Steve Almond

I was also 6 when “Willy Wonka” hit theaters. I don’t remember much about that year. But I do remember sitting in the darkened theater, as lustrous images of liquid chocolate in mass production rippled over me. I was dumbstruck with gratitude.

I didn’t even mind that the film had musical numbers in it (something I would not have otherwise tolerated) because they were all linked to candy. I remember humming the chorus to the song “The Candy Man” — Talk about your childhood wishes/ you can even eat the dishes! — for months after seeing the film.

The plot, based on Roald Dahl’s excellent book “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” runs like so: The reclusive chocolate maker Willy Wonka decides to hold a contest. Five lucky kids who find golden tickets inside his Wonka bars will receive a lifetime supply of chocolate, along with a personal tour of his super-secret factory.

The result of this contest, as we are breathlessly informed by news anchors, is Wonkamania. What follows is a biting, and remarkably prescient, satire of the modern media shark feed; there is simply no other story being told in the popular culture at that moment.

In one scene, a frail young man tells his psychoanalyst about a dream.

“To believe in one’s dreams is a manifestation of insanity,” the doctor informs him, in a heavy German accent.

“But I dreamed the arch angel came to me and revealed to me the precise location of a Wonka golden ticket.”

The doctor looks stunned. “And what exactly did he say?”

“Well, what difference does that make?,” the patient objects.

“Shut up,” the doctor shrieks, “and tell me where the ticket is!”

It is at this point that, even at age 6, I intuited that the filmmakers were going for something a little more sophisticated than “The Apple Dumpling Gang.”

This was the genius of “Willy Wonka” — it dared to defy demographic mandates. The humor was broad enough to appeal to kids, but sophisticated enough to reward grown-ups.

I can happily affirm this, as I watched the film (for a third time in one week) with Anabel (age 7) and Jake (age 4), both of whom had also seen the film before, multiple times, and claimed to have better things to do, but nonetheless fell rapt under its spell. Such is the effect of Willy Wonka. It is crack cocaine to the candy freak. And as an adult, the film has become even more enjoyable for me to watch, because I now understand gags like the endless non-indemnity clause that the contest winners have to sign before entering the factory.

Another great thing about the movie is that the kids in it — the contest winners — are not your standard Disneyfied vessels of innocence. On the contrary, they are as corrupt as the adult world around them: the petulant, screaming Veruca Salt, the gluttonous Augustus Gloop, the shrill, gum-chomping Violet Beauregarde.

My favorite was Mike Teavee, who seemed to represent, at age 8, a protean American vulgarity. We first encounter him in the thrall of a TV western (he watches around the clock) shooting at the screen with his cap gun while reporters stick microphones in his face.

One of the reporters asks Mike if he likes guns.

“Wait ’til I get a real one,” Mike says. “Colt 45. Pop won’t let me have one yet, will ya, Pop?”

“Not ’til you’re twelve, son,” his dad says fondly.

The one good kid in the film is Charlie Bucket, the blond mop top who (of course) finds the final ticket. Charlie is everything the other kids aren’t: sweet, humble, hardworking and poor.

This last fact bears mentioning, as American film culture is famously reluctant to confront, in any way, the existence of poverty in the midst of our generalized profligacy. Movie poor people never look much like real poor people.

Charlie Bucket does, though, down to his ragged wool sweater. There is no dad in his family, just an overworked mom and four invalid grandparents who sleep in the same bed. They eat cabbage soup for supper. I remember being astonished when Charlie, in an effort to find his grandpa Joe’s slippers, peeks under the bed. There are chamber pots, a concept my mother reluctantly explained to me.

“Willy Wonka” was made long before the era of special effects replaced character development as the top priority in Hollywood. And yet the factory itself, from the chocolate waterfall to the lickable wallpaper, still feels utterly convincing. I’ve spent years dreaming about the dainty teacup that Wonka sips from, then bites into.

Then there is Gene Wilder, who plays Wonka as a wild-haired eccentric. It would be impossible to convey the brilliance of Wilder’s performance on paper. So much of it resides in body language, inflection, facial expressions. But I should mention that it did not occur to me, until I saw “Young Frankenstein” a few years later, that Gene Wilder was merely an actor playing the part of Willy Wonka; I thought Wonka was an actual person.

Wilder’s charm derives from a curious blend of lunacy and insight. He mutters strange asides in foreign languages, quotes Shakespeare, and bursts into manic fits of rage. In what is no doubt the creepiest scene this side of “The Shining,” Wonka takes his charges on his custom-designed paddleboat, the Wonkatania. Wonka steers into a dark tunnel. The score grows menacing. Soon, huge, disturbing images are flashing on the walls — a worm crawling across a man’s neck, a chicken decapitated with a cleaver. The children are terrified, which seems to be the whole point. Rather than comforting them, Wonka begins to recite Blakeian couplets, his voice building to an apoplectic screech, while colored lights scroll across his face.

There’s no earthly way of knowing
which direction we are going …
Not a speck of light is showing …
Is the grisly reaper mowing?

This scene scared me witless as a kid (it still does). But I found it strangely exhilarating also, a revelation of the anarchic danger of our fantasy life.

This is Wonka’s whole thing: He honors the imaginative capacities of childhood without kowtowing to its solipsism. I am thinking of the moment when, confronted by a whinging Veruca Salt, he stares into her eyes and whispers reverently, “We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams.”

Wonka is fabulously unfazed when, one after another, the kids break the rules and suffer ignominious fates. Augustus Gloop, for instance, topples into the chocolate river and is sucked into a giant pneumatic tube and sent hurtling toward the fudge room. Wonka knows these kids are completely out of control — doomed by their own indulgences. By the end, the only one left is Charlie Bucket, to whom he bestows the chocolate factory.

As a kid, I wanted desperately to be Charlie, to be that good, that pure of heart. I wanted to be the kid who resisted his own cruel and selfish impulses and lived happily ever after. I don’t mind telling you that I still tear up at the end of the movie.

Most of all, I wanted to be the kid who won an entire chocolate factory. I was obsessed with this idea, and it dogged me into adulthood. I recently wrote a whole book about candy, expressly so I could get myself inside a few small factories.

The great unsung irony of the original “Willy Wonka” is that it was funded by the Quaker Oats Company, which hoped to put out a Wonka bar. The money people, in other words, saw the film as a promotional vehicle. But the candy bar never made it to market.

As for the new film, it has been accompanied by the expected cavalcade of product tie-ins, the most intriguing of which (to me, anyway) is the Wonka Donutz bar, a ring-shaped chocolate thing speckled with colored nonpareils. It takes some getting used to; it contains a ganache-like chocolate filling inside a milk chocolate shell, and these two elements, along with the crunchy nonpareils, created a kind of textural triple whammy.

But the Donutz bar should do just fine. So will the new film. Still, all of this poses a more basic question: Why remake a masterpiece? Does the world truly need Johnny Depp done up as Michael Jackson, defiling the memory of Gene Wilder? Does it need to tally the candy-coated thrills $50 million in CGI technology can buy?

“Everybody has had one and one is enough for anybody,” Wonka tells the greedy children who demand a second Everlasting Gobstopper.

My point exactly.

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

For a few years there back in the ’90s, Soul Coughing was making the most interesting music on the planet, a sonic collage of Doughty’s downtown beat poetry and guitar riffs, the monstrous syncopation of bassist Sebastian Steinberg and drummer Yuval Gabay, and the zany sampling of Mark De Gli Antoni. Doughty called it “deep slacker jazz.” The critics, by and large, raved. But the band minted only a few minor hits before imploding.

Doughty details this implosion in the new book, as well as his own stifling childhood, his descent into addiction, and his eventual recovery via the 12-step program. The 41-year-old has since built a thriving solo career, turning out albums full of catchy pop melodies and droll lyricism.

Salon interviewed him by phone from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Your memoir doesn’t pull a lot of punches.

I definitely felt ethically obligated to show myself as a pretty dark character. Who I was earlier in my career is a lot more interesting than some weird white knight version of myself.

I was amazed at how honest you are. There’s a line in the book, for example, where you’re writing about Jeff Buckley and you say, “I wanted him brought down.”

He was just a ridiculously beautiful person and his voice was amazing and people followed him around like he was Jesus — and who could blame them? Boy oh boy did I envy that. When he died, I was so envious. I was like, “He’s a legend.” And years later, when I came to from the fog, I realized he was just a human being, very talented, a very good guy, and he died.

His death made me think about the halfhearted suicide attempts you made as a teenager. At one point you tried to hang yourself from a shower curtain using a guitar cord, which felt like exactly what a young aspiring rock star would do.

Pretty much. I didn’t want to die, though. I just wanted someone to help me and it was the only way I could figure out to get help. I was angry and powerless to put my anger to a more effective use, but I hope I conveyed how haunted and strange and emotionally violent the home I grew up in was. When you grow up in an abusive household, unconsciously you seek out abusive relationships.

It seemed clear your band mates fit that description.

Oh yeah.

The book is so blunt about how angry you were at them and still are. I wondered about this, because isn’t part of the whole 12-step program about seeking forgiveness?

It’s about making amends. But making amends is not a forced march. Part of writing the book is: I want to take responsibility for my part, and that’s why I portray myself quite negatively a lot of the time. But I would say that I was, like, an asshole and they were in my opinion somewhat sociopathic. So their bad is bigger than my bad. But my bad is still bad and I got to take responsibility for that.

It felt like the undercurrent of your relationship with the band was resentment against you as the songwriter. You brought in the melodies and rhythms and a sense of how the song was going to sound and your band mates — for whatever else you might say about them, were remarkable players —

We had the muscle to give the Beastie Boys a run for their money! And Beck! And we ended up like a footnote. When people like Soul Coughing, it’s so frustrating because we could have been a truly great band and instead we were an interesting band with a cult following. And my biggest problem is my band mates genuinely think I was not the songwriter. It’s like getting into an argument where you bake a pie and have to prove you baked the pie. It’s like: Here’s the receipt for the flour, here’s the dirty dishes. It’s insane and utterly crazy-making. The thing that really disappoints me is that some of the famous samples on our first record, the Andrews Sisters and Howlin’ Wolf and Toots and the Maytalls — I brought that stuff in. And when the sampler player was asked about how he came up with those samples, he was not even aware that he was talking about stuff I brought in.

It seemed like your age had a lot to do with the band dynamics, the fact that you were so young relative to the other guys.

I was 22 when we did our first gig. I already felt like, “Jesus, why didn’t I have a record at 19?” I was bizarrely grandiose and at the same time ridden with anxiety. I was 23 when we made our first record, and 24 when it came out.

Right, and these guys were a decade older. They’d been around the block. Maybe they had trouble giving you too much credit.

I wonder if they were trying to sink their own boat, if they were just super self-destructive, knowing that this was the one shot they would have, and I would likely go on to make more records and they likely wouldn’t. It just doesn’t make sense that they [messed] with the guy who had his hand on the off switch. But then again, I heard reports after we broke up, and they were shocked and angry. And I was like: Really? You said all this shit. You said we’re going to divide up the song credit equally even though you didn’t write the songs. You didn’t think that eventually I was going to … get out of there.

As a solo artist you’ve been able make the exact kind of records you want.

Yeah, but it’s so funny. Whenever there’s a new album, I read the iTunes reviews and there’s always one that says, “I’m glad this rocks out more like ‘Haughty Melodic.’” And there’s always one review that says, “Yeah, but he’s never as good as he was in Soul Coughing.” I don’t know anybody with an audience that’s so divided. And it’s not just, “Hey, I like acoustic records.” It’s like, “The kind of music I like is better than the music you like.” People — particularly young people — just have this self-centered view of art. If they like something, it’s not a preference. It’s true or false. I’m trying to learn to laugh at it.

It seems like you’ve made your peace with a smaller career that’s more sustainable.

The desire to be immortal is something you’re never going to win. I mean, I just read that Paul McCartney called up Yoko Ono and asked for some of the songs to be changed from “By Lennon/McCartney” to “By McCartney/Lennon.”

You write a lot in the book about being a lonely guy. There’s a lot of self-lacerating groupie sex, for instance. What’s your personal life like now?

Well, I was a ho for the first couple years after I stopped using and I was much better at it than when I was using, but it got really sad. So I got into relationships. I’ve had three major relationships in a decade. I was 18 when I started using full-time and it’s sort of like I got stuck there. So now I’m trying to be an adult, but I feel quite behind the rest of the world.

Are you concerned the book coming out will stir up stuff from past?

I sort of put blinders on when I was writing it and didn’t think about how people were going to react. But now people are coming down the pike, particularly from my long menu of horrible, brief sex encounters.

Do you sense a flame war with your ex-band mates in the offing?

Yeah, I’m better at that than I used to be. I think it’s very much a “Don’t feed the trolls” type scenario. Better for me to let them say whatever it is they want to say and for me not to know about it, even if they’re like, “Doughty’s a Nazi and he shot JFK and he kicks puppies.”

Turn off the Google Alert?

Oh, totally. I did that a while ago.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, gazing at the deep-blue cover.

Kaplan is a guy who gets excited about all sorts of books. The difference, in this case, is that he published “Blue Christmas.” More precisely, his new imprint, B&B Press, released the book. It thus represents a heartening trend in the brave new world of publishing. Rather than trimming their sails, a number of independent booksellers are taking a page from Amazon by producing titles themselves.

Kaplan assured me his decision to launch a publishing arm had nothing to do with the online giant’s recent ploys, which include a notorious attempt to enlist readers as, essentially, retail spies.

His impetus, in fact, was the desire to publish a special limited edition of Les Standiford’s “Last Train to Paradise” to mark the centennial of Henry Flagler’s railway. At the same time, Kaplan explained, the local novelist John Dufresne “had this wonderful idea for ‘Blue Christmas,’ and since we had a team together, I thought, why not two at the same time? After all, there’s a tradition of bookstores as publishers. Shakespeare & Company published ‘Ulysses.’ City Lights published ‘Howl.’”

As publishers, indies enjoy a few distinct advantages over the competition. First, they can emphasize titles of local interest by local writers. Second, they can showcase the books in their shops. Third, because of advances in printing, they can bring books to market more quickly than traditional publishers. Just as important, when an independent bookstore sells a copy of one of their own titles, they collect all the profits, rather than a sliver. Consider it a poor man’s version of vertical integration.

Kaplan told me he hoped other bookstores would take up small-scale publishing. That’s already happening.

Consider Malaprops, in Asheville, N.C. When I arrived there for a reading a few weeks after my trip to Miami, general manager Linda Barrett Knopp was eager to talk with me about the revival of Burning Bush Press, Malaprops’ publishing arm, and its new title, “Naked Came the Leaf Peeper,” a wonderfully goofy serial novel in the spirit of the serial mystery “Naked Came the Manatee.” Leaf Peeper includes chapters from Carolina literati ranging from Tony Earley to Fred Chappell.

Barrett Knopp said the Burning Bush relaunch was intended to mark the store’s 30th anniversary. But getting back into publishing has been on the agenda for a while. “We originally thought about purchasing an Espresso Book Machine,” she explained, referring to the on-site machine that some stores use to produce library-quality paperbacks in minutes. They quickly realized it would be cheaper, and more efficient, to adopt the small-press model.

One of Barrett Knopp’s inspirations was her own husband, Brian Lee Knopp, who started his own press to publish a memoir of his years as a private eye, “Mayhem in Mayberry,” Malaprops’ top seller in 2011. That book’s success demonstrated not only the author’s irreverent appeal but also the power of Malaprops itself as a commercial vehicle. After all, as authors have long known, it’s the folks on the front lines that direct loyal customers to particular titles.

In this sense, Malaprops is simply taking advantage of what indies have always done best: serving as de facto community centers and literary recommenders. “We already have a long list of presales for ‘Leaf Peeper’ and the local buzz is growing,” Barrett Knopp said. She anticipates publishing two or three more titles in 2012 and envisions a day when Burning Bush will expand its purview to include regional books that are now in the public domain. Other area writers are already clamoring to be part of the effort.

Just down the road from Malaprops, in Spartanburg, S.C., I visited an indie that exemplifies this new model of the bookstore as publisher and purveyor. Hub City Books is an outgrowth of the Hub City Writers Project, which was launched 15 years ago to support local writers. The centerpiece of the project was Hub City Books, a small press that has published some 50 titles, including works by area luminaries such as Ron Rash and George Singleton.

For most of its history, Hub City sold its titles at Pic-a-Book, Spartanburg’s sole independent bookstore. Then, four years ago, Pic-a-Book went under. “We took a real financial hit,” explained Hub City’s executive director Betsy Teter, “because hometown sales were our bread and butter. And Barnes & Noble wasn’t doing the job for us. We couldn’t get the display we needed.”

As she lay in bed fretting over how to recover the lost sales, an idea hit Teter “like a bolt out of the blue”: Hub City should open a store. She found a location downtown, an abandoned Masonic Temple, launched a capital campaign that raised $300,000 to fix up the site, and opened for business in July 2010.

The building now houses the bookstore and the press, along with a coffee shop and bakery that rent space from Hub City. “We can get full retail price for our press titles here,” Teter told me, “versus giving up 60 percent at the B&N across town.”

Just as important, the store serves as a literary nexus that local residents are eager to support. Membership donations, offered at the register, have increased from 300 to 600 over the past year. Local writers hang out and browse. “Donors like seeing this bookshop on Main Street,” Teter said. “Plus sales in the second half of 2011 are up 8 percent over the same period last year, so we’re happy.” From what she can tell, Hub City represents an entirely new model: the bookstore as the public face of a nonprofit that also publishes and offers writing programs.

The leap into publishing by indies can be seen as the literary equivalent of the locavore movement. It not only emphasizes local writers, and local subjects, but also asks residents to support a local business with their dollars.

Teter is under no illusion about the forces arrayed against independent bookstores, not the least of which is the rise of electronic books. But she, along with her compatriots, is cautiously optimistic that small-scale publishing can be part of the answer, by providing an alternative to traditional publishers and Amazon, which are increasingly focused on books they can turn into national bestsellers.

As Kaplan reminded me, the true value of a great independent bookstore resides in its connection to a particular community: “If someone loves our bookstore, has been coming in for years, understands what we’re trying to do, and you can put a great book in their hands that was published by our store, I mean, who’s going to say no to that?”

Almost immediately, I received this: Did you just call me a whore?

I frantically thumbed my reply, making a couple dozen errors on my way to this gem: nosorrydontknowhowtotext.

It never occurred to me simply to call the number and speak to the human who sent the message. That seemed somehow too forward. If my interlocutor had wanted to talk on the phone, after all, he or she would have called.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the texter in question turned out to be my editor at Salon. (Hi, Sarah!) She has not texted me again.

Now look: I am not one of those cranky old Luddites who greets every new technological innovation as another chink in the armor of civility. Nor am I seeking to indict, or inflame, the growing legion of texters. I certainly understand the appeal of text messages. It’s a form of communication that suits the American lust for efficiency. Why engage in a whole awkward, messy human conversation if all you need to do is transfer information, or a quick anodyne sentiment?

I also realize that people who are younger than me (people who don’t, for instance, remember a time when Apple was a record label) have grown up communicating primarily by typing into machines. To them, it feels more natural to use little blips of prose than to speak directly, in real time, on a telephone.

But it is worth pointing out that in the past few years the culture of communication in the developed world has undergone a pretty radical shift. You either text, or you don’t text — and the fault line between these two camps grows ever wider.

We’ve now reached the point where texters feel empowered to be openly hostile to those of us who can’t, or won’t, text. Email is, to them, a laughably primitive medium, akin to smoke signals. And thus I keep hearing the same condescending four-word refrain: “Why didn’t you text?” Or sometimes, “Check your texts, dude.”

The world of texters is sort of sorry I missed that rendezvous and that magazine assignment and that free ticket to the Red Sox. But mostly, they’re sorry I’m a sad loser who doesn’t text.

A few weeks ago, for instance, I visited friends in Portland. I kept calling them on their cellphones, and they kept replying with text messages. I eventually met up with one of them at a bar. But before we could even speak a word to one another, we had to deal with this accumulated tension.

And thus I began (as I so often do) by asking just the wrong question. “Don’t you ever talk on the phone anymore?”

My friend narrowed her eyes. I suspected she was furious. I certainly was. But rather than telling me to go to hell, she turned to a third friend and explained, “He doesn’t text.” What struck me was her tone. It wasn’t cruel so much as pitying. She might as well have said, “He doesn’t drive.” Or perhaps, “He doesn’t know how to read.”

I continue to receive text messages from people who clearly know me. Mostly, they’re writing because my name has somehow come up in conversation. It’s a sweet impulse, in other words. But because I only see their message and a phone number (since they’re apparently not close enough to be saved in my contact list) I usually have no idea who they are.

Weeks, or sometimes months later, when I see them again, they’ll ask if I ever got their “message,” and I’ll say no, because I assume they mean a phone message. Then they think I’m lying. And I’m left to ponder why they’re guilt-tripping me. And really, the best result I can hope for is that we reach that familiar text/non-texter impasse, which ends with them asking, “Dude, why don’t you text?”

In the grand scheme of things this is penny-ante stuff. The reason I find the text revolution so dispiriting has more to do with the actual human dynamics of our culture.

By which I mean that there’s a growing tribe of people whose bodies may be situated in a public setting, such as seated across from you in a restaurant, but whose brains and heart belong to a device.

This was true in the age of the Palm Pilot, oh so many years ago. But the Palm Pilot geeks (my brother was one of them) were still sort of outliers. You could listen to them go on about how they’d just organized their entire event calendar and cross referenced it with their budget spreadsheet and the whole thing was, you know, kind of cute in a wonky way.

Then came the BlackBerry vanguard. But that seemed limited to frantic and overachieving business people.

With the advent of smart phones, I often feel the entire culture is suffering from a perpetual and pervasive case of attention deficit disorder.

By which I mean that when I’m talking with someone, I’m also, implicitly, competing with their device, and with all the other people they might want to text — or tweet or chat or message — rather than talking to me.

This is especially mortifying in my creative writing classes. Students these days don’t even try to hide the fact that they are engaged in one or more text conversations during class. I see them every time I teach, glancing furtively at the device on their lap, thumbing out acronymic dispatches.

There’s really not much to say in defense of such conduct, except, I suppose, that college students have always been distracted creatures.

The fact that people my age — in our 40s, that is — are subject to the same kind of nonsense strikes me as sad. And I myself am sad when I begin to drift away from a conversation, itching to find a computer where I can check my email or surf the Net.

The turn away from phone conversations, and toward texting, is a part of this larger evolution. As a species, we’re becoming glib and skittish and nervous about intimacy.

Friends of mine who are texters have argued that I should view the practice — along with Twitter — as a turn toward the written word.

But my own impression is texts (and tweets) are pretty much the opposite of literature. They’re not about making a deep connection, or initiating a discussion, but proving our superior wit. They serve a kind of bureaucratic emotional function, by putting our consideration on the record, our flickers of affection.

I recognize this pattern from my own emailing habits, all those dashed-off one-liners that are intended simply to prove I’m a nice guy. Or at least not a jerk.

The shift from emails to texts simply accelerates the process by which people are holding their own internal lives at bay. After all, if some future editor had the misfortune of combing through an archive of your text messages, I doubt she would find much that revealed who you truly were. Instead, the record would show that you had trouble making plans, that you liked to quote characters from a particular television show, that you hoped to run into a number of folks, but wound up missing most of them.

There’s no doubt that joining the text revolution would save me time, especially now I’ve finally gotten one of those “slide” phones that has a full keyboard. But I have no plans to do so. It feels like another one of those deals where I’m trading convenience for a tiny part of my soul.

You have to draw the line somewhere, after all. So I’m going to keep leaving those awkward voice mails for my friends — and ignoring the snippy texts they send, inferring that I should stop leaving them awkward voice mails.

I’m not trying to be a jerk. I’m just trying to hold on to a few of the inefficiencies that make us human.

This went on every single day for months. I wasn’t frightened so much as terribly sad and confused. I was an insecure kid, often excluded by my brothers, and therefore hypersensitive to social neglect. I spent weeks puzzling over what I’d done wrong. I cried in my room, not just at Sean’s abrupt and unexplained scorn, but also at my own cowardice. Because, of course, I never said anything about this stuff — not to my parents or brothers, or teachers, or anyone. I felt ashamed of being picked on, and that shame served as my consent.

Above: The author, at 12

Even after metal shop ended and we moved on to high school and became friendly again, I never confronted Sean about his cruelty. But I also never forgot it. And, like every other bullied kid on earth, I spent more hours than I’d care to admit fantasizing about a day of reckoning.

Here, I suppose, is where the wonders of the Internet enter the picture. They are what allowed me to track down Sean Lynden in a matter of seconds, and to send him an email asking if I could interview him about our time together in that metal shop class, and specifically my memories of his bullying.

I hadn’t seen Sean since our high school graduation, nearly 30 years ago. I’d gone on to become a writer and teacher in the Boston area. All I knew about him was that he still lived in California and worked for a venture capital firm. I was certain that he’d decline my request. But I’d underestimated him. He wrote back:

Hey Steve — happy to talk. Your story is interesting as I honestly don’t remember that. Then again, given human nature I find it easy to believe that I may have forgotten or purged a memory where I was the villain.

A few days later, we talked by phone. What follows is an abridged version of our conversation. (I’ve changed a few names, at Sean’s request.)

So, like I said, I wanted to talk about this brief, intense period of time when — and I realize this is a memory, so it’s totally subjective — but it felt like you really hated me.

Really?

Yeah. It was mostly in this metal shop class we took together.

I definitely remember taking that metal shop class in eighth grade. And I was thinking about it, since you sent that original email, and I do remember being in a relationship with someone where I was the bully or the dominant, because I remember feeling that. But I never would have put two and two together and thought it was you.

I had this sense of being totally frozen out. And it was clear, or it seemed clear to me, that you were calling the shots. You were the alpha of that group.

It’s funny you would say that, because this was around the time that Billy Dempsey entered the picture –

Yeah, I remember Billy coming up to me at the lockers, I think you were there for this, and threatening to kick my ass.

I don’t remember that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The thing is, we had this very tortured relationship where I spent the entire time trying to prove myself to him. Billy was athletically more gifted than me and he was fearless and willing to get into fights with anybody, whereas I always saw myself as an egghead nerd. So it’s quite possible, I could easily see, if there was an opportunity for me to prove to Billy that I was his equal in terms of being the macho guy I would have grabbed at it.

I spent years trying to figure out what I’d done to make you angry, and why you’d be angry at me specifically. This will probably sound crazy, but I wondered if part of the reason, unconsciously anyway … look, I don’t want to step over any boundaries, but what I recall was that your parents had gone through a divorce.

Right. It was right around then, seventh or eighth grade, when they separated.

So I developed this theory that you turned on me because you saw me as coming from this happy family where the parents were still married.

[Pause] You know, it’s possible, I mean, I don’t remember that specifically, but I’m sure I was going through all kinds of feelings and frustrations during that time period. But there’s a yin and yang to the situation. Because I grew up in a family with two sisters who were much older than me. And I remember from elementary school on that I had a hard time making friends. So I don’t think I would have gone after you just because you had the happy family. It would have been more the other way around: that if by bullying you I could actually get what I wanted — the brothers, the friends, the whole thing — then, I could easily see myself doing that, because I still find myself going out of my way to be someone I don’t think I really am to impress people. As sad as this will sound, I’ve always struggled to be more popular than I am.

The popular jock?

Yeah. Like Jim Meaney. Remember him?

Of course.

I can still remember watching him, the big soccer star, the guy who got all the girls, and telling myself: “Don’t be jealous of this guy. This is as good as it’s going to get for him.” But everyone wants to be Jim Meaney in high school.

One other thing I should mention, there are different kinds of bullying and harassment at every different age. But you would not be the first person to accuse me of verbal or mental bullying. Actually, there’s a woman I work with who, half-jokingly, calls me a bully, just because of the kinds of jokes I make, and because of the way I handle myself in arguments. And as you know, because you’ve always been a funny guy, too, once you find something that works — you make a joke, “Hey, look at Almond wearing that ugly shirt!” and everyone laughs — you go back to that well. Very quickly that can spiral out of control. And it isn’t necessarily that I like or dislike you. It’s just that I can make myself look good by making you look bad and you don’t always care, especially as a teenager, who you hurt along the way.

It’s weird talking to you about this so many years later, because I always felt like there was this split in your personality that I identified with. On one hand, you could be competitive and snide, even a little vicious. But that was more like a cover for this more introspective insecure guy.

Oh, definitely. And part of that, too … you know it’s funny. If, like, you were advising one of your writing students you would never come up with such a hackneyed artifice, but if you think about where all this was happening, it was in metal shop. Remember metal shop? You had kids making throwing stars in the corner, all these big machines. It was like center court for the whole junior high school male machismo ideal. And part of it could be that you got picked out because you were safe. If I’d teased Tony Miletello he probably would have kicked my frickin’ ass after school. But you and I both knew it wasn’t going anywhere physically. We just weren’t those kinds of guys.

I was totally inept with those machines. Actually, for months after that class, one of my eyes would get red and tear up. My dad finally took me to a specialist, who used this very powerful microscope and he found this tiny little shard of metal that had gotten in my eye from one of those machines. And for me — you want to talk about sentimental literary metaphors? — but for me, what happened between us in that class was something I carried around for years, like a little shard of metal in my eye. I’m amazed that I never had the guts to say, like, “What was going on, man? Why’d you do that to me?” But I guess I was afraid if I brought it up at all it would make me seem like a wimp.

Honestly, what I remember is later on, in high school, when we were kind of friends. You remember that time your dad took us to see “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex,” that Woody Allen movie? I’ll never forget that, because we were, like, these prepubescent kids and suddenly there were these boobs on-screen.

I have no recollection of that whatsoever, though it does sound like something my dad would totally do.

After the movie we went to get ice cream at Swensen’s, and I still think about that because it was the most awkward half-hour of my life.

You know, one thing I was always curious about, because I remember hanging out with your dad, too, was why you didn’t live with your mom after the divorce.

She did have custody initially. But the issue with my mom, she was working these weird jobs, like the graveyard shift at Hewlett-Packard, and I remember she also worked at Jack-in-the-Box. And my dad would sometimes stop by in the afternoon and there would be no groceries in the house. I was this absolute latchkey kid. So my dad finally said, “Look, I’m moving back in, because Sean needs to have a parent around.” And my mom moved out. That was the break. I mean, I was 12 years old. I wasn’t going to leave my house and go live in some apartment in another town. To my mom, that meant I had chosen my dad over her. But I was just along for the ride.

You seemed like this motherless child to me.

That was true. I still don’t speak to my mom, to this day. My sisters have struck up a relationship with her. But I have two 5-year-old twins and my mom has never seen them. That’s a topic for another conversation probably.

Yeah. Wow.

Look, I really have to go. But I just want to say, even though I don’t really remember it, I definitely apologize for being a dick.

End note: Obviously, I forgive Sean Lynden. In fact, there’s a lot I didn’t include in this interview that suggests how tough it must have been for Sean growing up. Whatever grief he put on me, all those years ago, he came by honestly.

The panic merchants of the Fourth Estate have done much in recent years to sell us various lurid bullying narratives, all of them rendered as compact dramas of good versus evil, and most ending in violence. This is how we, as a culture, like our cruelty served. But the question of why one kid, or a group of kids, decides to bully another kid is complicated. The tyranny resides both in circumstances and psychology. Behind every bully story, I mean, there’s a whole system of damage.

What happened between me and Sean Lynden is an example of the emotional abuse troubled adolescents inflict on each other all the time. Talking with Sean after all these years, what strikes me is how, in crucial ways, we were the same kid: lonely youngest siblings who cracked jokes to mask how sad we were most of the time, geeks who turned on each other to prove ourselves worthy of the jocks at the top of the pecking order. In a kinder world, we would have been best friends.

He stepped into a room and a great calm settled, like the veil a bride might wear, something to lure and disguise, and this was the sensation of balance, of knowing whom to embrace, whom to shun, whom to dismiss into the night with its perfume of balsam and gasoline.

How, then, to explain the feelings stirred in him by Leezza? The lurch beneath his ribs? The moist trembling of his tongue?

He had been married before: first to his soldiers, then to his wives, then to history. He had absorbed the roar of sand and bombs. This was not like that. It was something to do with his soul, a disturbance at the delicate border where his body joined his soul.

He had met her, the first and only time, in a room choked with myrrh. He stood in a corner and she walked toward him, smiling professionally. The cameramen shone their cruel light. She was thinner than she appeared on the television. Her eyes were lighter than expected. Her hair had been carefully straightened and smoothed, like a fine wool.

Much had been made of protocol. She reached to touch his hand and he demurred. This was the term used in the news reports. Demurred.

Later, he had taken her to his private kitchen for iftar, spiced goat and rice, a dish from his childhood. The two of them, and Tarek, who translated. They ate from a common bowl. In the fleeting moment before she applied a napkin, her lips shone.

For two hours and more he told her his ideas, made his little speeches, but neither of them listened. Something else was happening. She looked up at him and he felt like a boy again, wandering after the animals, dreaming of his father’s gun.

She smiled at him and he studied her teeth, the famous aperture that led to the interior of her mouth. He smelled the sour musk of her life on planes, her practical soap, toner. Then she exhaled and he breathed in more deeply and had to steady himself.

Tarek asked if he was feeling all right.

“Of course,” he said.

He wanted to ask the young fool if he had ever seen fingers so graceful.

Afterward, Safia found him sitting before the very bowl, staring at the cushion where she had sat.

“What were you doing, mooning over this black harlot?”

He thought for a moment to strike her, then laughed.

It became a little joke between them.

“Will you make a ghazal for her? Or perhaps she is your djinn.”

It was no joke. He had become unbalanced.

He thought about this now, with all the disruptions, the moving from one place to another. Had she willed this upon him from afar? Was she that powerful? His life was underground now, with the martyrs and the cowards. The young guards who clung to him like fierce daughters, his sad Green Nuns. They wept when he looked at them, and so he had to look away.

His advisors lied to him with the extravagance of poets, then choked on fumes of cordite. In a rash moment, while the others slept, he thought to send a diplomatic cable: Come to me, smooth child of Africa. Let us find a valley where the wicked will not enter, between the high dunes of Ubari where the stars riot at night.

But he lacked the courage to wake the necessary personnel.

Perhaps he should have been a poet, and died well under the boot of another man. At least then he would have had words to offer her, a tribute to her treasonous beauty.

There was so much to make him feel foolish now. He scurried about like a mole, his wife and sons fleeing in all directions, the soil of his homeland dank with blood.

Was there a place for love outside of history? A place where Leezza could show him the dark length of her body? He lay for a moment, listening to the missiles, the earth sneezing dust. He wondered about heaven.