{"id":136457,"date":"2019-05-21T09:00:11","date_gmt":"2019-05-21T13:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=136457"},"modified":"2019-05-20T15:20:21","modified_gmt":"2019-05-20T19:20:21","slug":"somehow-i-became-respectable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/05\/21\/somehow-i-became-respectable\/","title":{"rendered":"Somehow I Became Respectable"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

John Waters. Illustration by Ken Ingels.<\/p><\/div>\n

Somehow I became respectable. I don\u2019t know how\u2014the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirty Foot<\/em>, which is composed of close-ups from porn films, yet a museum now has it in their permanent collection and nobody got mad. What the hell has happened?<\/p>\n

I used to be despised but now I\u2019m asked to give commencement addresses at prestigious colleges, attend career retrospectives at both the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the British Film Institute, and I even got a medal from the French government for \u201cfurthering the arts in France.\u201d This cockeyed maturity is driving me crazy!<\/p>\n

Suddenly the worst thing that can happen to a creative person has happened to me. I am accepted. How can I \u201cstruggle\u201d when my onetime underground movies are now easily available? Even Multiple Maniacs<\/em> was rehabilitated music-rights-wise and is back in theatrical release from Janus Films, the original distributor of Godard and Truffaut movies, for God\u2019s sake. Pink Flamingos<\/em> has played on television! How can I whine about my films being hard to see when Warner Bros. now handles many of my titles and Criterion, the classiest of all DVD distributors, is restoring some of my rudest celluloid atrocities? Even the Museum of Modern Art now has in their collection the elements of my earliest 8mm movies that have never been formally released, and, jeez, seven of the books I\u2019ve written are still in print and two of them became New York Times<\/em> best sellers. How could that be? How? <\/p>\n

I can\u2019t even impersonate a damaged artist anymore. I have actually had friends for fifty<\/em> years and some of my dinner dates are not tax-deductible for business\u2014the sign of really having a successful personal life. Knock on wood, I\u2019m in good health. Good Lord, I\u2019m seventy-three years old and my dreams have come true. Couldn\u2019t you just puke?<\/p>\n

Success is not the enemy you may think it is when you\u2019re young, but if it comes too quickly it can be a high-class problem. Yes, you should feel slightly panicked if your insane early work is taken seriously without any initial resistance, but know that being a starving artist is an outdated concept. There\u2019s nothing wrong with making money from doing something you love. You can be happy and fucked-up and still triumph, I promise you.<\/p>\n

But suppose you\u2019re still failing, struggling unsuccessfully to find your voice? You should ask yourself, Am I the only person in the world who thinks what I\u2019m doing is important? If yes, well, you\u2019re in trouble. You need two<\/em> people to think your work is good\u2014yourself and somebody else (not your mother). Once you have a following, no matter how limited, your career can be born, and if you make enough noise, those doors will begin to open, and then, and only then, can you soar to lunatic superiority. Mr. Know-It-All is here to tell you exactly how to live your life from that day forward.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m never wrong\u2014just ask Joan Rivers\u2014well, you can\u2019t, because she\u2019s dead, but when she was alive, I introduced her to a date after we watched her perform in Provincetown and she said to him, \u201cAre you with John?\u201d When he replied yes, she advised, \u201cJust do everything he tells you to do.\u201d Joan knew I was infallible. She knew it raw.<\/p>\n

First of all, accept that something is wrong with you. It\u2019s a good start. Something has always been wrong with me, too. We\u2019re in a club of sorts, the lunatic fringe who are proud to band together. There\u2019s a joyous road to ruin out there, and if you let me be your garbage guru, I\u2019ll teach you how to succeed in insanity and take control of your low self-esteem. Personality disorders are a terrible thing to waste.<\/p>\n

Being crazy in a happy creative way begins and ends with your family. No matter how hard you try, as you get older, you turn into a twisted version of your mom and dad. No, it\u2019s not fair. But too bad, you can\u2019t choose the house you want to be born in, so just look at fate like a bingo card: sometimes you get a winner, other times you have to improvise, switch cards, and even cheat to not lose. That\u2019s just how it goes.<\/p>\n

Children can\u2019t demand good parenting any more than their parents can expect to be made proud. I was lucky. My mom and dad encouraged my dreams right from the beginning even though they must have been scared of their firstborn, who arrived six weeks too early\u2014a preemie. A teacup baby. A little boy slightly miswired, already not following the rules, ahead of his birth time and ready to roll. Maybe I was baptized too often, stripped of my inner coating of original sin. There\u2019s only one thing wrong with the Waters baby\u2014It\u2019s Alive!<\/em><\/p>\n

All I know is I was born with a screw loose. I realize now how hard it must have been for my parents to understand my early eccentricities. As a child in kindergarten I always used to come home from school and tell my mother about the twisted little boy in my class who\u2019d only draw with black crayons and never talked to the other kids. I yakked about this unnamed friend so much that my mother eventually mentioned him to my teacher, who looked confused and then blurted, \u201cBut that\u2019s your son!\u201d I was creating characters early for myself and you should let your kids do the same. Having multiple personalities when you\u2019re young is mandatory for a happy childhood.<\/p>\n

A few years later, every morning I would slink down the steps of our family home on the way to school pretending I was the Nude Descending a Staircase<\/em> painting I had read about in Life<\/em> magazine. \u201cWhat\u2019s the matter with you, boy?\u201d my dad would sputter, confused for good reason. \u201cHaven\u2019t you heard of Duchamp, fool?\u201d I\u2019d haughtily think without ever explaining out loud the roots of my fantasy behavior. My parents didn\u2019t overreact; they just took a deep breath and opened their minds a little wider.<\/p>\n

But suppose your mom and dad did<\/em> freak? That doesn\u2019t mean you have to punish yourself by repeating their humiliations for the rest of your life. Realize all childhoods are treacherous, followed by teenage years of further torture. Being an adult should finally be a relief. Don\u2019t waste time spinning your wheels for the rest of your life trying to get back at your parents. Marvel at how they were even more neurotic then than you are now. It takes two to do an ass-backward tango, so why not dance?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

John Waters\u2019s books <\/em>Role Models (2010) and <\/em>Carsick (2014) were national best sellers, and his spoken-word shows <\/em>This Filthy World and <\/em>A John Waters Christmas continue to be performed around the world. \u201cIndecent Exposure,\u201d a retrospective exhibition of Waters\u2019s acclaimed artwork, was recently shown at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. He is at work on a novel.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder<\/a>,<\/em> by John Waters. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on May 21, 2019. Copyright \u00a9 2019 John Waters. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Waters, self-described garbage guru, wonders how he stumbled into what every young artist fears: acceptance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1764,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[16711,3922,17379,53980,16321,24003,428,504,635,44336,8432,53982,53981,34437,912],"class_list":["post-136457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-avant-garde","tag-camp","tag-counterculture","tag-divine","tag-garbage","tag-indie-film","tag-john-waters","tag-literature","tag-memoir","tag-midnight-movie","tag-parents","tag-pink-flamingos","tag-radical","tag-radical-faeries","tag-trash"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSomehow I Became Respectable by John Waters<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"John Waters, self-described garbage guru, wonders how he stumbled into what every young artist 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