No. 114: Life After the Tour

The tour for YOUNG WORLD is technically not over. One more city (San Francisco), which will include a couple more days of high school shows and a public event in Petaluma. But that stop is in my favorite part of wine country, at a bookstore called Copperfield’s where the bookseller feels like family, and my partner is joining me the weekend after for a few days of vacation in Marin County. In other words, it’s less the end of the tour and more a gentle fizzle out.

The peak of the tour finished this past weekend — a furious build through 12 cities and 20 days to a big homecoming bash at the St. Louis County Library, where so many friends joined that it felt like some kind of ethereal scene at the pearly gates, where you’re greeted by all the souls you love. Our friend, Anna, threw the most glorious reception at her house, with a custom neon-orange YOUNG WORLD cake and a buffet so big that it had a menu board and a trolley filled with ice-cream sandwiches. Everywhere I turned, there was someone I cared about. So much so that when the night was over and my partner and I collapsed in bed at midnight, he said: “Now we know what our wedding would feel like.” I responded: “This might be better than a wedding.” Him: “Agreed.”

A wedding, after all, comes with politics — there’s always simmering tensions and drama and perceived slights, and here, there was none of that. Three weeks earlier, the NYC launch had a fraught quality to it. The feeling of stepping into the unknown, where the book might be a colossal flop or I might never find a way of organically talking about civic participation and current geopolitics without looking like a fool. The risk of forever being kicked back into my cubby hole as the “Fairy Tales Guy.” But now, we were at ease, both author and intimates. The book had gotten off to a flying start, two weeks straight a bestseller, and succeeded beyond expectation. I’d pressed the case for lowering the age-gate on the presidency in real, serious forums — PBS, Axios, CNN, Politico, and more. More importantly, I’d gotten home safe and healthy, without falling ill, the number one enemy on a long book tour. I had a summer ahead of blank-calendar days and routine and writing and friends and tennis and love.

For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt euphoric.

Euphoria is a curious feeling, because we confuse it with joy. But it’s not joy. It’s release. Some subterranean handshake between your conscious mind and your unconscious self, as if you’ve had faith in something deeper and surrendered to it, and now have reaped both the material and spiritual rewards. It’s as if you’ve let the caterpillar that you know you are become the butterfly you never knew you could be... but only for a moment. Because euphoria is ephemeral. It starts to dim. Not to darkness or depression, but to a fresh understanding. That it’s time to fold your wings and go back into the cocoon. Time to start all the way over.

I’m not quite back into my cocoon yet. I can feel my brain still processing. Little glimpses and memories I collected during the last few weeks, like little jigsaw slivers that haven’t yet congealed into a bigger puzzle.

There was the audience of 300 kids at an east coast high school, where everyone looked exactly the same. The same outfits, the same hairstyles, the same hollow-eyed stares. Is this what this high school looked like back in the 90s? Or was it more like what I remembered, with contrasting pockets of style: the skaters, the jocks, the goths, the prepsters… Two decades later, how had everyone been sanded down into one template? The algorithm, my mind theorized. Everyone using the same apps, watching the same popular videos and memes, deploying the same AI to do their homework. Instead of raging against the machine, they’d let their souls fall asleep to it.

Then there was the boy who refused to take a copy, even though a donation had given free books to everyone in their small class. When I offered one to him, he shook his head: “No one here gonna read a book.” (The girl behind him smacked him and said, “No one meaning you?”) It wasn’t what he said that stayed with me. It was the way he said it. The defeat in his voice, as if the idea of a book, even one in raging neon color, was a bridge too far.

Then there was the librarian who insisted on telling the juniors and seniors that I was gay in her introduction — because she wanted them to realize they could be comfortable with their own identities. I said it didn’t bother me, but it did. Why? Did I feel like I’d lose some part of the audience before I began? Did I still have little lurking pockets of internal homophobia? Or was it simply that I didn’t want any mention of my personal life to color an urgent message about these kids’ political futures?

Then there was the librarian in St. Louis that had so revved up the kids and prepared them for my visit that they’d created custom Revolting Youth t-shirts with a certain president depicted as a zombie on the front and ‘BENTON 4 PREZ’ on the back — plus a balloon installation, Revolting Youth banners, and YOUNG WORLD tablecloths. These were seniors in high school and perhaps the only ones on the tour where I hadn’t started the show to a sea of hollow stares that I needed to work hard to wear down. It wasn’t just the preparation the librarian had done that changed things. Telling kids an author is coming isn’t enough. It was the involvement. The visit belonged to them, as much as it did to me.

Then there were the kids who’d come from all over for the public events. Convincing their parents to drive them hours, across multiple state lines, to get there. This, in itself, could bring me to tears. But more than that — I kept wondering how this conversation began. How did a teenager figure out I was coming, then convince their parents to rearrange their schedules, drive long distances, and get a hotel room in a random city, all so they could come to a 90-min book talk? How did that house become a forum for this kind of literary adventuring? And how could we get other households to be that safe for readers?

Lastly, there was the book itself, which continued to stay with me, even after days and weeks on the road. That wild neon glow that screamed in every room it was in and on every bookstore shelf, demanding attention, like some kind of primal scream (or like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, a friend noted). I never fully assimilated the book into my ordinary field of view, the way I had other books on past tours. No matter how many times I saw YOUNG WORLD pulled out of a box or handed to a kid, something about it just seemed so different, like a magical talisman or some otherworldly grail. Nothing about it feels like it belongs to me, even now. Will that ever change? Or is this one just forever special?

There are other little memories that bob and float. They’ll come and go over the next few months, as I head back into the cocoon and turn to a new incarnation. Little by little, this Revolting Youth era will become a past part of me, the way Fairy Tale Guy was, like different facets of a polished stone, that exude their own kind of light.

But right now, I’m still in a liminal space.

I know I’ve changed because of this book.

I can feel it in every cell of my body.

I just can’t yet tell you how.

Until next week —