A Hypnotic Suggestion?
Try This on for One Week
For the Coming Week Please Try This On
In my salad days we all wanted to be George Plimpton, playing football for the Detroit Lions. We all wanted to be Gloria Steinem covertly infiltrating the Playboy castle in a tight-fitting bunny costume and sussing out the secrets of Hugh’s swinging sex empire. We dreamed of being William T. Vollmann or David Foster Wallace and having adventures. Sebastian Junger riding out A Perfect Storm or Jon Krakauer climbing Into Tin Air.
We wanted to be Nellie Bly, feigning insanity and getting committed to the lunatic asylum on Blackwell’s Island where we’d be starved and beaten, but eventually meet up with the mass murdered Lizzie Halliday.
If nothing else, we wanted to be David Sedaris going pants-less to a nudist colony.
We didn’t want to be writers. We wanted to live fantastic, interesting lives. And Write About It.
Think back on Steinem’s constant fear and hunger as a Playboy bunny. She’s prodded by the wiring in her satin costume, sharp wires digging into her legs and chest. Her feet are squeezed into tight shoes as she totters up and down carpeted stair steps holding a tray filled with sloshing drinks above her head. Within arm’s length a huge picture window looks out on a Manhattan sidewalk where male bystanders are encouraged to linger and ogle her ass as she climbs up and down those steep, shag-carpeted stairs for hour after hour. That glass wall filled with male eyes watches her from the outside. She’s given no time for a lunch break. She’s constantly evading eye contact with her shift manager, afraid her boss will discover she’s a reporter. Playboy is paranoid about anyone infiltrating their ranks. Steinem serves every gin fizz terrified that a customer will call her out. Recognize her. Blow her cover. She’ll be humiliated. Fired. Lose her income from the writing assignment for New York Magazine. You’re Steinem, serving those heavy plates of thick-cut roast beef to leering, clutching, pinching key club members as they toss back Scotch and try to grab your ass. You’re Steinem, afraid you’ll never get published.
Now, you’re Hunter S. Thompson driving across the Nevada desert with your lawyer, the both of you peaking on acid while the colors of everything smear in trails down both sides of the highway, with coming over the horizon the Welcome to Las Vegas sign with the mirage of space palaces and high-rises that seem to mushroom up out of the hot, flat caliche, rising straight up in the shimmers of desert heat, the baked smell of sagebrush in your lungs, the dry air of 90-miles-an-hour coupled with the burn of vodka and legions of law enforcement officers just waiting to call you out, just waiting with guns and badges to say, “You’re under the influence, stoner man” and throw you in jail, and by doing so botch your paycheck from Rolling Stone.
For the next week, you’re a participatory journalist embedded in the world.1
You suffer every pain… enjoy every small triumph… because it’s all invested in getting The Story. You’ll not steer events. You’ll just ride along. You’ll allow the story to take its own shape. You’ll make note of details, but not cling to them.
This is not about you.
But you’ll remember everything.
On the count of One… Two… Three…
Tom always said, “Writers write because they weren’t invited to the party.” Well, it’s time to strap on your bunny ears and crash the party.