You’ve got a fan in Seattle. Sam Bull listens to your show. He just bought 25 acres of land in the foothills of the Cascades. It’s beautiful. I recommend The Feast Of Love, by Charles Baxter. Last night at around ten I was sitting in Nadia’s living room in my boxer shorts, eating a shell steak and drinking beer, and it was hot, and Nadia was eating a salad with spinach and avocados, and Bob Marley was grooving out of her bedroom, and she had just turned on the air conditioner but the heat from the kitchen was too much for it, because I had also baked a potato in the oven, and we both had a sheen of sweat on our bodies, and the lights were turned on low so without my glasses I could only see the gist of things, and I sat back in her mom’s big white armchair with a perfectly cooked piece of meat in my mouth, and a cold beer on my thigh, and I thought: I feel like summer in New York. I felt like there were prostitutes on the street corner and a mugging in the park and the subway lights weren’t working and kids were dealing drugs and a black man in a hoodie was getting razzed by four white guys in t-shirts and five blocks over a white man in a t-shirt was getting razzed by four black guys in hoodies and stone-faced businessmen in pin-striped suits walked like knives through it all because they had too much money and power and they were untouchable. But the streets were mostly empty because anyone with any sense had fled the heat and human heat, and there were only taxi cabs and sirens on the avenues. I was there, though, with Nadia, above it and in it, with steak and sweat and beer, and it felt pretty cool.
AJ
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Some Points of Reference
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How to become a fan in Seattle
Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love
Grill your own perfect shell — a.k.a. New York strip — steak
Are we just supposed to know who Sam Bull is? Or, more to the point, how is it that Sam Bull is a real person and not a character in a novel, a novel with names so absurdly indicative as to be the kind of names that only appear in novels?
A fine, fine question.
Nice writing.
Where is Chris Lydon in this story-steakless in Seattle. Now Mid Summer’s Night Dream. That is the question.
Answers: (1) Not necessarily; (2) A person with a fortuitous last name and a woman willing to accept him, semen and eggs, and the inability of anyone who might be inspired by Sam Bull’s very true and very real presence in Seattle to get published. As for the true hard facts of this Mr. Bull, he now comes with a fifth-wheel trailer, a snowmobile, a generator, an outhouse, and a shovel (for when the outhouse needs to be moved). Number 1 question as to the proposition of 25 acres in the foothills: What do you do there? It seemed to me to be a ridiculous question until this I closed the sale. Then I was sort of overwhelmed by the fear that I might not be able to think of anything to do there. That I would start to go there just because I bought the land. That it would be like a trophy. Have you seen my land? I own it. These are my trees. Knock on them, real trees. That kind of thing. So what do you do with land? You build on it. You build a tree house for your kids, then you build a big lodge-like house for yourself. Then you advertise that you have a free fifth-wheel trailer and hope that someone will come haul it away, and people come out and they kick the tires, and then you explain that it hasn’t been moved since you owned it and that you aren’t guaranteeing anything, just a clean deal. Then you wonder if maybe you would have gotten a better response if you charged for the pleasure of hauling it away. You wished that you had more experience in the fifth-wheel trailer universe so that you would know the answer to this. Look I just don’t want to get stuck with this fifth wheel trailer.