Always Meet Your Idolizers

Every year, we celebrate the day Dave Barry met me.

By Zach Hively

​They say you should never meet your idols, that they can’t possibly live up to your expectations of them—they’re just people, after all; people like you, with hopes and dreams and families and problems of their own, people who just want to get home as fast as possible because don’t we all deserve to go to the grocery store without complete strangers interrupting our attempts to remember what all was on the list we left stuck on the fridge? 

However, they never say the same thing about never meeting your adoring fans. You should always meet the people who idolize you. There’s nothing better for your ego than being recognized in public and having your picture taken by people you have never met before and probably will never meet again.

I know, because of that time I went out of my way to meet one man trying to make a go of it.
This was 2006. Actual printed newspapers were still a thing. Yet, while the writing was still on the paper, it was also on the wall—and one journalist, if you can call him that, saw it coming. Let’s call him “Dave” because that is his name. Dave had been writing absolutely, critically serious social commentary for the Miami Herald for more than twenty years, yet he had failed to receive any recognition more widespread than national syndication and a Pulitzer Prize and, I don’t know, a dozen or so books with names like Boogers Are My Beat. 

But, knowing that the newspaper and fire-starter industry as we knew it was on its way out—or maybe just because he was ready for something different—Dave retired his weekly column and set out to co-author a series of novels for younger readers. This was a bold career move, because it was predicated on the gamble that books were not going to follow newspapers into obsolescence. 
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You want to know why else this was a bold career move? Dave and his friend Ridley were not only writing books for younger readers; they were writing officially-sanctioned fanfiction. Specifically, prequels to the famous Peter Pan stories created by J. M. Barrie and Disney. 

You want to know why this was even bolder? The publishers decided that Dave, whose entire readership was in the United States, and Ridley should go to England to promote this book—the very same England where the original Peter Pan stories were set. This would be like you and your bar-buddy deciding to fly to Tatooine to reboot Star Wars, or like flying to Coruscant to reboot Star Wars. 

In short: Dave, brave though we can imagine him to be, might have been feeling just a little bit out of his element. We can suppose. We are not omniscient narrators here, and our legal counsel advises us not to presume to know his feelings. So we will continue to speculate, vaguely, and most definitely not definitively. 

This is where I come in. I had been aware of Dave’s work for some time. I had not reached out to him to voice my support—that can be unnerving to an author contemplating a career change, or any career at all. But I would (anonymously, of course) submit occasional wacky news entries for consideration to his blog. This was in the days before we writerly types were concerned with creating “content”: Dave’s blog, while it was indeed a content generator, served me much more as a procrastination device at the time, and I was happy to lend a hand.

It was on this very blog that Dave (or his assistant, judi with a lowercase j) announced that Dave and Ridley would be visiting the UK for a media tour for their first book, Peter and the Starcatchers. Lo and behold, I was in the UK too! I am a US American, and in my view, the entire UK is about the geographic space of Delaware. It didn’t matter where in the UK these two would be promoting their book. I could reach it from Norwich within half a day. We were practically in the same neighborhood.

So I reached out to judi to inquire how I might best lend my support to Dave. She wrote back (and I could tell she was barely containing her excitement at my inquiry) that this media tour was largely stopping at BBC radio programs for interviews, and there really weren’t any public events per se, because no one (well, one person) on the entire island knew who Dave was. 

But … there might be one opportunity, she said. Dave and Ridley were scheduled to sign stock at Harrods in London on St. Patrick’s Day. This was not a public reading, but if I went and asked around, it was possible some clerk might let me in the back room to say hello.
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Now, this meant I would have to wake up early (on St. Patrick’s Day, no less) and while everyone else on this college campus (not an exaggeration) would be drinking Guinness at 8 am (also not an exaggeration), I would have to catch a train to London and then find a cabbie who knew where this bookstore called Harrods was located. 
Worth it.​

So I did. The cabbie and I had a bit of talking at cross purposes when I arrived in London, me not knowing that Harrods was not in fact a bookstore and him not knowing that I was, in fact, in certain very small circles, famous. But we worked through our differences and he dropped me off at the most ridiculous department store I had ever seen. (Considering that my most ridiculous comparison was probably Coronado Mall in Albuquerque, this may say more about me than about Harrods—though Coronado Mall certainly lacks the equivalent of Princess Diana paraphernalia near the escalators.) 
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I navigated the labyrinth until stumbling into the bookish section, where I asked after Dave and Ridley, and the bookseller pointed me to a small table set up with small stacks of books and two very real flesh-and-blood men standing behind it with no one around.
This was not a stock signing after all. This was a public event. And were it not for me saving their faces, they would be signing to a whole lot of nobody.

I picked up three books and, playing it cool, asked the two men to sign them for me. (One of them looked vaguely like Dave’s one-inch-square syndicated headshot, which made me confident I was in the right place.) The first one was for a friend back home. The second was for my sister. 

The final book, I said, was for me.
“What’s your name?” Dave asked.

“Zach,” I said. (Had I known then, like I do now, that my forthcoming book would be called Call Me Zach Hively Because That Is My Name, I might have better utilized this moment for product placement purposes.)

Dave started to write in my copy of his book. Then he stopped, stone cold. “Wait,” he said. “Zach. Are you the Zach who judi was talking with?” 
“I am,” I said. 

“Zach!” he said, and he shook my hand with a great deal of warmth and vigor. “judi is not going to believe you came. I have to take your picture to prove that you’re real.”

Of course, I let him. It was the most gracious thing I could do, considering the moment. Dave’s “CrapCam” was legendary among his blog readers, and true to form, the resulting headshot was, indeed, pretty crappy. By this point, one other person had wandered into the book room, and by all appearances had decided to buy a book to rescue these poor American authors from the even weirder American pinning them to their station. You can see her in my CrapCam photo.

But we had made a connection, Dave and me—and we conversed enthusiastically for several minutes about, oh, you know, this and that. It would be rude of me to spill.
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Eventually, he finished signing my book. “For Zach, my personal idol,” he wrote—thus providing me with the best future book blurb I would ever not be able to use, because my legal counsel advises me not to without Dave’s explicit permission.

I felt we could have talked all day. Part of me wanted to make all Dave’s and Ridley’s UK dreams come true by inviting them out for a Guinness—if we were very lucky, the pubs would still have the grotesquely large fuzzy Guinness hats, on which you could pin a button for every pint you consumed—but I also felt, as the celebrity, it was my best course of action to make a clean exit, so these two fine men would not feel any pressure to alter their media tour for the day.
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So we shook hands again, and I let Dave and Ridley sign the other person’s book, and I wound my way back to a return train to Norwich. 

That could be the end of that. But this is why you should always meet your idolizers: they just might inspire you in return. 

Several years later, I embarked on my own serious journalism career, writing serious social commentary for very serious newspapers (one of the very few still in print!) and websites. I dropped Dave and judi one more email—and why not—just to thank them for that day in Harrods and the inspiration it provided me for my own bold, reckless, even senseless career trajectory. 

“Congrats!” Dave wrote back. “Your Fellow Humor Professional, Dave.”

Dave is not dead yet, yet still his inspiration lives on in me—for better or (more likely) for worse. My forthcoming book, Call Me Zach Hively Because That Is My Name, compiles several years of my award-winning Fool’s Gold column, available in one place and with a legitimate cover for the first time. 

The publisher, Casa Urraca Press, is launching the book on Kickstarter in April. (You can sign up now to be notified the moment it goes live—giving you the best shot at early-bird access to advance reader copies.) ​

Other rewards include exclusive hardcover editions, giving books to libraries in support of (or to the detriment of) literacy, and joining me in cahoots for a Fool’s Gold column. 
After all, it’s readers like you who make our dreams come true. Maybe someday, some of you can be my personal idols.
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