Key - Congratulations, who are you again?: a memoir

This book is dedicated to my favorite child,

you know who you are.

I have changed a few names in this book and made efforts to downplay the physical hideousness of my enemies, where possible.

I came to America because I heard the streets were paved with gold. When I got here, I learned three things: One, the streets were not paved with gold. Two, they were not paved at all. And three, it was going to be my job to pave them.

N INETEENTH-CENTURY IMMIGRANT LAMENT

W HAT IS A DREAM?

According to Cinderella, A dream is a wish your heart makes.

It is instructive to note that our hero sings these words to a family of birds who wear kerchiefs and dont appear to have the power of language, revealing the first important thing you need to know about dreamers, which is, most of them need psychiatric evaluation. If you have a dream, you may need to be evaluated, too. The dream will make you crazy. Thats how they work, in my experience.

Far as I can tell, the word dream means about a hundred different things. The most important kind of dream is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. kind, where you envision an impossibly beautiful reality over the horizon of human history. Well call these Prophetic Dreams.

Then theres the kind of dream where youre wearing nothing but a clerical collar and riding a dolphin through a grocery store. Occasionally, these visions present us with important messages from deep within our hearts, about what we fear and need, such as additional medication, but mostly theyre terrifying and harmless. Well call these Porpoise Dreams.

Next, we have Aspirational Dreams, where you long to build a small summer home on an inlet where you might spend your last years on Earth scanning the horizon for dolphins, which might explain the recurring porpoise dream. You wont die if these dreams dont come true, but they can at least give you a reason to get up in the morning. Nothing wrong with that.

This book is about none of these kinds of dreams, neither Prophetic nor Porpoise nor Aspirational. We are here to discuss the best dream most any of us can hope for, one that might actually come true and fundamentally alter our fortunes and lives, should we apply ourselves and manage not to lose everything that matters down the fathomless quarry of ambition.

I talk of American dreams.

For the purposes of this book, I am going to define the American dream as the answer of a calling to eschew the more common pursuits of personal peace and affluence in order to do something beautiful and exceedingly difficult with your life, such as writing a book that shames your family and all but guarantees you will never again be invited to certain homes to celebrate national holidays, which is what happened to me.

I am talking about vocation here: The ache to do and be something amazing when you grow up, maybe even to become famous in the process, to manifest a vision of yourself that feels improbable yet perfectly possible, and to pay off your student loans and mortgage doing it. These are the dreams that college admission representatives and retired athletes are always going on about, in front of awed and occasionally disbelieving crowds of young people. I have had many such dreams in my life, which is perfectly normal, this being America, the greatest nation in the history of the world, alongside Rome and perhaps Iceland. People still fly and float and walk to this place, to seize joys untrammeled with their minds and talents. One of the great things about America is, your dream can take many forms. You can do something wholesome and productive, like practice medicine in a place where they ride llamas, or build mattresses that never wear out, or design affordable water-filtration systems for remote villages, or you can do something evil, like make another Spider-Man movie.

Whatever you dream, just be careful.

Mark Twain said this famous thing, how the two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why. What he didnt say is: A dream is also a monster that wants to eat you.

A dream doesnt start out as a monster. It starts out as a little baby that comes out of the uterus of your burning heart, and this little dream-baby grows up and gives birth to more dream-babies. Some dream-babies die in utero. Some get born and are then exposed to the gamma rays of vainglory and mutate into menacing beasts that will try and destroy you and your loved ones.

Nobody tells you this part of the American dream.

All they tell you is, Dream big! You can be anything!

But you cannot be anything.

You cannot be a bird, or a television, or an elected official who does not lie, constantly, to those he professes to love most. Some things, sadly, are not possible.

What is possible: You can give birth to a dream and nurse the baby until it is big and strong and monstrous, and you can share your dream-baby-monster with the world in such a way as to bring light to humankind, or at least a few thousand people, depending on the quality of your marketing materials, and you can be wholly transformed by the light-bringing experience. And then you may look around and see that the light you bring also burns. Thats what this book is about: One man making his American dream real, while simultaneously almost immolating everything important in his life.

As a result of my dream coming true, my life was transformed beyond all comprehension. I got famous. Strangers took photographs of me in a Waffle House. I did photo shoots for magazines, including one in a bathtub, with my clothes on, for which all involved parties were grateful.

I was handed more money than anyone in my family had ever seen on a check with their name on it, which bought us a very luxurious home, with five ceiling fans. My childhood was one of general impoverishment, where our house only had, like, two ceiling fans. I try to explain this to my daughters, but they dont get it. They just stand there in the kitchen, eating decadent candies and pastries that my dream has provided, while the fan blows luxurious air on them.

When I was a boy, we didnt have a fan in the kitchen, I say.

What are you even talking about? they say.

You ungrateful humans! I say, and storm out.

This is one of the things you do when youre famous: You storm out of rooms.

I was not always famous, sadly. Time was, I could be at a Waffle House or in a bathtub and nobody would ask to take a photograph with me. It was embarrassing. I could go for a walk in the park with my family, and nobody would gawk. At church, people would ask perfectly inappropriate questions, like, How are you today, Harrison?

Or, How are the children?

Or, Hows class going?

It hurt, a little.

But now that I am famous, people gawk constantly. My wife, Lauren, and I might be having dinner at a restaurant near our home in Savannah, Georgia, and people come right up to the table.

Are you Harrison Scott Key? they ask, thrusting a book at me.

I am, I say, while my wife pretend-vomits on her salad.

Shes a funny lady. Hilarious.

And its fine, its fine, because I sign their books, and these fans buy my beautiful wife and me a round of drinks and we have a good laugh. Ever since I got famous, I havent paid for a single cocktail. I couldnt tell you how much drinks even cost. Do you barter? Do you have to pay in pelts?

The last few years of my life seem like a drug-induced hallucination, weird and wondrous. I now travel the country, being asked to tell the story of How It All Happened. If your American dream comes true, people will ask you, too. Its flattering and frightening because birthing a dream feels like being sucked up into the vortex of a tornado you summoned out of your very own heart shortly before being hurled back down to the earth, after which local TV crews run up to your bruised and battered body with microphones and say,