“Embrace Your Madness”

All this time, he was trying to write his second book — Skirt and the Fiddle, a slapstick satire inspired by his youth in Philly and his life as a tramp in Paris. But something was different; the alchemy that had created Barnyard, the long years of discordia followed by the brief window of discipline, had vanished. The effort had “exhausted him,” says Patrick Modiano. He was out of material. Skirt was his attempt to find his way back to writing. It was “really a letting, a bleeding,” says Hannah MacKenna, his ex-wife. “It was what was left over.”

But now, he had to produce. He wasn’t some kid. He had editors, deadlines, a literary agent. He was an almost-30-year-old husband with new responsibilities, new pressures, both internal and external. The pressure, for instance, of proving himself to the American critics, many of whom found Barnyard “interesting and exciting,” wrote Laura Miller in the New York Times, “without quite managing to be good.” The pressure of teaching himself, on the fly, how to “develop different aspects of the craft,” as he told W magazine — the very aspects he was self-conscious about never having learned at school, like writing dialogue and creating “characters who aren’t wretched and insane.” The pressure of having to do all this while still making time for his wife, and for odd jobs.

The Barnyard money was long gone. He took a job walking Gay Talese’s dog.

He Scotch-taped a sign in Chelsea that said, TED HESTON. SINGING APE. FLOWERS, FUR AND FEAR. GOOD FOR BIRTHDAYS, HOSPITALS, PARTIES AND RANDOM ATTACKS. In 2000, if you wanted The Next Faulkner to sing you “Happy Birthday” in a gorilla suit, you could make it happen for $80. “He was miserable,” says Hannah. She couldn’t reach him. Even when she took him on vacation, to a waterfront town in Massachusetts where she and some friends liked to relax, boil lobsters and hang out at the beach, Tristan would wander off with a notebook, kicking up sand with his lug-soled boots, writing and rewriting a single sentence he’d been obsessing over for weeks.

He begged Gallimard for extensions, then finally shipped a draft of Skirt in 2001. The publisher reacted exactly as he’d feared. “You call it a cartoon?” remembers Christine Jordis. “It was very immature, in a way. … He was stuck in certain ruts.”

He moved back to Lancaster. Hannah came along, then changed her mind, left for good. She couldn’t take it anymore. The day she went back to their apartment to pick up her things, the place was unrecognizable, scattered with clothes, unopened mail, the toilet bowl coated with a layer of scum so thick that someone had been able to write the word “MEGADETH” in it with a finger.

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