If at Birth You Don't Succeed Read online

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  For my mom and dad,

  who gave me life

  and a sense of humor about it

  INTRODUCTION

  … Well, Why Don’t I Start?

  It’s 8:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning and I’m bouncing on a trampoline surrounded by a film crew, shouting jokes into a camera. Soon, the doors of the Jumpstreet trampoline park in Austin, Texas, will open to a flood of children on their way to the best birthday parties ever, but for now it’s empty and cavernous as my friends struggle to steady their cameras and boom poles while catapulting me up into the air like a rag doll. I’m thirty years old and being professionally silly is what I do for a living—or at least part of it.

  I’ve been a comedian, hosted travel shows, explored world religions, started improv troupes, given keynote speeches at conferences around the country, and had a milk shake named after me called the Handicappuccino. I was also briefly an Oprah protégé and the subject of a John Mayer song (sadly, it wasn’t “Your Body Is a Wonderland”). Not bad for a guy in a wheelchair who almost flunked out of kindergarten and whose only degrees are a GED and an honorary “Ducktorate” from the Disney College Program.

  But on this cold February morning, I’m a fitness guru and we’re filming an episode of my YouTube series Workout Wednesday. The theme of this ridiculous installment is “Bouncing Back,” and I’m shouting every random esoteric pop culture reference I can think of to sell my audience on the idea that the greatest failures can also be catalysts for triumph. For me, that’s been true from the start.

  When I was born, instead of waiting to become an angelic, full-term bouncing cherub, I showed up two months early to my own birthday party as a three-pound, seven-ounce screaming hairless mole rat of a boy, kept alive by a series of tubes that would later become known as the Internet. I take full responsibility for this kerfuffle. Even though my mother was involved in the process, she’d gone through the whole ordeal with my brother a year earlier and he’d turned out great. There’s no denying it: I was a crappy baby who failed his way into this world and I’ve been making the best of it ever since.

  As a result of my untimely birth, I have cerebral palsy, which I guess, if you wanna get technical about it, is a neurological condition that can affect motor skills, speech, and mobility to varying degrees. In my case, it means that my movements resemble that of a marionette whose puppeteer is having passionate maritals behind the little red curtain. I use an electric wheelchair because I have no sense of balance and muscle spasticity has arched my spine like a cat’s, while my legs are really just for show. I also have a lazy eye, but I believe that has less to do with the CP and more to do with the fact that as a baby I was operated on by an ophthalmologist who’d previously performed surgery only on giraffes. With my eyes unable to track, I never read, and I can’t type, so I never thought I’d write a book, yet here you are, reading the first pages of my memoir like a champ. As it turns out, I’m somebody who was born in the wrong month, but at the right time to tell his unlikely—though not unlucky—story.

  My success is as much a product of the age we live in as anything else. I gained notoriety thanks to a viral video, I got to work for Oprah thanks to the format of reality TV, I traveled the country using suggestions from the Internet, hell, I even met my girlfriend on Twitter. We’ve worked together on this book over Skype and Google Docs, while she was living in Berlin and I was six to nine time zones away in the United States. If I had been born only a few decades earlier, I might have been some mysterious recluse confined to a decrepit mansion who writes poems about what grass must feel like. Instead, I’ve lived a vibrant life and get to share my story with you.

  In the following pages you’ll read about all my career peaks and my many romantic valleys. You’ll get a behind-the-scenes look of what it’s like to work at Disney World and also what it’s like to narrowly avoid self-castration. I hope you’ll find these stories relatable, humorous, and meaningful, because if not, there’s just a lot of really embarrassing shit in here. Some of these stories would have been too personal and painful to share if I didn’t think they had the potential to help other people feel a little more comfortable in their own skin. For better or worse, I have now published all the things that up until this point I was too ashamed to tell my mother.

  My life didn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me before I started writing this book. How on earth did I get my own TV show from the most powerful woman in the world before I had my first kiss from a girl? How did somebody who couldn’t get a job cold-calling people for magazine subscriptions end up in the entertainment industry? How did a kid who was unable to legally obtain a driver’s license blossom into a man who was trusted behind the wheel of the Mars Rover? And how did a guy who regularly falls off toilets make friends who would literally carry him up mountains? What I’ve learned from taking a bird’s-eye view of my life so far is that the good fortune I’ve had has come from seizing not just my moments but my mistakes. I might not be able to tie my own shoelaces, but if there’s one skill I’ve perfected, it’s the art of finding the humor and the purpose in every failure. I’ve accepted that we’ve all got crap to deal with and problems that we’re fighting not to be defined by. At the end of the day, we all want the same stuff: fulfillment, love, support, comfort, and a hot-air balloon with laser guns attached to it. The most important thing is that we appreciate the crazy ride we’re on.

  The “Bouncing Back” Workout Wednesday episode ended with my friends launching me into a trampoline wall in an epic wipeout. As I lay there, sweaty and bruised, the only thing I had energy left to do was nurse my whiplash and go get some breakfast tacos. But then my friend and cameraman Chris Demarais came up to me with a twinkle in his eye and said, “You know, this place has a mechanical bull. Would you be up for filming another one?”

  I considered my exhaustion and the risk of injury, anticipated the impatient line of gawking eight-year-olds, and decided to grab the bull by the horns.

  “Sure,” I said. “Just let me catch my breath.” Because I knew that no matter how this shook out, getting creamed on a trampoline and riding a mechanical bull is a pretty badass way to spend a Sunday morning.

  Giddy-up!

  I

  Oprah to Nope-rah

  CHAPTER 1

  What’s in a N4me?

  I grew up watching a lot of plays because my mom worked for Buffalo’s annual Shakespeare in the Park, so I can appreciate the Bard’s work for the sword fights and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups I’d get at intermission. I look back fondly on those summer nights spent sitting on a blanket, lathering up in bug spray, and crawling through the crowd to see if I could charm my way to even better snacks from strangers. Whenever the soliloquies bored us, my brother Brad and I would scamper off to the playground and stage duels with plastic dollar-store swords. No matter how vigorous the battle, we’d always try to make it back to
the hill in time to catch the real fencing between the Montagues and Capulets onstage. I must have seen the “good parts” of Romeo and Juliet forty times as a five-year-old.

  But when I was old enough to actually read and comprehend the ill-fated tale of the two Italian teenagers, I took exception to some of Bill’s poetic assertions, in particular his hypothesis that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Even at twelve, I knew, in my heart of hearts, that this was absolute rubbish. If roses were known as “break-up-me-nows,” a long-stemmed dozen delivered to your girlfriend’s office on Valentine’s Day would do a pretty decent job of killing the mood, and if you called a rose a “blooming colonoscopy,” nobody would care how lovely it smelled and I guarantee you that Dame Maggie Smith would not attend your garden party.

  Now, Shakespeare’s poetry might be enough justification for two angsty teenagers to fall in love and kill themselves, but let’s be honest—that’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. I’m not saying who’s the better writer here, me or Shakespeare (I’ll leave that up to you to decide after you read my chapter on manscaping)—all I’m saying is that names matter. I know this because without my name, my life would have taken a completely different course. I would go so far as to say that if my name was anything else, no one would care who I was. This book would not exist. Whether you want to call it fate, destiny, or a coincidence of star-crossed letters, my name and my path were intertwined from the day I was born.

  If my dad had had his way, I might’ve been known as Trondor. Tron was a very popular movie in the early ’80s, but I’m glad I didn’t wind up as a twenty-nine-year-old whose namesake was a fictional DOS-based computer program on a scooter (although, on reflection, he would’ve gotten the scooter part right). The other name at the top of my dad’s list was Benjamin. And Benjamin Anner doesn’t sound half bad! You know, like the type of guy who might wear cardigans and Oxford shirts and cultivate a dry yet biting wit. But that wasn’t what my dad had in mind. He wanted me to adopt the abbreviated “Ben,” so that when paired with Anner my name would become Benanner. Yes, that’s right, my own father wanted my name to be a play on the word “banana.” I don’t want to make assumptions, but I’m pretty darn sure that the only person willing to embrace the nickname “Benanner” wears Hawaiian shirts and tube socks with sandals, has a police scanner on his paddleboat, and goes to strip clubs for the buffet. I’ve had a plethora of nicknames in my lifetime, but thankfully, none were as damning as that.

  I grew up being called “Zachy” by my grandma. The kids at school called me “Zach Attack,” except for one of my fellow occupational therapy patients who had Down syndrome and would excitedly exclaim “Zach Morris!” every time I rolled into a room, and then, upon learning that I was not the popular character from Saved by the Bell, was repeatedly disappointed. There were other nicknames too. My brother and I interchangeably called each other “Fuckface.” After my parents’ divorce, my mom’s boyfriend Greg joined in with my family’s crude but loving sense of humor and decided to call me by the endearing nickname “Dickless,” whereas my best friend, Andrew, chose to go with the affirmative, often just referring to me as “Dick.”

  Then there were the names that I gave myself: “Sergio” and “Eduardo” (when I went through my Latin lover phase), and, when forced to shuffle down the street with my walker, I would occasionally even adopt a female persona, donning my mother’s barrettes and shifting my already ultra-girly prepubescent voice up an octave to become “Zacharina.” Since walking was a tedious activity that only served to remind me that I couldn’t move like other kids, I had to spruce it up with something fun that normal boys would do—like cross-dressing!

  Of course, there were also the names that invariably come with being born with cerebral palsy and using a wheelchair. Cripple, retard, spaz, gimp, and a whole bunch of other things whispered under somebody’s breath in the hallway or shouted in the heat of a floor hockey match in gym class. Thankfully, the only name that stuck was the one I was given at birth.

  I came to be known as Zach Anner through tumultuous circumstances. When my mother went into labor with me two months ahead of schedule, the time my parents had to think of baby names was cut short. So my mom, who had always liked the name Zachary, named me after a US president no one really knows or cares about, Zachary Taylor. The most notable and only thing I ever learned about him was from the dictionary with all the presidential portraits in my dad’s house. He was the one president in that book wearing a sword in his painting, which to my six-year-old mind made him cool enough to be my namesake.

  My parents’ reasoning was not sword-based; they felt Zachary suited me because of President Taylor’s nickname: “Old Rough and Ready.” This didn’t seem to fit with my premature arrival at three pounds, seven ounces, and my five-week stay in an intensive care nursery; the name was just wishful thinking that someday, no matter how rough things were, I would be ready. But the only thing I was ready for when I was born was not dying. And then not dying progressed to living. At the time of my birth, living well was nothing more than a hope. It would take a long time for me to make good on the promise of “Old Rough and Ready,” but in some ways, I owe both my identity and my career to my name.

  For the first quarter century of my life, my birth name was the subject of little controversy and served merely as a way for people to identify me and get my attention without shouting “Hey, Wheelie McMuffin!” or “What up, gimp?” In fact, the only point of contention surrounding my actual name was how it was spelled. People tend to treat the name Zach like it’s the word “Chanukah,” like you can just start with a Z, put a vowel in the middle and some consonants at the end, and you’ll wind up with something acceptable. That’s not true. My name is Zach. Z-a-c-h. Four letters. That’s all you need to remember.

  It was important to my mother that I learn how to spell my own name, especially since my dad often misspelled it. I am an “H” Zach. I was not a “K” Zack. I did not go surfing and put lemon juice in my hair to make it unnaturally blond. Driving this point home to my teachers probably got my mother the reputation as one of those moms. But as a six-year-old who could neither enunciate nor project, or even hold his head up very well, people automatically assumed that a physical disability was indicative of a mental one. There’s no better way to unintentionally reinforce this misconception than answering the question “How do you spell your name?” by shrugging and saying, “I dunno, whatever.” So while it might have seemed overzealous at the time to place such importance on a single letter, my mom fought for that “H,” and in the end, it was that letter that made all the difference. In the years between when my name became important to me and when it started mattering to anyone else, I paid little attention to it and focused instead on my dreams of stardom.

  When we were growing up, my dad constantly filmed my brother and me with his enormous Panasonic video camera, which recorded direct to VHS tapes via a cable attached to a separate tape deck the size of a Ghostbusters pack. Whether he was shooting us licking the cream fillings of Oreos and sticking them to the wall behind the couch or blasting cap guns and covering ourselves in fake blood, my dad encouraged a flair for showmanship and a passion for filmmaking in both his sons.

  I love making videos almost as much as I love making people laugh. In high school, I would show up with a handicam, drifting from table to table in the lunchroom and filming pre–YouTube-style vlogs, which I called The Zach Show. My intrusive and incessant filming of my peers ensured that instead of being known as just “that kid in the wheelchair,” I was rebranded as “that obnoxious guy with the camera.” Later, after transferring to film school at the University of Texas at Austin, I starred in a sketch comedy show called That’s Awesome! where I gained the reputation of being the hilariously offensive guy who could get away with saying anything. But being crass just for shock value quickly lost its appeal, and as I matured, I shifted my efforts toward projects that meant something, that I could be proud to attach my n
ame to. I worked very hard over a period of several years turning Zach Anner, the insult comic, into Zach Anner, the optimist adventurer and all-around positive wheelchair-bound lady magnet.

  In the summer of 2010, when I was twenty-five and living in Texas, I became associated with one of the most recognizable names in all the known universe—Oprah Winfrey. At the time she was launching the Oprah Winfrey Network and had a promotional competition where anyone could pitch their “OWN” show. Basically, you’d pick a show category—cooking, health and well-being, fashion, finance, pop culture—and post a short video audition. The public would vote and the top ten hopefuls would then face off on a reality competition called Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star, where one contestant would ultimately win a season of their TV show. Over fifteen thousand people made submissions, so my mom figured that I had a pretty good shot and eventually convinced me to enter.

  My video entry began with a simple introduction, “Hi, my name is Zach Anner, and I have something called cerebral palsy—which I believe is the sexiest of the palsies…” I then explained why I would be a horrible TV host for each of the proposed categories, showing myself burning toast on a stove while wearing a chef’s hat, modeling a sparkly dress and my grandmother’s wig as the least convincing drag queen since Wesley Snipes in that To Wong Foo movie, and tumbling through improvised yoga poses in a revealing paisley Speedo.

  After a minute of pointing out everything I sucked at, I spent the last two describing my concept for a show I’d actually be perfect for: a travelogue for people who never thought they could travel; a show that would inspire the audience to go out and see the world. I wanted to urge everyone to embrace the spontaneous and unexpected nature of globe-trotting through a sense of humor. I closed the video with a rousing promise that my show would prove that “no mountain is too high, no volcano is too hot, and no Atlantis is too underwater or fictional!” In the end, I thought I did a pretty good job selling myself as a television personality for someone with a seven-dollar haircut and an oversize shirt, but just because I put the video up didn’t mean that anyone would see it or care.