Works of Lars Eighner at Lars Eighner's Homepage

Something has has to me that changes everything, and changes nothing.

I realized that on Wednesday, October 20. That was the first stormy morning of fall, and I'd been out to catch the bus to the University at 6 a.m. I got a $10 bill out of the cash machine at Twenty-fifth street. My bank balance was $18 so I couldn't get any money from the $20 cash machine at the Diamond Shamrock in Hyde Park.

In spite of the Byzantine room numbering in the University's communications center, I found the audio lab studio and had a pleasant interview with RTF student Heather Browne although we were separated by sound-proof glass—Ms. Browne had to be her own recording engineer as she had been unable to recruit anyone else to do it at so early an hour.

The interview did not go so well, I thought. Ms. Browne went for the answers big and small to the homeless problem, which answers, The Washington Post has been kind enough to point out, I don't have.

I caught the bus back to Hyde Park and went to the Diamond Shamrock. Just as I was opening the glass door a man who was pumping gas into his van called to me, "Hey, you're Lars, aren't you?" Well, I was. But I couldn't remember who he was. High school? No, he was too young. Someone I'd worked with at the state hospital? Hmmm …

"I've started reading your book," he said. Oh. Yeah. I didn't know him. He knew me because I'm famous now.

I got a bunch of stuff at the Diamond Shamrock because aside from dog food, there was nothing left in the apartment. I walked a block north through the alley to the apartments, and just as I got to them, the man pulled up in his van. He'd gone home and got his book for me to sign and for Lizbeth to stomp. But before I could duck into the apartment to see if I could find my stamp pad so Lizbeth could stomp the book, the man's wife with three or four dogs pulled up in another van.

After they left, I had a horrible thought. I haven't written a novel. I've written a memoir. Those people, all of the other people, are all going to know a lot about me.

Why didn't I think of that when I was writing the book? It's too late to try to pass it off as a novel.

I don't suppose I come off too badly in the book—I don't suppose anyone comes off too badly in his or her own memoir. But there was stuff in there: who I'd slept with, what we had done. I mean generally you're supposed to get famous first, and then the National Enquirer hires sleaze-bags to find this stuff out, but I had volunteered it. There was stuff in the book more intimate than tabloid fodder, like how I think and what things mean to me: things that even my closest friends have not known about me and things I had not known about myself until I tried to get them down on paper. And somehow, there's been a terrible mistake. Didn't anyone understand? I didn't want the fame. I wanted the money.

Well, okay, I wanted to write a good book, too, even a great one. Kirkus Reviews and The Washington Post don't like my style. But I wasn't writing for them. Thucydides admitted it, so I might as well: I was writing for the ages. (Of course, Thucydides has lasted 23 centuries, so his admission seems a little less cheeky. But even his book was new once.)

What had not changed was that after my trip to the Diamond Shamrock, I was stony broke again. I had to hope Roy Bragg and The Houston Chronicle expense account could stand me to a cappuccino at Martin Brothers that afternoon. Martin Brothers is where I go with the journalists who interview me, and where I went with the video crew when we were making the video essay. I like the cappuccino and I can smoke on the patio. I've never been there on my own money. It's always on someone's expense account. And I'm sure the waiters hate to see me coming, because we take a table and are there for hours.

I have not quite mastered the art of talking to the press. To me these sessions seem so much like two writers schmoozing over cappuccino that I often forget that one of us is working.

Now I really don't suppose I'm all that famous, so although I dread these blocks of exposition, I ought to take a moment here to say what this is all about.

From January 1988 to September 1991, I was more or less homeless most of the time. I wrote a book about that called Travels with Lizbeth which was brought out in October by St. Martin's Press. The book included my essay "On Dumpster Diving," which became an instant chestnut when it first saw print in 1991, and has since been gobbled up by so many anthologies that freshman English students will have difficulty avoiding it—-for many years to come, I hope.

Before publication, Travels with Lizbeth was the subject of a large article in Publishers' Weekly. Since publication, the book has been on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Actually, there were stories in Texas Monthly and The Texas Observer first. The Texas Monthly piece brought some interest from movie packagers, and Rebecca Sinkler at New York Times Book Review told me the Texas Observer piece had influenced their decision to review the book. There was a Sunday Lifestyle feature in the American-Statesman with Sarah Bird's glowing review, and a Sunday page-one feature in the Dallas Morning News. Roy Bragg's Houston Chronicle piece is supposed to be for one of the Sunday magazine sections.

So far as introducing a book goes, friends, this is as good as it gets. There was some talk of a New Yorker profile as well as a review, but since I won't let my dog Lizbeth be flown to New York as cargo, perhaps this has fallen through. I did notice there wasn't any coverage on the West Coast—peculiar I thought, since some of the book is set in Los Angeles. But my publicist at St. Martin's said we wouldn't be doing the West Coast. "Too competitive," she said.

Evidently St. Martin's had not budgeted a lot for publicity on my book, and the first press run had been very small. I knew, of course, that the first press would not be the 15,000 copies that were mentioned in the Publishers' Weekly story. Any time you read a figure for a press run or a figure for the author's advance before the book is released, you can count on the figure being a lie. Those figures are sort of not really lies, because everyone in the trade knows they are lies and even the liar knows he or she is not fooling anyone.

At any rate, there were not enough copies of the book when the New York Times Book Review hit the street, and there wasn't enough money in the promotions budget to take full advantage of this very big break. Nonetheless, St. Martin's put together a fairly good trip to New York, mostly involving other people's money. Lizbeth and I were to fly to New York at the expense of CBS This Morning and while we were there we were supposed to do a bunch of stuff.

But Lizbeth is nine years old, has never flown before, and it was CBS's own Sixty Minutes that had run an exposé of the horrible things that can happen to animals that are flown as cargo. I couldn't imagine that anyone who had read the book would really think that I'd put Lizbeth through such a trip after what she has been through or that I had written the book with any intention of exploiting Lizbeth to sell it. My publicist at St. Martin's has not called me since I said "No."

In You Can't Go Home Again Thomas Wolfe said he had to see something a thousand times before he saw it once. And so it is with me. When I got a call from Harper's that they wanted to excerpt my Dumpster piece, we had a nice discussion and the editor seemed to be trying to wrap up the call when I mentioned money. I suppose money is the last thing that writers about to be excerpted in Harper's ever think of. But I explained to the editor that I was still living out of Dumpsters. Then I knew, although she had spent a lot of time working on the piece to make an excerpt that would fit her space, she never had understood that it was real. She had not meant to duck the issue of money, but so few Harper's writers are living out of Dumpsters that she had never thought of money as an issue.

Likewise, I do not suppose CBS or my publicist had ever consciously thought that I was crass enough to put my dog through several hours of torture—we are talking about a dog who tries to crawl under my head at 1 a.m. because she has detected thunder too distant to be perceived by human ears—just to sell books. They've just seen so many authors who dance to any tune to flog a few tomes, season after season, that they are incapable of grasping that a book can be real or that I could have meant what I wrote. (I mean, they don't picture Dr. Ruth doing everything she has written about in her latest book and they know the celebrities, some of whom are less gracious than Tony Randall is in crediting his collaborator, haven't actually written their books.)

So I guess I'm as famous as I'm going to be for a while. And some days that doesn't seem very famous. On my first excursion to see my book on sale I was told it had been in the window until it got knocked out by Dazed and Confused. My book had been out for a week and I figured it was already history. I had a dreary bus ride home and for a week or so thought dark thoughts about Richard Linklater and whoever scheduled things at our common publisher.

On my next expedition to a bookstore to find my book, I saw stacks of Dazed and Confused and Lasher and Glen Alyn's fine biography of Mance Lipscom, all on display, and exactly two copies of my book hidden in the travel section. As this was the week after the New York Times and the American-Statesman pieces, I figured it was all over. Now I suppose things are looking up—the third printing is at press and I am guessing there will be a fourth before Christmas—but I'm still not sure where November's rent will come from.

The New York Times piece had devoted a paragraph to one of my erotic books—we had sent them a copy with great trepidation when the reviewer asked for it. The paragraph had contained the perfect blurb, and this had not been lost on my erotica publisher. He had immediately unloaded 800 copies of my work on B. Dalton and was chuckling "They are not returnable," when he talked to Steven Saylor, who began representing my work when I had no reliable mailing address. (Steven is a successful novelist with a serious of mysteries set in ancient Rome the latest of which is The Catalina Riddle. Don't even ask; he doesn't want any more clients.) I am rather hoping that while he is in such a gleeful mood, the publisher will cut the check for the advance for my next erotic title quickly (American Prelude).

Yeah, there are some movie offers. Somehow Amblin heard of the book while it was in galleys—and asked to see it because they had heard there was a dog in it—"And we love dogs!" Spielburg's scout had said. We knew it wasn't right for them but sent them the galleys anyway.

Disney has looked at the book. We were pretty sure that Disney did not want to make the picture, but Disney often will option properties they have no intention of producing, just to keep out of competitors' hands. Tri-Star passed as they thought the theme of homelessness was too near a recent project of theirs with Danny DeVito.

We still have several active players, and it seems very likely we will conclude a deal with one of them. The most enticing offer has a downside, in that it would not be about the book directly, but would involve a fictionalization of me. The upside is that I'd get to write the treatment and the first-draft screenplay, which even at Guild minimums is more money by two or three times than I expect to make from the book itself. More importantly, it is a place to go with my career.

This is a problem. Perhaps there could be a companion volume to Travels with Lizbeth, a sort of You Can't Go Home Again about all the incredibly wonderful things that happen to me after I have been "lionized," as the Texas Monthly put it. But that is the most that could happen.

I sometimes detect a green-eyed glance from authors who have had several series of novels, but who have not yet made the cover of the New York Times Book Review. I understand that. But the truth is, my book gets the attention it gets because it is one of a kind, and although I can imagine writing a better book, I can't imagine writing another one that will get this kind of attention.

When this little flurry of attention has passed and Travels with Lizbeth is a tiny blip on the literary horizon, the series authors will still have their followings and fans, year after year, book after book.

Me? I want a little cottage in West Hollywood, near the boulevard, with a little yard—if I could get it while Lizbeth could still enjoy it. And that's not likely to happen.