I Think You're Totally Wrong Read online

  DAVID: You’re Jewish?

  CALEB: Yeah.

  DAVID: You are?

  CALEB: Persian. My grandfather was born in Iran, though my father was born in Lebanon. He’s Sephardic.

  DAVID: That’s a major surprise. Not that it particularly matters, but with a name like Caleb Powell—

  CALEB: My father’s name, at birth, was David Jamil Mizrahi. He came to America when he was two.

  DAVID: Hold the back page, as my father used to say.

  CALEB: My grandfather, his dad, Jamil Mizrahi, died when my dad was five. His mother was named Powalski and changed it to Powell. As a single woman in the 1940s, she had to fight her in-laws for custody and compromised by keeping my dad in Jewish school. Then she remarried a Catholic when my dad was nine. I’m just a quarter Jewish. Supposedly I can become an Israeli citizen based on this.

  DAVID: Do you think of yourself as Jewish in any way?

  CALEB: Not religiously. Ethnically, a little.

  DAVID: Culturally, does it resonate?

  CALEB: I’m fascinated by it. Whenever I bring it up, Terry will say, “Oh, you just want to be Jewish.” Yeah, like I want to be black, too.

  DAVID: “Caleb”: it’s such a religiously loaded name.

  CALEB: Moses sent twelve spies to Jerusalem and only Joshua and Caleb did God’s work. Joshua got an entire book. Caleb got a few lines. My father went to Jewish school, then Catholic school, and came out neither. I suppose he considers himself Christian. He says, “I know it’s silly, but I believe in God.” We rarely talk about it.

  CALEB: You ever believe in God?

  DAVID: Zero. How about you?

  CALEB: Yeah.

  DAVID: Really? Surely not now.

  CALEB: You read my novel twenty years ago. I don’t expect you to remember. It’s partly about a Christian youth who loses faith.

  DAVID: I didn’t know how autobiographical it was. What was the title again?

  CALEB: This Seething Ocean, That Damned Eagle.

  DAVID: I’m obsessed with titles, and no offense, Caleb, but that has got to be among the worst titles I’ve ever heard.

  CALEB: That’s what you said twenty years ago, too.

  CALEB: I never became serious about life until I was twenty-six or -seven. Until then I focused on art, writing, and music. Then I switched and focused on life. And the best artists focus on both.

  DAVID: Writing a book is as much an experience as falling in love.

  CALEB: If you’re a writer, you can’t focus only on life as depicted through art. Externally, you have to live, then internally create your art.

  DAVID: It doesn’t work like that. It’s the Yeats line: perfection of the life or perfection of the work, but not both. You’ve got to choose. It’s the only way to get anything done. Most people live through life. Not that many people live through art.

  CALEB: You’ve worked hard. You’ve written a lot of books.

  DAVID: People always praise me for “working hard,” but it’s the only thing I can do. You’ve immersed yourself in life much more fully than I have. You probably wish you’d written books that had been published. Whereas my portico gates slammed down a long time ago. It’s obviously a concern of mine: by focusing so much on art, have I closed myself off so completely from—

  CALEB: Yeah: the stutter, masturbation, acne, basketball heroics, the girlfriend whose diaries you read, the journalist parents who always did the “right” thing. I can’t objectively evaluate your writing because I know you, but at times it’s like you’re writing one long book.

  DAVID: It’s true of everyone. Everyone has only one—

  CALEB: Could you go a month without writing, but live extreme?

  DAVID: I’m sure I have.

  CALEB: Stupid question.

  DAVID: No, it’s an interesting question. I’m always working on a book. It’s pathological. The moment I’m finishing one book, I absolutely have to, as if I were an addict, create a windstorm around a new project.

  CALEB: Ken Kesey stopped writing because he said he wanted to live a novel rather than write a novel.

  DAVID: Such bullshit.

  CALEB: It’s partly a copout, but he has a point. I wanted to be a writer in college. I wrote one novel, kept rewriting it in your class, and then I said I wanted to live a novel before writing one. It’s not like I completely stopped, but writing took a backseat. I’ve written four books, along with stories and essays that could make another, but from the age of twenty-three to thirty-five I stopped writing creatively. Writing was always the goal of experience—traveling to forty countries, learning several foreign languages, spending eight years overseas. I kept a journal in the UAE and you could count that as a book. If I didn’t write, I compensated by reading. I read compulsively.

  DAVID: How old are you now?

  CALEB: Forty-three.

  DAVID: So what is your larger point?

  CALEB: Just that I think you’re partly right: writing is so hard, you can’t compromise. Sometimes I wish I’d chosen art. I submit to a lit mag and a grad student editor half my age tells me I’m backing into sentences with too many subjunctive clauses.

  DAVID: You remind me at times of my college friend Azzan, who was born in Israel, grew up in Queens. Big man on campus: walked around with a khaki-colored, military-looking jacket and a purposeful stride. Compared to the other intellectuals at Brown, he seemed so assured. A ladies’ man, a year or two older. I admired him, even idolized him to a degree. He always said he was going to become a writer. He spent junior year abroad, had a torrid affair in Paris. Got a Rhodes scholarship and at Oxford focused mainly on boxing. He went here, went there, was always saying, “Oh, I’m just gathering material for my great novel. You can’t write without living your life.” I’ve always thought it was his mistake, substituting experience for writing, but maybe it’s my mistake. Maybe he didn’t really want to be a writer in the first place. He’s nearly sixty now and now he’s ready to write, but it’s too late for him to become a serious writer.

  CALEB: What are you trying to say?

  DAVID: Your writing is interesting, and getting more so, but—

  CALEB: It could be better.

  DAVID: It’s stuff you should have been doing twenty years ago.

  DAVID: The Trip was originally six half-hour episodes on BBC, which later got edited down into a two-hour movie. I much prefer the show, but this is the movie—hope you like it.

  Steve Coogan: Hey, Rob, Steve.… Are you free?…

  Rob Brydon: Why me?

  Steve: Well Mischa is unavailable. You’ve met Mischa, haven’t you?… I’ve asked other people, but they’re all too busy. So, you know, do you wanna come?… There’s a small fee, which I’ll split with you, sixty-forty.

  • • •

  Rob: It’s 2010. Everything’s been done before. All you can do is do something someone’s done before but do it better or differently.

  Steve: To some extent, that’s correct.

  DAVID: To some extent, that’s incorrect. If I believed that, I’d slit my wrists.

  CALEB: I agree. Nothing is exactly the same. Every work of art is both original and influenced by other works. You want this flip at the end, like at the end of Wallace and Lipsky, but maybe I come out of this more convinced that I’m right and you’re wrong.

  DAVID: Hmm. Not sure we self-consciously say that we’re trying to do all that, do we? Is that gonna work?

  Magda the Hotel Clerk: Sorry, we only have one double room for you.…

  Rob: We can share, that’s all right.

  Steve: No we can’t.…

  Rob: This is a huge bed. We could easily share this bed.

  Steve: It might be huge to you.…

  Rob: What’s the problem, anyway? What do you think’s gonna happen?

  • • •

  Mischa: (on phone with Coogan) You think I’m gonna go to Las Vegas and become a prostitute?

  • • •

  Rob: (to his wife, Sally, on phone) Cou
ld I interest you in some rather salacious … I’m not wearing any pajama bottoms …

  • • •

  Rob: Don’t you find it exhausting, still running around going to parties and chasing girls at your age?

  Steve: I don’t run around and go to parties. I don’t run around and chase girls.

  Rob: You do …

  • • •

  Steve: Do you find it exhausting looking after a baby?

  Rob: Yes …

  • • •

  Man on Street: Are you Steve Coogan?

  Steve: Yes, I am.

  Man: Aha!

  Steve: Aha.

  Man: All right, man. How you doing?

  Steve: Fine, thanks.…

  Man: Can I ask you a question?

  Steve: Yeah, of course, absolutely.

  Man: Is it true what I read about you?

  Steve: What do you read about me?

  Man: That you’re a bit of a cunt.

  Steve: Well, where did you read that?

  Man: It’s in today’s newspaper. Here, look. (Holds up a newspaper with the headline “COOGAN IS A CUNT”)

  Steve: Uh, whoever said that doesn’t know me very well.

  Man: Are you sure? (Unfolds newspaper with full headline: “COOGAN IS A CUNT SAYS DAD”)

  • • •

  Steve: I’m sure people think we’re gay.

  Rob: I don’t care.

  • • •

  Rob: (at home after the trip) Hello …

  Sally: I’ve missed you.

  • • •

  Steve walks around his empty apartment, looks through his mail, sighs. Piano music.

  • • •

  Rob: (playing with his daughter, then sharing dinner with Sally) … delightful homecomings …

  • • •

  Steve: (watching a video of himself with Mischa, then leaving a message on his agent’s voice mail) I’m not going to do the HBO pilot … I’ve got kids … Bye.

  • • •

  Rob: (hugging Sally) I don’t like being away from you.

  • • •

  Steve is alone in his apartment.

  • • •

  Film ends. Credits.

  DAVID: It’s pretty great, isn’t it? We’re watching the trading of skins. I love that moment when Brydon, even though he thinks of himself as a domestic man, comes on to that girl and gets rebuffed.

  CALEB: You almost want to see what would have happened.

  DAVID: The way he crawls back to his original position on the couch—it’s hard to watch.

  CALEB: He’s relieved he doesn’t have to go through with it. Did he do it because he’s not happily married?

  DAVID: To me, no. It’s because he feels pressure from Coogan to act out. Then, of course, at the end, there’s Coogan, looking forlornly at his copy of Vanity Fair.

  CALEB: “I’m not going to do the HBO pilot. I’ve got kids. Bye.”

  DAVID: It’s incredibly beautiful, but the first time I watched it I thought (and Laurie did, too) the ending was a little too easy. I wish they hadn’t oversold the pathos.

  CALEB: It’s almost a happy ending, even a moral ending, which I thought you were supposedly against.

  DAVID: I cry at Friday Night Lights.

  CALEB: Coogan chooses fatherhood. And Brydon probably feels relieved he didn’t cheat, as he returns to his wife and child.

  DAVID: I can feel Coogan’s loneliness at the end. It’s quite palpable.

  CALEB: And he realizes this. Even though his children live with his ex, he chooses them. He won’t advance his career if it means he’ll be a nonexistent father.

  DAVID: I think I’m starting to fade. I’ll see you tomorrow, Caleb.

  CALEB: Good night.

  DAY 2

  CALEB: Did you and Laurie ever discuss having a second kid?

  DAVID: Yes. In what was probably not my greatest moment, I said no.

  CALEB: No?

  DAVID: I was teaching twelve months a year—four quarters at the UW plus any visiting teaching gigs that came up—to make ends meet, and had no time to write. Now all I do is think about Natalie, but those first couple of years I wasn’t hugely loving being a parent, I must admit. And, probably most importantly, Laurie and I weren’t getting along that well.

  CALEB: What’s the age difference between you and Laurie?

  DAVID: We’re the same age. She had the famously bad formulation of “We’re not getting along that great, so let’s have a second kid.” My response was “I’m pretty ambivalent about almost everything, but one thing I’m certain about is that I don’t want a second child. I’m sorry.” I wasn’t draconian. I just said, “That’s the way I feel. How do you feel?” And she said, more or less, “I’m not a hundred percent certain, and if you’re pretty certain, I’ll yield to that.” That’s my memory; I should ask her if I’m remembering correctly. I do remember talking about it with her later, and she said, “If I had really wanted to have had another child, I would have just had one,” which at the time I remember thinking was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard. Men are apparently that manipulable. I know the conventional wisdom is that if one person, especially the woman, wants a second child, you’re supposed to say, “Aye aye, Cap’n.” I didn’t do that. It was a very selfish decision, mostly having to do with writing and a little having to do with not wanting to be paying college tuition when I was sixty-five. My feeling at the time was “Let’s raise Natalie and we’ll see where we are then, and if we wind up getting divorced, each of us’ll still be fifty-four. Not dead yet.” Pretty pathetic.

  CALEB: Did you say that to her?

  DAVID: No, but I remember Laurie saying at one point that if we didn’t have Natalie to connect us, she didn’t know why we would stay married. For a variety of reasons that I can go into if you want, I now feel very happily married, and I couldn’t imagine not being with Laurie, but like any marriage, our marriage has had its ups and downs, and that was undoubtedly its—

  CALEB: Nadir.

  DAVID: And it wasn’t horrible; it was just one discussion. It’s one of Laurie’s best traits: she moves on. At least to me, she presents as the queen of non-regret. But if we had never had a child, the marriage would almost certainly have ended.

  CALEB: That’s something you decide before you get married.

  Didn’t you talk about how many kids you wanted?

  DAVID: No.

  CALEB: How many years were you together before you got married?

  DAVID: Four years.

  CALEB: And it never came up?

  DAVID: Both of us were equally ambivalent. When it came up, we just said, “We’ll see.” I’m very “female” in wanting to talk about everything, but Laurie never wanted to talk about it. You guys had specifically agreed: three children?

  CALEB: We talked beforehand: as many as three, no more. The first two turned out well, so what the heck, we tried for a third. Terry wanted only girls. If we had a fourth, she’d want another daughter.

  DAVID: Wait—what’s wrong with the male sex?

  CALEB: She’s great with her mother. They talk daily. Her mom was only nineteen when she conceived Terry. She’s like an older sister. Both Terry’s parents are cool—quasi hippies or ex-hippies, although I don’t think that’s how they see themselves now.

  DAVID: How old are your kids?

  CALEB: Six, five, and two. Terry was, respectively, thirty-five, thirty-six, and thirty-nine when she had them. She’s a year younger.

  DAVID: Why three? Why not two or four?

  CALEB: We each are the oldest of three siblings. I’d been living in Asia up until we got married, and when we got married we immediately tried for a child. Terry was thirty-four, we didn’t want to wait, and she got pregnant almost instantly. We married in June and by September she had her twelve-week checkup. We lived in a condo. I worked construction, and I played basketball at Green Lake almost every day. I wanted to get into this basketball culture now that I was back in Seattle: make friends
, be cool.

  All summer I asked guys if they wanted to have a beer with me after playing. After an hour or two of ball, I could blow a twenty on a round or two of beers and then go home. I put my neck out. Terry would ask me about my day. And I’d tell her, “Oh, I took Darryl or Tyrone or James or Sniper to the Green Lake Tavern for a couple of beers.” And she’d say, “Who paid?” I’d say, “It was my invite.” She’d say, “They ever invite you? They’re taking advantage of you, aren’t they?” I’d tell her I didn’t care, and that I was new. If you invite, you pick up the check.

  Terry’s pregnant, and she has her three-month appointment. I’m playing basketball, and Tyrone asks me if I’m up for a beer. First time I get an invite. Hell yeah. It felt cool. We’re on court, winding down, and all of a sudden I see Terry on the sideline.

  DAVID: And she’s pregnant?

  CALEB: This is the first time she’s ever watched me play. Game ends, I go to the sideline, and she says, “I miscarried.”

  DAVID: Oh my god.

  CALEB: Tears and hugs. We go have a cup of coffee near Green Lake, and I tell her we’ll try again. She tells me we have to wait at least six weeks. They have to perform this procedure to remove the remnants of the fetus. On the way back, in the parking lot, there’s Tyrone, and he’s like, “What’s up? We gonna have that beer?” I look at Terry, and she says, “I’ll meet you at home. You do what you want.”

  DAVID: Did Tyrone know your wife had miscarried?

  CALEB: Not yet. Terry has gone to her car, and I’m thinking, well, I feel like a beer, and what more can I say? I’ve done my duty. So I go with Tyrone.

  DAVID: You’re not serious.

  CALEB: Instead of walking to a nearby tavern, we hop in his car and he drives to this mini-mart, buys a twelve-pack, goes back to the Green Lake parking lot, yells to a couple of his homeys, they get in the car, and we’re all drinking beer behind tinted windows, and then one of the guys pulls out some dope and loads a bowl. I’m thinking, gee, we’re in public, I could get busted, my wife’s home wondering where I am after a miscarriage, and I’m more worried about making contact with some dudes. This is fucked up.