If everything could ever feel this real forever, if anything could ever be this good again

This week was an end to the legacies of two white male New York giants of television, the fictional Don Draper and the real David Letterman. I have alternately loved and hated them both, and I’m glad that they’re making room for others, though at least in Letterman’s case, as Chris Rock pointedly stated during the final top ten list, Letterman is making way for another white guy.

There is so much more of everything now than any of us could possibly want or need. There is so much noise. Is it even possible anymore for anything to really cut through it, to not just seem as disposable as all the rest, to make some kind of impact on the landscape? Does Jimmy Kimmel really mean anything to anyone? Am I just too old? I don’t know. If anyone can make a real impact anymore, I don’t think that person is gonna be another white guy.

When I was a kid, it was Carson and then Letterman. Growing up in Chicago, my image of Los Angeles where The Tonight Show came from was one of style over substance, glamour and facade and little real underneath. I already loved places that felt more industrial and grungy, beat up and lived in. I remember that one of my favorite things about the Letterman show back then on NBC were the photos we’d see going to and coming back from a commercial break. They were all just so New York, or at least what I thought of then as New York. 

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And Letterman, too, as a person, felt more real and alive to me than anything else on television. His monologue jokes were almost always terrible but it wasn’t about the jokes for me, it was about the little moments in between the jokes. The reactions and ad libs. The discomfort and awkwardness. The glint in the eye. It was about the way he pulled back the curtain on how his show was produced, making people like director Hal Gurnee and stage manager Biff Henderson familiar to viewers. It was also about the way he pulled back the curtain on his own neuroses and often tore himself down. 

My favorite musical performance from all of Letterman is longtime friend of the show Warren Zevon, dying of cancer, performing “Mutineer,” a song that means a lot to me, which includes the line “Ain’t no room on board for the insincere.” 

Letterman was a lot of things. He was definitely an asshole sometimes. But he almost always seemed sincere to me. (Jay Leno, by contrast, was always insufferable to me because he never seemed sincere at all.)

People change as they get older, of course, and where Letterman had once been edgy, willing to bite the hand that fed him in bits like this brilliant one when General Electric took over NBC…

he later seemed more comfortable with the establishment or at least less willing to contend with it. Maybe it was just that I didn’t want to let go of the admiration I’d had for Dave since I was a kid, when he had more lasting impact on what it is that I find funny than any other comedian or public figure ever has, but I always felt like I could still see that raw, insecure, quivering, living thing inside Letterman, right up to the very end.

And the end was a six-minute montage summing up 33 years, kicked off after Letterman told the story of his relationship with Foo Fighters and how this song in particular had been important to him during his recovery from heart surgery in 2000.

As an ending, it is both too little and too much. It is too much because it is too little. It takes me back to a house in Illinois, to vacations in Texas, to nights in the San Fernando Valley, to life at college, to San Francisco. Conversations with my father or with friends about this event or that event on Letterman. The risk and experimentation and excitement. The thrill of staying up until 12:30 and having no idea what we might see that night. 

I can’t watch that montage again. The sadness of the reduction and compression, all the things left out, the things on the cutting room floor of Letterman’s show and my life. What are we left with. What does it all come down to. What’s really important. It can’t be everything.