True, I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Romeo and Juliet
WE PACKED UP ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 2007.
I was thirty-one years old and now earned enough money to afford a mortgage on a Savannah home the size of a large cookie tin. Here, Lauren could spend all day with Stargoat, thus making her dream come true, to stay at home with her own child whilst trapped inside a cookie tin. This home also had room for a kitchen table, where I could now write in the morning before work, such that while Lauren put food into the baby’s mouth at one end of the table, I could be at the other end, not helping.
Having a dream is amazing!
I’d gotten very good at writing the most basic, expository stuff—reports, memos, summaries, proposals. I’d written enough cover letters to fill a library and had spent the last two years teaching The Elements of Style to young men, which taught me more about grammar than I’d learned in three decades as a student. I could control language to make the various kinds of sense I needed to make, but there was a thing I could not do, and that was write a story that shimmered with even the most basic magic.
I’d written the beginnings of a thousand stories, and no ends, hardly even any middles.
I continued to seek writing advice where I could get it—online, in books, during author talks at bookstores—but it all felt so mawkish and vague, drivel about listening to your heart and being present, which made writing sound like therapy, which felt sad to me, because a Great American Writer is a very strong man who boxes tigers for a living, I believed.
The only bit of advice I could understand was this: If you want to be a writer, put your ass in a chair.
Apply seat of pants to seat of chair, one book said.
Step one, a blog said. Put ass in chair.
Everybody was very clear on this particular point.
It is a deceptively simple rule, which I liked.
Now, the amazing thing about asses is that you can literally put them anywhere you want, although asses often do not wish to be put in difficult places. If an ass could talk, and many of them can, especially the ones named Chad or Courtney, and you asked the ass what it wanted to do for a living, its top three career goals would be:
I’d been putting my ass in a chair for a long time, and nothing much had happened. Or had it? Maybe I was further along than I knew.
“Can you finish feeding her?” Lauren would say, of Baby Stargoat, as I kept my ass snugly in place at my end of the kitchen table.
“I’m writing,” I’d say.
“You’re just sitting there.”
“It only looks like I’m sitting here.”
“Are you not sitting there?”
“In many ways, that is exactly what I am not doing.”
This is what a dream looks like. It looks like you, trying to do an impossible thing in your head, while you sit there, doing what appears to be nothing, wondering how to explain that the apparent doing-of-nothing is in fact, you hope, something.
Seven o’clock in the morning, the baby crying, my wife crying, too, in the bathroom, because her desire to be a mother was just as difficult, and far more urgent and necessary, especially when your husband’s dream is to sit in the house and stare out the window. I sat there, looking at my daughter looking at me, wondering how I would ever learn to write a book and feeling shitty for thinking of such frivolous things as books in the face of a human who clearly needed me, two humans, one stomping through the house, trying to busy herself to see how long it will take me to sit there while the other human, the diapered one, cried.
I was as confused by the real people in my house as the imaginary ones on my laptop. I stared alternately at both: The computer, the baby. The story, the baby. The dialogue, the baby.
“Why is she crying?” I said.
“She’s a baby,” Lauren said from our bedroom. “Babies cry.”
“Is she hungry?”
“Maybe.”
“Tired?”
“Everybody’s tired.”
Stargoat cried and cried. If I let it go longer, Lauren would do something. But she wanted me to do something, even though we agreed that this would be my writing time, and writing doesn’t happen if you’re not writing, which is exactly the definition of parenting in the dictionary.
parenting
΄pε:r(ә)nt:ing
verb
the act of not doing other things
I loved my wife, and also I did not love my wife—for not understanding how impossible the task of writing a book seemed, made all the more impossible by its apparent triviality. The hardest part of dreaming is that if you don’t do it, nothing terrible happens. Life goes on. This is why crying babies and student loans always take precedence; if you don’t see to those matters, things explode, break down, civilization stops being civilized. But if you never cut that album you always wanted to record, what happens? What worlds come crashing down, but the one in your heart? None.
I stood up, took Stargoat, changed her diaper. Lauren said nothing to me for the rest of the morning. I was a ghost. I sat down and tried to write for another forty-five minutes, but could not. How could I? I felt like a selfish assface, and then wondered if selfish assface-ness was a prerequisite to the task of American dreaming, and if my wife would leave me, one day, for somebody without the burden of such a foolish thing as a dream, an easier man who mowed the lawn and held the baby and did as he was told, because he was not locked inside the chamber of his own skull, conjuring realities that seemed more pitiful and useless with every passing day. It didn’t seem right or good that my dream appeared to be making me more unlovable by the hour.
Put the ass in the chair, that’s what they said, and now I knew: The ass is not a part of me. It is me. I am it.
That’s what I did. That’s what I was.
After two hours of staring at my wife and baby, I pried my ass from the chair and carried it dutifully to my new day job.
* * *
What I did at SCAD was write.
I wrote talking points, tour scripts, video scripts, blogs, bios, letters, lectures, presentations, and speeches, speeches, speeches, so many speeches for vice presidents and deans and commencement speakers, including my new boss, Paula, who had been writing her own words for decades, but now, as president of a large university, was too occupied with running the institution to spend all day, for example, trying to think of an interesting metaphor to help elucidate strategies for increasing instructional engagement and seat utilization rates.
Paula knew what she wanted to say, but she simply didn’t have the time to stare out the window for three hours thinking about how to say it. This was my job.
She’d call me into her office and say, “I need some remarks for so-and-so event.”
“You got it,” I’d say.
And so I’d Google the event, and talk to anyone who knew anything about the event, and go to the place where the event would be happening, touching walls and furniture until I felt that I knew more about the event than anyone would ever want to know, and then I’d go for a walk around the park outside our building and float up into the virtual reality holosphere in my brain and try to imagine the guests of such an event. Who were they? What did they want and need to hear, in that moment, that place?
I conjured a speaker in my mind, speaking, and listeners, listening, and weather and air temperature, ambient sounds, smells, echoes of whatever had just happened, or anticipation of what was about to happen, whatever it was, a fundraising auction, a fashion show, a film screening, writing it all down, these disparate motes of mostly invisible atmospheric phenomena that one might use to summon a feeling, evoke an image, to elevate the moment above the drone of the average human day into kairotic time, charged with meaning.
I threw myself into this kind of imaginative trance, and wrote, and wrote, and wrote, made outlines, lists, birthing images, passages, punch lines, arranging, rearranging, reading aloud, hating, loving, and a few days later, I would proof and print and present the document to Paula, and the next morning would find it on my desk, with four simple words in her handwriting.
“Let’s try this again.”
But, but, but! Didn’t she know about my imaginative trance? About the disparate motes of atmospheric phenomena? How dare my employer not love with rapturous passion the perfectly acceptable and exceedingly mediocre remarks I had written for her!
Try it again?
I’d show her!
And so I’d try again, and show her.
“Too many words,” she might say next. “Looking forward to see what you do with it!”
The problem was, she was so kind about it. She offered feedback with grace and enthusiasm, like a beloved elementary school teacher politely asking you to stop gnawing desk legs. In heels, she seemed at most two feet tall, the world’s tiniest college president, in possession of some secret faith that somehow, I could do better.
I found her faith in me disturbing. My first drafts were amazing, everybody knew that.
But that’s not true, not at all.
And so I’d try again, and show her.
“More elevated words,” she might say.
“This is all just words.”
“This is not what we discussed.”
“Be more careful.”
“Do over.”
“No.”
Again.
And again.
And again.
I’d crumple into my desk chair, defeated, so very disappointed that I’d been lied to my entire life about the quality of my work. Most of my previous teachers had said things like:
“Nice work!”
Or, “Wonderful!”
Or, “You’re so talented!”
Because they’re very tired, these teachers, and if you show up to class and do the homework and contribute to class discussion in a totally non-insane way, many will give you whatever grade you want, because they’ve got students who can’t even spell their names. I could see it now clear as new bathwater: All those years, I did the work, I showed up, and I was a good enough writer, and that is all I was.
Good enough is almost always never actually good enough, if you’re writing for an editor or an executive or any audience with rapturously high expectations of quality, and Paula’s desire for excellence was dizzying, ridiculous, unreachable, it seemed.
Did she really expect me to start over with this project?
“You can do better!” she said, and when it came out of her mouth, she’d say it so pleasantly and genuinely, as if she actually believed the words. It was very hurtful.
And yet this belief in me had a slightly narcotic effect, this dare of hers to make something better when the thing was already as good as I believed I could make it.
Every new thing I wrote, no matter how trifling it seemed in the grand scheme of the cosmos, captions or catalogs, footnotes or annual reports, toasts, roasts, eulogies, obituaries, from the brief to the exhaustive, the trifling to the solemn, whatever it was, this woman was not going to lie to me about the quality of my work.
Pray for somebody like this to come into your life, a mentor to dropkick your bad habits out of your life forever, because if you do, just when you think do over are the only words you’ll ever hear again, you’ll hear them again. And again. And again.
* * *
When I received this perfectly reasonable rejection of my work, what I did was go back to my desk and stare out the window at the sky and beyond into the vacuum of space while desiring to set all the world’s thesauruses on fire. Sometimes I’d stare for an hour, but after a year or two in the job, I got this down to several minutes.
I grieved over my work, as every artist must. But you learn to do it quickly. I’d sit and simmer a little, pondering why she did not like my brilliant clown metaphor, which I spent three hours writing, thinking very intensely about clowns for what seemed like too long, and then I’d move on.
When this happens to you, you cannot cry, or run into the office restroom and splash your face with water and look at your dripping and panicked visage in the mirror, no. You are a grown-ass adult with grown-ass responsibilities, so you affix a car battery to your brain to keep it working long through the night to do it over and over and over and over.
And over and over and over.
And over and over and over.
This ability to keep working, when all your best ideas have evacuated your mind, when the clock runs down, when wiser and more talented people tell you, “Nope, try again,” once and then twice and then three times, and you are tired and it is time to go home and eat dinner and watch American Idol, this is what separates the amateur and the professional. You are playing a game of chicken with your own doubts about your talent, and you cannot flinch, for if you keep doing it over, pressing down against the carbon-based matter of your brain, for days, weeks, months, years, one day you will open your skull and pull out a clown metaphor that will make whole rooms weep in recognition of their common humanity.
“This is beautiful,” Paula said, more and more, as the days grew into weeks and months and seasons. “Thank you.”
Hearing these words—this is beautiful, thank you, great work—as simple and humane as the encouragement of a third-grade teacher who believes in every child, was like breathing pure oxygen after so many years, because I knew something now: I could write a thing, and then make it better, and better again, and then even better than that, because someone believed in me, and not only believed, but also compelled me via the extremely positive reinforcement of a monthly salary, to do the thing she believed I could do. Because when you tell people the truth about how good their work is, they will feel painful feelings of inadequacy, until such time as they either quit or their work improves, more and more, at which point the praise becomes more desired than gold, yea, than much fine gold. For it is not mere praise. It is evidence that you are moving in the right direction down the Damascus road.
My heart had carried me to Savannah, I think, because I knew this is what I needed. I needed somebody who would stop lying to me about the quality of my work. Truth is the only way anything ever gets any better.
* * *
And I kept at it, and then went home at the end of each day, carrying my ass dutifully back to the tiny house, where, suddenly additional asses had accumulated, upon the birth of our second daughter, Beetle, when Stargoat was two, which meant chairs for asses were becoming scarce. Every day before work, I’d plant my own ass at the far end of the kitchen table, while Stargoat and Beetle sat there on the floor watching me.
Why aren’t you playing with us? their eyes wanted to know.
Why are you a bad father? their eyes asked.
Was I?
By one measure, I was a great father: I didn’t drink, didn’t philander, didn’t curse or raise my voice all that much, had no ridiculous hobbies, nothing that sent me off into woods and lakes and golf courses every weekend, spent hardly any money on myself, and signed everything over to Lauren every month to pay every bill. Money was tight, sure, but never squandered on guns and fishing rods. We were disciplined. Never a late payment, unlike Pop. Always on time. Everybody had food and clothing. The lights stayed on.
By another measure, I was a perfectly derelict father, never quite there in spirit, always hovering in my own head, trying to work out the problems of a story that would not let me write it, believing that this would be the one, the breakthrough, the door through which I might discover the secret, the key, the hidden code that would let me break the spell and finish the thing and get the agent and sign the deal that would invite my wife and daughters into a magical world where all the houses had more than one toilet.
Nights, at the dinner table, Saturdays in the yard, Sundays at the park, on a Wednesday morning before work, I would be there, totally engaged, and then a cloud would pass over the sun, and the most present part of me would vanish.
“What are you looking at, Daddy?” Stargoat would ask.
“Nothing,” I’d say, picking a different nothing to not look at. “Writing.”
I tried not to make eye contact, but that’s hard to do when Beetle climbs under the sink and starts eating boric acid. You can’t say, Oh, it’s fine, boric acid is only dangerous if inhaled in large quantities, and I’m really struggling to create dimensional characters here. You have to stop writing. Your dream has to disappear, just for a second, as you wash boric acid off the wailing baby.
Which brings us to the real secret to making any dream come true.
* * *
What you have to do is, you have to leave your family. This method was perfected by William Shakespeare, who abandoned his wife and children in Stratford-upon-Avon, moved to London, and subsequently wrote the greatest literature in all of human history. Was it worth destroying his family, to give us these plays, which reshaped the very nature of the human mind? Yes? No?
That’s the difference between Shakespeare and us. He left his family, and us, we refuse to. Also, he had talent. You might have talent. At this point in my journey, I had none, it seemed. I could write a decent wedding toast, but not a story.
After two years in Savannah, I began leaving my family every morning at five fifteen. Sometimes Lauren drove me. I’d jostle her awake and dress and put the groggy little flopping girls in the truck and she’d drive me to a coffee shop a few blocks from the office, where I sat for two hours before work trying to write something that did not make me want to chew off my own tongue. I’d kiss her and the children and say goodbye, privately deliberating on how selfish this was, to make these fine people tote me into the darkness to tend a tree that might never produce fruit. What ancient magic powered the dream through these dark mornings? I cannot say what compelled me to wake and rise, when I did not wish to wake and rise, when all evidence pointed to fruitlessness and waste, but I felt a surging inside me, generated by a tiny throbbing quark of hope. Whatever greatness I was to manifest, it would come from this quark. I could feel some kind of hidden greatness there. I could.
On the darkest mornings, I worried: Maybe it wasn’t a good quark. Maybe it was a quiet, evil quark, the poisonous seed of ego. But no, this couldn’t be true. I believed that the quark was not bad, it was good, and it lived inside me. I cannot explain its origin, other than to say that this quark was faith. I had begun to believe that God put it there.
Perhaps all those sermons on the parable of the talents had plunged their pleading optimism into this bright trembling singularity. The quark hummed, ready to burst its light through me, and my dream to write, I felt, was how this light would find its way into the world. I won’t lie, the sensation of this hope within me was at times onerous, for it would not relent, and it was also deeply pleasurable, to know a thing was growing inside me and might soon burst forth.
My body, in those days, was transmuted into a quivering vessel of insistence. As soon as my feet touched the floor in the morning, I could not be at the writing table quickly enough. I set out my clothes the night before, usually on a dining room chair, so I would not wake Lauren and the girls with any predawn fumbling. Let them sleep, while I made banked fires blaze. Shirt and trousers and shoes and socks, empty, flat, as if I had been raptured out of them, and each morning, a rapture reversal, the clothes filling with my body and blood, the quark making me hot and excitable, eager, a dog before a morning hunt.
An elastic bungee cord pulled me toward the coffee shop, and I jumped in the truck, ran stop signs and red lights, in all weather, blueblack cold and hot soupy rain, hoping to be at the door when they unlocked it, already in the underwater of my imagination, coffee sweet and simple, cord into wall, headphones on head, screen illuminated, throbbing, cursor blinking. Welcome back, friend.
On days that did not begin with writing, I became irritable, hangry, scowled at sunsets. There comes a time for all dreamers like this, when your body so desperately longs to be doing the thing it was born to do that not to do it becomes physically painful. This moment is key to dreaming, when you get to the place where it’s harder not to work on your dream than to work on it. This is good. Your heart and soul and mind on the same page now. This dog will hunt.
The urgency that drove me to wake so early, when I had so many other tasks and responsibilities and people to please and nurture, was informed by the book of Ecclesiastes and the narrator’s continual peroration that the light of my excitable quark would not last forever. Everybody dies. The light goes out. You’ve got one life to let it loose.
I had sailed through seas of doubt over the years and did not feel like one of those dutiful focused energetic disciples of Jesus. I was no wingman of the Lord. I felt more like Jacob, the tomfooling Old Testament clown who demands a blessing from the angel like a jackass at the customer service desk, refusing to leave until he gets cash. God had admired that ancient fool’s tenacity, I believed, and I hoped he would admire mine. The angel of the Lord held my dream in his hand, if he would only give it over. We sparred every morning.
* * *
I realize all this talk of angels and quarks may sound insane to you. It sounds sort of insane to me, too. I am only trying to understand how it all went down, how I could leave my wife and children every morning when they needed me most. Leaving was going to make me not only a better writer, but a better father, a better husband, I hoped: Leaving, so that when I came home, I could be home.
I had 150 minutes every morning to write, from five thirty to eight o’clock, and a day has 1,440 minutes. Sleeping took about 480 of those minutes, and SCAD purchased roughly 600 of those minutes, which left 210 minutes for my family and general hygiene. Which meant three and a half hours at night in which I was giver of candy and piggyback rides, tickler of tiny humans, doer of dishes. It sounds like a lot, until you realize your daughters go to bed at sunset, practically, because their mother knows what she’s doing, because sleeping children are happy children.
Time. Always time. Time runs off and leaves you.
I decided to keep my dreaming and angel-wrestling between the lines, between those 150 minutes every morning, so that I might not look up and find my family changed, or gone. What they don’t tell you about the placing of the ass in the chair is that you have to train the ass to sit, before you can make something with it. Most people’s asses cannot just sit, without something to watch or eat. But you’ve got to train your body to be where it needs to be and do what it needs to do. So I stared. I stared at the computer. I stared at the people at the café. I stared and did not write much worth keeping. My ass said, This has become tiresome.
In those days, I had to distract my ass, to fool it into sitting for longer and longer periods of time. I distracted it with various activities. I read the Internet, all of it, hoping to learn something of my fellow man that might prove useful in composing literature, and what I learned is that social media is like those 3-D dolphin posters at the mall in the 1990s: You stare, hoping to see something amazing but even when you see the hidden thing, it’s not that amazing.
I spent undue hours writing everything but literature—emails to friends, cover letters for jobs I did not want, long lists of potential rapper names, should that ever be an option.
White Lyin’
Just-Ice
DJ Tanner
Looking back, these many hours of not writing may have been writing after all. I was trying to make myself laugh, to sidle around the watchful logic-dragons of my brain and get at the comic gems hiding under their gaze, to recreate the comic conditions of my childhood, when I made whole classrooms laugh, reaching into the velvet sack of my imagination and hoping to pull out a rabbit, or God knows what. Meaning. That is what I sought.
These were the long dark days of my story, and they were not easy days, and they were not days at all. They were years.
* * *
Savannah, like most American cities, was sick with its own kind of dream, of money and what can be got with it. I often found myself on the church lawn surrounded by mostly decent men amidst much talk of boats and fishing.
“Do you like to fish, Harrison?” they asked.
“I like fish tacos,” I said.
SAFE SAVANNAH CONVERSATION TOPICS
The small talk with other men was brutal and the more fiercely I lunged toward the dream, it seemed, the more I grew inept at male friendship. How often did I stand in stoic manly herds among lengthy talk of redfish season or deer season or taking the kids out to Wassaw Island, which requires a boat to reach, where you can basically have your own private beach for the children to run wildly across, because, you know, the public beaches are just overrun with non-boat people and their non-boat lifestyles.
“What do you do for fun?” I was asked, often.
What I wanted to say was, I used to hunt and fish, as a boy, but now what I do is sit at a table and watch my life run between my fingers like ground bone.
But instead what I said was, “Baths. Mostly I take baths.”
Did these men, whose wives were friends with my wife, find meaning in their work? That is the thing I’d been after, all these years. Meaning, the sort my father did not seem to find in his work. Meaning, to color every day, to power the heart. Perhaps their Boston Whalers gave them meaning. I tried not to judge these fine men and their preoccupation with the accouterments of wealth. For many of them, they were focused on a fantasy to pilot across the tide with a Ray-Ban tan on their faces. And, just given the many historical epochs when the best any of us could hope for was to die by having our throats slit by Huns, I’d think, Sure, that’s fine. You get your boat, brother. Enjoy the wind in what hair you have left.
When I was in my twenties, I thought, Beach houses and boats are a waste of resources, attempts to shovel material goods into the God-shaped hole inside us all. But now that I was thirtysomething and getting thirtysomethinger every day, I was starting to think it might be fun to put some boats into my God hole, too.
All these men, fathers and husbands, they worked hard, or seemed to. They appeared to be handling their shit, according to all the available evidence, their marriages mostly not falling apart, their children mostly heeding their commands.
I needed to handle my shit, too. I’d opted for a life in art, by God. I’d made this bed. If you’re going to have the courage to live the dream, then live that shit. Art is work. Put your pants on and get your fool ass to work, son.
* * *
I kept at it, handling my father and husband shit like a man, at nights, on weekends, handling my work shit during the day, and every morning, handling my dream shit. After a year or so, my ass learned to sit. To be quiet and listen to the hum of the universe. I learned to be quiet and go into the deep places of me.
It felt like free diving, the way divers train to go deeper, a little at a time, one breath at a time, deeper, deeper, coming back up, then down again the next day, up, down, through the blue and down into the black, past the place where the sun can reach. So deep, so far down you’re practically an amphibious creature, moving through the dark, discovering things, plots, characters, ways of writing you had suspected were down there but had never seen with your own eyes, and then, Blam! it’s time to resurface and clock in and be a father, an employee, a human again.
I sent stories and essays to Orion, Ploughshares, Barrelhouse, Tin House, Brick House, Outhouse, The Pinch, The Smart Set, The Dope Boys, River Teeth, Salmon Lips, Bass Face, Image, The Believer, The Pagan, The Warlock, Destiny’s Child. I sent more stories to one magazine than all others, called the Oxford American. I’d mailed them three or four reams of paper over the course of five years, each story rejected via courteous postcards mailed by some twelve-year-old intern from Sewanee. The rejection postcard had a lyrical quality to it, with line breaks and everything.
Many thanks for your submission.
We regret that it does not quite fit our publication’s needs,
but we appreciate the chance to consider your work and
wish you the best of luck in finding a suitable home for it.
I wrote my own version of this postcard, which I kept taped to the front of my laptop:
Many thanks for sending us your newborn baby.
We regret that it is the ugliest goddamned baby we’ve ever seen,
but we appreciate the chance to look briefly at it before it had a chance to steal our souls and
we hope you don’t mind, but we set it on fire and put it on a raft made of bamboo and
released it in the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane where it belongs.
After receiving several dozens of these rejections, I decided: No more submitting to magazines, for now. Instead, I took my chair and my ass and the rest of my body and decided to go deeper down into the water than I had ever been, to find the pearl I sought.