Once, for a split second in 2002, I thought I was famous.  My ego first began to swell when I did a book signing in Nashville and more than thirty people showed up.  Yessir, I thought to myself as I drove away from the bookstore that evening, the Mike train is rolling.

The next stop was Memphis.  The publisher put me up in the Peabody Hotel, a swankish old place.  Italianate marble doodads, pianist in the lobby, doormen in top hats, a fountain at the center of the grand lobby.  Not my standard Motel 6 or Super 8 situation. Also, the Peabody has world-renowned ducks.  The ducks live atop the hotel.  Every morning, a uniformed attendant gathers the ducks from their rooftop lodgings and escorts them to the elevator bank, there they enter the center elevator and descend to the lobby.  When the doors open, they waddle up a red carpet and into the marble fountain for a swim.  The ducks keep a punctual schedule and the carpet is always lined with tourists and hotel guests who turn out to witness the historic procession.

It was a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Nashville, and I got to the Peabody well after midnight.  Before I turned in, I set my alarm for five a.m. for the first in a series of telephone radio interviews. It seemed like my head hardly hit the pillow before I was live on the air, pretending to be awake.  But hey: such is the price of  fame.

By the time the interviews were over and checkout time arrived I’d had about four hours of sleep and looked like it.  Stuffing my clothes into my roller bag and slinging my backpack over one shoulder, I left my room and punched up the first available downbound elevator.

I was asleep on my feet when the elevator doors opened to a storm of flashbulbs.  My eyes snapped wide open and all I could see was a red carpet stretching before me and flanked by a sea of people, many of them squinting at me through viewfinders.  There I was, framed in the elevator door, unshaven, baggy-eyed and toting my own luggage.  The comic image was heightened by the fact that in those days I had long hair and dressed like I was raised by a wandering pack of country music roadies.

But all these people! So wild to see me! Just as I had my first coherent thought—Oprah must have picked my book!—the flashbulbs stopped and the titters began.  Then the lobby filled with laugher and I realized: In my fog, I had managed to intercept the elevator intended to collect the ducks.  I tried to zip out of the way, but the little wheels on my suitcase got hung up in the carpet, and I had to scuttle around for awhile until I got everything untangled and smoothed out.  By the time I escaped, I was as red as that rug.

That evening I arrived at the bookstore fifteen minutes early.  Chairs had been set up near a fireplace and seven people were already seated.  Seven people and still fifteen minutes to go, I thought.  We’ll hit double figures, easy.  Not bad for an unknown cheesehead in  Memphis.  All aboard the Mike train.  Just then the manager got on the P.A.  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “author Michael Perry will be here this evening to discuss his latest book—if you’d like to meet Mr. Perry, please join us in the chairs over by the fireplace.”

At which point, all seven people looked at each other in alarm, then split.

No one ever did show up.

Since then, things have gone fine.  I make a living, but I don’t need a security detail to go to Farm and Fleet.  And now when I go to Memphis I stay in the Super 8 where I belong.  But I like to think that now and then somewhere in this nation—possibly even in other parts of the world—someone will be sorting through a forgotten set of photographs or videos from that time they went to Memphis, and there I will be, a startled goofball in baggy shorts and scuffed boots, bound for a book signing where no one shows up, but for just that one split second at least as famous as a couple of ducks.

Mike Perry is an author and performer whose many book and CDs are available at The Local Store. “Ducking Fame” is excerpted from Roughneck Grace; reprinted here with permission of the Wisconsin Historical Society Press.