DS: No, Paul was delighted with it. Esquire sent a photographer down. I warned him, "Sometimes photographers might try to force you to do things you don't want to do. Don't do anything you don't want to do." I called at 11 o'clock in the morning, and he'd already had like four beers and smoked a joint. The photographer came, and Paul took his shirt off, and he blacked out his teeth with Magic Marker. He was French kissing my dad's dog for the photograph.
PB: Do you feel any qualms about using your family for your material?
DS: Well, basically, I went to my brother's wedding, and it was the first time my family had been together since my mom's funeral. In the morning, one of my sisters would knock on my door, and I didn't answer. And it didn't escape me that I was in my room writing about them, rather than spending time with them. Because basically I went to the wedding looking for a story. That's the kind of brother I've turned into, and it's really horrible, I think.
PB: Even though they're OK about it?
DS: Yeah, I think it's pretty bad. Paul's OK with it. But if the situation were reversed, I wouldn't like it. There's a lot of things they tell me now that they tell me I'm not allowed to repeat. I don't know what to do with things I can't repeat. My attitude is, "Why tell me?" Whereas a normal person, or a caring person, might want to hear that so they could know the other person better, or they could then offer comfort. Or protection, or something. My attitude is, "What do you expect me to do with that?" It's not like they're going to do anything with it. It's awful, it's really awful. [Laughs] It's like, "Here's your life, here's your privacy, here's your dignity. It's not like you're gonna do anything with it."
PB: If we can believe your story "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" in the latest book, your artistic inspiration came mostly from mass quantities of speed. At one point, you write, "I'd been up for close to three days and had taken so much speed that I could practically see the individual atoms pitching in to make up every folding chair." Are the descriptions of your speed habit true?
DS: Yeah.... Crystal methamphetamine. I've been keeping a diary for a long time, and I look back to those years, and it's just the speed talking. Page after page after page after page. Just crap. I was doing conceptual art then, too, so it would be not only crap, but it would be manifestos. Just pretty awful.
PB: You've given up drinking and drugs now and just stick to cigarettes. What got you to stop taking speed?
DS: My drug dealer moved out of town. If I'd lived in a bigger city, I could have found another way to get it. But I didn't know where else to go. I was surprised...maybe five years after she left town, I was living in Chicago, and somebody offered me some, and I was able to say no. I was surprised, because I was powerless over that stuff. It feels...I just love it. I often think, "Oh, if I had some crystal, I could get this done so quickly. Get anything done." It just makes you feel so smart and so...so...alive. It's just a wonderful drug. It really is. It is so dangerous.
