Inappropriate

Inappropriate

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby in the basement bar
Of the Seelbach Hotel. A few years later, he traveled
First class to Hollywood and let them mutilate his soul.
The great Scott died drunk, penniless, writing-blocked, and alone.

Only after his death did Fitzgerald become a star,
As English Literature professors sought to unravel
The Great Gatsby’s tapestries. The slim novel has sold
One hundred million copies since Fitzgerald turned to bone

and is widely regarded as The Great American Novel. I love the book, but I didn’t know that Fitzgerald wrote it at the Seelbach until the night I checked into my room in Louisville, Kentucky, and read it in The Luxury Hotel Guide to Famous Alcoholic Writers. I was at the Seelbach to give a keynote speech for an American Literature conference. I spend a lot of time in hotel rooms preparing to give keynote speeches. It’s my job. My speech was scheduled for eight the next morning---The Breakfast Club for Adjunct Professors---so I went to bed early, around eleven, but


At three or four in the morning, I heard Fitzgerald’s ghost
Drunkenly stumble and mumble down the sixth-floor hallway.
“First you take a drink,” the ghost said. “Then the drink takes a drink,
Then the drink takes you.” I heard Scott’s cocktail glass clink

Against his wedding ring. I heard him toss his tweed raincoat
To the floor. Then he knocked on my door. I said, “Go away,
You bitter fuck.” Goddamn, I hate the sweet and sour stink
Of alcoholics. I hate how those damp bastards can shrink

Like mice---no, like rats---and squeeze through the smallest holes
In our walls. “Go away,” I said to Scott. “Go back to your grave.”
But the ghost slipped under my door, smiled, threw me a wink,
And shambled into my bathroom and threw up in the sink,

a disgusting and hilarious act that made me wonder if this ghost was actually my father’s ghost hiding behind a mask that made him look like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ghost. Can ghosts be that convoluted? I would guess that the haunter is only as complicated as the haunted. And things did become more complicated when Fitzgerald’s ghost squeezed some of my toothpaste onto his pointer, and finger-brushed the vomit taste and smell out of his mouth, and staggered back into the living space and sat beside me on the bed. I wondered if Fitzgerald’s ghost was going to make a pass at me. I searched my literary memory for any reference of Fitzgeraldian homosexuality. Well, I think it’s safe to assume that Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, certainly enjoyed a Platonic and homoerotic crush on Jay Gatsby, so perhaps Fitzgerald had enjoyed a few homoerotic crushes of his own. Maybe Fitzgerald and/or his ghost had a homoerotic crush on me. Wow, I was flattered that the great writer had risen from the grave to rattle his chains in my bed. Or maybe he was just drunk. I remembered a Fitzgerald quote: “Often people display a curious respect for a man drunk, rather like the respect of simple races for the insane.” Was I that simple? Was I in awe? Shouldn’t I have chased that drunken ghost out of my room or perhaps run screaming in terror down the hallway and into the elevator? Or wait, perhaps one should use the stairs in event of a haunting. In any case, I neither booted Fitzgerald nor made my own escape. Instead, I wondered how a man is supposed to make love to a man, and I doubly wondered how a man is supposed to make love to a ghost, and then I laughed and awoke


From my Gatsbian dream. “How strange! How lovely! How funny!”
I thought, but soon recalled Fitzgerald’s advice to “Cut out
All those exclamation points. An exclamation point
Is like laughing at your own joke.” Well, fuck that noise!

I am a funny writer! I get paid tons of money
For my jokes! But more than that, I write gorgeous poems about
Chocolate cream pies in the eyes! And wicked kicks to the groin!
I write villanelles that celebrate the counterfeit coins

Nailed to wooden floors! And the fake wasps trapped in honey
Cubes! I once gave a stuffed parrot and eye patch to my gout-
Stricken brother---a limping Captain Kidd---and he enjoyed
The prank so much that his funny bone fell out of joint!

O, his humerus was so humorous! It was punny!
Ah, I wrote a poem about the joy of laughing out loud
While having sex! There’s no need to be serious or coy
When one is engaged in that dampest and deepest of joys,

in that most revealing (and concealing) of acts! God, I love to fuck just as much as I love to write poems! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray! And I hope my readers are celebrating my hilarity (and pornography), because I also need to tell you something sad and serious. After I woke from my dream about Gatsby’s ghost, I sat at my hotel room desk, and I wrote most of the poem you are now reading. And after falling back asleep for a few hours, and being startled into the world by an alarm clock playing Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” I ate a room service breakfast of biscuits and gravy---a subject that deserves one thousand heroic couplets---and walked downstairs to give my keynote speech. As usual, I improvised my talk, because that feels more genuine, more relevant to the moment, and more tribally influenced. When I improvise, I feel like I’m standing around a campfire. Which campfire? Any and all of them! So, yes, I told my story about Gatsby and his ghost to the gathered professors of American Literature. I told dick jokes! I told vagina jokes! I insulted Democrats, Republicans, vegetarians, vegans, Indians, and white people! I made fun of my enormous skull, my fat stomach, and my bowlegs! Over and over, I said, “I have so many weaknesses! I am fragile and finite!” I told them that Jay Gatsby---James Gatz---was the first Native American, even if he was actually a German Jew from North Dakota. Yes, Fitzgerald had written the first Native American novel, and in creating a character who believed in the “green light, the orgiastic future that year after year recedes ... ,” Fitzgerald had given me the vocabulary to describe my own Native American identity. Oh, yes, I am the genocided Indian who is also the dream-filled refugee! I am indigenous to the land but an immigrant into the country! Oh, yes, I am the ironic indigenous immigrant! Yes, I told the room filled with the tenured, soon-to-be-tenured, desperate-to-be tenured, and never-to-be tenured


That, damn, I was full of various kinds of shit and gas,
But that I was desperately trying to convey hope
In our futures, even as I knew that we were “boats
Against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,”

and you better believe that I improvised and used the final and powerful sentence of The Great Gatsby as my final sentence. Hell, I didn’t consciously know that I was going to use it. As I rattled my way to the end of my speech, Fitzgerald’s tragic wisdom just spilled out of my mouth. I realized that Indians are now and will always be walking backwards. We will always be contrary. In my mind’s HDTV, I saw two million Indians walking together, with their big faces pointed toward the past and their flat asses pointed toward the future, and I laughed. It was sadly humorous! Or humorously sad! And what is humor anyway? Victor Borge said, “Humor is something that thrives between man’s aspirations and his limitations.” Mel Brooks said, “Humor is just another defense against the universe.” Golda Meir said, “Those who do not know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.” Jesus, I gave my heart and soul---and all of the humor in my bones---to that keynote


And, yes, once again, I was paid a shitload of money,
But I tried to create passionate and hilarious art,
So all I could do is weep when I read the comment card
That fatally declared that, “All Alexie was, was funny.”

Well, that comma between the “was” and “was” was comedy,
But it also conveyed an insult that I can’t ignore.
It implied that I’m mediocre---that I’m a laugh whore.
The bastard declared that, “All Alexie was, was funny,”

As if delivering a punch line was somehow easy.
Jesus, that comment card made me feel naked and raw,
And illuminated all of my open wounds and scars.
The asshole declared that, “All Alexie was, was funny,”

And I drowned in a tsunami of insecurity.
I wanted to go find that pretentious professor and choke
Him into unconsciousness with a book of dirty jokes.
The fucker declared that, “All Alexie was, was funny,”

And I turned that little note into a tragedy.
But, no, that won’t make me quit. I’ll still resist convention;
Yes, I will disprove the professorial contention
That a serious man is not supposed to be funny.


Sherman Alexie