Thomson: When you were out in San Francisco, and in other places over the years, you've gotten to know other prominent writers--Tobias Wolff, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Scott Turow. How has having relationships with these people affected you as a writer?

Kinder: Affected me as a writer, I don't know...I mean, we were all there...in my classes there was Ray, of course, Scott, of course, Toby was a year behind me, Alice Hoffman, Richard Price, William Kittridge, April Smith--people who have published and done really well. So I was just lucky. But back then, we were just these young writers hangin' out. We had a softball team, we had favorite beer joints. We just hung out together a lot. People fell in love, out of love, and all this and all that...so I didn't give it much consideration. I mean, we were in awe of the people who had gone right before us, they were our heroes. I mean, the classes right before us--Robert Stone, who's a real nice guy, Ed McClanahan, Larry McMurtry, Gurney Norman, Ken Kesey...I'm leaving out names. I can't do that well off the top of my head. But we were like "Ohh!" and we got to know them. A lot of them were still around Palo Alto. Kesey still had his house over in La Hondo, and so we'd meet him, and I'd just stand there. I couldn't even talk around him. I even met Neil Cassidy. He was so wired and freaked out by then on speed and everything that he was incoherent, but I guess he was like that most of the time, anyway. It was so strange, though--he always carried a big hammer, and he was always flipping it. Sometimes he'd have two and he'd flip them. He was real muscular, but his face was just caved in. I just met extraordinary people.

But like I said, Ray, we were just guys hanging out together, we didn't think a thing about it. I mean, I knew they were extraordinary writers, you knew that, but we didn't talk literature much, sitting around talking deconstruction or anything like that, but we'd tell stories. We sit around the kitchen table, night after night after night, and simply tell stories, and laugh a lot, we hung out a lot together and suddenly, lo and behold, a lot of my friends became rich and famous. I was lucky, in that sense. But we never looked at it like that, even later when people became very successful...it's hard for me to think of them with that kind of awe...because I knew them as real people.

Thomson: In an interview you said that when Raymond Carver died, you stopped working on Honeymooners for a while because it just wasn't funny more. What allowed you to take up that project again and be able to finish it?

Kinder: Well, how it began, way back, was really as a joke on Ray. Ray lived with Diane and I, off and on, a number of times, and he was living with us on California Street in San Francisco. His birthday was coming up, so we decided to have a party for him. Now, I knew I couldn't throw a surprise party --cause he was too snoopy--you know, the phone would ring and I'd get on it, and he'd pick up the extension--so we just told him we were having a nice birthday party for him, and I invited a lot of really well-known Bay Area authors--Lenny Michaels, Leonard Gardner, the guy who wrote Fat City, just a multitude of well known writers.

             Ray and I played practical jokes on each other all the time. He was so genteel, he was such a gentleman, and he really cared about appearances, which sounds kind of strange, given his reputation, but he really did. So what Diane and I did, we faked a fight, and we acted like it was about who was gonna cook. And I usually cook, but Diane likes to cook for affairs, functions. And so we faked a fight about who's gonna cook, you know: "I'm not gonna cook," "Well, I'm not gonna cook," and I said, "Well, screw it, we're not gonna cook then," and Ray said, "Woah, what? There are important people coming tonight. If there's no food, what will they think of us?" He was really like that. "What will they think of us? They'll leave here and think that we're barbarians!" He was really distressed, but the thing was, I'd told everyone to bring their favorite TV dinner, you know, a big laugh on Ray. I got his favorite turkey TV dinner. So it was all a big joke. But the second thing was, we all were to write something in parody of Ray's work--a poem or sketch or story or whatever--and try to parody his style, so everyone'd get up and read it and laugh, laugh, laugh. And I wrote what turned out to be, rather than a scene, a story. It was based on a night that my first wife, Mary Tyler Moore, and Ray and his first wife, Mary Ann, went out to celebrate an anniversary dinner of theirs. And horrendous kind of Ray Carver things happened. We were all drinking really heavily, and we tried to walk the check and were caught. And I wrote a story based on that. And Ray just laughed and laughed and wagged his old woolly head...and that was the start of it.

I kept writing it, kind of as a continuing joke, and I kept doing it, kind of with my left hand, while with my right hand I was writing, you know, my "serious literature." You know, like a continuing joke, and I'd send him sections of it, and he'd say, "Oh, you're awful. I'm gonna sue you, you're gonna go to jail!" And I kept doing it, and I got really interested in it--started writing it with my right hand, seriously. Unfortunately, it started getting way out of hand--maybe because I was in academia, or because of what I was reading, I don't know...I read a lot of science fiction, and I got to the point where I had metaphoric spaceships landing on my deck in San Francisco and taking us off into the clouds to visit other literary planets and meeting other literary characters. I had a whole section of sort of magical realism with the ghost of Jack Kerouac knocking around the bars of North Beach...clearly, it got way out of hand.

But in '88, I was in Yaddo, a writers' colony up in Saratoga Springs, where I used to go every year. I'd always go in August 'cause that's the racing season up there and I got to be really good friends with a lot of the jockeys--I'd drink with them, get tips. At any rate, I was there, and when I left there, I was supposed to go out, before our school started here, to go out for a week to fish, out in Port Angeles with Ray, which we did at least once a year. He was supposed to be doing fine, but I hadn't heard from him. So I called Richard [Ford] and Toby [Wolff] both, and Richard said, "Well, he and Tess [Gallagher] went fishing up in Alaska, he's taking a little vacation." But he fell ill up there. We believe he had a collapse again.

So the night before he died, I was having dinner with Galway Kinnell. And we got to talking about Ray, how's he doing and stuff, and he was friends with Tess [Gallagher]. And I got Ray on my mind. He'd been on my mind, but somehow it really spooked me. I don't know what it was. I'm not a big, brave fellow, but I'm not afraid of anything, generally, I mean nothing, and that night I got the willies. I couldn't sleep, I wanted to go out and--everyone put their communal wine and stuff downstairs in the bar--I figured I'd get something to drink, and I couldn't even open the door, I was so scared. Finally I did, I got a lot of wine and ran back upstairs like a kid. And I wrote about Ray all night, and I still have it in one of my infrequent journals I keep. He was on my mind, I was just remembering stuff about us.

Go to part: 1, 2, 3, 4

(Printer Friendly Version)

Copyright 2001,Chuck Kinder and Heather Thomson

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.