Wine Time With Austin Author: Ben Reed

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For reasons never to be understood, the interview recorder was switched on halfway through the fourth bottle of wine. We do not even remember what variety of red wine it was, but it was buttery smooth and delicious. The interview was, to be frank, quite useless in terms of getting to know the writer. It wandered, stuttered, and was as seemingly confused as any drunken conversations you may have been annoyed by whilst sipping your vodka gimlet at any local tavern. [Most of the recorded passages went like the one transcribed at the end of this post, errr… something of a trainwreck]

We can be rather unprofessional. A few bottles of wine and time with a hilarious and passionate writer really tends to bring that out in us. So we decided that a follow-up set of questions should be sent “the new old-fashioned way”: by email, in order to augment the disastrous live interview. Yes, it might be considered lame by some. But, whatever. Ben was game, so potential lameness aside, all is good.

Here is what we got in response.

AUSTINIST: Please help solve one of the oldest philosophical questions of our time: Let's say you're dreaming of having your teeth pulled out of your head by an oily batch of bikini-clad Hawaiian Tropic girls. Dentist Office sort of environment, not some back alley. Would you prefer to be a Pirate, or a Ninja? What the hell do you mean by that?

REED: Pirate. The sea still calls to me.

AUSTINIST: This was already asked, but the answer got lost in all that wine... If you had the opportunity to punch anyone you wanted, dead in the face, with NO recourse whatsoever, who would it be and why do they deserve to have their pride bent-over by your desire for violent retribution?

[Reed made sure to mention to us that he thought this question had some not-too-subtle homoerotic undertones, and that he was not sure whether it was us or himself who should feel strange about that. Suffice to say that Ben has obviously studied some rhetorical analysis in his day.]

REED: No one. Honestly. I'm not saying folks shouldn't scrap now and again, but getting away with it wouldn't be any fun if there was no risk of getting caught.

[Damn. He went kinda “high-road” on that one. We’d punch Ben Affleck. For serious.]

***Painting of Ben Reed by Billy Morgan

AUSTINIST: What do you believe makes Scott McClellan the hater that he so obviously is?

REED: You know, I used to have this totally humanistic, optimistic estimation of the men and women in the American government. I believed the vast majority of them were well-meaning, good-hearted, patriotic men and women who lost sleep over stuff like social security reform and budget cuts that might hurt orphans or the elderly. Now, after a term and a half of the present administration, and a healthy diet of Alex Jones, I'm pretty sure they're all Satan-worshipping demons who would eat your kids if they thought they could get away with it, and maybe even if they couldn't. And besides, the press secretary is just another head on the Hydra, although the most transparent evidence of how steadily declining standards of entertainment and education have transformed American politics into a marginally interesting melodrama. It's really just another show that has to compete with The O.C. and Survivor. They can't afford an intelligent audience, so they don't cater to one. All they need is a large, uninformed audience, so they can continue to pursue a criminal agenda that represents everything antithetical to spiritual, societal, and intellectual evolution. And besides, I stopped watching when Ari Fleischer left.

[Ah, yes. That Ari Fleisher was a HOOT!]

AUSTINIST: What the hell is a hipster? Does one need a license to own one?

REED: Fads aren't cool. Groups aren't cool. Anything that has its own ethos is inherently uncool. All of the world's cool has probably been used up, distilled into true individuals who were rebellious because they couldn't help it, and were usually punished for what everybody but them saw as transgressions. Or at least those who could best personify them. James Dean. Bill Hicks. Paul Newman in Cool Hand. They were what you would call 'non-conformists'. So it would stand to reason that groups of style-conscious generation-y teenyboppers would stand on the left side of the cool line. But I don't know, really. Maybe it's inevitable. All my friends say 'Forty is the new thirty'. So maybe twenty-five is the new fifteen.

[Must be some of that “new math” we keep hearing about.]

AUSTINIST: There is a fog which takes over during a brief portion near the end of The Bow Tie Gang, which is rumored to have come from a real experience that you had growing up in Alameda. Is this rumor true? Don't bullshit us. Is the fog supposed to represent something specific in the novel?

REED: No, it happened, and it was totally bizarre. One of those memories your brain might accidentally catalog as a dream, or an old episode of The Twilight Zone. But of course that's not the only reason it's in the book. There's more than just what's floating on the surface. Taken together, the whole scene is a kind of nightmarish respite from the forward-moving direction of the plot. A diversion from reality, if you will, where the kids are forced to encounter fear in its rawest, unseen forms. When they finally see the lights of the bowling alley, they're totally flummoxed [read the book and you’ll know what he’s talking about here]. They thought they were on a completely different part of the island [Alameda]. And when they go inside, of course, the reader is definitely intended to perceive the new differences the Bow Ties sense between themselves and everybody else. It's an almost tangible rift. They've been on an odyssey that no one but themselves can relate to. And the protagonist is covered in his own blood, like they've just returned from some Neolithic hunting trip gone horribly awry. So when they stumble upon all these happy kids in a bowling alley, kids who have no idea what the outside world has turned into, it should resonate with anybody who's ever been run through the ringer and come out a different person. It could be an allegory for growing up, I don't know. The important elements are change and alienation, how those two ingredients are absolutely necessary in any life worth living, yet always seem to be followed by pain and pathos. Their return to the world, they soon realize, is not a homecoming but an intrusion. The point is driven all the way home by Wil's encounter with an old acquaintance, and the rift between them is made apparent on a more obvious level. And finally, their mere presence leads them into a fistfight, the classic American expression of alcohol and class conflict. And they're totally fucked until Steve arrives, inexplicably from out of the fog, saving their necks but bearing the worst possible news.

[Whole lot of references to actual events and characters in the story, which may or may not be good journalism to leave in the interview, but so what? That’s actually the answer we were looking for.]

AUSTINIST: Name a single book, or series of books, that you believe to be little more than doorstop-kindling-bullshit. Why is that?

REED: The Bible. Which is sad, really, because it was really good fiction. It should have been packaged as an anthology of ancient mysteries and lyric histories, up there with Beowulf and Gilgamesh. But it's been politicized beyond its poetry. I don't know when earthlings gave up allegory for literal interpretation, but it has really sucked the fun out of some pretty cool ancient texts. I think some of us true believers ought to roll up our sleeves and find all the original or oldest versions of each story, including those that were never canonized, and assemble a better book. Then have it translated into an arcane Chinese dialect where it can be heavily edited by some toothless village elder with no knowledge of the white or Arab worlds. What he gives back to us will be re-translated into English, ready for America, if America is ready for it.

[That… is a fantastic idea. A sort of reversal-recycle-representation. It would probably be wildly popular in New Zealand. We have no idea why we think that.]

AUSTINIST: You are jumping out of a plane, alone. Why are you doing that, you silly man?

REED: Because the lunatics are running the asylum, and I have to get back.

AUSTINIST: Some believe that writing is an art form (with "form" being the operative word), which posits that writing is not actually organic, necessarily, and that it has to have structure in order to stand on its own. If that theory was a pile of dog shit, would you stand next to it or yell at whoever left it there? Feel free to expound in all directions.

REED: Writing is the ultimate art form, and the structure is part of that art. It is art, representation, broken down into the basic code of the literate world's understanding, reassembled in the reader's mind. A painter can buy a tube of red paint, but the writer has to invent red every time. A sculptor can weld a tie iron to a 60 gallon drum, but she still has to explain what she meant. There's nothing stilted about storytelling, simply because it necessitates language, and language necessitates form and patterns. It's like saying putting people on the moon isn't as cool as climbing Mt. Everest because NASA uses math.

[Math is really, really hard. Or so we hear.]

AUSTINIST: Being a rabbit, you have options when you enter the old farmer's personal garden. You can eat whatever you want (lazy ass rodent). So, what'll it be today?

REED: Snow peas.

AUSTINIST: How do you believe your ten year-old self would view your present-day self, accomplishments and embarrassments combined?

REED: First, he'd be amazed and relieved how much his penis has grown. I realize that sounds immature, but it's the truth. And besides, I'm a pretty immature person in a self-afflicted way. Once, when I was about ten, I turned my bike upside down in front of this girl's house because I knew she was looking out the window and I wanted her to think I knew how to work on bikes. So I pretended not to see her and tried to appear fixated on my bike, as if it presented a difficult but surmountable problem to my adept young mind. Of course I'm not technical and never have been. At that time, I had trouble following the instructions that came with my Lego sets. Still, my only mechanical aspect is my perpetual fixation with reinvention. So my ten year-old self might be disgusted that I still haven't outgrown that phoniness. But he'd just have to accept that the writing, the thing he and I both are most proud of, is just another channel of this obsession with taking these ridiculous stabs at self-invention. We like the other worlds, the other problems, the other selves. We get tired being us. We don't want to control it. We just want to be there.

AUSTINIST: Kick ass. We just want to be there too, damnit.
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[Below is a piece of the live interview, transcribed from piece-of-shit digital recorder, which should never be operated by anyone under the influence. Unless it is being used to break a window or something.]
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AUSTINIST: You’re a mixed drink.

REED: A what?

AUSTINIST: Mixed drink.

REED: Like, alcohol?

AUSTINIST: Yeh, yeh of course! Booze! WHO [slurred something awful] would you want to drink you, WHYYYY, and under WHAT condition?

REED: Under what condition?

AUSTINIST: Yeh. You could be any drink. A martini, a rum and coke, [liquor was obviously a driving force in our mind at that point] a whatever. That’s not important though.

REED: So it’s just the WHO, and under WHAT condition?

AUSTINIST: Yeh.

REED: Okay. Instinctively I would say a dark haired woman.

AUSTINIST: A what? A dark who?

REED: No, no, no. A dark haired woman. Not drinking me because she needs to. She’s drinking me because she gets satisfaction from it.

AUSTINIST: Is that the name of some sort of drink? “Dark Haired Woman?” What’s in that?

REED: [lost in his description, ignoring our confusion] Not because she’s gonna freak out because she’s not going to get a drink.

AUSTINIST: Oh, so she’s… well, man, I’m a bit lost here.

REED: [intelligently continuing to ignore us] And has at least ordered it with a little bit of class. And tips well, but not too well, you know what I mean?

AUSTINIST: [laughing hysterically] I have no idea what is going on here! I don’t mean ordering from you as a bartender, man! I mean, if YOU are the drink…

REED: I’m just sayin’ though, that’s just an external version of an answer. If it’s a seven dollar drink or something then she should tip at least a buck, but not over three, because that would be unreasonable.

AUSTINIST: Unreasonable? I… No, but if YOU were a martini, YOU, BEN, were a martini sitting on a bar sometime in 1940, who would you want to have ordered and be drinking you? That’s what I mean here.

REED: Well, I thought of a cocktail in a martini glass, and I wanted [the person to have ordered it] to be a dark haired woman who is well dressed and ordered it with an element of class, who wanted it because it gave her pleasure, and it gave her some passing wistfulness about the way she drinks it. So when you say… [voice trails off and away from recorder]

AUSTINIST: [rudely interrupting] That’s pretty lyrical man! Is that a reference or something? [adding pointless cursing] Shit!

REED: No, no, I’m giving a knee jerk here. I didn’t even feel bad about what my girlfriend would say after she read it.

AUSTINIST: I truly like that! [guffawing, almost canned-sounding laughter]

[sound of girlfriend’s voice from adjoining room, barely audible, but obviously hearing us talk about her and playfully chiming in with “I can hear you guys in there!” type of response]

REED: [with a huge smile on his face] I know honey! You’re always listening! [with a tone of happy acceptance] It’s alright with me!

AUSTINIST: [awkward pause]…

REED: Ahhh…

AUSTINIST: So…

REED: Yeah. I have other things, but I can’t process them into language right now.

AUSTINIST: [having no idea what that could possibly mean, but too drunk to ask] Okay.

REED: [somewhat expectant of follow-up question] …

AUSTINIST: Alrighty then. I got nothin’ on that.