William Gay: Time Done Been Won't Be No More

JMW Is there any news about your movie?

WG You know No Country for Old Men is being released as a movie. Paste magazine had a big review and it is a rave. I haven’t seen a bad review and everything is saying that the Coen Brothers are at the top of their game. This is the first movie for a long time that I have actually considered going to the theater to see. When it opens in Columbia we might drive up there and watch it. We went and saw Shrek III not too long ago.

My least favorite actor in the world is Adam Sandler. I don’t like Jim Carrey much either but I like him better than Adam Sandler. There is something weird about that guy. I kind of like that movie Dumb and Dumber . Tommy Franklin, down in Oxford, had all these guys hanging around together and they started going over to each others’ house on Sunday night and it would be movie night and all these guys were semi-intellectuals and they were showing arty type independent films and when they came over to Tommy’s house he showed Dumb and Dumber but they didn’t really get into it. I think there are some really funny scenes in that movie.

JMW I have never seen it.

WG It was made by these two brothers and they were good when they started out. Something About Mary , was their movie, but it ( Dumb and Dumber ) is really crude.

JMW Can the kids watch it.

WG Well it has bad language in it. But most of my grandkids they get to watch anything they want to watch except when they are over at my house and I won’t let them watch anything with an R rating, but that is just me. I never let my kids watch everything that anybody else got to watch.

JMW I just saw you are going to be a fellow with the United States Artists foundation this year.

WG They are making the announcement later this month and they have been calling me wanting me to fly out there and they are having an award ceremony at Paramount Studios. They wanted a picture so I took care of that but I don’t want to fly out there.

I need to quit smoking like I quit drinking. That would be really good. I’ve got patches but I just haven’t used them yet. I should have checked into this stuff, I’ve never had any interest in disease or health for that matter. I have always been healthy and I never went to doctors. I have never been seriously sick; it is a little disquieting to have to face all that. I knew I was feeling really rotten all last year. I probably had high blood pressure for months before this deal happened. (He recently had a heart pacemaker installed.) It was probably an accumulation of things like a lot of stress over the kids’ situations and worry about that dog. Then my heart just said, “Fuck it, I’m not putting up with this crap no more”. It was time to go to the house.

JMW Yep, the long home.

WG When I heard that phrase used I knew that would be a book title. I heard it at my Uncle’s funeral; it’s a quote from Ecclesiastes. My editor didn’t like the title and we fought over that. That was one of the few fights I won. He wanted to call it The Pit.

JMW Sure glad you won that one.

WG One time I was with this guy who runs a writers program over at MTSU and he was trying to get a program going for Tennessee writers and I said that I hoped Tennessee would treat its writers like Mississippi or Georgia. Alabama and Mississippi have these awards like Writer of the Year and as far as I could see Tennessee doesn’t have anything. (William became the first recipient of the Tennessee Writer of the Year in 2009.)

JMW I got a grant once from the Tennessee Committee for the Humanities. I set up a program called Prehistory of the Cumberland Valley. They gave me $3,000 in a grant and I got the state archaeologist and the leading archaeologist from the University of Tennessee and gave them a stipend and travel expenses and they agreed to come and then I got the High School gym and advertised in the paper and invited everyone in the local counties to bring their artifacts in and the archaeologist would talk to them about it. It was really popular. I couldn’t believe it.

WG What sort of stuff did you see?

JMW The best of it was large sandstone statues that are very famous in the Cumberland Valley and some guy in Celina had a really nice one. Of course lots of common arrows. Some guys had some big fakes. They are weird looking flint pieces called slave killers and the archaeologist immediately called them fakes. The old Indians just didn’t make shit like that.

WG There is a guy In Hohenwald who has a lot of that stuff. The old dentist. I was working on his house one time back when I was painting, remodeling and that sort of stuff. Some of the brick were flaking off and he wanted me to rebuild the brick, so I got a bunch of different dyes and then made up different mortars and got them to match the colors on the house and I went around with a ladder building up the bricks all over the house. But he was going to a meeting where everybody brings their stuff and trades it or sells it and he let me look and he had a big box in the bed of the truck and he had really interesting stuff. But I think that guy dug up stuff. It was all years ago. I don’t think he does that any more.

He is an interesting fellow and one of my favorite people in Hohenwald. He is in Provinces and he knew it too; he recognized himself. I did a thing at the library and he turned up and came up and sat down with me and he said, “Hey Speedo, what ya doing?” That is a line from the book and what the Dentist calls the character in the book. It is kind of neat that he took it well, but he comes off, there is nothing bad about him. He is giving me magazines and giving me books, which he actually did; he gave me a lot of magazines.

There used to be a magazine called True and when he had accumulated too many magazines he would stack them up and give them to me and there would be several issues of True and I kind of liked that magazine. It usually had articles about UFO’s and government conspiracies to keep you from knowing about UFO’s and that kind of stuff. That was before the days of men’s magazines being what they are now. There was always good stuff to read in there. I remember seeing an issue back in the 70’s with this woman on the cover and it looked like a shoddy imitation of Playboy or Penthouse and all it was was fifty pages of tits and ass. They were trying to survive but it wasn’t working and there isn’t any True Magazine any more. I have a couple of real old issues from the 50’s.

JMW Do you remember a magazine called Argosy .

WG Oh yeah, John Keel used to have articles in Argosy and there was a magazine called Saga and John Keel had a column in Saga for a while. There were good magazines when I was a kid. There was Saturday Evening Post and there was Colliers . I never liked Look because there wasn’t that much to read in it and Life was the same way. There was a magazine called The American Magazine that used to run Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe novellas.

JMW Did you read Reader’s Digest when you were a kid?

WG If I didn’t have anything else to read. I hate Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. They were completely worthless. And with Reader’s Digest even when I was young I could divine that what I thought didn’t exactly jive with what they thought. It has always been a conservative magazine.

JMW I read it for the jokes.

WG Yeah the jokes were good like “Life In These United States” and “Laughter: The Best Medicine.” There was a lot of funny stuff in that magazine. Fate magazine used to be a good magazine back in the day. Magazines have to undergo changes to compete, so they don’t always work.