If at Birth You Don't Succeed (2 page)

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 name 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.

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 Z
ACH
A
NNER
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.