Gordon Lish - Collected Fictions

Pay attention to me!

You think I am talking just to hear myself talk?

I LIKE TALKING ABOUT sitting on toilets. It shows up in the roughage of my speech. Wherever at all in keeping with things, I try to work it in. You just have to look back at stories I have had printed for you to see I am telling you the truth. Sitting on toilets is certain to show up with more than passing incidence. I will even go so far as to say that where you find a story with a person sitting on a toilet in it, forget the name that's signed as author — no one but I could have written the thing. Indeed, it would be inconceivable to me I didn't.

But the one I've got now, this one here, it promises to be the pick of the lot.

Or anyhow the purest.

Well, the truest, then — the least fictitious, then — then the one with not much in it made up.

The other thing about it that I like is that it could not be simpler for somebody to tell — nothing in it but just a man sitting on a toilet in it and the wallpaper in it the man is looking at.

Oh, of course — not just a man but myself.

How could I tell a story about anyone else? For one thing, it could never be true, could it? I mean, what do I know about people — or care to? Good Christ, I have all I can do to marshal even a small enough interest in guess-who.

Or do I mean large enough?

I don't know.

THIS IS ANOTHER THING I am always putting into stories—"I don't know." Just those words, just like that. You see a story with "I don't know" in it, this'll be your tip-off as to who was it who wrote it. It could have anybody down there under the title there — but he isn't, she isn't, I am.

Or was, was.

Well, it's exciting.

It is exciting.

Not writing, not speaking — but being a sneak.

When I was a boy, this was what I wanted to grow up to be — a person who was a sneak and an assassin. I wanted to be dangerous. This was when I was little.

When I was little, my mother would get me to sit on the toilet for her and stay there and stay there until I could show her something, and sometimes — more and more oftentimes — I couldn't. She would say, "Put your royal bombosity down on the royal throne and don't you dare let me see you get up off of it until there is something in there in it for your mother to look at."

It's terrible what I have to show for it now. I tell you, I don't know where the food goes. It's frightening. Am I getting poisoned? Or pickled?

I take things.

You know — to make me go.

I especially take things when we go away and it gets worse — not going, the not-going. This is where this comes in — the story, this story, the wallpaper. Listen to this — I had taken a lot of something — because it had been days already, days of nothing but of sitting and of not going already, of its maybe having been thus even for a week of it already. So I'd swallowed enough to choke a horse, gone to bed, been down for mere minutes, when I had to get back up again and I really mean it, what I said.

Get back up!

It was somewhere quaint — an inn somewhere — you lose track — a cute hotel — meaning no bathroom of your own, meaning a bathroom out at the end of the hall, meaning a bathroom with a kind of a latch contraption on the door — and with a pitched ceiling pitched so low you had to keep bent over — even sitting down, you had to keep bent down — and even bent, I couldn't stop going — oh, God, going and going. Forever it felt like.

Gallons it felt like.

It felt like my whole life was coming up and coming up — and going good and out.

I mean going down and out.

Which is when I started studying the wallpaper.

I thought I was sluicing away, dissolving from the inside out, rendering myself as waste, breaking down to basal substance, falling through the plumbing, perishing on a toilet I could not even call my own.

You'll laugh, but I got scared.

I thought: "Call for help."

I thought: "Do it before you swoon."

Which is when I reached out for the wallpaper as you would for a lifeline, for smelling salts, a float.

I don't know.

I thought: "Hang on to the wallpaper!"

I mean, with all my mind, with that.

Well, I could see it was a wallpaper you could do it with — a pattern — growing things — things that grow — a picture of this, then of that — and the names for them given as thus:

Blue-eyed grass.

Wintergreen.

Sweet William.

Sneezeweed.

Vetch.

Violet.

Primula.

Coreopsis.

Clover.

Mariposa.

Marsh marigold.

Rose mallow.

Dandelion.

Red-eye.

Clover.

Black-eyed Susan.

Poppy.

Bluebells.

Buttercup.

Hepatica.

Wood sorrell.

Belladonna.

Ivy.

I SWEAR IT — ALL THOSE, each and every one.

Grasses, weeds — I don't know — crap, all that itchy actual crap — pointless from the word go.

I sat there holding on.

For nothing less than for life itself.

Pretty dumb.

After all, all it was was just a lot of shit. If anything, I should have been joyous, been jubilant, been pleased as punch. Hey, come on — I was going, wasn't I?

But I was scared to death.

I thought: "Hey, hotshot, you think you're so smart, let's see you swindle your way out of this."

Skip it, what the tricks are — they are never not the plenitude the wallpaper-writer needs.

But ask yourself meanwhile this — which wallpaper-reader lived again to have for him to struggle again with shit like this?

THE BIG THING ABOUT THIS IS deciding what it's all about. I mean, by way of theme, what, what? Sure, it gives you the event that got me sworn off whiskey forever. But does this make it a tale of how a certain person got himself a good scare, put aside drunkenness, took up sobriety in high hopes of a permanent shift? I don't think so. Me, I keep feeling it's going to be more about Jews and Christians than about this thing of matching another man glass for glass. But I could be wrong in both connections. Maybe what this story is really getting at is something I'd be afraid to know any story I ever wrote is.

Either way or whatever, it happened last Easter, which doesn't mean a thing to me because of my being Jewish. To my wife it's something, though, and I am more or less willing to play along — providing things don't get too much out of hand. Egg hunts for the kids, this is okay, and maybe a chocolate bunny wrapped in colored tinfoil. But I draw the line when it comes to a whole done-up basket. I don't see why this is called for — strands of candy-store grass getting stuck between floorboards and you can't get the stuff up even with a tweezers or a Eureka.

As for the Easter that I am talking about, not much of all of this was ever at issue. This was because we got invited out to somebody's place. I think the question just got answered this way — whatever they do, this'll be it, this'll be Easter — no reason for us to have to make any decisions. Which was a relief, of course — the whys and the wherefores of which I am sure you do not need for me to turn nasty and explicate for you. But my wife and I, didn't we find something else for us to get into a fuss about, anyway? And this is the best I can do — say "something else." Because I don't remember what. Not that it was anything trifling. I'm certain it must have been something pretty substantial. I mean, aside from the whole routine thing of spouses with our differences doing Easter.

Our boy, however, he got us reasonably jolly just in time for our arrival. What happened was, you just caught it from him, his thrill at getting into all this country-ness of experience. You see, I think our boy really suffers in the city — I think my wife and I agree on this — not that you could ever actually get a confession of his unhappiness out of him. He's all stoic, this kid of ours — God knows from what sources. Twelve years old and tough as a stump, though to my mind a stump is nowhere near as tough as what I think you have to be as tough as. At any rate, he was out and gone as soon as we pulled up into the driveway. Trees, I guess, the trees. That boy, in him we're looking at a mighty delight to get up high on anything, his mother and his dad always hollering, "Come down from there! You're giving us heart failure!"