Johnny Case in Wonderland . . . hopelessly adrift in popular culture

Many years ago Christopher Hitchens gave a lecture at Bedford Falls U.  The Politics Department brought him to campus for our annual Scoop Jackson Lecture, for which he gave a presentation based on what he argued were the war crimes of Henry Kissinger.  After his talk, which was amazing, he took Q & A, and he was as forthcoming a speaker as I’ve ever seen.  The Q & A went on for well over an hour, and I have no doubt it would’ve gone on until no one had any more questions had he not been cut off by a colleague of mine.  That was my first glimpse of his innate generosity.  The next morning he was due to fly back home to Washington, D.C.  As soon as I found out he was speaking on campus, I had volunteered to drive him to the airport in Tri-Cities, WA, which is a good 60 miles away.  This meant that I had to get up super early in the morning to get him out of here on time for his flight, but I didn’t care as I was delighted to have a chance to spend an hour or more with one of my literary heroes. 

I introduced myself to him after his talk so he’d know who I was, and then met him at the appointed time the next morning.  I was incredibly intimidated.  I was (and am) a long time Vanity Fair subscriber and had been reading his pieces for as long as he’d been writing for the magazine.  I didn’t always agree with him, but I always loved reading his stuff; he is without a doubt the fiercest writer I’ve ever read.  He was unflinchingly honest and had not the slightest ounce of fear when it came to filleting someone he thought deserved it.  His writing was muscular, convincing, and erudite, but I think what doesn’t get said enough about his work is that he was absolutely hilarious.  I think of him as rivaled by only Mark Twain when it comes to humorists—regardless of the subject, in almost all of his pieces there were zingers and turns of phrase that made me laugh out loud.  I’ve never read one of his books—my relationship with his work has been almost exclusively through his work at Vanity Fair—but I’m pretty sure I’ve read every piece he’s ever written for the magazine.  

I have never been as excited about meeting someone as I was that morning I drove Mr. Hitchens, or Chris, as he told me to call him, to the airport.  I adored his work and I tried to talk to him about it, but he kept wanting to know more about mine.  At the time I was working on a project that analyzed the likenesses between the contemporary porn industry and the classical Hollywood studio system.  Frank Rich had just published a big piece on porn in the NY Times and we’d both read it and I had a lot to say about it, and so did he.  He had a lot to say about Rich as well for that matter, and also about the Bush administration’s Justice Department under John Ashcroft, which unbeknownst to both of us had been surreptitiously preparing to launch an assault on the pornography industry that would get sidetracked by larger events. 

I was a young assistant professor who had yet to accomplish anything who wanted nothing more than to be able to talk to one of his literary idols about his work, but when we got to the airport, which occurred in the blink of an eye, I realized we’d ended up talking about my work almost the whole drive.  How sweet of him was it to do that?  When we got there, it was hard not to notice that there didn’t seem to be as many cars in the parking lot as there normally were.  We parked and I walked in with him, wanting to make sure he got off okay.  We went through the two sliding glass double-doors and it was like driving into a surreal Nevada ghost town on Highway 50.  There wasn’t anyone in there but a couple of cops, a few people sitting in the check-in area watching the TV, and a lone girl working the counter.  It was eery.  Not knowing what the deal was, we looked at each other with eyes askance as Mr. Hitchens dragged the luggage he refused to let me carry to the counter to check-in.  And then, as he would shortly thereafter write, “‘Look at that!’ said the chubby blonde girl at the United Airlines ticket counter where I was struggling, as she pointed over my shoulder at the airport TV screen.  ‘That’ was the slow-motion collapse of the second tower of the World Trade Center, while it briefly held its shape, even while crumbling to atoms, and resembled a peeled banana sculpted from smoke before dissolving into eddies of filth.  The girl was laughing, partly from nerves.  Other people in the departure lounge were confessing guilt as they watched greedily to see again the long shot of the plane arcing into the building, and the plume of red and gold flame.  One knew objectively that this lovely projectile was packed with shrieking or frozen captives, but one also knew that this was an image to which the mind would recur, and recur again.” 

That moment of abject horror that Mr. Hitchens and I shared on the morning of September 11, 2001 is one I’ll never forget.  I wasn’t alive when Kennedy was assassinated, but I know every one who was knows exactly where they were and what they were doing and that’s certainly the case for me as concerns that horrible day.  Neither of us had watched the news that morning and we had talked a blue streak rather than listen to the radio en route to the airport, so we didn’t have a clue about what had happened.  We found out the hard way as our first inkling of that morning’s events was seeing the second tower drop.  It was clear pretty quickly that he wasn’t going anywhere, so after he got in touch with his family to make sure they were okay, there was nothing else to do but go back to Bedford and wait until planes were flying again, which, as it turned out, took awhile.  He told me to go where he could get some liquor first thing, and I had to tell him that in Washington the liquor business was controlled by the state and that their stores wouldn’t be open for another two hours at least.  I felt like an idiot telling a grown man he couldn’t buy liquor, but it was true.  We got back to Bedford and went to a super market so he could get some wine and then stopped at a sandwich shop for a bite to go before heading back to my house and waiting for the liquor store to open. 

We ate our sandwiches and I drank the wine with him—I remember distinctly that it was L’Ecole No. 41’s Schoolhouse Red—and then we went to the liquor store and bought two bottles of Johnny Walker Black.  We got back to my house and he said he needed to write something and asked if I had a computer he could use.  I told him I did and that he was of course welcome to use it.  He asked me if I wanted a drink and as it was both well before noon and at the time I hadn’t yet come around to the joys of scotch, I told him I didn’t think so.  It was the first time I saw a flash of his famous temper.  He was clearly annoyed with me and said something about it being rude to let a guest drink alone, and I quickly recanted and said I’d love to have a drink with him.  He grabbed two pint glasses from my cupboard and filled them both about a half inch from the top.  He then put the slightest of splashes of soda in both.  “Do you know why I added the soda?” he asked me with deadly seriousness.  I didn’t, but I didn’t want to seem like a rube, so I thought about it for a moment and the noticeable silence made me feel like a bigger moron than I would’ve had I just said no to begin with.  So finally I said “no,” and he broke out in an impish grin and said, “because it heightens the payload.”  We adjourned to my front porch so he could smoke, which he did like a 40’s noir anti-hero, and he proceeded to knock back his pint glass of scotch in about 5 minutes flat.  He made Don Draper look like a choir boy and it was overwhelming to see him in action live.  I am well known around these parts as a man who can hold his liquor, but I’ve still never seen anything like the damage that man could do in short order to a bottle of booze. 

My computer was in the basement of the house I lived in at the time and for the next several hours every 45 minutes or so Mr. Hitchens would come upstairs and pour himself another pint glass of scotch with a splash of soda and sit on the front porch and smoke cigarettes and talk to me.  I nursed that one pint he poured for me all day long and I was on my lips about halfway through it, so for me the last part of the glass was simply maintenance.  He finished the first bottle and ended up a good piece into the second one before we parted ways later that evening.  We talked about everything imaginable and although my memories of the specifics of what exactly was said are understandably dim, what I do remember is how funny he was, how generous and kind and quick to laugh, even as he was in the midst of writing the piece I quoted above, which would be titled “We’re Still Standing” and published the next day, September 12, 2001, in The Evening Standard of London.  When he finished the essay he asked me to help him send it via email to the paper, which I did, but not before asking—for god only knows what reason—if he had spell checked it yet.  His visage turned dark and stern and he tersely said, “I don’t need spell check.”  We got the piece off and his good spirits returned almost immediately and he didn’t seem to hold my inadvertently insulting him against me, for which I was incredibly grateful.  Not long afterwards he left, passed off to one of what would end up being a chain of colleagues who would make sure he was well situated until he was able to depart several days hence.

We stayed in touch via email for awhile after that but eventually, as often happens, we lost track of one another, but I have to believe he never forgot me because, after all, how do you forget the person you spent 9/11 with?  And I wouldn’t have forgotten him regardless, as he was the first famous person I’d ever met, and a personal hero to boot.  I’ve subsequently had the good fortune to meet and spend quality time with a number of well-known filmmakers whose work I revere, but I’ve never for a second been intimidated by the experience.  After all, once you’ve asked one of the world’s great essayists if he’s used spell check yet you have to believe the dumbest moment you’re ever going to have with a public figure is out of the way.  And now the monthly ritual of opening up my Vanity Fair and thumbing through it to see if he’s got an essay in it, one of the great joys of the last 20 years of my life, is gone forever.   The literary world just became a lot more dull with his passing.  Thank you, Mr. Hitchens, for lighting the way as long you did.