Wonder Boys

A Pittsburgh-based novel and film of the same name, woven into my life

“I think he might have named her after me,” my friend, Deborah, said. We were probably at Cappies on Walnut Street sharing our deepest secrets when it came out. Deborah was working on her Ph.D. in Art History at that time and we had become “study buddies” during the fall semester of 1996 when we were both taking Professor Doctor Klaus Conermann’s course in Middle High German. The film, Wonder Boys, had not yet been made, but the novel had been published on March 14, 1995, so it is conceivable that it was sometime between that semester and our eventual parting when she moved to Germany and then Austria where she’s now the wife of the director of the Mozarteum. Last I checked, she was giving tours of the Mozart Geburtshaus in Salzburg.

The character in Chabon’s novel was a small part, the half-sister of Grady Tripp’s wife who’d just left him on the morning upon which the film opens. In the film, the opening scene is in a classroom that I had to give up for the shooting. I’d been teaching German 1 the spring semester of 1999 at Carnegie-Mellon University on my lunch hours. In the evenings, I taught a couple of courses at the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning; German 1 and German for Reading Knowledge. The latter was my favorite. My main gig was holding down the fort as secretary to the Chief Conservator of the Carnegie Museum of Art about which I wrote a couple of days ago.

The film (and novel) centered on a character who was inspired by a professor of creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh under whom Chabon had studied during his time as a student. I’d meet that professor in person on the day Neil Armstrong died, August 25, 2012. I was sitting in the Frick Fine Arts building to honor the memory of Lewis “Buddy” Nordan, next to my friend who was a longer-term friend of Buddy. I leaned over when the notification came in on my phone of Armstrong’s death to whisper the information to David. We were being regaled with stories of Buddy by a man who’d ascended the stage to take the podium with difficulty. “I’m what’s left of Chuck Kinder,” he said. The name didn’t mean much to me and I didn’t hear it clearly. He was recovering from a stroke suffered some years before. At the end of the memorial celebration of Buddy’s life, which was being emceed by Clyde Edgerton, I made sure to get Chuck’s last name correct, introducing myself as a friend of Buddy. He replied and said “Everyone was.” Later that night, I looked him up and was amazed that he was the role model of Chabon’s “Grady Tripp” - the central character of Wonder Boys.

Even more remarkable to me was that Chuck’s remembrance’s of Buddy included sharing that he and Buddy had punked Raymond Carver over the phone when Carver was providing his perspectives on Buddy’s stories. Sitting in Kinder’s office in the Cathedral of Learning with Buddy silently listening, Kinder had asked Carver what he thought.

“There seems to be a lot about midgets in these tales,” Carver volunteered.

In a hushed whisper, Buddy said, “Tell Ray I’m a midget!”

“There’s a lot about transvestitism too!”

“Tell Ray I’m a transvestite!” came the prompting whisper to Kinder’s ear, out of range of the phone’s receiver.

“Is he there with you now?” Carver inquired.

“He is,” Kinder admitted.

“Is he in drag?” Carver wanted to know.

“Tell Ray I’m in a little blue Halston number; an off-the-shoulder kind of affair!” Buddy whispered.

“Can I talk to him?” Carver asked.

Buddy got on the phone affecting his best bad Charlie Chan impersonation - all to paint a mental picture of an asian transvestite midget in Carver’s mind.

Such was the madness of the man we lost on April 13, 2012. One of his sons recounted how he would pretend a garbage can in a McDonalds was eating him just to shake people up. Buddy was known by some as “The Clown Prince of Southern Literature.” His most successful novel was “Wolf Whistle” which is about the murder of Emmet Till down in Mississippi, not far from where Till had met his violent end; a decidedly unfunny experience through which Buddy had lived as a young teen-aged kid. He knew the murderers. He became friends in later years with Emmet Till’s mother.

While I do not believe Michael Chabon attended that memorial service, he might have and I probably would not realize it. I realized today, however, that

Michael Chabon

has joined Substack. I know I’ll be reading some great prose from him here soon and hope he won’t mind me drawing my readers’ attention to his work.

To go back to 2012, in June of that year, a few months before the memorial service. I ran into someone who heard me telling one of my stories and came up to ask for my contact information. She was studying at Cambridge at the time and living in Berlin. I saw no harm in providing my connection but made sure to make mention of my wife, just in case she might have had some other reasons than interest in my story telling. Later, via email, she confessed that she hadn’t realized I was married at first, but that my story-telling style reminded her of the writings of Raymond Carver, with whom I was then unacquainted. I surely had heard the name, but, given that information, I went out and bought a few of his works at Kramer Books in my neighborhood here in DC. I was reading one of them on the flight out to Pittsburgh to attend Buddy’s memorial service. You can imagine my shock when Kinder recounted his story. I had already fallen in love with the film, Wonder Boys, when it was released. I saw it, in fact, with my own analog of the character played by Katie Holmes in the film. I’d see it again when I landed in Denmark with my next partner who I mentioned in this post from yesterday:

I will probably watch it later today again, now that I have it on DVD. My life has taken different turns from that point, but I was very happy to have it all come flooding back this morning when I saw that the author has joined us on Substack.

As usual, I could go on and on and there are stories within these stories, but I hope that this will inspire more than a few readers to jump down some rabbit holes and, if nothing else, read the novel and see the film.