John Waters is more likely than most 68-year-old cult authors and moviemakers to hitchhike to Little Rock and the Arkansas Literary Festival.
Waters' latest book is Carsick (2014, due out in paperback in May). The book describes his hitchhiking adventures from home in Baltimore to his second home in San Francisco.
"I would again if I had to," he says of thumbing his way nearly 3,000 miles, "now that I know I could."
The festival will be Thursday through Sunday in and around the Central Arkansas Library System's Main Library campus. Waters will speak about his road trip at 8 p.m. Saturday at Ron Robinson Theater. The talk will cover some of his other favorite subjects as well.
"Always evolving, always up-to-date," he promises: fashion, trash, crime, sex.
This Filthy World, he titles his one-man show. "Distinguished lecture," the library calls it. A curious respectability has settled on the movie director of 16 mostly R- and NC-17-rated features.
"Nobody gets mad at what I say," Waters says of speaking tours that have taken him from Paris to Fargo, N.D.
He expects no trouble, he says, if only he can avoid reference to the song, "I'm Just a Little Girl From Little Rock."
"Kill everyone now! Condone first-degree murder! Advocate cannibalism!"
-- Pink Flamingos (1972)
Pink Flamingos stars the late Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead) on a drag queen rampage to be the filthiest person on earth.
It ends with an offense so unprintable, the Lincoln Center Film Society in New York warned about Waters. The society billed last year's 50-year look back at Waters' career, "How Much Can You Take?"
For the release of Polyester, he gave out scratch-and-sniff cards that matched smells to scenes in the movie, from roses to flatulence.
But this same Waters is the writer-director of Hairspray, the dance-happy original source of the Broadway musical and 2007 remake with John Travolta.
He blames Hairspray for making him distinguished --
worse yet, beloved. He claims to have been horrified when the movie ratings board classified it PG.
"I thought I'd never work again," Waters says, telling how he opposed the wholesome label. The board stood firm that he had turned out a basically clean picture with a message in favor of racial equality.
"I'm politically correct in a weird way," Waters says. He personifies some of the most conservative values of respectable citizenship. Homeowner. Employer. Nonsmoker. Early riser with a stick-to-it work ethic.
"I'm just a gay version of my father," he says. "He sold fire protection equipment, and I sell shock and filth."
"Penny Pingleton is permanently, positively punished."
-- Hairspray (1988)
Waters not only will accept an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in May, but also deliver the college's commencement address.
"I'm taking it seriously," he says, although temporarily at a loss for what go-get-'em advice he will have for the leaders of tomorrow. "There will be parents in the audience."
His experience might apply best to the Catholic parents of, say, an odd child with a penchant for puppetry and perversion.
Gathering a cast and crew of "weird counterculture friends," according to the Internet Movie Database, the lad set about making his own movies. His debut achievement: Hag in a Black Leather Jacket (1964).
A Dirty Shame, with Tracey Ullman and Johnny Knoxville, is Waters' most recent movie, about a Baltimore neighborhood gone sex crazy due to head injuries.
"I'm Sylvia Stickles, and I've got the itch."
-- A Dirty Shame (2004)
In Carsick, the author begins with a fictional description of the best ride he could imagine. A pot dealer picks him up.
Nonchalantly, this stranger gives Waters $5 million -- the very sum Waters has been trying to raise for years. His dream is to make a Christmas movie called Fruitcake, starring Knoxville of the Jackass films that Waters admires.
The stalled movie and shortage of $5 million are true parts embedded in the make-believe.
Waters goes on to imagine the worst that might happen to him on the road: a morgueminded murderous maniac.
In the book's third section, "The Real Thing," he sets off cross-country with a cardboard sign and a faith in "the basic goodness of people."
"If I get stuck in the middle of the night," he promises himself, "I'll do anything I have to do to survive -- even call a limousine."
The people he actually met, Waters says, "couldn't have been sweeter."
Waters' longtime assistant and actress, Susan Allenback (Betty Doggett in A Dirty Shame), confirms what Waters says in the book's introduction -- that she thought the idea was "ludicrous," and that he sneaked off to hitch his first ride.
"All of us in the office worried and fretted because it could have turned out very wrong," she says.
"Of course, the story has a happy ending -- even better than we all imagined," she says, but still.
"We spent many hours formulating plans to track him on his journey," she says, including "some that we thought up to secretly shadow his progress, but knew he'd kill us if we really tried to do."
"Who wants to be famous? Who wants to die for art?"
-- Female Trouble (1974)
Carsick is the latest of Waters' six books, counting screenplay collections.
In his book Role Models (2010), he reports a home library of 8,425 books. He now raises the count to about 9,000, and subscribes to Publishers Weekly for tips on more to come.
He devotes a chapter, called "Bookworm," to what he likes best of all: "staying home and reading."
"Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own," he writes. "It's the freedom to buy any book you like without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it."
Waters recalls his younger years of working behind the counter in small bookstores as his only normal employment. Bookstore clerk is the career to which he would return if he had to find a job, "if I could find a bookstore."
He accepts royalties from e-books, but he doesn't read even himself in electronic form. He defines the vanishing term, ''bookstore,'' as a place that sells books, no candles. "Candles are the sign of a bad bookstore."
Waters is devoted to his patronage of Atomic Books in Baltimore, a quirky independent that boasts "literary finds for mutated minds." The store's website (atomicbooks.com) answers the frequently asked question: "Does John Waters own Atomic Books?" No.
Books to be found on Waters' bedstand these reading nights: Chicken Little and Slovenly Peter, two of his childhood favorites.
Chicken Little runs around, convinced the sky is falling. The idea of the heavens crashing down "kind of appealed to me," Waters says.
The Arkansas Arts Center's Children's Theatre will perform a stage version of the panicked fowl's chicken run during the literary festival.
Slovenly Peter is a lesser-known old German tale that Waters imagines "a lot of parents gave their children." The boy's misbehavior brings terrible consequences, as when he won't stop sucking his thumb. Snip go the big scissors, and one thing Peter will never do is thumb a ride.
"I loved it as a child," Waters says.
His current reading exhibits much the same enthusiasm. He recommends Rachel Cusk's A Life's Work: On Becoming a Mother.
"How scary and horrible," Waters says -- having a baby.
"Shut up, mother! ... You can rot in that wheelchair for all I care."
-- Polyester (1981)
He wasn't always so bookish. Waters confesses to having been a reluctant reader as a boy -- a failure at words, just as he failed to make an acceptable sugar scoop in shop class.
As for the shop assignment: "Why would I ever need to make a sugar scoop?"
Reading problems went away with his discovery of Grove Press. Grove championed books so notorious, they resulted in landmark court fights over censorship: D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch.
Books and writing consume his days, as Waters tells it -- books, writing and pencil mustache trimming. The merest slip of the shaver could destroy his trademark look, likely the thinnest lip fringe ever displayed on a book jacket.
The author's other books include Crackpot: The Obsessions of John Waters and Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste.
"Grandmother, Uncle Belvedere, you've made me the happiest juvenile delinquent in all of Baltimore."
-- Cry-Baby (1990)
Waters' first visit to Little Rocks puts him in mind of the former president and first lady from Arkansas, Bill and Hillary Clinton.
"I figure Hillary has never seen any of my films," he says, "but I bet Bill saw Pink Flamingos."
Style on 04/19/2015