Congratulations, Who Are You Again?

by Harrison Scott Key

  Having fans was terrific and terrifying, I have to say, and I made great efforts to have meaningful interactions with each one, even when they said unexpected things in front of the book-signing table, like the nice lady who leered down at me and explained how my dead father sounded like a child abuser and probably belonged in jail.

  “Thanks for reading!” I’d say.

  * * *

  I met many interesting readers that summer, readers galore, readers too wild to be believed, who insisted I come shoot hogs on their land, offered me marijuana, implored me to buy whole or term life insurance—whatever my needs were—readers who invited me to Pilates, handed me mixtapes, pamphlets, unpublished manuscripts written in a genre they called “Christian thriller,” which I assumed must be a story about the risen Lord and his disciples driving around in an RV solving social justice mysteries.

  I shook hands, high-fived, became a hugging machine, wrapping my arms around men, women, children, those I remembered and those I didn’t, as well as complete strangers who were merely shopping in the bookstore and had wandered too close to the Hugging Area.

  Hugging became so deeply enjoyable, in part, because it served as a distraction from the more impossible task of signing books in a manner that befit my tender newborn reputation as a prominent author who simultaneously exudes wit and pathos on demand, which is impossible, as I do not generally exude both wit and pathos without strenuous effort and a shot of something flammable, which then ruins my penmanship and ability to spell. Nevertheless, I tried. I wanted to be a kind, attentive, non-celebrity author by personalizing as many books as possible, which proved to be one of the great unforeseeable difficulties of my new daily experience.

  STANDARD AUTOGRAPH

  To Rita,

  Best,

  Harrison

  ** OR **

  Darren,

  Fine meeting you!

  Harrison Scott Key

  PERSONALIZED AUTOGRAPH

  Rita,

  I can smell you from all the way over here!

  XXOO,

  Harrison

  ** OR **

  Darren,

  You look pretty good for a burn victim!

  Try aloe,

  Harrison Scott Key

  Not that people enjoy being called a burn victim, but in that particular case, Darren had just told me he’d been out at the pool all day and actually had a pretty bad sunburn, while Rita had apologized for reeking of barbecue because she’d been smoking chicken for a softball fundraiser. So it wasn’t cruel, what I wrote, I hoped? I wanted each autograph to be a little performance, and I found this increasingly difficult, the longer I stayed on the road, when fatigue worked its magic.

  Occasionally, I found myself confronted by potential threats of violence.

  “Hey, um, yeah,” a vaguely familiar man asked, at a bookstore in Alabama, when it came his turn in line. We’d gone to high school together in Mississippi, I knew that much, but that’s all I could remember. “I got a question about that mean dude in that one chapter,” he said.

  “You mean the dude who tried to whip my ass?” I said.

  “Yeah,” the man said. “That was Ricky, right?”

  “It depends,” I said. “Are you Ricky?”

  “Ha, ha,” he said, which could mean yes or no.

  “Who am I signing this to?” I said, hoping to hear his name.

  “Calvin,” he said.

  “Are you Calvin?”

  “Why the hell you asking me that?” said Calvin or Ricky. “Now sign it! And make that shit funny.”

  “Sign something good,” everybody said.

  “Go fucking wild!” they said.

  “Make it personal!” they threatened.

  “Perform!” they said. “Dance, monkey!”

  Quick! Take out a piece of paper and write something clever on it while a person you haven’t seen in a quarter century stands over you like a prison guard and declares loudly for all to hear that one time in chemistry you pretended to make a phone call with her shoe, which you have no memory of and can’t imagine your ever being so cavalier about infectious disease that you would hold the shoe of another person to your head.

  Quick!

  Be funny!

  Write it longhand! Make it pretty. Do it while your body is so depleted of necessary nutrients and sleep that you wouldn’t be able to remember having lost your virginity to this poor woman in a baptistery. Go, do it, now!

  “Who should I sign this to?” I said.

  “Carla.”

  “Is that you?”

  “It is.”

  “Where are you from, Carla?”

  “Actually, could you sign it to my brother, Ed?” she said. “He’ll relate to your story. He’s in prison for attempted murder. He’s my brother. Well, he’s not my brother. But we did used to be engaged.”

  Quick! Write a funny quip to incestuous Ed, in jail for attempted murder. Go! Do it!

  I found interactions with old friends and acquaintances both more fun and also more threatening, as these exchanges were occasionally filled with surprise information, for example, “Dude, in college, you were kind of an asshole.”

  And I’d say, “Really?”

  I did go through a rough patch there for a few decades, and I was slowly beginning to see just how rough the patch might have been.

  “You were a real jerk to me,” some old pal would say.

  “You were mean,” they’d say.

  And I’d have to think about it.

  What I wanted to say was, The ass in this situation does not seem to be me.

  But what I said was, “Man, I’m sorry. I really am.”

  And they’d say, “Congrats on the book!”

  And now I’d have to sign their book and say something nice.

  What I’d want to sign was, I remember when you were nice.

  But what I’d sign was, “You look pretty good for a burn victim.”

  * * *

  The truth was, I didn’t remember them, because maybe I was sort of an ass in my earlier and more vulnerable years. And that’s when the irony washed over me like a warm summer rain. In my book, I had attempted raw naked honesty, and these people had perhaps noted this and were simply returning in kind. Truth tellers get truth told to them, also. Had I learned nothing from the hussy? All this foolishness, I could see, had become the mechanism of my sanctification. In the Christian religion, sanctification translates literally as God kicks your head repeatedly like an angry mule in labor. It is a trial, this mule, and this tour was my mule.

  I took the offerings of whiskey and the kind congratulations and the manuscripts and the declarations of my shortcomings as a human and I said, Thank you, mule.

  TWO WAYS PEOPLE INTERACT WITH YOU AT PROMOTIONAL EVENTS

  What New Fans Say *“We just love you!”

  *“My book club was so tickled!”

  *“The chapter on marriage saved our marriage!”

  What Old Friends Say*You a bald motherfucker now, ain’t you.”

  I was tired, and thrilled, and sleeping in an endless cyclotron of hotels and guest rooms and friends’ apartments. I recall one especially drugged night that summer, as I slept in an apartment on Monuments Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, the home of an old friend, Daniel. At three in the morning, a great tumult of noise erupted and a man stood in the doorway of this bedroom, japing and cackling.

  “Hey! Hey you!” he said, as I slept. “Are you Harrison Scott Key?”

  I felt hot acid in my hands and feet. The tour was whipping my ass and I now wished to return the favor to this man’s ass, or perhaps his head, by removing it from his neck and hurling it into the street. He kept calling my name. I was dead asleep five seconds ago, remember, my soul emptied out, the insides of me haggard and ashen, to match the outsides.

  The grimacing man seemed to believe all this was hilarious. I had to fly out early to another city, to prepare myself psychically to be told once more I was long ago an ass by people wh
o were clearly themselves also asses and I needed rest to prepare for all this ass-to-ass action. I did not know this man. Daniel’s friend, I guess?

  I may have said some things to this fool that may not have been kind. I may have declared his mother to in fact be a she-goat, his father a pederast. All the stowed away anxiety of this damned tour erupted in a volcanic moment at this howling man in the doorway as I hurled insults in preparation for a ground assault. I was shocked at what came out of my face.

  I may have said, Shut the fucking door or I will break your ass-face.

  He shut the door. I wedged it closed and went back to sleep, assuming my friend Daniel must now be dead somewhere, at the hands of this meth head. Sometime later, the meth head kicked open the door again and I rose and prepared to swing at him and as I did, he stuck a Nerf gun through the crack and shot me in the face.

  The madman cackled. I saw him no more.

  I lay there in the dark in this unfamiliar apartment, chest pounding, sweating, in a bedroom where Daniel’s young son usually sleeps, the room filled with Legos and Millennium Falcons and such, an oscillating fan hurling air at me in the dark. What was happening? I didn’t behave like this.

  The notion came to me, as notions often do, in the twilight of failed sleep: I had not written a word in three months. I’d been checking the Internet instead, trying to get and measure my fame. I needed to write. I was art-hangry. I’d been unable to process the meaning of everything that was happening. Events and faces and scenes shot through me like rays of raw energy. Life was passing through me, falling away all around me, and I had no way of catching it, to understand it, to stop time. I prayed a prayer to be more human, to enjoy this grueling stretch and not transform into some kind of were-author, and somewhere before finishing the prayer, I fell asleep.

  The next morning, as I left, I found a note in Daniel’s handwriting. “He just really wanted to meet you,” he wrote. “He’s a huge fan.”

  Chapter 18

  I’m just like anyone. I need love, and water.

  —PRINCE, in his first TV interview

  IN SUMMERS, WHEN I WAS A BOY, MY FATHER WOULD WRITE these sweet little notes for me in the morning, left on the kitchen counter.

  Boy,

  Spread gravel

  Finish sod

  Kaiser blade dog yard

  Pop

  It was like a little love haiku. He wrote me one every morning.

  Boy,

  Wash the eaves

  1 part bleach, 3 parts water

  Do it right this time

  Pop

  Like parents of every generation since the dawn of humankind, I am sure he felt a certain urgent disappointment in what he perceived was the luxurious sloth of my daily existence.

  Boy,

  It’s some mold on the bricks around foundation

  Use rest of bleach

  Happy birthday

  Pop

  By the time I could hold a shovel without hurting myself, around age ten or eleven, my older brother, Bird, three years my senior, had already achieved escape velocity from our little penal farm and spent many summer days elsewhere, often up at the Pearl River, where I imagined him surrounded by a half-dozen swamp angels smelling of coconut and Coors Light. Work will do that to you, let the imagination wander to impossible scenes. There seemed to be a toxic knot of something inside me, I couldn’t say what—anger, maybe, frustration, a nascent worry that perhaps life had no meaning. Whatever it was, this feeling, this metaphysical nausea, was hard for me to comprehend as a boy. Sometimes I think it was guilt, for what, I don’t know, or maybe it was worry that God would wipe us all from history, should he see fit to do it. I wanted to do my duty, in case I should be called to account for it.

  Working like a draught animal helped me process my feelings of dread and create meaning where my mind told me none was. Work helped me make sense, I guess, and I had to make sense fast, for all the work had to be done before Pop got home. I’d eat a piece of toast and study the list, dreading it, but knowing that I would do it all, and be deeply satisfied I had.

  “You better start before it gets too hot,” Mom would say. “Happy Birthday!”

  I sweated and slung the blade and laved the brick. My mind would spin off into new galaxies as my body was dying, overheating, and I just kept going, and there was anger in it, and I’d push past the anger and get to this weird place where all the physical exertion became a kind of purifying tonic, and I pushed and pushed, knowing Pop would be home soon, and the hotter and harder I pushed, the more the toxic thing inside my brain got melted, and in lurches and leaps a peace would overcome me.

  Mom would bring out a fat glass of tea and ask me to lie down.

  Part of me wanted to work so hard, I’d die. I thought it might be nice for Pop to see me dead, after all that work. It would serve him right, for parenting. I’d lie down on the driveway, feeling dead in the frog-hot Mississippi summer, covered in grass and abrasions and cow dung and chemical burns, and let the stored-up heat of the gravel work its magic on me while the sound wall of cicadas put me to sleep, a hand towel over my eyes.

  I’d hear him pull up and stir myself to a sitting position.

  “Looks good, boy,” Pop would say.

  I came to love this hard-won feeling, this sacral burning, of pushing the body and mind as far as they would go until a holy thing happened. It’s possible that this is why I became an artist, the pursuit of this psychosomatic exhaustion, of a beautiful thing finished for my father, but only after great suffering.

  * * *

  By midsummer on tour, I had begun experiencing unfamiliar tremors, physical and spiritual. The work was not finished. The holy thing had not happened yet, and I was starting to see what I was after, with all this running: There was guilt in it, absolutely, a wicked survivor’s guilt, that the book I’d written about my father had won, for me, adoration and treasure. This ridiculous and improbably long tour was a sacrament, a means to resurrect him, and a kind of death wish. I would work myself ragged, to just this side of dehydration and heat exhaustion, the way I had as a boy. Maybe it wasn’t God I feared, but the thing I thought my father was—a spirit, hovering over me, expecting me to work until I could not.

  I’d driven what felt like ten thousand miles, hugged ten thousand torsos. I felt like a man gripping the wing of a plane five miles above the earth, happy, exhilarated, near death at every moment. Death, or some kind of apotheosis, felt, it’s hard to say—imminent. Lauren would call this a panic attack, but I wasn’t panicking: I simply felt as though demons were hovering over me, preparing to suck my soul out of my skull with a straw.

  “That’s a panic attack,” Lauren said, when I described it to her via text.

  My dream was trying to kill me.

  I needed a fat glass of water. I needed to lie down.

  But I could not.

  “Are you okay?” an interviewer asked, at a radio station in Jackson, Mississippi.

  My head was on the table.

  “I’m fine,” I said into the Formica. “I’m just dying.”

  The man sounded worried.

  “Are you sure you want to do this now? We can reschedule,” he said.

  But no. I had a talk to do that afternoon, at Lemuria, where everybody I’d ever known in the great state of Mississippi would be waiting to congratulate me and perhaps explain what an asshole I’d been to them one day many years ago, at which point I would be compelled by the never-ending need for sales to thank them for their honesty and friendship and then pretend nothing hurt and hustle to the next town to do it all again, when everything hurt.

  I was a professional. I did my interview.

  But I needed cool. I needed water.

  Hydrate, the blog had said.

  In my experience, the coldest place in Jackson in summer is the Waffle House on Northside Drive, where I oft spent afternoons reading, and I soon found myself dying in a booth while the staff occasionally prodded me to see if I was still breathing
.

  “I’m alive,” I said.

  “We just checking,” they said.

  Lemuria was up the hill, a few hundred yards away. I needed a hospital bed, a cave.

  Please don’t let me die, I prayed, head still on the table.

  I was praying to Terry Gross. She was my god now, this beautiful brilliant little demiurge with a haircut like a crimini mushroom and a laugh like fondue chocolate.

  My prayer was that I might create enough psychic tremors in the cultural seismographs of WHYY in Philadelphia, where Gross and her microphone hovered slightly off the floor, to get an interview. One call from Terry and I could stop all this foolishness. Thirty minutes with this incisive inquisitive probing fairy beast lady would send the book into the ionosphere. If I could make her laugh, the book would be a bestseller. If she could make me cry on air, the book might get elected president. I’d seen it happen. Just having the title of one’s book spoken aloud by her voice on the radio can send a book up the Amazon list by a molecular recombination licensed by NASA for sending supplies to the International Space Station. Do a good interview with Gross and when you leave the studio they hand you a roll of stickers that say Now a Major Motion Picture.

  MY BOOK TOUR ITINERARY, ROUGHLY

  6:30 a.m. Wake. Think about writing. Don’t. Check email for messages from Phillip regarding overtures from Fresh Air. None.

  7:30 a.m. Pack. You are missing all your underwear.

  8:30 a.m. Drive. As you are driving through the South, your healthiest breakfast option is to stop at a convenience store and eat all the napkins.

  Everywhere, you seek fruit. Apples, you say.

  Apples? the man says at the counter. No apples.

  Bananas, oranges, anything?

  We have Hostess Fruit Pies, the man says.