Аманда Палмер - The Art of Asking; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help

And the other thing , said Xanthea, sighing. I have friends who’ve played like a gajillion more open mics than me, who are taking it more seriously and gigging every single weekend. I mean, I get what you’re saying. But it doesn’t feel fair .

What do you mean it’s not fair? I said. They’re offering you the money because they like you… and your music, right?

I just mean… like, there’s an ORDER of things—a progression , she said miserably, looking guiltily at me, and then at Sam. And I’m not at that place where I feel like I’m allowed, you know, to get paid .

We both just looked at her and said, in unison:

Xanthea. TAKE THE DONUTS.

In the early days, The Fraud Police seemed to keep pace with my career. Despite write-ups in bigger magazines, airplay on radio and TV, and playing larger venues, the growing fame and all the outside eyes just made me feel more insecure, like I was pulling a bigger one over on everybody. On a bad day, the success did the opposite of reassuring me. Instead, it compounded my fears of not being real.

The volume of those voices in my head blaring you’re a total phony weren’t diminished by compliments from other artists, or by congratulations from my mentors, or even when my parents stopped asking me what I was really doing with my life (due, I feel sure, to the first time I had a show listed in the New Yorker , a press outlet that they actually KNEW).

What at last began to quiet the voices and dismiss the deep-rooted psyche-bashing work of The Fraud Police was simply this: after hundreds of signings, after talking to thousands of fans, I started to believe that what I did was just as useful as what they did.

They spoke to me directly. In the signing line. Over Twitter. A lawyer loved listening to my music on her long commute to work. An ecologist said my first album got him through final exams. A young doctor had a psychotic break during med school, and said that listening to my song “Half Jack” over and over again in the hospital had helped get him through. A professor had met his wife years before at a Dresden Dolls concert, and now she was in a coma following a car crash; he sent me a necklace of hers as a keepsake.

These were “real” people with “real” jobs, making society work. And there were a lot of them.

I would take in all these stories, and one by one, ten, a hundred, a thousand stories later… I had to believe it. I would hold these people in my arms and I would feel the whole synchronicity of life and death and music envelop us.

And one day I turned around and it had just happened without my realizing it.

I believed I was real.

I had just finished a gig in Perth and was driving to a fan’s house, to crash with the Australian crew, when Neil called me from New York.

He said, My dad just died .

What?

He died. My dad just died. He was in a business meeting, something happened with his heart, and he fell over, and he’s dead .

Oh my god, Neil .

What could I do? I was about as physically far away from him as I could possibly be. We had only been dating for about three months, but it was long enough to have started falling in love.

Do you want me to come to you right now? I’ll get the first flight out , I offered. I’ll just get on a plane and come be with you .

No, darling . He sounded like a zombie. Stay there. Finish your tour. Go to Tasmania .

No. I’ll come. Really. I want to .

No, don’t. I’m asking you not to. Stay there. Go make the people in Tasmania happy .

I felt so incredibly helpless. He was in New York City, literally about to start a signing for his new children’s book. It was midnight in Australia and eleven in the morning there.

I talked to him for a while longer, then hung up, feeling useless.

I was given our host’s master bedroom that night—I was feeling disoriented, and I slept with the phone clutched in my hand. Neil had as deep a connection to his fanbase as I did. I could just imagine him there, those first people coming up with their books in hand, and I imagined him losing himself in their stories, their faces, their details.

I imagined him signing every book very deliberately, focusing on the task at hand, thinking every once in a while, as the ink touched the page and he got lost in a millisecond of space: My dad is dead . I called him the minute I woke the next morning, but I got his voicemail.

I called Cat, Neil’s old friend, who was helping him out with the signing.

How is he? I asked. How was the signing? Is he okay?

You’re not going to believe this… but he’s still at it .

He’d been signing for seven hours straight, for 1,500 people.

I didn’t know what to do. Write him a long, heartfelt email? Send flowers? Both seemed ridiculous.

So I called my assistant at the time—wonderful, helpful Beth, who was also in New York—told her about Neil’s dad, and gave her instructions. She raced around the city to accomplish several tasks, and stepped up just as Neil was dedicating the very last book to the very last person, after eight solid hours of signing.

She placed a tomato, a schedule, and a banana on the table in front of him.

From Amanda , she told him.

Cat, who was standing off to the side, texted me:

You did it. I don’t know HOW you did it.

But he just actually smiled for the first time.