One spring day in 2009, in Asheville, NC, where my creative collaborator James Navé and I were teaching a writing workshop, I opened my computer to see a notification: “Salman Rushdie wants to be your friend on Facebook.”
I barely knew Salman. We’d never had a one-to-one conversation, though we’d met at a few gatherings in London, when he was still living a clandestine life, and more recently he’d come to the New York launch party for my memoir Love Child, given by our mutual friend Joan Juliet Buck. I saw my role, vis-à-vis Salman, as being the person who pulled him onto the dance floor. The person who tried not to be awed by the aura of untouchability that he’d been so unwillingly drenched in.
I laughed out loud. Countless people wanted to be Salman’s friend—or his sworn enemy—but, devil/martyr icon that he was, he’d been virtually depersonalized. It seemed so out of register that he wanted anything so mundane as a Facebook friend—let alone me.
I checked with a mutual friend. Yes, it really was him. So I accepted his friend request, as you do, and left it at that.
A year or so later, I was raising money for my short film Good Luck, Mr. Gorski. I’d written the script about 20 years earlier and after Love Child, that’s what called me. I applied for a New Mexico Film Board grant of $20,000 and didn’t get it. Well, I thought, I could ask 20 people to invest $1000 each, but that was a big ask since short films don’t make money, so “invest” would be a disingenuous synonym for “give.” What if I asked 1000 people to give me $20 each?
Here's the story: When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, he said, as we all know, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But he said other things too—one of which was, “Good luck, Mr. Gorski.” So, who’s Mr. Gorski? The CIA went ballistic: sounds like a Russian name! We’ve put a Commie spy on the moon! But Neil Armstrong wouldn’t say who Mr. Gorski was until decades later. The Gorskis were his next-door neighbors when he was a kid in Wapakoneta, Ohio. One day he was throwing a baseball with his brother and the ball sailed over the fence into the Gorskis’ backyard. That night he snuck out of bed and climbed the fence to get his ball back, and overheard, through the open bedroom window, Mrs. Gorski, very upset, saying, “Oral sex? You want oral sex? You’ll get oral sex the day the kid next door WALKS ON THE MOON!”
Sadly, not true—but even so, don’t you want to know what happened with the Gorskis, the day the kid next door walked on the moon?
I trotted out my pitch at every opportunity, followed by, “Would you like to join the launch crew and contribute $20?” I messaged Facebook friends too, including Salman—after all, he’s the one who wanted to be my friend—not expecting a reply. When the reply came, quickly, it came with a contribution which seemed to have a zero too many. I wrote back, “I think you made a typo.” Salman wrote back, “No I didn’t.”
When we had a screening of the film in New York, Salman was the very first person to arrive.
Yesterday I read his new book KNIFE: a memoir of his attempted murder on August 12, 2022. It’s an account by an almost-murderee who loves life and lives love, with a woman who by force of will pulled him back through the veil. Despite being a story that’s pretty much bounded by his own damaged body and the room he’s in, it’s full of people: friends and strangers, near and far, alive and dead. And to my massive surprise, one of them is me.
I don’t spend much time on Instagram, but on the morning of August 12, 2022, I happened to scroll through and saw a gorgeous picture of the full moon posted by Salman, in Chautauqua, the night before. Within an hour, I heard of the attack. In KNIFE, he describes looking at that full moon, on his last night of innocence as he calls it, and the associations it brought up in his thoughts. Among them: Good Luck, Mr. Gorski.
And he also thinks of the early film Voyage dans la lune by Georges Méliès, made in 1902, and its most famous image, which he reproduces:
The story of the Gorskis, as we told it in the film, is the story of two people sleepwalking toward death when suddenly, out of nowhere, they’re gifted the chance to get their lives back. All it takes is two tiny, private, reckless moments: one each. I didn’t know how the story would end when I sat down to write it; I wrote it to find out, and it was one of the few times in my writing life when I really did feel like I was taking dictation. I didn’t make this up. I just tapped in to where it was.
KNIFE is also the story of a man getting his life back, fueled by the reckless determination of love. It’s tender and funny and full of wisdom and brilliance worn lightly, and it’s as intensely personal as personal can get. It proves the power of open-hearted art: it transmutes violence and pain into delicate, honest sweetness.
In the long run, in the struggle of art vs. ideology, it’s art—which questions and lampoons and makes impossible connections—that takes the victory.
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