Donika Miller's Blog

It was midnight, and therefore now Easter Sunday. I was standing on the corner of 23rd and 3rd, sifting through the newspapers outside a deli, looking for the New York Times piece on Tucker. I had two broken teeth. I had no health insurance with which to fix my teeth. I was in New York with my family, and my mother was barely speaking to me. I had no job and was soon to lose my car and apartment. I was looking ahead to a night on an uncomfortable couch. And I'd never been happier with my life.

"Should we pick up a copy for him?" I asked TheGC, now Rudius' lawyer.

"Come on," he chuckled, "This is Tucker we're talking about. You think he doesn't already have five copies sitting in his apartment?"

"Good point," I conceded, but really I was kind of disappointed. I had this idea in my head that we'd gather, crack open a fresh copy of the Times, and pore through the article together, soaking in the praise, cringing over each misstatement. Sort of like the cast of a play stays awake together waiting for the first reviews, but maybe that was just the editor in me, searching for the perfect moment.

***

When I was growing up, my mom always taped some sort of reading material on the bathroom mirror, to give my siblings and I something to think about while we brushed our teeth. I remember little Buddhist meditations, poems about seasonal events, and inspirational aphorisms. The one I remember most, though, was a liquor ad. It showed a grizzled old man playing the trumpet with the caption, "Do what you love, the rest comes naturally..." underneath. And like the relentlessly naive person I am, I believed it.

I believed it, but had a hard time carrying it out. Even as a kid, I was what most people would call a serious person. I was bookish and industrious, and didn't do a lot of stuff that little kids do for fun. Riding bikes? Who needs bikes when there are books? Hanging out at the mall? How about a job at the mall instead? In fact, when I think back on my adolescence, I remember my jobs more than anything. Working was a big deal to me. The money gave me a measure of independence, but more than that I liked contributing to an endeavor. I started working young, lied about my age, and took pride in doing whatever job well. Whether it was serving food or lifeguarding, it gratified me to contribute to the overall good.

So you can imagine how picking a college major, and therefore (in my mind at the time) a career, weighed heavily on me. Science was always my strong academic suit. Well, second to English, but I barely considered that a subject. Reading and writing, I thought, isn't that something anyone should be able to do? What's the specialty there? I showed up at college with most of the classics under my belt, and didn't see a reason to major in something I could already do. Plus, science appealed to my need to contribute. Inventing vaccines and developing insect resistant vegetables-- that's how you make the world a better place.

But I took lots of English classes, because it allowed me to read beyond textbooks and I did hold an admiration for writing as a craft. Also, because I hated my science classes. Gone was the wonder and insight of high school Biology, now replaced with weed-out courses, depressed professors, and type A classmates. I kept changing majors, comically-- Microbiology to Molecular and Cell Biology, Molecular and Cell Biology to Biochemistry, Biochemistry to Genetics-- as though I'd find one of those hyper-specialties more satisfying than another. Worse, I started going to class less and less, and my grades dipped and stayed below a 2.0. Finally, I took some time off from school to get my head straight.

I started, of course, by getting a job. My mom had heard that TV Guide was looking for editors and encouraged me to apply. It required a college degree and a resume, neither of which I had. She pointed out that there was a screening test involved, and reminded me that I test well. She turned out to be right. I did so well on the test that they didn't even notice there was no degree listed on my hastily-thrown-together resume. I was genuinely excited. I had a real job with a desk and benefits and responsibilities that let me use my head. Or so I thought. The reality of office life sank in after about six months, and I became increasingly incredulous that people lived that way. The work itself was utterly unchallenging, and the tedium of sitting in the same place, with the same people, doing the same nonsense for 40 years was almost indicative of mental illness to me. Only a crazy person would live like this, I thought. Though I was disappointed in myself for dropping out of school, I'd sit in the office looking at my coworkers and become overwhelmed with gratitude that I had school to return to. My life at TV Guide was not it for me. I started taking classes at night, now even more wacked out under the pressure of deciding what I wanted to do with my life. Predictably, I dropped out again after flipping among several different majors.

What happened in between that and my third college is not important. What is important is that I sent for my transcripts, and looking at them, something immediately jumped out at me. Through two schools, countless majors, and wavering grades, I had straight A's in all my English classes. More, I realized that I had never skipped one single English class, a major feat for me since I always found class attendance kind of unimportant. I had no idea what one did with an English degree, but in the back of my head I heard something whisper Do what you love, the rest comes naturally.

I ripped it UP as an English major. For the first time I was working from true inspiration, not from what I thought I was supposed to do. I loved my classes, loved my classmates, and loved my professors, some of whom I still keep in touch with. One night while working on an assignment for a creative writing class, I let myself think about something I'd repressed for a long time: becoming a writer. I remembered when I was in seventh grade, going to my mom, and timidly telling her that I thought I wanted write when I grew up. I expected her to scoff at the idea, and tell me to do something more secure, to use harder skills like science. But I'll never forget what she really said, "That's good, because writers change the world." She went on to talk about The Jungle and what it did for both workers and consumers. I mentally kicked myself for not listening to her, and started writing a book, sending poetry to magazines (with no success) and collaborating with other writers and creative types. I also thought about working on a PhD or becoming a teacher after graduation-- jobs I thought would align with writing.

Like many recent college graduates, I was taken by the face, turned upside down, and violated in ways I don't want to describe by student loans. I needed a real job for at least a year until I figured out grad school. I took a job at a dotcom, which really wasn't bad in the beginning. You could bring your dog to work; it was a cubicle free environment; we drank at work on Fridays. The work itself was even somewhat satisfying. New companies like that encourage and even require that you work autonomously and creatively. Most importantly, though, it came with a regular salary, and I was delusional enough to think it would support me AND pay off my student loans in a year.

Three years later I was still at that job, inches from being clubbed to death by adulthood. Terrified of more student loans, I never applied to grad school. My paycheck was barely covering my living expenses, and the company I worked for succeeded to the point that it became totally corporate. My desk job had sapped the inspiration from me, and my long term writing partner and I had 'broken up.' Severely mentally constipated, I kept working on a novel in fits and starts, but it was bad. I simply had nothing to say. The WoW-obsessed computer geek sitting next to me had a richer and more interesting life. Worst of all, though, I felt completely trapped. The best parts of me were dying, I was dependent on a system I hated, and I had no idea how to get out without becoming homeless. I was drowning and I knew it.

The Internet became my salvation. On any given day I could learn about something new, read about someone interesting, or interact with people who had cooler experiences than I did. Somewhere in there, I stumbled upon the Tard Blog. After laughing myself retarded, I looked around the site, wondering who was hosting such a thing. That turned out to be Tucker. I laughed myself retarded again reading his site, and showed it to a friend. "This is what you should be doing," she observed. "Don't be silly," I brushed it off, "This is essentially self-publishing. No one takes that seriously. Editors exist for a reason." But in my heart of hearts, I knew she was right. I went back and read Tucker's site again, looking for holes in his approach. I couldn't push one thought from my mind, though. This guy is going to be famous... and I want in on the ground floor.

I sent Tucker an e-mail offering pretty much the only thing I had to offer the world at that point: editing skills. He responded in typical Tucker fashion, as though he was doing me a favor, and agreed to let me edit his stuff on a trial basis. He was happy with my work, so we continued on as he created new material, built his following, and turned his site into his livelihood. For myself, I bounced from unfulfilling job to unfulfilling job, often with Tucker's work as the only thing I cared about or looked forward to.

Tucker visited Philadelphia shortly before his book came out, and again in typical Tucker fashion, he came equipped with a lecture for me. We stood in a crowded bar, and while repeatedly jabbing me in the throat with his finger to accentuate his points, he basically shouted at me, "YOU NEED TO START WRITING. IT'S RIDICULOUS FOR YOU TO JUST BE SITTING THERE NOT DOING WHAT YOU WANT TO DO. HAVE YOU LEARNED ANYTHING FROM ME? LIVE THE WAY YOU WANT TO LIVE, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!" I stared back, wishing he'd stop poking me, and translated all of that to Do what you love, the rest comes naturally. Then he said something that really caught my attention, "I MEAN IN THE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I SEPARATED OUT FOUR PEOPLE: BUNNY, PWJ, NILS, AND YOU. DO YOU THINK I WOULD DO THAT FOR SOMEONE WITH NO TALENT?"

"Wait, you mentioned me in your book?"

"OF COURSE I DID. I ASKED IF I COULD USE YOUR REAL NAME, DUMMY."

"I thought I would just be in a list or something... gosh, that's really sweet. Thanks."

"SWEET? BABY, I DON'T DO ANYTHING TO BE SWEET. IF YOU'RE IN THERE IT'S BECAUSE YOU EARNED IT AND IT'S TIME YOU STARTED ACTING THAT WAY."

That night I cracked open a pre-release copy of Tucker's book, and there was my name, in bold! I was so overwhelmed and vaguely embarrassed that I actually had to peek at it a few times before I could bring myself to read my blurb. It was a very kind paragraph crediting me, but the words were almost unimportant. I was in someone's book! Had I known then that he'd hit the NYT list, I might have passed out. Somehow, being mentioned in someone's book made my dreams feel a little more real to me. Certainly if I could help someone that much with their book, I could write my own. Right?

And I did start writing again. Some fundamentals came back to me. Write every day. It doesn't matter if it's good, just get it down. Imitate a passage by another writer if you have writer's block. Go out and eavesdrop, then write a story around what you heard. But I couldn't shake the idea that I sucked. In college, while reading true masters of the craft, I believed I could be as good or better than them. I think my confidence sprang from doing excellent work in school; it made me feel powerful and capable. Years of working in an office had laid that feeling completely dormant. So I wrote and hid it like a dirty little secret (and I swear to you that as I write this right now, all I can think is, "Who the hell wants to read this shit?"). In the meantime, Tucker was getting more and more attention, and making noise about starting a company.

From my perspective, he HAD to start a company. I was working for IBM and flying to Richmond, VA every week to do absolutely nothing. It was wearing on me. Staying in hotels with censored cable, missing my life at home, and being continually unchallenged was driving me to literally drink. Had the hotel not been attached to a bar, therefore ensuring a daily, energyless hangover, I'm not sure I wouldn't have assaulted my boss. I was still writing, but had less and less to say. Again. I knew for sure was that I did not belong in an office, and while I acknowledged this consciously, my subconscious hijacked me.

One week, I made my hotel reservations, packed my bags, and then simply did not leave. It was a Monday, and I kept telling myself that maybe I'd go to the airport that afternoon. Claim flight delays to my boss. The day ticked by and I told myself I'd fake a cold, go in Tuesday instead. But I woke up Tuesday still completely incapable of getting in my car and driving to the airport. I knew it was over, so I called the hotel and cancelled my reservations so they wouldn't charge me, then IBM, then our client, at a significant markup at each turn. Around noon my phone rang. It was my boss. I was too scared to answer. What would I say? "Sorry, I'm crazy. I'm calling out crazy this week." About half an hour later it rang again, my boss's boss. And later my boss again. Finally a beloved co-worker called and I worked up the courage to listen to my messages, starting with my boss's:

Hi Donika, it's Mary. Listen, could you meet me up in Jeanette's office in about 15 minutes? I want you two to discuss the data you need.

HOLY SHIT! It was a full day later and they still didn't realize I wasn't there! If I ever doubted that my work was unimportant and unnecessary, that message removed all doubt. (And if you are the client in Richmond and reading this, it should remove any doubt that IBM is ripping you off.) The next message was the obligatory we're-so-worried-about-you call, followed by an angry message indicating that they understood I was not showing up... ever. The final message, from my co-worker, I could barely make out because he was laughing so hard, "Donika... please... please call Mary and Karen... they, hahahahaha, they... oh fuck it, I know you're not going to talk to them. Give me a call later." I became completely calm, because at that moment, I knew for sure that I was never, NEVER going back to an office again.

***

A month later, I was in New York celebrating Easter with my family. My mother was disgusted with me. I'd left a secure job with a good company and no backup plan. Worse, I was running around with Tucker, a persona non grata in her mind. So getting the night away to read the NYT piece was a very welcome relief. When TheGC and I got to his apartment, Tucker was sitting on the couch with his hand down his basketball shorts. He and TheGC started talking about sports, and I sat on the edge of the couch ready to smack someone. Why weren't we talking about the article? What the hell was in it? Was it bad? Good? It wasn't just that I wanted the best for Tucker, but that the piece was somewhat of a turning point for him and anyone he'd collected to work with him over the years. A positive article would command the attention of producers and publishers, and put us all in a good position to start a company with a shot at success. Finally Tucker dropped the Style section in my lap, "Here... you wanna see this?" I looked down at a huge photo of him on the front.

The article was good. Tucker had interacted well with the author, and the author in turn genuinely tried to get what he was doing with his career and represent it fairly. I guess he was over it by that time though, as he launched into planning before I could fully finish reading. A Rudius author once told me that talking to Tucker in person was like chasing lightning, and he was right. Within fifteen minutes, he had laid out a comprehensive and sound business plan that put all emphasis on nurturing talent. As I listened and reformulated the information in my head, the same feeling came back to me as when I found his site, but this time it included me. My scalp tingled and my skin felt like velvet, We're going to be famous, and I'm in on the ground floor.

Being famous was never my objective, nor is it now, but discovering new writers, giving authors power over their work, and exposing good writing to an audience... that was a job I'd be proud to do and could throw my soul into. I thought about the last ten years of my life, the stumbling, the confusion, the loss of hope, and the very good luck I had in meeting up with Tucker. Lucky though I am, I know that really what brought me here was doing what I loved. No matter what else was going on in my life at the time, being active in the writing world sustained me and delivered me to a good place. And who knows? Maybe someday I'll have a book's worth of things to say about it.

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