INTERVIEWER
So how do you get hired to write for TV without having a TV?
GARDNER
The guy who hired me was David Milch. He was what they call the showrunner—the producer who was responsible for getting all these episodes made. He had been an English professor at Yale before he got hired for this show. Milch, it had turned out, taught Fat City in his English course. So that’s how I got the call. Milch asked whether I would write an episode. This is the truth: I had ten dollars in the bank that I kept in there just so they wouldn’t close my account. He phoned up, and I said yeah. He even gave me the freedom to make up my story. I just pulled a story out of a daily newspaper, out of the Chronicle. Maybe a six-inch news story and I developed characters and the crime and all the pathos and everything. So I sent Milch this thing and he went for it big. He said, We’ll run this show and now I want to hire you as a full-time writer. I asked whether I could do it up here, in the Bay Area. And he said, No. We need you down in the office where we can talk every day and you can concentrate on writing. Which is good, because if I were writing at home, I’d be wondering what’s for dinner and would have to go out to shop or something.
INTERVIEWER
Love is depicted tragically in Fat City. Billy pines for his long-gone ex-wife. He cannot stand Oma when they’re together but is obsessed with her after they’ve broken up. Ernie marries Fay out of obligation, because she becomes pregnant. What brought you to that view of love?
GARDNER
Guys older than me seemed to have their own love problems. I had young love problems. I got married when I was twenty years old and was very romantic in my attitudes. My wife kept packing up and leaving. I was talking to my sister about it years later and said, You know she left about six or seven times. And my sister said, You’re not remembering right. She left you twenty times. She probably did. And each time was heartbreaking because she would say, That’s it! It’s over forever, I can’t live with you. And then, maybe a month later, she wanted to come back.
She wasn’t like Oma. She wasn’t a drunk. I worked at a skid row gas station and that’s where I saw a lot of women like Oma. I was nineteen or twenty when I got that job and after my shift was over I would hang out at a bar and get drunk and nobody ever asked me for an ID. And there were some of the most god-awful women in there. One woman sat a couple of stools away from me, and all of a sudden piss started running all down the side of her stool. And the bartender started yelling, “Get out of here!” and she had no reaction. She wasn’t going to leave. I don’t know why I didn’t have the guts to put that in the book.
I tended bar, too, and I remember a quarrel this couple had. I couldn’t have put their quarrel in the novel because it would’ve seemed like goofy comedy that I made up. They were opening a package from the butcher shop. There was a whole chicken with the head and feet in the bag. And they’re planning their dinner—he says, I could have that with sweet potatoes, and she says, I’m gonna rub it with garlic and all this stuff. And then they got in some kind of argument and she picked up that chicken by the feet and started smacking him, and he ran out of the bar and she’s following him smacking him with this chicken. Sometimes I wish I had put it in the book, it would’ve been a great scene in the movie.
INTERVIEWER
How long did the marriage last with the woman who left you twenty times?
GARDNER
Seven years.
INTERVIEWER
Is that the only time you’ve been married?
GARDNER
I’m trying to remember. I had a couple of long-term living-together arrangements, like marriages, but that was the only time I was legally married. The whole experience made me wonder, What’s it all about? What’s marriage all about, if the whim to leave keeps coming over someone and they leave and come back? What does it mean? Then I lived with this writer, Gina Berriault, for I can’t remember how many years. Maybe fifteen years. It seemed much more like a marriage than when I was married.
INTERVIEWER
As an amateur boxer you were a welterweight, and you still are. What is your secret, after all these years, to maintaining your fighting weight?
GARDNER
Haha! Well, I had to give up jogging a few years ago. But I did jog for thirty or forty years. I used to even go to the gym once in a while and punch the bag. I got into health food when I was about eighteen or nineteen. My sister and I became followers of a dietitian named Adelle Davis. She was into protein and vitamins. I still take maybe eight different vitamins every day. Some of them I take two of, so I probably will take about a dozen vitamins a day.
INTERVIEWER
I want to read aloud to you my favorite sentence from the book.
GARDNER
Oh good!
INTERVIEWER
Okay, here goes:
In the midst of a phantasmagoria of worn-out mangled faces, scarred cheeks and necks, twisted, pocked, crushed and bloated noses, missing teeth, brown snags, empty gums, stubble beards, pitcher lips, floppy ears, scores, scabs, dribbled tobacco juice, stooped shoulders, split brows, weary, desperate, stupefied eyes, under the lights of Center Street, Tully saw a familiar young man with a broken nose.
GARDNER
Oh boy!
INTERVIEWER
Here’s what I want to ask you. There are a lot of lists in the book, but they’re not precisely lists. They’re an accumulation of details that paint a vivid scene for the reader. Was this a conscious effort?
GARDNER
Okay. A lot of writers wouldn’t have seen all these details in their lives. But I had the gas station job at seventeen and it was a very impressionable age. I remember experiences where I just meditated for an hour before I might have written a sentence like that. I would almost translate remembering things. In the skid row bars, I saw these faces, and all their scars and mangles and everything. I don’t know why I decided I wanted to put all that in one sentence. It’s an aesthetic sense that would lead a writer to cram all that in.
A lot of people couldn’t become a writer the way I did. When I was sick with rheumatic fever, I was stuck in bed for eighteen months. I was just barely able to read. And what do you do? I must have daydreamed and daydreamed. I must’ve been making up all kinds of stories in my head. What I don’t understand is why I wasn’t the kind of writer that would have written a dozen books by now, because it seemed like fate was turning me that way.
INTERVIEWER
You wrote a book that many people think is a masterpiece. That’s one more masterpiece than most people have written in the history of the universe.
GARDNER
That sounds good.
INTERVIEWER
Does it matter to you that you haven’t written another book?
GARDNER
Oh yeah, I feel it mattering to me. There’s the wife of one of my friends, she’s a poet and he’s a novelist. She has a tendency to kind of scoff at me. She said, Only one book? I’m sensitive to that kind of stuff. I resent it and it still troubles me.
INTERVIEWER
Not everyone is meant to write a dozen books.
GARDNER
I agree with you. Writing a novel is, as you know, a demanding job. I guess everyone does the best they can. Maybe. It makes me uncomfortable. You’re not supposed to write just one book and then hang it up.
INTERVIEWER
Even though we, as readers, know that Billy and Ernie will never be contenders, they’re still sustained by their hope and illusion. At an advanced age, do you think you are still sustained by illusions?
GARDNER
Oh yeah. I’m working on a novel, yeah—that’s sustained by illusion. I have days go by where I don’t do anything. I think I could just do things like cooking, buying food, washing dishes, and it could take a whole day, you know. I don’t know what it is. It could be anything, like lack of confidence that I could do it again. But I haven’t lost everything mentally that I used to have. I’m too early in this book to want to be tied down to what it is—I had a different book in mind for a long time. But then it also seems to me that I’ve let so much time go by. I’m reaching an advanced age where I can’t just sit around and wait until I can shake this up into something wonderful. I have to do the best I can. And you know, it’s like rising to the occasion. If you planned to do something terrific, maybe the whole thing is intimidating and you don’t do it at all. Maybe a more modest ambition opens the door. Maybe you just do a good job.