Christopher Kemp

With the publication of the novel “Filth,” in 1998, Welsh gave the world Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson, a police officer in Edinburgh’s Royal Lothian Constabulary. An antihero of the highest order, Robertson embarks on a suspect-molesting, drug-taking, hemorrhoid-scratching journey that ends explosively with his mental breakdown. The despicable Robertson shares narrative duties with a loquacious 3-meter-long tapeworm that lives coiled in his gut. It’s a hoot. Really.

This May saw the publication of Welsh’s new book “Glue,” a sprawling novel that follows four friends across three decades. Set in the familiar territory of Edinburgh’s squalid council housing projects, Billie, Carl, Terry and Gally first meet at school in the 1970s, listening to the Jam and the Buzzcocks, each desperately trying to lose his virginity. From there, we meet the friends at 10-year intervals for hilarious and heartbreaking updates on where life has taken them. In between going to the “fitba” and “gittin thir hole,” each of the characters has to overcome his obstacles; some fare better than others do.

I spoke with Welsh recently about “Glue,” “Trainspotting,” his other books and his influences, the Brontës among them.

In many ways, “Glue” is a return to the familiar ground of “Trainspotting.” It’s set in the Edinburgh council housing schemes, and much of it is written in the Scottish dialect and revolves around the struggles of four young men as they grow up. Was this an intentional return to familiar subject matter?

Well, I think the similarity really is the fact that it’s very much character-based rather than plot-based. I didn’t really have a plot for this one. I just thought, well, I did want to get back to the feel of “Trainspotting,” the idea that you’ve got these characters that are, sort of, sparking off each other and they generate the story from there.

I didn’t mean it to be wider in scope, through the years and all that. The first part I wrote was 1990. It wasn’t really going anywhere at that point so I moved forward to 2000 and I thought, well, they’re not friends anymore and that’s the story. But why are they not friends? So I kept going back between 1990 and 2000 and I couldn’t really get the plot line. So I thought, I’ll have to go back further to 1980 when they were just out of school and all that. So I got a picture of them at these different stages of life. I thought, I might as well go further back again and put the parents in so you can see where they’ve come from.

Normally, I like to have characters that are living in a short time frame in the novels, and put them in a position whereby they’re having to overcome something. Like Renton [in "Trainspotting"] has to overcome his heroin addiction in a short time frame of about a year. Roy Strang of “Marabou Stork Nightmares” has to come to terms with his rape and being in a coma. Bruce Robertson from “Filth” has the murder and the mental breakdown and the tapeworm. It’s like throwing stones at somebody over a short period of time and you get that kind of incendiary feeling that you’re in their world. But “Glue” ended up a lot more expansive.

You mentioned Bruce Robertson from “Filth.” To what extent does a fictional character represent your own state of mind? Were you going through a bad time when you wrote “Filth”? Robertson’s a really despicable character.

Yeah he is. I’ve always liked to do that, though. I’ve always liked to get real bad bastards into fiction. When you read a lot of fiction, you can see that the person that’s writing the fiction obviously wants to be seen as the central character. It’s wish fulfillment. I try to get away from that. I like to have really bad horrible characters in the fiction. That was actually quite a good time for me. I felt quite upbeat when I was doing Bruce Robertson.

There are also some fairly unpleasant characters in “Glue.” Do you think your readers and critics view you through your characters?

I always get this thing where people say, “Oh you must be really pissed off, or fed up, or depressed, or mentally ill, or crazy or something like that.” The weird thing is that every time I’ve been to see people like poets, who write about flowers and trees and all this affirmation of life and the soul, and this upbeat, uplifting stuff, they’re always really miserable bastards. They’re always really fucking miserable depressed bastards. It’s like comedians. They’re always really miserable depressed bastards in real life.

When you construct such flawed characters, are you hoping that, despite their vices, readers will come to like and identify with them, or do you want readers to hate them unremittingly?

I like to empathize with somebody that you wouldn’t normally empathize with, and see what’s happening to them. It’s much more interesting to me, to find something good in somebody that’s really beyond the pale in a lot of ways. I think I was influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s play “Mother Courage.” He makes her terrible. Horrible. But there’s something about her, something endearing about her in a strange way. Maybe that’s why people take drugs as well. I mean, it gives them permission to behave badly. When people drink it gives them permission to be a kind of way they wouldn’t normally be. And I think that’s why there’s something empowering about really bad bastards. Because they do things that we wouldn’t normally do.

So you’re living vicariously through them?

I think what I’m trying to do is get a reaction from them, to get a reaction from myself. I think when you write fiction you’ve got to get a reaction from yourself. Having said that, none of my characters could appear alien to me. Everybody’s done things that they feel really bad about from time to time and feel that they’ve let themselves down. It’s not habitual behavior. What you can do when you write is take a fleeting emotion and you can stretch it out into the whole character.

Do you think the use of phonetic vernacular Scottish in your books will keep American readers from your work?

My first book tour was about seven years ago and they keep asking me to come back so it can’t be too bad. It means I’m never going to be like John Updike and top the New York Times bestsellers list automatically with every book I put out, or Stephen King or someone like that. What it does mean is, I think I’m going to be appreciated by people who are prepared to look for a wee bit more in literature and prepared to make a bit of an effort.

So is there a practical purpose to it, or is it solely to make readers expend a little bit of effort?

The reason I started to do it was because the characters just didn’t talk like that or sound like that in my head. So I thought, if I do it in Standard English, why am I doing that? It’s pretentious. Also, I was heavily influenced by the rave culture and acid house and all that and I wanted to get rhythms in it and beats into it, and Standard English isn’t a very rhythmic language. It’s not a very beat-y language. In the ministry of language it’s an imperialistic, a sort of controlling, weights-and-measures kind of language. So it’s not very funky, it’s not got that kind of funk.

The kind of language that I use, a lot of the words are Gypsy words and it’s a Celtic, oral storytelling tradition. It’s very informative, it’s got that aspect to it that drives it on for me, drives the story line on for me. When you think about it, the book is the last thing that you have Standard English in. I mean, you don’t have it in films; nobody talks like that in films, even British films. You don’t get it anywhere else. You don’t get it in drama; you don’t get it on TV. You would find it really strange if people spoke like that but you have to put up with it in a book. Why?

Again, as in “Trainspotting,” “Acid House” and “Filth,” “Glue” is set in Edinburgh. Do you think there’s something unique about that environment, or are your characters universal?

I think they’re universal. With “Trainspotting” everybody went on about it being a drug thing and all that, but it was about the characters. I go to Tokyo or Moscow or New York and everybody says, “Oh, we know a Begbie, we know a Sick Boy,” and I think if you get good characters they have universal application.

Franco Begbie, the Scotch-drinking, punching-and-kicking psychopath from “Trainspotting,” is perhaps one of the most vivid characters to arrive in contemporary fiction for decades. He makes a cameo appearance in “Glue,” along with some other characters from “Trainspotting.”

I think you get a virtual-reality world in your head. It’s like, if you want a nutter, instead of just writing one and having to go through all the characteristics, you think, well, I’ve just got Begbie. You know he’s in the same place around about the same time, so why not just have him as the nutter rather than just create another one? It’s also a bit of responsibility as well, for the community. It’s not a big community so, if you create another nutter from scratch, the impression is that everybody in Leith is a nutter, which they’re not. Let’s just stick with Begbie for that walk-on part. The problem is when I go home to Edinburgh. Every nutter in Edinburgh thinks that Begbie is based on them. So I have to try to tell them no, no, no.

How did you write “Trainspotting”?

I found a 1982 diary and that became the basis of “Trainspotting” really. It was all nonsense, it was all fiction. And I took a lot of notes when I was traveling on a Greyhound bus from New York to Los Angeles and that also became “Trainspotting.” So it was a fiction of a fiction really. But that’s what really kick-started the whole thing.

Were you surprised by its popularity?

Yeah, I was. I wasn’t surprised that it got a lot of attention locally. I knew that the punters would like it because it is that sort of book, but I didn’t think that the literati would like it and I didn’t think it would travel as much as it has.

The film adaptation of “Acid House” will be released in the U.S. on DVD this August. It definitely deserves its R rating, with a lot of explicit language, drug use, sexual content and violence. You could even say it carries on where “Trainspotting” left off.

I thought, if we do “Trainspotting 2″ it’s just going to seem a bit crass. So, we’ve got license to just really go for it and not do an airbrushed film. A lot of the people in it are my mates who haven’t acted before. We wanted to get people that didn’t look like actors and really looked like real characters. It was never going to be a massive commercial film, but it was good to do a wee grungy kind of art-house film.

You make a cameo appearance in “Trainspotting” and again in “Acid House.” Are you interested in getting more involved in cinema?

I can’t act to save myself. The directors are pretty clever; they always give you a wee part if you want one because it stops you from criticizing the film if you don’t like it. Not that I would anyway because I like both the films.

You’ve become an influence to a generation of writers. Who are your literary influences?

My influences are a lot of classic Scottish fiction. James Matthew Barrie was the first Scottish writer I read. I just read all the big Scottish writers like Alisdair Grey, Iain Banks and James Kelman and all that. American stuff as well, like Beat stuff: Burroughs, Kerouac, Bukowski. Modern American fiction as well, like Gary Indiana and Joel Rose. Southern writers like Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy. Just about everything really. I’m influenced by Dostoevski and, not so much Tolstoy, but Tolstoy as well and even all the classic English stuff that you wouldn’t think, like the Brontës and all that kind of stuff.

Why such a brief reading tour?

I really should spend more time over here. I’m over here for three weeks. I was talking to somebody who spent six weeks over here, doing a bit, and you can’t do it. It just fucks you up. It means that you’re talking about the book constantly for six weeks. Even after a few days I find myself becoming strangely autistic about it. I’ll probably end up in the funny farm after just three weeks.

Ettinger has seen membership grow steadily, and his team is performing more suspensions now than at any other time. “In recent years we’ve been getting maybe three or four a year, I guess,” he says. Ettinger, like his patients and their pets, is waiting for the day they can all be revived. In much the same way as drowning patients can be resuscitated after long periods without breathing,

Ettinger believes researchers will find a way to reverse the tissue damage that accompanies long-term freezing, allowing his customers to be resuscitated too. Until then, their bodies will remain submerged, or “suspended,” in liquid nitrogen, in vast containers called cryostats, the largest of which is capable of storing up to 16 bodies at once. With an eye toward the future, the folks at the institute are aware that the bodies they freeze must be in the best shape possible. In other words, they must be fresh and, to minimize tissue breakdown, the initial phases of suspension must be performed in the minutes immediately after a patient is declared dead. “We can have people on the spot if we know ahead of time,”

Ettinger says. The sooner after death the process is begun, the more likely it is to be successful, he says. When his wife died last year, technicians were standing by to begin her suspension immediately. “There were only seconds lost,” he says. Immediately after death, a flurry of activity begins as technicians rush to prepare the patient’s body for cooling and suspension. The body is stripped of any clothing and an anticoagulant solution is injected via either the femoral or the carotid artery. Pumped around the patient’s circulatory system, this solution prevents the blood from clotting and causing ischemic tissue damage.

Technicians cool the body with cold packs while transporting it to the institute’s fully equipped laboratories. Blood pressure and acidity are measured constantly, while a device for heart/lung resuscitation maintains vascular flow, pushing anticoagulant around the body, looping through arteries, veins and capillaries to permeate the brain. Once body temperature is stabilized at 16 degrees Celsius, the patient’s blood is thoroughly washed out with buffered physiological saline, which also contains mannitol to prevent fluid migration from the rapidly cooling cells.

Finally, after the patient’s blood is removed and disposed of, the body is suffused with a glycerine-based cryoprotectant solution that protects the tissues from freezing damage, and then it is slowly cooled again using cold carbon dioxide vapors. After it reaches dry ice temperatures, the body is cooled further to minus 196 degrees Celsius, which arrests further degradation or decomposition.

“This plant,” he says again slowly for emphasis, “is a dancing plant.”

Kampermpool stands maybe 5 and a half feet tall. He strides through the nursery, disappearing occasionally behind a screen of orchid stems to reappear seconds later on the other side, his green-and-white polka-dot shirt flashing between gaps in the swaying thicket.

It is almost 6:30 in the morning and we are standing in Kampermpool’s plant nursery in Udon Thani Province, in tropical northern Thailand. It is already hot and humid in the small and unremarkable town, which sits about 35 miles south of the Laos border surrounded by rice paddies and knots of thick jungle. A mile or so to the south of the nursery is downtown Udon Thani, which consists of brightly lit Kentucky Fried Chicken franchises, pizza joints and multiplex movie theaters. Another mile farther south, a small and crowded station links the town by train to Bangkok, about 10 bumpy hours southwest.

At night, elephant handlers — bent, little toothless mahouts — park their elephants implausibly under the store awnings downtown, to shelter from the rain that comes nightly. But this morning at his nursery, it is not yet 7 o’clock, the sun is still low in the sky, and Kampermpool, who is 65, has already been up for hours, singing softly to his dancing plant. It responds to music, he says proudly. “This is the third generation, my friend,” Kampermpool continues, pointing at the dancing plant again. “It’s a Desmodium gyrans. It’s the third generation, OK? Third crossing, OK? Self-pollinated, my friend, third time, third generation.”

The dancing plant grows unchecked in a secluded enclosure at the back of Kampermpool’s nursery, bursting from a brick trough filled with dark wet soil. Black netting hangs in folds overhead to block the sun’s harmful rays, and barbed wire prevents thieves from breaking in to the enclosure at night and stealing a prized sample of the plant. Surly workers kick halfheartedly at clumps of mud in the fields; bales of barbed wire bake in the sun. To the untrained eye, Kampermpool’s nursery looks more like a gulag.

Kampermpool doesn’t care. He cares only about his dancing plant. If a fire broke out tomorrow among the orchids, jumping steadily from trough to trough and advancing slowly, relentlessly, through the nursery, Dr. Pradit Kampermpool would think of only one thing: The Plant.

He would run selflessly through thick banks of smoke to raise the alarm, to build a firebreak with orchids, to take an emergency clipping of his dancing plant and store it in the damp safety of his mouth, to do something! … anything! … just to save it … save The Plant!

Share this observation with Kampermpool and he’ll take it as a veiled threat, stepping backward cautiously, narrowing his eyes, and asking, “What fire? Tomorrow? What do you mean, fire?” After that, he clams up. He’s sulking. The sun climbs higher. The fields get warmer. The pointed little leaves of his dancing plant — his Desmodium gyrans — nod and bounce in the breeze. The bird warbles again. He shrugs. “I spent seven years on this plant,” he explains sheepishly.

The Plant twitches.

Before Kampermpool could start breeding The Plant, he first had to find it. Ask him where it came from and he quickly gets coy, simultaneously jabbing a stubby little thumb at the green hills over his shoulder, pointing vaguely at some trees on the other side of the road, and nodding his head toward Laos in the north, all the while muttering quietly to himself.

When he was a young man, Kampermpool carefully states, considering every word to be sure of giving nothing away, the elders of the hill tribes scattered to the north would talk about a species of plant that danced. They used the dancing plants, he says, high in the mountains, in the jungle villages and the border towns, to make tea.

It was 1976. Kampermpool began to search for the plant. “I hired people to check for me,” he says. “I found one in Yunnan, in China, but the leaves are bigger; they have some near Kanchanaburi, near Burma, but nobody pays attention — it looks like a weed.”

And it does look like a weed. A couple of sprigs of Kampermpool’s plant would not look entirely out of place atop a salad. Neither would it attract attention sprouting from between two paving slabs. If a trusted friend told you it was bok choy, you would not question it.

Eventually, says Kampermpool, crouching suddenly behind a thick clump of orchids and hunching his shoulders, his hired workers found a dancing species growing deep in the jungle. Kampermpool shifts his weight to the balls of his feet, leans forward, and whispers from behind his hand. “Shhhhhhhh,” he says. He is no longer standing in his nursery with the morning sun slanting through the clouds: Dr. Pradit Kampermpool is back in the jungle.

“So I’m watching,” he whispers, parting imaginary foliage and squinting through the years, past the rows of orchids and the bales of barbed wire, to an imaginary clearing. “Hmmm…” he says softly. “Well, the leaves are similar.” He pauses for effect. “Then it moved a little bit!” he shouts, flinging his arms in the air and jumping backward.

It was 1991. The search for the dancing plant was over. It had taken 15 years. “This plant nearly disappeared from the world,” Kampermpool says, “so I dug it up.”

It is a simple statement. Kampermpool is not trying to be literal, but that is exactly what he did. He dug it up. He took a shovel deep into the jungle, dug up the plant, shook the dirt from its roots, brought it back here and carefully planted it in the trough filled with dark, wet soil that sits at the shady end of his nursery. It has remained there ever since, its roots probing the rich mulch that Kampermpool regularly shovels on and gently pats down. Finally, the complex breeding programs, the 24-hour nurturing — the watering, fertilizing, measuring, sampling, pruning, trimming — the crossbreeding, the biopsies, the singing, the coaxing, the watching, the constant monitoring, could begin. First he bred the plant, and then he bred it again — second generation, my friend, OK? — and then later still, he crossbred it with a Chinese species of gyrant to create a hybrid. Slowly, over the years, the plant became The Plant.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

On Oct. 31, 1873, Charles Darwin wrote to Sir Joseph Hooker, “Now I want to tell you, for my own pleasure, about the movements of Desmodium [gyrans] … The little leaflets never go to sleep, and this seems to me very odd; they are at their games of play as late as 11 o’clock at night and probably later.”

Darwin was the author of “The Origin of Species,” published in 1859. Hooker, his friend and confidant, was the director of England’s Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, a repository for thousands of plant species collected from all over the world. On June 10, 1850, Hooker collected a specimen from Sikkim, a northeast Indian state that sits snugly in the Himalayan foothills, with Nepal a few miles to the west, Bhutan to the east, and China stretching out to the north; on June 30, 1850, he collected another sample from Khasia, in Meghalaya state, southeast of Sikkim. Hooker sent the specimens back to Kew.

Darwin began studying Desmodium gyrans — or Hedysarum, as he sometimes called it — and the movements of its little leaflets as early as 1855, after borrowing one of Hooker’s specimens. “I do hope it is not very precious,” Darwin wrote, thanking Hooker for the loan, “for, as I told you, it is for probably a most foolish purpose. I read somewhere that no plant closes its leaves so promptly in darkness, and I want to cover it up daily for half an hour, and see if I can teach it to close by itself.” More than 20 years later, Darwin was still trying.

If the pointed little leaves of his borrowed specimen twitched to sounds as Kampermpool’s do, Darwin never noticed it, or if he did, he never mentioned it. And if he sang to his specimen as Kampermpool does, bending close and whispering into its bushy leaves, crooning softly, gently wheedling, cajoling, and coaxing it to move, he never mentioned that either.

“I am working away as hard as I can at all the multifarious kinds of movements of plants,” he wrote to German researcher Fritz Muller on July 24, 1878, “and am trying to reduce them to some simple rules, but whether I shall succeed I do not know.”

Characteristically, Darwin did succeed. Two years later, a book-length monograph titled “The Power of Movement in Plants” was published. It was the last book published during Darwin’s lifetime, representing more than two decades of research on moving plant species. During that time he performed round after round of experiments, measuring the movements of the leaves in all conditions, depriving the plants of light and nutrients, syringing water onto the leaves to simulate rainfall, subjecting them to extreme temperatures, and removing slices from the plants.

Darwin’s Desmodium gyrans specimen moved when he syringed water onto the leaves. As the water landed on its pointed little leaflets, it set the plant twitching, and Darwin measured the movements. He wrote again to Muller in April 1881, and concluded that the movements were designed “to shoot off the drops of water.”

“If you are caught in heavy rain,” he continued, “I should be very much obliged if you would keep this notion in your mind, and look to the position of such leaves.”

Still, Darwin was not finished with the plant. Long before it became The Plant — more than a century before it was discovered in the jungle and transported to Kampermpool’s nursery in Udon Thani — Desmodium gyrans had a hold over Darwin that was almost as strong as the one it now has over Kampermpool. On April 16, 1881, a year after the publication of “The Power of Movement in Plants,” Darwin dispatched a note to his friend Lord Avebury. The first line reads, “Will you be so kind as to send and lend me the Desmodium gyrans by the bearer who brings this note.”

Once again, he was requesting a specimen; but Darwin never finished his research on Desmodium gyrans. He died a year later, on April 19, 1882. He was buried next to Sir Isaac Newton, beneath a flagstone in the north aisle of Westminster Abbey, and any theories he had secretly harbored about the plant were buried with him.

Kampermpool will eagerly tell you there’s an important difference between the plant Darwin studied more than a century ago and the specimen growing in the Udon Thani nursery.

“It’s a dancing plant!” he will predictably insist.

“This plant is a dancing plant!”

That, Kampermpool will proudly state, is the difference. It dances. Indisputably, Darwin’s plant moved and, Darwin believed, the movements shook water droplets from its leaves following a heavy rainfall. But Kampermpool’s plant — The Plant — responds to music — to music! — and Kampermpool has actively encouraged this behavior for more than a decade by selectively breeding and crossbreeding the young plants that respond most enthusiastically to his singing.

Darwin called the plant Hedysarum; modern botanists call it either Desmodium gyrans or, more correctly these days, Codariocalyx motorius; its common name is Telegraph plant or Semaphore plant — after the leaf movements, which resemble semaphore signals. Kampermpool — who is burying his face in his plant’s leaves again, disappearing almost up to his ears, and cooing softly to it — calls his plant Miss Udon Dancing Sunshine.

In fact, since it was first described by Dutch physician and naturalist Maarten Houttuyn — who named it Hedysarum motorium in 1779 — the plant has been called at various times, Hedysarum gyrans (1781), Desmodium gyrans (1825), Desmodium roylei (1834), Codariocalyx gyrans (1842), Pseudarthria gyrans (1844), Meibomia gyrans (1891), and Desmodium motorium (1938). Botanical taxonomy sometimes gets a bit cluttered, says Gwilym Lewis, the principal scientific officer at Kew. Lewis tries to make sense of it :”Although the plant was first recognized and described in 1779,” writes Lewis by e-mail, “it has been moved by subsequent authors into different genera, e.g., Desmodium motorium (Houtt) Merr. (where Merr. is an abbreviation for Merrill). This new combination made in 1938 is also based on Hedysarum motorium, or, put botanically, Hedysarum motorium is the ‘basionym’ of both Desmodium motorium and Codariocalyx motorius. OK so far?”

Not really. But despite the confusion, Lewis assures me they are all the same plant: a leguminous Asian shrub. According to the International Legume Database and Information Service, it is not hard to find and is widely distributed throughout Australia, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Jamaica, Laos, Malaysia, Martinique, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam. It can even be found on the Society Islands, a chain of islands dotted remotely in the South Pacific. In Mauritius, in the 19th century, it was cultivated intentionally.

But Codariocalyx motorius or Desmodium roylei or Meibomia gyrans, or whatever you choose to call it, does not dance. It twitches. Very early in the morning, as the rising sun burns the mist off the fields, provided the weather has not been too hot, too humid or too dry, as long as the soil conditions are favorable, and it is not too windy, the leaves of Kampermpool’s dancing plant respond to his singing by twitching. Otherwise, The Plant spends most of its time hidden by orchids and protected by netting and barbed wire, its pointed little leaves nodding and bouncing in the breeze.

It dances, says Kampermpool defensively. “According to our experiments,” he says, “when we are using electronics it doesn’t work well. It likes humans, it likes musical instruments, but they have to be played by humans, my friend. If you sing a song composed by the king, it’s dancing better. This is very strange.”

Put a question — any question — to Kampermpool and he will respond instead by talking about The Plant. Because of this, he is an enigma. He might have children but, then again, he might not; allegedly, he spent several years in Iraq, researching desert plants, but perhaps this is not the case. His doctorate degree might be honorary, or he might have earned it conventionally — we don’t know. It is possible — and Kampermpool certainly makes it sound as if he has — that he has met the King of Thailand, His Majesty Bhumibol Adulyadej. [Editor's Note: Two years after the original publication of this story, a representative of Dr. Pradit's contacted Salon to state that the doctor had never met the King of Thailand, nor did he intend to give the impression that he did so.] So it is not surprising that, when asked about The Plant and the mechanism that actually makes its little leaflets move, Kampermpool sighs and rolls his eyes, recalling instead the day he found The Plant under the cool canopy of the jungle. Then he gives an extemporaneous lecture on the years he has spent breeding and studying The Plant; or claims that more than 30,000 tourists visit the nursery each year to see The Plant, although none are present this morning; and talks about his plans to market The Plant globally — you will be our planner; you will have a position forever — and voices his concerns that dark operatives, who stalk the nursery at night, will seize control of The Plant.

- – - – - – - – - – - -

According to a 1998 study that appeared in the journal Chronobiology International, the plant’s movements are caused by the swelling and shrinking of motor cells in special organs buried deep within the leaves, called pulvini. Via the pulvini, protons are pumped into the lateral leaflets, which in turn causes the movement, in and out, of charged ions. “During the pump state,” the paper reports, “ions are taken up, causing water influx and swelling of the motor cells. Depolarization causes loss of ions and water efflux (the motor cells shrink).” In other words, as protons are pumped into the pulvini, ions enter too, bringing water with them; when the charged ions leave the pulvini passively, the water migrates from the pulvini too. The movement of water molecules causes the motor cells in the leaves to shrink or swell and, as the water enters and exits, the plant’s little leaflets twitch.

But there is little point sharing this information with Kampermpool. Almost certainly, he would show his derision by first elaborately making the sound of a soufflé collapsing — Pshummph! — and then refusing to comment any further.

Pshummph!

Charles Darwin?

Pshummph!

Pulvini?

Pshummph!

Kampermpool shrugs, stands back and sighs, and then points at the plant again. “I will ask my people to prepare tea for us, my friend,” he says, signaling to a man leaning on a hoe before marching off toward his house and officially ending the discussion.

“This is tea,” he says a few minutes later, raising a cup to his lips and slurping noisily. “It’s dancing tea, you know, my friend. Boil it in hot water and drink it,” he says. “We’re drinking every day!”

Kampermpool is sitting in the shade, taking dainty sips from his teacup, with his little finger cocked and carefully pointed at the white clouds that march across the sky above his house. “This is an excellent tea for antioxidants,” he says between sips. “In 15 minutes, your cheeks will become red. The next morning, my friend, you will feel very light.”

It smells a lot like marijuana.

“No,” shouts Kampermpool, slapping the table. “No marijuana!”

Maybe not, but studies performed in the 1960s suggest that the leaves and roots of Desmodium gyrans — and likely Miss Udon Dancing Sunshine — contain psychedelic compounds, like N,N-dimethyltryptamine.

N,N-dimethyltryptamine?

Pshummph!

- – - – - – - – - – - -

It is hot and humid year-round in Udon Thani. Walking through the town is like wading through warm water. Despite this, Kampermpool rushes round his nursery like a black-haired dynamo, absent-mindedly watering his wilting plants.

Most days, after he has finished tending to his plants, he will find a shady spot, make a pot of tea, and wait for the fields to get dark around him. He is a busy man; sometimes he teaches a class at the university. He keeps busy to escape the inescapable: that he is stuck. Finally, after all these years, Dr. Pradit Kampermpool is stuck with The Plant. He has spent a fortune researching, breeding and crossbreeding this weedy-looking plant whose pointed little leaves nod and bounce in the breeze. The decades of research have cost him more than his house is worth.

He loves The Plant. It represents a 25-year odyssey for Kampermpool; it has been his only constant in a sea of change. The Plant also provides an object lesson in what can happen to someone who invests everything in something that eventually turns out to be nothing. And now, after 15 years spent scouring the jungle for The Plant and then another 10 years of careful breeding, Kampermpool is finally stuck with it, stubbornly defending the indefensible assertion that it is, in actual fact, a dancing plant.

“It’s a dancing plant.”

He stands beside The Plant now, looking at it sadly. It has its roots in him; the same roots that he unhurriedly shook soil from, wrapped in a moist cloth, and carried back to the nursery all those years ago. Each year those roots have inched a little deeper into his life, probing silently, delving. A root can split a boulder in two in the same way, moving unnoticed and undetected through the strata. Dr. Pradit Kampermpool might be able to tell you that, but he’s walking to the shady end of his nursery with quick little steps, his shiny black hair bobbing among the orchid stems, swinging a watering can, and singing.

This story has been changed since it was originally published.

Finally, in 1969, he tackled the subject of war, recounting his experiences as a POW in Dresden, forced to dig corpses from the rubble. The resulting novel was “Slaughterhouse Five.” Banned in several states — and branded a “tool of the devil” in North Dakota — it carried the snappy alternative title: “The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., a fourth-generation German-American now living in easy circumstances on Cape Cod (and smoking too much) who, as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden, Germany, ‘The Florence of the Elbe,’ a long time ago, and survived to tell the tale: This is a novel somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from. Peace.”

Catchy. With an alternate title like that, it’s safe to assume the 79-year-old Vonnegut might have something to say about the Sept. 11 attacks, bringing Dresden to downtown Manhattan, and also the current war in Afghanistan, life and death, and what might come after.

I phoned Vonnegut for an interview. One of the first things he said was, “You don’t sound like an American.” He’s right. I’m English, which wasn’t a problem until he blamed me for the destruction of Dresden, an event that took place 27 years before my birth. Incidentally, this makes me — by his estimation — much too young to be taken seriously. Regardless, I maintain my innocence.

What is the purpose of life?

Well, I have a son who writes very well. He just wrote one book; it’s called “The Eden Express.” It’s my son Mark, who is a pediatrician and who went crazy and recovered to graduate from Harvard Medical School. But anyway, he says, and I’ve quoted him in a couple of my books, “We’re here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.” That’s pretty good, don’t you think?

Death is a central theme in many of your books. Why does it play such an integral role in your fiction?

Well, it’s so terribly interesting to everyone. There’s two things that people can’t take their eyes off: People fucking and people getting killed. [laughs] These events seem to be terribly interesting. And also, we don’t see it very often. I had one young woman, a student of mine, complain that she had never seen a dead person, and I said to her, “One must be patient.”

Your mother committed suicide in 1944, on the eve of Mother’s Day. You’ve also written extensively about your time as a soldier in World War II. Do you think these experiences, which took place when you were in your 20s, contributed to your attitudes toward death?

No, because they were quite firmly fixed. You know, if I’d been raised a Catholic, as a good boy I would have believed, or tried to believe, what the Catholics believe, for instance. My ancestors, first ancestors, came over here before the Civil War and they were all freethinkers and they were much influenced by science. They were educated people and figured that really the priest or the preacher didn’t know what the hell he was talking about [laughs] and that Genesis was a lot of baloney and Jonah and the whale and so forth. So they were rationalists, I guess is what they were called, but they were a religious sect, they called themselves freethinkers.

I think in my piece I did for Studs Terkel [in Terkel's new book, "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth and Hunger for a Faith"] I said that we try to behave as well as we can without any expectation of reward or punishment in the afterlife and we serve the highest abstraction with which we have any familiarity, which is our community. And that’s been quite enough.

Nietzsche, who got a bum rap, incidentally — he had nothing to do with Nazism in any way — he said in effect, in German of course, “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.” I know something terribly important is going on. I mean, my Lord, everything’s so busy, and so, yeah, I have that kind of deep faith. So skepticism isn’t a luxury at all. Death is … I love sleep. Aye, there’s the rub. Perchance to dream.

In the novel “Deadeye Dick” the protagonist accidentally shoots a pregnant woman on Mothers Day 1942. Is there a parallel between the event in your novel and your mother’s death?

Oh, I would suppose that, I was 19, 20, 21, something like that when she did it, and I think that any child — I mean, one reason suicide is a bad idea — is any child is going to blame himself or herself to a certain extent: What did I say? What did I do?

In your last book, “God Bless You Dr Kevorkian,” you make several visits to heaven as a roving reporter, via carefully controlled near-death experiences, to interview the spirits you encountered in the hundred yards of vacant lot between the blue tunnel and the Pearly Gates. It’s a great book. But do you believe in heaven at all?

It’s fun to think about, you know. I’ve actually imagined afterlives because it’s amusing. Because of the hospitality problem and the entertainment problem, it’s hideously impractical [laughs]. In one of my books, I forget which one, I imagine a heaven where, when you died, you got to be whatever age you were happiest on Earth. And it was a mess for me because my father was 10 years old. [laughs]

And he was difficult to relate to?

A real pain in the ass! [laughing harder]

What age would you choose to be if that were the case?

The best age for a man is 44. How old are you?

I’m 28.

All right. Well, when you’re 44 people will finally take you seriously.

In December 1944, you were captured by the German army and became a prisoner of war. As you described in “Slaughterhouse Five,” you narrowly escaped death during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945.

Yes, by your people [the English], may I say. We were just the longest good neighbors in the daytime. You guys burned the place down, turned it into a single column of flame. More people died there in the firestorm in that one big flame, because there was nothing to breathe, than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

I claim no responsibility for the firebombing of Dresden

Well, I’m fond of your people on occasion. I was just thinking about Bomber Harris, the marshall who was in charge of the RAF [Royal Air Force] who believed in attacks on civilian populations to make them give up, although quite the opposite had happened in Britain … But a whole lot of RAF guys objected to a monument being put up to Bomber Harris. I think it probably finally did get up, but a hell of a lot of RAF guys were ashamed of what Harris had made them do. And that’s really sportsmanship and, of course, Brits are famous for being good sports.

But the bombing [on Sept. 11], no, it was hellish. People in Indianapolis, Minneapolis and Los Angeles are all reeling from this terrible attack. And of course, everybody’s reeling from what they saw on TV. [laughs] That’s where we’ve gotten to now. We just respond to something that happens on TV. But I think, God, weren’t they smart, the guys who did this? I had no idea those buildings were so fragile.

How close is your apartment to the site of the World Trade Center?

About three miles. A long way off. You know, I think about an amazing event like this, the firebombing of Dresden, any huge event: My God, Vesuvius has erupted again!

With the immediacy of television, do you think the attacks were overemphasized when compared with events like the firebombing of Dresden, during which 135,000 people were killed?

What I object to is that it’s totally distracting, just as the O.J. Simpson case was totally distracting, and Gary Condit. And so TV has the power to make us think about one thing. And, you know, in Congress now all sorts of monkey business is going on, anti-environmentalist stuff, because the TV just keeps us focused on ground zero and Afghanistan.

Do you think our military response to the attacks has been appropriate?

Well, our foreign policy for years has been based on unmanned kamikazes. [laughs] You know, we’ve let quite a few of those go.

You were once attacked while speaking at the Library of Congress and accused of speaking ill of the United States, the most wonderful nation in the world. In a 1999 interview, in defense of your cynicism, you said simply, “But it is a shitty country.” It seems there are people out there who agree with you.

I’d forgotten — but that’s pretty good [laughs]. It is preposterous to imagine that you belong to something as big as the United States. It’s like saying, “Howdy, I’m from Asia. Where are you from?” [laughs] You know, every artist in the United States worth a shit was against the Vietnam War, which was, you know, cruelly stupid and unnecessary. So every writer, every painter, every poet, every musician was against the Vietnam War. And I have said that it’s like a laser beam, you know, where all the beams of light are aimed in one direction and so all art, the total art world, and also a whole lot of other decent people, would form this laser beam, everybody aimed at the Vietnam War to stop it. And the power of this weapon turned out to be that of a custard pie, two feet in diameter, dropped from a stepladder six feet high [laughs]. It made no fucking difference.

In a number of your novels you state that evolution was really a bum deal, supplying man with brains that were far too large for his own good. With the attacks of Sept. 11, and the current bombing campaign in Afghanistan, do you think maybe we’re seeing some effects of these large brains of ours?

Well yes. Evolution is utterly — whatever the mechanism is, and I don’t think much of natural selection as a mechanism — but whatever the mechanism is, it has no conscience, it has no purpose.

But, you know, a science fiction clichi is that we don’t know how to stop war or cure cancer, till people in flying saucers come and tell us how to do it, or till we grow an extra lobe on our brains and get smarter. We’re getting smarter. Human beings are getting smarter, just like elephants in trouble, you know, saying, “Hey, you know, we’re in trouble but we’ll be OK if we put on a couple of hundred more pounds.” Or a giraffe saying, “Boy, life is hell now but if we add a couple of feet to our necks we ought to be OK.”

What would your alter ego Kilgore Trout say about the terrorist attacks?

Oh, I’ll have to think a minute because I’m not really his spokesperson — he’s a separate personality. [Pauses] He ignored an awful lot. And specific events. I think he probably didn’t make a comment. It would have been like an automobile accident or something.

Not too important, then?

No, but he’s certainly interested in oceanic changes. Huge slow ones. Irresistible ones.

How would you like to die?

I don’t know. When I was a soldier I just didn’t want to be hurt. I hoped it wouldn’t hurt. So I suppose painlessly because I hate pain and I love sleep. My dear sister died of cancer and her very last words were, sort of wondering, “No pain. No pain.” That was so nice.

I once read an interview in which you were asked how you would like to die and you said, “In a plane crash on Mount Kilimanjiro.” Were you in a better mood that day?

[Laughs] No, that was actually a Ray Bradbury story and that’s how he thought Hemingway should have died. Maybe I said it sometime. Just fucking around. I have the feeling now that I had at the end of the Second World War: I’ve done everything I’m supposed to do, please can I go home now? And I have that feeling now, and then I think, “Well, where the hell is home?” And what I’m yearning for is back in Indianapolis when I had a brother and a sister and a mother and a father and I can’t get that, but, if it were possible, I would like them alive and I would die among them.

Do you believe there is anything afterward at all?

No. Well, I don’t know. It’s biochemical to be redistributed, certainly. I think what Jung feared was that his intelligence would get mixed up with everybody else’s. [laughs]

Have you written a suitable epitaph for yourself?

Yes, well, I’ve already said so in the books: “Everything was beautiful, nothing hurt.”

What are you most scared of?

Bad things happening to my children and grandchildren.

What book influenced you the most?

“Candide” by Voltaire, I guess.

What book do you most wish you’d written yourself?

I wish I had written “Romeo and Juliet.”

How do you define success?

I don’t know. No answer.

What do you truly believe in?

Well, again, getting back to Nietzsche’s statement, as a person of deep faith, I obviously believe in something in the end. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a great big something.

Do you have any regrets?

Plenty.

Given the opportunity, would you fix them?

No. Oh, I suppose, yeah. I don’t like the question.

Are you working on a new book at the moment?

Yes, but like everybody else, I was just shocked by the World Trade Center thing. Also what it’s done to the world economy. I mean, boy, you think those towers were something? It’s such a fragile economy. Don’t joke about economics because that’s how you get food.

In several of your novels, characters become unstuck in time. In “Timequake,” a bump in the space-time continuum causes everyone to relive the decade between 1991 and 2001, repeating everything they did the first time they lived it. Do you believe that, like characters caught in a timequake, we all have a chronology we are destined to follow, no matter what?

I think maybe the future has as much to do with who and what we are now as the past. It may be that you continue. Life is … there’s enough to think about. But I do suspect that the future has a hell of a lot more to do with stuff right now than we realize. And it wouldn’t help much to realize it.

So essentially, we’re all following a path that has been set for us, without having much control over it?

I’m afraid so. Why, are you in trouble?

My mission: to interview the interviewer. With a record like Terkel’s, such a proposition could be daunting, but it’s not. Hard of hearing, he shouts down the phone in a friendly, wheezy voice, curses his hearing aid, asks me to speak up, to repeat myself, curses his hearing aid again and, at the same time, manages to talk at breakneck speed about anything and everything.

His doorbell could ring any moment, he says. He’s expecting someone who wants his autograph. “I’m a half-assed celebrity in town,” he jokes. Ironically, Terkel had already started working on “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” — meeting and interviewing subjects — when his wife died. “Well, it’s a crazy moment,” he says. “Don’t call it serendipity, because it’s tragic. I lost my wife.” Death had come home. Terkel continued to do interviews in the months that followed, and managed to complete the book. He has since begun work on two more book projects.

“Hold the wire,” he shouts suddenly when the doorbell finally rings. He reads my phone number back to me loudly, reads it again, excuses himself and hangs up. A little later, he calls back and we have a chance to talk.

“I’m going to have a martini,” he says later still, as the interview draws to a close, “let’s see, it’s 20 to 5 here. H.L. Mencken said, ‘Don’t drink before sundown. Don’t drink before sundown! ‘ Well, it’s not sundown yet and I’m going to have a Bombay gin martini, and then we’ll see what happens.”

Why did you decide to write a book about death?

Death is the one experience none of us has had and all of us will have. As Kurt Vonnegut says in the book, it’s the most ordinary thing in the world. At the same time, the book is about life, primarily. It’s about life. I always like to do a sotto voce, cup my hand over my mouth and say: It’s about l-i-f-e. Life.

In the introduction, you mention that author Gore Vidal suggested that you write a book about death as early as 1970. Why has it taken so long for you to finally approach the subject?

I had a radio show in Chicago for many years, on WFMT, a classical music station. I was its one aberration. It was an eclectic program, and I used to have a lot of people on, writers that I liked. And one of the writers was Gore Vidal. One day at the bar he says, “You ever thought about doing a book about people’s thoughts on death?”

I said, “Oh my God.” I was having a martini; I looked in the martini glass and all I saw was an olive. I was always told: “A book on death? They don’t want to talk about that, you’re crazy.” But they want to talk about it. They want to. The irony is, it’s the most alive book I’ve ever done.

Religion figures heavily in the responses of many of your subjects.

There’s a recurring refrain in the book, you’ll spot it: “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Now, it sounds like one of those New Age bromides, but it’s not. They want no middleman between themselves and God, whatever He, She or It is. And I find that fascinating. I find myself astonished by many of the responses.

Saul Bellow, a fellow octogenarian, once wrote that every man has his own poems.

Oh, that’s wonderful. I like that.

Reading the oral histories you’ve collected here, it seems that Bellow was right and that what you’ve managed to do is capture your subject’s poems.

I’m so glad you said that. I’m a gold prospector. I’m digging. Out of that digging comes tons of ore. Thirty pages. A lot of it is fat — [I'm] cutting the lean from it, getting at the core. Now I’ve got eight pages. But it’s still not a necklace, or a watch, or a gold bracelet. I have to bring it all together, and that’s my necklace. Now the editing, that’s the delicate part, now I’m a brain surgeon. You spoke of the poem within; I believe we all have it. The key to interviews is listening to the person, even to the silences. This is all parenthetical, you don’t mind do you? I’m doing stream of consciousness now. I’m a short Joyce.

You asked many of your subjects if they feared death. Do you fear death?

At this stage in the game, I’m 89 years old, I have two martinis a day, two cigars a day, my wife’s gone and my friends are gone too. I’ve had a good run. However, I’m greedy. So I want to do a couple of books. I probably won’t finish them, but it makes the day go quicker. So do I fear death? Not especially.

How did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 change our perceptions of death?

Well that’s a good question. You see, I’d started the book long before that. Has it changed my perception of life and death, you mean? If anything, it’s italicized it. If anything, more than ever, [the Sept. 11 attacks were] a tragic, stupid event, a barbaric event that has made the book even more pertinent than it may have been before. And I find this ironic and tragic at the same time.

How can I put it? What has happened has made us more vulnerable. We are not the Fortress America. I think that’s the last thing Thomas Paine had in mind 200 years ago. Following “Common Sense” he wrote “Rights of Man,” and in that he spoke of this new society, this open society, and he said it could lift the world, lift it. I’m talking about 1791 he was writing it. He didn’t mean for us to be Fortress America. If we are Fortress America, then we are against “Them,” whoever “Them” is — the rest of the world, of course. So suddenly it’s happened. We are vulnerable and in this vulnerability, I hope we’re more human. You see, to err is human, to be vulnerable is human and so, in a sense, I’m looking now to find something hopeful that’s come out of this, ironically enough, that we ourselves may recognize what it is to be “the other.”

So you think the attacks should teach us all how to empathize?

You know, when we saw that picture of that little girl running, the Vietnam shot, that little terrified girl, napalm around her — remember that? That should be our little girl from now on. That’s the thing you see. That little girl should be considered our little girl.

Remember Einstein? I still lean on Einstein. I love to quote Einstein because no one dares contradict me. Einstein said shortly before he died, he was so overwhelmed, his own findings led to Hiroshima, subsequently — the irony — he tore his hair when he learned about Hiroshima. He never expected [the bomb] to be dropped on human beings, and then he said something along the lines of, “Everything in the world has changed with the split atom except one thing — the way we think.” We have to think anew. If we don’t think anew we’re in the soup.

And are people now thinking anew?

Remember, all my books have dealt with the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary Americans. And we saw it of course with the tenacity of the firefighters and the cops and the paramedics and everybody. So the ordinary American, I think, senses something deep down, inchoate though the feeling is, that our spokesmen, politicians or whoever they are, don’t understand at all.

Will the current campaign — this long War Against Terrorism we’ve embarked upon — become another Vietnam for the United States?

I don’t know. I wish to hell I knew because there’s no precedent for this. It won’t even be Vietnam because Vietnam was a country, where of course we had no business being to begin with. It was an obscene misadventure. Now, there are groups, there are fragments, we know that. Afghanistan is a fragmented land and it’s one warlord against another, and even the Northern Alliance, when it comes to human rights, have not been overwhelmingly great. I think we have to have this new move, a whole new Einsteinian approach. I return to him all the time.

For “The Good War” you collected oral histories of soldiers from World War II. Do you think the war experience is universal? Will the oral histories of the soldiers currently in Afghanistan sound the same as those you collected for “The Good War,” or have we lost something over the last 50 years?

Well, we have lost something in the last 50 years. I think the Cold War’s aftermath is still around and about. Now, ironically enough, our ally is Russia. Here we go again. Archibald McLeish wrote a wonderful piece during the most frigid parts of the Cold War for Harper’s, I think, and he said, “We are enthralled to them,” — the Soviets — “and they’re enthralled to us. No matter what they do, we’ll do the opposite. No matter what. And no matter what we do, they’ll do the opposite.” So I thought of that, and that still hovers even though things have been reversed now. There’s Putin and Bush — buddy-buddies: the irony. But no, it can’t be the same. It’s different.

How was World War II different from the current campaign against terrorism and the Taliban?

It was a war against Hitler, of course, against fascism, against all there was. It subsequently had to be fought, but you can’t compare the two. There is no one country involved now. Not Afghanistan. We know they’re warlords, knocking each other off. They’re purchasable too and so you can’t compare them. There’s confusion, there’s bewilderment. So at this moment, we’re at a crossroads. Will we learn? You see, you always come back to Einstein again. We have to think anew. It’s not just Them, a Third World, distant. It’s one, whether we like it or not.

Has George W. Bush proven himself as president of the United States?

Oh, no. No. Whom is he helping domestically with the tax cuts? You know very well who tax cuts help. The big CEOs are being rewarded, while thousands are being laid off.

If not George W. Bush, then who?

When it comes to the military and the Pentagon, Gore was as fervent for expanding the military budget as Bush is. So I don’t think it would have changed much with Gore, as far as the bombings are concerned. Possibly it might have been different as far as the domestic program is concerned. That might have been the difference. Oh God, I don’t know. Would FDR have been the guy? Well, he’s my favorite president of course. At the same time we know what he did in the Executive Order 9066 — Japanese Americans’ internment. And that was a big blot, a horrendous blot. But nonetheless, he would have been the closest to it. We need a statesman, a new kind of statesman, and I don’t see any on the horizon.

By launching a protracted bombing campaign, have we responded appropriately to the Sept. 11 attacks?

No, no. No bombing campaign. Bombing is the one thing bin Laden was for. He loves the idea of being bombed. It makes him a hero, a martyr among the great many in that whole region of the world.

We are the richest country in the world and everybody, I think, is capable of change. I don’t care who they are, everyone is capable of change. I’m not saying bin Laden, who is as nutty as a fruitcake and is an example of fundamentalism — in this case Islamic — that’s gone crazy. I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about the fact that everyone in the world, generally, is capable of change. I found that out. My greatest interview, I think, was with an ex-Klansman, a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and [about] his redemption and change. I feel we’re the richest country in the world. We know there’s more food that we need to feed every man, woman and child.

Now, if in our largesse we said: “This is what we’ll do, all over the world, everywhere.” Suppose we bomb them all over the world with food, clothing and shelter. I think it would alter us considerably. I know this sounds altruistic, it sounds goofy, it sounds idealistic in a comic way. Yet, it’s the way. We’d be the most beloved nation in this epoch. So there you have it. As I say, this guy’s a goof, who’s talking to you now, an idealist. But on the contrary, that ideal is a reality, that ideal is being realistic. That’s the ticket. You got an earful.

Dan Capps is a cricket spitter from Madison, Wis. Capps may be the most famous cricket spitter of them all. According to the “Guinness Book of Records,” he can spit a cricket farther than anyone else on the planet. It’s right there in the book, sharing the page with records for “Greatest distance pumpkin shot” (1,496 yards) and “Most hamburgers stuffed in mouth” (three). Capps has held the world cricket spitting record since June 1998.

“The actual record is 32 feet and one-half inch,” Capps says. “That’s often misquoted.”

Along with thousands of other contestants, Capps comes here each year simply to enjoy the drama of the spit-off, to mingle with fellow spitters and trade new techniques and styles. Cricket spitting is a mysterious new sport; sanctioned by the “Guinness Book of Records,” covered by CNN and ESPN, and treated seriously by a growing number of participants nationwide.

Cricket spitters do not compete in sweaty basements, dingy back rooms or secret dens. Cricket spitting is not controlled by hoods, thugs or dark operatives, and cricket spitters do not gamble on the outcome of a contest, or purposefully “throw a spit” for personal gain. Most open contests are held outdoors, with contestants competing in one of four brackets: senior male, senior female, junior male and junior female.

The sport’s aim is simple: to spit a whole dead cricket as far as possible; to beat the opposition with a superlative spit; to claim the cricket spitting championship and return home victorious. In competition, contestants must observe a set of arcane rules, the first and most rudimentary of which reads as follows: “The crickets are to be Brown House crickets, weighing between 45 and 55 milligrams.” Another rule reads: “Crickets should be previously frozen, then thawed for the record attempt.”

Capps, tall and bearded, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, says he was at the 1998 Bug Bowl showing his collection of exotic insect species when he was asked if he’d like to take part in the cricket spitting competition. “I said, ‘Well, shoot, I’m not squeamish about these things, I’ll give that a try,’” he recalls, “and as it turned out, I was pretty good at it.” Consequently, Capps made it through the preliminary rounds, and beat out his opposition in the spit-off, winning the contest. Two months later, he secured the official Guinness cricket-spitting world record, which he still holds today. Being the cricket-spitting world record-holder has its own problems. “I work as a mechanic in a meat packing factory,” Capps says. “I’ve been there for 31 years and it’s kind of a redneck environment. I took a lot of ribbing.”

The worst insult a spectator can pay a cricket spitter is to say “it was a good spit, but it was wind-aided.” Such a term is loaded with insinuation and subtext, and can tarnish an otherwise respectable spit.

In fact, representatives from Guinness refused to ratify the spit that won Capps the Bug Bowl in 1998, ruling that, because the contest was held outside, the spit might have been wind-aided. “It wasn’t a controlled environment,” Capps says. “Their concern was that the event was held outdoors.” To satisfy Guinness officials, Capps traveled to Los Angeles and broke the record before a studio audience, on the FOX TV show, “Guinness World Records: Primetime.”

The spit: Capps reverently places a dead cricket in his mouth, looks at the floor, and begins his wind up, rocking back and forth rhythmically from one foot to another like a long-jumper preparing to jump. The crowd is quiet. Stretched before the cricket spitters is a vinyl mat, bordered by out-of-bounds lines, with each foot clearly marked off along its length.

Suddenly, Capps throws the top half of his body forward, scissoring at the waist, and spits. The cricket is airborne. Like trying to locate a golf ball in midair after it has been struck, it is almost impossible to follow the cricket’s arc after it leaves Capps’ mouth. There is a pause. The crowd presses forward expectantly, those in the front rows craning their necks. Seconds become minutes; minutes become hours, years, eons. People die. Stars are born.

Where is the cricket?

Suddenly, all eyes settle on a dark, little nut resting on the mat.

Wait, it’s the cricket.

Rule 4: “The distance will be measured from the center of the edge of the spitting circle, to where the cricket comes to rest, using a measuring tape.”

The measurement: 32 feet and one-half inch.

The crowd erupts; flashbulbs explode; another title belongs to Capps.

Tom Turpin is the father of competitive cricket spitting. A professor of entomology at Purdue University, Turpin held the inaugural cricket spitting competition there, in 1997, at the Bug Bowl. He is also responsible for the cryptic and arcane rules that govern the cricket-spitting contests. He says he sat down and drafted them after deciding in 1996 to add cricket spitting to the events already on the Bug Bowl roster.

“I’m not aware of any cricket spitting event before our Bug Bowl event,” says Turpin proudly. “Crickets just seemed like a logical thing. We freeze them until they’re dead and then we thaw them until they have the consistency of a live cricket. So it’s not like spitting an ice cube.”

Specially trained officials watch over the contests closely, says Turpin, and a rigorously run competition requires at least four officials to make sure the rules are observed, the cheating attempts stymied, and all the spits accurately measured. Each of the officials wears a hat that bears his or her official title, and a thigh-length white coat with a cricket decal and the words “Cricket Spitting Official” clearly visible on the back. “There is what is called the Circle Judge, who is the head official,” Turpin says. “That’s the one who is really in charge of the whole thing.”

As the contest gets underway, and the officials solemnly take their stations, the spitters try to concentrate, gather their thoughts, and prepare to spit. Although still a young sport, Purdue’s annual contest already displays all the tradition, custom and ceremony of a much older sport. “Officially, in our contest, the cricket to be spit is presented to the spitter on a silver platter,” Turpin says. The platter is held by a second official, who is in charge of distributing the crickets and making sure competitors cannot tamper with them. “The second person is what we call the Cricket Keeper,” Turpin explains. “At the command of the Circle Judge, he or she will say ‘Choose your cricket.’”

At which point, says Turpin, the spitter will make a selection, step into the Spitting Circle and prepare to spit. “They have to have the cricket in their mouth before they are invited into the Spitting Circle,” he says. If so much as a leg or antenna is visible, the spitter will not be allowed to spit. And here’s another important rule: “The cricket has to be intact,” Turpin says. “It has to have two antennae, four wings and six legs.”

If the officials are satisfied, the cricket is intact, and the spitter is prepared, the signal is given, and the spitter finally can spit. Everyone prepares differently, says Turpin, but contestants must complete their attempt within 20 seconds to avoid disqualification. Most contestants tend to spit quickly, he says, but others — like Dan Capps — take a while to coat the cricket with saliva, hoping this will help them spit further. Some people try to make a cricket more aerodynamic by chewing off its legs, wings or antennae, he says, reducing air resistance and hopefully adding valuable inches to their spit. This is not allowed. This is a dirty trick. Each year, at the Bug Bowl, Turpin tells contestants that they can’t do that because “its not cricket.” In fact, a third official — the Cricket Spotter — is on hand to locate the cricket after it has been spat, and carefully count its legs and other extremities to make sure it is intact.

“The rules state that a person cannot get out of the Spitting Circle until it has been found,” Turpin says. If a spitter leaves the circle prematurely, or gets caught off-balance by inertia in the seconds following a spit and falls out of the circle, the Circle Judge will hold aloft a red flag, denoting an invalid spit; but if the spit is good, the cricket is located, and it has the expected number of legs, wings and antennae, the Circle Judge will announce “Fair spit” and raise a white flag. At that signal, the fourth official — the Tape Master — is dispatched across the Spitting Circle to measure the length of the spit. Measurement complete, the Circle Judge reads off the distance, the spit is duly logged, and the competition can continue.

Cricket spitting might sound like an unusual leisure activity to most of us, but to members of the close-knit community of cricket spitters that gathers each spring in Indiana, and again each fall in Pennsylvania, there is no better way to spend a weekend. It’s a community that continues to grow too, with the numbers of participants increasing steadily each year. Tom Turpin says spitters numbering in the thousands travel to Indiana from as far afield as California solely to compete in the annual spit-off.

At Turpin’s first cricket spitting competition, he ran out of crickets, surprised by the large number of participants. “I suddenly realized I didn’t have enough crickets,” says the Bug Bowl cofounder. That first year, the overall competition winner was Matt Ledington with a respectable spit of 25 feet and 11 inches; Dan Capps won the following year with a spit measuring 32 feet and one-and-one-half inches, a spit that really set the standard in competitive cricket spitting.

“After the first two years, Guinness called,” Turpin says. “They called us and wanted to know if we’d be interested in getting a couple of guys out on the show and, in the process, set the record.”

“The next thing you know, I’m flying out to Hollywood,” says Capps, the 51-year-old record-holder, “that’s where the record was established. They weighed the crickets, they had no wind there, and all the measurements were accurate.” Ledington went too and, under the harsh studio lights, the two men competed head-to-head in a tense spit-off. With the world record at stake, Capps spat second and won, and the rest is history.

Three years after claiming the record, Capps still works at the meat packing plant, and he still collects and exhibits his collection of exotic insects at festivals across the country. Cricket spitting, says Capps, is not a very lucrative sport. It hasn’t made him rich, he doesn’t have any endorsement deals or corporate agreements. Now, though, when he visits the Bug Bowl and walks past the nervous contestants — as they limber up and prepare to spit — he does so as a guest spitter. People try to emulate his technique, the way his tongue curls pinkly, and folds wetly around the cricket, coating it with saliva before each spit. He has been elevated to the position of instructor. He is the cricket spitting guru. “I tell them you have to expectorate the cricket headfirst, in a spiral,” says Capps, quickly admitting that the truth is far less dramatic. “It’s just a matter of blowing hard,” he says. “We’re talking about a limp, dead thing that doesn’t give you any assistance. It isn’t very aerodynamic.”

Even so, with spits regularly exceeding 32 feet, Capps is still the man on the circuit to beat. “You know, you can’t get a record every time,” he says. “I’m pretty consistent up to about 30 feet and anything that goes 25 feet is a good effort. I’ve exceeded the record many times. In practice I once went 47 feet and in public competition I guess my best has been 38 feet, a little over 38 feet, at Penn State University.”

But it was wind-aided.

These days, Capps is philosophical about his cricket spitting career. He doesn’t train or practice; he doesn’t spit crickets at home; and he never finds himself in spitting ruts that bring red flag after red flag from the Circle Judge. He’s cricket spitting’s answer to Wayne Gretzky. Nevertheless, he’s resigned to the fact that his record will be broken one day. “It wouldn’t be the end of my life,” he says. “Even a guy like Michael Jordan — you don’t maintain your peak for a long time. Some day, some young fella will come along and be talented enough.”