If at Birth You Don't Succeed Read online

  After a week online, my entry had received high praise from my mom and my childhood occupational therapist, but only a few hundred votes on the Oprah competition Web site, and there were other submissions that had already amassed millions. In a last-ditch effort to get my name out there, some friends, my brother, and I took a spontaneous trip to Dallas to audition for Oprah recruiters in person. When we arrived in the parking lot of a Kohl’s department store at dawn, there were already hundreds in line to try out. I was exhausted from driving all night, was generally unkempt, and probably could have used some deodorant.

  When it was my turn, I was ushered to a round folding table with twelve other hopefuls and given one minute to sell myself and my show to a casting director. Running on pure adrenaline and no sleep, I gave the most energetic pitch of my life. For someone who had barely remembered to put shoes on, I had surprising command of an audience. But to be honest, it’s all a blur now. I can only recall that at the end of my sixty seconds, the round table of other would-be Oprah protégés and exceedingly peppy recruiters cheered. Afterward, my exhausted motley crew and I slugged our way through the rides at the nearby Six Flags adventure theme park to pass the time while waiting to see if my impassioned speech had earned a callback. It hadn’t.

  As we drove from the amusement park to our crash pad at my friend Marshall’s grandma’s place, I got word from my college friend Chris Demarais that my audition video was doing well on a site called Reddit. He sent me a picture someone had posted of something that in all my wildest dreams I never thought I would see—my name scrawled out in permanent marker across a pair of naked breasts. Not only that, but it was spelled correctly! I had no idea what Reddit was, but I liked it. At that point, I thought my name had reached its peak, but the world had bigger plans than ZACH ANNER on boobs.

  On the evening of June 13, 2010, two weeks after the original posting, my video had picked up steam and garnered about twelve thousand votes, which made me very happy. There was no way I would ever catch up to the leading videos in the contest, but it was nice to see that I might have found a niche audience. Chris and I had tried to get my travel show off the ground for years, writing a treatment and applying for grants, but nobody seemed interested. Now people I’d never met were getting behind not only my idea but behind me as a person. It was a nice feeling for a guy who wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to hack it in the entertainment industry. The sting of the casting directors’ rejection faded and I went to bed satisfied with my new smattering of topless fans.

  I was woken in the middle of the night and carried out of my friend Marshall’s grandmother’s house, and then down the street to Marshall’s parents’ house, because they had Internet. Nobody would tell me what was going on. But my brother and friends sat me down in a chair and I could tell from the huge video camera in my face that either something extraordinary had happened or I was about to get a surprise kick in the nuts. My brother turned on the computer and pulled up the audition video I’d already voted for twenty times earlier that day. I was still three-quarters asleep as my childhood friend Andrew stood behind me biting his nails, waiting for me to realize what they already knew. Then I heard Marshall say from behind the camera, “Why don’t you just read how many votes you have there.” I looked at the screen in front of me and was overtaken by an excitement I hadn’t felt since I was a kid racing downstairs on Christmas morning.

  “What the BALLS is this?!” I sputtered in disbelief as it hit me that twelve thousand votes had miraculously skyrocketed into more than two million over the course of just a few hours. It was the most flabbergasting of all flabbergasts. And the only reason this happened was because of the name Zach Anner and the misplaced dedication of thousands of other people whose names I’ll never know.

  While I’d been peacefully dreaming about riding a humpback whale in a middle school gymnasium, my audition video had circulated through Reddit to the online community 4chan. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I later came to understand that 4chan is an online forum that is frequented by, among millions of other users, a controversial group of cyber activists called Anonymous who use their enormous Internet presence to turn the tides of the Web, depending on the whims of the masses lurking in the shadows behind their keyboards. To this day, I’ve never made a post on or even visited 4chan. But they thought my video was genuinely hilarious, and, as it turns out, a few posters saw another reason to get behind my irreverent pitch. A case of mistaken identity had made me an unwitting warrior in a battle against the Queen of Television that had begun years earlier.

  I suppose the absurdity of a guy in a wheelchair making jokes while wearing wigs and a dress might seem like the perfect prank to pull on Oprah, a personality some 4channers had decried as preachy and disingenuous. But it was my name coupled with my irreverence that started the perfect storm of online conspiracy theories. And it all came down to that H.

  It took me years to piece together the story of what happened with 4chan during the competition, and I’m still not sure I have all the facts straight. I don’t know when or why 4chan’s feud with Oprah began, but they had trolled their way onto The Oprah Winfrey Show before by making mayhem and outrageous claims. On those occasions, they’d communicated with the show’s producers by using the screen name Opr4h, substituting the vowel a with the number 4. Once my video was posted on the 4chan forums, it didn’t take long for them to start connecting imaginary dots that unearthed the biggest online cover-up to have never existed.

  It was at this moment that the potential in my name, which had been dormant for twenty-five years, awoke and started working its peculiar magic. Imagine you’re Tom Hanks in an underwhelming, sloppily scripted thriller we’ll just call The Da Gimpi Code. If Oprah becomes Opr4h, and you apply that same logic to my name, Zach becomes Z4ch, and all you need to do is be a little liberal with the spacing and use that serendipitously placed H … and Zach Anner becomes Z4channer … Z - 4chan - ner! And just like that, for better or worse, I had been adopted by the most controversial presence on the Web. Without even realizing it, I had become their star. The idea of me going head-to-head with the most powerful woman in show business on her own turf inspired thousands of deliberately anonymous people to vote thousands of times for the fake person, Z4chAnner. The real Zach Anner was, of course, oblivious to this.

  In the days that followed, the attention from 4chan and Reddit caused my video to go viral, eventually tallying nine million votes and earning me a spot on Oprah’s reality competition. But no matter how it happened, my audition was seen by a lot of people. For the first time the world knew my name, and they knew Zach Anner as the positive funny guy who wanted adventure. I was championed by everyone from John Mayer to David Hasselhoff and was suddenly featured in Time magazine, USA Today, and the New York Times, and on a bunch of TV shows: I was profiled by Sanjay Gupta on CNN, featured on ABC News with Diane Sawyer (but without Diane Sawyer), and brought my complete lack of balance over to the fair and balanced folks at FOX News. I received thousands of messages from complete strangers about how my video had moved them and changed their perception of people with disabilities. My name actually started to mean something bigger than myself; it meant hope and possibility to a population that had largely been ignored. And then things got ugly.

  Despite a general goodwill toward me that people rarely see on the Internet, there inevitably came rumblings of cheating on both sides. Ridiculous rumors circulated that Oprah was trying to rig the competition in favor of another contestant, and for a whole day the number one search on Google was “Oprah Hates the Handicapped.” And there were still people out there who thought I was just a big ruse. To them I was some con artist who, instead of posing as a billionaire prince from some obscure country, had opted instead for the much more glamorous persona of a guy in a wheelchair with a lazy eye who sometimes peed his pants if he laughed too hard.

  But amid the whispers of “cheat” and “phony,” I stayed true to myself. Whenever some shock-jock ra
dio host or a gossip site tried to get me to say something bad about Oprah, I wouldn’t engage in the negativity. I refused to speculate about why six million of my nine million votes were abruptly and mysteriously deducted from my video midway through the competition. I just shrugged and said, “The Internet’s a crazy place and I’m extremely grateful to everyone who supported me. And I’m a huge fan of Oprah.” Weathering that time period and toeing the line between gratitude toward Oprah and toward my fervent but unpredictable Internet saviors helped me realize why “Old Rough and Ready” might be the right nickname for me after all.

  When I was born, those who didn’t know me would have called my circumstances a tragedy. But my parents knew better. When they looked at me, what they saw was just a kid who was destined to take a different path than that of anyone else they’d known. They gave me the tools to explore and let me find my own identity. It took me years to figure it out, but nowadays when people come up to me on the street and excitedly ask, “Are you Zach Anner?!” I’m able to confidently say, “Yes!” because I finally know who that guy is. I’m a guy who’s been able to recognize that sometimes the only difference between mistakes and miracles is what you choose to call them. And the most interesting lives are the ones that have an equal mix of both.

  CHAPTER 2

  How to Win a Television Show

  “Four thirty in the morning, perfect time to get up!” said no one ever. Day Two of filming Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star began in the dark, or at least it did for me. Technically, we had a 7:30 a.m. call time for arriving at the studio, but I needed a full three hours to get ready for the day. My morning routine would be repeated and perfected at my new home in the Sheraton Universal Hotel in Los Angeles over the next several weeks. First, my best friend Andrew and I would exchange groggy morning salutations through the wall of our adjoining rooms and then, five minutes later, he’d walk in like a bear fighting tranquilizers, fussing with his glasses and absentmindedly playing with his ample chest hair while he waited for me to pick the perfect outfit for him to iron. My wardrobe for my audition video had consisted of a Speedo, a dress, and a chef’s hat. Somehow that silly video had made me a reality show star, and now I had to dress the part.

  Filming this TV competition was potentially a monthlong gig, depending on when you were eliminated, so I’d packed optimistically according to what I thought my prospects were: about five days’ worth of clothes. Upon realizing I’d only brought four pairs of underwear (and you need at least five), Andrew had made an emergency excursion to Target the day before, to make sure I wasn’t competing commando.

  “What color you wanna wear, Broseph?” Andrew asked as he ripped the plastic off the Fruit of the Loom five-pack. Today was important because it was the first elimination day and, not trusting in my actual ability, I put all my faith in my boxer briefs.

  “Let’s go with the purple ones. Those will be my new lucky underwear,” I declared.

  Like I always say, the best friends provide moral support AND ball support.

  Breakfast arrived at 5:00 a.m. with a knock on the door. Andrew answered it in a state of déshabille, greeting our formally dressed bellman, who I came to think of as a less enthusiastic, Indian version of Lumière, the candlestick from Beauty and the Beast. He wheeled in our morning banquet, asking eloquently, “How is morning?” before lifting silver covers from each item and announcing them as though the dishes were foreign dignitaries at a ball: “Orange juice … coffee … pastry … bacon…” and something he ingeniously mislabeled a “fruit melody.” I appreciated the pageantry for something that moments later I would be eating on the floor, still half-naked. Breakfast deserved reverence because it was the only meal I would allow myself to eat all day.

  My stomach had been a beast since high school. I couldn’t tame or reason with it, and it would unmercifully wreak havoc without warning. No matter how kind and careful I tried to be to my digestive tract, its mood swings were violently erratic. I was living with my own private Grendel in Tummy Town, where fruits, vegetables, enchiladas, and ice cream could happily coexist, until one misplaced bread crumb or Skittle would summon The Beast and the whole town descended into chaos. With no children to sacrifice and no Beowulf, the most I could do to appease The Beast was feed it and sedate it with Imodium. Since we’re all friends here, I have no problem dropping eighth-century Old English literature analogies to tell you that I need a good twenty minutes in the bathroom every morning … and by twenty minutes I mean forty minutes … and by forty minutes I mean at least an hour … just check back later! My self-imposed early wake-up call was to accommodate this very long engagement.

  I had a lot to prove on this competition. There was always the question of whether I could withstand the fifteen-hour days and be a serious contender. I knew my mind was up to the task, but like an elephant on a unicycle, it was a delicate balance getting my body to cooperate. After all, how would I be able to make a travel show that embraced the unexpected if I couldn’t thrive in a controlled environment in which makeup artists thanked me for allowing them the privilege of trimming my nose hair? In order to make the world more accessible, I was going to have to present the most accessible version of myself to the world.

  Andrew was there to make sure that no matter what transpired in the three hours before I headed out the door, I was 100 percent straightened, combed, pressed, primped, and brushed by call time (in the industry, they call it “wheels up,” just in case you want to feel cool). I was the only contestant out of the ten finalists allowed to have a friend/“medically necessary assistant” in his room at the Sheraton. Then again, I was also the only one with cerebral palsy.

  The compromise we’d struck with the production team was this: Andrew could take care of me before and after hours, but I couldn’t tell him anything about what was happening on the show. Since Andrew was a trained EMT, I presented him as a medical professional and neglected to mention that he had also been my best friend since third grade. Every morning he’d bid me farewell by saying, “Chew bubble gum,” a phrase co-opted from our favorite childhood video game hero, Duke Nukem, who, just before opening fire on his alien foes, boldly declares, “It’s time to kick ass and chew bubble gum—and I’m all out of gum.” With these three simple words, my best friend had found a way to subvert the OWN competition’s strict No Encouragement policy and chew bubble gum became our mantra. After we parted, Andrew could go off and have adventures in Los Angeles during the day, and an aide named Hershall would look after me on set, presumably to make sure I didn’t break or steal shit.

  Because of my filmmaking background, the prospect of reality television terrified me. Reality shows are based on drama and character, and I knew from my own experience working in the TV studio at the University of Texas that both were extremely malleable in the editing bay. My character was in the hands of producers I had only known for a day, and my fear was that I’d be presented as the helpless little boy in the wheelchair. By Day Two, I’d given them plenty of footage to support that depiction.

  The format of the show had ten finalists broken into two teams who competed by producing different types of mock-television segments with a new celebrity mentor each week—makeover segments, cooking segments, late-night talk show segments—basically, any form of TV that requires hosting. Then, the OWN competition’s judges, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’s Carson Kressley and Entertainment Tonight’s Nancy O’Dell, would judge the segments and someone from the losing team would be sent home.

  For the first challenge, we were supposed to do “Man on the Street” interviews with the guidance of Dr. Phil. Both teams were instructed to choose a topic for him to comment on, and I had come up with “How Technology Affects Relationships.” I was charged with the task of stopping people outside the Universal Studios Theme Park and talking to them about psychology. I’d done this type of thing a hundred times before when I was a show host for my student television station at the University of Texas, but how can one gu
y in a wheelchair surrounded by gigantic cameras compete with the magic of Harry Potter and genetically enhanced turkey legs? He can’t! They were setting us up to fail! It was an experience so disheartening that when I returned to the Sheraton at the end of Day One, I told Andrew to pack our bags. Given my volume of clothes, this took two seconds.

  In my mind, the only thing that could save me from the previous day’s disaster was a completely superstitious one—the newly anointed pair of lucky purple underwear I’d put on that morning. I didn’t think my magical boxer briefs could save me from elimination, but maybe, just maybe, they could spare me from a brutal public shaming by Dr. Phil, America’s Number One Disapproving Military Father.

  Dr. Phil is a large man with a looming presence. Immediately upon meeting my team, he had turned our joy and excitement about being on the show into mortal fear of being unqualified. Trying to be cool, I’d asked him casually, “What kind of dynamic do you like to have with folks onstage? What do I need to do to make you feel comfortable?” To which he’d humorlessly replied, “Don’t worry about what I need, worry about what YOU need to do. You are all incredibly unprepared.” I knew what I needed to do—crawl into a corner and suck my thumb for a bit! Usually it took people getting to know me before they were so disappointed. This was not a good start. In Dr. Phil’s mind, we had no business in television and should all be out digging ditches somewhere, and the last ditch we dig should be our own grave—’cause that’s just how useless we were. Or at least that’s how it felt.