On knowing that the work matters more than the success

One of the things that I found really interesting that I didn’t know about you until I went to one of your readings last year was that you went to Columbia. I feel like when people think of Jerry Stahl, they don’t necessarily think of the Ivy League, they think of Hustler and like these gritty beginnings. When you go to your Wikipedia page, it doesn’t make mention of it.

Well, first of all, you have no control over Wikipedia. It also said I was married to a porn star named Brandy Alexandre. You can’t control Wikipedia. They say a lot of crazy shit.

I’m just interested in, I guess, it’s not part of your mystique. And what’s that about?

Do I have a mystique?

Yeah, of course you do.

Well, I guess we’re gonna destroy that now.

[cackle]

What’s that about? I don’t know. I was a kid. And no other college would have me. My old man checked out when I was 16. So I got shipped away from like, kind of a lower middle class neighborhood to school––I’d never even seen a stereo. I got shipped away to this talent school. Oliver Stone went there, apparently, people like that…I’ve written about it here and there. But the Columbia thing I guess, it was most valuable because I got started writing for The Village Voice and I started getting into New York, and nothing happened at Columbia, but New York was great. And then I dropped out after two years. You know, made some money dealing, basically like one did, went to Europe for a while and came back and finished in like a year, or a year and a half.

Do you think that going to that school did anything for you?

It got me to New York. I just wanted to be a writer and New York City was where it was at.

So how did you start? Are you writing every day back then? What are you doing to really get your work out there?

It was hard, you know, because I had to work. So I would go by a magazine stand and look and decide which magazines I can try to write for. My first story for The Village Voice was about confession magazines, if you remember them. I got on an elevator with an editor and I heard her talk and say, “The only difference between me and my readers is that I have an IQ over 40.” So I quoted her, because I obviously never went to journalism school. And I had to go and apologize. That was with my right hand. With my left hand. I was writing porn to pay the rent with fake sex letters for Penthouse and stuff so… Did I write every day? Yeah. I was writing to feed myself basically, you know? Because I got out of school, I didn’t have any fucking plans. You know, so I started hustling and I naively didn’t realize you could not make a living. I mean, I kind of could, I lived in an apartment for four hundred bucks back then. You know, my great bathroom down the hall with the Puerto Rican queens, God bless them. But, it was a different time.

I dated a painter in the mid aughts who lived in one of those downtown, they’re still around.

It’s a lot. Had to walk five flights up. “Is that screams of joy or are they being murdered?”

So yeah, man. I wrote six unpublished novels before I ever got one.

Are you shopping these around, what are you doing?

I tried, but I didn’t know about agency shit, you know.

I guess that’s why I asked you about school. How do you learn to navigate that? How do you learn to get it out there?

You’re talking to the wrong guy. I haven’t had an agent for 10 years…I just walked away from that, because it just drove me crazy. And this way I have a great independent publisher, Akashic, a small press. And the guy founded it with rock and roll money from his band. So the money is not great. But I make money when I option things, to the extent I make enough money, and that helps.

So you’re navigating outside the system at this point.

Yeah, I was in the system. I had big publishers. But every time I had a big publisher––this isn’t complaining, it’s just reporting––I never had an editor, they would always go to a different house before the book came out. And then the book got “orphaned.”

I really wanted to be a musician, but I sucked. I just knew I didn’t want a day job. You know, so I figured: What can you do naked and fucked up at three in the morning? You can write.

How do you make the transition from New York to TV?

Again, not something I ever planned…You mentioned Hustler. I took a gig with them. And that was in Columbus, Ohio. And I lived in the YMCA, Ohio with group showers with a guy who had like black lung disease…it was very eye opening. And then yeah, I came to LA and I had no plans to get into TV, but somebody read something. Actually, she was the woman who became my first wife…We had a kid, we’re still friends, but it was obviously not destined to be…But yeah, I sort of fell into it. Somebody read my writing and I got a gig. I had never even seen a script the first time I got it. I didn’t know about Final Draft or any of that shit. I didn’t know how to indent.

Even though I had TV jobs, I got fired from like every TV job… Because of Permanent Midnight… people think I was like this TV writer gone bad. What happened was, it was a 1000 page book, basically. And the editor was like, “We don’t really care about you sleeping in a car and doing crimes in downtown LA. How about celebrities?” …So even though TV was like this much of my life, [makes tiny gesture with pointer finger and thumb] because of the way the book came out, it looked like I was just Johnny TV with a habit. But how I became that guy was initially, I met somebody, who I guess, liked my work and got me a gig with Alf of all things, which I am eternally associated with.

How do you decide to do a memoir if you’ve been writing novels and how do you decide this is the story to tell? And how do you get a publisher and get a toehold?

All great questions. It was a magazine article. Okay. And what I realized was I had come to the other side of being a junkie and gotten clean. And I wrote this article, I think it was called “You’ll Never Eat Brunch in This Town Again,”––I didn’t title it some wigged out fucking editor did. It was for a magazine called LA Style that doesn’t exist anymore. And somebody optioned it. I just got a call. I didn’t have agents at the time.

And then it was rejected, like 28 times because I got an agent who I eventually got rid of, but he kept saying, we want a Julia Phillips thing. He wanted a book about celebrities and I’m like, I can’t, you know, I don’t know any of these fucking celebrities… I wasn’t hanging out in that world. I mean, when you write TV, you’re not hanging out with them. I think Jack Klugman spit soup on me once.

I was looking at your IMDB today, and I saw that show [You Again] and I was so excited because my husband has been working on a project with John Stamos and I just thought a Jerry Stahl John Stamos connection would be beyond hilarious.

I didn’t know he was on that show [editor’s note: he was the co-star], that just shows how deeply invested I was. I got fired from most of those things pretty fast.

But you got in the room, which is pretty cool.

Here’s how Hollywood works: once one person pays you money. They think, “Okay. They paid him money. I mean, we can pay him money.” And that’s all it is. You break that one fucking nut and suddenly you’re in. I mean, I had to probably work harder to destroy my career than I did to make it.

And then this big success, as you said, comes from documenting an absolute bottom. How does that feel?

Very strange.

Yeah.

I didn’t necessarily see it as a success. I mean, I didn’t get reviewed in The New York Times. Like I say, I wrote this giant book, and they distilled it down to ‘TV writer gone bad.’ Therefore, my biggest success was also on some weird level, the source of my biggest shame, you know? And that’s like the pound of flesh. That was the formula. If you can put something in any work of art or any book that vaguely mortifies you. That’s the price you have to pay.

It seems like you were really good at that with journalism. You were good at going to weird places.

That was my gig, right? Especially before I got off drugs because it was just like, my idea of gonzo journalism was just: get fucked up, go to some fucked up situation, and then write about what it feels like to be fucked up in that fucked up situation. The classic being the Elysium nude singles retreat, where I go and become a nude single for a day or two. Believe me, I couldn’t have done it without drugs.

But with memoir, you’re not you’re not writing about other people like that anymore, you’re turning the lens on yourself.

Yeah. Turning the lens on myself was a revelation. And in a way, it was terrifying. But in another way, it’s pretty liberating. Because all this shit you’ve been hiding all these years, you suddenly can let it out. But for all the people you’ve fucked over, near and dear, or not so near and not so dear, how galling for them? Right? These people whose lives you ruined and ran roughshod through, and you’re being rewarded and celebrated as this guy.

Do you feel like [sobriety] changed the way you work? Do you feel like it changed your productivity?

Yeah, man. Learning to write without drugs was the hardest thing ever. It was like if I couldn’t find an adjective, it was in a syringe, but it’s not like it made me more creative. To me, it made the chair more comfortable. It’s like William Burroughs, someone once asked him, “Why do you use heroin?” He said, “So I get up in the morning and shave,” and that’s kind of it. You know, it’s not giving me these giant tidal waves of epic creativity. It’s like, okay, I can focus. So it was really hard to work without that.

You know, Hubert Selby [Jr.], he was kind of like a mentor, he basically saved my life when I was trying to get clean. And I remember whining to him once about how, “Man, but the thing is, if I give up drugs and shit, I’m gonna lose my edge.” And he was like, “You dumb motherfucker. You don’t realize, you don’t know how crazy you are until you’re off of everything.” And I went, “Oh.” Because his books are like the darkest things ever written in American literature. And he wrote it on the “natch.” That was such an inspiration to me.

After Permanent Midnight, you wrote about parenting, and I don’t know that people would necessarily associate you with that…

I was not “Father of the Year,” nor would any of my children confuse me for “Father of the Year.” Yeah, maybe that’s it, maybe it was like, the last frontier I guess, was being normal.

And how was being normal?

Didn’t work out.

[cackle]

I mean, you realize that ain’t gonna happen. But, as long as you aren’t fucking other people over you can kind of do whatever the fuck you want, you know?

That’s like a lyric from Hair.

I’m not familiar with the lyrics from Hair.

It’s something like: ‘Kids, be free, be whatever you are, do whatever you want to do, just so long as you don’t hurt anybody’

That’s really where I grew most of my inspiration from, Hair…Now, I’m a little embarrassed, clearly a clichéd sentiment. But it’s just…You’re just afraid of looking like an asshole–

–but it doesn’t feel like you are afraid of looking like an asshole.

Well, thank you. That’s the kindest thing anyone ever said to me, Michael Silverblatt would never say that.

No, probably not. [laughs]

No, it’s basically like, all the drugs do, aside from making the chair more comfortable––and this is with any art form, for me personally, because this is just my experience and I’m not in the advice business––when you’re writing, it’s like you’re on a trapeze. And what the dope does is make you forget that there’s no net. And what you’ve got to learn is that if you fall and there’s no net, what’s the worst that’s gonna fucking happen?

That’s a hard one.

Yeah, it’s the hardest.

So, is there something you wish you could impart to that young guy getting into the writing racket?

I wish I knew––back in the day––how little what I thought mattered mattered. Cash and prizes are great, but that shit comes and goes. What matters is the work. Everything else––“success,” accomplishment, all the lush and depraved extras we think we want mean fuck all. Now that I’m a lot closer to dead than 40, I wish the old me could tell the young me to forget the bullshit, just shut up and write (and invest in Apple.)