Or was it time to stop moving, in pursuit of an elusive calling that kept moving farther out over the horizon?
SCAD made me an offer.
“It could help me be a better writer,” I said to Lauren.
“I don’t know,” Lauren said. “You can write a book anywhere.”
“You have to see this place,” I said. “The churches actually have steeples.”
“So.”
“They have bookstores there,” I said. “And parks, for children. Parks everywhere.”
“Everybody’s got parks.”
“They have more.”
Lauren had said okay during all my previous nervous breakdowns and grand schemes, and at some point, I knew, she was going to run out of okays.
“It’s so far from family,” she said.
“It pays well, for a writing job.”
“How well?”
“Well enough for you to stay home with the baby.”
She considered this, for a day, and a night, and again into the next day. I could demand she assent. I won the bread, and bread was necessary to the function of this endless war of living. But I was no general, and she no soldier. The war we fought was only in our hearts. If we moved again, it would be together, earnestly, voluntarily, two dreams yoked like happy oxen.
She looked at me, and then at Baby Stargoat in her arms.
“I guess she’ll be a Georgia peach,” Lauren said.
Chapter 6
True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
WE PACKED UP ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 2007.
I was thirty-one years old and now earned enough money to afford a mortgage on a Savannah home the size of a large cookie tin. Here, Lauren could spend all day with Stargoat, thus making her dream come true, to stay at home with her own child whilst trapped inside a cookie tin. This home also had room for a kitchen table, where I could now write in the morning before work, such that while Lauren put food into the baby’s mouth at one end of the table, I could be at the other end, not helping.
Having a dream is amazing!
I’d gotten very good at writing the most basic, expository stuff—reports, memos, summaries, proposals. I’d written enough cover letters to fill a library and had spent the last two years teaching The Elements of Style to young men, which taught me more about grammar than I’d learned in three decades as a student. I could control language to make the various kinds of sense I needed to make, but there was a thing I could not do, and that was write a story that shimmered with even the most basic magic.
I’d written the beginnings of a thousand stories, and no ends, hardly even any middles.
I continued to seek writing advice where I could get it—online, in books, during author talks at bookstores—but it all felt so mawkish and vague, drivel about listening to your heart and being present, which made writing sound like therapy, which felt sad to me, because a Great American Writer is a very strong man who boxes tigers for a living, I believed.
The only bit of advice I could understand was this: If you want to be a writer, put your ass in a chair.
Apply seat of pants to seat of chair, one book said.
Step one, a blog said. Put ass in chair.
Everybody was very clear on this particular point.
It is a deceptively simple rule, which I liked.
Now, the amazing thing about asses is that you can literally put them anywhere you want, although asses often do not wish to be put in difficult places. If an ass could talk, and many of them can, especially the ones named Chad or Courtney, and you asked the ass what it wanted to do for a living, its top three career goals would be:
Being sat on
Being lain on
Being in a music video, if those still exist
I’d been putting my ass in a chair for a long time, and nothing much had happened. Or had it? Maybe I was further along than I knew.
“Can you finish feeding her?” Lauren would say, of Baby Stargoat, as I kept my ass snugly in place at my end of the kitchen table.
“I’m writing,” I’d say.
“You’re just sitting there.”
“It only looks like I’m sitting here.”
“Are you not sitting there?”
“In many ways, that is exactly what I am not doing.”
This is what a dream looks like. It looks like you, trying to do an impossible thing in your head, while you sit there, doing what appears to be nothing, wondering how to explain that the apparent doing-of-nothing is in fact, you hope, something.
Seven o’clock in the morning, the baby crying, my wife crying, too, in the bathroom, because her desire to be a mother was just as difficult, and far more urgent and necessary, especially when your husband’s dream is to sit in the house and stare out the window. I sat there, looking at my daughter looking at me, wondering how I would ever learn to write a book and feeling shitty for thinking of such frivolous things as books in the face of a human who clearly needed me, two humans, one stomping through the house, trying to busy herself to see how long it will take me to sit there while the other human, the diapered one, cried.
I was as confused by the real people in my house as the imaginary ones on my laptop. I stared alternately at both: The computer, the baby. The story, the baby. The dialogue, the baby.
“Why is she crying?” I said.
“She’s a baby,” Lauren said from our bedroom. “Babies cry.”
“Is she hungry?”
“Maybe.”
“Tired?”
“Everybody’s tired.”
Stargoat cried and cried. If I let it go longer, Lauren would do something. But she wanted me to do something, even though we agreed that this would be my writing time, and writing doesn’t happen if you’re not writing, which is exactly the definition of parenting in the dictionary.
parenting
΄pε:r(ә)nt:ing
verb
the act of not doing other things
I loved my wife, and also I did not love my wife—for not understanding how impossible the task of writing a book seemed, made all the more impossible by its apparent triviality. The hardest part of dreaming is that if you don’t do it, nothing terrible happens. Life goes on. This is why crying babies and student loans always take precedence; if you don’t see to those matters, things explode, break down, civilization stops being civilized. But if you never cut that album you always wanted to record, what happens? What worlds come crashing down, but the one in your heart? None.
I stood up, took Stargoat, changed her diaper. Lauren said nothing to me for the rest of the morning. I was a ghost. I sat down and tried to write for another forty-five minutes, but could not. How could I? I felt like a selfish assface, and then wondered if selfish assface-ness was a prerequisite to the task of American dreaming, and if my wife would leave me, one day, for somebody without the burden of such a foolish thing as a dream, an easier man who mowed the lawn and held the baby and did as he was told, because he was not locked inside the chamber of his own skull, conjuring realities that seemed more pitiful and useless with every passing day. It didn’t seem right or good that my dream appeared to be making me more unlovable by the hour.
Put the ass in the chair, that’s what they said, and now I knew: The ass is not a part of me. It is me. I am it.
That’s what I did. That’s what I was.
After two hours of staring at my wife and baby, I pried my ass from the chair and carried it dutifully to my new day job.
* * *
What I did at SCAD was write.
I wrote talking points, tour scripts, video scripts, blogs, bios, letters, lectures, presentations, and speeches, speeches, speeches, so many speeches for vice presidents and deans and commencement speakers, including my ne
w boss, Paula, who had been writing her own words for decades, but now, as president of a large university, was too occupied with running the institution to spend all day, for example, trying to think of an interesting metaphor to help elucidate strategies for increasing instructional engagement and seat utilization rates.
Paula knew what she wanted to say, but she simply didn’t have the time to stare out the window for three hours thinking about how to say it. This was my job.
She’d call me into her office and say, “I need some remarks for so-and-so event.”
“You got it,” I’d say.
And so I’d Google the event, and talk to anyone who knew anything about the event, and go to the place where the event would be happening, touching walls and furniture until I felt that I knew more about the event than anyone would ever want to know, and then I’d go for a walk around the park outside our building and float up into the virtual reality holosphere in my brain and try to imagine the guests of such an event. Who were they? What did they want and need to hear, in that moment, that place?
I conjured a speaker in my mind, speaking, and listeners, listening, and weather and air temperature, ambient sounds, smells, echoes of whatever had just happened, or anticipation of what was about to happen, whatever it was, a fundraising auction, a fashion show, a film screening, writing it all down, these disparate motes of mostly invisible atmospheric phenomena that one might use to summon a feeling, evoke an image, to elevate the moment above the drone of the average human day into kairotic time, charged with meaning.
I threw myself into this kind of imaginative trance, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, made outlines, lists, birthing images, passages, punch lines, arranging, rearranging, reading aloud, hating, loving, and a few days later, I would proof and print and present the document to Paula, and the next morning would find it on my desk, with four simple words in her handwriting.
“Let’s try this again.”
But, but, but! Didn’t she know about my imaginative trance? About the disparate motes of atmospheric phenomena? How dare my employer not love with rapturous passion the perfectly acceptable and exceedingly mediocre remarks I had written for her!
Try it again?
I’d show her!
And so I’d try again, and show her.
“Too many words,” she might say next. “Looking forward to see what you do with it!”
The problem was, she was so kind about it. She offered feedback with grace and enthusiasm, like a beloved elementary school teacher politely asking you to stop gnawing desk legs. In heels, she seemed at most two feet tall, the world’s tiniest college president, in possession of some secret faith that somehow, I could do better.
I found her faith in me disturbing. My first drafts were amazing, everybody knew that.
But that’s not true, not at all.
And so I’d try again, and show her.
“More elevated words,” she might say.
“This is all just words.”
“This is not what we discussed.”
“Be more careful.”
“Do over.”
“No.”
Again.
And again.
And again.
I’d crumple into my desk chair, defeated, so very disappointed that I’d been lied to my entire life about the quality of my work. Most of my previous teachers had said things like:
“Nice work!”
Or, “Wonderful!”
Or, “You’re so talented!”
Because they’re very tired, these teachers, and if you show up to class and do the homework and contribute to class discussion in a totally non-insane way, many will give you whatever grade you want, because they’ve got students who can’t even spell their names. I could see it now clear as new bathwater: All those years, I did the work, I showed up, and I was a good enough writer, and that is all I was.
Good enough is almost always never actually good enough, if you’re writing for an editor or an executive or any audience with rapturously high expectations of quality, and Paula’s desire for excellence was dizzying, ridiculous, unreachable, it seemed.
Did she really expect me to start over with this project?
“You can do better!” she said, and when it came out of her mouth, she’d say it so pleasantly and genuinely, as if she actually believed the words. It was very hurtful.
And yet this belief in me had a slightly narcotic effect, this dare of hers to make something better when the thing was already as good as I believed I could make it.
Every new thing I wrote, no matter how trifling it seemed in the grand scheme of the cosmos, captions or catalogs, footnotes or annual reports, toasts, roasts, eulogies, obituaries, from the brief to the exhaustive, the trifling to the solemn, whatever it was, this woman was not going to lie to me about the quality of my work.
Pray for somebody like this to come into your life, a mentor to dropkick your bad habits out of your life forever, because if you do, just when you think do over are the only words you’ll ever hear again, you’ll hear them again. And again. And again.
* * *
When I received this perfectly reasonable rejection of my work, what I did was go back to my desk and stare out the window at the sky and beyond into the vacuum of space while desiring to set all the world’s thesauruses on fire. Sometimes I’d stare for an hour, but after a year or two in the job, I got this down to several minutes.
I grieved over my work, as every artist must. But you learn to do it quickly. I’d sit and simmer a little, pondering why she did not like my brilliant clown metaphor, which I spent three hours writing, thinking very intensely about clowns for what seemed like too long, and then I’d move on.
When this happens to you, you cannot cry, or run into the office restroom and splash your face with water and look at your dripping and panicked visage in the mirror, no. You are a grown-ass adult with grown-ass responsibilities, so you affix a car battery to your brain to keep it working long through the night to do it over and over and over and over.
And over and over and over.
And over and over and over.
This ability to keep working, when all your best ideas have evacuated your mind, when the clock runs down, when wiser and more talented people tell you, “Nope, try again,” once and then twice and then three times, and you are tired and it is time to go home and eat dinner and watch American Idol, this is what separates the amateur and the professional. You are playing a game of chicken with your own doubts about your talent, and you cannot flinch, for if you keep doing it over, pressing down against the carbon-based matter of your brain, for days, weeks, months, years, one day you will open your skull and pull out a clown metaphor that will make whole rooms weep in recognition of their common humanity.
“This is beautiful,” Paula said, more and more, as the days grew into weeks and months and seasons. “Thank you.”
Hearing these words—this is beautiful, thank you, great work—as simple and humane as the encouragement of a third-grade teacher who believes in every child, was like breathing pure oxygen after so many years, because I knew something now: I could write a thing, and then make it better, and better again, and then even better than that, because someone believed in me, and not only believed, but also compelled me via the extremely positive reinforcement of a monthly salary, to do the thing she believed I could do. Because when you tell people the truth about how good their work is, they will feel painful feelings of inadequacy, until such time as they either quit or their work improves, more and more, at which point the praise becomes more desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold. For it is not mere praise. It is evidence that you are moving in the right direction down the Damascus road.
My heart had carried me to Savannah, I think, because I knew this is what I needed. I needed somebody who would stop lying to me about the quality of my work. Truth is the only way anything ever gets any better.
* * *
And I kept at it, and then went home at t
he end of each day, carrying my ass dutifully back to the tiny house, where, suddenly additional asses had accumulated, upon the birth of our second daughter, Beetle, when Stargoat was two, which meant chairs for asses were becoming scarce. Every day before work, I’d plant my own ass at the far end of the kitchen table, while Stargoat and Beetle sat there on the floor watching me.
Why aren’t you playing with us? their eyes wanted to know.
Why are you a bad father? their eyes asked.
Was I?
By one measure, I was a great father: I didn’t drink, didn’t philander, didn’t curse or raise my voice all that much, had no ridiculous hobbies, nothing that sent me off into woods and lakes and golf courses every weekend, spent hardly any money on myself, and signed everything over to Lauren every month to pay every bill. Money was tight, sure, but never squandered on guns and fishing rods. We were disciplined. Never a late payment, unlike Pop. Always on time. Everybody had food and clothing. The lights stayed on.
By another measure, I was a perfectly derelict father, never quite there in spirit, always hovering in my own head, trying to work out the problems of a story that would not let me write it, believing that this would be the one, the breakthrough, the door through which I might discover the secret, the key, the hidden code that would let me break the spell and finish the thing and get the agent and sign the deal that would invite my wife and daughters into a magical world where all the houses had more than one toilet.
Nights, at the dinner table, Saturdays in the yard, Sundays at the park, on a Wednesday morning before work, I would be there, totally engaged, and then a cloud would pass over the sun, and the most present part of me would vanish.
“What are you looking at, Daddy?” Stargoat would ask.
“Nothing,” I’d say, picking a different nothing to not look at. “Writing.”
I tried not to make eye contact, but that’s hard to do when Beetle climbs under the sink and starts eating boric acid. You can’t say, Oh, it’s fine, boric acid is only dangerous if inhaled in large quantities, and I’m really struggling to create dimensional characters here. You have to stop writing. Your dream has to disappear, just for a second, as you wash boric acid off the wailing baby.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 7