John Waters
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(laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Interestingly. So how many days did you hitchhike? JOHN WATERS: It took only nine days. Twenty-one rides. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So do you feel that you hitchhiked I mean nearly hitchhiked for hitchhike’s sake? JOHN WATERS: I hitchhiked for an adventure. I hitchhiked at first because I had a book advance. I didn’t spend one penny of it in case I chickened out halfway there. I didn’t spend any of it until I got there. Because I’d be too embarrassed to chicken out. You know and I forgot it rains all the time in spring so I would be standing there in the pouring rain in this poncho and I learned early that you can’t have a hitchhiking sign and an umbrella. You can’t hold them right. And I really looked like a junkie Mary Poppins. (laughter) You know, my sign it was really a bad look, really and I stupidly— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And look mattered. JOHN WATERS: Look matters. And I had this baseball hat which always makes me look like Ed Gein anyway and it said “Scum of the Earth,” which was a movie I liked, but it was a really dumb choice to wear when you’re hitchhiking, when you’re in a rest stop looking around, you have a hat on that says “Scum of the Earth.” It doesn’t inspire, “Hop in!” (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But nine days is short. What I mean to say is also you wanted to get there. JOHN WATERS: The worst book would have happened if the first ride somebody stops and, “I’m going all the way to San Francisco, get in!” It would have been terrible if that happened. I would have had to jump out. That would have been good. Escape a ride. I never had to do that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But still it’s a quick trip. JOHN WATERS: It maybe sounds quick but I tell you it wasn’t. I was—it was quicker because the first, I call him the Corvette Kid, the kid that was a Republican elected official who picked me up in Western Maryland going to his lunch at the Subway and he didn’t know who I was or anything, and he took me to Ohio, he just kept talking, his parents were freaking out. Then he kept texting me and he drove forty-eight hours at eighty miles an hour without me knowing to catch up to me in Denver, which was great. You know, and we had a real adventure, we did. But people were horrified because I would check in a hotel with a twenty-year-old boy, and people would go, “Christ, John.” Swingers were trying to—texting him that we’d meet in rest areas, saying, “Let’s hook up in Vegas.” Oh my God. So we had an adventure. It was fun and we did bond. It was a very nice trip. But he came back and then I got out and gave him the keys to my San Francisco apartment and said, “Just go stay there. Let me get some more rides.” (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I’d like to read a small passage of you being picked up by a truck driver. You say, “I’ve never felt gayer as I climb up those three steps.” (laughter) JOHN WATERS: Oh, that’s true. That is true. Into a 90,000-pound truck. Where he’s like, “Come on!” I thought, “Oh my God, I’m getting in this truck.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Let me start again. “I’ve never felt gayer as I climb up those three steps on the passenger side of the eighty-thousand-pound Kenworth and jump inside. Eureka! A trucker has actually picked up a hitchhiker! ‘The book needed this!’”—that I find very interesting—“’The book needed this!’ I explain right away to the handsome fifty-year-old driver, who seems to take it all in stride despite, I could tell, having never heard of me when I introduced myself.” It’s so important. Well, first of all. “The book needed it.” You needed certain experiences for— JOHN WATERS: Well, the trucker is a cliché of hitchhiking. And today no truckers almost stop because the companies are so strict now. They have two drivers. The trucks never stop. One sleeps in the back and one drives. So they’re never going to pick you up. None of them are ever allowed to pick you up. They all have chips in them. They can only drive so much a day. Up in those trucks it’s modern now, they wear these kind of—they look like Madonna up there, you know, (laughter) and there’s computers and everything. They’re fancy. It’s not like some truck stop. The one I wrote about in the best chapter. That’s the one I want to go to. Fumbelina. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Can you tell a little bit about that? Because that is a fantastic scene. JOHN WATERS: Well, thank you. It’s an outlaw truck stop. And they still do have them, but they’re more in the South and they’re off the forbidden highways. Yeah, they’re real things where drugs and liquor and strippers. I wanted to go to one of them. But they don’t have any of them on Route 70. No. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Would you read one page from it? JOHN WATERS: If I can find it. Let me look here. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s so delicious. See if you can find it. It’s worth the wait, I promise you. JOHN WATERS: I don’t know what part I’m going to read in it. Hold on. I’ll give you a little explanation of it. All right. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s just so good. JOHN WATERS: Gumdrop leads me to a bar and orders me a free vodka without even asking what I drink. He just knows. He gets gin for himself and guzzles it down in one gulp and burps out the sound of a busted truck muffler with amazing realism. He drags me through the partying drivers, many of whom are dancing recklessly with other scary women. I see a red-hot dancer who looks like a gal in a Russ Meyer movie undulating with precision in a bikini on top and a micro-miniskirt. Gumdrop races ahead and stuffs a $20 bill down her cleavage. On cue, she retrieves the bill from between her giant tits, pretends to drop it, spreads her legs in a practiced stance, and bends over to pick it up. She is, of course, wearing no underpants. Knowing the routine, Gumdrop leans his head over between her legs and looks up to Cupid’s cave. Fumbelina—that’s her name—purrs, “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera” and “takes a picture” with the expert muscle control that can only come from years of training. I have never seen a man look happier than Gumdrop does at that moment. He fumbles for another double sawbuck and in between her knockers it goes. Once again, she pretends to be all thumbs as she retrieves it and “drops” the twenty and slowly . . . very slowly bends over to pick it up. “Take two,” Fumbelina chuckles as Gumdrop takes his place below and says, “Say cheese.” Again she snaps his “photo” with vaginal precision. I can see Gumdrop’s eyes beaming in gratitude. “Fumbelina, this is John Waters,” he says politely, poking me in the side to let me know I, too, should give her a twenty. “Nice to meetcha,” she says as I slide a bill inside her supervixen breasts, and Gumdrop slaps me on the back in approval. Fumbelina “fumbles” the bill, drops it in choreographed clumsiness, bends over to pick it up. I hesitate, knowing what is expected. “Don’t worry, I’ll retouch the picture,” she says with a giggle, and I take a place between her legs looking up into the natural lens. “Hold still for focus,” she orders, and I do. Click! Yikes, a snatchshot! I feel like Lee Miller as she modeled for Man Ray’s first solarized photography, the “rayograph.” (laughter/applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you. JOHN WATERS: I can picture Fumbelina. I would really like. That would be a good strip act where she always pretends to drop something. And I like strip joints. I like I always feel comfortable in them. I’ve said this before, I wish everybody in the world was a stripper but me. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What I found also interesting in the last passage I read, I could tell, about the truck driver having never heard of me when I introduced myself. There is something that happens often again and again in Carsick which is your desire, I mean, you you go between the desire— JOHN WATERS: Not wanting it and wanting it. When I’m alongside the road and I can’t get a ride, I pray I’m recognized. When I get in I don’t care if they do or not because it doesn’t make it better. It makes it better if they don’t because they tell me more stuff and I can find out more about them. But when I’ve been standing there for ten hours I’m practically, “That’s me!” I didn’t get so bad to have a sign that said, “Help! I made Hairspray!” (laughter) Close, close. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s interesting because you’re between fame and unfame as you want to be recognized, you don’t want to be recognized. JOHN WATERS: But the people— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But the notion of fame also is so important. JOHN WATERS: Well, it’s part of it. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah, yeah. JOHN WATERS: But the people. What’s interesting, the people that were in mid-America that picked me up. Even when they knew who I was, they didn’t ask any celebrity questions about other people. They don’t care about that. They don’t care. It was refreshing. Nobody ever said to me, “What’s this movie star like?” Or “Have you ever met this person?” They never asked that. They just talked about fertilizer and stuff that was really interesting to me. Like if you give a baby pig M&Ms it will follow you forever and remember you. (laughter) I like knowing that. My friends don’t know that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I have to tell you, I don’t know that. JOHN WATERS: Well, you do now. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Now I do. JOHN WATERS: Just carry some with you in case you ever run across a little pig. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But it is interesting. This notion of fame also is interesting because you, there was something also during this trip that made you want to be recognized. JOHN WATERS: No, you’re wrong. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No? Am I wrong? JOHN WATERS: It made me want to see how far that could take me. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Take you quite literally yes. JOHN WATERS: I wanted to see if it could help or hurt or was it different, how far would this go? You know when I’m standing on some side of a road, it really didn’t go far because even if they recognize you, they don’t think it’s you. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re an impersonator. JOHN WATERS: You’re not in the right. You’re out of context. You know if they see you on a television show it’s very different than seeing you in the gas station of, you know, Taco Bell while I was like washing my face like Crackers in Pink Flamingos. You know, I made that joke in Pink Flamingos, “Let’s live in gas station lavatories.” It wasn’t so funny when I had to. (laughter) Yeah. I never thought that would come to the truth. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But that’s interesting also in terms of the structure of the book which is that the third part, which is the real McCoy, whoever McCoy was, I mean, there’s a whole debate about how the real McCoy is, which I think is partly interesting. Is that reality is quite different from what we imagine. JOHN WATERS: It’s not as extreme in some ways but at the same time— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a little more tame. JOHN WATERS: It was the opposite of my last book, Role Models, which was people that had extreme lives that I admired. This was about people that probably the real people did not have extreme lives, but I admired them just as much for how open-minded they really were about things which is against the cliché of what people think about mid- America. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And coming back to the notion of fame I’m wondering if this trip was also an experiment in seeing what happens when you become unfamous. JOHN WATERS: Yes, yeah. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What happens when you become unfamous, but you know this comment that I’ve always loved by a poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, who said that “fame is but the collection of misunderstandings that gather around a new name.” And there’s something about this urge to be known. JOHN WATERS: But you know, my dreams have already been fulfilled years ago, more stuff has already happened to me. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Really? JOHN WATERS: Oh, yeah, everything I ever wanted to be as a kid has happened to me. I’m lucky, are you kidding? This is crazy, everything else. I never thought that—I wanted to make hit midnight movies, that was it. And it went a lot further than that, so the fame thing to me is— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So would that mean that you’re satisfied? JOHN WATERS: Yes. I’m understood, certainly, by the public. I don’t feel like I’m some tragic person that has never been understood. No. I think I’m completely understood and it’s been amazing to me how far I’ve gotten to tell you the truth. That I ended up an insider. That’s the most perverse thing of all. (laughter/applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The interesting thing there is I’m wondering if I can twist that a little bit and say, would one of your fantasies perhaps be to have a quarter of yourself, or a part of yourself, a private part of yourself— JOHN WATERS: No. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That might be an outsider, that would not— JOHN WATERS: No, I want to be like— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You want to be mainstream? JOHN WATERS: No, what I want the best is that you work your whole life so you can be like Justin Bieber so you can never leave your house you’re so famous. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You love Justin Bieber. JOHN WATERS: I do especially now that he’s Bizzle. Oh, I love it when he’s black. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Tell me what you love about Justin Bieber. You know, I read that and I was going to play some Justin Bieber but then I just decided I wouldn’t but rather ask you why you have such a love affair— JOHN WATERS: Well, he is talented, if you look at that documentary that first one, when he was singing when he was eight years old playing pots and pans. You know, he doesn’t do anything that bad. You know, they said that he went home with a girl fan and performed cunnilingus for an hour without taking his hat off. Well, he’s a feminist, that means, actually. (laughter) Who’s complaining? Right? And then he was busted for drag-racing in a Ferrari going over sixty miles an hour. I didn’t think they went that slowly. (laughter) You know, it’s hard to be a billionaire when you’re nineteen, you know. I just, I’m for him still, I’m for him. I went to see his documentary alone on Christmas Eve day (laughter) and I felt like I was in an episode of To Catch a Predator, (laughter) which I wanted to do with him the day before he turned eighteen, a special Christmas version. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: What would the plot be? JOHN WATERS: Just move to each town. Put him on a park bench, bust ’em. Move to the next one. Bust ’em, bust ’em, bust ’em. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I think. Hopefully it can still be made. JOHN WATERS: No, he’s over eighteen now. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Okay. There’s a soundtrack to this. JOHN WATERS: Yeah, I have a sound list, a playlist, in each fantasy chapter I have a song come on the radio about hitchhiking. And I love obscure country music and most song about hitchhiking are about country, always. Well, there’s “Hitch Hike,” the great Marvin Gaye song. But most are about loneliness and country/western songs. And I would guarantee that most of you have never heard most of the songs on there. I hadn’t a lot of them. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Well, let’s listen to the first one, which some of you will have heard and you can say something about it. [“Witch Doctor” by the Alvin and the Chipmunks plays.] JOHN WATERS: But in this song we’re huffing nitrous gas. (laughter) That’s what we’re listening to when this is playing. And the Chipmunks are great for that, really. If you’re on nitrous, they really are the right soundtrack. Yeah. And I love the Chipmunks. I did like the Squirrels better, they’re the rip-off of the Chipmunks. The Chipmunks wanna-bes. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The second one. [“V-A-C-A-T-I-O-N” by Connie Francis plays] JOHN WATERS: I don’t want to give too much away but I have a fantasy chapter where Connie Francis picks me up, (laughter) and I have just been raped by a space alien and something odd happens between us. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Okay, I think we’ll leave it at that. JOHN WATERS: Yeah, we’ll leave it at that. It’s fiction. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s fiction. But after our conversation and after your good questions John will sign his book and then you can go back tonight and find out what this fantasy was all about. You’re recognized in various ways throughout your trip for your cameo in Chucky, for your appearance in The Creep, but you’re also misrecognized. JOHN WATERS: Well, it’s a joke, but that’s an old thing that they always think I’m Steve Buscemi. It’s the oldest joke and I tell Steve Buscemi this and he says, “They think I’m Don Knotts.” (laughter) But that’s an old joke, really. But I’ve had flight attendants—one leaned down to me and said, “I know who you are. You’re Ed Wood.” I thought, “Ed Wood!” (laughter) Because they got mixed up. They knew Johnny Depp was in my movie and blah-blah-blah, but my favorite, this happened recently, I’m on a plane, this woman’s staring at me kind of the whole way and finally she says, “Are you a magician?” (laughter) I wanted to go “There’s your boarding pass. What happened to your boarding pass?” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: She was right in some way. JOHN WATERS: Well, thank you, but that one made me laugh out loud. Right. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you think you—when you’re not hitchhiking and you’re trying to be anonymous, do you like being recognized? JOHN WATERS: It’s part of my job, you know, if you’re out, you’re at work. Do I like—do I feel like posing for every cell phone picture? That’s the curse, that every day—I do, of course! They bought me my house, why would I say I wouldn’t take a picture with them. I don’t understand that. Tonight when I sign books, I’ll take a picture with every person, sit down next to me, as long as you know how to work your camera, give it to somebody who will take it. No, I don’t mind that, that’s part of my job is to do that. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Not every filmmaker, writer, feels that way. JOHN WATERS: Well, not every filmmaker, writer, has a standup comedy act, either. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: That’s true. (laughter) JOHN WATERS: I mean, you know, I push that, that’s how I make my living. In a way, if you have a book signing, why wouldn’t you be nice to the people who are buying your book. The famous story one girl pulled out her Tampax once and slapped it down at a book signing and asked me to sign it. I went, “She bought the book, sure.” (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I love the fact that you said the famous story. I didn’t know that one but it’s fantastic. JOHN WATERS: I’ve told that one a lot. It’s famous in some circles, right? (laughter) And it was my first unsafe autograph. Well, I held the pencil up high. Please don’t do that tonight. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You’re giving them some ideas. JOHN WATERS: No, no, no, that’s why I try not to tell that story. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: In the book you say the following: “I go outside to take a phone call from my office and update them on my whereabouts. They are happy I’m with The Kid and inform me that the Kansas Couple have Facebooked pictures from our ride and now these have gone viral, too. I quickly check my Google Alerts and am both horrified and, I guess, flattered to see some company has already manufactured and offered for sale for $19.99 a ‘hitchhiking bull denim tote bag’ with my END OF 70 WEST sign pirated from the Facebook picture. Jesus.” JOHN WATERS: In one day. I know. It was shocking. I was impressed. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Horrified or flattered? JOHN WATERS: Both. But God, they ripped me off that quickly. They put my sign on a bag to sell it? But then I thought, “Well, what do you care?” that certainly is nice they noticed. You know then I realized how far the story had gone that that would happen. It’s really hard. You can’t even see your e-mails on the side of the road with that Kansas wind blowing, you know. It was just shocking to me that it happened. I thought it was funny. I didn’t buy one and they didn’t send me one. They should have sent me one. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You stayed in touch with your office a lot. JOHN WATERS: I whined to them heavily. That was their job. To listen to me whining. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Why did you whine? JOHN WATERS: Because it was cold—One day I had to stand there for ten hours. I didn’t have any water and that’s the day I said to my assistant, “It’s the day I’m going to have to drink my own urine.” (laughter) She tried to be humorous. She saved on her answering machine the most pitiful message I left that she still torments me with by playing it. “Susan, call back, ooooh.” PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But it’s interesting because you in a way you hitchhiked, you exposed yourself and remained vulnerable to the elements more than a usual hitchhiker. JOHN WATERS: No, I probably had it easier, because technically I had a credit card, I could call a helicopter to come get me if I wanted, (laughter) but I didn’t do that. I almost—I didn’t spend a night in the woods, but I almost did. I had to Dumpster-dive to get cardboard signs. I was soaking wet. People were mean to me in the Holiday Inn. You know, stuff did happen, it was real, it was not a luxury trip, but now that it’s over it’s hard for me to remember the terrible parts because I know I made it and I’m here tonight and I have a book. It was all worth it, certainly. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s so interesting this notion of anticipation and retrospective looking. You know, there’s this line I’ve always loved of Susan Sontag where she says about traveling, “Just wait until now becomes then, you’ll see how happy we were.” JOHN WATERS: That’s sort of true. Well, I’m always happy, kind of. You know, I don’t think that youth was better than my age, I don’t look back and say, “My generation had more fun.” You know, I get, the people at Occupation, you know, that movement, had just as much fun as I did in the riots in the sixties. It’s fun to be bad when you’re young. But as I say in the book, Brigid Berlin, the great Warhol star, said to me, “How can we be bad at seventy?” What a great line, because how can you be bad at seventy? If you’re trying it’s rather pitiful, right? So this was as close as I could get to be bad was to hitchhike across America. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I love the radical animal lovers and human haters. JOHN WATERS: Well, that is true. Some real animal fanatics hate people. I’m scared of animals, but I don’t hate them. I think they should be loose, biting people. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This passage is fantastic. “I think all dogs should be off leashes. That’s what they want to be doing, running in packs, like the wild canis I saw in Bucharest that seemed so happy to attack you, snarling and yapping when you get out of a cab. Dogs don’t want to be home with their owners stuck in some sort of sick S&M relationship” (laughter)—I mean, I love this—“sentenced to a lifetime of human caresses. How would you like to take a shit with someone following you around waiting to pick it up with a plastic newspaper bag? (laughter) Talk about humiliating. Also, I hate to tell you this, but can’t you see your cat hates you?” (laughter) Fantastic passage. |