The Unspoken Thing

Where does it go?  I don’t think man has ever been there.  We’re under cosmic control and have been for a long, long time, and each time it builds, it’s bigger, and it’s stronger.  And then you find out…about Cosmo, and you discover he’s running the show… 

—Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

I had always imagined Kenny Kramer as a kind of Neal Cassady: rendered by his good buddy as a free-thinking, eccentric madman—as Kerouac famously related his adventures with Cassady through the fictionalized selves of Dean Moriarty in On the Road and Cody Pomeray in The Dharma Bums—a man with too much life in him to stop and write it down like his more introspective counterpart, with a philosophy too open-ended to define it in any single static published story, whose essence can only be translated into a word that defers to the vastness of everything: Cosmo. 

            That Kenny Kramer went on to drive a bus after his alter-ego took the country’s television sets by storm is an incredible coincidence.   Kramer begins the coincidence, his first name yet to be revealed to us, that it is Cosmo and not Kenny, with a road trip by his own car that breaks down, by hitch-hiking with, first, a trucker, then, on the back of a motorcycle, and, finally, in the back of a van, in a parody of the drugged-out communal trip of hippie youths that latch on to his experience, hoping to adopt him as a Ken Kesey/Charles Manson leader, across the country, from the New York to L.A., though it is a two-minute montage on primetime television that catalogues this journey on the road and not two hundred pages of spontaneous prose.  Regardless, “The Trip,” and Seinfeld’s myth-making on the whole, create a legend just as On the Road created an idea of Neal Cassady, the real-life friend and inspiration for the beat generation, and both Kramer and Cassady ran with this notion that they wrote for themselves, as mixed with the versions of themselves that were written for them, and they both did it in the same way: they drove a bus.

            Cassady became the same larger than life inspiration for the author of the next generation’s counterculture: Ken Kesey, a man who by 1965 had taken so much acid and was so beyond the level on which the previous authors functioned that he had decided that writing was an anachronism, that the new narrative was to be lived.  Cassady drove the insanely colored bus of the stoned out-of-their-gourds Merry Pranksters across the country and finally brought Kesey and Kerouac together in—where else—Manhattan; Kramer started his own “Reality Tour” of the New York reality that provided the basis for what would become Seinfeld, an approach that goes furthur than making infinitely self-referential jokes about the ironic creation of a show that presupposes its own fiction while describing the truth of its own origin, by showing those on the bus what that truth is, not writing it and enveloping it in fictions and jokes, revealing the real Kramer, that which gives Seinfeld and David access to Cosmo.   And then you find out…about Cosmo, and you discover he’s running the show…

            Needless to say, when Kenny Kramer finally responded to an email months after I sent it—and had forgotten about it—and did not answer my questions but, instead, gave me his phone number telling me to call any time, I felt on the verge of finding out…about Cosmo.    I prepared questions, I asked people for a week about how I could go about recording it, and I waited nervously for the courage to make this call, the presumptuousness to put words to the unspoken thing that connected the world of Kenny Kramer to that of Cosmo Kramer.  Finally, I put my mother’s computer next to the speakerphone base and prepared the Garageband program to record it, went to the other room with the handset, and made the call. 

            I first got a recording of his home answering machine telling me the number of his cell phone; I then got hold of Mr. Kramer who, after recovering from a moment of confusion about who the hell I was, told me to call his house number an hour later.  I looked over the notes I had prepared, paced the house, called Brendan, and waited. 

            When I finally called and everything was in place, the conversation went very badly.   From my initial inability to improvise a response to “What makes your book different from every other book about Seinfeld?” things did not turn out as I had anticipated.  I was nervous talking to someone whom I considered a legend; I felt false describing what are, essentially, just great jokes in terse academic terms; and he rattled off stock anecdotes that he has been telling on his bus for over ten years, not in the least answering my questions—and who was I to interrupt and contradict a legend?—Are George and Kramer, based on stand-up comedians, stand-up comedians in philosophy, if not in profession?  No.  Are the presences of Kenny Kramer and Larry David in the background of the episodes causing trouble in Jerry’s neat world? “Well, yeah, Jerry has a very neat world.  Jerry in real life is a very fastidious person…There is such a thing as Alternate Side of the Street Parking…”  Can you see a sort of formula by which to describe the difference between Seinfeld and the reality that created?  “The formula is Larry.  I mean Larry came up with something that really hadn’t been done on television before where you have four characters and each has their own little story and adventure going, you know, running concurrent to each other…”  How would you compare the relationship between Cosmo Kramer and Jerry with that of Kenny Kramer and Larry?  “Cosmo’s relationship with Jerry is really more like that of my relationship with Larry…” 

            Everything I thought about Seinfeld, every insight I had come to hold dear, every attempt I had made to put into words the mechanisms of the show’s self-reflective layers, the previous year of my life was gibberish to the one man I thought would understand me.   Perhaps this was my punishment for attempting to put the Unspoken Thing into words, for writing the story of the death of writing, for betraying the faith in Cosmo, getting off the bus for the purpose of describing it, for emulating Tom Wolfe, an author whom I frankly consider to be a jackass.