The Best of Me Read online

  Copyright © 2020 by David Sedaris

  Cover design by Jamie Keenan

  Cover art © CSA Images / Getty Images

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  First ebook edition: November 2020

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  Barrel Fever and Discontents: “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2”; Holidays on Ice: “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” “Christmas Means Giving”; Naked: “The Incomplete Quad”; Me Talk Pretty One Day and Esquire: “You Can’t Kill the Rooster,” “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” “Jesus Shaves”; Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim and The New Yorker: “Us and Them,” “Let It Snow,” “The Ship Shape,” “The Girl Next Door,” “Possession,” “Nuit of the Living Dead”; Dress Your Family… and Esquire: “Repeat After Me,” “Six to Eight Black Men”; When You Are Engulfed in Flames and The New Yorker: “The Understudy,” “In the Waiting Room,” “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle”; “Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle” also appeared in The Best American Travel Writing 2006; When You Are Engulfed… and GQ: “Town and Country”; Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: “The Motherless Bear,” “The Faithful Setter”; acknowledgment is made to Public Radio International’s This American Life, on which “The Cat and the Baboon” was originally broadcast in a slightly different form; Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls: “Think Differenter”; Let’s Explore… and The New Yorker: “Dentists Without Borders,” “Memory Laps,” “Loggerheads,” “Easy, Tiger,” “Laugh, Kookaburra,” “A Guy Walks into a Bar Car,” “Standing By,” “Understanding Understanding Owls”; “A Guy Walks into a Bar Car” also appeared in The Best American Essays 2010 and The Best American Travel Writing 2010; Let’s Explore… and GQ: “Just a Quick E-mail”; Let’s Explore… and Prospect: “If I Ruled the World”; Let’s Explore… and Esquire: “Dog Days”; Calypso: “A House Divided”; Calypso and The New Yorker: “Now We Are Five,” “The Perfect Fit,” “Leviathan,” “A Modest Proposal,” “Why Aren’t You Laughing?”; Calypso and The Paris Review: “The Spirit World”; The New Yorker: “Girl Crazy,” “Card Wired,” “How to Spend the Budget Surplus,” “Undecided,” “Unbuttoned.”

  The following were published as fiction: “Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3,

  No. 2,” “Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol,” “Christmas Means Giving,” “Girl Crazy,” “Card Wired,” “How to Spend the Budget Surplus,” “Dog Days,” “The Cat and the Baboon,” “The Motherless Bear,” “The Faithful Setter,” “Think Differenter,” “If I Ruled the World,” “Just a Quick E-mail.”

  ISBN 978-0-316-62825-9

  E3-20201006-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter Vol. 3, No. 2

  Front Row Center with Thaddeus Bristol

  Christmas Means Giving

  The Incomplete Quad

  Girl Crazy

  Card Wired

  How to Spend the Budget Surplus

  You Can’t Kill the Rooster

  Me Talk Pretty One Day

  Jesus Shaves

  Dog Days

  Us and Them

  Let It Snow

  The Ship Shape

  The Girl Next Door

  Repeat After Me

  Six to Eight Black Men

  Possession

  Nuit of the Living Dead

  Solution to Saturday’s Puzzle

  The Understudy

  Town and Country

  In the Waiting Room

  Undecided

  The Cat and the Baboon

  The Motherless Bear

  The Faithful Setter

  Dentists Without Borders

  Memory Laps

  Think Differenter

  Loggerheads

  If I Ruled the World

  Easy, Tiger

  Laugh, Kookaburra

  Just a Quick E-mail

  A Guy Walks into a Bar Car

  Standing By

  Understanding Understanding Owls

  Now We Are Five

  A House Divided

  The Perfect Fit

  Leviathan

  A Modest Proposal

  Why Aren’t You Laughing?

  The Spirit World

  Unbuttoned

  Discover More David Sedaris

  About the Author

  Also by David Sedaris

  For my brother, Paul

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  Introduction

  I’m not the sort of person who goes around feeling good about himself. I have my days, don’t get me wrong, but any confidence I possess, especially in regard to my writing, was planted and nurtured by someone else—first a teacher, then later an agent or editor. “Hey,” he or she would say, “this is pretty good.”

  “Really?” This was my cheap way of getting them to say it again. “You’re not just telling me that because you feel sorry for me?”

  “Yes…I mean, no. I really like it!”

  Still, I never quite believed them.

  What lifted me up was writing for The New Yorker. While this had always been a fantasy of mine, I did nothing to nudge it along. I’d always heard that if the magazine wanted you, they’d find you, and that’s exactly what happened. I started my relationship with them in 1995, when an editor phoned and asked if I might write a Shouts & Murmurs piece on then-president Bill Clinton’s welfare reform proposal. I was given one day to complete it, and when I was told that it would run in the next week’s issue, something inside me changed. It wasn’t seismic, like an earthquake, but more like a medium-size boulder that had shifted a little. Nevertheless, I felt it. When the magazine came out, I opened it to my piece, arranged it just so on the kitchen table, and strolled past it, wanting my younger, twenty-year-old self to see his name at the top of the page.

  “Wait a minute.…Is that…me? In The New Yorker?” Thirty-nine years it had taken the magazine to notice me. Good thing I wasn’t in any rush.

  If you read an essay in Esquire and don’t like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it’s in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you. That said, you’re never going to please everyone. It’s hard to think of a single entry in this book that didn’t generate a complaint of one sort or another. And it could be anything—“How dare you suggest French dentists are better than American ones!” “What sort of monster won’t swap seats on a plane?” Many were angry that I’d inadvertently killed a couple of sea turtles. Granted, that was bad, but I was a child at the time, and don’t you have to eventually forgive someone for what he
did when he was twelve?

  There is literally nothing you can print anymore that isn’t going to generate a negative response. This, I believe, was brought on by the Internet. It used to be that you’d write a letter of complaint, then read it over, wondering, Is this really worth a twenty-five-cent stamp? With the advent of email, complaining became free. Thus, people who were maybe a tiny bit offended could, at no cost whatsoever, let you know that they were NEVER GOING TO BUY ANY OF YOUR BOOKS EVER AGAIN!!!!

  They always take the scorched-earth policy for some reason. Of all the entries in this book, the one that generated the most anger was “The Motherless Bear.” Oh, the mail I got. “How dare you torture animals like this!”

  “It’s a fictional story,” I wrote back to everyone who complained. “The giveaway is that the title character speaks English and feels sorry for herself. Bears don’t do that in real life.”

  That wasn’t enough for a woman in England. “I urge you not to mock these intelligent and sentient creatures,” she wrote, demanding that I atone by involving myself with the two bear-rescue organizations she listed at the bottom of her letter.

  Just as we can never really tell what our own breath smells like, I will never know if I would like my writing. If I wasn’t myself, and someone sent me one of my essay collections, would I recommend it to friends? Would I stop reading it after a dozen or so pages? There’s so much that goes into a decision like that. How many times have I dismissed something just because a person I didn’t approve of found it enjoyable? Or maybe I decided it was too popular. That’s the sort of snobbery that kept my younger self slogging through books I honestly had no interest in, the sorts I’d announce had taken me “six months to finish” but were only two hundred pages long. If something is written in your native language and it’s taking you half a year to get through it, unless you’re being paid by the hour to read it, I’d say there’s a problem.

  One thing that I would like about my writing is that so much of it has to do with family. It’s something that’s always interested me and is one of the reasons I so love Greeks. You could meet an American and wait for months before he begins a sentence with the words “So then my mother…” It’s the same in France and England. Oh, they might get around to it eventually, but it never feels imperative. With Greeks, though, it’s usually only a matter of seconds before you hear about someone’s brother, or what a pain his sister is.

  There’s a lot of talk lately about “the family you choose.” It’s a phrase often used by people who were rejected by their parents or siblings and so formed a group of supportive, kindred spirits. I think it’s great they’re part of a tight-knit circle, but I wouldn’t call it a family. Essential to that word is that the people you’re surrounded by were not chosen. They were assigned by fate, and now you must deal with them in one way or another until you die. For me, that hasn’t been much of a problem. Even when I was a teenager, I wouldn’t have traded my parents for anyone else’s, and the same goes for my brother and sisters.

  It bothers me, then, when someone refers to my family as “dysfunctional.” That word is overused, at least in the United States, and, more to the point, it’s wrongly used. My father hoarding food inside my sister’s vagina would be dysfunctional. His hoarding it beneath the bathroom sink, as he is wont to do, is, at best, quirky and at worst unsanitary.

  There’s an Allan Gurganus quote I think of quite often: “Without much accuracy, with strangely little love at all, your family will decide for you exactly who you are, and they’ll keep nudging, coaxing, poking you until you’ve changed into that very simple shape.”

  Is there a richer or more complex story than that?

  I like to think that the affection I have for my family is apparent. Well into our adulthoods—teetering on our dotage, most of us—we’re still on good terms. We write one another, we talk. We take vacations together. I just can’t see the dysfunction in that.

  The pieces in this book—both fiction and nonfiction—are the sort I hoped to produce back when I first started writing, at the age of twenty. I didn’t know how to get from where I was then to where I am now, but who does? Like everyone else, I stumbled along, making mistakes while embarrassing myself and others (sorry, everyone I’ve ever met). I’ll always be inclined toward my most recent work, if only because I’ve had less time to turn on it. When I first started writing essays, they were about big, dramatic events, the sort you relate when you meet someone new and are trying to explain to them what made you the person you are. As I get older, I find myself writing about smaller and smaller things. As an exercise it’s much more difficult, and thus—for me, anyway—much more rewarding. I hope you feel the same. If not, I can probably expect to hear from you.

  Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter

  Vol. 3, No. 2

  Dear Subscriber,

  First of all, I’d like to apologize for the lack of both the spring and summer issues of Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter. I understand that you subscribed with the promise that this was to be a quarterly publication—four seasons’ worth of news from the front lines of our constant battle against oppression. That was my plan. It’s just that last spring and summer were so overwhelming that I, Glen, just couldn’t deal with it all.

  I’m hoping you’ll understand. Please accept as consolation the fact that this issue is almost twice as long as the others. Keep in mind the fact that it’s not easy to work forty hours a week and produce a quarterly publication. Also, while I’m at it, I’d like to mention that it would be wonderful if everyone who read Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter also subscribed to Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter. It seems that many of you are very generous when it comes to lending issues to your friends and family. That is all well and good as everyone should understand the passion with which we as a people are hated beyond belief. But at the same time, it costs to put out a newsletter and every dollar helps. It costs to gather data, to Xerox, to staple and mail, let alone the cost of my personal time and energies. So if you don’t mind, I’d rather you mention Glen’s Homophobia Newsletter to everyone you know but tell them they’ll have to subscribe for themselves if they want the whole story. Thank you for understanding.

  As I stated before, last spring and summer were very difficult for me. In late April Steve Dolger and I broke up and went our separate ways. Steve Dolger (see newsletters volume 2, nos. 1–4 and volume 3, no. 1) turned out to be the most homophobic homosexual I’ve ever had the displeasure of knowing. He lives in constant fear, afraid to make any kind of mature emotional commitment, afraid of growing old and losing what’s left of his hair, and afraid to file his state and federal income taxes (which he has not done since 1987). Someday, perhaps someday very soon, Steve Dolger’s past will come back to haunt him. We’ll see how Steve and his little seventeen-year-old boyfriend feel when it happens!

  Steve was very devious and cold during our breakup. I felt the chill of him well through the spring and late months of summer. With deep feelings come deep consequences and I, Glen, spent the last two seasons of my life in what I can only describe as a waking coma—blind to the world around me, deaf to the cries of suffering others, mutely unable to express the stirrings of my wildly shifting emotions.

  I just came out of it last Thursday.

  What has Glen discovered? I have discovered that living blind to the world around you has its drawbacks but, strangely, it also has its rewards. While I was cut off from the joys of, say, good food and laughter, I was also blind to the overwhelming homophobia that is our everlasting cross to bear.

  I thought that for this edition of the newsletter I might write something along the lines of a homophobia Week in Review but this single week has been much too much for me. Rather, I will recount a single day.

  My day of victimization began at 7:15 A.M. when I held the telephone receiver to my ear and heard Drew Pierson’s voice shouting, “Fag, Fag, Fag,” over and over and over again. It rings in my ears still. “Fag! I’ll kick your ass good and hard the nex
t time I see you. Goddamn you, Fag!” You, reader, are probably asking yourself, “Who is this Drew Pierson and why is he being so homophobic toward Glen?”

  It all began last Thursday. I stopped into Dave’s Kwik Stop on my way home from work and couldn’t help but notice the cashier, a bulky, shorthaired boy who had “athletic scholarship” written all over his broad, dullish face and “Drew Pierson: I’m here to help!” written on a name tag pinned to his massive chest. I took a handbasket and bought, I believe, a bag of charcoal briquettes and a quartered fryer. At the register this Drew fellow rang up the items and said, “I’ll bet you’re going home to grill you some chicken.”

  I admitted that it was indeed my plan. Drew struck me as being very perceptive and friendly. Most of the Kwik Stop employees are homophobic but something about Drew’s manner led me to believe that he was different, sensitive and open. That evening, sitting on my patio and staring into the glowing embers nestled in my tiny grill, I thought of Drew Pierson and for the first time in months I felt something akin to a beacon of hope flashing through the darkness of my mind. I, Glen, smiled.

  I returned to Dave’s Kwik Stop the next evening and bought some luncheon meat, a loaf of bread, potato chips, and a roll of toilet paper.

  At the cash register Drew rang up my items and said, “I’ll bet you’re going on a picnic in the woods!”

  The next evening I had plans to eat dinner at the condominium of my sister and her homophobic husband, Vince Covington (see newsletter volume 1, no. 1). On the way to their home I stopped at the Kwik Stop, where I bought a can of snuff. I don’t use snuff, wouldn’t think of it. I only ordered snuff because it was one of the few items behind the counter and on a lower shelf. Drew, as an employee, is forced to wear an awkward garment—sort of a cross between a vest and a sandwich board. The terrible, synthetic thing ties at the sides and falls practically to the middle of his thigh. I only ordered the snuff so that, as he bent over to fetch it, I might get a more enlightened view of Drew’s physique. Regular readers of this newsletter will understand what I am talking about. Drew bent over and squatted on his heels, saying, “Which one? Tuberose? I used to like me some snuff. I’ll bet you’re going home to relax with some snuff, aren’t you?”