Why I Miss Norman Mailer By Mr Fish

Posted on Feb 17, 2011



By Mr. Fish

I thought that I’d done everything I was supposed to do. This was back in the springtime of 2007, about seven months before Norman Mailer died. I’d sent an e-mail to the address in the newspaper and made a reservation to see him talk about what would be his last novel, “The Castle in the Forest,” at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, but I never got a confirmation e-mail back. I couldn’t even get anybody on the telephone. For four days I tried. It pissed me off.

“Writers Guild,” I grumbled to myself, listening to the telephone ring off the hook at the theater at 1:30 in the afternoon, six hours from when the event was scheduled to start. “What is a writers guild doing in Hollywood, anyway?” I asked myself. “What is a writer in Hollywood?” I knew what a writer was on the East Coast: He is a smoker, works on a typewriter and is an enormous failure; he is a sandwich maker who cries easily and can quote Nabokov and Algren and Eliot. The West Coast version of a writer is a 50-year-old fat guy in white sneakers who wrote a couple “X-Files” episodes 13 years ago and knows the name Faulkner only as a screen credit on some old Bogart movies.

As the phone continued to ring, I imagined the 50-year-old fat guy asleep beneath a torn “Dark Side of the Moon” poster somewhere in Westwood, his bed loaded with cats, nothing but dirty cereal bowls in the sink, his comic book collection archived in a stack of dusty boxes in the closet and ready to be sold if things get really bad, like if he all of a sudden got a girlfriend. I slammed down the receiver and called Book Soup, the retailer that was sponsoring the event. They told me to take a hike, that they were connected to what was happening at the Writers Guild only as booksellers, not as seat warmers.

Seat warmers. I wanted to kill somebody.

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