When I put on my suit and looked in the mirror, it hurt my heart a little, I won’t lie, and so I reminded myself of the new salary, which had a soothing effect.
This was the right move, I told myself. This was the move that would make the space to make the book possible. I had to keep reminding myself of the book. It was going to be so good, once I started writing it, but I couldn’t start, not yet.
First things first.
Chapter 5
When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.
—JOHN KENNEDY TOOLE, A Confederacy of Dunces
THE NEW JOB CONSISTED OF MEETINGS AND COCKTAIL parties with physicians and big pharma, where everybody spoke to one another about monetizing science via National Institutes of Health funding while I stood there saying, “Wow, that’s amazing,” and praying for a meteor to fall on us.
I’d read books on how to behave in these types of situations, which all said the same thing: Be yourself. But I felt like a thousand selves. Which self should I be today? The one with dignity? The one who screams at houseplants and urinates in the sink? I am legion.
My various duties at these fundraising events was to make contacts, build networks, collect business cards, and feast on the flesh of mammon, but I had difficulty internalizing the mission of the job. Most white-collar jobs require you to want to want to do them, to do them well, but I lacked all ability to want to do anything but make my dream real, which was hard, because nobody was paying me to dream.
To do one of these soft-skill jobs well, the professional kind that more and more of us are compelled by economic progress to find, where most of your time is spent in meetings, problem-solving and planning and ideating and pursuing mostly intangible ends, these jobs are easy to perform in a perfectly acceptable subpar fashion, because almost nobody knows what anybody actually does, which works to the advantage of the shiftless and mediocre.
If you want to thrive in these diaphanous professional roles, what you’ve got to do is devote your imaginative life to them, allowing the brain to work through questions even when you’re not at work. You drive home, letting the knots of the day settle. You eat dinner, watch some television, have a beer, start untangling the knots. As you sleep, the untangled knots reconfigure into potential solutions, and you wake and run and shower, and the solutions appear to be weaving themselves into surprising and complex new forms that appear to solve the organization’s current challenges, and you drive to work and put it in an email heading that you’ve figured it out. This is what so many professional jobs consist of, even the easy ones, demanding the mind be a perpetual thinking machine, twenty-four hours a day, all week long, with occasional breaks for lovemaking and birthday parties, and this is a problem.
Well, for dreamers, it’s a problem.
For non-dreamers, it can be invigorating. The working out of the knots of professional responsibilities into complex woven patterns of solution is a great delight to the mind and heart. People who love their jobs experience this joy constantly, daily, weekly. But for those of us with a whole other dream, these damned dreams have their own knots to be worked out, which only the mind, at rest and play and sleep, can untangle.
When would I untangle my dream knots? I’d always written at night, but now I spent so many nights standing next to wealthy people at parties, guessing what to say to not seem like a total weirdo, which I feared was not possible.
“It sounds like a fucking nightmare,” Mark said, on the phone.
“The world is full of people who hate their jobs,” I said, helpfully.
I tried to do the work well, or well enough. At every mandatory cocktail party, I tried my hardest to comport myself with professionalism.
I distinctly recall one such event, an anniversary party for the Tulane Medical School, to which many New Orleans physicians had been invited. It was a pre-party, really, a party before the real party the following night, which they do in New Orleans, because, you know, they like to party. The real party was in truth a prelude to the gala the following weekend, the precursor to the most intense party of all, the after-party, which was a rehearsal for what happened after—the after-after-party, also known as “Drunk Breakfast.”
So here I was at this pre-party in the Quarter, in an upstairs room at the House of Blues. Weeknight, happy hour, surgeons, podiatrists, cardiologist, radiologists, they all came pouring up the stairs after work, looking to get hammered before the complimentary dinner. Tulane was providing the drinks, of course, which is how you get anybody to come to anything, I’ve learned, especially the wealthy ones, who feel shame when required to pay for drinks with their own money.
I arrived early, along with a small army of fundraising colleagues, other nice people who, like me, had stumbled into this profession. Nobody grows up wanting to ask people for money for a living, and if they do, they should be quarantined. It’s not the kind of thing you want spreading.
The guests arrived. It was time to work.
What has any of this to do with the dream? you may be asking.
And the answer is: nothing, and everything.
* * *
I did the usual thing I did at cocktail parties during this period of my life, which is to get pleasantly drunk as quickly as possible, so as to make myself appear eager to listen to tales of summers in Tuscany and such. I was learning a lot about the rich. The drinking helped me look like I was listening when what I was really trying to do was quiet the wounded kitten of my sadness who lived in the place behind my eyes.
I drank bourbon and ginger ale, which made me funnier and more amorous with the elderly wives of the New Orleans medical gentry. I flirted and danced with all the wealthy grandmothers, got them drunk. This was my specialty.
“I haven’t danced like this in ages,” said a lady my mother’s age, as we shuffled irregularly across the floor.
“Ages?” I said. “You can’t be more than twenty.”
“Hush, young man.”
I dipped this nice lady once, and then twice, and was surprised to find myself dipping her head into a tray of mussels, which she didn’t seem to notice, which is what happens when your blood has high concentrations of rosé.
“Wow, aren’t we having fun!” she said, pulling lemon wedges from her hair.
“Makes you smell like spring, Lois.”
“I’m Janice.”
When the song concluded, I worked my way toward the food. We had an hour to go. You throw one old lady into a delicious array of mollusks, you’re a fun guy. Do it twice in one night and you’re a menace. It was time to attempt communication with the doctors; it was their money we wanted. Most of the alumni physicians were in their forties and fifties, men and women both, hale and attractive, tanned and vigorous. They were runners. They sailed and fished. Their teeth gleamed.
I stood with my plate and tried to make eye contact with the most approachable-looking alumni from across the room, which is not always advisable when you’re eating jumbo shrimp. At these parties, guests always gather in groups of two and three, creating a cluster that functions very much like a protoplasmic entity, ingesting nearby life-forms to make itself more powerful. The ingestion into a party cluster can be frightening. People sometimes stare, wondering why you are now in their cluster. At this point, I always tried to say something funny, like, “Fun cluster!” or “I regret the choices that brought me to this moment.”
I found such a cluster, populated by three men, serious-seeming. They spoke of their families, their boats, the threat of rain. I hovered in their cluster without drawing attention to myself. What do I say? Do I introduce myself?
Hi, I’m Harrison Scott Key, and my job is to take your money and use it for important educational purposes, such as the open bar.
I hovered, rocked on my heels, said nothing.
They could see me hovering there and pretended not to notice.
I would wait until the perfect time. I would make a hilarious and personable remark. We
would become friends. They would ask me on their boats. We would hold sailfish in photographs. This is how you got somebody to put the university in their Last Will and Testament, which was the endgame to all this nonsense.
Deferred giving, they called it.
“Ask about their children,” a buddy had advised me, once. “People love that.”
I had no children and felt the subject beyond my dialogic capabilities. I could identify one, in a painting. My wife wanted some. Her body was a Disneyland, and babies were hidden inside her Tower of Terror.
“Audrey still at Ben Franklin?” said Doctor Number One, the short one.
“She starts at Newman this week,” said Number Two, the tall thin one.
“Really?”
“We want to support the public schools, but you know.”
“I know.”
Doctor Number Three, the quiet one, nodded sagely. He, too, knew. What, I didn’t know.
“You have children?” I said, jumping in.
“Yes,” said Number Two.
“What kind?”
I had meant to ask, you know, boy or girl? It seemed like one of the first things you ask about children. They either had penises or not, I knew that. I had read it somewhere.
“Pardon?” Number Two said.
Number Three, sensing that the cluster had just gotten funky, excused himself for a drink.
Now, at this point, what do I do? Do I clarify, or do I take the awkward moment and deepen it into a sacred and glorious fullness? The little angel in my head reminded me that this was work, this was my job.
Don’t be a weirdo, the angel said.
The little demon said, A weirdo is what you are.
I did, and did not, want to be fired.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What did I say?”
“You asked if I had children, and then you asked what kind,” Number Two said.
“I did?”
“You did.”
“Well, what kind are they? Are they human, or something else?”
“My children are human.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s always a good sign.”
SAFE NEW ORLEANS COCKTAIL CONVERSATION TOPICS
Money
Fishing
Hunting
The Saints
Mardi Gras
Tulane Football
What Restaurant You Went To
What High School You Went To
The Poor State of Public Schools in Our Fair City
After the parties, I went home, sneaking a tiny crème brûlée or cheesecake wedge into my suit jacket, placed there so very delicately like a little bird, to carry home to Lauren. She worked as a nanny to two small children, dreaming of her own.
She had become the only bright spot in my day. That’s one thing you learn in the washed-out wastelands of work: Everything at home, if you have a good thing there, takes on new color. Lauren taught me how to live. What you do is, you watch Lost and eat casserole. We had a TV now, and cable. They were heady days.
“What should we have for dinner?” I’d say.
“Brownies!”
It’s amazing how, sometimes, calories and Lost are all it takes to feel not crazy. We’d eat brownies and then I’d have three to ten additional brownies, trying not to think about telling a prospective donor it was probably good that his children were humans.
It was a quiet life in our half of the duplex, Lauren’s sister and brother-in-law in the other half, which was nice. How easy it would be to carry on in this way, next door to family, full of baked goods and love, in the same job, which would soon grow more tolerable, if I would only let it, plus the good health insurance and occasional free booze. When I thought about it that way, our life didn’t sound so bad, did it? As a boy, this was my dream, was it not, to pay the bills and keep off welfare and hold the boat steady and plow on through low waves into the sunset of paradise? Wouldn’t that have made Jesus and my family happy enough? But that destiny seemed juvenile now, pushed out of the way by a bulb shooting up from deep in the earth, the strange timeless urge to conquer an earthly kingdom.
I could not explain it and still find the words inchoate and difficult to summon, this desire to carve my name into history. I don’t know who or what put it there. God? My father? Some inborn knowledge of the gaping chasm of eternal darkness that swallows us all, if all this heaven business turns out to be a lie? At times, this urge felt and feels still, now, like that ancient terrifying lust of the human heart, which slays its brother and sets fire to villages and builds monuments to itself in vanquished lands among enslaved peoples. At other times, the desire for greatness felt and feels like the great crowning glory of humankind, what we were designed for, to seize creation and make something new and beautiful with the raw stuff of it.
Which would I choose, the quiet pleasing life in the plain American style, or the wild beautiful Viking warlord conquering one? Did I have a choice? I imagined this compromise happening all around me, in faces on the streetcar, in the elevator, men and women growing soporific and content in the coursing rhythms of life—work and food and sex and work and children and vacations and work—not remembering the name of the dream they once had, until it’s too late.
I saw how it could happen to me, this perfectly acceptable American happiness. Lauren ennobled our home with tiny humanizing acts of love: I’d come home to find a candle in the living room, flame dancing in the breeze through the front door. She’d have nailed something decorative to the wall, made everything smell like autumn and butterflies, baked cookies and put them on a plate we’d been given at our wedding. Maybe this life was enough. Maybe I didn’t need a dream.
I had no sense back then to say thank you. I looked at the candle and the cookies and did not know that they were making me more human, even as my work made me less. I tried to wake up early and write every morning, and sometimes I did, and sometimes I did not. I seemed to be growing dumber. In a fit of desperation, I agreed to teach a playwriting workshop in the English department and was reminded that teaching was not something I hated.
After a year of this, every new work event making less sense to my soul, but knowing I could make six figures in a single promotion if I would only buckle down and not go all George Costanza, an old friend called and asked if I wanted to teach English at a boarding school back home in Mississippi. I’d never taught high school but I liked the idea of not having to drink and carb-load to feel human.
Lauren and I discussed it. Babies could be arriving any day. The thought of raising them in our natal land had no small appeal. She was sad at the prospect of moving away from her sister, but it wouldn’t be far.
“Plus,” I said. “Summers off. For the book.”
“For the baby, too,” Lauren said. “For whenever the baby comes.”
I said, “Let’s go.”
Again, she said, “Okay.”
That August, I left the cocktail party circuit for good, or so I believed, and became an English teacher in Mississippi, a few dozen miles upriver, on high ground. Two weeks later, Hurricane Katrina destroyed the house my wife had made into a home, water to the rafters. It had been strangely good timing for us, but not for her sister and her husband and their month-old infant. They lost everything but each other and a few Polaroids the dirty black water hadn’t dissolved.
I wonder, sometimes, what might have happened, had Lauren and I stayed in New Orleans for the storm to wash away. Would the hurricane have hastened the dream, tossing us on a distant riverbank, cleansed and unburdened of expectation and ready to start fresh? Or would the storm have soaked and bloated and broken us, the way it had broken others?
* * *
The boarding school, we soon learned, would break us in its own way, part Dead Poets Society, part Full Metal Jacket. Teaching English, which I loved, for $32,000 a year, which I did not, demanded so many creative protons early in the morning and late again at night and every weekend that I had none left over to write very much, and two
semesters into the job, I found myself as bookless as ever.
A few months after the one-year anniversary of Katrina, I got another phone call, this one from a hurricane refugee friend. The storm had heaved friends all over the South, and this particular man had washed up in Savannah. He now worked at an art school called SCAD and said they were looking for a writer.
I was done with new jobs, I told him. Every interview required new forms of lying, and I was done with lying. I had a fine job and a book to write and a new baby.
“Congratulations, man!” my friend said. “What’s her name?”
“Stargoat,” I said.
This is not her name, but in this book I’m going to act like it’s her name.
I told him I wasn’t interested in any new job, as fun as that might sound, but he asked me to apply anyway, as a favor, and I did, because what is a cover letter but an act of the most creative writing? I mailed the letter and SCAD called back.
They offered to fly me over, and I went. Why not? A free trip to a lovely city.
“Ever written a speech?” the president of this college, a nice lady named Paula, asked.
“Actually, no,” I said, “but I’ve heard some.”
I walked around town and was rather surprised to find Savannah exactly as beautiful as the university’s promotional literature declared it to be. It was a little upsetting, all the trees and verdant squares and Victorian architecture, the Moorish cupolas and Romanesque windows, and everywhere you looked, dreamers! Some kid taking a photograph, or a student drawing under a tree, or a woman on a bicycle, having the audacity to sing. It felt like the kind of place where somebody could write a book.
And yet, I had a fine little teaching position in a fine little village in Mississippi, in which I was perfectly positioned to write a fine little book, should I ever ascertain precisely how such a book might in fact be written, once I finished grading papers.
And yet, might the mandatory six thirty in the morning study hall duty and weekend lesson preparation and teaching the canons of rhetoric to boys who didn’t always know how to read or deodorize themselves somehow be an impediment to the fostering of my own imagination?
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 6
