Eating DeLillo
I been eating DeLillo since I was a kid. At first DeLillo was the guy posing in a jogging suit on the Wheaties box, world class novelist. "Books do a body good." Then General Mills got slapped with fines for an environmental catastrophe: half our town was cut down by a wave of smoldering molten nacho cheese. It was horrible. If it came into contact with your skin it would stick to you and burn. Dayglo napalm. His lawyers went to work to reclaim his image, but for a while Wheaties disappeared from the shelves. The next time I saw a box of Wheaties, it had Gore Vidal on it, posing in a jogging suit, smoking a pipe. Then DeLillo got his own cereal. There was a game on the back: it said help Billy Twillig find his way through the complex and decipher the transmission. If you sent in ten proof-of-purchase seals, they sent you a secret booklet that explained the Names. For awhile, they were giving away a shrink-wrapped, hardbound copy of Underworld as a free literary surprise in every box. Heavy book, didn't leave much room for cereal.
I am convinced that DeLillo cereal is nutritionally perfect. It was all I ate in college: DeLillo and coffee. I'd fix myself a big bowl of DeLillo late at night and watch tasteful soft porn on cable. I studied design and later went to work for a firm in Michigan. My second year we secured a contract with DeLillo and I was designing the cover of the box. Making the cereal look rugged and wholesome had been the approach in the previous decade, but now they wanted something psychedelic. "Can you make it explode more?" Something about decadence and ecstasy. At that time America had a president who was active sexually. I was in love with the rep from DeLillo and I tried to make the box of DeLillo explode more. Chartreuse, fuchsia, and orange. I thought it could be seen from space. But the DeLillo people didn't think it exploded enough. We almost lost the contract. I was moved to a different team: a billboard & a five-second spot for the "Drink Water" campaign. We tried to come up with some transparent concepts. "That's a good idea: now dilute it!" I got depressed. I switched back to Wheaties (now Hunter S. Thompson was on the box—a jogging suit and scotch), and then stopped eating breakfast at all. By then I was into hardcore and just about the only people I saw were the other men at the XXX store, with whom I avoided eye contact. Now, of course, DeLillo is red white and blue like everything else, and on the box it says "Part of a patriotic breakfast." At a meeting discussing storyboards for a commercial for vegetarian caviar, someone brought up DeLillo and suggested we try to roll patriotism into our concept. Vegetarian caviar: worth fighting for.
This is the edge of nowhere. It suits me. I tried to do the meditation exercise where you close your eyes and try not to be a smart-ass, but I couldn't focus. I get so mean sometimes I beat my cat. And now it is time to do the thing I call praying, which is to sit awake at night in the dark and stare up into the empty sky where nobody answers you. Then will fall the stars of my streaming tears.
So help me I want to put poison in all the boxes of DeLillo.