Talking pretty in Manila

The word "humorist" may seem like a quaint vocation – one thinks of Will Rogers or Mark Twain – but finding humor in situations and sharing it with others is what David Sedaris does.

Writing books, plays and performing his work at public readings is also what this American humorist does. But what he really wants to be, he tells us at Global Café at Greenbelt 3, is a tips hustler.

"In America, everyone has a tip jar –when you get a cup of coffee, everywhere, they’ve got a tip jar. So I thought, okay, I’m going to have one too," Sedaris says over coffee. "So I had a tip jar on my signing table. And at first I had a cup. But the second your cup is full, people think, ‘He has enough money.’ So I said to the bookstore, ‘I want you to give me a vase.’"

After that, Sedaris hit on other money-making schemes, like renting out his chair at book signings for $20. "Then what I started doing – this is how you really make your money – you get to the bookstore two hours early… then 20 minutes before the reading, I’d go to the back of the room and say ‘I will sign your book right now for five dollars.’ And if you had a choice between waiting five hours in line or paying five dollars, anyone in their right mind would pay five dollars." On one book tour, he claims to have made $4,000.

Sedaris – in a crisp white shirt and sporting a recent haircut from Bruno’s – promised to forego the tip jar for his book signing here in Manila. But you get the impression the gay essayist will take away a lot more than just tips from the Philippines. Especially with an itinerary that includes a visit to the TV show Wowowee (where he later gave away a hundred dollars) and trips to Quiapo (where he bought a lot of beads and, for some bizarre reason, retaso potholders) and Makati Cinema Square (where he swore he didn’t buy any pirated DVDs). He’d already been to Jollibee; the name alone was orientation enough for the Paris-based author of such collections as Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day. His agent, a Filipina named Cristina Concepcion, steered him towards Manila for this Asian book tour. "I just knew that it was a place where people go to a place called Jollibee," he declared gleefully. (Sedaris had a Champ, by the way.)

The North Carolina-raised writer began reading his work on America’s National Public Radio: it was a sardonic tour de force called "The SantaLand Diaries" about his experiences working as a seasonal elf at Macy’s department store in New York City. Since then, he’s earned a Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2001, Grammy nominations, and even taken his public readings to Carnegie Hall.

Family dysfunction is a theme of Sedaris’s work. Human embarrassment and discomfort also figure in. His mastery of the grotesque – and sometimes just the gross – detail may suggest Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor or Truman Capote. But there’s something more reader-friendly about his satire: more often than not, Sedaris is the butt of his own pointed prose.

And, like any parachute journalist, it’s the funny names that light up his eyes like a pinball machine when touching down in Manila ("Oh, you’re ‘Girlie’? Is that your real name?’), the tales of Imelda Marcos, and the little cultural differences ("I’ve never met so many people who lived with their parents"). But you also sense that, someday, he’s gonna write a hell of a chapter about Manila. And you also sense that it will be fair, infused with warmth, if not total comprehension. We assure him he could easily fill a book.

During the press conference at Global, he fiddled with a woven bracelet given to him earlier by Jessica Zafra. It seemed like a prop: something to keep him focused while he entertained us just by chatting for an hour and a half. Strangely, his voice – with a gentle lisp – is not as high in person as it is on tape.

When there’s no podium to hide behind during a book reading, David Sedaris touches his dick. Constantly.

He doesn’t want to, he insists; he has to. It’s a compulsion, an obsessive thought that festers in his mind precisely because it is so inappropriate to do in front of an audience that’s hanging on to his every word. Sometimes he does it with his hand in his pocket, other times he pretends he’s brushing something off the front of his pants. He thinks that nobody really notices, but after one book reading, he says, his sister came up to him and said, "What’s going on with your dick?"

"It’s the same thing when somebody tells you, ‘Whatever you do, don’t touch your nose, don’t touch your nose,’" he says. "If I can hide, then it’s not an issue, but if I can’t hide then… I still have things like that."

This, after all, is a guy who zealously licked light switches as a kid – 28 times in a single classroom period – tapped the heel of his shoe against his forehead, counted his steps (all 637 of them) from school to his family’s rented apartment, tongued mailboxes along the way, touched every blade of grass that his mind screamed needed attention and, upon finally arriving home, touched the front door with each elbow seven times.

Or maybe not.

In the world of David Sedaris, nothing is what it seems. You can’t be sure whether what you’re reading is fact or fiction – just stories. That’s the interesting thing about his books: human virtues are written about almost grudgingly, quietly; human foibles – especially his – are put under the Hubble Telescope.

In a radio interview, Sedaris once said that he hated being called a liar because he was one. So, let’s pretend for a moment that this was a game show and your task is to guess which of the following statements are true:

1) David Sedaris walked into the interview dressed in corduroy and denim.

2) He helps raise funds for an organization mainly because it trains monkeys to act as companions to quadriplegics.

3) When he’s talking to a foreigner who doesn’t speak English, he always asks, "Do you speak French?"

4) He loves guesting on TV shows.

5) He wants to get married.

6) He has to have classical music playing when he’s writing.

7) He watches movies in Paris every day.

8) He experiences discrimination for being gay.

9) He’s a militant smoker.

Answers:

1) False. Sedaris was wearing a white shirt, almost-light yellow pants, gray tube socks and brown shoes. In his pocket was a pack of Kool cigarettes.

2) Partly true. When Sedaris was signing books in Boston, he asked, for lack of a better question, the woman in front of him: "When was the last time you touched a monkey?" She said, "Can you smell it on me?"

Turned out the woman worked for an organization that trained monkeys to act as companions for quadriplegics. An invitation to the center followed and Sedaris witnessed a monkey in training.

"The woman pretended to be a quadriplegic and rolled into the room in a wheelchair and said, ‘Oh, Terence, I’m hungry.’ The monkey opened the cage, got out, opened the refrigerator, took a sandwich out, put it in the microwave, turned it on, and after it was finished put the sandwich in a holder so she could eat it. Then she said, ‘Terence, we have company and my hair’s a mess, brush my hair.’ The monkey took a hairbrush, looked at her, and just hit her on the head."

After that, Sedaris decided to help the organization raise funds. But he will never work with monkeys: "If you read with a monkey, nobody’s going to pay attention to you."

3) True. Sedaris hates it when he can’t be understood. His French has improved somewhat from the time he wrote about attending French lessons and struggling to explain in French the concepts of Christianity and Easter to a Moroccan classmate. And when faced with a non-English speaking person in Europe – like in Germany during a book tour – Sedaris always asks haughtily, "Well, do you speak French?" to show that not all Americans speak only English.

4) False. The only thing he hates more than having to guest on a TV show is having to guest on a French-language TV show, which he had to do to promote his last book.

Radio is a different thing. You get the feeling that even as a child writing religiously in his diary, he mined – and continues to – the medium for weirdos who call in at 2 a.m. "I don’t care for sports but I’d listen to Sports Talk with Bob Wannamaker, all these dads calling in all upset over last night’s high school basketball game. Or there was a show called The Bird Man and people would call up and say, ‘Bart, there’s something on my feeder, and he’s not a cardinal… Now, Jerry says he’s a cardinal, but I’ll have to disagree with him on this. And there’s some red in it. But it’s not a red red, if you know what I mean…?’ And I don’t care anything about birds, but I loved that. Those are people you’d never hear from, ordinarily."

5) False. He doesn’t want to get married, but will "happily sign any piece of paper that would save me money. The Americans that I know who are married – one of them is always named Stephen, they always use the word ‘partner’ and hold the ceremony on a cliff with a lesbian minister. I just think, uggggh!"

When asked if the gay marriage controversy in America has moved Sedaris to be more politically active, he says, "If they passed it in Spain, in France, and in England they don’t seem to care, why are Americans so hysterical about it? Americans think, those two lesbians are getting married, what will it do to us? Two guys named Stephen who want to exchange bad poetry on a mountaintop, that’s not about you either. When they say things like, ‘Well, God said that marriage is…’ Didn’t the Bible say, too, that you’re allowed to have slaves as long as they’re from a neighboring country? So, why are you paying attention to this and ignoring that?"

6) False. He hums when he’s writing. Other than that, he writes in silence, thanks to headphones, the same kind that pilots use to blot out noise, like his partner Hugh’s music in the other room.

7) True. He watches movies in Paris every day when he can, thanks to his Fidelity card, which charges him only 17 euros a month for unlimited viewings. "In Paris, I’ll go see a movie that I know is bad, I’ll walk out and say, wow, that was bad. In London, where it costs 10 pounds to see a movie, I’ll walk out and say, that sucked!"

Sedaris also hates the onslaught of Hollywood children’s movies out there: "One thing I hate is that someone decided somewhere that children are not happy unless they see animals in sunglasses. Like every f**king movie has a poster with an animal with sunglasses on. Why is that entertaining? In Key West and Vancouver I’ve seen the same thing: dogs with sunglasses (begging on the streets). I just wanna shoot the dog and put it out of its misery."

8) True. Reverse discrimination, if you will – at least now that he’s rich and famous. "I’ve always found that two gay men can rent an apartment easier than anyone. It’s like, ‘Do you mind if we repaint? We’re thinking, too, about taking out the carpet and sanding the floor – we’ll pay for it – and maybe doing something with the windows?’ I mean, what landlord wouldn’t want that?"

In "I Like Guys," Sedaris describes his experience in camp trying to hide his homosexuality. "Our dormitory counselor arrived for inspection, shouting, ‘What are you, a bunch of goddamned faggots who can’t make your beds?’ I giggled out loud at his stupidity. If anyone knew how to make a bed, it was a faggot."

9) True. In the strange universe of David Sedaris, smokers get priority – they are too much of an outcast in the real world anyway, especially in America. "You’d go to the bookstore and there’d be 800 people there, so I thought, ‘I can do what I want.’ So I offered priority signing for smokers. My reasoning was, smokers had less time to live, so they have less time to stand in line. And a man in Los Angeles – I was reading at UCLA – filed a lawsuit, saying I was discriminating against non-smokers on California state property. And my thing was, like, ‘What the f**k are you doing in my audience?’ Let’s say there are 2,000 seats, and my thing was you had to have your cigarettes on to prove, because if you’re a real smoker, you wouldn’t leave your cigarettes in the car, because you’d think ‘Maybe the theater will catch on fire, I can have one last cigarette before I go.’ So maybe out of those 2,000 people, 18 people had cigarettes. So it’s not the end of the world if 18 people step in front of you in line."

He’s never attempted to quit smoking ("We had a meeting in Australia a couple of years ago, and 23 hours without a cigarette is called quitting") and neither did his mother, whom Sedaris always writes about with part-mockery, part-mystification, and a hundred percent affection. He writes about getting into arguments with people on park benches over his right to smoke, and his brother with whom he shared an apartment.

"If I were king of the world, the first thing I would do is I would punish people who throw trash into ashtrays. Don’t you hate it when you come out of an airport and the ashtray would have paper cups in it?"

There’s rage in Sedaris’s work, like any observer of human folly, but he’s the first to tell you what getting up and talking is really about: getting people’s attention. Like his mother’s. Coming from a family of six, Sedaris had to learn to hone his storytelling skills. "I think large families are like that. You have to compete for attention. Like if we came home from school, if we would say to my mom, ‘Then, um, the teacher… um, she told Jerome he shouldn’t, um, raise his hand if he, um, didn’t know the answer…’ My mother would just say, ‘You know, I stopped listening about four minutes ago... That was so boring.’ So you’d learn to say: ‘Mom, Jerome raised his hand in class, and the teacher slapped him across the face!’ And it’s not true, but at least it’s quick. So that would be my way of abbreviating the story and getting my mother’s ear."

He seems to have inherited much of his mother’s caustic wit, which is memorably captured in his collections. (She passed away of cancer several years ago.) "My mom really loved getting a little bit of attention," notes Sedaris, "so when I wrote about her, I just always wanted her to get the attention she deserved. If she were still around I’d bring her with me on my book tours."

His brother, sisters and father are also fine with his essays, which frequently dwell on the peculiar Sedaris family dynamic. Though maybe this is because their eccentricities are not that different from other families’. Or maybe it’s because, as Sedaris says, "People like to be written about. More often than not they will come up and say, ‘Here’s a little something you might want to write about.’ Usually the story they tell me is not as interesting as the fact that they’re telling me." But Sedaris is also careful to give his stories to his family to read first, before publishing.

Asked about his writing habits, Sedaris says he writes on a Mac now, given to him by Hugh; before, he used an electric typewriter. While writing, he refuses to show his work to anyone – until it’s done. But even his essential writing rhythms have changed over the years, from the rambling, shaggy-dog essays of Naked to shorter pieces. This comes down to grueling public readings. "Now, if I write something that’s longer than 12 pages, it’s too long to read out loud. It just becomes this other thing. So I’m not really interested in writing things I can’t read out loud. And when I look back at Naked, even the longest thing could be cut down – give me a pair of scissors! I think keeping that length in my mind actually is sort of helpful."

He won’t classify what he does as fiction or non-fiction ("I guess I always thought of things as, like, the truth run through a story mill. You know, like the truth is one thing, but the entertaining truth is another."), but says he is working on short fiction right now: "They’re short stories about animals, but the animals act like humans, but they just happen to be animals. They’re short, they’re like fables, except I have to work on my morals a bit."

As we wind up our conversation at Global Café, Sedaris enthuses about exploring "the juxtapositions" of Manila. He might not have even made it here, if he had believed all the bad press: "I was reading a book about Manila, and in the chapter called ‘Nuisances and Annoyances,’ it said that it is not uncommon to be held at gunpoint by your cab driver.

"It said that people will come up to you and invite you to their home for a traditional home-cooked pica-pica platter and they will drug you and you’ll wake up in an alley, and about mosquitoes that bite you and your joints fall off. And I thought, ‘You know what, I’m gonna put this book away.’"

Manila may be just the place for David Sedaris to work on his morals. Or maybe not. He seems to be having too much fun already.

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David Sedaris’ books are available at Powerbook Specialty Store with branches at Greenbelt 4 (757-6428 to 29), SM Megamall (635-2898 to 99) Alabang Town Center (850-5662 to 63), Glorietta 3 (752-7075), Shangri-La Plaza Mall (638-0023 and 25), Robinsons Place Ermita (523-3334, 524-3448) and SM Mall of Asia (556-0244).