ESSAY
Sarah Vowell Was My SoulmateWASHINGTON, D.C. 16 June 2007 |
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The year was 2000, I was reading Sarah Vowell’s essay collection “Take the Cannoli,” and the coincidences were flooring me.
Sarah Vowell had grown up in Bozeman, Montana, in a house full of guns with a father who was a member of the National Rifle Association (“Shooting Dad”).
I had grown up in Laramie, Wyoming, in a house full of guns with a father who was a member of the National Rifle Association.
Sarah Vowell was descended from a Cherokee clan in Oklahoma (“What I See When I Look at the Face on the $20 Bill”).
I was descended from a Cherokee clan in Oklahoma.
Sarah Vowell had played the baritone in her high school marching band (“Music Lessons”).
I had played the baritone in my high school marching band.
The more I read the more amazed I became. Ms. Vowell described herself as a “smart alecky loner with goofy projects and weird equipment.” (“Shooting Dad” again). Wait, I thought. With my reporter’s notebook, my miniature cassette recorder, and my still and video cameras, that’s what I am! She wrote about the Chelsea Hotel in New York (“Chelsea Girl”). I had visited New York once or twice and remembered the Chelsea Hotel from the Leonard Cohen song.
By page 129 of “Take the Cannoli” I was convinced Sarah Vowell was my soul mate. Never mind that she had named her book after a scene in the Godfather I couldn’t quite remember, we lived 3,000 miles apart, and that she moved in a tight circle of writers and artists that had no reason to admit me. It was enough that she understood what it meant to make a mix tape for a college crush (“Thanks for the Memorex”). I was sure this was the real thing.
In between essays I stared at the jacket photo on “Take the Cannoli” and imagined us making waffles at her place on West 86th. It was Sunday and I was pouring a second cup of coffee for Ira Glass, in from Chicago. I was lamenting the evening flight I would take back to Seattle and lightly brushing off Sarah’s pleas that I relocate. “You don’t have to work!” she begged. “I just sold ‘Take the Cannoli’ to Simon & Schuster! Who cares about the future! We’ll make the Upper West Side our paradise!”
My Bohemian New York girlfriend was just waiting for me. Whenever I put down her book to make a cup of tea, or get myself a cookie, suddenly there we were in the Frick Collection, or a sidewalk cafe in the Village, or Central Park, tossing a quarter to a Russian emigre with a dancing bear as we held hands, raved about the unheralded genius of Edmund Wilson, and agreed how amazing it was that two westerners of Cherokee heritage who played the baritone in marching band had found each other in the greatest city on earth.
The only thing I had to do was somehow meet her.
But this, it turned out, would be easy. Fate is swift and sure. Sarah Vowell was on book tour, and scheduled to give a reading at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company in only one month.
Here is what I thought: If I went to Sarah Vowell’s reading, and said hello to her as she signed my copy of her book, we would fall in love.
I honestly thought it would be as simple and as easy as that.
Of course there were obstacles. On the appointed evening some professional colleagues, including my boss, were in from out of town, and I was scheduled to have dinner with them. The dinner would be at the same time as Sarah Vowell’s reading, but I solved this problem by announcing to my professional colleagues — and my boss — that I would be leaving dinner early to catch the end of a local book store reading.
I’m sure they thought I was insane, or that I secretly hated them.
But just as I was sure that a few casual words with Sarah Vowell in the autograph line would win her love, it didn’t strike me as strange to be abandoning my colleagues to get an autograph at a book store reading. In my mind, I was arranging a meeting with my future wife. When I was photographed in Esquire walking arm in arm with Sarah Vowell down Columbus Avenue, my abandoned friends would understand.
I should also mention that over dinner I had two or three glasses of wine.
I still remember drifting down the wooden staircase to Elliott Bay’s basement reading room that night. I love that book store, and it’s at its best in the evening, when the sound of the basement cafe’s espresso machine and clinking glasses fill the bustling upstairs store, where outside plate glass windows kids drift from one night club to the next in Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square.
The first hint of trouble came when, at the bottom of the stairs, I saw how long the line was.
Would she notice that I wasn’t in the audience when she was reading? Was it rude to expect an autograph when you hadn’t even attended the reading? It was my first moment of self-doubt.
The second came when I noticed that several other Seattle hipsters were vying with me to be last in line. When I joined the line behind them, they coyly dropped out, only to rejoin the line behind me. Naturally, I pulled the same move on them. After one more cat and mouse exchange I gave up. Fine. They could be last in line.
But as the line dwindled something else dawned on me. In venturing to the book store to meet Sarah Vowell and get her autograph, I was not alone. Everyone in line, I realized, also loved Sarah Vowell. I still thought Sarah and I were meant for each other, but I began to think that winning her love from the autograph line might not be as easy as I had assumed. Maybe, it occurred to me, this was not the best place to impress Sarah Vowell.
“Disaster” is a strong word. I don’t want to compare my turn at the autograph table with Sarah Vowell — my 20 seconds with my intended — to Hurricane Katrina or the invasion of Iraq. But it was pretty bad.
I mentioned Laramie, Wyoming. I got a blank stare. I saw that my heroine looked tired, even a little impatient. I said I had also played the baritone in high school. She kept staring.
“I also wrote something for the McSweeney’s website, once,” I told her.
Finally, I saw myself. A guy in his mid-30s, alone at a book signing, obviously and somewhat desperately trying to impress Sarah Vowell. This must have happened to her at least once a night. At least I had washed my hair that morning. There were other people at the autograph table. They shifted their weight, and when I tried to catch their eyes they looked away.
“Well,” Sarah Vowell finally said, that trademark knife in her voice, “Looks like I beat you to the book deal!”
I handed over my book and asked if she could make it out to my mom. She said something about keeping up the good fight, and even that she might have heard my name. It was a nice gesture. I’m sure I looked like the beaten man I was. I thanked her, took back my book, and slinked from the store.
For years I had no way to make sense of this experience. In my mind the events I have described all boiled down to the learned wisdom that I can be an idiot sometimes. This might be a valid insight, but it wasn’t a particularly useful tool for organizing my experience. When you embarrass yourself in front of your hero, you want it to add up to something larger than just, “Maybe I am a loser.”
So I held onto my tale of book store love gone wrong, not knowing what to make of it, or what it really meant. Until, that is, several years later, when I found myself at the grand opening of the youth writing center 826 Seattle, talking to Dave Eggers, George Saunders, and Ryan Boudinot.
George Saunders was giving a reading that night and for some reason, and without thinking, I told him about my misguided love for Sarah Vowell and the time I became her book store stalker. I summed it up in a few sentences, and when I finished George Saunders didn’t skip a beat.
“Yeah,” he said, “it’s funny. When someone becomes famous, people project all sorts of things onto them. They transform that person into someone from their own imaginations. And the person they invent has very little to do with the real person they admire.”
That was it! That was exactly what I had done. Out of the material in “Take the Cannoli” I had invented my own version of Sarah Vowell, who naturally bore only a slight resemblance to the real thing.
The more I thought about it, the more relieved I felt. Wasn’t the point of making art to connect with an audience? To share something meaningful with the strangers who come across your work? When I read Sarah Vowell, she built a bridge and I simply walked across. I was really just an active reader. A very active reader, true, but I just had gotten a little carried away. It was nothing to feel embarrassed about.
As George Saunders and I laughed about the folly of my crush on everyone’s favorite This American Life correspondent (“Is that really true, about the baritone?” he asked), and he jokingly assured me that at the book store that night he would greet me as a long lost friend, something else occurred to me, about George Saunders, a writer whose work I had long admired.
It’s something you might not notice at first, but that becomes undeniably clear the more you talk to him, and relax in the company of his sharp sense of humor easy way with other people.
George Saunders, I suddenly realized, is really, really hot.
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