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My Dinner with Eric

7 June 2005

I just had dinner with Eric Bogosian. I can’t believe it. I’ve been a huge fan of his for years, ever since this guy Sam gave me his performance piece “Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll” on CD back at Roach Motel many years ago. Then I caught up with his starring and basically one-man role in Oliver Stone’s movie version of Bogosian’s play “Talk Radio,” and after that I saw his live theater shows and bought his books. Now he’s a novelist as well, peddling two novels, “Mall” and his new one “Wasted Beauty” which, uncharacteristically, Books and Books hadn’t managed to get a shipment of, so no signed copy for me, but as it happened, things turned out much better . . .

I showed up alone, after yet another day spent alternately unpacking boxes at my my new apartment and dozing away the brutal June heat, that even cranking AC can’t dispel. I made sure to be early to the bookstore, as I’m a huge fan and wanted to get on the front row. It certainly has been a long time since I was in Coral Gables. It was the first time I’d seen the new Books and Books location.

After a breathless introduction by a local theater director, Bogosian came out and began to discuss his book, with a very different affect than I remembered from his performance pieces. He talked about how 9/11 happening “ten blocks from my house” “broke something in me” and how he stopped doing or writing his live performance pieces as a result, though he still writes plays.

He read a sequence from “Wake Up and Smell the Coffee” (in which a schlemiel tries to chat up an airline attendant), and then read a long sequence from his novel, a scene at a therapist’s, in which the protagonist discusses with the therapist his guilt at being unhappy even though he has a life which appears as if it ought to make him happy.

A Q&A session followed, in which the large audience proved itself very well-up on Bogosian’s work. At one point he got into an argument with a young man who was taking photos of him, on the subject of whether the guy needed his permission or not. It was an interesting exchange, and the young man acquitted himself quite well. I was tempted to get into it, as I’d half thought about taking a couple of pictures myself before deciding I was too interested in what was being said to distract myself. The whole thing seemed to bother Bogosian, and he seemed to feel that he’d ruined the mood of the reading by extending the exchange, but it was more entertaining than anything else.

He discussed the making of the movie version of Talk Radio, which was made in tandem with Born on the Fourth of July. When Oliver Stone introduced him to an old man in a wheelchair he didn’t realise it was a make-up test for Tom Cruise, etcetera.

At the end of the reading the audience descended on him in large numbers for signings. I looked around the room and caught sight of an old friend I hadn’t seen for years – Caren Rabbino, founder of the Miami Light Project, which is now a cultural staple in the city, though I remember her back at the University of Miami telling me she was thinking of starting it. It was great to see her, as once upon a time we had been close friends. I made my way over to her and we had a happy little reunion. I recalled asking Caren about booking Bogosian years ago and her response about him being already too big; this was obviously before the two times that the Miami Light Project brought him to town (I still have my Nov 11, 1995 ticket from the Broward Center). Shortly after that, she invited me to join her and “Eric,” now an old friend of hers, for dinner. Two other friends were coming along, and we proceeded to Bugati, an Italian place just off Miracle Mile. I was in a great humor, though I was careful not to overdo it. I did take the piss out of Bogosian’s faux Brit accent in “Benefit,” the sketch about the British rock star though, and talk ranged from “command economies” (another of our party had been hosting a reading group based around a new book by an Indian economist) through brain chemistry (a transsexual of his acquaintance claims that now she’s a guy the testosterone really “starts the video rolling” when “he” spots a hottie), the book business, various authors – Eugenides, McEwan – to quaaludes and various forms of excess as practiced in Britan and the US (his description of “real ale” made it clear that to him this was something really exotic). He said “the chains” often set up his readings in the children’s section, “and of course I do all this explicit sex stuff” he laughed. Finally, Bogosian was explaining that when bikers in a certain part of the country wear embroidered white wings it signifies that they’ve been hazed by being made to have sex with a dead person; this seemed to be the cue for the management to turn on the lights and close the place down.

It was a very relaxed dinner and the movie actor-performance artist-playwright-novelist-renaissance man seemed to enjoy himself. He was clearl

We were trying to book our ticket from Srinigar to Delhi, after rain washed the roads away. We spent the whole day at Indian Airlines, complete chaos, and then there was this mad scramble to try to get out of there.