“How much you get for that?” Pop asked, looking over my shoulder at the dinner table.
“A dollar per envelope.”
“Heck, son. That’s a fine skill.”
Every month, another fight over the checking account, and every month, I sat in my bedroom growing anxious and sad about work and money, praying on the tattered carpet and telling myself: Whatever non-moaning, non-shit-ass profession I should choose for myself, it must provide enough money such that I will not go caterwauling at my family every time I have to touch the checkbook.
This was my second dream.
* * *
My third dream was to make Jesus happy, because I was a member of the Church of Christ, a nineteenth-century evangelical sect consisting of good country people who believe Satan came in the form of a piano. I was baptized at age twelve by a preacher named Brother Dale who was later voted out of the pulpit and run off to Alabama, where it was rumored he became a salesman of vacuum cleaners. Why he was let go, they didn’t say. He seemed like a good man. He hit the sides of the pulpit for effect, which upset certain influential laity. Maybe that’s what did it.
Before he disappeared to spread the gospel of advanced suction power, Brother Dale preached often on the parable of the talents. The basic thrust of this recurring sermon was, God gave you a gift, and you had better do something worthwhile with it or you could end up on welfare, which could lead to all sorts of wickedness, such as additional pianos.
I was thus led to believe by the joyous rhetoric of ministers that a job should be meaningful, should fill the worker with purpose and clarity about his place in the economy of God’s kingdom. I just couldn’t see how my father’s work did that. Perhaps he had cultivated in himself the wrong talents, which is what led to his work-related melancholy? Identifying my talents seemed the key to finding non-shit-ass work.
What were my talents?
I could spell okay. I was pretty good at changing the lyrics to songs, in the manner of Alfred Yankovic, whose weirdness I found agreeable. The very first thing I wrote on my own, and not for school, was a parody of “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” called “You’ve Lost That Bloated Feeling,” a soulful number about acid reflux. I was very proud of this song, which I performed for everyone at Sardis Lake Christian Camp, a weeklong odyssey of horseflies and spontaneous swimming hole baptisms, while people prayed for me.
After church camp, I returned to a summer of yard work, driving tractors, dragging bush hogs, slinging blades, patching fence, feeding hogs, and giving bottles to calves, their dark endless eyes rolling back, tugging, biting, fighting, the way we all do.
Mom would come pick me up from whatever farm they’d leased me out to, and I’d sit there at the supper table, farmer tanned and peckish, telling the story of some amazing thing I’d seen—a coyote we caught chasing sheep, a calf I’d helped pull into the world.
“It’s hard,” I’d say.
“What’s hard?” Mom said.
“Anything on a farm. All of it.”
“A rich man ain’t got to work with his hands,” Pop said, across the table, tapping his enormous skull with an enormous middle finger. “A rich man works with his noodle.”
I looked to Mom.
“You have a good noodle, son,” she said, reassuringly, touching my hand.
“What you should do is be a lawyer, see,” said Pop.
He spoke about lawyers with a peeved and reverent awe. They were always trying to take our house, he said.
“Even shit-ass lawyers make money,” he said, “and most is shit-ass.”
“Lanny, language,” Mom said, then turning to me. “It’s true.”
“Every lawyer I know got two houses,” Pop said. “A beach house or some foolishness.”
“A beach house does sound nice,” Mom said.
“Ole Miss, they got a good law school,” Pop said. “That’s what ye ought to do.”
I was still in junior high, but this lawyer talk had already begun.
“I don’t care what you do,” Mom said, “so long as you’re a medical doctor.”
Something was always swelling on Mom, nodules and such. She needed somebody to show her moles to. She went on about her thyroid like it was waiting in the woods across the road with a knife and a gun.
“You’ll have to take care of me, one day,” she said.
I knew: Whatever I did for a living, I’d have to make enough money to pay my bills and fend off the shit-ass lawyers and keep the shit-ass glands from killing my sweet mother, while simultaneously making Jesus proud and using all my shit-ass talents in such a way as to stay off welfare. It was a lot to ponder for a child.
* * *
And the next morning, I’d go off to school, where dreams were all the rage. They inspired us with posters, mostly about war. Aim High, the war posters said. If we did, we could get paid by the government to kill people. Be All You Can Be, other posters demanded. Yes, but what would we be? How would we know we were being all of it and not just some of it? It felt like a threat.
You better eat all the food hidden behind this curtain!
Don’t settle for anything less than what you have agreed in advance to settle for!
My first legitimate career goal, at age thirteen, was to work for the Mississippi Department of Game and Fish as a game warden. I liked the idea of driving around the woods in a truck, arresting people for poaching, which seemed the easiest way to keep my father out of prison for poaching. I wouldn’t have called this a dream.
I dabbled in magic tricks, ventriloquism, sleight-of-hand, avocations that involved some measure of performance and wizardry. My boyhood heroes were weathermen and comedians, two professions quite similar in form and substance, when you think about it, where the difference between telling the truth and talking shit is often known only to God. Both professions seem to involve summoning the demons of anxiety, then exorcising them. They are buffoons and heroes both. One hero was the weatherman Woodie Assaf, a Mississippi broadcasting legend, the son of Lebanese immigrants and who spoke like a sober Tennessee Williams. Woodie was beloved by all and helpful during storms, and I liked the idea of helping, and of being loved, and being the first to know the location of all the tornadoes.
But weatherman had, at heart, a serious cast, and my temperament was always and forever unserious, insufferable, like my other heroes, Mel Blanc, Don Rickles, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams, Johnny Carson, Bill Murray. Who knows why a child winds up funny? Does one blame the parents? Is it a gift, or a disease? All I know is, when I looked into the face of Alfred E. Neuman, I saw me. Mad Fold-Ins gave me life.
Quotidian existence was too serious, I felt, and I was drawn to those who punctured solemnity, which seemed a very human malady, a sickness that comedy could heal, somehow. I often brought my Animal Muppet doll to school and made it speak in tongues during homeroom. Sometimes, the doll performed healings.
“Something wrong with him,” they said.
“Touched in the head,” they said.
On Saturday nights, I listened to A Prairie Home Companion in my bedroom and tried to imitate Tom Keith’s sound effects, while my mother stood at the locked door and prayed for me.
One day in tenth grade, I found a hot mic on the floor of the gym and a small wicker basket and passed it around as an offering for the Lord, while I healed classmates, who were happy to volunteer, it being flu season.
“Blasphemy!” the teacher, Mrs. Pulaski, said. This was Mississippi, where public school teachers could still demand you seek God’s forgiveness.
A coach was summoned, Coach Mann, to arrest my heresies, and I was sentenced to three licks with his paddle. This corporal punishment was nothing compared to the stropping I got at home. His broad paddle had a mighty sting on denim buttocks, it’s true, but the wallops dulled in the burning glow of comedy. These scenes, when I commanded an audience, playing spiritual healer, summoning and dancing across waves of disbelief and hysteric laughter, carried me to the very
limits of paradise.
“Why would you do such a thing, son?” Coach Mann asked, threatening to tell my mother, whose classroom was but a few steps away. He had been a preacher once. “Those who parrot the Lord risk judgment.”
But these faux healings and other performed tomfoolery were not parroting to me. They had real healing power. Laughter was medicine, according to Reader’s Digest. Whatever I was doing to get laughs, it felt as divine as anything I’d seen on stage at a youth rally. The buzzing frenetic power of those moments dangled me over a thrilling abyss. My blood sparkled. Anything felt possible. Illumination, anger, laughter, sadness, revelation. My father had tried to teach me the ways and means of power—violence and virility, meat and blood—but no, no. Laughter was power. This was Holy Ghost power.
* * *
Comedy was always more fun with a friend. I found my best one in 1990, in tenth grade. Mark was the first young man I’d ever met who admitted publicly that he sometimes felt a compulsion to read books, considered a rare disorder in our community. At our high school, admitting to peers that you read a lot was like admitting you’d had rickets as a baby.
“Wow,” they’d say. “That sounds awful.”
For both Mark and me, stories offered a starship away from the desert of our lives. I can remember visiting his bedroom for the first time and discovering, arrayed in splendor around his room, up the walls, behind his headboard, creeping across every surface of his odorous domain, hundreds of books, paperbacks leaping from the walls of his doublewide like geodes from the sides of a hidden cave, a goblin’s plunder of stories. I pulled them down, one at a time.
“Who’s Plutarch?” I asked.
“That dude was nuts,” he said. “Rome and shit.”
“What’s this one about?”
“Aliens,” he said.
“And this one?”
“Moral philosophy.”
“And that one?”
“Oh, death and whatnot.”
We traded books in class the way other kids traded Skoal and cigarettes, passing dog-eared volumes low across the aisle when the teachers weren’t looking. All the reading naturally occasioned an almost involuntary compulsion to write. I wrote stories, poems, letters, parodies of New Testament parables. By my senior year, I discovered that I could earn gas money by writing research papers for classmates.
“This term paper is so good,” friends said, handing me the eighty-five dollars we had discussed. “You’re gonna be famous.”
Actually, what they said was, “Where’s the bibliography?”
And I said, “Bibliographies cost fifteen dollars.”
Did it feel wrong, cheating? As a follower of Jesus, I knew that the Messiah, being the son of a famous author, would probably not like my plagiarizing, but I also knew that God had hired at least three or four dozen Holy Ghost writers to compose His book. Incidentally, I wrote my own paper on the writing of the King James Bible, which King James also paid others to write for him.
That same year, my class named me Most Likely to Succeed, maybe because I had helped some of them graduate by writing their papers.
“What do you want to do with your life?” everybody asked.
I had no answer. I wanted to get out. To flee, like Dorothy, like Luke. On the night of graduation, dark and hot, Mark and I sat on a porch pretending to enjoy the beer my brother had bought us, trying to imagine futures for ourselves.
“We could start a band,” I said. “We would have to learn some songs.”
“That seems like a lot of work,” he said.
We had both just finished Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, which we considered the greatest work of nonfiction ever published. It was glorious, tragic. We wanted that life, without that part where you die young, like Bonham. But the rest, the gold records and adoring fans and the large private airplane orgies, that sounded pretty good, or if not the orgies, at least the opportunity to politely decline an orgy.
Even then, we knew but could not say it in words, that we felt called to a life of difference, of something besides a mere job. We wanted lives of books, stories, music, comedy, travel, wonder, power, sound, rooms full of people stomping the floor until we appeared. But what would we do when we got into the room?
“What are we going to do?” Mark asked.
“We have to do something,” I said.
“I know, it sucks,” Mark said.
Night came down like a slow curtain. We stared into the black Mississippi dark and let the chains of the swing creak under the weight of the question. I knew what I wanted, but how do you say it out loud? How silly do you sound, once you finally declare what you want from the universe? What I wanted was to be amazing. To make people stand and howl. To slay, like the Viking warlords of old. This was my fourth dream, formless and void.
What form would it take?
I was about to find out.
Chapter 2
My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead.
—JENNY OFFILL, Dept. of Speculation
IN THE FALL OF 1993, I ENROLLED AT BELHAVEN COLLEGE IN Jackson, Mississippi, a small liberal arts school where one might assume I majored in English, given my lifelong love of reading. Instead, they placed me in remedial composition: Turns out I was actually kind of an idiot. Just because I wrote term papers for money didn’t mean I could write. Apparently, writing standards were somewhat low in Mississippi’s public schools. Who knew?
This remediation took place in a bleak basement classroom and was taught by a humorless teacher who looked like Samuel Beckett, which was unfortunate, as she was a woman. She had many gifts, though, including a gift for making all literature boring. Every time she spoke about literature, the literature died. And so, in an effort to keep her from murdering more stories, the safest thing for me to do was major in psychology, which included almost no reading and thus would help make the world safer for literature.
Early in my matriculation, a roommate, Brian, editor of the college newspaper, was kind enough to ask me to write for him.
“Why?” I said. Clearly, I was a poor writer.
He said what all editors say when they need somebody to write for them, which is, “I have space to fill.”
I could fill space. I’d been filling space for years. I agreed to pen a weekly column, largely about music, which granted me a press pass that I flashed at bouncers when touring bands came to town.
“I’m a journalist,” I said.
Nobody believed me. But they let me in for free, and I danced and drank and tried my best to note odd things and describe them for my imaginary readers, the way I described the birthing of calves to my family as a boy.
Naturally, readers responded to my writing, mostly by hating it, and I learned that some people’s expectations are very high, such as demanding every story include facts. Words were fun, but journalism was not my scene. I’d try to cover some important campus event and end up writing haikus about everybody’s hair.
* * *
Sophomore year, everything changed when I found a fat green book on Brian’s shelf. I felt an ever-increasing urgency, with each passing day, that some secret wisdom might live inside this book, waiting to be discovered. I tried my best to ignore it. We had enough reading assigned in college. They’d already made me read Dostoevsky and Calvin until I felt like a rescue animal. But there it was, this ridiculous book with its ridiculous title—The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
One day, I picked it up. It wasn’t one book, I should say, but a series of four novels and a novella, all bound in a single omnibus, fat as a Funk & Wagnalls.
“You should read it,” Brian said. “It’s really funny.”
I did not believe him, of course. Books were not supposed to be funny, everybody knew that. Deep, important, profound, yes, but not funny. Funny was for public radio.
The next day, a Friday in October, I took the book to the school cafeteria for breakfast, which I did not normally eat, preferring
the extra minutes for sleep, but the book wanted to be read. Books do that. Some of them, if they’re the right one, show up on your doorstep like a baby you didn’t know you needed until you hold it and you’re like, I love you so much.
I sat there at breakfast with the overachievers and early risers and my grits and began to read. How can I explain what happened? The prologue melted my brain.
It was barely two pages, not even seven hundred and fifty words, and the world cracked open like a magical coconut of love and inside the coconut I found my dream. The real one: My calling.
When I finally looked up from the book, the cafeteria had emptied of students. Class had begun, but what was class, anymore, with such feelings inside me? I took the book outside and found a shaded stretch of porch on the administrative building, and continued to read. The pages shook me loose of my body, the gasses of my soul igniting in a great blazing ball of wonderment.
It was a silly book, ridiculous, almost upsettingly so, and felt like wizardry, like Holy Ghost power, this book, riven with comic sacrilege and papered with satire, about the vastness of the human condition and politics and existentialism and robots so advanced they were capable of achieving clinical depression. It was almost as if a funny book could not just mean something, but rather that it must mean something to be funny.
I read until noon, and I ate lunch and continued to read, calling in sick to work at the clothing store where I sold Vasque hiking boots to the wealthy children of the Jackson Metropolitan Area. I read under trees and read on steps. I read in rocking chairs and at the library. I read all weekend, and when I finished the book on Sunday night, I was reborn.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 2