Places I've Been (Part One)

Elon Musk owns Twitter now, so I am determined to write more here, where I can leave Substack at any time and take all of the email addresses with me. To help me build better habits around that, here's a thing you may have seen going around whatever social sites you use: It's a map of the United States, with points awarded by how many states you've spent time in, with different scores depending on the quality of time you spent—living somewhere is worth more than stopping for gas, and so on.

I've been to most of the states—forty of them, by my count—in some capacity, and have some sort of story to tell about just about each. So let's start going down the list.

Alabama: 

I stumbled upon a unique story about Alabama in 2011, after the super outbreak of tornadoes devastated a large chunk of the state. Through a friend, I discovered that there was a city in Alabama called Phil Campbell, Alabama, and that a group of people from around the world named Phil Campbell (with a handful of Phyllises in the mix) had organized a group trip to the town to volunteer. I was early in my career at that point and was a hustling freelancer, and I pitched the story a few places. Within an hour, I got a phone call from an editor at Parade Magazine—the pamphlet magazine that appeared in the Sunday newspaper—asking me how quickly I could get on a flight to Huntsville. It was a lot more enthusiasm than I expected.

I got a rental car at the airport and drove to Phil Campbell a few days later. I had never done any sort of disaster or trauma reporting at that point in my career, and quickly learned how to recognize and respect boundaries. Some people are eager to tell their stories and others are overwhelmed with grief at all that they've lost, and it is not all that difficult to tell from a glance who does not want to talk to a reporter. (Those who do want to talk about what happened still have boundaries, and part of the job is recognizing where those might be even if the person you're talking with might not be entirely clear on where they are.) It was sobering, at any rate—the devastation was fresh, and the people in Phil Campbell had competing hopes—they wanted attention that might help their community recover, but they didn't want to be exploited. Parade ended up being the perfect outlet to cover the assignment, since most folks in town were familiar with it, and nobody had ever been upset by anything it had published, which wouldn't have been true if the New York Times or GQ had picked up my pitch. A Phil Campbell who lived in Birmingham came into town to show me around and introduce me to a few folks, and I left a couple days later. There's a documentary about the volunteer effort made by a filmmaker from the town, called I'm With Phil. you can rent it on Apple or Amazon or wherever; it captures the spirit of things nicely.

Alaska:

I've never been to Alaska, but I would very much like to go.

Arizona: 

I dropped out of college almost immediately because I wanted to be Henry Rollins very badly. Part of that involved touring as a spoken word artist. I spent a good chunk of 2004 on tour, playing shows that were absolute crapshoots: Some nights, there might be three people there, some nights it could be hundreds. It was hard to know in advance if the promoter was the sort of person who actually tried to get people to come out to the show, if they booked other acts to fill out the bill, if they remembered that you had set up a show at all.

I mostly performed alongside musicians, rather than other people whose sets were them talking. This was because my tourmates throughout the year were musicians—that summer, I toured with a hardcore band from the Rio Grande Valley called The Malcontent Party, and later in the year, with a musician friend of mine named Tony, who played music under the name Real Live Tigers. (On a handful of dates, I was booked for poetry slams or comedy nights or whatever; these shows rarely went well, because my act was kind of a messy hybrid of the two.)

That fall, in Phoenix, Tony and I showed up to the venue and learned that the entire lineup would be touring acts, which is not great for drawing a crowd, unless one of the touring artists is famous. It turned out that one of them that night was, though? Kind of, anyway, in the way that mid-aughts emo bands could be famous—it was a band called The Only Children, which was a new project by the frontman of the band The Anniversary, who were somewhere between the Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World on the 2004 indie cred scale. Unfortunately, The Only Children didn't have a record out yet, so only the most avid Arizona emo message board dork knew who they were, and none of them wanted to hear me read poetry and talk about George W. Bush. It was a great example of the reversals that come with touring when no one in America has heard of you: You expect nothing, find yourself opening for someone with a draw, learn that they're playing under a new name, perform in front of their bored fans, and get back in the car to sleep in a Walmart parking lot for a few hours before heading out west to do it again the next night. I still miss it sometimes.

Arkansas: 

I've been through Arkansas loads of times, mostly just to get from Texas to somewhere else. That's not the only reason I've been there, though. In the summer of 2004, on tour with the Malcontent Party, we played a show in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. We were coming off of a couple of nights in New Orleans, and on our way up from Louisiana, the van blew a tire. It was maybe the fourth date of a two-week stint, and at this point in my spoken word career, I would perform the funny bits extemporaneously, while I would read the poems from paper.

We needed to find a way to get the van back into driving shape, so I started walking with Donner—the bassist for the band—to find a gas station. After a mile or so, some good ol' boy in a red pickup drove by, slowed down, and offered us a ride. We gratefully accepted, got a lift another couple miles, and then got dropped back off with a can of Fix-A-Flat. I learned when we got back that Chris, the guitar player in Malcontent, entertained the rest of the band by performing my set from memory, which is pretty funny—but also embarrassing, since he was able to recite things that I was still reading off of paper. That night in Pine Bluff was the last night I read my shit; I spent the drive to Jackson, Tennessee practicing the entire set from memory.

(One more detail: The promoter for the show in Pine Bluff was maybe sixteen years old, which wasn't all that unusual. After the show, we asked him if he knew somewhere we could stay—also not unusual—and he invited us to his parents' house, which was old as shit, and Chris woke up in the middle of the night absolutely convinced that he saw a ghost. To this day, if I ask anyone who was on that tour if they remember that night in Pine Bluff, the first thing I will hear back will be about the haunted house.)

California: 

I've spent a lot of time in California because Kat spent about half of her time there from 2017 to 2019. Most of the time I've spent there was to keep her company, but in 2018, I was out there because we co-wrote a TV pilot and her agents were super excited about it, and insisted that I needed to get out there to pitch it. It was all thrilling.

We spent a few days rehearsing the pitch for the show (a drama about three warring families all trying to claim the crown of best Texas BBQ joint, please contact CAA if you are a producer who would like to know more), then hit our meetings. The first one was for a young exec at a production company in Burbank run by—actually, I should probably leave the names out—but anyway, we have this pitch that we have practiced and practiced to bring it to exactly fifteen minutes, and we are sitting across the table from this guy when I realize that he is wearing snake-eye contact lenses. That is how stylish and cool he is—even his contacts are a fashion choice. Meanwhile, I am dressed Extra Texan, because that is the energy I am trying to bring into these meetings for this show. I can tell immediately it is not going to work.

The next meeting is in Santa Monica and it goes amazing. The exec has a million questions for us, all of them insightful and engaged. She keeps complimenting us on our pitch—"that was so well-told!"—and we come out of it feeling like we are pretty much on our way to creating a TV show. We stop at Sidecar Donuts on Wilshire for celebratory treats, and the other meetings almost feel like a waste of time except what if we can get them into a bidding war?

We begin our pitch for the exec at the third meeting and his eyes glaze over after about twenty seconds. Great, only fourteen minutes and forty seconds to go. The prior two pitches—even the one with Snake Eyes!—were with people who were at least paying attention to what we were saying. This one is just an absolute black hole of energy. At the end, when it's time for questions, he has nothing to say about the show or the pitch at all, and only wants to talk at me about Beto O'Rourke. I'm glad that I don't remember his name; he probably runs Warner Brothers now.

We end up with a couple more, neither of which feels great, but that's fine, because we had Santa Monica in our back pocket—except as Hollywood newcomers, no one had told us that "well-told" is French for "thank you but we are not going to buy this," and after about a week of meetings, I get on a plane back to Texas. Every so often since then, something sparks for one of Kat's agents and we get advised to re-tool the pitch, but outside of a zoom meeting a couple of years ago, it seems like a dead project. And that, baby, is Hollywood.

(stay tuned for Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, and Georgia next time.)