Kristin sold a book of mine called Bird Box to HarperCollins as part of a two-book deal.

And while I floated in the ecstatic waters of fresh love and first success, I also had my first revelatory inner insistence, a knocking on an inner door, a door deep within myself, on the other side of which stood a small, faceless man wearing an overcoat in the fog, a man who used the voice I always hear in my head when he asked:

Exactly what does an artist deserve?

A simple question. Or so I thought then. The answer wouldn’t come for some time. And like most deceptively enormous inquiries, it started quiet, then got loud.

It would reach a profound volume the night Allison and I watched The Evil Dead.

For the time being: new love and a book deal. And if I didn’t see things in potentialities before, I was now seeing every potentiality at once. It was overwhelming, but what was happening was so blatantly positive, I didn’t bend or suffer beneath its weight. Love and books. Some money, too, a thing I hadn’t had much of in close to twenty years. Or ever, really. Music, too, as the band continued to play live shows without the incessant touring, a string of debaucherous local gigs during which I popped pot brownies onstage, raised bottles of Jack to the audience, and was once carried home by my brothers after falling into another band’s drum set. I was waking up with headaches in those days, of course, but with the doctrine that I couldn’t let a hangover stop me from my day’s writing. That wasn’t allowed. One of the many rules I’d followed for close to ten years. Because writing was never a hobby, not even when I did it for no reason (and had no prospects) other than to tell a story.

New love and books. And a hard, crazy respect for both.

I learned early that one can remain a gentleman while delivering the most grotesque of scenarios on the page, just like a married couple can honor each other while tying each other to the bed. Love . . . and the act of writing like the act of love. Equally electrifying and just as frightening. Ecstasy (and a sense of danger) to be found every day, every session, every time the mere thought of writing occurs.

Reverence, I discovered, for both. And wherever the twain shall meet. Because they do meet sometimes. In folded corners of practice, the far side of writerly rooms.

Or even in a landmark building in your hometown.