Walden on Wheels
got off to a slow start. Despite a few well-placed op-eds in the New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Ed., the interview requests—that are crucial for
a fledgling book, I’m told—never came. I had a few radio station interviews
lined up, but many were poorly established operations based in some of the most
remote parts of the country. One radio host didn’t even have an assistant to
answer company phone calls, so he took them while he was on the air. I called up the
day before the interview to make sure the sound quality of my cell phone was up
to snuff, and while repeating the words, “test, test, test,” I had the odd
feeling that I was live on the air.
“Am I on the air?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said. I would have felt embarrassed, but
it occurred to me that there probably weren’t any listeners.
Honestly, though, I didn’t care too much about how many interviews
I was getting or how many copies of the book were being sold. I’d already been
paid for writing the book, so selling 100 or 100,000 copies would make little
difference. I worked hard on the above-mentioned op-eds, and I did my best at
every interview I got, so I guess I just felt I did my part, and if the book
was going to sell, it really wasn’t up to me
anymore, but more amorphous, uncontrollable things like “fate” or laissez-faire
economics. Plus, I was just content to have published a book, which seemed like
such an implausible, far-fetched endeavor two years before.
I took a flight to Buffalo, NY to visit with family for the
first time in a year and a half, and from my boyhood bedroom I did a few more
phone and email interviews. Life, though, continued on as normal. I kept
working on book #2, I took a nightly jog to the Niagara River, and I made a
fruit and yogurt smoothie for myself each morning. For a couple of days, I became
the family laughingstock when I replaced the cheap $2 gallon of skim milk (a
family staple) with a gallon of organic. Neighbors were called up. I heard some
ecstatic shriek from my mom when she was on the phone with my aunt. “Organic? What
is your father going to say?” my mom said to me, all smiles and wild cackles. Upon
opening the fridge, my father stared at the white jug with a red “No antibiotics
and toxic pesticides used” label with a confused, slightly pained look on his
face, as if he was trying to figure out if he was the subject of a devious
prank. “You bought organic?!” he cried, leery of the new substance he was
holding, as if I’d suggested he amend his mug of tea and fill his cereal bowl with
turkey grease.
Meanwhile, there were rumors that my aunt needed some
dehumidifiers moved in her basement. The transportation of moderately heavy appliances
hardly seemed like a daunting task, but our family has a secret PTSD-based fear
of my aunt’s basement, so the place, in our memories, is not merely a damp
storage facility, but a bunker in which we harrowingly endured hours of
exploding shells. Years before, my mom, dad, brother and I helped my aunt haul
boxes of clothes, antiques, and holiday ornaments from her apartment to her new
home. The boxes went straight from the apartment attic, where they were never opened, to her basement, where they never would be opened. My brother and I,
curious about what exactly we’d been hauling for the past ten hours, broke open
a box to see what was inside. We looked at each other with mystified
expressions when we pulled out a faded teal dress from the 1970s with shoulder
pads. “Maine, are you ever even going to wear this again?” I asked. She
pretended not to hear the question as she placed a cardboard box on top of
another. After three days of box hauling, the basement was like a mini city.
When you walked through it, you felt like Godzilla waddling through narrow alleyways
brushing shoulders against towering skyscrapers. Consequently, my father, who doesn't come across to anyone as "morbid," has
more than a few times hinted that he aims to be the first in the family “to go,” so the burden
of moving the boxes again doesn’t have to fall on his sore shoulders.
My brother would end up helping my aunt move the dehumidifiers
and advising her on how to sell her couches on Craigslist. “You gotta know how
to play the game,” he said annoyed, as the older members of our family always
seem to lag woefully behind the rest of the world on the march to technological
sophistication.
“The game?” I said. “What, are you selling heroin in East
Baltimore?” (The phrase struck me as ridiculous because I’d just
finished watching HBO’s The Wire, in
which drug dealers refer to “the game” as the bloody drug war between gangs—not
gypping some sap out of an extra thirty bucks over an old couch.)
Over the course of a couple of weeks, several business media
outlets—many of which leaned conservative—became interested in my book. I received
a glowing review in the Wall Street
Journal, followed by features on websites like Bloomberg, Business Insider,
and Mike Huckabee’s website. Three different Fox News television shows asked me
to come on.
Things seriously took off when a Business Insider interview
was put up on Yahoo’s homepage, once again advertising my patchy chest hair and
mouth full of food to the world at large.
The article generated an astounding 9,500 comments, and, within
three days, I had 1,200 Facebook friend requests, my book shot up to the 109th
bestseller on Amazon, and I had close to 400 messages and emails from complete
strangers. Good Morning America was
frantically trying to get in touch with me, seeking an exclusive interview, sending
me emails all morning while I slept in past 10 a.m. When no one picked up at home, they desperately called my neighbors. These things, I’ve learned,
often fall through, so I was never on Good
Morning America, but I was invited onto CBS This Morning.
My publishing company flew me to NYC and put me up in a
hotel for a night. In the morning, I was picked up in a car and taken to CBS’s
studios. I met my publicist for the first time, who didn’t seem to mind my
complete silence on the car ride over, as I played out in my head a host of
worst-case scenarios, which ranged from “What if I have a brain freeze?” to “What
if I crap my pants?”
At the studio, a woman dabbed makeup on my face and combed
my hair while Gayle King very charmingly went over all the notes she took when
reading my book. Elizabeth Dole, another guest, was backstage with me, and I
was trying to avoid eye-contact with her because I’d forgotten if she was still
a senator of North Carolina, and I didn’t know if I should address her
as “Mrs. Dole” or “Senator Dole.” The subject of “Duke” somehow came up among
other people in the room, and despite having my back turned to all parties, one
of the producers mentioned that I was a graduate of the school as well. “Well,
hello, it’s nice to meet you,” said the esteemed guest. I didn’t want to say
something as uncouth as “It’s nice to meet YOU, too,” so I figured I’d kind of
just mumble “Senator” hoping that, if she expected to hear Senator, she would,
and if she didn’t, she’d just write it off as a speech impediment.
“Hello senna Dole,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you,
too.”
For the most part, the interview, only a few minutes long,
went well. I stumbled on one (somewhat sprawling) question, but muscled through
the brain freeze. Gayle King threw some softballs to me, which I was able to
manage with some adrenaline-fueled charm.
Fox News also asked me to be on, and with a great deal of
reluctance, I agreed. As David advised, this was my opportunity to “throw a
love bomb behind enemy lines,” and I justified it was okay since my harmless message about living simply and
paying off debt responsibly deserved as big an audience as it could get.
The next day, I got an email from Steve, a producer of The Tonight
Show with Jay Leno, who told me he had a Waldenesque cabin in Idaho and that he
identified with my story. We had a “pre-pre-interview” on the phone, during
which a producer feels the interviewee out and determines if he/she can supply
semi-articulate answers. I managed well, and he invited me to Burbank.
My dad is a big Leno fan, so he and my mom took time off of
work and flew in on a separate plane. I spent the evening at the hotel gym working out for four
hours. I spent three miles on the treadmill, five miles on the bike, and completed full
shoulder, bicep, and pectoral workouts. For the past week, I’d had a borderline
eating disorder, as I tried to shed every trace of flab, but also to destroy
all nervous energy with intense exercise and an austere diet.
On the morning of the show, my publicist and I met with two
producers, who told me about how the interview would go down. Steve, who, I
gathered, was having second thoughts about me, said, “Be charismatic, even if
that’s not how you usually are.”
I spent the next four hours in the gym, thoroughly scrubbed
myself down in the shower, and shaved. A driver took us all to the studio,
where I had a dressing room with my name on it, plus trays of veggies and
fruit.
Perhaps because of my dizzying workouts, I felt an odd sense
of calm. My mom, who said she might “throw up,” was visibly nervous and just
barely holding it together. We were talking with one of the show’s writers,
when my dad called out, “Hey Jay!” as if Jay, walking down the hallway, was
selling bags of peanuts at a ball game. Jay came in and spent about five
minutes talking with us, but mostly with my father, who’s Scottish, like Jay’s
mother. I was struck with my father’s carefree comportment, leaning back in the
sofa, shooting the shit with a nationally-recognized celebrity.
“How old are you?” asked Jay.
“I’m 63,” my dad said.
“Ah, same as me,” said Jay.
“Yeah, well I’m
not retiring early.”
My parents were ushered off to their seats in the audience
and I was taken to the makeup studio and given a new pair of pants because
mine were inexcusably wrinkled.
Steve Carrell was the first guest, and I was watching the
show from a television screen in my dressing room, still oddly serene until the
second half of his interview was coming to a close, which meant that I’d soon
be on.
They took me behind the stage, where I’d wait to be called
out. The band was rocking. The crowd was energized. A lady looked at me and
said, “Steve really got them going.”
In moments, I’d be called out onto an iconic stage on one of the
most iconic shows—a fixture of American culture. How did I feel? I was pumped. As the band played on, I found
myself dancing while shadow-boxing, oozing with energy that desperately needed
a vessel into which it could be salvaged.
I still wasn’t even that nervous. Part of it was because I
was well prepared and that I’d had my “first time” already. But part of it was
just that I didn’t care. I am going to be on TV—so what? Whatever
I put in books, on TV, on radio, on this blog doesn’t matter—it doesn’t change
what I am inside. How people perceive me doesn't change how I perceive myself. While I certainly didn’t want to crap my pants and be a viral embarrassment, truth be told, I just didn’t care what anybody thought. If Joe and Susan in New Mexico think I'm a dweeb, how does that in the slightest affect me? And while I’d very soon be in the national spotlight, I knew I
was a mere comet pebble in a vast TV galaxy—one voice drowned out by millions of others
on thousands of channels.
Between a last second pep talk, in which I deceived myself
into believing I was up to the task, and a reminder to, as Steve the producer
said, just have fun, I walked out onto the stage with something bordering on
confidence.
The next five minutes passed as if they were seconds. Afterward, I leaned
back in my chair, feeling awfully content with myself. Steve Carrell introduced
himself and told me my story would make for a good movie.
That night, I received another flurry of emails, including one from “Erika," who called me “realllly sexy,” attached a suggestive picture of herself, and proposed that
I “might have an easier time getting some in Miami than you did in your van....”
Turned off a bit with her forwardness and leery of getting
entrapped in a Manti Te’o-like scandal, I politely turned down Erika, who
turned out to be one of my male friends in New York screwing with me.
This was my third fifteen minutes of fame in the past few
years, and I was prepared to handle it. In the past, I'd been transfixed with having my
name listed on national publications, with receiving emails from mysterious strangers,
and always wondering what other changes this fame will bring me. There's a high high when you're on top, and a low low when your popularity dissolves. This time, though, I was just kind of nonchalant about the whole thing, feeling the sort of breezy contentment that one basks in after a good, hard day's worth of work.
I've learned there really are
no substantial “changes.” Though inundated with new Facebook friends, there are no new
friends. There is no new money. No new things. No one recognizes you on the street. In the media ocean, you are a big swell that lasts for a moment, and you're dashed into a trillion indistinguishable bits on the shore the next. It may in fact present some new opportunities, it may improve
your chances of getting a second book deal, but it doesn’t change who you are. How can you live for thirty
years and, one day, just magically change into someone else, with
different hobbies, values, and friends? You can’t. And having just spent a month visiting old friends and family, it was so clear to me that people just don't change, sometimes for the worse, sometimes the better. Myself included.
While my friends worried that I'd be swept up and altered by this new wave of fame, I knew better. At the height of my "fame," with Leno on the tube, I wasn't at some throbbing club, rubbing shoulders with famous people, or having wild sex with the likes of Erika, but laying in my underwear on my hotel bed, with the tray of fruit and veggies I'd pilfered from NBC resting on my stomach, watching another episode of The Wire.
