The sickening truth: I’d said worse about my own work. I’d said worse about certain brands of cereal on Twitter. Somebody made that cereal. Somebody got up every morning and tilted the chalice of their everlasting soul into the important work of the manufacture of that cereal product, and maybe they’d read that tweet. Had I thought about that? Had I considered how much vitriol I’d leaked from my own Stygian heart into the zeitgeist?
From the Astoria rooftop, I called Mark, told him about Fresh Air.
“That sucks,” he said.
I read the reviews to him.
“These people sound like they want to hurt you.”
“Can you come on tour with me?” I said. “You can drive. It’ll be like one of our old road trips.”
“Will you pay me?” he said.
“I can pay you in memories,” I said.
* * *
The thing you need to know about reading bad reviews of your book or your film or the new bar you just opened or your new dental practice, all of which can now be reviewed by any psychopath with Wi-Fi, is that they are not just hatefully reviewing your product: They are hatefully reviewing everything, writing epic one-star review essays, with numbered points, about the following:
Harbinger Pro Non-WristWrap Vented Cushioned Leather Palm Weightlifting Gloves
Westclox Travelmate Folding Alarm Clock
TheraBreath Dentist Recommended Dry Mouth Lozenges
Hello Kitty Flower Sheet Set
Why? Because they can. Because this is how it works now. My only advice to you, which I do my best to follow, is to try to forget that reviews exist. Be happy when a major paper reviews your book, send your publicist flowers, but generally put the reviews out of your mind, which you can’t do. You won’t. You’re going to have to read them, the good and the bad. You’ll want to go burn some houses down. You will. It’s not a fun feeling. Once you’ve felt that feeling, you want to never feel it again.
When you do eventually read reviews of the thing you made, there’s one bit of healthy advice I can give you, a balm for the pain: Go read bad reviews of the books (or albums, or films, whatever) that you love. I promise you, nobody’s saying anything about you that hasn’t also been said about George Lucas.
ACTUAL AMAZON CUSTOMER REVIEWS MATCHING QUIZ
1. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK
A. The Great Gatsby
2. Too many swear words!!!
B. The King James Bible
3. What a rip off!
C. A Midsummer Night’s Dream
4. Don’t be FOOLED!
D. Fruit of the Loom Men’s Basic Brief
5. garbage
E. Charmin Ultra Soft Toilet Paper
6. Short on plot
F. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Answer Key: 1-A, 2-C, 3-F, 4-E, 5-D, 6-B
A work of art is a love letter and not everybody wants to fall in love. The heart has to be tilted in the right direction to see what beauty, goodness, and light are there. Sometimes the heart wants nothing but to make war with the art it encounters, because the heart is a confused place, because maybe the heart is just on Twitter a lot, who knows. Everybody’s upset about something.
Some people hated my book. I hate many books, too. Hating books is actually kind of fun, especially when everybody loves those books, and some people did love my book. They did. I had to keep reminding myself of this, as I sat on the apartment roof, a hundred million more book events to go.
I did my meetings in the city, did my reading in Brooklyn. I had dinner with Cal and his wife, Cassie, also an editor, and another editor, Laura, and her husband, Danny, and a funny writer named David, and before the meal I reminded myself to say a silent prayer of gratitude, that I wrote a book and was somehow now having dinner with editors and writers in a Greenpoint restaurant called Fire or Stick or Baby or Sack or Fig or something. My life was actually kind of amazing.
* * *
I found Mark at the bottom of the escalator at the Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Bentonville.
“You look like hammered shit,” he said.
We drove to Fayetteville, Little Rock, Dallas, Austin, New Orleans, where audiences were modest and old friends showed up for hugs. We gave away coolers full of beer and handed out prizes and I tried my best to slay every audience, to give it all away to the good people who showed up. I saw Dayton, the old friend who used to be Rob, who also convinced me to do my first play in college. I saw Eliza, who’d edited so many of my stories for the Oxford American. I saw Brian, an actor-turned-bartender-turned-entrepreneur, and I saw Miller and Miller’s wife, Jessica, old friends who had three or four dozen children, apparently, and drove them around in an old Lincoln Town Car limousine, feeding this horde of beautiful children buckets of yogurt and oats, like animals. It was all quite lovely, seeing everyone, wondering at how anybody ends up with their own lives.
I saw Derric, a high school friend and former hip-hop-dancer-turned-community-banker who brought me a flask. “Something tells me you need this,” he said. We hugged. The hugs were real, now. I had let go of something heavy. The pressure to be amazing was gone, and that release felt like heaven.
“How are sales?” friends asked, in each new town.
“My book has cancer,” I said. “Pray for it.”
In New Orleans, my cousin Emily threw a party. I held cold bottles of rosé next to my face, each new town, each mile on the odometer reforming my soul back to anonymity.
Mark and I drank warm beer and shot Lone Star beer cans with a pellet rifle in a parking lot beside a bar, as the hot dry wind of Texas blew through the pecan trees and made us feel ageless. We rocketed through summer as troubadours of old, transforming bookstore readings across the countryside into bacchanalias of literature and crowds of ten to fifteen. I felt happy and alive, for the first time in a long time, unfettered by ambition, unable to care that what I had hoped might happen would not actually be happening. Contentment is easy when you have no options. I had become vocationally covetous, desirous of acclaim for its own pitiful sake, which had burdened my capacity for joy and shackled my heart. I felt lighter now. At every event, every bookstore and bar where I had been invited to read, I encountered every human as a gift, haloed in light. I looked upon these people, old friends and strangers, like a thirsty wayfarer looks upon a benevolent innkeeper. Gratitude filled me like cool water from an unknown spring.
“Thank you for coming,” I said, to everyone, shaking hands when none had been offered, pulling arms and chests close, embracing all who would allow it, full-bodied hugs that lingered and allowed us to exchange odors and heat, like good hugging should.
“Thank you for coming to our town,” they said.
“Thank you for having a town to come to,” I said.
“It’s nice to meet a real author.”
“You are the one who it is nice to meet.”
“Okay.”
“You didn’t have to come here tonight,” I said. “But I did.”
“I guess that’s true.”
“Let’s hug again.”
“Okay, if you want.”
In Austin, near the end of the tour, Mark and I stumbled down a grassy hill to the Barton Springs Pool on a hot bright day, and I invited the cold prehistoric water from deep inside a Texas aquifer to wash me clean. I laid on the carpet-soft hillside next to my best friend, drying, warm, eyes closed, seeing nothing but the blood orange sun through my fleshy lids.
“Thanks for coming,” I said to Mark, lazing somewhere off to my right.
“It’s fun,” he said.
“Why don’t you write a book?” I said. “If you did, we could tour together.”
“We’re already touring together,” he said.
A few days later, I boarded a plane in New Orleans, bound for home.
The dream was done. I did it.
Sort of.
Chapter 21
Juan Ponce de León went to Florida in search of the River Jordan, that he might ha
ve some enterprise on foot, or that he might earn greater fame than he already possessed.
—Memoir of Don Hernando d’Escalante de Fontaneda (1575)
I ARRIVED HOME ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON TO FIND MY FORMER life in ruins. I’d been mostly gone since spring. It felt like a year, a lifetime. In the living room, Lauren had rearranged the furniture in creative and unfortunate ways, her way of telling me that I was dead to them. My chair was in a whole other quadrant of the room. I didn’t recognize the place.
“Hello?” I said. “Hello? Anyone home?”
The house was in disarray. Fruit flies had colonized the breakfast nook. In the dining room, I found Effbomb (now six years old) drinking from a bowl of water on the floor, like a dog, while another child wailed in the hallway about how her panties felt on her body.
“I hate them,” Beetle (now eight) said. “I am literally dying of hating my panties.”
“Where is your mother?”
“These panties are hurting my feelings!” she said.
Upstairs I found Stargoat (now ten) sitting under a desk reading The Pilgrim’s Progress with a flashlight like some kind of Christian terrorist.
I finally discovered Lauren in the bathtub, dying.
“I’m dying,” she said, clutching her chest.
“Of what?”
“It’s a heart attack. My third one today.”
“You’re not having a heart attack.”
“I’ve had one every day for the last three months.”
“You’re very strong.”
“I’m the strongest woman alive,” she said. “Also, my face hurts.”
“What part of your face?”
“The face part,” she said.
“Face cancer,” I said.
“Face cancer,” she confirmed.
I didn’t have the heart to tell her I’d have to leave again, that the tour was not exactly over, that the book festivals would soon be pitching their white wedding tents across the land and I would have to disappear again, in search of those tents.
“The children seem distraught,” I said.
“They’re broken,” she said. “Something inside them broke.”
“They’re drinking from bowls and eating food off the floor.”
“They’re eating?” she said. “Good. That’s good.”
“I should do some laundry,” I said.
“Welcome home,” she said.
* * *
I gathered up the children and presented them with many gifts—T-shirts, candy.
“You look old,” they said. Whole sectors of my beard were now white.
“Shave your beard, Daddy,” they said. “Shave off the white. It’s scaring us.”
They embraced me, despite my haggard appearance, as did Lauren, when she finished dying in the bath.
“Read to us,” the children said.
In those moments at home with my family, I felt, by degrees, my heart being stretched by some benevolent force, the walls of it sagging with gladness and exhaustion, making room for new dreams, while somehow also providing more space for my own. My heart hurt with happiness to embrace these children. I felt like a man traversing a permafrost desolation who’d closed his eyes beside a dying fire, knowing he would never wake up, only to open his eyes and find himself naked in a hot spring, holding a bowl of steaming ramen, my daughters the noodles.
Being apart from these people had worn the walls of my family thin. I thought of my deployed friends, Army folk, men and women who disappeared for six or twelve or eighteen months. It is a divine gift that any military marriage does not end in divorce. One has to be made of iron and mercy. I was no soldier, but had missed many moments. When you’re not there, whether you’re out stitching harelips or eradicating giardia or fighting the enemies of freedom or reading aloud from a book for strangers, history will write you right out of the story.
“Let’s go out to eat,” Lauren said, gathering new life. “Let’s celebrate.”
I wanted to eat at home, at my table. To touch it, lay my head on it, lash myself to it with the tattered remnants of my hopes and dreams. Over the next few days, I took the girls to the pool and let Lauren lie on the bed and stare at the wall, which is what her dream was, now. That first week back, she hid in quiet rooms like a cat.
I’d find her in the guestroom, the lights off.
“Are you okay?” I said.
“Quiet.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Where are the girls?” she said.
“Outside.”
“Don’t tell them where I am.”
It was nice, not pretending to be famous anymore. Lauren seemed happy to have me home. Daughters are a lot of work, especially when they’re constantly covering their bodies in Nutella and glitter like it’s Burning Man.
“Don’t ever leave again,” she said, that first night home, in bed.
Our love was stronger than ever.
“I won’t leave,” I said, “for at least three weeks.”
* * *
It was over, but it was not over. An archipelago of festivals and conferences stretched out to the end of the year and around the horn of an unknown continent and into the undiscovered land of this whole other year, which might contain a paperback, should HarperCollins deem it so, based on what data I could not say.
And so we would limp on, I guessed, the way those old conquistadors did, Pizarro, de León, de Soto. My mind turned frequently to these and other fearless Eurotrash, God bless them. What were they after? The fabled waters of a New World River Jordan that might grant eternal youth? A city of gold?
At some point, in all their many thousands of arduous miles over water and swamp and red dirt and piney woods, you know that they knew they weren’t going to be finding these things. Maybe a little gold, sure. Maybe a nice natural spring in which to rest their searing flanks, absolutely. Gorgeous unfettered primitive beauty of a kind they simply had never seen before, with such creatures in it, yes, yes, but no age-altering geysers, no streets paved with platinum. When you see that the thing you’re after is probably not going to be found, what do you do? I mean, they hadn’t searched every square inch of the Americas, had they? Something had to be hiding just over the next hill, no?
My dream had come true, but also, the truth of the dream was now mutating, and I was not sure what to make of that. Do I keep going?
One ineluctable fact: Most conquistadors died on the road, on the way toward something they never quite reached. Perhaps every dreamer does. The dream just keeps evolving, birthing new and more complicated dreams, every new road forking into three new roads of joy and possibility and potential death. It’s hard to know when to stop and celebrate with that beer.
I had worked for decades to learn to turn on the spigot of human laughter at will. Why would I voluntarily shut it off now? Isn’t this the life I wanted? And so, I was off once more, floating like a ghost among the many book festivals of our land, happy gatherings of authors and readers, piles of books under tents, green rooms hidden beyond velvet ropes, filled with room-temperature ham.
* * *
One thing you learned about festivals is, everybody thinks you’re being paid to be there, but you’re not. This is not Coachella. Almost nobody is getting paid to be there, except the bestselling authors of many dozens of books about subjects like murder, and also murder, as well as sex and murder. Some festivals pay for your room, if they enjoy a well-oiled fundraising apparatus. Some festivals give you an honorarium, enough to buy tacos from a truck.
If you go to festivals with a debut novel or even your second or third one, probably, you’ll more than likely be spending a year or two buying your own plane tickets and hotel rooms and spending $200 for room service bread, which must be buttered with your own hands, which means each festival costs upwards of $1,000, which is a lot of money for a man whose family burns through panties like they invented cotton.
The upside is gift bags, filled with all sorts of luxurious giveaways, for ex
ample, gift cards for restaurants that do not open until several hours after you need to be back at the airport, and samples of cash crops and regional exports, like a pound of enriched parboiled rice, which comes in handy when bartering with local tribes.
The handlers are kind. They drive you places. One day, on my way back to Reagan International, I asked the driver, “Who’s the most famous person you’ve ever driven?”
“You!” he said.
“Do you know who I am?”
“You are the Harrison Scott Key!” he said, looking at the sign with my name on it.
“You had to look at your sign to remember,” I said.
“I drive many peoples.”
He was from Cairo, he said.
“Do you read many books?” I asked.
“The Stephen King is very good for reading.”
“Yeah, he’s a good one.”
“Do you write like him?”
“I use some of the same words.”
“This is very good, maybe I like you, too!” he said.
When I got out, he waved.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Goodbye, Robert!” he said.
I woke up one morning in another alien hotel room and a fevered panic, realizing with horror that I could not remember the color of my lawnmower.
Where was I? Los Angeles? Fairfax? Halifax?
The next night, on a ridiculously beatific autumn evening in a palatial courtyard in what turned out to be Nashville, at the foot of a large bronze statue of a nude Victory, surrounded by many authors, of which I seemed the newest and worst-selling, I could see, yes, so much is striving, that you work so very hard and so very long in solitude and madness to find your calling, your voice, your book, your publisher, your readers, that when it finally happens, it can be a shock to see how many more people have already done this, and done it better than you. It’s like Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay had arrived at the top of Mount Everest to find themselves largely ignored by a cocktail party in progress and then accosted by the mayor’s wife, who wanted to know if they’d tried the pork sliders.
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 20