“What to the untrained eye looked like vegging out in front of the television was actually me silently plotting a way to crawl inside.”
“Looking back, I think my family raised me right. There were probably some lessons about decency and fairness and manners in there somewhere – who can remember? – but the main thing my parents and brothers taught me by example was how to appreciate pop culture and music. I want to thank them and also explain to them that I am their fault.”
Dave Holmes came into the public eye when he came in second in MTV’s first “Wanna be a VJ” contest in 1998. His memoir is divided into two distinct parts: before MTV and after. I was surprised how roughly half of the content covers his life leading up to that moment, and that he was already twenty-seven at that time. The first half of the book tells his story primarily through the lens of someone searching for their place in the world while hiding their true self beneath layers of self-effacing humor, deflection, and constant, forced socialization. Not to spoil things, but Holmes admits that he leaned so hard into being the fun guy at the party, being so social, that he failed out of his first year of college. Raised in an Irish Catholic household in suburban St. Louis, it wasn’t until he was in his third or fourth year of university, his second go-round, that he came out to a group of his close friends.
This book does several things well. It scratches the itch for my Gen X nostalgia by taking me on a journey through Holmes’s pop culture education. Even the chapter titles are popular songs of the eighties and nineties such as ‘Free Your Mind’ and ‘Wannabe.’ Like a trashy magazine (on paper!), it shepherded me through the pop culture cringe of the late eighties and early nineties. Holmes shared his experience of coming out as a gay man in the midst of the AIDS crisis and during the era of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. But the truly magical thing this book does is it makes me root for the average white guy with no special talent who beat out hundreds of other competitors on a reality show and then turned this into a successful, decades-long career. Holmes came in second place and he still won. He admits time and time again that he does not know how he lucked into these things despite all of the mistakes he made along the way. “Great!” you think. “Cool! Good for you dude. You are a white man in America in the nineties. It is practically your job to screw up and get rewarded for it.”
I know, I know, I sound bitter. But despite chewing over it, I have accepted the truth: I really enjoyed this book. Holmes is self-deprecating and admits that yeah, he lucked out through no special talent or hard work on his part. The thing that was special, and that most people figure out eventually after experiencing their own set of failures, is that he finally realized how unique his circumstances were and he worked hard to make the most out of this opportunity. There is even a section in his book about failing upwards and how he experienced this before making it to MTV. When he started getting regular gigs at MTV, he was still working part-time at his temp agency. This dude didn’t get fired for calling in sick and going on TV. Who else gets to do that? If I call in sick, I pace around paranoid in the supermarket worried that someone will catch me buying powdered donuts instead of paracetamol and turn me into the HR police.
I’m roughly the same age as Holmes and I remember that contest so well. Not because of Holmes, per se, but because he lost to Jesse Camp.
Holmes describes Camp like this.
“And then I heard the voice. Heeeeeeyyy everybaaahhhhdy…. It was the tall, emaciated model from the line on Monday morning and she was a dude. She was a dude with a variety of scarves tied at various places on various limbs, with outstretched toothpick arms, with a voice like the child of Carol Channing and an automatic pencil sharpener.”
The interlude titled Notes on Camp answered what I and many other people reading this book were looking for: what was Jesse Camp really like? The answer is not long but it is satisfying.
Whether I enjoyed this book because, like a Gen X Captain America “I get that reference,” then you may also like it. Holmes is a very good writer and, if he can make me tear through a book about the average American white dude somehow succeeding where countless others have failed, I call that a success.
