Which brings us to the real secret to making any dream come true.
* * *
What you have to do is, you have to leave your family. This method was perfected by William Shakespeare, who abandoned his wife and children in Stratford-upon-Avon, moved to London, and subsequently wrote the greatest literature in all of human history. Was it worth destroying his family, to give us these plays, which reshaped the very nature of the human mind? Yes? No?
That’s the difference between Shakespeare and us. He left his family, and us, we refuse to. Also, he had talent. You might have talent. At this point in my journey, I had none, it seemed. I could write a decent wedding toast, but not a story.
After two years in Savannah, I began leaving my family every morning at five fifteen. Sometimes Lauren drove me. I’d jostle her awake and dress and put the groggy little flopping girls in the truck and she’d drive me to a coffee shop a few blocks from the office, where I sat for two hours before work trying to write something that did not make me want to chew off my own tongue. I’d kiss her and the children and say goodbye, privately deliberating on how selfish this was, to make these fine people tote me into the darkness to tend a tree that might never produce fruit. What ancient magic powered the dream through these dark mornings? I cannot say what compelled me to wake and rise, when I did not wish to wake and rise, when all evidence pointed to fruitlessness and waste, but I felt a surging inside me, generated by a tiny throbbing quark of hope. Whatever greatness I was to manifest, it would come from this quark. I could feel some kind of hidden greatness there. I could.
On the darkest mornings, I worried: Maybe it wasn’t a good quark. Maybe it was a quiet, evil quark, the poisonous seed of ego. But no, this couldn’t be true. I believed that the quark was not bad, it was good, and it lived inside me. I cannot explain its origin, other than to say that this quark was faith. I had begun to believe that God put it there.
Perhaps all those sermons on the parable of the talents had plunged their pleading optimism into this bright trembling singularity. The quark hummed, ready to burst its light through me, and my dream to write, I felt, was how this light would find its way into the world. I won’t lie, the sensation of this hope within me was at times onerous, for it would not relent, and it was also deeply pleasurable, to know a thing was growing inside me and might soon burst forth.
My body, in those days, was transmuted into a quivering vessel of insistence. As soon as my feet touched the floor in the morning, I could not be at the writing table quickly enough. I set out my clothes the night before, usually on a dining room chair, so I would not wake Lauren and the girls with any predawn fumbling. Let them sleep, while I made banked fires blaze. Shirt and trousers and shoes and socks, empty, flat, as if I had been raptured out of them, and each morning, a rapture reversal, the clothes filling with my body and blood, the quark making me hot and excitable, eager, a dog before a morning hunt.
An elastic bungee cord pulled me toward the coffee shop, and I jumped in the truck, ran stop signs and red lights, in all weather, blueblack cold and hot soupy rain, hoping to be at the door when they unlocked it, already in the underwater of my imagination, coffee sweet and simple, cord into wall, headphones on head, screen illuminated, throbbing, cursor blinking. Welcome back, friend.
On days that did not begin with writing, I became irritable, hangry, scowled at sunsets. There comes a time for all dreamers like this, when your body so desperately longs to be doing the thing it was born to do that not to do it becomes physically painful. This moment is key to dreaming, when you get to the place where it’s harder not to work on your dream than to work on it. This is good. Your heart and soul and mind on the same page now. This dog will hunt.
The urgency that drove me to wake so early, when I had so many other tasks and responsibilities and people to please and nurture, was informed by the book of Ecclesiastes and the narrator’s continual peroration that the light of my excitable quark would not last forever. Everybody dies. The light goes out. You’ve got one life to let it loose.
I had sailed through seas of doubt over the years and did not feel like one of those dutiful focused energetic disciples of Jesus. I was no wingman of the Lord. I felt more like Jacob, the tomfooling Old Testament clown who demands a blessing from the angel like a jackass at the customer service desk, refusing to leave until he gets cash. God had admired that ancient fool’s tenacity, I believed, and I hoped he would admire mine. The angel of the Lord held my dream in his hand, if he would only give it over. We sparred every morning.
* * *
I realize all this talk of angels and quarks may sound insane to you. It sounds sort of insane to me, too. I am only trying to understand how it all went down, how I could leave my wife and children every morning when they needed me most. Leaving was going to make me not only a better writer, but a better father, a better husband, I hoped: Leaving, so that when I came home, I could be home.
I had 150 minutes every morning to write, from five thirty to eight o’clock, and a day has 1,440 minutes. Sleeping took about 480 of those minutes, and SCAD purchased roughly 600 of those minutes, which left 210 minutes for my family and general hygiene. Which meant three and a half hours at night in which I was giver of candy and piggyback rides, tickler of tiny humans, doer of dishes. It sounds like a lot, until you realize your daughters go to bed at sunset, practically, because their mother knows what she’s doing, because sleeping children are happy children.
Time. Always time. Time runs off and leaves you.
I decided to keep my dreaming and angel-wrestling between the lines, between those 150 minutes every morning, so that I might not look up and find my family changed, or gone. What they don’t tell you about the placing of the ass in the chair is that you have to train the ass to sit, before you can make something with it. Most people’s asses cannot just sit, without something to watch or eat. But you’ve got to train your body to be where it needs to be and do what it needs to do. So I stared. I stared at the computer. I stared at the people at the café. I stared and did not write much worth keeping. My ass said, This has become tiresome.
In those days, I had to distract my ass, to fool it into sitting for longer and longer periods of time. I distracted it with various activities. I read the Internet, all of it, hoping to learn something of my fellow man that might prove useful in composing literature, and what I learned is that social media is like those 3-D dolphin posters at the mall in the 1990s: You stare, hoping to see something amazing but even when you see the hidden thing, it’s not that amazing.
I spent undue hours writing everything but literature—emails to friends, cover letters for jobs I did not want, long lists of potential rapper names, should that ever be an option.
White Lyin’
Just-Ice
DJ Tanner
Looking back, these many hours of not writing may have been writing after all. I was trying to make myself laugh, to sidle around the watchful logic-dragons of my brain and get at the comic gems hiding under their gaze, to recreate the comic conditions of my childhood, when I made whole classrooms laugh, reaching into the velvet sack of my imagination and hoping to pull out a rabbit, or God knows what. Meaning. That is what I sought.
These were the long dark days of my story, and they were not easy days, and they were not days at all. They were years.
* * *
Savannah, like most American cities, was sick with its own kind of dream, of money and what can be got with it. I often found myself on the church lawn surrounded by mostly decent men amidst much talk of boats and fishing.
“Do you like to fish, Harrison?” they asked.
“I like fish tacos,” I said.
SAFE SAVANNAH CONVERSATION TOPICS
Kids
Money
Fishing
Hunting
The Falcons
St. Patrick’s Day
Georgia Bulldogs Football
What Restaurant You Went To
What High Sc
hool You Went To
The Poor State of Public Schools in Our Fair City
The small talk with other men was brutal and the more fiercely I lunged toward the dream, it seemed, the more I grew inept at male friendship. How often did I stand in stoic manly herds among lengthy talk of redfish season or deer season or taking the kids out to Wassaw Island, which requires a boat to reach, where you can basically have your own private beach for the children to run wildly across, because, you know, the public beaches are just overrun with non-boat people and their non-boat lifestyles.
“What do you do for fun?” I was asked, often.
What I wanted to say was, I used to hunt and fish, as a boy, but now what I do is sit at a table and watch my life run between my fingers like ground bone.
But instead what I said was, “Baths. Mostly I take baths.”
Did these men, whose wives were friends with my wife, find meaning in their work? That is the thing I’d been after, all these years. Meaning, the sort my father did not seem to find in his work. Meaning, to color every day, to power the heart. Perhaps their Boston Whalers gave them meaning. I tried not to judge these fine men and their preoccupation with the accouterments of wealth. For many of them, they were focused on a fantasy to pilot across the tide with a Ray-Ban tan on their faces. And, just given the many historical epochs when the best any of us could hope for was to die by having our throats slit by Huns, I’d think, Sure, that’s fine. You get your boat, brother. Enjoy the wind in what hair you have left.
When I was in my twenties, I thought, Beach houses and boats are a waste of resources, attempts to shovel material goods into the God-shaped hole inside us all. But now that I was thirtysomething and getting thirtysomethinger every day, I was starting to think it might be fun to put some boats into my God hole, too.
All these men, fathers and husbands, they worked hard, or seemed to. They appeared to be handling their shit, according to all the available evidence, their marriages mostly not falling apart, their children mostly heeding their commands.
I needed to handle my shit, too. I’d opted for a life in art, by God. I’d made this bed. If you’re going to have the courage to live the dream, then live that shit. Art is work. Put your pants on and get your fool ass to work, son.
* * *
I kept at it, handling my father and husband shit like a man, at nights, on weekends, handling my work shit during the day, and every morning, handling my dream shit. After a year or so, my ass learned to sit. To be quiet and listen to the hum of the universe. I learned to be quiet and go into the deep places of me.
It felt like free diving, the way divers train to go deeper, a little at a time, one breath at a time, deeper, deeper, coming back up, then down again the next day, up, down, through the blue and down into the black, past the place where the sun can reach. So deep, so far down you’re practically an amphibious creature, moving through the dark, discovering things, plots, characters, ways of writing you had suspected were down there but had never seen with your own eyes, and then, Blam! it’s time to resurface and clock in and be a father, an employee, a human again.
I sent stories and essays to Orion, Ploughshares, Barrelhouse, Tin House, Brick House, Outhouse, The Pinch, The Smart Set, The Dope Boys, River Teeth, Salmon Lips, Bass Face, Image, The Believer, The Pagan, The Warlock, Destiny’s Child. I sent more stories to one magazine than all others, called the Oxford American. I’d mailed them three or four reams of paper over the course of five years, each story rejected via courteous postcards mailed by some twelve-year-old intern from Sewanee. The rejection postcard had a lyrical quality to it, with line breaks and everything.
Many thanks for your submission.
We regret that it does not quite fit our publication’s needs,
but we appreciate the chance to consider your work and
wish you the best of luck in finding a suitable home for it.
I wrote my own version of this postcard, which I kept taped to the front of my laptop:
Many thanks for sending us your newborn baby.
We regret that it is the ugliest goddamned baby we’ve ever seen,
but we appreciate the chance to look briefly at it before it had a chance to steal our souls and
we hope you don’t mind, but we set it on fire and put it on a raft made of bamboo and
released it in the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane where it belongs.
After receiving several dozens of these rejections, I decided: No more submitting to magazines, for now. Instead, I took my chair and my ass and the rest of my body and decided to go deeper down into the water than I had ever been, to find the pearl I sought.
Chapter 7
For a moment, nothing happened. Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
—DOUGLAS ADAMS, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
AT THIS POINT IN MY TALE, I FEEL A CERTAIN RESPONSIBILITY to get painfully specific and elucidate some of the technical matters of my dream. All the talk of dreams in our nation’s high schools and colleges and vocational seminars can be maddeningly vague. At the heart of any American dream, you have to learn the craft of a thing, and often many crafts at once. I want you to know how I eventually learned to do some things, and how dumb it made me feel that it took so long to learn to do them. I want to tell you how I learned to write a story.
It made me angry, how dumb I was. Why could I not figure it out, how to be as hilarious and wise and amazing on paper as I was in my own internal hallucination?
I have to be honest with you: There were many dark times, on the long desolate road of American dreaming. The darkness of those days was allayed by the familiar murmurations of home, of returning to our small, happy house, with a candle flickering on the coffee table, the same candle Lauren had been lighting for me every day of our marriage, the children grappling my ankle, the fragrant odors of Chinese takeout, the promise of a televised football game that might distract me from the horrors of my own imaginative fruitlessness. Two beers and a good meal and the love of a family can distract a man from any number of hateful horrors. God, it was awful, and beautiful.
The refreshment of family replenished my tanks with a variety of magic I do not understand; somehow, I kept on. I thank God I did. I don’t know how anybody does, sometimes.
I began to watch TV with a notebook in hand, to diagram movies like sentences, to try and summarize novels in a single word, cooking down the au jus of a story into a cube of comprehensible bullion. I learned, for example, how every mountain climbing movie follows a similar plot:
Cool mountain. Product placement.
Avalanche. People die!
Sherpas know things.
Many twentieth-century novels also followed a similar tripartite pattern:
Cool, war. Let’s go?
War happens. People die!
War is hell; now I’m crazy.
I began to see stories in terms of theme and metaphor, as the deployment of an idea into the atmosphere of action: the declaration of a theme (act one), the hydra-headed expansion of that theme into unwanted and unexpected terrors (act two), and the transformation of that theme into a new and culminating declaration (act three). Thus, Dorothy declares her desire to leave Kansas and go somewhere totally non-Kansan (act one). This desire expands into all sorts of beastly scenes, where Dorothy learns that wanting to leave Kansas may require her to be attacked by demonic trees and flying monkeys (act two). Dorothy is then transformed, along with her desire, and learns that she is capable of great feats, such as murder (act three). And it’s a happy ending, because Kansas isn’t so bad, and has no extradition treaty with Oz.
I learned how to perceive the source code of a story. The skeleton key to the whole thing, at least for me, was so simple as to be upsetting: Create a question—in the heart of the hero, and in the mind of the audience—and go about answering this twin-interrogation with each new sentence, via concrete images and the totally possible but highly improbable behavior of humane cha
racters in occasionally inhumane circumstances.
Before, I’d thought a story was this:
Event A
Event B
Event C
Event D
Etc.
The End
But a story is not that at all. A story is an old-fashioned treasure hunt, and what makes it so very hard for the writer is that when you start to write, you don’t necessarily know the nature of the treasure or even what the map looks like. All you need is a human with an empty place inside them they’re hoping to fill. That’s what a story is. We turn the page because we all have the hole in us, too, and we’re all trying to fill it, and we’re hoping the story will give us some ideas about how to do that.
That was it. That was the pearl.
* * *
This new knowledge made for heady days. I wrote stories every morning, so many, you have no idea, terrible stories, including a very long one about the man who invented New Coke and a novella about God, narrated by a unicorn, and they were all so bad, offering no compelling reason to turn the page. Something was missing, still. I had so many questions and nobody to ask them to but my poor wife.
“I need to ask you something,” I’d say.
I’d say it while I dressed for work and she used a foot to keep one child back from the stove, where she was making breakfast while holding another child who was trying to access one of her breasts to check the expiration date on the milk, three baskets of unfolded panties and onesies awaiting her imminent attention on the living room floor. Our dreams battered one another in this fashion, without ceasing. She, too, had many disappointments in the second act of her journey, as she slowly realized that her vision of being a stay-at-home mother, in reality, consisted mostly of folding laundry. Panties were her flying monkeys.
“Just a quick question,” I said, checking my watch. It was time to go to the office.
“Can it wait?”
Until when, I wondered. We hardly spoke anymore. At night, we crawled through dinner and collapsed into our own private exhaustions. There was never a good time.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 8