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Celebrity junkie
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Oct. 19, 1999 |
"Permanent Midnight" was a career Catch-22: It rescued Stahl from the abyss of his life as a washed-up TV writer/heroin addict, but it was also an albatross -- Stahl's vocation for the last four years has been "ex-junkie.'' Now, however, more than two decades after receiving the Pushcart, Stahl's finally published his first novel, "Perv: A Love Story." It's a disorienting, disconcerting, hilarious coming-of-age tale set in Stahl's native Pittsburgh in the early 1970s. Stahl has also recently collaborated with Ben Stiller on a pair of screenplays and is working on a TV pilot with ex-Devo member Mark Mothersbaugh. "Writing novels is an expensive habit; a guy has to find a way to pay for it," he says. Stahl spoke with Salon Books at an Indian restaurant in his Los Feliz, Calif., neighborhood. How's your liver doing? I heard it was pretty damaged from the hepatitis C that you contracted during your junk-using days.. Also Today "Perv -- A Love Story" It writes me from Ohio occasionally. It's doing fine. It's met other livers. It's having a ball. It's not in great shape, but I still think I dodged a big bullet. Any time you get a terminal disease it forces you to be healthier. Yeah, I'm totally fucked, but I'm not one of those people who feels doomed by it. It's just kind of a drag. One of the funny things about "Permanent Midnight" is that even through your hardest-core drug using, you were always health-conscious. I never wanted to drink alcohol. I always thought that was bad, so when I got off of heroin by doing crack, I would drink Robitussin-DM, which means I basically spray-painted the toilet blue about 75 times a day. But I didn't want to drink, because I knew that was bad. I had my standards. What was it like seeing your life pass before your eyes on a movie screen? There are no words. I was relieved that Ben Stiller did a great job. It's inherently ... I don't think there's any gland in the human body that prepares you for seeing celebrities reenacting the worst moments of your life 9 feet high. Was there stuff that you kept for yourself that wasn't included in the book? There's stuff you don't remember. Even with ["Perv"], people say, "Is it autobiographical?" It's like, they flatter me. I don't remember what went down. I work on a very visceral level -- I might not have been in the back seat of a car having my dick sucked by a weird hippie, but what is going through the kid's head at that moment I totally know. I totally know about being spun out and what am I supposed to do and how did I get in this apartment, who are these fucking people, what is going on. I mean, that's my youth, and a large part of my adulthood. That's just how it was for me. Didn't you used to joke at readings that you're contractually bound to use the word "heroin" each time you appear in public? All true. Or, when you're interviewed and they ask if they can see your tracks. On the BBC they asked if they could see my tracks and I said, of course, but most of them are on my penis.
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