Jamie, I’ve been told (by Jamie), is at work on a magnum opus on the topic of success and envy. The success in question, I believe, belongs to some friends and acquaintances of his. The envy belongs to Jamie. I bring this up because I spent a few hours, recently, hanging out with a friend of mine, Demetri Martin, who is on the verge of being bona fide famous.
I don’t think I’m envious of Demetri (well, maybe a bit: I’d enjoy being recognized on the street, as he was, and having my hotel rooms and meals and plane tickets paid for by Microsoft and Comedy Central, as his were), but it was impossible not to reconnect with him, for the first time in about four years, without doing some musing on where I was in my career relative to where he is, particularly since so much of our friendship was built on conversation about careers and ambitions.
I met Demetri in college, and we became friends when we shared a rented bedroom one summer in D.C. He was in between his first and second years of law school at NYU, and was interning at the White House. I was in between sophomore and junior year of college and was interning for (i.e. padding my resume with) the Senate Democratic Steering and Coordination Committee.
Demetri went back to NYU Law at the end of the summer, finished out his second year, took a leave of absence, went back, quit, tried one more time, and then quit law school for good, finally taking a low-energy proofreading job at an advertising agency and devoting most of his time and energy to writing jokes and honing his comedy act. By that point I’d graduated from Yale, moved to New York, and taken what proved to be a miserable job as a “story editor” (i.e. file boy) at Dan Wigutow Productions, which you may remember from such television film classics as Raising Waylon and Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman.
We worked not that far from each other – my office was at Washington Square Park and his was at Union Square – and used to meet, once a week or so, for lunch at what I’m pretty sure was (and is) called the University Diner, on University Place a few blocks north of the Arch. Demetri would talk about his ambition to conquer the world of comedy; I’d talk about my ambition to conquer the worlds of high-class whoredom and nonfiction writing. It was at one of these lunches, during the height of the dotcom hysteria, that we hatched the idea for Drohnz.com, our short-lived “sitecom” that was a precursor—in a vague, cultural zeitgeisty kind of way—to The Office. We roped in a few of his comedian friends (including one would go on to write for Saturday Night Live), half-assed it for three or four months, and then foundered and died on the shoals of the fact that a.) none of us actually knew how to create a website, though Demetri made a valiant try at learning, and b.) three or four months seems to be the outer limit on how long you can expect people to devote their energy to a project they’re not getting paid for and they’re not particularly passionate about.
I can’t quite say that I knew Demetri would be fabulously successful, but I knew that he might be. It was just clear, almost immediately, that he was funny enough, obsessive enough, and smart enough to make it. I think it was the smartness, in particular, or maybe the educated-ness, that set him apart, and made others in the comedy world want to help him and to be around him. Not that comedians, in general, aren’t smart people—but most of them aren’t really, really, smart, and almost none of them have Yale degrees (and half an NYU law degree).
It’s been interesting watching his rise, mostly from a distance. Within not too long, maybe a year or two after he quit law school, he was performing in the top clubs in New York, and had made friends with a lot of the top comedians. Pretty soon he was on Leno and Letterman and Conan. He had a half-hour special on Comedy Central. He won the grand prize at a big comedy festival in Scotland, worked for Conan for a brief stint, signed a development deal with one of the networks. Just this year he’s appeared a few times on the The Daily Show; he’s “the trendspotter,” which involves making sort of dadaist short films nominally about a particular trendy item or activity. And now he’s the spokes-comedian for Windows Vista, the “next-gen” operating system from Microsoft, and in that capacity he has a fully-functioning, armed and operational virtual existence.
And then, of course, there’s me. I have three years under my belt as a staff writer for a small weekly paper, an interesting and secure job as a writer/p.r. guy for a university, a few freelance articles published here and there, an agent who’s interested in representing my book idea, and this here wonderful blog. Not half bad for a 30-year-old writer. Most of my friends from the Columbia Writing Program can’t say the same for themselves; a few can say more (includin this very nice woman, about whom we may want to say more in the future). I make far less money than most of my high school and college friends—who are doctors, lawyers, businessmen—but I also have more freedom than they do and I probably enjoy my work, on average, more than they do. So I’m doing well, but I want to be doing famously well, and hanging out with Demetri reminded me that I’m not, and probably never will be.
I remember sitting in the offices of the writing department at Columbia one day, a few years ago, and contemplating the careers of my professors. They’d all published a few books, received some good reviews, written for national magazines, sat on fancy panels at literary conferences and been rewarded with professorships at an Ivy League university. And yet with the exception, perhaps, of one of the poetry professors, who’d won a Pulitzer, none of them were particularly well-known. More to the point, none of them were talked about.
What do I mean by “talked about?” It would look something like this:
INT: DIVE BAR, LOWER EAST SIDE OF MANHATTAN
[Two young men sit in a cramped booth in the dark corner of the bar. Johnny Cash can be heard faintly in the background. They’re smoking Luckys and have half-empty bottles of Pabst Blue Ribbon – which they refer to as “PBRs” – in front of them. They wear mesh trucker’s caps slightly askew and T-shirts with ironic retro slogans on them.]
HIPSTER #1: Hey, did you read Oppenheimer’s article in the new McSweeney’s?
HIPSTER #2: Yeah, it was alright.
HIPSTER #1: Yeah, it kinda sucked too, though.
HIPSTER #2: Yeah. I heard he’s reading at the KGB Bar this weekend. Wanna go?
HIPSTER #1: Okay.
FADE TO BLACK
When I’m honest with myself, I realize two things. The first is that although a scene like that could plausibly occur within the next five or ten years, it’s a best case scenario, and it would almost certainly be followed, in that best case scenario, by a career much like the ones my Columbia professors have had. Excellent, but not for the ages. The second is that I long ago chose not to pursue immortality (not that I would achieve it even if I pursued it).
I’m a procrastinator. I watch too much TV and read too many science fiction novels. I spend two or three hours a day reading political blogs. I exist substantially in communion with the ephemeral. I also, more to the point, am married and have a child on the way, and I have a lot of friends and am close to my family and I expect and want to be deeply involved in my kids’ lives. That’s the life that I want. I don’t want to be the guy who puts his career and his creative passion above all else. But there’s a cost to that. I won’t really ever be talked about that much by the public, or make a ton of money, or win a ton of awards.
Demetri, by contrast, has a real shot at that kind of celebrated life. He’s already had more recognition and made more money than most of the people on the planet. He’s also divorced and out of touch with most of his old friends; they’re casualties of his single-minded dedication to his craft and his career. He’s devoted his entire existence, over the past ten or so years, to his career, and it’s paid off, but at a price.
I don’t want to fool myself that the modesty of my success is directly attributable to my commitment to friends and family. It’s not, and there are famous, celebrated, ambitious people who are just as good as I am at being a spouse, a mother or father, a friend, etc. But nobodys gets to have it all, and part of growing up and becoming a man (or a woman) is accepting that.
