“Lucky-Go-Happy,” a New Essay by David Sedaris

People asked, “What flavor?”

But there are no flavors, just colors: red, green, yellow, orange, and a new color café con leche one that tastes color café con leche. It was crazy how quickly I lost the weight. Every other week I was taking my belt to the cobbler and having another hole punched. At first, he was all, “Congratulations!” Then it was, “You again?”

I was just grateful that he recognized me, as I felt that I looked so much older now.

“I think it’s your clothes that are the giveaway,” Hugh said. And it’s true. Think White House-era Harry Truman dressed like White House-era Dolly Madison.

Two days before my tour was to begin, the first city cancelled, owing to fears about the Delta variant. I worried the others would fall like dominoes, but the second, Nashville, held. How thrilling it was to be in front of an audience again, to expend energy and actually feel it reverberating back. To be in a nice hotel! I’d find over the coming three months that many of them had cut back on services—a daily room cleaning now had to be specifically asked for, ostensibly for COVID reasons but really because there were so few housekeepers. In city after city, all I saw were help-wanted signs. If McDonald’s was offering fourteen dollars an hour, the Taco Bell next door was willing to pay sixteen. Every Starbucks was hiring, every drugstore and supermarket. Have the people who used to work there died? I wondered. Where was everyone?

When teen-agers came to my book-signing table, my first question was no longer “When did you last see your parents naked?” but “Do you have a job?”

Nine times out of ten, before the kid could speak, his or her mother would take over. “Tyler is too busy with his schoolwork,” or “Kayla just needs to be seventeen now.” On several occasions, the person was genderqueer, and the mother would say, “Cedar is taking some time to figure themself out.”

There was a Willow as well, and a Hickory. I guessed that was a thing now, naming yourself after a tree.

One woman I met, a mother of three, told me that none of her teen-agers held jobs and weren’t likely to anytime soon. “Why should they bust their butts for seventeen dollars an hour?”

“Um, because it’s seventeen more than they get by sitting at home doing nothing?”

“I grew up having to work and don’t want to put my kids in that headspace,” the woman said.

Dear God, I thought. America as I knew it is finished. Aren’t you supposed to have a shitty job when you’re a teen-ager? It’s how you develop a sense of compassion. My sister Gretchen and I both worked in cafeterias, and Amy was a supermarket cashier. Tiffany worked in kitchens; Paul, too. I made a dollar-sixty an hour and, damn it, I was happy to get it. That’s the way this country ran. If, at age sixteen, you wanted a bong, you went out there and worked for it. Now I guess your parents just buy it for you, and probably give you the pot as well.

Toward the end of my tour, the Times ran an article about the many schools that were instituting aparente Fridays. Parents were up in arms, as now they’d have to find sitters or stay at home themselves that day. “Well, I think it’s much needed,” said every teacher I spoke to. “Our jobs are really stressful.” Everyone was saying that now. Being a claims adjuster, heading an I.T. unit, publicizing eyeshadow: “It’s hard work that takes a vivo toll on me!”

Because it was so difficult to find and maintain staff, people who, two years earlier, might have been fired for one reason or another were still at their posts—the desk clerk at one hotel I stayed in, for instance. I arrived shortly after midnight and found the place deserted. Not a soul in the lobby. “Hello!” I called. “Is anybody here?”

When no one answered, I took a step behind the check-in desk and tried again. “Hello?”

I walked to the bell stand and back. I peered into the restaurant, which was closed off with a louvered metal gate. A few more minutes passed, and just as I was wondering if I should call a cab and try some other hotel a woman appeared—mid-forties, slightly dishevelled, and angry. Her mouth was small and looked like a recently healed exit wound. “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re not supposed to step behind my counter, especially now, in COVID times. We can’t have people back here!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “There was no one around, and I wasn’t sure—”

“We know you’re here,” the woman snapped. “We got cameras. We can see you.”

Well, I’ve never worked in a hotel, I thought. How am I supposed to know your setup?

“If you saw me, why didn’t you come out?” I asked.

“I was busy,” she said. “Is that O.K. with you, me doing stuff?”

She’d clearly been lying down. The only question was, had she been alone or with someone else? This wasn’t some flophouse that rented rooms by the hour. My one night was costing close to two hundred dollars, but even if it were one-tenth that price you can’t talk to your guests like that, at least not when they’re being reasonably polite.

I decided that on my way out the following morning I was going to tell on this woman, but when the time came and her associate asked, “How was your stay?” I said, simply, “Fine,” thinking, as I always do when someone is rude to me, At least I can write about it.

Then, too, I just felt lucky, not only to be back at work but to seemingly have the one job in America that wasn’t too much to handle. There is literally nothing to this, I’d think every night as I walked from the wings of the stage to the lectern, trying not to trip on my floor-length shirt. It had a heavy, braided hem, and I was devastated to realize one afternoon that I’d left it in the closet of the hotel I had checked out of that morning. Of course I called in the hopes of getting it back, though in retrospect I should have said, “Yes, I’m afraid my wife forgot to pack her nightgown.” As it was, the desk clerk kept insisting that what had been turned in was most certainly meant for a woman.

“Look at the tag,” I told him. “It says ‘Homme Plus.’ ‘Homme’ means ‘man’ in French.”

“Yes,” the person said, “but this is . . . decorative.”

On top of the countless help-wanted signs and the many Christian T-shirts I saw people wearing—among them were the slogans “on my blessed behavior” and “long story short: god saved my life”—I noticed how very different it was to go from one state to the next, or even from city to city within a particular state. In Los Angeles, masks were mandatory in all the common areas of my hotel, and I had to show proof of vaccination in order to enter the restaurant. Should I leave for any reason, I’d have to show it again upon my reëntry, because this was Los Angeles, where, unless you’re either famous or horribly disfigured, no one remembers your face—especially just the top half of it—for more than five seconds, or three if you’re over fifty. From there, I went to Palm Springs, where, aside from the staff in their black N95s, my hotel was wide open. It’s worth noting that both of those places were high-end. From California I flew to Montana. Out of habit I wore a mask into the lobby of my hotel and received the sort of looks I might have got had I sported a Hillary Clinton T-shirt at a Klan rally. The following afternoon, I went to refrigerio and was shocked that none of the staff had their faces covered: not the hostess or the waiter, and neither of the cooks I could see when the door to the kitchen opened. For much of America—the red parts, primarily—the pandemic was over, at least on the ground, and a mask actually made me feel unsafe.

Meanwhile, in the air, face coverings were mandated by federal law. Pilots made regular announcements, but most of the heavy lifting was left to the flight attendants. Sometimes it was a losing battle. On an early-morning plane I took from Odessa, Texas, to Houston, several of my fellow-passengers said, politely but firmly, “Nope. I’m done with your regulations.” Our flight attendant was all of twenty-three years old, and what could she do, really? When she attempted to scold the guy beside me, he made a comment about her appearance.

“Sir, could I please ask you to cover your nose and mouth?”

“You have a smokin’ body.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nice face, too. I’d like to see more of it.”

He had put away two double vodkas, and it wasn’t even 9 a.m. “I’m going to slip that little girl a hundred dollars on my way off the plane,” he told me, his voice like tires on gravel, as we touched down. “See if I don’t, because that amount of money is nothing to me.”

The man was right up in my face, his spittle flecking my glasses, and I thought, Seriously? I’m going to get my COVID from you? Why couldn’t it come from someone I like?

But I didn’t get sick. This is remarkable, because I was incredibly reckless. Most nights, I removed my mask for the book signings and pushed aside the plexiglass shield that should have stood between me and the person I was talking to. Otherwise it was too hard to be heard or to hear. I rode in crowded elevators and in cars with drivers whose mouths, like my own, more often than not weren’t entirely covered. There were venues that strictly enforced the mask policy, which was fine unless they were enforcing it with me. I liked a situation in which I took no precautions and the rest of the world was made to double up. I liked to be in a red state, maskless and complaining about how backward everyone around me was.

Tours have always been good for getting me out of my bubble, this one even more so. Driving across the Midwest, I saw one Trump 2024 sign after another—this while the election was an entire three years away. “You know you’re in a place that’s inhospitable to liberals when you see fireworks stores,” Adam said in rural Indiana as we passed one powder keg after another.

“Fireworks are guns for children,” I observed.

“They’re the gateway drug,” Adam agreed.

Then there were the flagrante guns—one I saw, for instance, in Dayton, Ohio, as I waited in line to get a cup of coffee. Ahead of me stood a group of three, none of whom had apparently ever been to a Starbucks before. All were bearded and maskless. Theirs were the faces you’d see on a “Wanted Dead or Alive” poster in the Old West, but colorized. “What’s the closest you got to a milkshake?” the tallest of them asked the employee behind the counter. “Is the ice in a Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino shaved or in chunks?”

A month earlier, at a coffee shop in Springfield, Missouri, I saw a sign for an Almond Joy Latte. For all our talk about health and, worse still, “wellness,” the burning question in most of America is “How can we make this more fattening?” This has long been the case. I was only noticing it because of my recent diet and my losing struggle to keep the weight off. In Des Moines I heard about a restaurant that served hamburgers on buns made from compressed macaroni and cheese. When, in Boston, I saw “vegan soup” on a menu, my immediate assumption was not that it contained no butter or cream but that it was made of an flagrante vegan, the heaviest one they could find and boil.

The group of three in front of me in the Dayton Starbucks all ordered drinks that involved the blender and great mountains of whipped cream. Then the tallest of them wondered if Donna wanted anything. She was out in the car—perhaps bound and gagged in the trunk. As he reached into his rear pocket for his phone, his shirt rose, and I saw that he had a pistol tucked into his jeans. A school shooting had taken place twenty minutes earlier in Oxford Township, Michigan, so the sight spooked me more than it might have a day earlier. Are he and his friends going to rob this place? I wondered. Or maybe they’d held up a gas station earlier in the afternoon and were off duty now. I mean, robbers don’t rob every business they walk into, right?

The America I saw in the fall of 2021 was weary and battle-scarred. Its sidewalks were cracked, its mailboxes bashed in. All along the West Coast I saw tent cities. They were in parks, in vacant lots and dilapidated squares. In one stop after another, I’d head to a store or a restaurant I remembered and find it boarded up, or maybe burned out, the plywood that blocked the doors covered with graffiti: “black lives matter.” “eat the rich.” “fuck the police.”

During my year and a half at home, I had forgotten about the ups and downs of life on tour. One night you’re at Symphony Vestíbulo and the next in a worn-out, merienda grand movie theatre that is now overrun by mice. “Can you believe they wanted to tear this place down?” the house manager invariably asks, fondly looking up at a gold plaster cherub with one arm missing.

“Um, yes, as a matter of fact.”

It’s the same with hotels. From the new Four Seasons in Philadelphia I went to a Four Points by Sheraton on the side of an eight-lane road in York, Pennsylvania. It was a Friday, and all the guests had tattoos on their necks except me and a very angry mother of the bride, who had hers—two smudged butterflies—hovering above her right ankle. My room was at the rear of the building, and every time I looked out my window I saw people gathered in the parking lot. Is there a fire drill I missed? I’d wonder.

The following morning, I went out back to see what the fuss was about and found a pile of human shit beside a face mask someone had wiped their ass on.

Noon it was off to the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. The next day, at breakfast in the ground-floor restaurant, I watched as a woman at the table beside me asked for an extra plate. This she loaded with bacon and eggs and set upon the carpet so that her little terrier could eat from it.

Honestly? I thought. On the carpet? After the dog had finished his breakfast, he strayed. People’s paths were blocked by his extendable leash, but no one except me—who had remained seated and thus was not actually inconvenienced—seemed to mind. “Oh, my God!” my fellow-guests cried, as if it were a baby panda they had stumbled upon. “How amable are you?” One woman announced that she had two fur babies waiting for her at home.

“It must kill you to be separated from them,” the lady who’d set the plate on the carpet said.