October 20, 2014

I’m more than halfway through my monthlong book tour, and the cracks are starting to show. For two weeks, I’ve been living off a diet of very dark chocolate, various barbecued meats, and Tylenol. I’ve gained five pounds, mostly near my armpits, and there’s a permanent red crease across my forehead from falling asleep against car windows, the vast canyons between hotel pillows, and, on one sad occasion, an airplane tray table.

“We’re about the same age, right?” a woman asks me, appraisingly, after a reading.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“I’m sixty-eight,” she says.

I don’t know how to break it to either of us.

I’m forty-two.

Today, I fly into a suburb of Detroit for a reading. It takes place in a gargantuan catering hall with eleven hundred and forty people in attendance, mostly seniors. I’m on a bill with four commercial writers, two of whom have very successful television series currently on the air. One, who is from Wyoming, wears a cowboy hat and has just driven in from an interview at the local Fox affiliate. What am I even doing here?

The host gives us a breakdown of what people want from writers: “They don’t want readings. This is not a library. If they hear you’re gonna read, they’ll go, Ugh. We have writers here, if they’re not funny, or don’t tell anecdotes, they don’t sell books.”

Now I’m truly scared. I always read the same fifteen pages from “Little Failure” for twenty minutes. In the bathroom, I scribble some anecdotes on a piece of paper, anecdotes that sound appropriate for a Midwestern audience with maybe a few Russians among them: “Accepted at Michigan. Dumped at Oberlin. Misha from Murmansk says I’m a schmuck.” Somehow, I manage to weave that into a ten-minute comedy routine, and the good people of Livonia, Michigan, laugh at most of my jokes. (As they say in Hollywood, I’m good in a room.) I sell every last copy of “Little Failure.” The writers with the television series clean up as well. This is how books are sold in America today.

October 21st

I hereby declare Ann Arbor the best small city in America. I start my day with pumpkin pancakes at Angelo’s. When I’m in the Midwest during the autumn months, I like to say to people, “Brr, the frost is really on the pumpkin this year!” This never gets the colloquial response that I’m looking for, but it makes me feel a hundred-and-ten-per-cent American. After I eat two pumpkin pancakes drowning in whipped cream, I go for a long, quiet walk in the Nichols Arboretum, along the burbling Huron River. My fat-slathered heart calms down for the first time in weeks. But not for long.

It’s time for the groundbreaking Reuben sandwich at Zingerman’s Deli and then the important shawarma at Jerusalem Garden, followed by another three-hour-long nap. At my reading at the Ann Arbor District Library, the librarian points out my three main constituencies as they gather in the room: “The Russians, the Jews, and the town’s intellectuals.” In the signing line, a young woman tells me, “My mother gave me your book and said, ‘You have to read this! It’s about this dysfunctional Russian family.’ And I said, ‘Mom, it’s about our family.’ ”

For dinner, the kind library folks take me to a restaurant that Mario Batali recommended in a tweet. I forget the name now, but it’s something colorful, like, The Shtupping Turtle, and it’s housed in the building formerly occupied by the original Borders. The duck-fat-fried chicken alone is worth a visit. I am seriously thinking of moving to Michigan.

October 24th

It’s all about “The Wire” when I’m in Baltimore. I go to Mo’s for my crab cakes, not because it’s necessarily the best but because Felicia Pearson (Snoop) eats her crab cakes there. I sit by the kitchen, listening to the waiters philosophize: “In the history of the world, no one who has ever worked high all the time has kept their job,” one fellow with a sparse collection of teeth informs another.

Full of crab cake, I walk past Baltimore’s police headquarters, where the cops are screaming at one another in language that McNulty would recognize: “Hey, dickhead! You wanna move your car?” An entire meth-stripper complex exists just one block over from the police headquarters and another block over from City Hall. I start humming the original Tom Waits version of the theme song from “The Wire,” “Way Down in the Hole.”

I’m honored to read beneath a painting of Edgar Allen Poe at the amazing Pratt Library. (“Another little failure” a local wit tweets the next day, about a picture of me standing under Poe.) A gentleman in a wheelchair, his face lost behind a giant white beard, wheels himself over at the signing with a suggestion. “It was a very good reading,” he says, “But, when you talk about Hebrew school in your book, instead of saying you didn’t like it, could you say you did like it? There were many Jews in the audience, and I think that’s what they want to hear.”

October 25th

Chicago is a great enough city, but for lucky visiting authors it means several hours in the company of Bill Young, hands down the best “media escort” in the land. Knowing my affliction for horrifying beef-like products, Bill drives me straight from the airport to Ricobene’s (home of “the breaded steak pizza”), where I swallow an Italian beef sandwich with green peppers dipped into some kind of jus. I pass out in my hotel room for four hours, having nightmares about tonight’s reading at the Northwestern University campus. Bill told me that President Obama recently packed the hall. In the very best of circumstances, I can fill about a quarter of an Obama-sized hall.

I am wrong. The Chicagoans are probably the most loyal book readers I have met on the tour so far, and they manage to fill most of the seats, courtesy of the good people at the Chicago Humanities Festival. I feel like celebrating at my favorite local restaurant, The Publican, where my fellow-writer Walter Kirn joins me for a supper of oysters, suckling pig, and three kinds of aged ham served with a Nordic-creamery goat butter and peasant bread. The next morning, Bill takes me for a breakfast of Polish sausage and grape soda by a highway exit. You couldn’t make up Chicago if you tried.

On the way home to New York, I fly on an airline I am not terribly familiar with. It is called Southwest. The woman next to me has three vodka-somethings to dampen her experience, while the flight attendant cheerfully tosses peanuts at us, shouting, “Lunch!” My peanuts fall right into my lap. “Aren’t you glad we’re not serving soup anymore?” the flight attendant says. I envision a new motto: “Southwest: The World’s Favorite Dickensian Airline.”

November 1st

Princeton. My tour is coming to an end amid the gothic and ivy. This is the sixty-fifth of seventy-two readings that I will do this year in support of my “Failure.” Tonight, I read to an engaged crowd of supporters of the excellent local public library in a lecture hall called McCosh 50, a large space iconic enough to have been featured in “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.” The after-party is held in a new chemistry building that could be the Parliament House of an important European country. A middle-aged academic-looking man approaches me as I gnaw on a piece of steak. “Are you a different person when you do these events?” he asks.

“Not at all!” I say. “There’s only one Gary.” But the truth is more complicated. When I’m onstage in front of the Russians, Jews, and intellectuals who come out to see me, I am—as they say in the film business—pitching myself. And that means presenting a Gary who is less scared of the world than the sleepless, sixty-eight-year-old-looking man passing out in a hotel room at the end of the day. As the tour ends, I realize that I will go back to the non-performing, quiet version of myself, which fills me with both sadness and elation. On one hand, no one will listen to me. On the other hand, I won’t have to speak! And what about all the wonderful writers who aren’t “good in a room”? The ones who rely mostly on the words on a page to speak for them?

As for me, I hope to write another book someday, too. But not for a while. My Dutch tour begins in two weeks.

Read Parts I and II of “On the Road with ‘Little Failure’ ”