My family told me we were going over to Don DeLillo’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. We arrived at the house, a huge run-down brick duplex. The halves had been joined to form one big house, but one side of it had collapsed decades earlier and had never been repaired or cleaned up. The sign out front was missing some letters. It read:

D LI LO

When we walked in, we were in the unfinished basement, littered with debris. There were ovens all over the place that looked like the gas-jet gyros spits in Greek restaurants. Don was using them to cook pizzas for everybody. I started picking through all the garbage on the floor and came across some yellowed old photographs from the early ‘70s. Through the faded color I could just barely make out the images of my dad and my uncles and my grandfather, all looking really young, leaning against a car in…Don DeLillo’s driveway! Wow, I didn’t know their friendship went back so far. Then I came across a toy camera, like those LCD cameras from the ‘80s that would record on cassette tapes. I started filming everyone. Suddenly there was a loud splat noise, and I looked over at an ancient wood-and-metal sluice that was attached to the wall, leading upstairs through a hole in the ceiling. A bunch of raw meat was pouring down the sluice, and there was gore and animal fat splattering all over the place. The air filled with the thick nauseating smell of blood. I went upstairs to escape the odor.

Upstairs there was a giant party going on. DeLillo’s place was gigantic and maze-like, with countless interjoining rooms, most of which were decorated in a wood-grain panel and earth-color ‘70s scheme. I went up to the second floor, where there was a room filled with musical gear, and my friends were there rehearsing some songs. In another room there were a bunch of the rarest records, including the little-seen jigsaw-cut Joy Division single that’s worth in excess of $30,000. Why does DeLillo leave all this expensive stuff sitting around, where there are all these strangers walking in and out of his house? I grabbed a plate of bacon appetizers from a banquet table and decided to explore the rest of the upstairs. I could see an area down the hall that was closed off with plywood doors and padlocks. But before I got there, a couple of DeLillo’s security guards appeared from nowhere and grabbed me by the arms, pulling me away and telling me to leave.

I kneeled down and asked someone, who was sitting on the floor, “What’s with this DeLillo guy? Does he have some kind of supernatural powers or something?” He just looked at me, startled and nervous, and said, “Yes.” Just then, as if on cue, I looked up and there was Don DeLillo, looking at me silently with an implacable, slightly menacing expression on his face.

posted at 1:46 PM