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Flameout | page 1, 2
He valued artistic talent and ambition, courage, intelligence, humor and athletic prowess. He was fascinated by archaeology and funded digs in Crete, and wrote in the New Yorker about the brutalizing of Cambodia's Angkor Wat by dealers in black market antiquities. The metaphor of archaeology appealed to him on a visceral level; the concept of digging one's way to a buried, obscured truth was exactly how he saw the work of the fiction writer. This is not to say that Rob didn't have an extremely complex relationship with the trappings of his social class, as evidenced in his writing. Compelled to participate in many of the primal rituals of the upper crust -- like the Head of the Charles (the ur-crew event, an elite international race, something like the Kentucky Derby of crew racing) -- he was often in an obsessive rage over preppiness. He'd show up drunk and snarling, or lusting over grotesquely uptight tennis ladies. He could be found at the Racquet Club, gleefully working off hangovers earned in the sleaziest titty bars in Manhattan, loving and hating his own kind with a vehemence that often freaked out his companions. "That's so fucking prepeee!" he would shout at some event, opinion or person -- and you were never quite sure what exactly he meant. Rob loved rock music and his aesthetic sensibility was punk, vintage East Coast, early 1980s. As an artist (and person) he was much closer to, say, Dee Dee Ramone than to people like Michael Chabon or Jeffrey Eugenides (writers whom he has been compared to). He adored the work of Robert Stone, Dylan Thomas and Graham Greene but he reveled in Pavement. Rob believed that what he was looking for could be found in the hardest, ugliest places in our culture and psyche. And when he couldn't stand what he saw there, he sought escape in pure adrenaline-saturated sensation by (for just a few examples) driving too fast, moshing too enthusiastically at hardcore shows, inserting himself into politically unstable Third World countries, telling people what he thought of them to their faces, gambling huge sums of money, shooting guns and taking drugs. Rob's particular sense of humor, with its finely tuned and occasionally sophisticated appreciation for the bizarre, the revolting and the absurd, was often manifested in the literary journal Open City, which he co-founded and bankrolled. Open City was a witty, provocative and often dark magazine that published exactly what Rob and his co-editors, writers Tom Beller and Daniel Pinchbeck, really loved and nothing else. Like Gertrude Stein on the Rue des Fleurus, Rob delighted almost as much in discovering new counterculture talent -- and encouraging and promoting it -- as he did in working on his own writing. A memory of Rob: It is summer and we are visiting him in Nantucket, at his beautiful wide-gabled house that sits alone in the midst of acres and acres of rose-hip- and sea-grass-covered dunes, looking out at the brooding Atlantic. We have been listening to Pavement at full blast all weekend, drinking too much, arguing about fiction and playing endless backgammon games. Rob is wearing a black knitted watch cap, cat-burglar style, and has a cashmere blanket wrapped around his shoulders in a "homage" to the insanely annoying pashmina. Rob, a committed Democrat who routinely donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Democratic National Committee, has his rifle hoisted in the air and is explaining to us, at the top of his lungs, about Al Gore's electability problem: "Gore is a fucking fake Southerner, just like me. He has no fucking clue about anyone who didn't go to fucking St. Alban's!" He then clomps downstairs into the dark Nantucket night and shoots Heineken cans off the fence until his girlfriend, the thoughtful Vanessa, persuades him he might hit someone barbecuing on the beach. It is hard to know how to convey Rob without flattening him. Like most people who are worth knowing, he was many contradictory people at once, some of them appealing, some of them loathsome. He struggled with alcohol addiction for most of his adult life and most recently with heroin. He could be a vicious drunk, too, spewing devastating remarks at his friends and then disappearing before they could respond. Alcohol seemed to eliminate his understanding of limits, both physical and emotional. Drunk, Rob tended to be terrifyingly self-destructive. However, he did not mean to die last November. He had "Lightning on the Sun" in galleys, he had just gotten married that summer to his longtime girlfriend, he was ready to take off. Rob was an infrequent heroin user -- "chippers," they're called -- who was just terribly unlucky, and alone, one night. Rob's most distinctive quality, for me, in his art and life was his ambition to convey what he really felt, poetically and realistically. His work was sometimes brilliant and not always successful, but it was never about the bland, self-conscious cleverness that is the hallmark of so much of the writing of his contemporaries. He dared to reveal himself in his fiction and, for that matter, often in the first five minutes you knew him. Rob was just beginning. His talent, and his life, were only in bud. He wrote two excellent books, but he would have written more; he would have dug even deeper and rocked the house with his brilliance, his humor and his magnificent voice.
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