Michael Paterniti - Interview

DB: In what way?

MP: Because you are so completely in the present. You can be going eighty-five miles per hour, and it feels like you are not moving at all! It feels as if time isn't moving. You pass a cow and it's like, Wow, what a cow. It's a very Zen state.

DB: You kept Thurman Munson's 1979 baseball card propped on the dash. Any particular reason?

MP: To me, Munson is another great American hero because, like Harvey, he's not your typical hero. He wasn't the fastest guy on the field; he looked like a walrus; he threw baseball bats at camera people; he was a junkyard dog. But he was the heart and soul of the Yankees, and there was something about him I wanted to connect to.

DB: You and Harvey visited William Burroughs in Kansas. Could you talk about that?

MP: That was one of the best nights of my life--completely surreal and out of control. It was in 1997, a few months before he died. We talked about everything under the sun, about his drug use, of course, and what an amazing, magical substance morphine was. He'd just had his fix. We were sitting there, drinking, and suddenly William has his gun out, he's at the window, seeing headlights come in and pass over the wall, and he thinks we're being attacked or possibly that aliens have landed. There was this hilarious thing out back that Burroughs said was a landing pad for aliens--a huge mound of grass in the shape of a penis.

DB: You went to Dodge City too, right? What was it like?

MP: When you drive across the plains at night in total blackness and come into a lit-up town like Dodge City, with its amazing American legacy of gunfights and cowpokes and brothels, the past feels very immediate. You can almost see those old gunslingers wandering the streets.

DB: How about Las Vegas?

MP: Vegas is the chimera of the American Dream. It's a place where time doesn't exist. At night, people go into casinos pumped full of super-oxygenated air and walk out at dawn feeling like a half-hour has passed. Las Vegas would have amused Einstein-certainly he would have had many harp things to say about people being fed their gin and tonics and willingly turning over their money to this big, gobbling city of lights. But it would also have terrified him. He felt there was no room for chance or chaos in t e universe. One of his most famous statements is: "God does not play dice with the universe" In Vegas, that takes on a whole new meaning.

DB: You said you once slept with the brain. Was that in Vegas?

MP: No, that was at the very end, in Berkeley. I'd seen the brain early on, but then Harvey put it right back in the duffel; he'd showed it to me so quickly that it felt like dream. Throughout the road trip, any time I brought up the brain he would deflect and obfuscate, and I was never able to get him to show it to me. So by the eleventh day, the suspense was killing me. And when I found myself alone with the brain, I took it into my roof at the Flamingo Motel and put it on the pill w by my head and fell asleep next to it.