Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

Drink juice; smoke your breakfast. You will die. You are dead.

  9:00 a.m. McDonald’s. Buy a sausage biscuit and throw it out the window a mile down the road, because you don’t want people to congratulate you and think, He must really like sausage biscuits.

  10:00 a.m. Miss your routine. Miss your family. Miss that sausage biscuit. Call your wife. Say, “Good morning.”

  “Everyone has diarrhea,” she says. Those without diarrhea have gone feral. She is running out of migraine pills. She is dying, too. The girls shout into the phone, which your wife has left with them for a few minutes while she moves to Iceland.

  11:00 a.m. Think of all your friends in neckties sitting at desks longing for adventure, of pulling off on dusty rural highways to urinate into the carcass of a rotting armadillo. You are living the dream.

  11:30 a.m. Remove shirt. Feel like a boy with a kaiser blade. Think of the great authors of American history, a silent chorus of judgment declaring that authors aren’t as hearty as they were in olden times, when Hemingway slugged every third audience member just to demonstrate his overwhelming virility.

  2:30 p.m. Check into hotel. Go for walk, which is unfortunate, as this hotel is on a highway where people only walk if they are out of gas. People honk. Some throw garbage.

  4:30 p.m. Note that two people have favorited the tweet about tonight’s event and both appear to live in Germanic nations far from here.

  6:00 p.m. Enter bookstore. Meet Eric, sales rep for HarperCollins, who has come to see you and calls you “Bubba.” Do event. Feel holy and alive. Hydrate. Drink water that may actually be Riesling. Drink so much you are sure it is not water.

  10:00 p.m. Have first real meal of the day with Eric or whomever is kind enough to invite you to dinner, the HarperCollins money having run out long ago. Ingest tamales, pizza, catfish, onion rings, steak frites, bourbon, all the Pinots, cheesecakes, bread puddings, yellow cake, chocolate cake, gelato, burgers, curried rice bowls, leaves, grass, small children, an array of family pets.

  12:00 a.m. Tell everybody you have to leave, no more food, no more drink, please, while everyone looks at one another in astonishment. Why would you leave so soon? THIS IS YOUR PARTY.

  1:00 a.m. Check Internet. Photos from event and subsequent revelry are already live and accreting comments. Fall dead asleep as a baby on the rich and full teat of loving mother. Prepare to wake again in five hours and do it again.

  If this sounds like fun, it was.

  If this sounds awful, it was.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” everybody said, of the tour.

  “Aren’t you having so much fun?” they asked.

  And I was, because every day feels like a wedding day, full of beauty and meaning and poetry and delicious foods and alcohol and crotch sweat and dumb show, and you spend all day in physical discomfort while being petted and then at some point you sweat a lot and dance like you’re on fire and drink and don’t eat enough and hug many old friends and have a grand time and die a little because it’s all so much, and your dress is starting to smell and you can’t locate any of your underwear, and at some point, you are certain, one night, during one of these weddings, you are going to run from the altar screaming because your face is melting off, but man, it’s fun!

  I reminded myself that I was doing it all for Terry. I was calling to her through the atmosphere the way dying whales do.

  You hear, from time to time, about musicians canceling tour dates for nebulous reasons, usually “respiratory infection” or “vocal strain,” which I always assumed was code for “injuries associated with vacuuming powdered Adderall off the thighs of a woman who’s seen things nobody wants to see.”

  After my experience on tour, I knew: This was not always the case. Some of those celebrities were simply dying in Waffle House toilets. In these moments, throughout the fiery season of my crackling infant celebrity, as I trembled and palpitated behind locked doors while eager and mostly non-insane fans queued up at that very moment, I hid myself away, leaned against disinfected walls, sweating, dizzy, cold, desperately longing to be home with my people, The Office reruns in my eyeballs and a daughter’s head on my shoulder. I slid to more than one bathroom floor that summer, praying not to die, not yet. I tried hard to remember, to summon the image of Harrison shuffling into his shoes at five in the morning on a dank and lifeless Monday before a dank and lifeless workweek so long ago, the friendless, breadless, boneless aquatic bird I had been, falling through the sky of this dream wilderness. I had made it so far, and now the dream was real. Why couldn’t I stand and enjoy it, the asses and the hugs, the adulation and remonstration and atmosphere of mostly forgettable hysterics, every piece of this madness, the whole insane carnival of it?

  But I could not. I sat on the toilet floor. I needed to sleep for a thousand years.

  And then, I heard a voice.

  Do not be afraid, said the voice.

  And I knew, it was an angel of mercy. Our Lady of Perpetual Questions.

  Is it you, Terry? I said.

  Rise, my son, she said. For behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy which will be for all the people who have made arrangements to be here this day, a Thursday, which is difficult, as you know, having children and many commitments, as they do.

  I rose, washed my face in cold water, and departed this august house of waffles, obtained a banana from a more urbane convenience store, and also Advil and Extra Strength Tylenol, which I chewed like a wild animal, to get the precious tincture working, washing it all down with a gallon of tepid water from a battle-scarred Nalgene. I drove to Lemuria, up the hill, my hometown bookstore, and sat in the parking lot, trying to quiet the mind.

  My phone rang.

  A New York number. I answered. It was one of Phillip’s assistants at HarperCollins.

  She said, “How’s it going?”

  I said, “My organs are shutting down.”

  She said, “Oh. Okay. Well, Fresh Air wants to do an interview.”

  Chapter 19

  Woe to you who laugh now!

  For you shall mourn and weep!

  —LUKE 6:25

  WHEN YOU’VE GONE UNPUBLISHED FOR SO LONG, STRAINING every cell in the sloshing meatsack of your corporal vessel to create something new and beautiful while the best years of your life drip off the eaves of your soul like dirty rainwater, it’s a little unreal to know you’re going to get to share your story with 4.5 million listeners, which, based on a highly complex algorithm, comes to a total of approximately nine million individual ears.

  I texted Mark the news.

  Liar, he said.

  I texted Lauren.

  Woah! she said.

  And Debbie.

  Wow! she said.

  And Mom.

  I have another sinus infection, she said.

  An email from Phillip, two days later, explained that NPR wanted to do a pre-interview, to make sure I was not insane. I tried to imagine what the interview would be like. It is public radio. Anything can happen. One minute they’re discussing domestic terrorism and the next minute they’re giving away tote bags. It wouldn’t be easy: Our Lady Gross doesn’t just bring you on her program and knight you with her ten-decibel Neumann studio mic. She asks tough questions. She’s not afraid to call you a terrible person in a really nice way. You have to tell her your inmost secrets and allow her to say, Wow, I had no idea you were so full of darkness and evil.

  Why would Fresh Air listeners care about my book? Well, the book was about people, and many NPR listeners are people. But I needed more, a hook, an affiliation to things other people cared about. Maybe race?

  The book was most definitely about the South, shot through with descriptions of what racism looked like to me as a boy. Being a reasonable white person from a place like Mississippi, especially if you live around reasonable people from other places, means you get to spend most of your adult life being asked to explain the unexplainable, to elucidate the marriage of liberty and bloodshed that your homeland gave flower to, and all
the tragicomic alien weirdness that comes out of that flower.

  Mississippi is a bounteous kingdom, birthplace of American music and American literature and American terrorism. Elvis and Jim Henson and Archie Manning and Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, and the people who murdered Emmett Till and Medgar Evers, too. It is a glorious and violent place, frightening and wild and radioactive with human pain.

  “Isn’t everybody down there a racist?” a man on a Chicago street asked me one day long ago, when he saw my Magnolia State tag.

  “Yes, everybody,” I said. “Some of us can also juggle.”

  * * *

  Did America really need another white guy on the radio explaining how racist he wasn’t?

  I spent the next week listening to every Fresh Air interview for the last six months. During that time, among many historians, journalists, showrunners, film directors, et al., Gross had interviewed the following super-famous people, which was blowing my mind, that I was about to be among their number:

  Neil Patrick Harris

  Larry Wilmore

  Benedict Cumberbatch

  Bradley Cooper

  Bob Odenkirk

  Michael Keaton

  Colson Whitehead

  Larry David

  Philip Glass

  Adam Driver

  Billy Crystal

  Toni Morrison

  She had also interviewed a number of celebrity memoirists, including Gloria Steinem, actor Illeana Douglas, Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein, Patti Smith, and designer Donna Karan, as well as a few prodigiously talented non-celebrity memoirists, such as Chris Offutt (My Father, the Pornographer), George Hodgman (Bettyville), Steve Osborne (The Job), and Sally Mann (Hold Still), and as a result, everybody was now talking about these non-famous writers’ books.

  Terry, if I may call her by her first name, had become for me an object on which to fixate doggedly, lost as I was in this great miasmic ether of my book tour. So much of self-promotion, that necessary adjunct to creative success, is swatting at an invisible flying mammal in a very dark cave. Nobody really knows how to make contact with the flitting creature of fame, and so you throw everything you’ve got up into the air, hoping to make contact, wildly, desperately. Looking back, I can see how the voice of Terry Gross gave me something to echolocate and search out, in the darkness, as I flailed blindly across America.

  * * *

  The pre-interview call came from a producer I’d heard many times on the radio.

  “Harrison?” he said.

  “Yes, hi!”

  The half hour flew by. We discussed the book a little but eventually, as I feared, conversation turned mostly to themes that really lived at the margins of my story, such as race and the Confederate battle flag, dammit.

  “Blah, blah, blah, systemic oppression of a people blah, blah,” I said.

  Stop it, I told myself. Be funny! Tell your story! Talk about your father!

  “Blah, blah, ideology blah, blah, signifier blah, blah, mass media,” I said.

  Good lord, man! Stop it! What are you doing?

  “What some people don’t seem to understand blah, blah, blah,” I said.

  Stop being boring, you boring jackass!

  It’s like I’d taken a fatal dose of Dullbutrin. What I tried to say is that I had a theory, which is that the Confederate flag had become a universal American symbol of adolescent impudence, which I know, because many of those people tried to run over me with their trucks during my youth. The more these folks from back home think the flag bothers somebody, the higher they’re going to wave it. Why? Because they can. Because bellicosity is in their blood. Because it’s so easy to upset people who read Sontag. This is what I tried to say, in a funny and relatable way, but it came out all wrong, and then the pre-interview was over.

  It’s fine. It was fine. I did fine.

  I checked my Amazon ranking. In two months, my book had climbed from number 35,777 to number 1,567, and I was about to skyrocket into the bosom of almighty bestseller-dom, once Terry said my name on air. All that work that my father taught me to do, all the hustle, was paying off.

  And then a few days later, Phillip sent an email.

  “They’re going to pass,” he wrote.

  “What do you mean?” I wrote back.

  But I already knew.

  Chapter 20

  Dreadful beyond dreadful . . [sic] no garbabe [sic] can would accept it!!

  —AMAZON REVIEW, The World’s Largest Man

  AS A RESULT OF MY TRAGICOMIC AND SPEEDY REJECTION BY the literary kingmaker known as Fresh Air, one thing was certain: My book would never become a bestseller. This, I saw, was the realization of almost every author who ever authored a book. Students would not be assigned to read it, Barnes & Noble would never place it among their high-traffic tables. The end was nigh. My dream to become a great American author had come true, or at least a good American author, or an author with American citizenship, which was fine, or would have to be, and now the Ferris wheel of my success was coming around and slowing down, to let me off.

  It had been a good run.

  What had happened in my audition? Had I been boring, as I feared? Yes, absolutely—boring, and irrelevant, and not at all funny—which is how Phillip had pitched me, the funny author, oh, you must hear this man! And they had heard me, and had not been impressed. I should’ve been prepared, should’ve done three shots of Wild Turkey. How could I have been so insouciant and foolish?

  So, I was rejected. It’s fine. My career was over. It’s fine!

  But wait: Why was I so disappointed in my Terry Gross rebuff? What was my dream, again? Was it to write a book, or was it to get famous by writing a book? Was there a difference? Everything I’d ever prayed for had come to pass, and yet my ambitions felt unsated.

  The problem with your dream coming true is you never quite know when it happens. It’s right there in the nonfinite verb form of dreams coming true. Nobody knows when the moment actually occurs. When I was a boy and heard my parents fight over money, my dream was to make enough money to not fight over money. When I saw how unhappy Pop was in his work, largely a result of seeking and failing to gain riches, my dream was to be happy in my work and not seek riches. When I was older and saw how many Wet Wipes the children used in the span of a single hour, my dream was to seek riches.

  This wish did not come true. They did not pay me enough money to quit the day job, working at the college. You have to write a lot of books for that to happen, apparently. Like, maybe five? Or get one turned into a movie that wins an award? I don’t know.

  I slouched through my tour, driving through the old American colonies, Georgia to the Carolinas to Virginia to DC to New York to the roof of a friend’s Astoria apartment building, staring at the hulking majesty of Manhattan, working my way through the three stages of Publicity Grief:

  Disbelief.

  Benadryl.

  Public Nudity.

  I put on a nice smile for all the nice people, whose numbers had suddenly plateaued. I walked through their cities topless, my fungus clearing a path, looking for anything—answers, direction, sunstroke. I felt nothing, was numb from the head down, walking barefoot through parks along Charleston Harbor and the James River and the East River, towel around my neck, a man without a cabana. I found moaning pleasant, like my parents, before me.

  It would make me feel better, I decided, to read my Amazon reviews. I’d been ignoring these reviews for two months. They were just too personal, gushing with unchecked adulation and vitriol. Reviews help nobody. Everybody knows that. It’s masturbation or masochism or both. I hadn’t read a review in months.

  I’m lying.

  I’d been reading them every day. Because, I mean, if a tree falls in the woods, and nobody’s there to give it five stars on a website that also sells toilet paper, did it really happen?

  * * *

  Reading these reviews was awesome and terrible, like opening a magic box that contained a new thing every time you opened it—a rub
y, a square of chocolate, a mutilated kitten, a new phone, a cold beer, a bouncing beagle puppy, two mutilated kittens, a box of Popeye’s spicy fried chicken, a scented candle. Nobody wants to see a dead kitten, a dead kitten hurts your heart, but every time you click the link, the promise of a Red Lobster cheddar biscuit is enough to make you look in the box, and that is what I did. A lot. This was one of the terrifying delights of becoming an author, this ability to go on the Internet and find out exactly what people think of you. The heroin hits your bloodstream instantly.

  Wonderful, one review read.

  Brilliant.

  Stunning.

  Defies categorization.

  Fabulously wicked.

  Heartbreaking.

  Lots of crying.

  Moved to tears.

  I tumbled through all this interstellar glory, celestial bodies of self-congratulation spinning out beautifully in every direction. Art is hard. It’s nice to read nice things about what you feel is your life’s calling, although not everything was a nice thing.

  Disappointing, they said.

  Fecal matter.

  Superficial.

  Pathetic.

  Awful.

  Imagine this. Imagine spending a decade painfully alchemizing every important question about yourself and your family into an epic work of art, at which point a man visits Amazon.com and declares, Come on, man.

  Every time I’d read a new negative review, blood and hot oil rushed into my psychic brain pan. The eyeballs quivered, my pants got real tight. What was wildest was how I knew some of these people. One was a former colleague, another was one of my wife’s friends. One was a pastor. What the hell. Didn’t they know I read these? Did they not care? What the what had I done to these people?

  Mr. Key needs a new editor, they said.

  Seems like he’s trying too hard.

  Then the author gets married, and the whole book goes downhill.

  What a thrilling rush, to read such personally injurious sentences. The good reviews only dull your sense of self, an opiate, but these hateful reviews, wow. This is a lightning flash in the front yard. This is getting a pencil shoved up your nose by a neighborhood child you don’t even know. It makes you feel alive.