There is someone with a deep respect for the language he inherited from the father he never met. At 23 he has an MFA, a subscription to the New York Review of Books, an encouraging coterie of friends he can rely on to puncture his ego and tell him when he’s just plain fucking up, a thorough—but never blind—appreciation of the Western canon and, after a post-grad trip to China, fringes of the Eastern, also an admirable modesty—he doesn’t think he’s better than anyone for writing, it just happens to be what he likes doing, although if you fell into conversation with him on a crowded Chinatown bus and said “so what do you do?” he’d answer literally: “I call telemarketing agencies and try to sell them people’s phone numbers, so I guess a sort of telemarketer to telemarketers.” He certainly wouldn’t lick his lips and say “I’m a writer“—doesn’t think he’s there yet—even though at 19 he won his English department’s creative writing prize. In high school a small, bespectacled English teacher told me that growing up he’d wanted to be a playwright, but he just didn’t have the follow-through, and I feared I didn’t either. Three years earlier, sitting in the same chairs, this blog post’s protagonist was told the very same thing, except he knew that wouldn’t be a problem for him: He had the patience and has it now, to stick with something ‘till it sings, to slaughter passages he’d worked on through the dawn when they didn’t quite fit, to wait there until the right word came to him. He doesn’t have a Tumblr but doesn’t begrudge those who do, and also the closest he’ll come to the conventional success he’d never admit to wanting is a string of short stories published in academic journals with about as many pages as readers, and now at 39 he’s married and runs the telemarketers-to-the-telemarketers office but if on a day like this one, what would seem to be the last nice day of fall, the Replacements’ “Unsatisfied” came on he’d probably tear up, but then again how couldn’t you, that song is beautiful, and if I were this blog post’s protagonist I’d probably wait around for a word more accurate than “beautiful” but who knows if I even know one.
And somewhere Tucker Max is balancing a stack of hundreds on his erection for the amusement of a 17-year-old girl who will later, smiling, say “I slept with Tucker Max” to her friends. On February 7, 2012 the virile antichrist will release two books simultaneously, and they will both be very successful.
