John Waters
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JOHN WATERS: That’s true, yeah. Another thing, I say this in my spoken-word act. Don’t be talking about riding on dolphins with your bullshit spirituality. Do you think they want your fat ass on them? Get the fuck off them! (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s a Wonderful Life comes up a few times. JOHN WATERS: Just once, it’s a movie that— PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Without giving it away, it’s a movie that you— JOHN WATERS: No, that is giving it away. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Give it a bit away, I mean people are going to get the— JOHN WATERS: At the end, I get killed and I try to imagine what hell is like. And that movie is playing. Yeah. (laughter) For eternity. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The Corvette Kid. Tell us something about him. JOHN WATERS: Well, I did, I talked about him. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Talk about him a little bit more, yeah. JOHN WATERS: He was great, he was a kid that wanted an adventure. He was a Young Republican elected official but we didn’t talk about politics that much. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Did you keep away from speaking about politics? JOHN WATERS: No, but he said to me once, you know, “I’m a town councilman, I deal in potholes. That’s not exactly Republican or Democratic really argument.” Although it is, about how much you pay to fill them. I don’t know it was sort of like he just had a crazy great time. It was like a vacation, and it was thrilling for me to see through his eyes going through the Rockies and seeing the whole country and everything. And we were just in on a joke because everybody thought it was insane we were together. His friends were writing to him saying, “Way to go, you’re with a gay man in a hotel. What are you thinking?” (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And his mother was so worried. JOHN WATERS: His mother, poor mother, I tried to talk to her, he wouldn’t let me. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: His mother was googling you. JOHN WATERS: Well, it’s not good to google me. Comes up, you know, fighting for the Manson family parole, (laughter) just got a gay award, eats dogshit. You know, it’s not a refreshing thing for a parent. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No. JOHN WATERS: And then they said, how do you know it’s even me, it could be just a crazy person. But why would they say they were me? You know, they could say somebody a little more upscale. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: The book is less about America and the countryside because one doesn’t get really a sense from reading the book about the countryside. JOHN WATERS: Because it’s the same now everywhere because of the Internet and everything. Local color is vanishing and that’s good and bad but everywhere kind of is the same, the geography isn’t, and there is about geography anyway. I saw fires everywhere and Kansas and the bleakness and I loved Kansas in a way because it’s so minimalist and so far and so brutal, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to live there in the winter. And so that was fascinating to me. But other than that, the products, the stores, they’re all the same everywhere, the whole world. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I want actually to bring this to a close by asking you to give me some Yelp reviews of these various places. You mention a lot of motels you’ve been, and so if you could say something about your experience. You know, the reviews you read online. JOHN WATERS: You mean of the motels? Days Inn is the best because they have good lighting. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Lighting is an obsession for you. JOHN WATERS: Well, because you can’t read. The Holiday Inn, I’m telling you, I felt like Stevie Wonder when I was in there, (laughter) you know, it’s like, you can’t, it’s the worst. They all have terrible breakfast rooms. They have the worst possible food. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah you talk about— JOHN WATERS: Really bad. And another thing they don’t have newspapers, even USA Today they didn’t have, they didn’t have any newspapers, which makes me crazy, right? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So Days Inn. JOHN WATERS: I felt snobby. They don’t have room service. Now, that sounds snobby. I thought you could get a pizza delivered, or a hamburger, but you can’t, really. You just have this free breakfast room where people sit staring at the television, (laughter) no eye contact, eating the most repellent fake eggs and a frozen bagel that no New Yorker could ever swallow. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Sounds bad. JOHN WATERS: And I always thought I’d go in my breakfast room with my sign and say, “Oh, hi,” and maybe I’d get a ride. People would just look away from it. Nobody would make eye contact. And you don’t really want to drink a lot of tea or coffee or even eat because elimination is a problem when you’re hitchhiking. You can’t say, “Pull over!” “Again? Get out!” (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: La Quinta Inn. JOHN WATERS: Oh, they were all right, except I stayed at La Quinta Inn and then I went to the movies, and then these people recognized me and gave me a ride back to the La Quinta but they took me to the wrong one. (laughter) I panicked, I thought, “Is this where I’m staying? No, it’s not!” And then the guy felt sorry for me and took me in the courtesy van all alone at midnight back to the right La Quinta Inn, (laughter) where I had to do laundry, and that’s really depressing, because I didn’t realize, they don’t have Laundromats, they have one little room with a washer and dryer in it with no change machine, no soap, or anything and of course as soon as I put all my laundry in with soap it stopped and wouldn’t work. I had to go downstairs. The woman had to come up with a credit card trying to hit the quarter. Oh, it was quite an ordeal. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: This was John Waters discovers part of America in some way. JOHN WATERS: Well, it was, it was, yeah, it was hard traveling you know. But it was fine. Not even, I don’t mind going to the Laundromat. I go to the Laundromat in Provincetown all the time. I actually like Laundromats. I used to—I filmed—my old movies, we always filmed in them because they had strong lighting. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Your experience at the Walmart. JOHN WATERS: The Walmart, I had never been in a Walmart and my sister gives me shit about that all the time. “You are such a snob, you’ve never been to the Walmart.” Well, I realized why. I don’t buy in bulk. You know, I don’t go and say, “I’ll have a thousand potatoes,” (laughter) you know, and they have no help, there’s no one, you can’t ask anybody. They’re as large as like the Newark bus station, you go in, and I thought, “Oh, they have a supermarket, they have everything here,” but they had so much stuff that I was overwhelmed. But it was in a Marine base neighborhood so it was like the Porno Walmart and it was all soldiers in outfits, and I really tried to look up but it was like being in a porn, I couldn’t watch or anything. It was very weird. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe a couple more. Ruby’s Tuesday and Applebee’s, your experiences. JOHN WATERS: Ruby Tuesday’s was all right, I lost my credit card there and they mailed it back to me, so that was okay. Oh, Applebee’s was filthy, (laughter) and it was after church, too, and the people were filthy that were coming from church. (laughter) They left the men’s room a pigsty, I’m telling you, I didn’t care for that, no. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: From this experience, this nine-day experience, what was the most surprising moment, the moment that somehow— JOHN WATERS: When the Corvette Kid came back, when he drove all the way back, and I he maybe was just screwing with me on the computer sitting at his parents’ house, you never know. And when I saw him there, I thought, “you really did this, you came back, so thank you.” That was the most surprising—I knew then that the rest of the trip was going to be okay. You know, hat one morning I didn’t care where I spent the night. I didn’t have to be at the right exit ramp and everything where I was going to get—I had a ride before I woke up. And that was the worst every morning to wake up and think, “You are really crazy. You’re doing this again, you gotta go stand out there.” And every morning. It was hard—no one ever picked me up in the morning, it always took a while and I don’t know why. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Do you feel that in some way doing this trip made you go back in time? JOHN WATERS: No, I think it brought me up to date to realize that if I have to now I can always hitchhike, if I miss a flight, rather than stay in that horrible hotel they put you in, I’m hitchhiking, right, with those little vouchers where you have to wait in line for eight hours to go stay in some horrible hotel. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Your answer makes me really think about again to bring up my own father. My mother was very ill recently and my father, aged ninety-four, two years ago, was visiting my mother a lot in the hospital, they live in Belgium, in Brussels, it was January. It was snowing, no public transportation, there were no taxis, and I came to visit him and he said, “You know, it’s just amazing, I mean, I do not know how people manage who don’t hitchhike.” JOHN WATERS: Oh, he hitchhiked there? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: He hitchhiked home at age—he said, “How do they manage, how do they walk, I mean, they might hurt themselves falling,” so this ninety-four-year-old man hitchhiked, people looked at him and took— JOHN WATERS: Wow, he’s braver than I am. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: But, in a sense I don’t think it was in order to capture his youth as much as to know that he could do it. JOHN WATERS: Because he could have taken a cab, right? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe, but there was so much snow that it was like Doctor Zhivago in the middle of the snow. I mean it was very hard. The first, the opening chapter there’s a kind of a fantasy of you being completely funded. JOHN WATERS: Well, yeah, the ride picks me up and then they back my whole movie, and we dig it up on their farm, they say, “Oh, you don’t have to pay it back, and we don’t give notes, make whatever kind of movie you want.” And they own a corrupt FedEx place, that is everybody who works there look like they’re kind of Whole Food jail escapees. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Does this mean we might get to see Fruitcake? JOHN WATERS: Oh, who knows? You know. No. Do I think I’m going to meet somebody who’s going to say, here, here’s five million dollars in cash, take it home. No, I kind of doubt that will happen. Although, friendly drug dealers did help me in the beginning. They’re always good backers. Pot, I wasn’t like, you know, heroin based. (laughter) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I remember the first time we spoke. I’ll never forget. You spoke to me about poppers. JOHN WATERS: Oh yeah. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I had no idea what you were talking about. JOHN WATERS: Really? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Yeah, I mean, since then I’ve educated myself. (laughter) But might we— JOHN WATERS: I have poppers in the book. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You do! You do! JOHN WATERS: I get a ride from a policeman who’s doing poppers singing songs from Hairspray the Musical and so we’ll see. Maybe that will happen. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Maybe a movie will come? JOHN WATERS: Who knows? I’ve pitched it. I still have meetings about it. Who knows? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: You say, “I’d love to write a novel.” JOHN WATERS: Yeah. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Tell me. JOHN WATERS: Well, I might. Who knows? You know because really all the movies are novels in a way, they’re just written as a screenplay. But that’s the scary thing. I don’t know that I will, but it’s the only thing really left I haven’t done that I’d like to. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Tell me something about what it might— JOHN WATERS: No. No. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No? JOHN WATERS: You know, if you’re trying to get pregnant, do you tell people? PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No. JOHN WATERS: Okay. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Thank you very much. (applause) JOHN WATERS: thank you very much. That was great fun. (applause) PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Now we have time for some very good questions. And absolutely no time for bad ones, so please come up to the mike. JOHN WATERS: Oh, you can ask a bad one, it’s all right. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Okay, ask a bad one. Let’s begin with a bad one please, could you come up to the mike? JOHN WATERS: No one, you see. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Nobody’s coming? Okay, a medium good one? JOHN WATERS: See, there’s one, just yell it out. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: No, just. JOHN WATERS: You can come up. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Come quickly. JOHN WATERS: Come quickly. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: I mean, come slowly. Here. Q: I just want to know, are you ever going to be a guest judge on RuPaul’s Drag Race? JOHN WATERS: I am! Maybe this summer. We’re working it out right now. (applause) Q: What kind of stuff did you travel with when you were hitchhiking? Did you have a duffel bag or did you have a stick with a handkerchief? A backpack? JOHN WATERS: No, a duffel bag is not really me. I had a fake crocodile bag that I got as a gift at the Spirit Awards, but I was panicked because it looks like it would cost a million dollars, but it was plastic. I had five pair of underpants, and I took my worst underwear so I could throw away a pair every day, shed weight. I had one Issy Miyake jacket that looked like I was homeless. Only I knew it was fashion. (laughter) Q: I used to work at Issy Miyake. JOHN WATERS: A good pair of boots from a store called is it REI, I had never been in there in my life, it was so humiliating, because they have a little rock you’re supposed to climb up, (laughter) and my assistants were laughing, and said, “You have to climb up there to see if they fit.” I thought, “I’m not climbing any rocks when I’m hitchhiking.” (laughter) But those shoes worked when I was in the rain. A poncho, some little toiletries, little ones, one credit card, one ID, my fame kit, and very little. I just wanted—and my signs, I had different signs. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: It’s fantastic how you describe cutting up those signs was really hard for you. JOHN WATERS: I couldn’t do that, I’m really bad at tearing cardboard correctly. Things that most people can really do I can’t. But I carried very light because you don’t want to be lugging stuff, you know, you want to be able to run and get in a car and also if you have to run away from somebody you want to be able to carry it. (laughter) Q: Thank you. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: A wonderful cover by the way where you can see the bag. Good. I like how people are running to—This is really good, getting some exercise, too. Q: John. I read in an old book of yours once that you hated sports and you hated when cabbies would ask you how the Os were doing or this or that. I was wondering if maybe that’s softened a bit with age, if you get a little civic pride. JOHN WATERS: No. There’s a chapter in here where I get picked up by a person that drives me crazy about talking about sports and they won’t stop it until they drive me crazy and make me smoke a cigarette I’m going so insane. So I don’t mind sports. I think people have the right to enjoy sports, I’m not completely a sports bigot. I try to watch it and I just can’t. When I played it as a kid I always was in right field, of course. And no balls ever came there but ones that did, I would just look at it. (laughter) People would be screaming, “Pick it up!” people are running around the bases, “Waters! Waters!” “You pick it up.” Q: Thanks, John. JOHN WATERS: Yeah. But I turned that into a career because they asked when in Baltimore this one channel had a new sports announcer coming and they had all supposedly celebrities saying stuff, and they asked me and I said, “I hate sports,” and they said, “Well, say that.” I said, “You’re kidding.” So they paid me to say that, and it became a hit. Housewives and women in stores would yell, “I hate them too!” (laughter) I became the spokesman for it and they had to double my pay to get me to come back and say, “I still hate sports,” (laughter) so I turned that into a career. PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: John Waters! Thank you very much! JOHN WATERS: Thank you! (applause) LIVEWaters_6.4Transcript |