Hella Nation - Evan Wright [7]
Kenny arranged for me to meet with Wallace in Las Vegas and serve as his guide. When Wallace published his feature, “Neither Adult, nor Entertainment,” in Premiere (“Big Red Son” in the essay collection Consider the Lobster), I appeared in it under the pseudonym he bestowed, “Harold Hecuba.” I spent several days trying unsuccessfully to decipher the meaning of his reference to Hecuba, torturing myself over my inability to decode the meaning of the great author’s reference. Finally I called Wallace. He was stunned that I didn’t get who Harold Hecuba was. “He’s, you know, the Phil Silvers character who guest stars on Gilligan’s Island,” Wallace explained. “I thought you would get it. You don’t feel bad about it?”
“Why should I?”
“You shouldn’t,” Wallace said. “Hecuba’s not stuck on the island like everybody else. He gets off of it. Makes it back to the mainland, I think, that is, if I have my Gilligan’s Island references right.”
I would make it off of porn island within a year. On my last day at Hustler , MacDonell entered my office and closed the door. He regarded me from behind his thick black-framed Elvis Costello glasses. For the briefest instant his face seemed to quiver with emotion. “I just wanted to say, by leaving here today you have completely failed me,” he said. “I believe you will fail every employer you have in the future.” It was the standard, warm Hustler farewell.
Though I left the island, I’m not sure I ever made it to the mainland.
The sense of disconnectedness I carried as a result of both my personal pathologies and my years of employment in an outcast industry seemed to be an asset in my reporting for Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair. Whether my subjects were the tree-dwelling anarchists of “Wingnut’s Last Day on Earth,” the San Francisco attorneys who threw away their ties to their community by forming a bizarre family with a prison inmate in “Mad Dogs & Lawyers,” or the Hollywood über-agent who fled his lucrative career to make pro-war films in Iraq in “Pat Dollard’s War on Hollywood,” most shared a similar sense of being exiles from the mainstream of American culture. Even the young troops I profiled in “Not Much War, but Plenty of Hell” had a profound awareness of their separateness—of values, of culture—from their peers at home.
The editors whom I worked with often described my subjects not just as outsiders, but as people who were “disenfranchised.” The assumption seemed to be that most of my subjects would have chosen to participate in the mainstream if they hadn’t been somehow shut out of it. While I did write about some, such as young Russian immigrant Konstantin Simberg in “The Bad American,” who were desperate to reach the mainland of the American dream, most of the people I encountered in writing the essays in Hella Nation were rejectionists. They gravitated to subcultures because they didn’t want to participate in the dominant culture. Many of the troops I would meet serving in the front lines of America’s wars in the Middle East disagreed with the common stereotype that they had joined the military because they had been forced to by socioeconomic circumstances. They insisted they had joined as much for opportunity as to escape the inanities, or as some put it, the “self-centeredness” of civilian life.
Americans are repeatedly told