Dedication
This book is dedicated to my favorite child,
you know who you are.
Note to the Reader
I have changed a few names in this book and made efforts to downplay the physical hideousness of my enemies, where possible.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Note to the Reader
Prelude to an American Dream
Act I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Act II
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Act III
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Act IV
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Act V
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Postlude to an American Dream
Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
About the Author
Also by Harrison Scott Key
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prelude to an American Dream
I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I learned three things: One, the streets were not paved with gold. Two, they were not paved at all. And three, it was going to be my job to pave them.
—NINETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRANT LAMENT
WHAT IS A DREAM?
According to Cinderella, “A dream is a wish your heart makes.”
It is instructive to note that our hero sings these words to a family of birds who wear kerchiefs and don’t appear to have the power of language, revealing the first important thing you need to know about dreamers, which is, most of them need psychiatric evaluation. If you have a dream, you may need to be evaluated, too. The dream will make you crazy. That’s how they work, in my experience.
Far as I can tell, the word dream means about a hundred different things. The most important kind of dream is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kind, where you envision an impossibly beautiful reality over the horizon of human history. We’ll call these Prophetic Dreams.
Then there’s the kind of dream where you’re wearing nothing but a clerical collar and riding a dolphin through a grocery store. Occasionally, these visions present us with important messages from deep within our hearts, about what we fear and need, such as additional medication, but mostly they’re terrifying and harmless. We’ll call these Porpoise Dreams.
Next, we have Aspirational Dreams, where you long to build a small summer home on an inlet where you might spend your last years on Earth scanning the horizon for dolphins, which might explain the recurring porpoise dream. You won’t die if these dreams don’t come true, but they can at least give you a reason to get up in the morning. Nothing wrong with that.
This book is about none of these kinds of dreams, neither Prophetic nor Porpoise nor Aspirational. We are here to discuss the best dream most any of us can hope for, one that might actually come true and fundamentally alter our fortunes and lives, should we apply ourselves and manage not to lose everything that matters down the fathomless quarry of ambition.
I talk of American dreams.
For the purposes of this book, I am going to define the American dream as the answer of a calling to eschew the more common pursuits of personal peace and affluence in order to do something beautiful and exceedingly difficult with your life, such as writing a book that shames your family and all but guarantees you will never again be invited to certain homes to celebrate national holidays, which is what happened to me.
I am talking about vocation here: The ache to do and be something amazing when you grow up, maybe even to become famous in the process, to manifest a vision of yourself that feels improbable yet perfectly possible, and to pay off your student loans and mortgage doing it. These are the dreams that college admission representatives and retired athletes are always going on about, in front of awed and occasionally disbelieving crowds of young people. I have had many such dreams in my life, which is perfectly normal, this being America, the greatest nation in the history of the world, alongside Rome and perhaps Iceland. People still fly and float and walk to this place, to seize joys untrammeled with their minds and talents. One of the great things about America is, your dream can take many forms. You can do something wholesome and productive, like practice medicine in a place where they ride llamas, or build mattresses that never wear out, or design affordable water-filtration systems for remote villages, or you can do something evil, like make another Spider-Man movie.
Whatever you dream, just be careful.
Mark Twain said this famous thing, how the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. What he didn’t say is: A dream is also a monster that wants to eat you.
A dream doesn’t start out as a monster. It starts out as a little baby that comes out of the uterus of your burning heart, and this little dream-baby grows up and gives birth to more dream-babies. Some dream-babies die in utero. Some get born and are then exposed to the gamma rays of vainglory and mutate into menacing beasts that will try and destroy you and your loved ones.
Nobody tells you this part of the American dream.
All they tell you is, Dream big! You can be anything!
But you cannot be anything.
You cannot be a bird, or a television, or an elected official who does not lie, constantly, to those he professes to love most. Some things, sadly, are not possible.
What is possible: You can give birth to a dream and nurse the baby until it is big and strong and monstrous, and you can share your dream-baby-monster with the world in such a way as to bring light to humankind, or at least a few thousand people, depending on the quality of your marketing materials, and you can be wholly transformed by the light-bringing experience. And then you may look around and see that the light you bring also burns. That’s what this book is about: One man making his American dream real, while simultaneously almost immolating everything important in his life.
As a result of my dream coming true, my life was transformed beyond all comprehension. I got famous. Strangers took photographs of me in a Waffle House. I did photo shoots for magazines, including one in a bathtub, with my clothes on, for which all involved parties were grateful.
I was handed more money than anyone in my family had ever seen on a check with their name on it, which bought us a very luxurious home, with five ceiling fans. My childhood was one of general impoverishment, where our house only had, like, two ceiling fans. I try to explain this to my daughters, but they don’t get it. They just stand there in the kitchen, eating decadent candies and pastries that my dream has provided, while the fan blows luxurious air on them.
“When I was a boy, we didn’t have a fan in the kitchen,” I say.
“What are you even talking about?” they say.
“You ungrateful humans!” I say, and storm out.
This is one of the things you do when you’re famous: You storm out of rooms.
I was not always famous, sadly. Time was, I could be at a Waffle House or in a bathtub and nobody would ask to take a photograph with me. It was embarrassing. I could go for a walk in the park with my family, an
d nobody would gawk. At church, people would ask perfectly inappropriate questions, like, “How are you today, Harrison?”
Or, “How are the children?”
Or, “How’s class going?”
It hurt, a little.
But now that I am famous, people gawk constantly. My wife, Lauren, and I might be having dinner at a restaurant near our home in Savannah, Georgia, and people come right up to the table.
“Are you Harrison Scott Key?” they ask, thrusting a book at me.
“I am,” I say, while my wife pretend-vomits on her salad.
She’s a funny lady. Hilarious.
And it’s fine, it’s fine, because I sign their books, and these fans buy my beautiful wife and me a round of drinks and we have a good laugh. Ever since I got famous, I haven’t paid for a single cocktail. I couldn’t tell you how much drinks even cost. Do you barter? Do you have to pay in pelts?
The last few years of my life seem like a drug-induced hallucination, weird and wondrous. I now travel the country, being asked to tell the story of How It All Happened. If your American dream comes true, people will ask you, too. It’s flattering and frightening because birthing a dream feels like being sucked up into the vortex of a tornado you summoned out of your very own heart shortly before being hurled back down to the earth, after which local TV crews run up to your bruised and battered body with microphones and say, Amazing! How did you do that?
I mean, what do you say?
That’s why I wrote this book, so I would know what to say. I think it’s important to get it all on paper now before I become even more famous and start wearing an ascot and walking around with an expensive cat, which could make writing books difficult. I want my children to know, and my students, and the world, how beautiful and terrifying it was, for my dream to come true, and how it made me believe all sorts of bizarre things, such as how I was famous, even when I’m not. Because let’s be honest: You probably don’t know me. I have never been mentioned on E! News. I don’t even have my own Wikipedia page, unlike, say, Baby Jessica, the little girl who fell down a well in 1987 when she was eighteen months old.
If I thought it would get me a Wikipedia page, I might fall down a well, too.
Having a dream is not unlike falling down a well.
How else to describe the dizzying sensation of being the first member of my family to have his name said aloud on National Public Radio, which felt sort of amazing, and would have felt even more amazing if anyone in my family knew what National Public Radio was.
I mean, it’s not like I have a driver or an entourage or a personal stylist. I generally feel no pressure to be thin, or even clean. I am not a beautiful man, and cannot say that I enjoy seeing my picture everywhere, which is one thing that happens when you become a little famous. I don’t mind some pictures, but sometimes my head feels too large on my body. I try not to think about it. I have done a pretty good job of forgetting it’s even there, until my wife reminds me, as she does sometimes when we’re lying in bed, looking at one another.
“Your face is so big,” she’ll say.
“That’s sweet,” I’ll say.
Not that I believe I’m hideous, although from certain angles I do look like Sloth from The Goonies, according to several people who were my friends before they told me that.
“Can we take a selfie?” the fans ask.
What am I supposed to say? Yeah, sure, as long as my head isn’t in it?
They take the photo and then put it on the Internet, which is fine, really it is. I don’t mind other people having to see my head. That’s what it’s there for. And now I see my giant head everywhere, in magazines and newspapers and on websites and flyers, and it’s weird. You do get tired of seeing yourself. Nobody tells you this.
But I am going to tell you. I am going to tell you everything.
Act I
DON’T SETTLE FOR ANYTHING LESS THAN WHAT YOU HAVE AGREED IN ADVANCE TO SETTLE FOR
Chapter 1
Eugene wanted the two things that all men want: he wanted to be loved, and he wanted to be famous.
—THOMAS WOLFE, Look Homeward, Angel
MOST FAIRY TALES BEGIN WITH THE HERO ALREADY KNOWING what she wants. Dorothy wants to flee Kansas. Luke wants to flee the desert. Cinderella wants something beyond the service professions. There seems to be a great deal of fleeing, honestly. In Titanic, Rose wants to leave the big boat and go make pottery and ride horses, apparently. These are big movies about big desires, where, in the first few minutes, you learn what these characters long for. They long for it deeply, desperately, almost mournfully. They sing about it to birds and think about it while staring super-intensely into twin sunsets. The hero declares his dream out into the universe, and the universe says, Come and get it.
Which can be misleading, because we are not in a movie. You and I, we spend the first few decades of our lives declaring various dream-proposals out into the universe, while the universe says, I don’t know, maybe!
Dreams are diaphanous and maddening things. How do you know your own dream? It reveals itself like the moon through a shrouded curtain of clouds, here and then gone, appearing in a new part of the sky every time you look up, and in a whole other shape.
As a schoolboy, I demonstrated no special gifts or talents, aside from running my mouth in class, in the back of the room, in the direction of whichever young lady was trying hardest to ignore me. When talking would not pick the lock of adoration, I turned to the composition of amorous messages on notebook paper, which I then folded and handed to girls in my class, in hopes that they would allow me to lick their faces, however that worked. I had seen this licking on television and thought it looked interesting.
In sixth grade, I began writing letters to everyone—my grandmothers, friends, pen pals. My favorite correspondent was Diana, from Vietnam. Diana was my age. Back in my day, before children were encouraged to send pictures of their genitalia to one another via small handheld computers, we actually took the time to get real paper and draw pictures of our genitalia by hand, which we then mailed to one another via a system of wagon trains.
I did not send lewd illustrations to Diana, but I did send stories, in exchange for pictures of her, which I showed to friends to make myself seem more interesting. And it worked, among a certain demographic. I suppose lust and love are what’s behind all art, in the end, no matter where you come from.
Where I come from is Mississippi.
Like many white children in the American South, I was born into abject lower-middle-class non-poverty, with both of my parents and all my original body parts.
Out there in the idyll of rural Rankin County, all piney woods and pasture, most of the dads had jobs involving engines, balls, hogs, or Jesus. The moms were nurses and cafeteria ladies and school bus drivers, usually. Everybody worked like a mule. Dreams were not spoken of much. What was spoken of was work. My father hated his work, I was pretty sure, a fact I deduced from how often he described wanting to whip the asses of the men he worked with, mostly the ass of his boss, Clyde, who cast a long shadow over hearth and home.
Pop was a salesman for an asphalt refining company, a job he would explain to anyone who wanted to listen.
“It’s a shit-ass job,” he’d tell you, “and I’m lucky to have it.”
He complained all night, most nights, about his shit-ass boss and his shit-ass job and the general shit-ass-ness of it all. Pop returned from work, downcast and surly, with tales of the vocational cruelties he’d had to suffer at the hands of Clyde. He never shared these with us boys, Bird and me, just Mom, but it was a small house, and his Hill Country brogue was cultivated to carry.
Mom seemed to hate her work a little, too. She was a schoolteacher at McLaurin Attendance Center in a tiny community called Star, home of Faith Hill and a gas station that sold potato logs so good you’d fight a man for the last one. I saw it happen.
She liked teaching okay, I guess. She loved the children generally, but at the end of every summer, she’d st
art moaning, slouching around the house, speaking to the furniture, lying across beds diagonally, staring into the abyss, talking to God, or perhaps the ceiling fan, asking it to fall on her before the new school year began. She made no effort to hide her disdain of certain children.
“He’s born of the devil,” she’d say, of this or that child. “They’ll all be in Parchman Farm one day, you watch.”
Were these their callings, to have jobs that made them curse and moan and speak of Satan? From the very first, when talk of professions and careers began launching from the mouths of my schoolteachers, I had but one thought: Whatever I did with my life, I decided, it would not make me moan. I wanted non-moaning, non-shit-ass work, if I could get it.
That was my first dream.
* * *
Money was tight. Guns and other accouterments of war and bloodshed filled our home, but all else was subject to the greatest fiscal scrutiny. School clothes were acquired from Bill’s Dollar Store. Salmon croquettes and fried ham filled us up. Most vegetables we shelled and shucked ourselves, grown on my grandparents’ farm in Coldwater. The Deepfreeze, that great bounteous coffin, held many pounds of meat we’d felled with our own hands, cotes of frozen doves like pygmy chickens in repose, deer sausage and backstrap wrapped in heavy white paper, and catfish fillets the color of white peaches, caught on trotlines of a special design, perfected by Pop in his boyhood.
It was a childhood of plenty, rich in provender and adventure, but always and forever short on legal tender, causing not a little marital strife between Pop and Mom every month, before payday. When she wanted to get her hair done, she held a yard sale and afterwards always gave us a little. Walking-around money, she called it.
The only time I ever feared for the wholeness of their marriage and the permanence of home was when they fought over money, and it was usually Pop doing the fighting. Mom tried to be helpful, combing through receipts, defending her ration of Aqua Net. I tried to help out where I could. By the age of ten, I was an avid cutter of coupons.
My brother, Bird, and I began working outside the home as soon as we could be expected not to humiliate ourselves or besmirch the family name. My first paid employment was at age eleven, at Rivers Plant Farm for $3.10 an hour, minimum wage at the time. Bird and I filled flats with potting soil, moved and stacked and tossed flats away. Once Bird could drive, we began cutting yards in town. We put ads in the Rankin County News advertising our services. We did farm work, hauled hay. Bird bagged groceries at the Jitney Jungle, and I made gas money by hand-lettering wedding invitations in various medieval fonts, a skill I’d learned from a library book.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 1