Suffer for Our Amusement

As he walks out of the elevator at the Fairmont Olympic Hotel, David
Sedaris looks up, over his shoulder, down at his shoes, and then sort
of spins around. He’s looking for me, but I’d rather watch him futz
around than introduce myself. Anyone who’d recognize him as David
Sedaris would want something awkward to happen to him so he could watch
his response. A bellhop whizzes by and some Talbots-wearing folk wander
behind him, looking exhausted and incontinent… but that’s it. Nothing
else really happens.

He walks downstairs to the hotel’s cafe and asks the tattooed
barista behind the counter for cake, but there is none. “What about a
pastry?” he asks. “We have a chocolate tort,” the woman says. Then
Sedaris announces he doesn’t like chocolate.

None of which is interesting, at all. But his career makes us want
to believe that boring moments like this might someday hold literary
value. In Sedaris’s new book, he uses pictures of 9/11 hijackers to
dissuade birds from pecking at his windows. On an airplane, he coughs
up a throat lozenge onto a stranger’s lap and then attempts to retrieve
it. He gets into a conversation with a bigoted cabdriver who uses the
expression “fucky-fuck.” He makes you feel like all of these funny
things are actually happening in your life, if only you were paying
close enough attention.

You’d think Sedaris wouldn’t want to be interviewed by a junior
reporter, but it turns out he had nothing better to do on a beautiful
day in Seattle. We talked for an hour and a half.

Do you have any stalkers?

No. But there was this woman who came to one of my book signings and
then I guess she left right after the reading and got into her car and
drove to the next one, because she was at my hotel in Denver and I had
no idea how she got the address for it. But she called herself a
stalker, and if someone calls themselves a stalker then they’re not a
stalker.

Who do you stalk?

I don’t think anyone but me understands how handsome Matt Damon is.
Right? I went on Matt Damon’s website, to When I Met Matt, and it was
people saying, “Oh my god, I met Matt Damon and he shook my hand” and
“Oh my god, I met Matt Damon and he is so cute” and I look at that and
I think, “You don’t know what cute is.” You don’t know. If that’s the
only word you can come up with for Matt Damon, that’s pathetic.

Do you write when you’re stoned?

I’d love to get high and just stare at the cover of my book and feel
it against my fingers. I think that’d be really great since I really
like the cover drawing, and I’d probably just sit there stroking it
saying, “Oh my god, oh my god.” Or it would be fun to get high and walk
by a bookstore and see it sitting on a shelf and think, “That’s my
book!” But no, I don’t write when I’m stoned.

Did anything interesting happen on the plane ride here?

I met a flight attendant and she taught me a new phrase: She said,
“Us flight attendants, we get so gassy on the airplane we end up
farting as we’re going up and down the aisles of the plane. We call
that ‘crop dusting.'” She also said a flight-attendant way of saying go
fuck yourself is “I’ll be right back.” And then this male flight
attendant told me that when he was angry with the way people on the
plane were treating him, he’d go up and down the aisles saying, “You’re
trash, you’re trash, you’re trash.” You can learn a lot from flight
attendants.

Does it ever take time for the humor of a situation to reveal
itself?

There’s a story in the book in which I wound up in a waiting room,
in France, in my underpants. And everybody else had their clothes on.
It took me six years to write about it.

Do you want children?

I want grandchildren. I’m going to die in 10 years.