The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Encounters with Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 After a series of one-line gags, he announced two topics for the evening, and it would be his task to put them together: “Woman’s Liberation and Richard Nixon.” The conjunction of these wildly disparate topics provoked more laughter. Just like Mailer to try to yoke together incompatible extremes.
+But he didn’t get far before a man in the balcony moaned aloud with mock weariness, “I’m bored.”
+“Oh, fuck you,” snapped Mailer, annoyed at the interruption. “You aren’t even beginning to be bored.”
+“Fuck you with a telephone pole!” the guy shouted back with verve.
+“You’re not man enough to hold the telephone pole,” responded Mailer.
+The crowd roared; they were enjoying the repartee. I couldn’t say the same for myself; I had heard better insults in a junior high playground.
+Mailer began to talk about the McGovern campaign, but again, they would not let him continue. They baited him, and when he rose to the bait, a voice in the balcony piped out, “Now, now, Norman, that’s a very childish way to reinforce your masculinity.”
+As the interruptions continued, Mailer began to lose patience, like the hard-as-nails principal of a slum school, trying to deliver a lecture to an assembly full of punks while the smartasses in the balcony pelt him with spit balls. “I tell you what, gang,” said Mailer, “keep it up and we’re gonna have a showdown.”
+The crowd was vastly amused by these sideshows even as I was finding them more and more tiresome. I resented the protestors for their interruptions, and I resented Mailer for encouraging them. Was he only going to play the clown this evening?