“Are you sure?”
“Wes! I wannoo dance too!”
“That music’s a little loud, isn’t it?” my wife asked.
“Nonsense,” I said. “Look at the baby. He loves it.”
“I can’t see his face because it’s buried in your chest.”
“You’re just gonna have to take my word for it. RAWK!”
My daughter ran up to the boy and hugged him.
“Whoa, hey, that’s not one of those evil hugs, is it?” I asked.
“No! I’m just hugging him. See?”
“Oh. Oh, carry on, then.”
We all started to rock, and I leaned into the baby and whispered in his ear, “I’m glad you’re here, son. I’m so glad you’re here.”
I wish I could tell you that everything that came after this little scene was blissful, but of course it wasn’t. There were still arguments and brothers shoving sisters and sisters shoving brothers, and more heartache and more worry and more everything. All the bullshit you sign up for when you start out doesn’t just go away. It goes on and on and on until you stop running away from it and start embracing it, until you realize that all the trips to the grocery store, all the nervous fretting at the playground, all the terrifying trips to the doctor are what truly matter. It becomes your reason for living, the thing that means more to your life than your life itself. It’s never gonna be perfect—no, it’s not. You’re gonna keep fucking up, and fucking up badly. But you can’t give up. You have to keep fighting to make things right. Because that’s what love is. Love means you never stop trying to be better.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There’s a certain deliberate thoughtlessness that goes into writing about your family. You have to be willing to expose things they may or may not want exposed, to potentially mortify them all for the sake of entertaining a bunch of strangers. This is especially true in the case of my children, who are still far too young to grab me by the shirt collar and be like, “Hey, Dad, IX-NAY ON THE PEEING IN THE OTTUB-HAY.” So I’d like to thank my family for their unending love and patience. You kids get an extra hour of TV as reparations. Pretty sweet deal, if you ask me.
I’m also indebted to my parents and my wife’s parents for their love and support and for all their free babysitting, because babysitting rates these days are complete bullshit. Seriously, fifteen bucks an hour? I didn’t see you build me a coffee table while we were out to dinner.
Professionally, I am again forever indebted to Byrd Leavell of the Waxman Leavell Agency for helping me see this project through. There are so many agents out there who don’t give a shit, but Byrd has never had a problem making time to answer my pointless emails and help me work through any sort of structural problem I have writing a book, making sure that book represents one clean, simple idea. If you’re a young writer and you have the fortune of getting a call from Byrd, hire that man. Hire that man and extract all the free drinks out of him that you can. He’s the bestest.
I’m also grateful to Patrick Mulligan and Lauren Marino at Gotham for their judicious editing, along with production editor Erica Ferguson, copy editor Mary Beth Constant, proofreaders Rick Ball and Anne Heausler, designer Spring Hoteling, production supervisor Bob Wojciechowski, publicity manager Anne Kosmoski, editorial assistant Emily Wunderlich, and the art team of Monica Benalcazar and Stephen Brayda, who created a brilliant cover. It was incumbent upon me to write something that lived up to that cover, and I hope I did.
There were a handful of friends and colleagues who gave me advice and/or support during the writing of this book, and I’d like to thank them all, including my wife, Howard Spector, Jesse Johnston, Spencer Hall, Justin Halpern, Will Leitch, Matt Ufford, Jack Kogod, Peter de Saint Phalle, and more. I owe a big thanks to Tommy Craggs and AJ Daulerio for championing me to the powers that be at Gawker, and to Scott Kidder and Nick Denton for bringing me on board full time. I’m also grateful to Jim Nelson and Devin Gordon at GQ for taking me in and giving me access to their secret vault of man-scarves and steampunk apparel.
Finally, my youngest son would not be alive today without the care of all the doctors and nurses at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital in Gaithersburg, Maryland. I will never stop being grateful to them. I feel like a smaller man when I consider the amount of skill and mental fortitude they need to do their jobs every day. I couldn’t do that. That’s real work. I remain forever in awe of all of you. Thank you for saving our boy.
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