 |
||||||
|
 |
 |
|
SUB: You appear to be a major John Lennon fan -- you even have him tattooed on your arm. What's the big attraction? PZB: I'm not very good at explaining my obsessions. If I could explain them in a few tidy sentences, I don't know if I would feel the need to write about them. But as I discuss in the afterword to PLASTIC JESUS, I became interested in John just after his death in 1980. My mother and I were visiting relatives in Kentucky for Christmas, and I was bored out of my mind and started reading my mom's copy of Newsweek: the John Lennon memorial issue. Something about it grabbed my imagination. I bought a few Beatles records, then bought a few more, and eventually plastered my room with Beatles posters and became a teenage hippie Beatlemaniac. Quite an anomaly in a rural North Carolina high school in the early eighties. John was the latest and best in a long line of attitude-driven badasses I admired. He inspired me to start an underground newspaper, reconsider my own political and social beliefs, experiment with drugs (something I'm quite happy with, thanks), and generally become an in-your-face rebel quite a few years earlier then I might have done otherwise. SUB: You don't seem like an in-my-face rebel. You seem very quiet and polite, actually. PZB: Yes, people who meet me at conventions and signings sometimes express surprise that I'm not a raving bitch -- which I think says more about their manners than it does about mine, by the way -- and even seem faintly disappointed that I am, well, nice. I've always tried to be nice to people who were nice to me. But if someone starts shit with me, I don't let it go. And back in high school, I had people starting shit with me every single day. In the seventh grade, I switched to a school where I didn't know anyone, and managed to fit in for a couple of months before they smelled the weirdness on me. I don't know what it was. I wasn't dressing differently or anything like that yet. But I made friends with an Indian girl who was considered weird, I wrote stories that weren't for English class: little things that added up. Pretty soon it was shit every day, shit on the Carrie White level. But I couldn't just take it and let it build up like Carrie did; I started fighting back. Of course, most of what I did at first only hurt me. I read a book about gay rights on the school bus. When physically attacked, I fought against kids who were bigger and stronger than me. I told the redneck kids who hated me that their lives were going to suck and mine was going to be wonderful. Eventually, when I started my newspaper, I realized I did have allies in that school. There were punk kids and other disaffected types who'd had no idea that I was even out there until I started publishing this little rag called The Glass Goblin (after a Harlan Ellison story). Things were better after that. The kids who'd always hated me still did, but at least now they hated me for something I was saying instead of because they didn't like my face or whatever. SUB: All that because of John Lennon? PZB: All that because of John Lennon, and Harlan Ellison, and Hawkeye on M*A*S*H and Garry Trudeau and the movie "The Boys In the Band" and a militant dyke I knew in Chapel Hill and a million other things. My influences at the time were nothing if not diverse. I was pliant and insatiably curious. I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea how it was going to happen. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Feel free to e-mail us your questions and comments |