Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  I walked home from the party, alone, sagging through the streets of Music City like a man in a Randy Travis video. At the hotel, I sat down with my book, its cover gnarly and rubbed raw from being tumbled about a hundred airports and Ubers. Pages had begun to fall out. I flipped through it, alighting on a passage, then another, startled by what I found.

  “I wrote this,” I thought. “This is what I wrote.”

  Some of the writing, I felt, was a little silly. I winced, a few times. Other times, I marveled. I could hear ambition and desire bulging up through every clause. I had wanted so badly to be great at something.

  The book seemed heavy now, heavy as a man’s casket. I thought of my father. The book was him, in a way. It was weird. Clearly, I was doing penance out here, on the road, and why? It was silly, how difficult I’d made things on myself. I was living my best life, and everybody knew it but me.

  * * *

  I sat in airports in every time zone in North America and watched the faces of the people. Which of them had a dream? Who was living it? Who was almost there, but not quite? It is very difficult to tell who is happy just by looking, unless they were one of those people at the Atlanta airport eating Popeye’s chicken for breakfast. The expressions I saw all around me told stories—hope, longing, a belief that some better future is out there, just ahead, at the next city, the next day. Sometimes, you think you see it, like a large bird in the trees, obscured by the spidery branches of panic and fatigue, there, yes:

  A look.

  Hope.

  Confidence.

  Faith.

  Peace.

  Fire.

  You see it everywhere, on the faces of everyone on television, sidewalks, tarmacs, escalators, sports arenas, the faces of humankind striving for greatness—gold medals, research grants, green cards, the big sale, the white whale. Remember what happened to Ahab? I guess that’s the lesson of so many stories. Be careful what you dream.

  In October, in another airport in another alien city, I received my first royalty statement, via Debbie. The document was three pages of grids and tables. It looked like the lab results of a cholesterol test, featuring many interesting vocabulary words like:

  Subtotal of Deductions

  Subrights Earnings

  Payment Due

  Payee Share

  Advances

  Unearned

  Canada

  But how many books had I sold? How many books is enough? Enough to not be embarrassed when you visit your publisher’s office? Enough to be able to purchase a jet ski without regret or shame? Nobody knows.

  “Ten thousand,” Debbie said. “That’s a good target.”

  Even she sounded a little tentative, like she wasn’t quite sure, either.

  HOW SALES WERE

  No. of Books Sold: 4,118

  Total Actual Earnings for Me: $11,770.84

  Which Means HarperCollins Paid Me: $0

  Because They’d Already Paid Me: $305,000

  Which Meant I Technically “Owed” Them: $293,229.16

  Which Meant, to Earn My Advance, I Would Need to Stay on the Road Until the Year: 2075

  HarperCollins was not going to make me pay this money back, and there was more good news: My lawnmower was yellow! I remembered.

  But what color were my children?

  And when was my wife’s birthday?

  Everywhere I went, everybody asked, “Is your wife with you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Oh, I wanted to meet her!” they said.

  They wanted to see what she looked like, I suppose, to see if I’d made her up. The book had made her more famous than me.

  “We would be friends, I think,” they said of her.

  * * *

  “You’re a strong woman,” they said to my wife at church, while I was off, somewhere, on the road. “How do you do it?” they said.

  And she fed the girls and dressed them and managed their hair while I slouched in a chair in the sky somewhere over America, trying to pay for the house in which they refused to get dressed, and then I’d land, and Oh, God, it’s beautiful, it’s autumn in Savannah, warm and cool and clear as glass, and they’re all four waiting in the front yard, Effbomb on the swing, Beetle on the sidewalk, Stargoat next to Lauren on the steps, now running to the car squealing, “Daddy! Daddy!”

  The Uber driver said, “You are a lucky man.”

  And I said, “I am.”

  The condition of the year was one of absence, of visiting, of being a guest, everywhere, even in my own home. Once, at church, an elder greeted me as a visitor.

  “How are sales?” everybody asked.

  Nobody asked if I was having fun, or if it was wild, living my dream.

  What they asked was, “How are sales?”

  “Selling many books?”

  “Sales strong?”

  “How are they, generally?”

  This is one of the questions everybody asked. They wanted to know about numbers. They wanted to measure my success. Which is frustrating, and perfectly illustrative of the contradictions of the American dream, which is that you will want to quantify it, so that you can assess your progress toward it, and this is impossible, for the target will never stop moving. What they are really asking is, Are you a victorious conquistador, or not?

  Yes, I would’ve said, had they asked.

  Another question everybody asked was, “What’s your next book about?”

  “Writing another?”

  “Will it be a memoir?”

  “A novel?”

  This, too, revealed another paradox of the American dream, that the urge to conquer and create and do something new will not let you sit still and enjoy what you have made. I didn’t want to think about what’s next, but people wouldn’t let me not.

  “How long did it take to write your book?” everybody asked.

  “Nations rose and fell,” I said. “Empires were founded and crumbled.”

  Sometimes, they asked real questions, the kind that go deep down.

  “You wrote a book about having a father,” one man said, somewhere in Virginia. “Are you a good father?”

  And I said, “I am a terrible father. I haven’t seen my children in years.”

  And everyone laughed, which is what people do when you tell them the truth.

  I was gone every weekend that fall, and came home every Sunday night, and now I saw a look on my wife’s face that I thought I’d never see again: She missed me. What a glorious thing, to see a woman who’s seen you in all your ugliness and wants to kiss you anyway. Just a little one, right there in the yard, while the girls dig in your pockets for candy from the gift bag.

  “What did you bring us?” they asked.

  “Premium long grain rice,” I said.

  I stood with my wife in the kitchen next to the calendar and marked all the days I’d be gone, what I would miss, every weekend in September, October, November, February, March, April, May, stretching out to the edge of eternity, de Soto refusing to stop, moving the hulk of a dying dream to a golden city that simply is not there.

  “Remember how hard we worked for this,” I said.

  She was tired. I was tired.

  At every turn, together, we had done the impossible thing, and climbed onto a new ledge to discover that a dozen impossible things were still required of us both.

  It was cool now, fall. The backpack was heavier with sweaters.

  “Don’t you need to go to the airport?” Lauren said, jostling me awake at four o’clock in the morning. I’d slide out of bed and into my backpack and float to the airport in the dark. I would not be making my family breakfast today, or taking Lauren a cup of coffee, to say thank you in this ridiculous trifling way, thank you, thank you, for letting me make a dream real, for allowing it, nurturing it alongside me. No, I would be in a truck, in a cab, a Lyft smelling of dead things and mountain berry Glade deodorizer, miles away, preparing to cross borders into unknown lands like the mad conquistadors of old, heading
to another airport, looking deep into the Georgia night and wondering where I was going or if I was already there.

  Act V

  WHAT NOBODY TELLS YOU

  Chapter 22

  I think about all the encouragement I’ve received over the years. Are people just being friendly? Or do they hate me?

  —JACK PENDARVIS, Movie Stars

  NOW WHEN I CAME HOME FROM TOURING, EVERYTHING WAS fine: The children were in the kitchen, conjugating their Latin. Lauren would be darning a sock, the cat reading a book. Was this a quiet rebuke, to show me how unnecessary I was to the operation of their happiness? Or was this a gift, to show they were appreciative of my enduring labors on their behalf?

  “I want you to come with me,” I said to Lauren, one night, as I unpacked for the eightieth time that year.

  “Where?”

  “On tour.”

  “We can’t afford it.”

  It was true: The money was getting low. I’d been roving the continental breakfasts of North America like some lone dragoon in a Cormac McCarthy novel, stashing foodstuffs in my pants for later. I could’ve had a whole other career performing in magic shows for hungry children, making chicken wings appear from my sleeve.

  “We have a little money left,” I said.

  “Plane tickets are insane,” she said.

  “I am not going to beg you to come with me.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Please,” I said. “I’m begging.”

  “The money,” she said, pretending to be the responsible one, the way she likes to do.

  “You’re famous now,” I said. “People want to meet you.”

  “I am not famous.”

  “My readers don’t believe you’re real. They want to know why you married me.”

  “Nobody knows that.”

  She played on her phone in bed. What madness was this, that she wouldn’t come? For a decade, she’d been a mule to whom the children cleaved like Velcro. The woman couldn’t find personal space if you gave her a pike and a roll of razor wire.

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?” I said. “It’s a vacation. You need this.”

  “Your mom can’t handle the girls for three days.”

  “My mom will not let our children die.”

  “Your mom doesn’t even know how to use our microwave.”

  “They’ll be fine.”

  “The money,” she said.

  “Fine,” I said, hurt. “Fine. I’ll take Mom.”

  I owed it to my mother. Here was the woman who’d carried me in her womb, who’d provided half of the family’s household income as a schoolteacher, who’d driven me to the library as a boy. She’d made this dream possible, hadn’t she?

  Here was the woman who always said, “You have so much talent.”

  The woman who said, “So handsome. Your forehead is a little big. But so handsome.”

  * * *

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said to Mom, on the plane, a few days later.

  “I think it’s fun,” she said. “My son, the famous author!”

  “Don’t expect hordes of adoring fans,” I said. “Just so you know. This is how publishing works. You write a book and nobody comes.”

  “I’m sure people will be very excited to meet me,” she said.

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’m so proud of you,” she said, patting my arm. “I just want you to know.”

  When the beverage service began, I asked for a tiny bottle of bourbon.

  “What time is it?” Mom asked.

  “Noon.”

  She studied the tiny bottle.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” she said.

  “No, Mother.”

  I poured the tiny bottle over ice.

  “You’re one of those alcoholic writers,” she said. “I’ve read about it. All writers are alcoholics. Are you? You are.”

  “Can you get me a pillow?” I asked a flight attendant. “I need to asphyxiate this elderly woman next to me.”

  “You think I’m old,” she said. “I could show you pictures of my friends. They look dead.”

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep and thanked Jesus for giving me a mother who loves me and asks if I am an alcoholic, despite the fact that on many occasions I have witnessed her killing a box of California Red like it threatened her family.

  At every book event she attended that year, she gloated over me as though I was a large prize-winning hog, marching me around the bookstore and presenting me to old schoolmates, second cousins, support beams, doorjambs.

  “Have you met my son, Scott?” she said.

  I should say: Up until young adulthood, I went by my middle name, Scott, which my father preferred, because Harrison simply had too many syllables, which to him made it sound foreign. Hank, Luke, Jack, Scott, these names are brusque and artless, like a good American boy. At age twenty-three, the year I wrote my first play, I started using my full name, Harrison Scott Key, because a young creative professional with no talent needs a way to distinguish himself from other young talentless people.

  Mom had initially supported this decision, at least a little.

  “How fun, Scott!” she said.

  “Harrison,” I said. “That’s what I go by now. It’s a good writer name.”

  “You will be successful at anything you do, Scott!”

  “Harrison.”

  “Oh, Scott, we’re so proud!” she said.

  * * *

  Nearly twenty years later, my mother was very excited to get to call me Scott constantly in front of people who now knew me as Harrison. She’d sit down beside me in the signing booth and commence to bewilder everyone.

  “This is my son, Scott,” she said.

  “Harrison,” I reminded her, as I’d been doing since the Clinton administration.

  The thing is, it’s very hard to pretend to be famous in the waning season of your first and perhaps only book while your mother is explaining to everyone in line that she gave birth to you and can call you whatever she wants and also when you were a baby, you had a staph infection around your rectum, the scars of which are still evident, should my readers wish to know.

  “Call me Harrison,” I’d say. “It’s on the book. It confuses people.”

  “Why did you even change it?” she said, getting loud. Other people were staring, deliberating, were we fighting? Was this real? I didn’t know. Did she?

  “Oh, do you actually go by Scott?” readers asked, when Mom started this routine.

  “No,” I’d say.

  “He’s an alcoholic,” Mom would say, to everyone standing around.

  It was like a spiritual ATF raid. Do you see Billy Ray Cyrus chasing Miley around the VMAs going on about how she used to be Destiny Hope Cyrus? Did Sarah or Hagar or Lot go on breaking Abraham’s balls constantly after his name change?

  You’ll always be Abram to me, they didn’t say, as they fought off Gomorran warlords.

  It’s not like I’d asked her to call me Sonja or Captain Peanut.

  “Harrison,” I said, right there in front of everyone. “Say it. Harrison.”

  It’s important to remember that this whole time, three or four people are staring, waiting to have their books signed.

  “Are you ashamed of who you are?” she said.

  “I’m ashamed of who you are,” I said.

  “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  “One day you’re going to need me to push you in a wheelchair,” I said.

  People would laugh at all this, while I entertained visions of rolling my mother’s future wheelchair into light traffic. Was this her unconscious retaliation for my having written so transparently about the family? Was she seeking a hidden vengeance for my emptying out the psychic closets of our crumbling ancestral manse? Didn’t she know I could drown her?

  Yet she seemed genuinely proud. The joy that beamed from her face as she enacted these performances, it was obvious she was having great fun. I decided not to drown her, not yet. Th
ere was time still. America has many rivers.

  * * *

  At one bookstore, my mother sat there surrounded by a few old friends, and I stood up and drank from a bottle of water and began to speak. I decided to read from a whole new section of the book, something I hadn’t yet auditioned for a live audience.

  As I started to read, it dawned on me that the story I’d chosen contained quite intimate details and conjecture about my mother’s emotional inner life, and there she was a few rows back, beaming. I could see it coming a few lines ahead and wondered if I should censor it. But my psychic torpor had diminished the capacity for complex problem-solving at high speeds, and there came the perhaps overly revealing passage about Mom, and I plowed right through the delicate parts like a fat baby rolling over a sack of taco shells, and I hoped, prayed, that Mom enjoyed the attention, was flattered to be in a book, but wow, it was true stuff, real stuff, and as the laughter died down, I could feel everybody looking at the back of my mother’s head and wondering if she felt it, too, this hot, bright, naked truth about her, just being spewed across a roomful of strangers by her son. And then we all came up through and out of the hole and it got funny again, and they laughed, and she laughed, and it was over.

  “What did you think?” I said, after.

  “I think people enjoyed it,” she said.

  “I mean, was it weird?”

  “Weird?”

  “To see all those people hearing true things about us?”

  “I wasn’t really paying attention.”

  “Mom.”

  “Son.”

  “I hope you had fun,” I said, giving her a hug.

  “I did. I always do. I just wish your father was here. He was so proud of you, Scott.”

  I guess, deep down, I knew she was calling me Scott because that’s what Pop called me. She had let go of so much of him in these last few years, but not that, not yet. Every time she said it, she heard him saying it, too. That, and she liked tormenting me, because she’s funny, because that’s what funny people sometimes do. I’d said funny things about her, which meant she got to say them about me. This is how it worked.

  I gave up correcting my mother, which is one of the things comedy lets you do. The woman could call me whatever she wanted. I stopped asking her to stop. It kept things real, never too far from the hard, heavy earth in which everyone, in time, is buried. One day she’ll be gone, too, and I’ll desperately want someone to call me Scott, or an alcoholic, or both, and nobody will, and it might be a little sad. Funny things always are.