Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  Nobody tells you that sometimes your dream will feel like a joke.

  And then one day a man walks up to you on the sidewalk holding your book. He will thrust your book at you, right there on the street, and ask you to sign it, and you do, and when you hand it back to him, he will say that your book made him love his father more, which seems a miracle to you, that your ridiculous book amplified love in the world.

  The man is older, and wealthy, you can tell, just by his shoes and the tailoring of his shirt, and he is weeping as he speaks about his father, long dead, and you marvel, thinking how your own father, brash and virile as he was, would laugh to know you wrote a book about him that made grown men cry, right there on the street, including his own son.

  “Thank you,” the man says, and you thank him, too.

  You walk away, eyes a little wet. Wonder of wonders.

  * * *

  Nobody tells you that you will change, will cease reading reviews, that one day you will be able to go hours without checking your Amazon ranking. You will find yourself in the park, staring into the trees.

  “I had a publicist, once,” you will say to the squirrels. “His name was Phillip.”

  Nobody tells you that whatever your ambition compels you toward, to make books, buildings, clothes, advertisements, machines, life insurance policies, robots, robots who keep making sequels of lesser and lesser quality, whatever it is, the journey to greatness makes fools of us all.

  Nobody tells you how you will once again love teaching, the thing you ran away from at the beginning of all this, because your heart was perhaps dispositioned meanly toward certain works of art for ridiculous reasons, inclement weather, missing buttons on shirts, your own quite obvious undeveloped talent, but the grace and generosity others have shown your foolish little book has opened up a River Jordan of unexpected charity inside you, and now you find your heart turning to a more generous bearing when encountering the work of others, to listen to what goodness and light they’re after, and to find ways to help them toward that light, the way you help someone reach a book on a high shelf. That is your job now. To help others reach the high book.

  Nobody tells you that you will look at your students and also your children with new eyes, that you will find yourself asking these little people in your house what they want to be when they grow up, and they will say:

  “A scientist.”

  “A mommy.”

  “A dancer.”

  “A writer.”

  “A teacher.”

  “A chef.”

  “A BMX racer.”

  “A fibers artist.”

  “A firewoman.”

  “A drummer.”

  “A she-goat.”

  “A professional whittler.”

  “Someone named Linda.”

  Nobody tells you that your children will become as ridiculous as you are, that this is how it works. Your love for these ridiculous people makes you cry when you think about it, and you cry all the time now, during movies and songs and church and baths and while sitting on the front porch, as they ride bikes and ask to take off their clothes so they can do naked cartwheels in the yard, which makes their mother cry for altogether different reasons.

  * * *

  Do what you love for a living, and you’ll work every day of your life, and you’ll never stop working, even when you should.

  Nobody says this.

  Nobody says that you will never stop wondering if your dream came true, because it’s an unanswerable question. A dream cannot be weighed, or packaged, or touched with the hands and exchanged for Euros. A dream is a metaphysical reality, a quality of atmosphere, a way of being, a condition of life that you long for. I know that now. There was much I didn’t know about my dream when I began. I hadn’t known it would require so much effort as to make me feel like Willy Loman. I hadn’t known the writing would require the stark nakedness of my soul. I suppose any dream requires some measure of soul-nakedness. It is not fun, descending down into the ugly tornado shelter inside you. Most people never even take the first step.

  And I grew to love it, the clearing out of the darkness in me via writing, the painful and happy explosions of laughter that happened in me and which I hoped would inspire the same in others: That’s what I wanted, a life where I could spend time doing that, a few hours in the morning, or at night, or all day. This urge to express ridiculous ineffable truths in language, as a way of making meaning in a world that often seems to lack all sense, it evolved, changed shape, took on bizarre new forms. Sometimes, my dream was to write, to maybe help heal others, the way comedy healed me. Sometimes, it felt like a dream to be famous. Sometimes, it seemed like all I dreamed of was book sales and mortgages. Now, it appears that my dream is to help my children become she-goats and someone named Linda.

  Nobody tells you how happy this will make you.

  Nobody tells you that dreams change, grow feral in the night, the moon breaks through the clouds and they grow teeth and hair, and then the sun rises, and they seem sweet and precious and good again. My wife’s dream to work at home with her children evolved, too, once the children were old enough to follow her around the house, and she dreamed a new dream, to work at school with her children, where they continue to follow her around, in addition to the children of others, as well as many confused parents, and I am happy this became her dream, for this is how we pay for their educations, allowing them to go to a school where everybody can read and nobody gets paid to write everybody’s research papers, we hope.

  My dream came true, it did: I can access the light inside me, what little there is, can take it in my palm and study it and make it into something funny and beautiful in words that can live on a page in a book on a table for anybody in the world to find, should they desire it, for a book, like any work of art, helps you find a bit of your own light, and my light is silly, and my light is sad, and on good days, my light is true, and I can shine it now, if I apply myself and stay hydrated. This was my dream, and it comes true every morning, somewhere between four and five o’clock, when the world hides under blankets and skeins of flesh, and I sit at this table, fathoming what cannot be fathomed. Nobody tells you that a dream is not something you will accomplish, long from now. It is something you do every day. That is all it can be. That is all it ever was.

  * * *

  Maybe the most amazing thing nobody tells you is that an editor named Laura from HarperCollins will call you one day in late summer and say, “We have good news.”

  “Your book,” she says, “is a finalist for an award.”

  “What sort of award?” you ask.

  The one they give to all The New Yorker people, she says. The Onion writers won this award, and The Daily Show ones, too, and David Sedaris, and you laugh. Clearly, someone has made a terrible mistake. But also you don’t laugh, because you secretly think, I’m as funny as those yahoos.

  But then you think, No. You are not. They write for The New Yorker, whereas you recently had a story republished in the Greene County Independent (fifty cents), a weekly out of Eutaw, Alabama, although you didn’t make the front page, which was reserved for a controversial story on the placement of an electrical pole near a water tower.

  The award is called the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and you would very much like to win this prize, to place it alongside your baseball trophies on top of your bookcase, including the most special trophy you own, which you won when you were eleven, in what’s called a “beauty and beau” pageant, which is something they do in the public schools of Mississippi to determine whom Jesus loves the most. The nameplate on this trophy reads:

  MOST HANDSOME

  THIRD PLACE

  There were three male contestants.

  This is my Most Hideous Boy Award.

  Nobody tells you that one day, you will marry a woman who believes this trophy is hilarious. The very sight of it makes her rush to the toilet with abandon.

  “Most handsome!” she says, weeping joyfully, catchin
g her breath.

  “That’s very kind of you,” I say.

  “It’s so sad.”

  “I am a revolting freak, thank you.”

  “Oh goodness, look,” she says, holding her now urine-soaked crotch.

  Whenever she’s feeling down or needs a urine sample, she comes into my office to look at this trophy.

  Nobody tells you that you’ll come to love this trophy most of all, even more than the big tall BMX trophies, because this last-place trophy tells the truth. You are not a beautiful man, by conventional standards, never have been. You are broken and hideous and demon-riddled and you know it, and if you are even a little funny, this is why. How your wife can be so beautiful and so funny, this seems unfair, but beautiful people are broken, too.

  This, you have learned also.

  * * *

  The Thurber ceremony will take place at Carolines on Broadway, a comedy club in Manhattan, where people like Dave Chappell and Maria Bamford and Tig Notaro and Mitch Hedberg have performed, and where you will be reading one of your stories in one month, according to Laura. You are dying.

  “It’s a major award,” your mother tells everyone, shortly before turning to you to ask, “What’s it called again?”

  Nobody tells you that the Midtown hotel you’ve promised your children is going to cost more than a reasonably priced family sedan, but you will not care, not even a little, because you are living in eternity now, and you are taking everyone, even your mother, because it will be fun to walk around New York with an elderly woman who whispers constantly, “Now, which one do you think is into jihad?”

  And you go, all of you, you fly to New York, to ascend the dream ziggurat you have been seeking for so long. It seems you have arrived to something. Nobody tells you that at the top of this ziggurat is the Central Park Carousel and the Natural History Museum and the Met and the East Village, where your mother points out all the places where they would find bodies if this were an episode of Law & Order.

  Nobody tells you that on the night of the ceremony, high up in a hotel towering over this city of dreamers, your children will encourage you like ancient holy orbs of fairy light.

  “Daddy?” Effbomb says. “Which book is this award for?”

  “I’ve only written one,” you say.

  “Good luck, Daddy,” she says, patting your head as you put on your good shoes.

  “It’s okay,” Beetle says. “If he doesn’t win, they will still give him a prize.”

  “False,” I say. “Besides, you are the prizes.”

  “You should brush your teeth,” Stargoat says. “They seem a little yellow.”

  Nobody tells you that you and Lauren will walk to Carolines through the whooshing epileptic declarations of Times Square, walking slowly, because of her heels, that she demands you slow down, that she’s been demanding you slow down since you were children. You are walloped at every turn by the humanizing qualities of this funny woman whose hand you hold.

  You will pray, “Why, God? Why am I deserving of any happiness? Why have you blessed me beyond comprehension?”

  You stop at a light. You have to wait. You hold hands and wait together.

  “I’m starving,” Lauren says.

  Look at your watch. It is almost her feeding time.

  Look at her, while she looks at the stoplight and calculates the necessity of eating the granola bar in her handbag now, or later, in the Carolines restroom. She touches her forehead, because she very likely believes she now has forehead cancer. You love this weirdo.

  The light turns. You walk.

  * * *

  You enter the club, at the corner of Forty-Ninth Street and Broadway, and your posse is there. You have a posse. They don’t know that they are your posse, probably. Nevertheless.

  “Wow!” Debbie says, greeting you at the bar. “Can you believe this?”

  “Thank you for everything.”

  Hug her.

  She says, “Wow!” again. She says wow a lot. This is what makes her a good agent. Debbie just returned from Tuscany. Nobody tells you that one day your posse will include people who go to Tuscany and say ciao with a straight face. You love Debbie. You love everyone, including Cal, also of your posse, the editor from south New England, who is also in attendance. Cal has grown a beard and looks like an extremely well-read lobsterman. Hug Cal, too. Thank everyone you meet, even those who do not know who you are.

  Over there, a rival gang, The New Yorker people. Go over there, meet them. Attempt to hug some of these coastal elites, as they recoil in horror. Get your wife a drink.

  A man finds you, ushers you and Lauren into the room where all the famous comedians perform, and it’s all curvilinear and lopsided, like the bridge of a starship designed by Frank Gehry, and you’re on the front row of the starship. The end of your dream is about to begin.

  And suddenly it has begun, all three finalists reading from their books, you and the other two, one at a time, a funny man who writes for the Wall Street Journal and a funny woman who edits for The New Yorker and you, a cracker whose father was born into some kind of awful country song, dragged across his own vexed ambition by a mule, a man who wrestled with the demons of money and education all his life, never not remembering the mule, or the plow, or the kerosene lanterns, and trying, ever and always, to forget, and not to forget.

  All three of you are funny. Everyone laughs. All is in order.

  And now it is time for the award, and nobody tells you that they will call your name.

  And you will say, What?

  And Lauren will say, Go!

  And you will say, WHAT?

  Nobody tells you that the look of surprise and joy on Lauren’s face will be like all the treasure chests of an empire opened at once in the morning sun, that you will bound oddly to the stage and hold the prize and lift it into the sky like it’s Rocky IV while your wife cries like Adrian because she is so full of exultant unbridled joy because you have won.

  Nobody tells you that the owner of Carolines will find you so hilarious that he will ask you to stay and perform that very night, and a Saturday Night Live casting director is in the crowd and hands you her card and asks you to call her, and before you can process all this, you and Lauren are drinking champagne at some club called House of Planets or Gilded Rage, and the sun is coming up, and your phone is full of texts from the publicist, who tells you Today wants to know if you can do the show this morning, and you will sell one million books because of this. You will pay off the house. What do you say? You need to sleep. You need a shower. But you can’t say no to the Today show, not now, no, this is your time.

  Nobody tells you this, because it doesn’t happen.

  * * *

  Let me tell you what happened.

  There I sat at Carolines in the front row, the dream-posse enveloping me protectively, Lauren to my right, Debbie the Tuscan and Cal the Lobsterman to my left, flanked by other nice HarperCollins personnel who probably had to be there for work. The emcee did a funny thing, and then introduced a representative of the Thurber people, and the Thurber man came up and pulled out a small index card and announced the winner, and the winner was me. I died. I laughed madly, like a crazy person. I may have high fived a few strangers as I bounded to the podium and turned and saw that Lauren really was joyfully weeping, likely because the event was almost over and dinner would be happening soon, and because she loves me. I pulled out my hilarious acceptance remarks at the very moment I realized they didn’t really want me to do any hilarious acceptance remarks, because other people were waiting to use the room, and I rushed through and ruined my hilarious acceptance remarks.

  Nobody tells you that in this crowning moment, you will be far away from yourself, soaring above the island of Manhattan like a man in a movie, and then it will be over.

  Everybody said congratulations and departed, the room suddenly empty as a chest bereft of air, and I stood alone in back of the club filling out a W-9 for the prize money and then found myself on the sidewal
k with Lauren and a heavy engraved crystal plaque and no plans and nobody to do them with but her.

  I thought somebody would at least want to buy us a celebratory drink, yes? Perhaps a shower of champagne at some point, whilst jutting madly out of the roof of a limo, perhaps?

  But no. Yet again, I had been wrong. This seemed to be the story of my dream, distilled into a single shuddering moment: Something amazing would happen, while I stood there, waiting for something amazing to happen, not noticing that something amazing had already happened.

  “What now?” Lauren said, into the earthly din of city traffic.

  “I think I would like to write a highly lucrative musical,” I said.

  “No, I mean dinner,” she said.

  Our children were several blocks away, already in bed. Mom was with them, in the adjacent room, watching Dateline and feeling terrible for strangers. The night was ours.

  “Let’s just walk,” Lauren said. “We’ll find something.”

  I had to get this woman some food, or she would hurt somebody. She would climb a building and start swatting at aircraft. We walked. I took her hand. We never do this, and now we’d done it twice in one day. The hands get all sweaty. We both hate it, but it’s fine. Sometimes two funny people can just hold hands and not be weird. Nobody tells you this.

  We found a restaurant out of a Billy Joel song, and were seated. I placed the award on the table, and Lauren picked it up.

  “It’s heavy,” Lauren said.

  “That’s how you know it’s real,” I said.

  “Real what?”

  “Real neat.”

  I patted the prize and decided that the thing to do, when we got home, was teach my children important life lessons by making them clean it once a week.

  I pulled out the $5,000 check. What should we do with this money? Save it? Invest? Give it to various nonprofits and churches whose work builds up, and does not tear down?

  “Gimme my money,” Lauren said.

  “We will all be dead one day,” I said, struck with the fleeting nature of it all.