Not meeting the one who, perhaps thankfully, got away.
Meeting my Heroes is an occasional essay series from Matt Carmichael.
[This is the final installment of Meeting My Heroes, for now at least. HOWEVER, I’m hoping to pull this together into a book, with your help. I’ve launched a kickstarter to cover publishing costs and you could also be my hero for backing it. Regardless, thanks for subscribing and reading this project and I sincerely hope you’ve enjoyed!]
I’m watching Northern Exposure with my family at the moment. There’s a scene early on where Maurice, the uber-masculine-yet-complicated astronaut founder of the town, is talking about how John Wayne was his boyhood hero. Right until he learned that Wayne didn’t do his own stunts, or take his own hits or do his own fighting. When he learned that, he said, his hero was “given feet of clay.”
Maurice is from a bygone era, portrayed on a show that itself is 35 years old. John Wayne was his hero. But so was the poet Walt Whitman. Here’s what he said about Walt Whitman and heroes:
“I don't give a damn if Walt Whitman kicked with his right or his left foot. Or that J Edgar Hoover took it better than he gave it or that Ike was true-blue to Mamie. Or that God-knows-who had trouble with the ponies or with the bottle.
We need our heroes.
We need men we can look up to, believe in. Men who walk tall.
We cannot chop 'em off at the knees, just to prove they're like the rest of us.
Now, Walt Whitman was a pervert, but he was the best poet that America ever produced. And if he was standing here today and somebody called him a fruit or a queer behind this back, or to his face, or over these airwaves, that person would have to answer to me.
Sure, we're all human. But there's damn few of us that have the right stuff to be called heroes.”
I have now written about 70,000 words about more than 75 of my heroes. Each story has been mostly complimentary. To go back to the original premise, if you are afraid to meet your heroes, or meeting them disappoints you, you should maybe get some better heroes.
The last two chapters were about heroes in their own right, Zoe Keating and Amanda Palmer. I was glad to tell their stories and mine. When I interviewed them, I hoped they could also help get me closer to my great white whale. (That’s a reference to Moby Dick, which was written by Herman Melville. I have not read that book on the advice of my sister. However Jane has always used “Extreme Ways” by the musical Moby as her walk-up music in softball. Moby, is named after Moby Dick because Moby was supposedly, but not really, related to Melville. I didn’t meet Melville, of course, but I have met Moby.)
Anyway.
I agree with Maurice that people need heroes. However I don’t think they have to be larger than life like John Wayne or astronauts. I think I’ve presented a pretty broad range of heroes in this collection.
America is obsessed with celebrity. Celebrities gets conflated with heroes. We’re bombarded by action films recycling old heroes like Super Man or making up new ones. Some of us grew up with flawed normies who became heroes like the “Greatest American Hero” or the Incredible Hulk.
We build our heroes up, sometimes. Part of the problem might be that we learn “the hero arc” in English class as the ideal way to tell a story. As a result we are surrounded by heroes stories and try to make everyone out to be a hero, or an “everyday hero.” We’re taught that first responders are all heroes. And many, maybe even most of them are. But some… aren’t.
Bowie was a hero every day and thought everyone had a chance. He sang that we can all be heroes, at least for one day.
But maybe we shouldn’t try too hard. We should keep heroes rare and rarefied. Because heroes are people too.
70,000 words in and I’m still wrestling with this idea of what even is a hero.
Part of the reason I’m wrestling with the definition is because of the one that got away.
Which brings us to Neil Gaiman.
Sigh.
I loved American Gods. I loved Good Omens. I loved his short stories. I loved him on Twitter (a fallen hero of a platform) and how human he was but also he was clearly just smarter and more clever and witty than the rest of us but still hung out on social media with us. He’s replied to me on Twitter and retweeted things. Then he joined Tumblr!
He had a habit of signing his books in airport bookstores while waiting for his flights. Just casually popping in with his fountain pen and hoping no one would notice. He seemed to care a lot about his “stealth signings.”
He tweeted about doing this at LaGuardia one time. He actually got caught. His tweet read, “I signed a bunch of copies of NORSE MYTHOLOGY today in NY LaGuardia terminal B. I DID talk to the shop assistant. Her: "Er, why are you doing that?" Me: "It makes people happy." Her: "Oh. Okay. I'll put them back on the shelf for you." No police were called.”
I was sitting in the New York Public Library soaking it in before a flight home. I read the tweet, closed my laptop and hopped a cab to LGA. I searched a couple of book stores and nothing. So I tweeted, “The guy at the pre-security store wishes you had specified which gates or airline. Heh. He’s had three people ask so far.”
NEILHIMSELF REPLIED in a timely fashion, Air Canada area,” and I then had to talk my way through TSA with a boarding pass for the wrong part of the terminal. I think the TSA guys determined I was too much of a nerd to be a threat. And that’s how I came to own a signed copy of Norse Mythology, which I still treasure.
I had so much respect for him as a writer. I loved his turn on Master Class. Kids (tho not mine) grew up with Corallai. My kids didn’t love that book. But they did love watching Good Omens. My kids did grow up hearing me talk about Gaiman. We watched in the pandemic as he did a virtual book signing of Pirate Stew with the illustrator, Chris Riddell. I drove to Madison to finally see him in person at a reading he did, and I bought each of my kids their own copy of his “Make Good Art” graduation speech.
I came close to interviewing him for What the Future but eventually was rebuffed. Twice.
I kept trying. Hoping I’d have the right hook or angel to get him to bite.
And then….
The first allegations surfaced. And then the New York Magazine piece ran. In an actual way, Neil Gaiman was a pervert. At best. At worst, he was a lot worse. [Note, he denies the worst bits.]
So I’m ending this series of meeting my heroes, for now, with the one I wrestle with. I mean, what if it turned out that Lou Reed or Robin Williams were not great humans? From all accounts they were (Lou was maybe challenging for some…) But what if…
Everyone needs to do their own calculus about canceling artists and what happens to their work. Netflix and Amazon did their math and cut ties. Neil even stepped away from the work (TV’s Good Omens, and the graphic novel that was being created) in the hopes that the art could continue without him. I had supported the Good Omens kickstarter to get a copy for Meredith and we were given the option to withdraw when the allegations surfaced. I asked her what she wanted to do and she decided that as long as he wasn’t personally profiting in any way it was still good art.
He wasn’t, unlike, say, JKR, so we kept our pledge.
“Make good art” is still a good mantra. American Gods is still a good book with a powerful idea about technology. Good Omens and Sandman are parts of the fabric of our world.
In the end, it’s math, and choices and trade-offs. And the heroes we want to meet. Neil’s definitely not a hero anymore. At least as a human.
Yet I’d like to ever give as good a speech as Make Good Art.
I didn’t stalk him in Madison (I did see my friend the Mayor, with whom I always had good conversations). But had I met him or had I landed that interview, I would have been tempted to include it here. The conversation would have been brilliant and full of life lessons. Because that’s how he is and what we would have talked about.
Also in the end, and this is the end for now, everyone would write all of this differently. Everyone has a different constellation of stars. A different pantheon of heroes. I hope you’ve learned something about mine, and something about me in the process.
Your views of what makes a hero and what doesn’t will vary.
However, dear reader, to go back to the spoiler from the introduction, I hope you surround yourself with interesting people and meet as many of your heroes as you can. If you’ve chosen well, they won’t disappoint. If you can’t meet them, read about them. Listen to them on podcasts. Soak up what you can, where you can. It’s all worth it, I say watching a 6 hour documentary on Billy Joel, whom I haven’t and likely will never meet. But man, those songs…
I have told a lot of stories. All of which are my story. There’s an idea that gets attributed in various ways to various people but boils down to, “the author is necessarily the hero of his own tale.” In today’s parlance it’s having main character energy or vibes.
So yeah, I’m the hero of my story. In some ways you’ve met me too. I get that it’s an odd way to tell my story. There are huge parts missing. I haven’t told the story of my friends really. Or my family. Therefore you haven’t heard about the people who are really important to me day-to-day and decade-to-decade.
Maybe that comes next.
You’ve seen some people who you might kind of know already, but now through my eyes. And a bit of me through my eyes.
Mostly you’ve succeed in my dad’s advice. If you’ve made it this far, you’re a reader.
And that’s the best note I can think to end on.
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