Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you—assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you—that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.

In that case I didn’t leave embarrassed. I left feeling betrayed. What I’d wanted, much more than the book—which I would now rather die than read—was to be seen by this person. If only for a few seconds. I left the store determined that when and if it was ever my turn and I was the author seated at that table, I was going to engage people until they grew old, or at least thirsty. “Well, all right, then,” they’d say, looking past me for the nearest exit, “let me let you go.” I would see them until they wilted. And that’s pretty much how it goes. I generally start the conversation immediately—that way the person wanting a book signed never has to say the things they’d stood in line agonizing over and will most likely regret later on.

This is EXACTLY what he does at his signings!

In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there’s American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you’re in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don’t need to hand out bribes in order to get what you need. That spark you feel when an idea comes to you—This could work. I can actually make this happen!—is Western privilege as well. It may not be certainty, but it’s hope, and if you think that’s worthless, try living in a place where nobody has it. Worse still, try getting a decent hotel room there.

The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than nine hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them.

People who win the war move on. People who lose turn their flags into beach towels and hang hard rubber testicles from their bumpers. They make it easy for the rest of us to hide. “Over there!” we say, pointing to a bro dozer with a Confederate flag affixed to it. “That’s what a racist looks like.”

For our natures, I have just recently learned from my father, can change. Or maybe they’re simply revealed, and the dear, cheerful man I saw that afternoon at Springmoor was there all along, smothered in layers of rage and impatience that burned away as he blazed into the homestretch.

Saul Bellow wrote, “Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces.”

For much of America—the red parts, primarily—the pandemic was over, at least on the ground, and a mask actually made me feel unsafe.

The man was right up in my face, his spittle flecking my glasses, and I thought, Seriously? I’m going to get my COVID from you? Why couldn’t it come from someone I like?

There were venues that strictly enforced the mask policy, which was fine unless they were enforcing it with me. I liked a situation in which I took no precautions and the rest of the world was made to double up. I liked to be in a red state, maskless and complaining about how backward everyone around me was.

This is the kind of passage the haters latch on to for being entitled and obnoxious, without realizing that he is admitting this quality in himself, acknowledging his shortcomings and double standards through snark and sarcasm. He’s not proud of it. Haters don’t get that. It’s classic Sedaris telling on himself .

“You know you’re in a place that’s inhospitable to liberals when you see fireworks stores,” Adam said in rural Indiana as we passed one powder keg after another. “Fireworks are guns for children,” I observed. “They’re the gateway drug,” Adam agreed.