Something about this book brought it all together, rerouted every narrow watercourse of my life into the same deep basin of feeling, and I knew. In a dazzling burst of light, my childhood dreams were irradiated, transfigured. I wanted to make people feel the way this book made me feel. This revelation fell on my skull like a sack of Bibles.
Now, I should say: If you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide, I cannot guarantee that a hydrogen bomb of glorious divine light will detonate inside you, but if you are a dreamer, there shall be a bomb inside you. You will be blinded by the Damascus light, and it will produce inside of you a new knowledge, that you must paint or preach or dance or sell your worldly goods and join a Peruvian mission to the poor or make the world laugh. The urge to answer these callings is no mere desire. It is a conflagration, a savage upending of the nature of the life you believe possible. It reconfigures your very insides.
Was it possible?
Was I a writer?
Had I been one all along?
Is that why Brian told me to read the book? Had he known what it would wake up inside me? Was it an accident that he was an editor? We had chosen to room together, a few months into freshman year. Had the literary nascence in him pinged the soul antenna in me? What odd fate brought this young man, who brought this book, which stirred these questions inside me? My body was a lake in winter sunshine, formerly hidden fish rising to the surface.
I had never given any thought to writing as a profession. I knew coaches and farmers and preachers. That’s what I knew. And yet, I came from this beautiful disaster called Mississippi, where we have so many good role models for writers, such as William Faulkner, regarded by most Mississippians as a shiftless turd. Sure, he invented American consciousness, but when he spoke, he sounded like a lecherous Looney Toons character with tuberculosis. Mention Faulkner to my great aunt from up in Oxford and she’d say, “Oh, you mean the mailman?”
In school, in American literature, we read Flannery O’Connor.
“She sounds demented to me,” I said to the professor.
“She was Catholic,” he said, and we young Protestants nodded sagely.
We also read the work of a Delta man who grew up down the road from my grandmother, Walker Percy, another papist, although slightly less demented, a result, we were told, of his being so bad at Catholicism. We read Willie Morris, too, writer of one of my favorite books, The Courting of Marcus Dupree, who lived somewhere in the vicinity of our college.
“Is he Catholic, too?” we asked.
“No, but he drinks like one,” the professor explained.
I was a poor student, always staring out the window, longing to write something that made people feel the way Hitchhiker’s and Mad magazine made me feel, and with no courage at all to call myself a writer. I wasn’t a writer. I wasn’t anything.
Out the window, I stared at the façade of a home belonging to another writer, a quiet and queer-looking lady who could be seen sitting at her desk in the window, working, even though she was very old. This was Eudora Welty. I’d read a few of her stories and thought they sounded more like poems, the sort of writing that got English majors high.
My new friend Rob and I rode our bikes into her yard and knocked on the door. On this door, she had two pieces of literature. One, a Clinton-Gore ’92 bumper sticker, which we reasoned some ambitious operative had affixed out of righteous vandalism. The other was a piece of paper, on which she had written, No autographs today, please.
“They say she’s famous,” I said.
“She’s probably a liberal, like my mom,” Rob said, deducing.
Could she hear us, from her writing table? If I’d had any sense, I might have knocked and tried to befriend the genius upstairs. Perhaps everything would have happened differently. But what did I know? Writing was too much fun to think about doing for a living. Livings were supposed to be cruel things, made by sweat and fear. Writing was the opposite of all that. Writing was probably not my dream, I figured.
* * *
What my new dream was, my fifth one, was growing more specific by the day: I was being called by God to melt the world’s brains via flaming balls of comic wonderment. It would be a full gospel healing, like in high school, but how? I checked at the career services office and there were no internships in brain-melting and satirical healing.
I had done some plays, so I figured, maybe, I should be an actor? That would at least get me an audience.
I auditioned at a few universities, Alabama, Florida State, others. For the audition, I recited my favorite lines from Raising Arizona in the voice of my father. The faculty members must have believed I was insane. I was admitted to the MFA acting program at Ole Miss, probably on a dare. Studying this urbane art in the quiet hills of Lafayette County, Mississippi, made about as much sense as enrolling at Julliard to study poultry science, but whatever. You get desperate. One forgets that for most of his journey toward Damascus, and even after he arrived, Paul was blind and groping, with purpose.
Incidentally, that’s also a great way to describe my acting skills: Groping with purpose. I was not great on stage, not unless I was allowed to play me, which is unfortunate, as I am not a literary character. I was only able to access real emotion through comedy, and only obliquely, wildly. The real goods, the sadness and hurt that fill any human heart, was too hot and bright for me to look at directly, at least, in my own life. I pretended the hurt wasn’t there, which is great, if you’re trying to suppress your trauma, like a regular human person, but not great if you’re an actor, who must access the trauma and make it art.
Actors, I decided, had too many emotions. They were troubled people. And thus I decided to pursue, with a brief and flailing passion, a career in stand-up comedy, because comics have only one emotion, and it is rage. I could work with rage.
I remained in acting school but focused all of my efforts and energies on comedy improv and open mic sets around Oxford and in other towns around Mississippi. I deeply enjoyed writing jokes for myself, which allowed me to opine on a range of subjects as vast as the firmament while simultaneously being heckled by angry drunk women, which turned out to be great, since I enjoyed feeling terrible about myself.
All the writing of second-rate jokes convinced me that maybe I had a new calling, to write funny plays, and thus was born my sixth dream, to be the next David Mamet, the hillbilly Aristophanes. Plautus the Cracker.
“I’m going to be a playwright,” I announced to my parents, one Thanksgiving. I was twenty-three.
Pop stared at his turkey. He’d yanked off a whole leg of the bird, just for himself.
Acting had been bad enough, but there was always the hope I might become the Chuck Norris of my generation. He’d let himself believe it.
He studied that turkey leg and attempted to digest this new information. His boy would never be another Charles Bronson. He looked at the leg like he had not meant to pull the whole thing off. He’d made a terrible mistake. His boy, pride of the family, son of a son of a son, with a good noodle, the one who could have already been two years deep into the study of law, this boy, his boy, was going to become some simpering little animal, sightless and cave-dwelling, hunched over a desk, hiding in the back row of a theater. A playwright?
“Like Shakespeare,” I said.
“Shakespeare?” he said, looking up.
“Shakespeare’s dead,” Mom said, clarifying.
“Hell, I know that,” Pop said.
“I’m paying for it,” I said. “Loans, scholarships. I’ll work it out.”
“Good,” he said.
“I think it’s great!” Mom said.
“Long as I ain’t got to pay,” said my father.
“I think it’s great!” Mom said again, in case we hadn’t heard her.
“An actor, and now a playwright!” Bird said, coming up for air from the mountain of casserole. “And he ain’t even queer!”
“Thank you,” I said.
“He’s not gay,” Mom said. “You’re not gay.�
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“Hell no, he’s not gay. Look at him.”
Everyone looked at me, my grandparents, cousins, the whole lot, looking for the marks of non-gayness which they reasoned must be visible on my person. I looked haggard. I’d let my hair grow wild and fibrous, along with my beard—a wayward apostle.
* * *
That winter, I enrolled in a different graduate program, this one in Texas, and I set myself to writing plays, and approximately none of those plays were good, including one I wrote about a North African Christian martyr who was put to death for getting baptized, which I conceived of as a comedy. The plot was based on the historic martyrdom of Perpetua, who admitted to the Carthaginian authorities that she was a Christian and was put to death by wild cow, which I found funny. Death by cow is funny.
“How’s graduate school?” Brian, my old roommate, asked, via this new technology called Hotmail. Brian was working in southern politics now, a star on the rise.
“I need ideas,” I said. “If I can’t make religious persecution funny, maybe I’ve picked the wrong thing to be.”
“Have you read A Confederacy of Dunces?” he asked.
“Never heard of it,” I wrote back.
He mailed me a copy, which I opened, and read, and learned about Ignatius J. Reilly, a failed writer-slash-hot-dog-vendor who lived with his mother and constructed his worldview around the Neoplatonist Catholic philosophies of Boethius, while drinking Dr. Nut and writing prayers to Fortuna, the pagan Roman goddess of luck. This book hissed and crackled with spiritual power, sacred and profane. My brain melted again, in the manner of old.
It was the sort of book that confirmed everything you secretly believed about the world’s extraordinary strangeness, a story as ridiculous as death-by-cow, and it won a Pulitzer! Oh, Fortuna! How! How might I write something like this, and see the wheel thrust me skyward!
This book bloated me anew with possibility, which is how, at age twenty-five, two degrees in hand and not a single funny play to my name, I enrolled in a PhD program at Southern Illinois University, hoping the degree would add a veneer of respectability to my many failures as a human, or at least create insurmountable debt that might give me deep wells of sorrow from which I might plumb a comic weltanschauung that could make all my dreams come true.
And friends, let me tell you, that is almost exactly what happened.
* * *
It was suggested to me that if I wanted to be a serious writer, I needed to write serious things, or at least something confusing enough to be misunderstood, which was the highest achievement to which a work of art could aspire, according to those professors I admired most. And so, setting aside the two-headed alien presidents and Lucky Dog vendors of high comedy, I began to write many confusing plays about adultery, deception, and suicide.
“Brilliant,” everybody said. “I don’t even know what it means.”
“So raw!” they said. “So rife with opacity!”
“Audiences will hate this!” they said. “It’s perfect.”
But it wasn’t. It was the worst. It was serious and solemn and deep and the worst, the fakest kind of bad, the shallowest deep you can imagine. I was sad, on the verge of new kinds of sadness, the real kind. It was frightening. I worked what felt like too much, teaching until noon, then sitting at a diner, inhaling coffee and cigarettes until four o’clock, then off to another café, more drinking and smoking until midnight. A solid twelve hours of reading and writing every day for nearly a decade, and the work was just terrible, so flaccid and derivative that I began to feel maybe the universe was trying to tell me that Pop was right: I should’ve studied law.
“So much discipline!” my classmates said, seeing me at the diner.
“Are you still here?” they said, after leaving, and returning.
On weekends, they’d invite me out, and I’d say no, I had writing to do.
“A better man than me!” they’d say, and go out, and make lifelong friendships, have such fun, which they described in lurid detail the following Monday, while I sat there, a tobaccoed husk of a man, who’d spent a weekend toiling in the isolation of my self-imposed hackery.
This was no life. Wasn’t I talented? Hadn’t my high school classmates named me Most Likely to Succeed? Suddenly the “Most Likely” part of the equation took on ominous tones. Statistically, a man likely to do something was just as likely not to.
In the final year of my doctoral program, after a decade in higher education, on the cusp of my third academic degree, I considered the sad comedy of it all. I’d had some great writing teachers, who had a gift for lying about how good my plays were. They were not good. I was not good. What I needed was a teacher who wouldn’t lie, and I would meet her in my final year of graduate school. Five minutes into our first real conversation, I knew that I would marry this teacher and we would make a thousand babies.
But I was wrong. It would only be three.
Chapter 3
Wendy had thick blond hair, small and nimble hands, and a skeptical expression that invited you to talk her out of it.
—TOM DRURY, Pacific
HER NAME WAS LAUREN.
I was home for Christmas when it happened. She was rooming with an old friend, Sarah, and the old friend and I sat on a Mississippi porch, smoking and discussing art like a couple of assholes. We had begun with futurism. It was brutal and fun, exactly what you want to be talking about when you’re a failed scholar who knows nothing but how good he’s not. It was late that December night, the air cool and damp, the concrete glowing orange in the streetlight. Lauren walked up in the dark after a long shift at Keifer’s, the Greek restaurant where most everybody but her snorted coke and the hummus was so good you didn’t care.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” I said.
“We were just discussing all the isms,” Sarah said.
“Sounds fascinating,” she said. “Good night.”
She was the prettiest human I had ever seen in the light of a high-pressure sodium-vapor lamp, and I felt it would be sad to see her go. She bummed a smoke and stayed, and every few minutes punctured a hole in the balloon of our carefully curated aesthetic solemnity with an acid squirt of irony, which was upsetting. That had always been my job.
“What are you two even talking about?” she said.
“Antonin Artaud,” I said. “The Theatre and Its Double. Have you heard of it?”
Lauren was a ballet dancer by day. Weren’t ballet dancers supposed to be grim and worldly, broken and beautiful and Gallic?
“Um, no,” she said.
“What are you reading right now?” I said.
“I just finished People magazine,” she said. “Have you heard of it?”
I hadn’t known beautiful people could be funny. I thought it wasn’t allowed. Comedy, I had been led to believe, was the province of us hideous folk.
Over the next few days, while I crashed on their couch, I learned much about this sardonic Helen of Troy, how she believed she was dying at least once a day, from various rare cancers that aren’t actually real (One way I knew she liked me, or at least didn’t hate me, was when she turned to me and touched her cheek and said, “I think I have face cancer.”), I learned many useful facts about this strange beautiful creature, like how she can’t eat fast food in a car, even as a passenger (“What if the car goes over a bridge, and into the water, while I’m eating?” she said. “No, I can’t risk choking and drowning at the same time. That’s too much.”), and I learned how sometimes in church she would get dead arms (“Dead arms. Dead hands. Numb lips, fingernail sensitivity, pelvic discomfort.”). When I realized she was both telling the truth and quoting What About Bob?, that sealed the deal. We would be together forever. I made a mental note to let her know this as soon as possible.
I drove back to Illinois and pined.
“It’s weird,” I told Mark, on the phone. “She hates reading.”
“Yeah, that is weird.”
I’d grown so full of rancid
ideas and abstract philosophies that my soul longed for somebody allergic to all those things. Perhaps an antidote to all this learning was required. Everything had felt so wrong for so long, and this woman, as bizarre a match as it seemed, was the first thing in a long time that felt right.
A year later, we married.
Her family appreciated my imminent PhD, and my family found it incredible that a woman so beautiful would deign breed with such a gruesome freak as me. There was a natural comedy in the match. Our love was maybe the first good funny story I ever helped write.
A month after the wedding, they awarded me the doctorate. Getting a PhD is not as hard as people imagine. As long as you turn in all your assignments on time and don’t sexually harass any prominent donors, they will almost always give you one.
Pop was proud, as was Mom. Their boy was a doctor. But I felt as far as ever from the reality of making people laugh and getting paid to do it. I didn’t have the juju. Something didn’t work right in my head. I had turned the wrong way to Damascus and ended up on Tatooine.
“What is your doctorate in?” people asked, at our wedding.
“Poverty,” I said.
* * *
That summer, I decided to present my new wife with a special gift: I would go insane. I’d been interviewing for teaching jobs in Florida, Tennessee, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and she was looking forward to the beginning of a quiet, happy, almost-fairy-tale life with her husband the professor.
“Maybe I don’t want to teach,” I said.
“False,” she said.
“Maybe I want to be a dentist,” I said.
“No,” she said. “What? No.”
“You can do anything you set your mind to,” my teachers had always said, and what they really meant was, “You can be mediocre at anything you set your mind to,” and I was mediocre at so much, the possibilities were endless.
“I feel crazy in my head,” I told my new wife.
“It’s fine, we’re all crazy,” she said, explaining which members of her family were on medication for various psychiatric and mental disorders, which calmed me down, and once calm, I did the sensible thing, taking a job teaching dramatic literature at Mississippi State University in Starkville, where I got paid $30,000 a year to teach eight courses and have students threaten me with litigation, should I grade their essays accurately.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 3