42.

JIMMY FALLON’S DRESSING ROOM was trippy. It was some kind of forest theme, maybe an inside joke, or a bad high. The walls looked like bark, a little fox statue stood in one corner, a mushroom-shaped stool in another. It seemed to be a room designed by people who liked to get high. Or for them. It was stocked with snacks and gifts for the guests, but those were weird too. All organic everything. Organic chocolates, organic nuts, organic this, organic that. The more organic, the more acutely Anthony’s gag reflex activated. For a guy like him who didn’t like soda in Europe because it didn’t have enough artificial sweetener, the food in Fallon’s dressing room was inedible.

Who liked this kind of stuff? The whole room felt like it was designed for some kind of tree-dwelling troll hippy with an aversion to corn syrup. And the gift was a pair of UGG slippers. If Anthony went back to where he was from wearing UGGs . . . Fallon’s sense of humor clearly didn’t stop on the stage.

From the dressing room, Anthony watched Fallon tape interviews with earlier guests; he heard someone approach outside the dressing room and turned from the TV to see the no-bullshit Irish-American Hollywood fixer Ray Donovan.

Or not Ray Donovan, but the man who plays the character on the Showtime series, the actor Liev Schreiber. He introduced himself. A funny thing about famous people: they have to at least pretend you don’t already know who they are.

“That’s crazy, what you guys did,” Schreiber said.

“Man, it’s crazy that I’m meeting you! I was literally just watching Ray Donovan before I left for the trip.”

“Oh, thanks, that’s nice to hear.” Schreiber’s voice was quiet, gravelly. “But what you guys did just took balls.”

It suddenly occurred to Anthony that even though he was having a conversation with a movie star, a man who’d literally played a Marvel hero on screen, it actually didn’t feel unnatural. Which itself felt weird. It was somehow natural and weird at the same time; weird that it was natural. It was like he was on autopilot. He just knew what to do. He’d always planned on being famous, practicing his autograph with a star for the A, but always figured he’d have to get over nerves when he went out to speak in public, which he knew was a thing you had to do every once in a while if you got famous.

But he didn’t feel nervous. During all the interviews, all the media appearances, with all the famous people he’d met so far, he never felt anxious. Performing came easy to him. Which was almost unnerving in itself. Had he been altered somehow by the train? Had he become a slightly different person?

He’d gone from interviews to media appearances, a president pinning a medal to him, everything happening in such rapid succession that there was no time and there hadn’t felt like an obvious reason to think and plan. He hadn’t had time to consider what was happening to him. One day he simply became famous. That was it. So from the moment he stepped off the train, everything felt halfway like being in a movie.

Maybe because it almost was a movie. In a few minutes he would go out onto a television set and pretend to have a natural conversation with Jimmy Fallon as if the two were best buddies, but they were going to do it with makeup, and stage lights, and hundreds of people watching, crew members and big cameras on wheels moving back and forth. It was like stepping into a movie. And since it all felt a little artificial, he didn’t feel nervous. It wasn’t real.

That changed only very briefly, and the only person who proved capable of making him nervous—to make him take a moment and think about fame—was a kid in a black T-shirt and a headset walking up to him backstage and saying, “Okay, Mr. Sadler, in ten, you’re going on.”

“Where do I walk?” The curtain was huge.

“Just pull it back and walk through.”

“Wait, walk through where?”

“You’re on in ten, nine, eight” then the kid went silent and walked away.

“Wait, hello? Where are you going?” But the kid was gone, off to prep some other guest while Anthony wondered how many seconds had gone by and how fast to count, started concentrating on counting in his head, then started to worry about tripping over the curtain on his way onstage. Or what if he couldn’t even find the opening, and it was one of those slapstick situations where he gets turned around and confused and the audience roars with laughter at the panicked guest mummifying himself in the curtain?

Should I go? This is a pretty damn long ten seconds. It was a forced silence where Anthony couldn’t say or do anything other than think, I’m about to go on TV! A tingle in his fingertips, his palms clammy, and then his last quiet moment was over and he had the curtain aside with an explosion of bright, blinding lights.

Anthony was back in his element. Prime time.

“THANK YOU FOR BEING ON The Tonight Show. I appreciate this, uh . . .” Fallon didn’t seem to know exactly where to begin, so Anthony bailed him out.

“It’s pretty crazy, thanks for having me!” The audience laughed. This wasn’t hard.

“Yeah, good, yeah, now can you just, uh, I know . . . please just walk me through what happened . . .”

And off they went.

He hadn’t known that one of his favorite artists, the up and coming rapper Vince Staples, was the musical guest, but here he was, and Staples picked a song to perform that featured one of Anthony’s celebrity crushes, the singer Jhené Aiko. She came out in matching off-white sleeveless top and calf-length skirt, exposed midriff, exposed arms so the spiderweb tattoo on her shoulder was half visible, wearing sneakers but somehow making that sexy too. Anthony felt himself get a little uncomfortable in his seat. All his dreams were coming true.

Aiko sang with her sensual, youthful voice, singing in tandem with Staples, but really, singing straight into Anthony’s heart.

And if I told you that I love you would you know it was a lie Pretty woman, how you function with the devil in your thighs?

During the breaks he shot the breeze with Fallon and David Wells, a retired Yankees pitcher. He went over to the house band, the Roots, and asked for a picture. The bandleader, Questlove, obliged, and then said, “I always have guests autograph a pair of drumsticks. Will you autograph these for me?”

“For you? You want my autograph?”