Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  Who cared about any of this?

  I did not.

  This was a bad idea. I was not a Great American Writer. I was probably not even a great American. A great American contributes to society and does not go harassing sales associates at the Feed-n-Seed to find out what they long for in the dark of night, so that he can write a story about them that nobody will ever read because the protagonist’s name is Dale Wagontrain.

  I checked out every great novel I’d ever lied about having finished. Melville. Austen. Dostoevsky. Kafka. A few contemporary authors—Larry Brown, Raymond Carver. A memoir, for fun—Nabokov.

  What I needed was a solid opening line.

  GREAT FIRST LINES FOR A NEW BOOK

  Call me Dale.

  As Dale Wagontrain awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous pelican.

  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a tractor.

  Now that I was on campus, I could use the Internet. Here’s what I Googled, in this order:

  “How to write a book.”

  “I want to write a book.”

  “I want to dance with somebody.”

  “I want to feel the heat with somebody.”

  “I have a dream.”

  I watched Dr. King’s speech. I got pretty inspired. By the end, I was weeping. Man, that Dr. King could really bring it home. He had a dream to manifest the sacrificial love of Jesus in the burning heart of America whereas I wished to write a paragraph about Dale Wagontrain.

  Next, I Googled: “How to be a writer.”

  So many hits. There were many blogs. Blogs were huge, back then. Boom time for blogs! Many of these blogs included helpful tips on how to write a book, like, Write what you know, and also, Write what you don’t know.

  Google “How to be a firefighter” and you will get fourteen million hits, each very specific and helpful. First, be a volunteer firefighter, one website says. Become an EMT, suggests another. It might be difficult, but it’s clear: Do this, do that, and you, too, can fight fires.

  Now Google “How to be a writer,” and you will get 360 million hits, and none of them will be useful. I found one site that listed exactly 210 steps to becoming a writer including helpful information such as, While writing, drink water to avoid fatigue.

  This was the best advice I found: Hydrate.

  My brain hurt. Perhaps I needed water. Imagine Kafka doing this! Or Dos Passos. Or Welty. What a ridiculous man I was. Which is exactly how writers feel most of the time, I have since learned, and anybody else with a dream. This is unfortunately the process for becoming great at almost anything. You will be reduced, via punctuated moments of horror and illumination, to ever-deepening abysses of ignorance, until such time as you know absolutely nothing, at which time you will begin to write something true.

  But not yet.

  Not for me. I had miles to go. Years.

  I stared out the library window contemplatively and remembered the thing I’d forgot, which is: I hated my teaching job and would likely need to resign and seek new employment. The benefits of staying in this position at Mississippi State were obvious (summers off to write), but the costs of not resigning were also obvious (teaching classrooms full of hundreds of people who’d rather not be there, no matter how entertaining you are, and also, death by python). I couldn’t imagine going for tenure in the discipline of theater while devoting all my creative energies to this whole other discipline about which, let’s be honest, I knew very little.

  I typed up a resignation letter and the next day delivered it to the chair of the department, who said, “Oh, okay.”

  She didn’t even seem surprised. This is one of the great cruelties the young dreamer must face, being surrounded by people who do not give an eff. Sometimes this is what not giving an eff looks like, like someone saying, Oh, okay.

  Part of me wanted her to ask me not to go. The dream was delicate in those days. I required signs and wonders at every step.

  What I also required was a job that paid more and demanded less. I needed meat to feed the dream and also my wife, who loves meat, and who wanted meat to feed our future babies, once they were manifest in the world and had teeth, and I was becoming increasingly aware that babies, in addition to meat and teeth, would also have their own dreams. My little heart was running at capacity. How would we find room and meat for other dreamers? Isn’t this fear why I wanted out of teaching, because the students never stop burdening you with their own pulsating baby-dreams? The very seams of me felt bursting with desire for greatness. There was no room at the inn for others, and it was a little terrifying to imagine how I was going to write a book and find a new career while also feeding my wife and children and their own dreams.

  Which leads us to the inevitable and ignoble part of all this, which is that all dreamers have at least two jobs. Job number one is your dream. Maybe you want to become an influential and culturally relevant designer of home furnishings that are simultaneously comfortable and beautiful, or perhaps you desire to make powerful films that prophesy into the miasma of contemporary moral decay. These are difficult dreams and take time, in most cases, especially when tremendous skill is required to master the art and craft that comprises your calling. One cannot traverse the vast deserts of time required for the mastery of most enduring human vocations. The desert must be crossed by you and you alone.

  Job number two is the meat to feed the crossing of the desert of your dream. This is where you get your health insurance and money for food, to feed all the people you have promised to feed, and money for wine, which you will need to quiet the crying baby of your dream at night, just for an hour or two, so you can rest, and the wine your wife will also need, to quiet the actual crying babies, which have not been born yet but soon will, should you keep having sex with her like that, every night, because of all the wine.

  Hydrate.

  The endgame here for most of us is that job number one and job number two will actually fuse into the same throbbing organism, such that the thing you love to do will become the thing that pays for the meat and the insurance and the wine.

  How long would it take me to write a book? I figured two years, three, tops. One year to write a rough draft. One year to make it amazing. One year to convert it into legal US tender via magic. I would be thirty-one years old with my first book. Not too shabby! Which means, whatever job number two was, I’d only need to do it for maybe three years. That felt like a long time, but totally doable. With this thought, I had reached stage one of the dream: Delusion.

  THE TWO STAGES OF THE DREAM

  Delusion

  Death

  I have since learned that most dreams have only these two stages, or at least it feels like this for much of the time. You need delusion, for the opposite of delusion is realism, and realism is facing the reality that it’s very likely going to take at least a decade to make your dream come true, and it’s going to be a largely friendless decade, hollowed-out and harrowing, empty of so many things that make us more human—kickball leagues, weekend getaways, beach bonfires—all those happy little things that flicker in the night sky of human experience and constellate into meaning and community.

  Many good things would happen in the years ahead, during and beyond the long lonely decade about to unfurl before Lauren and me, but my dream would often dull the good things I experienced, make them harder to enjoy, harder even to see. If somebody had held me down and said, If you want to be a good writer, you’re going to have to be willing to be bad at lots of other important things that, when done badly, as you will surely do them, will hurt that which matters most, I would not have believed them.

  * * *

  What was I going to do for money while I wrote a Great American Something? My wife and I owed nearly $100,000 to various faceless entities and possessed nothing of real cash value.

  Every morning, I had a new idea.

  Maybe law school be
cause John Grisham wrote A Time to Kill while practicing law?

  Or med school because Walker Percy wrote The Moviegoer during his residency?

  Or high school because Stephen King wrote Christine while teaching English?

  The thing with day jobs is you need one that will not cannibalize all your spiritual currency. Law, medical, and teaching professions empty the tank. You throw every imaginative proton at your day job, and you look up and have no protons left over for the dream. It’s a wicked problem.

  What might not require all my protons? Pharmaceutical sales rep, management consultant, magazine journalist? All winter, I sent out CVs and called hiring managers, and many of them called back because it was probably pretty clear that I was a white man, given my Anglo name and unfettered enthusiasm for areas of knowledge about which I knew very little.

  “So, you have a PhD?” one hiring manager said.

  “Yes!” I said.

  “And you want to be a copy editor at Cooking Light magazine?”

  Yes, yes, I did, explaining that I had always yearned desperately to write about low-calorie meringues. But it wasn’t enough. I soon discovered that nobody in the private sector really cared about the PhD unless it allowed me to generate discounted cash flow models with Microsoft Excel. But at least the degree got people’s attention; they were curious to see what sort of man might be throwing away his entire education, which, let me remind you, required tens and tens and more tens of thousands of dollars to service. It was like paying off a house I’d already watched fall into a ravine during a mudslide.

  The good news came one spring afternoon in the final month of my teaching contract. Tulane University in New Orleans had taken the bait and wanted to interview. The job was a corporate fundraising position for their medical school, which made total sense, as I’d never written a grant and knew nothing about medicine. They said the job was all about people. Meeting people, communicating with people. I was a month away from being jobless, and so I went to the library and started to bone up on people.

  * * *

  I found many great books, like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which gave me great career advice while simultaneously making me want to microwave my own head. The advice included such helpful nuggets as synergize, which is known as “collaboration for jackasses.” The book also taught me to “put first things first,” in which I was instructed to complete urgent tasks before non-urgent tasks, which made me sad that the world needed a book to explain this, and so I non-urgently hurled this book into the garbage. Other books introduced me to bone-chilling new words and phrases, such as influencer, low-hanging fruit, and breakfast meeting.

  It was a pungent spring, verdant and bright and wet. Everything was alive, the air heavy and happy. Azaleas grew big as trees. I bought a new suit and did my best to collaborate with it.

  “You look nice,” Lauren said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you look nice.”

  “It feels like a costume,” I said.

  The suit, I hoped, was a temporary thing, a hazmat barrier that would allow me to go incognito into the wastelands of sensible unhappy adults without exposing me to the radioactive materials of their dolor. I’d learned all sorts of terrible things, that fundraising is really friend-raising, and friend-raising is about building relationships. I was not very good at building relationships, although I had destroyed some, which seemed like relevant work experience.

  I could not fathom wearing the wool hazmat suit while trying to work my way around an omelet. Wearing a necktie to breakfast was going to feel like a funeral, like lying. Is that what being an adult is? Lying continually to yourself and others, in a helpful way, so as to build wealth, to build a dream? I was not a very good liar. I could hide nothing. If anybody wants to know if I’m having fun at a dinner party, all they have to do is look at my face. Am I smiling, or does my face suggest inflammation of the joints? My face is a mood ring.

  * * *

  I drove to the Tidewater Building on Canal Street in New Orleans, took an elevator to the eleventh floor, and commenced to answering many questions about multitasking, which was all the rage in 2004, when everybody believed a short attention span was a sign of genius.

  “Are you a multitasker?” my potential future boss, a nice lady named Christine, asked.

  The true answer was, “No.”

  What I said was, “Yes.”

  “Can you give an example?” she asked.

  I regaled her with an anecdote about the student who threatened me with his python, the recounting of an especially difficult passage of Saint Augustine, and an extended metaphor involving reptiles and putting first things first rather than last. “Or in the middle,” I said. “The middle is also a bad place for first things, which go first, in my opinion.”

  I tried crossing my arms thoughtfully during the interview, but could not, because I was wearing a suit, which meant my arms and legs could only stay in the down position. How did bankers and attorneys use their arms? Didn’t they have to obtain things from shelves occasionally, like their souls, which must be kept in a small box of walnut?

  I did what felt like a lot of lying in the interview and got the job.

  We needed money: That was no lie.

  My salary increased from $30,000 per year to $50,000, which, after taxes and student loan and car payments, came to forty dollars.

  Still, Lauren was proud; this seemed like an improvement in our fortunes.

  That summer, we moved to New Orleans. I was now the Assistant Director of Corporate and Foundation Relations for the Tulane University Health Sciences Center. It was the longest title I’d ever had, and the first job in which they granted me business cards. I thumbed the card, touched the forest green lettering. It felt good, to be endorsed by the world in this small way, the heavy box of cards a kind of institutional sanction that I belonged to somebody’s village. Tulane was a good school, especially for a hill country cracker like me, august in its old stones and high gothic windows. I’d made it to this special place, somehow, but it still felt wrong, like pretend. Who are you, really, when you must provide your name and credentials on a card to be believed? It was like handing a copy of my birth certificate to everyone I met: Here, this is me. I am real. As you can see, my name is embossed.

  * * *

  Three years earlier, I recall being summoned to the office of Dr. Raab, my dissertation advisor, a churlish, long-limbed Chicago playwright, the tallest writer I have ever known, big as a power forward but stooped over with some nameless guilt. I loved this man, and looked up to him, his Emmys and Drama Desk Awards arrayed about the office, which brought him no apparent joy.

  I entered his office, that holy of holies, and he closed the door. I sat.

  “I’m worried,” he said.

  “About what?” I asked. Me, I reasoned. He was about to dismiss me from the program, I feared, for my failure to write more baby caskets and adolescent cutting into my plays.

  “I’m worried that everyone will find out,” he said, looking out the window into the darkening Midwestern gloom.

  “Find out what?” I said.

  I sifted through possibilities. Had I plagiarized? Been caught stealing pencils? Why couldn’t I buy my own pencils? Who uses pencils?

  “That I’m a phony,” he said.

  He opined for a good half-hour on the central lie of his career—that he was worthy and good at anything, which he was not, according to him.

  Although to me, to all of us young students, he was godlike.

  “You have so many awards,” I said, having been thrust suddenly into the role of therapist to Yahweh. “You are tenured.”

  “I am exceedingly gifted at being phony,” he said, smiling.

  He went on about the tragedy of his many failed relationships, his scorched-earth former marriage, the calamitous disunity of his family, the adult children who he feared wanted him dead, the God who was not there, the windswept prairie of his soul, and the ge
neral foolishness of every life choice that had contributed to his vain greatness. I had never heard a grown man speak so openly of pain, outside a church. It was horrifying. I longed for home, where men did not discuss such things, where instead they buried the hurt deep and let the pathologies seep down into the groundwater and ruin everything, unlike this anxious, urbane, godlike writer before me, who buried nothing and still managed to ruin it all anyway, according to him.

  “Why did you call me in here?” I asked.

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  I stood and saw, on his desk, a play I’d recently finished, a comedy about a young bearded lady who longed to join a sorority and the abusive clown lover who could not abide this betrayal. Lord. Embarrassing. What a joke my talent was.

  “What did you think?” I asked, pointing to the script.

  “It was funny.”

  “Do you mean that?”

  “No.”

  * * *

  Three years later, business cards in hand, I recalled my dear professor’s painful fear of being exposed, “Ye Olde Imposter Syndrome,” a pox that afflicts the ambitious, the dreamers, who must bluff their way into imaginary parties in their own heads.

  Did my new job make me feel like a phony? Honestly, what it felt like was a demotion, a backwards trajectory, from assistant professor to fundraising functionary. University teaching is a profession, a calling, a thing you train and prepare for through years of intense study and consideration of the highest, deepest passions of the human heart, while the role of corporate fundraiser is a job for most anybody who can put on a suit and a smile. The former took me a decade to attain, and I abandoned it, threw it in the bayou. The latter took only a résumé and a cover letter and a little charm to acquire. Everything seemed backwards. I suppose this is how it is with dreams: You make decisions that look foolish to almost everybody, including yourself.