Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  I wanted to share the new work with my wife, but decided not to, as she was pregnant and now generally only answered questions about nachos. Instead I decided to ask my best friend, Mark, who I spoke to on the phone every month or six.

  While I had spent many years wandering in the wayward wilderness of my dream, Mark never wandered or waivered from his calling, which was to marry into wealth. He longed for the contemplative life, playing his guitar around campfires for captive audiences, which he managed by hiding everyone’s car keys. On his way to finding a loving and wealthy patroness, he became many things, a newspaper salesman, surgical assistant, actor, dishwasher, steelworker, canoe guide, raft guide, bus driver, finally settling on a career as a standardized patient, where he pretended to have diseases, a skill he picked up in high school.

  It was flexible work, with a lot of downtime, in which he could read. He had no literary prejudices of any kind. He loved it all. The only thing he expected from a book was to be amazed, constantly, until the end.

  He married a lovely woman named April, a flight attendant from Atlanta, which allowed him to travel for free to many exotic locations, such as Denver or Cincinnati. His life was unconventional, to be sure, and though he had far less money than most college-educated men I knew, he did live a glorious life, availing himself of the freedom to pursue nobler ends, such as walking his dog at any time of the day he chose. He was happy, and I was happy for him, and we still talked about books quite a lot. I called him often in those days.

  “I’m emailing you a story,” I’d say. “Tell me what you think.”

  Mark would dutifully read whatever it was, and he’d call back, and I knew he thought it was bad, because he wouldn’t bring it up. Which was fine, and we’d turn our attentions to other unpleasant topics, like how much money all our college friends were making now. We talked of art and books, and it was a balm of Gilead to talk with this old friend.

  After these phone calls, I felt happier, a load lifted. I hadn’t known I was sad before the call, but this sensation of lightness afterwards made me wonder.

  * * *

  One thing you learn when you read interviews with funny writers, which I did a lot in those days, is that many interviewers believe funny people are sad inside. I called this the Sad Clown Theory of Comedy, which states that every funny person is secretly masking his own sadness with a veneer of the shallowest vitriol, unlike stronger and more honest humans who lack senses of humor, such as interviewers, whom it should be noted are generally not funny, unless they are reading this and considering interviewing me, in which case, they are hilarious.

  It made one think.

  Is that what had made me funny all these years?

  Was I sad inside? I did not feel sad inside.

  Sure, I’d suffered seasons of melancholy for much of my life and it had only gotten worse with age, such that I continued to harbor dangerous and lingering thoughts of my own death, given the difficulty with certain paragraphs and the general dread felt almost daily for most of my adult life that I was squandering my best and most vigorous years on an enterprise that, at best, would make me eccentric and poor and, at worst, would destroy my most meaningful relationships and cast me among the great selfish bastards of human history. But that’s not what they meant, was it? They meant some other type of sadness, surely?

  No!

  I was not sad!

  I was a very strong man!

  I only cried, like, every few days, while listening to StoryCorps on NPR.

  And yet, I found myself remembering how, in my junior year of high school, one February afternoon, Mark and I saw Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, and it didn’t just make us laugh: It shot us into the atmosphere of our own souls. We drove around in the late pink of a dying day, the trees still naked, and couldn’t contain our joy. The film seemed a kind of bright transparency, laid over our lives, bland and featureless, to show us what color the world really had in it.

  “I can’t go home now,” Mark said.

  We rolled the windows down, played Radiohead and Zeppelin too loud, drove across two counties, spillways, levees. Mark did donuts in an unfinished cul-de-sac while I hung out the window like somebody’s dog, letting the winter air fill me. The comedy opened up veins of feeling, touching a nameless noun living way down there. It would be many years before I permitted myself to realize that this film depicts the hero’s suicide many times over.

  It’s funny what you remember.

  For most of my life since then, I’d have told you this was not a sad film, and it’s not, but then when you look at the story, really look at it, all you see is sadness, a story soaked in sorrow, the saddest, most pathetic folks just trying to make it to another day, the melancholy gathered and concentrated into the bright white light of laughter.

  * * *

  In graduate school at the University of Mississippi, I took a class called Voice and Movement for Actors. We were told to wear comfortable clothes. We did a lot of stretching and grunting. The teacher wanted us all behaving like hurt animals. Everybody rolled around like grieving water buffaloes, writhing on the floor getting very emotional.

  “Yes, good, find your trauma,” the professor said, a tall, thin, brutal woman.

  Our trauma lives in our bodies, she explained.

  I got on the floor, breathed, moaned, looked for my trauma, whatever the hell that meant, trying not to sound too sexual about it. One woman sounded like Jabba the Hutt having an orgasm dream. I kept my eyes closed. Sometimes the students wept or laughed in a scary way.

  “Access and release your trauma through the breath,” the professor said.

  I looked around in my body for trauma and located only a partially digested enchilada, which was not yet ready to be released. Whenever students had breakthroughs, everyone sat cross-legged and shared. It was not unlike church youth group.

  “I was sexually abused,” one said.

  “My mom is still in jail,” another said, weeping.

  “I ran over a cat when I was sixteen.”

  They hugged, wept.

  This class. This class was my trauma.

  “I had impetigo once, in high school,” I said. “On picture day.”

  Everybody hugged me. It felt weird.

  Ever since, I’d believed it was all hokum, this belief that great art demanded great suffering. No way. Sure, great suffering could birth great art, but so could other stuff, like a long weekend in a sweat lodge, or a partially digested enchilada.

  And yet, after seven years of suffering the trauma of my own dream, all these thoughts of trauma and where comedy comes from were doing something inside me. I felt a little baby enchilada kicking inside me.

  I began making many lists of everything that ever made me sad, including my giant ears and most other parts on my body, including my giant head, which can appear quite beautiful in certain light, such as complete darkness. And now I was shining a light on everything, all the things. I made a list of what I hated about myself, and my people, and my life.

  I winced a lot making this list. It felt so indulgent. Who cared about all this raw pain and suffering? All my life, I’d been putting the pain where it belonged, down in the tornado shelter, in the blackness, where nobody had to look at it. And now I was down in the shelter and was shocked at how full it was of human agony, great seething ghouls of the everyday torment that everyone knows, embarrassment, inadequacy, physical deformity, gassy bowels, hating neckties, my failure to take my wife on even one nice vacation, the emotional Great Wall of China between my father and me, the monster of pride in my heart that refused to admit anything was bad, ever.

  It all just came out. I may have wept.

  I had found my trauma.

  * * *

  I decided: Funny people really are sad inside, because everybody is sad inside, and so I formed a new theory of comedy, which I called The Sad People Everywhere All the Time Theory of Comedy, which states that most of the world ignores the sadness with anger or pills or fun pa
rties or Netflix or lots and lots of yoga or Internet trolling, while others are burdened and privileged to grapple with sadness obliquely via music or photography or other forms of art, while a very small tribe of courageous human souls grapple with this universal sadness head on, known as “Fans of the Cure” and “Lutherans.”

  So much of daily life comprises mostly of harmless posturing. We must pretend to be more amazing than we are, in job interviews, on first dates, because you can’t go through life shaking the rancid meat of your soul at every human you encounter, it’d be miserable, so we spend much of our day lying. We even lie about how much we lie. Art undoes all that. Art is an exercise in not lying, for once.

  Maybe comedians instinctively know what theologians and existentialist philosophers also know, which is how we are all hideous freaks, inside or out or both, and how in the dark darkness of our dark hearts we are all to some degree very shitty people? We think shitty thoughts, want shitty things, and commit acts of brazen shittiness, in secret and sometimes even in public, during karaoke. The most honest pastors and rabbis and teachers seem pretty keen on reckoning with the shittiness, and so does the comedian.

  Thinking these shitty thoughts, I began to write.

  Mostly what I wrote about was the shit in me, and the shit I thought and felt and saw, and the shit I wanted to do or say and could not, for shitty people who say their shitty thoughts out loud end up getting shot by other shitty people. It dawned on me like a slow moonrise, how the difference between the comedian and the tragedian are whisper thin. One has a gift for punch lines, the other for death scenes, but they tell the same tale: No matter how great we hope to be, left to our own devices, we cannot build a tower to heaven. The tower always falls, no matter who builds it, the king or the fool.

  Shit runs through every human heart, which is why the Bible is one of the greatest comedy books of all time, acknowledging as it does that we are all holy shit, little atomies of holiness running through the shitty architecture of every human creature. Laughter is one of the things that can light up the atomies. Laughter talks true. Sets you free.

  It can set your people free, too, because every tribe has its sacred temple, which the funny writer must plunder. What you have to do is go into each tribe’s holy of holies and see what they’re protecting as inviolable. You need to violate it because that which we declare inviolable becomes a god. You’ve got to slip in past the veil and snatch away the gilded calf and smelt it down into what you hope is comedy gold.

  These revelations accreted in layers of silt over days, months, years of reading and trying to find the door to my own idol-hoarding heart. Writing one funny line in a long non-funny story would give me a flashing glimpse into the profane holy of holies inside me, and the more I wrote, the more I could sustain this glimpse into a gaze. And then one day, it finally clicked.

  * * *

  It came like a thief in the night, early of a November morning, a Saturday, after my wife had been pregnant for thirty years. The third vagina was due in December. Lauren slept fitfully in those final days, a wounded monk seal. I lolled onto my back, also not sleeping, and got up.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I have an idea,” I said.

  I sat down at the kitchen table. It was three o’clock.

  One of the monsters in my tornado shelter was this: The generalized anxiety I’d felt since childhood about being from a place that almost everybody in the world, it seemed, mocked—the South, in general. Mississippi, specifically. There was much to hate about Mississippi, and still is, and much to love. I’d been embarrassed, unconsciously, of this biographical fact, especially the deeper I got into the credentialed thickets of higher education. I wanted to write about this, and on that morning, it burst from me like water from the rock at Horeb.

  It was the first thing I wrote that would end up in a book.

  I won’t quote those paragraphs here, because that seems, I don’t know, weird. You had to be there. And you can be there, if you turn to pages sixteen and seventeen of that other book. What I’ll say is this: These lines felt exactly like what I had been trying to create for the entirety of my adult life. This was going to be a chapter in my book, I decided. No, more than that: This was the book—the tone, themes, everything was in the DNA of this passage. I still didn’t know what the book was about, exactly, but I knew the answer was somewhere in these one hundred words.

  “Eff me!” I said, as I wrote. It was good, and it’s weird, knowing it’s good, after spending the whole of your life knowing it’s bad.

  I wrote and wrote and didn’t look up, and when it was five thirty, I dressed quietly and drove to the coffee shop and wrote some more. This was the happy and elusive Zone, when you lose time, in which materializes the flow, during which you do not care, the ecstatic state in which the love of God emanates from your atoms through your bones and out into the atmosphere, such that you now hover several feet above the floor and speak to shrubbery and run red lights without even pretending to notice, as you float like a Mayflower through the seas of traffic, smiling, eyes shining, as cars collide and explode in your happy wake. This is the Zone.

  Everybody who loves what they do for a living, athletes and teachers and firefighters, cherish and pursue this elusive state, in which their command of the art of their work is matched and magnified by their joy in it, to know they are doing and making a beautiful and useful thing. The world falls away, and with it every human frailty. In this Zone, the pedestrian slings and arrows that puncture the day, the ache and pinch of Sunday shoes and bank statements dissolve into nothing and the skies open and one flies into the sun. The quark shines! The face of the Creator is in these moments, when one sees, finally, yes: This is what you were made for. This is why you were brought here, to this planet, from the great unknowable darkness beyond. This is the light you know how to bring.

  I wrote and wrote and wrote all morning, laughing madly. I could have been naked and would not have cared or known. A gang of badgers could have been sent to mangle my legs and ankles, and I wouldn’t have noticed. A platoon of Confederate re-enactors could have pierced my body with minié balls and bayonets and removed both arms with bone saws and I wouldn’t have blinked, would have continued typing with my teeth and lips, bleeding out, barking into the air, howling with love.

  “Yes, Jesus, thank you, Jesus Lord,” I said, as I re-read what I wrote.

  I had done it. I had melted my own brain.

  At lunch, I drove home thirty feet off the ground and ran into the house like I’d discovered nuclear fission, which I had. There stood Lauren folding laundry and our two daughters watching Daniel Tiger.

  “I have to read you something,” I said.

  “Now?”

  “Sit down,” I said.

  I started reading. She laughed a little, folding all the tiny panties that littered our home.

  I kept reading. More laughing.

  “I’m going to wet my pants,” she said.

  But this glory train could not stop. She was laughing, dying, peeing all over herself because this is what happens when you push people out of your body, your bladder no longer works right, whole regions of the body resign.

  The girls started laughing, too, because they were confused. They crawled on their mother, laughing, everyone peeing all over themselves and dying and laughing.

  I had found my voice. I had found my power.

  That night, I sat on the porch with a beer and stared into and through the Savannah dark to a future I could now see.

  Lauren came outside. It was cool.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “I could be no better than I am right now,” I said.

  “It was very funny,” she said, getting tickled all over again. She kissed the top part of my head, and then touched me there, where the kiss was, and went back inside. I guess she knew, too: Everything was about to change. In a way, everything already had.

  Three weeks later, she gave birth to our third dau
ghter, Effbomb.

  Chapter 9

  I don’t like country music, but I don’t mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means “put down.”

  —BOB NEWHART

  THE NEXT THREE YEARS WENT BY QUICKLY, COMPRISED OF A more joyous writing and working. I lived with four women, now ages two, four, six, and thirty-four, and soon another wondrous woman would enter my life, a woman we called Debbie. Debbie was going to be my literary agent. I will now tell you how to capture one of these magical nymphs.

  A few days after I wrote the first story that made my wife laugh, really laugh, everything changed: I’d found my voice, my mojo, my juju, and I knew it. The juju was delicate and larval, but there it was. I found a way to sound on paper the way I sounded in my head. I edited the story and liked it more and more with every pass. By draft ten, it was even funnier. By draft twenty, the essay glowed like the One Ring.

  I showed it to Mark.

  “This is it,” he said. “This one does not suck.”

  Now was the time to take this gem, mined in the landscape of my inner life, and try and sell it to real people for legal tender. Every dreamer must make this leap, from make-believe playground to Earth, with all its traffic laws and humidity.

  For me, what this meant was getting an editor to publish the story.

  The way to do this is to have a best friend work at a magazine. This is the main reason most writers have best friends, I have learned, so that they can be certain somebody on the inside will ensure somebody more important will at least read the story they wrote, shortly before rejecting it, which they almost always do.

  But I had no friends at magazines.

  A few days after I finished the first good story I’d ever written, I learned that the editor of the Oxford American, the brilliant and churlish Marc Smirnoff, would soon be in town for the Savannah Book Festival. What I would do, I decided, is create a public spectacle. If I had no friends at magazines, I could at least make some enemies.