Vacationland

by John Hodgman

  And so I’ll probably bring out my blankie that I brought from home and still sleep with every night openly and without shame, because all of my roommates are going through the same thing. What’s that? Which nostalgic movie from my childhood will I choose to watch? I’m not sure. Probably Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, because that came out in 2005. And in that year I was only ELEVEN YEARS OLD.

  Oh sorry, I got distracted. What did you ask me? Will I go to the Samuel Clemens Address? I think you can understand that the answer to that is: nope, not ever. Ever ever ever ever.

  His students’ reactions made Professor Mark embarrassed for me. I was standing right there. He would say, “No, you guys, it’s going to be cool. John Hodgman is giving the Address.”

  And then Paige or Trip or Cody would just look at me, a middle-aged man, standing there sweating in my three-piece fake Mark Twain suit. I would give them a little wave to say, “Change your mind yet?”

  They didn’t. I would get no marijuana from these children.

  Before the lecture itself there was to be a reception for faculty and big donors to the college over in the Old State House. Professor Mark told me that it was a perfect reconstruction of the original state house from 1676, erected upon the same site. This was the first I had heard of this Old State House party, but I said nothing.

  Professor Mark wanted to drop his casual clothes in his car first. So we stopped in the Old State House parking lot, which I presume was not part of the historical reconstruction. It didn’t look like a 1676 parking lot, more a 1989. As he was taking care of his car and wardrobe business, I noticed two men walking up to us.

  They were two handsome, big white men with big white smiles. One was maybe fifty-five years old and the other was in his very early twenties. I knew they were father and son, because I had seen this in the American South before: prosperous fathers and sons hanging out together and dressing exactly the same. They were both dressed like dads: white roll-collar Brooks Brothers button-down shirts, no ties, chinos better than Dockers that still look like Dockers, loafers, blue blazers over their arms. They radiated contentment. The shriveled weirdo in me both recoiled from them and fluttered to their light.

  Professor Mark emerged from the driver’s side of his pale tan Saturn (specificity is the soul of narrative) and let out a bright, “Hey, buddies!”

  He said, “John, this is [name forgotten for the rest of my life] and his son, [same].”

  Professor Mark explained that he and the dad have known each other since childhood. That the dad had gone into some kind of lawyering or financing or businessman-type business nearby. He moved here, had a family, and now they hang out all the time again. Apologies if I don’t remember every detail correctly, Professor Mark. I was not paying attention.

  “He and I are best friends!” said Professor Mark.

  Now you know my feelings about those words. So I wanted to say, “What? Are you twelve?” But because I am mostly only a monster on the inside, and what’s more a professional, a performer who will not only give a Samuel Clemens Address for which he is unqualified, but also press the flesh at an Old State House wine mingle I never agreed to, I only said, “Nice to meet you.”

  It turned out that Dad and Son were definitely coming to the Samuel Clemens Address.

  “Oh yeah, really looking forward to it,” the dad or the son said. I don’t remember because they were so similar.

  Then the dad ducked his head and dropped his voice to conspiracy-meant-to-be-heard level. “Now, Mark. I wanted to say, I have a pretty nice bottle of single-batch bourbon I picked up on the way. Maybe after the lecture we can all go over to the Guest House and have a little party?”

  Professor Mark said, “How does that sound to you, John?”

  “Well,” I said, “apparently I am your prisoner, so sure.” I only actually said the last word.

  And then the son said, “That sounds great, Dad. Also, I have some marijuana.” He added, “Maybe after the lecture, we can smoke it.”

  He said this in front of three grown men, one of whom was his father. I felt like I should start running.

  But his father just smiled and said, “Four twenty, right, son?”

  And his son said, “You know it, Daddy!”

  There may have been fist bumps. I don’t know because my vision had whited out briefly in shock. Obviously I had misjudged these two badly. Yes, they were both dressed like dads, but they were both acting like Paige, Trip, and Cody, and they were working HARD at it.

  They were both deep into new music. At one point Dad spotted a CD in the pocket of Professor Mark’s open car door and said, “Mark, is that the new Taylor Swift album?”

  Professor Mark raised his palms. “I can’t help it,” he said. “I like it.”

  But the son came to Professor Mark’s defense. “Don’t apologize,” he said. “That’s a good album, Dad. But Professor Mark, have you gotten the new Tyler, the Creator yet?”

  Professor Mark struggled to remember what his best friend’s son was talking about. “No?” he said.

  And then Dad said, “Oh, it’s really good, Mark. But, Son, I have to say, I like the new Earl Sweatshirt a little bit better.”

  And that was the way they were for the rest of the night, constantly talking about the bands they liked, going down increasingly obscure musical rabbit holes. It was humiliating. I had recently been doing a huge amount of internet work, studying the new songs that children like so I can remain young, vital, and relevant, but these two were just lapping me, trading trivia about bands with names like Deerloaf and Starfart and No Monster Club and Marc with a C and Nescafé Moments and Kooshbag and Loth. I’d never heard of any of those bands (even though I made up all but one of them).

  When we went to the Old State House, I did my job. I chatted with young faculty members, a few of whom knew who I was and wanted pictures. I chatted with older folks who did not know at all who I was until I said, “I’m a PC,” and we did pictures again. This sounds like I hate these things, but I love them. I am grateful for the attention. I love having words to say when older moms and dads ask me what I do, and I love hearing about their retirements and hobbies. Even as a grown-up, I love pretending to be a grown-up. And plus, the reconstruction of the Old State House was truly beautiful, with the big paneled doors open to the brick archways that framed the lawn and the river and the twilighting sky. And there were pigs in blankets.

  But it turns out Dad and Son were too cool for an Old State House party. I didn’t see them anywhere. After a while Professor Mark caught me to say it was time to start heading over to the Address. But he was worried: he couldn’t find them. So I surrendered my plastic flute of cava to a side table and we went on a best friend hunt. We found them upstairs, in a low, long-paneled fake State House chamber, leaning out of the reconstruction of a window, smoking Parliaments and drinking Amstels and talking about Diplo or some garbage: Daddy Pitchfork and Pitchfork Jr.

  Professor Mark said some words like, “Oh, come on, you guys”—annoyance clothed sheepishly in sadness and utter unsurprise. I saw something now, something that maybe Professor Mark didn’t even see: a story under the surface, and a gambit. Professor Mark was losing his best friend. Daddy Pitchfork had a new pal. He was buying bourbon to drink with his son now, not Professor Mark. And perhaps in unconscious answer, Professor Mark bought a different bottle of bourbon for me, a stranger and new buddy. “I thought I had come here to deliver a Samuel Clemens Address!” I wanted to say. “Not be a wedge in some dude’s best friend love triangle.”

  Professor Mark, if you’re reading this, I’ll say maybe I’m wrong in my assessment of this situation. But probably not. I am very insightful.

  Pitchforks père and fils apologized and dropped their cigarette butts into their Amstel bottles. We walked over to the college gym, and there I gave the Samuel Clemens Address, and do you know what? It was FINE. I just
did my imitation of stand-up comedy, including a long bit of incredible improv surrounding the design of the state flag that hung from the gym ceiling. (I’m good at flag work.) True, the professor did trick me into whitewashing a fence about halfway through, but do you know what? Even that was fun, just like he promised.

  (That is a reference to Tom Sawyer, of course. I just put that in there to show you I do know at least one other thing about the works of Mark Twain. There was no fence, but the metaphor stands.)

  After the lecture, Professor Mark introduced a bluegrass trio he had invited to play. Again, nothing to do with Mark Twain. Professor Mark was just curating an enjoyable gym jamboree for his students and himself—an impulse I would applaud even if it hadn’t been a great success.

  The band was two men and a woman, I seem to recall, all young and glowing and tattooed playing old-timey songs. Professor Mark said to me, “You sing a little, right? Why don’t you sing along with us to the next one?”

  “No thank you,” I said. But I stood onstage and listened. The song was “Rocky Top.” “Rocky Top” is not a song of the South, nor of the north of the South, nor even of Professor Mark’s Southwest, but of the hills of Appalachia. It’s one of the seemingly thirty-five state songs of Tennessee. The Tennessee Volunteers use it as a football fight song, because it is fast and fun and tells a story of a remote paradise in the hill country. Rocky Top is a place without smog or smoke or telephone bills—the three conditions of Utopia. Once two strangers went up Rocky Top looking for a moonshine still, goes the tune, but the strangers never came back. It is fairly clear from context that they were murdered. It’s a great song.

  But while “Rocky Top” is very upbeat, at the end, I heard Professor Mark singing, and I appreciated how sad it is. It is really a song of lament for a lost place, a lost life. Even the song knows that the wish expressed in the very first line, to be back on Rocky Top, will never come true.

  The last verse is especially sad. I listened to Professor Mark sing it:

  I’ve had years of cramped-up city life

  Trapped like a duck in a pen.

  Now this is a terrible lyric. First of all “cramped-up” is gross sounding. And “trapped like a duck” sounds weird too. I admit that I’m a city boy myself, but you don’t trap ducks, do you? You shoot them, right? I mean, maybe if you’re banding ducks for scientific population studies, you would trap them first, and then release them. But somehow I don’t think that’s what a Tennessean dreaming of returning to idyllic mountain and moonshine life would be singing about. The point is, the metaphor raises more questions than it puts to bed. See? “Puts to bed.” That’s a good metaphor. You know exactly what it means. And I should know, as I studied LITERARY THEORY AT YALE.

  (And with that line I am grateful that Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote the song, and the Osborne Brothers, who made it their signature song, are not here right now to knock my teeth in.)

  But I had to give you that part of the lyric, because it leads to the transcendent final line:

  All I know is it’s a pity

  Life can’t be simple again.

  I cannot fault the poetry of this line. It hit me hard and deep as I heard it in the gym. The song’s message is no longer “I wish life could be simple again.” It is not even “I know life cannot be simple again.” It’s “All I know.” It is a consuming knowledge, an overwhelming sadness for what is lost that makes enjoyment of the present impossible.

  Now normally I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t) that leads at best to bad art, movie versions of old TV shows, and sad dads watching Fox News. At worst it leads to revisionist, extremist politics, fundamentalist terrorism, and the victory—in Appalachia in particular—of a narcissist Manhattan cartoon maybe-millionaire and cramped-up city creep who, if he ever did go up to Rocky Top in real life, would never come down again.

  But when I heard Professor Mark sing this line, I did not feel those things. I felt something else: a kinship. I felt a sudden sense of friendship on the one hand and bestness on the other: two distinct concepts that I am not connecting in any way. But I felt them both.

  After the singing, at the end of the night, Professor Mark quietly offered me thanks and what’s more: reprieve. He said, “John, I know we worked you pretty hard today, and thank you. I know there was some talk about a party after, but please don’t worry about that. You should just go on back to the Guest House by yourself if you like and get some rest.”

  I thought of him, driving home alone in his suit with his day clothes stuffed in the back of his Saturn.

  “No,” I said. “Let’s go. We are totally going back to that little house and we are going to party. Get that kid and his father and everyone else you can find.”

  And so we went back across the lawns in the warm darkness and turned on all the lights at the Guest House. We had Daddy Pitchfork with us and Pitchfork Jr., plus some other younger faculty members and one guy wearing a vintage tuxedo jacket and chunky glasses (they are in every state of the Union now), and we did it. We forced a party.

  Around the living room we had Professor Mark in the wing chair talking to a member of his department. Chunky Glasses was next to me on the couch talking to a young woman from the psychology department, and then over by the small table by the back screen door, Daddy Pitchfork broke out his bottle of bourbon and in a perfect Southern ritual poured one for his son first, then passed it around. To his credit, he also provided a bag of Chex Mix, which is a very gracious thing to do. Where I live in Park Slope we are not allowed to have such things. I dug around in the Chex Mix for the pumpernickel rounds. You put them into your mouth and they just begin to burn into your tongue, as they are steeped in Worcestershire sauce plus all the salt in the sea for a thousand years. I was beginning to like these guys.

  I listened for a while as Dad and Son traded facts about Frank Ocean, and since I had taken bourbon and Chex Mix communion with them, I thought I would try to make friends. “What do you think about Macklemore?” I asked. Please note that this happened a few years ago. I had heard Sir Mix-A-Lot discussing Macklemore on a Seattle Public Radio show the previous spring, and then I looked up “Thrift Shop” on YouTube nine months later, so I was feeling pretty up-to-date.

  “What about that cool song called ‘Thrift Shop’?” I said.

  Daddy Pitchfork quickly averted his eyes, ashamed for me. But Junior seemed legitimately confused. “Wait. Isn’t that song from last year?”

  And I said, “Probably. Yes? I don’t know. Look: I am in my forties now. I do not know who I am or what I am supposed to be anymore. And I do not know when songs came out.” But I do know, I did not say, that I do not like you.

  At that point Chunky Glasses suggested maybe we should have some music, and should he get his speaker from his car? And I said absolutely yes. Because I was going to show them. He came back with a ridiculously huge powered amp that I could hook my phone into, and so I began to play my cool songs: Parquet Courts, Cloud Nothings, Destroyer.

  The party started to come to life. To be clear: nobody danced. We were all white, and these were all songs purposefully written for white people to not dance to. They were designed for brow knitting and almost imperceptible head nodding and trivia contests. And to my immense pleasure, that is what was happening.

  Pitchfork Jr. elbowed his father. “Hear this, Dad? This is Purity Ring. I was just telling you about them. The producer and the singer live in different provinces of Canada and never saw each other when they were making this album.”

  Daddy Pitchfork cocked his head and let some Canadian electronica throb into his ears, and then nodded. “How about that?” he said. “They’re pretty good!”

  And I wanted to say: Yes. They ARE good. And I am the one who knows this! I know this because, unlike your son, I saw them in W
illiamsburg last year because I know the guy who had just signed them. That guy used to be the drummer in a band called the Long Winters, but he grew up and got a day job and now runs a whole record label. I know him because I met the lead singer of the Long Winters at a benefit concert for Dave Eggers’s nonprofit! It was the same benefit where I met David Byrne and St. Vincent BEFORE they met each other. I’m dialed in! I’ve made dinner for Black Francis and his family at the house that I OWN because we have kids the same age!

  But I didn’t need to say any of this. Because now they knew, and if you didn’t know, now you know: no one has more cred than John Hodgman of Brookline, Massachusetts.

  I just went on and played even more incredibly cool rap and indie-rock songs that I had heard about from NPR and McSweeney’s: Jean Grae, A. C. Newman, Tune-Yards, the Mountain Goats, Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. People continued to not dance; it was a good party.

  But then. I don’t remember who it was that said it, probably Chunky Glasses or Pitchfork Jr. But someone said, “I just don’t think Elvis Costello is very good.”

  Now this will make many people angry, but I do not care about Elvis Costello. As with Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, I was born without a certain genetic pure-enjoyment receptor for Elvis Costello. I got the Tom Waits RNA instead. Many would have me murdered for this, but it’s just a difference of brain chemistry, and it is my disorder to bear.

  That said, I appreciate all those artists. I know that Elvis Costello is a brilliant songwriter and lyricist. I know that he is not merely good, but in fact, very good, and to say otherwise is not tolerable. Not at my Guest House Best Friend party.

  So I went back to my phone and swiped through my library looking for that one Elvis Costello song I like to listen to. It was “Oliver’s Army,” and I played it loud.