I would ambush him.
“You’re going to do what?” Lauren said, later, when I told her my plan.
“Accost him.”
“Attack him?” she said.
“Engage him,” I said.
“You’re going to get arrested,” she said.
I told Mark.
“Holy shit,” he said. “This is awesome. You’re going to get arrested.”
* * *
The editor Marc Smirnoff is straight out of Dostoevsky, tall and brash and garrulous, looking like the smartest and most tortured member of a basketball team from the former Communist Bloc. When his talk began, he didn’t seem high, but also, he seemed a little high. Not on drugs, but on something. Irreverence? Drugs? It was thrilling, in a way, to know that my dream had thrust me into a world of such public strangeness.
This man was from a different age. Male magazine editors these days, they’re polished and beautiful in their navy suits and monk straps and are easily mistaken for hotel concierges and sommeliers, but not Smirnoff, with his running shoes and two-dollar haircut and skeptical eyes. He wore a blazer like a man who’d forgotten to bring one to the restaurant, too bothered with remaking the American literary landscape to worry about ironing his shirts. He seemed simultaneously exhausted and charged with energy, like a man who’d just ridden a bus across three states.
Like Hunter Thompson, he often wore sunglasses indoors, peeling them off dramatically when it was time to make a point. I’d heard stories, how he’d sit in the back at a conference and stand up and challenge a speaker with his sunglasses used for punctuation marks, waving them threateningly. Sadly, literary types never threaten people with eyewear anymore.
I sat there with my story in an envelope, laying across my lap, listening. Smirnoff railed and joked, raving about the flaccidity of American writing and his general disappointment in every magazine that was not his. He was offensive in the best way, jovially so, answering to a higher ethic beyond tepid politeness, cut from an impressive bolt of H. L. Mencken cloth, the edges raw. I loved him instantly. The world needed editors like this, with their edges and difficult truths. An editor like that would not lie to you about how good your work wasn’t.
“I guess we have to take questions now,” Smirnoff said, at the end.
A few hands went up. I could feel the burning bush inside me turn icy and cold. The world stopped breathing. I raised my hand.
“You,” he said, pointing.
The key to shamelessness is knowing exactly when to expose it to the world. If you do it at the right time, you catch people unaware and they might actually be impressed by your sheer naked vulnerability. Do it at the wrong time, and they’ll point and laugh for the same reason.
“You should read this,” I said, holding up the envelope like it held important grassy knoll evidence.
“What is that?”
“A story I wrote.”
The audience, full of literary strivers, gasped. Some covered their mouths, fearing a great public embarrassment was underway. The room got officially weird.
“Is your story any good?” he said, daring me while everybody stared.
“It made my wife have to change her panties,” I said.
The moderator called security. Suddenly, I very much seemed like the kind of nice white man who maybe has a gun.
I’d like to tell you what happened next, but my brain got knocked off the station. All I heard was static. When it was over, I staggered to the stage, dizzy with the ebb of adrenaline.
“My life is in your hands,” I said, handing the story to him. He smiled, said he’d put it on the pile with the thousand other stories-by-nobodies waiting to be read. I thanked him in a very I-have-a-family-not-a-gun way, and disappeared through a side door.
A week later: Nothing.
A month, two months: Nothing.
I would never again hear from this man.
And then it came, an email.
The story, he said, was terrible. Way too long. Too many exclamation points. But some paragraphs weren’t terrible.
“We’ll take it,” he said.
They offered me $400 for the non-terrible paragraphs, which I negotiated up to $450, to show that I, too, could be a difficult jackass. After writing for nearly a decade, I’d earned enough money with my writing to fly my wife to Bermuda, although she’d have to fly alone, and she’d be without lodgings or food when she arrived. No matter. This wasn’t about a little money. This was about a lot of money. The dream was near. I could smell it.
* * *
The writing ideas came in great surging waves now, and I made the rather risky decision to move back into the classroom, teaching English and writing at SCAD, which meant a not-insignificant cut in pay, about which Lauren was very excited.
“Time,” I said. “Time is what we need.”
“Money is what we need.”
“Summers are what we need.”
“Groceries are what we need.”
On holidays, I wrote.
On vacations, I wrote.
In the bath, I wrote.
On airplanes, on the way to writing conferences, I wrote.
At writing conferences, instead of attending important “networking” events, I wrote.
In the audience during panel discussions at writing conferences, I wrote.
In summers, I wrote for twelve to fourteen hours a day.
In staff meetings, in church, in line, at the movies, I took vigorous notes, for the next day’s writing. I removed unnecessary information from my brain in bulk and moved it to cold storage, such as where food items may be acquired or what bills are.
I found literary agents online, sent them my stories.
Be my agent? I said, attaching a copy of the one story in Oxford American, which I felt made me seem famous and beautiful.
It’s very humorous, they said, emailing back, but I’m afraid it’s not for us.
And I said, Don’t be afraid.
Soon, I found myself at a conference at the University of Mississippi, where I read a story for a large audience, and they laughed, the way I had always dreamt of making people laugh. Immediately upon my reading the last line, the audience applauded vigorously, and I felt that perhaps I could go ahead and die, this was it, I had done it, melted brains in my homeland, and a man ran up to the lectern leading a woman by the arm.
“Harrison, I’m Bob,” said Bob. Later, I would learn that this man was Bob Guccione Jr., founder of SPIN magazine, son of a notorious pornographer, and also the kindest man in the magazine industry.
“Hi, Bob!” I said, still at the lectern, gathering my notes.
“This is Debbie,” Bob said, introducing me to a tall, smiling woman. “Debbie’s going to be your agent.”
“She is?”
“She is.”
Debbie handed me a card.
A week later, Debbie was my agent.
* * *
The way it happened is this: The next day, after we’d met at the reading, Debbie and I had lunch. We ate chicken salad, and she worked her Jedi powers on me, like good agents do.
“What are you writing?” she said.
“A collection of essays,” I said.
“Why essays?”
“Because it’s an American tradition to write a book nobody will ever read,” I said.
She looked disappointed. She was fearless about showing me her disappointment. All the best mentors are.
“Your book is not a collection,” she said.
“It’s not?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Nobody reads them.”
“I read them.”
“Do you?”
“No.”
* * *
Debbie read a few more of my stories and signed me. I was going to be a fixer-upper.
“Let’s talk about your book, which is not a collection,” she said, via telephone.
“So what’s my non-collection about?” I asked, curious.
She seemed to know everything.
“Your father,” she said.
And I was like, “LOL.”
WHAT THE TEN BEST STORIES IN MY COMPUTER WERE ABOUT
My father
My father
My father
My father
My father
My father
A prayer breakfast
A studious armadillo
An old man who wears no pants
My father
I ignored this list and instead focused my energies on telling everyone about Debbie, because everybody wanted to know.
People asked, “Oh, you have an agent?”
I said, “Yes, why do you ask?”
They said, “Because you just brought it up.”
My wife would ask, “What’s the weather going to be like today?”
And I said, “I don’t know. We should ask my agent.”
At restaurants, servers would ask, “Would you like to hear the specials?”
And I said, “I bet my agent would love to hear the specials. We should call her.”
I told everybody about Debbie, friends, enemies, strangers, Mark. I told them how she’d once been a book editor and in fact had discovered Tom Clancy, when she bought his first novel, a little book called The Hunt for Red October, and how Tom went on to publish seventeen novels, which would go on to sell 100 million copies, many of which would be turned into films, which helped monetize his very name into a global brand of retributive American justice through superior violence and likable characters, which turned into first-person shooter games and board games and immersive theme park experiences, which turned into his being able to afford buying a $16 million apartment and a stake in the Baltimore Orioles. The implication here, of course, is that I was very likely the next Tom Clancy, just based on feedback from many people, all of whom were my mother.
I didn’t necessarily want to own a baseball team, but I did want to pay off my school loans, which we’d been attacking with nearly $1,000 monthly payments for what seemed like eternity, while it just stood there hovering before us, stolid and cold, a Typhoon-class submarine.
Also, my wife wanted those extra toilets I’d promised her. I’d almost run roughshod over our marriage and my family and everything that meant anything in pursuit of this dream, and it was time to make it rain toilets. We needed a bigger house, she felt. I ran the numbers and noted that we had approximately one uterus per 250 square feet.
* * *
What I didn’t tell people about Debbie is that she, like all the dream makers, made me do hateful things, such as question everything about my work. I did a lot of reflecting and praying in those days. These were new and more specific prayers.
I prayed, Should I write a funny novel about college football, God?
And God was like, Boring.
I asked, Should I finish the story about the armadillo?
God was like, I just sharted.
So I asked Mark.
“The stories about your dad are so good,” he said. “Didn’t you say Debbie loves them?”
“What about the armadillo one?” I said.
“It doesn’t seem relatable.”
“Armadillos are very relatable.”
I could hear Debbie over my shoulder at every moment of the day. There they were—the good angel and the bad angel and a tiny little Debbie, telling me that my book was about my father, which was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. I wrote down a list of themes in my least terrible work.
Manhood
Fatherhood
Masculinity
Virility
Men
Mannishness
Fathers
Dads
Husbands
Sons
Men
Sons
Armadillos
Hmm. Curious. This armadillo would not relent. Perhaps I should write about this feisty little armored mammal? Pop was feisty, too, and was appearing more and more in everything I wrote, manifest and hovering, the ghost of Hamlet’s father. Everywhere I looked, there he was.
“See?” the tiny little angel Debbie said.
I sucked it up and decided to finish the armadillo story, and another unicorn story, and a 25,000 word essay about a pair of shoes I once cherished.
I simply could not write about Pop. No. Those were wicked and tangled thickets I dared not enter. Instead, I reread my brilliant armadillo novella, which was about a young armadillo who did not want to be an armadillo and so ran away. He hated everything about being an armadillo, the chicken feet, the ridiculous shell, the distant relation to sloths.
And then I was like, My God, this armadillo is me.
And God was like, You are literally the world’s dumbest man.
Okay. So. It would be a book about my father and me, called The World’s Dumbest Man.
No, not that. But close.
* * *
Next, Debbie made me write a proposal, which is a very long brochure for a book that doesn’t even exist, where you have to say ridiculous things like: Not since [name of really successful book from a few years ago that everybody remembers and which was made into a film] has a [name of genre] so [adverb + verb] the experience of [nominative phrase].
For example: Not since Alan Jackson’s Book of Fancy Hatbands has a memoir so fully explored the experience of having a mustache.
That summer, I sat down and wrote a brochure for an imaginary book about my father, which was turning out in my head to feel like a book about the South, which was a little worrying. Write a funny book about the South and the next thing you know they’re making you do a ribbon cutting at a new Cracker Barrel and inviting you to speak at the Dukes of Hazzard Museum. I did not want to be a “southern writer,” the same way many gay writers do not wish to be “gay writers” and many Christian writers do not wish to be “Christian writers,” whatever that is, God forbid.
I wanted to be an American writer, free to write about my father, sure, but also to write about marmots or Jupiter or the history of buttons. Was Mark Twain expected to represent all people with flourishing white hair?
And yet, the South was my home, for better, for worse. I’d already written one story about the South, and several, actually, maybe all of them. What the hell.
“I am not a southern writer,” I said to Katherine, an artist friend who sometimes did illustrations to go with my stories.
And she was like, “Why are you such an idiot?”
The good news was, there is much fine literature to draw from in the American South, many inspiring works, like “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” by the esteemed agrarian poet, Kenneth Chesney. I made a vow: Nobody in my book would carry baskets full of chicken or cold jugs of sweet tea. There would be no sexy tractors. Instead, I’d write about the venereal diseases the children give one another after driving their non-sexy tractors, or the morbid obesity and the tooth decay caused by the chicken and the tea.
WHAT THE SOUTH MADE ME THINK OF
Blood
Love
Meat
Hot
Sex
God
Sport
Racism
Violence
Misogyny
Wealth
Woods
Poverty
History
Slavery
Air conditioning
Oppression
Depression
Secession
Biscuits
Biscuits are funny. But racism? Racism is a big scary thing. How does a white boy from Mississippi write about his racist father in a loving and funny way that is honest and doesn’t forever poison the well of their love?
This is where the humor comes in handy. It’s not mere icing, a sweet little thing you add around the edges to make a story more fun to eat. It’s also a way of knowing, a heuristic to get you into the side door of your theme. When everybody else charges headlong at free market economics, the two-state solution, when fertilized
embryos become human, or why white southerners are so nice and also very racist, the funny writer goes in the back door, totally unprotected and unguarded, to steal the golden calf.
While finishing the proposal, Debbie also made me commit additional acts of perversion, such as sending letters to famous people asking for blurbs to put in the proposal. I felt like a medical fundraiser all over again, asking strangers to give me things that I might not deserve. But I sucked it up. My shame and fear were being burned away in layers. I wrote real letters and mailed them, including handwritten notes by my precious daughters, in crayon, shamelessly pleading, to:
Famous Funny Nonfiction Writer Who Shall Not Be Named (no response)
Famous Funny Fiction Writer Who Shall Not Be Named (no response)
Famous Funny Film Critic Who Shall Not Be Named (no response)
Famous Comedian Who Shall Not Be Named (no response)
David Sedaris (Who replied with a typed letter explaining that he can’t do it, sorry, he’s been asked this twice a day for the last one hundred years and can only do it for friends now and also why in the hell isn’t my agent doing this for me and here’s his editor’s name at Little, Brown and Company, if I want to email her and say he sent me.)
George Saunders (Who replied with a much-delayed email saying sorry he took so long but no he can’t do it, for the same reasons Sedaris wouldn’t, but really just keep writing and it will happen, for he believes in me, even though he doesn’t know me.)
Ira Glass (Who replied with a handwritten postcard from his intern saying no for the same reasons as above but including a signed headshot of Ira for my daughters.)
Mike Birbiglia (Whose brother and cowriter, Joe, replied with an actually really kind and thoughtful blurb.)
Bob Guccione Jr., founder of SPIN and Wonderlust (Who sent an amazing blurb because we met that one time and he is very kind.)
Curtis Wilke, author of The Fall of the House of Zeus (Who sent an amazing blurb because Debbie asked him to because she’s his agent, too.)
Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating and Cooling (Who sent an amazing blurb because she heard me read once and seems more angel than human.)
Congratulations, Who Are You Again? Page 11
