Sleepwalk with Me and Other Painfully True Stories / Mike Birbiglia
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Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 www.SimonandSchuster.com Copyright © 2010 by Mike Birbiglia All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020. First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition October 2010 SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949 or [email protected]. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com. Designed by Nancy Singer Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Birbiglia, Mike. Sleepwalk with me and other painfully true stories / Mike Birbiglia. p. cm. 1. Birbiglia, Mike. 2. Comedians—United States—Biography. I. Title. PN2287.B45463A3 2010 792.7'6028092—dc22 2010018393 ISBN 978-1-4391-5799-2 ISBN 978-1-4391-7565-1 (ebook) To my parents, Vincent and Mary Jean. If it weren’t for your support of my many delusions, I would not have been able to write this book. Also, don’t read the chapters about yourselves. Also, I love you. CONTENTS Don’t Tell Anyone I Have Something to Say! Delusional Please Stop the Ride Goddammit Like Hell Patti and the Bear Going Places The Deal I Can’t Stop! My Hero Something in My Bladder The Promise of Sleep Sleepwalk with Me One More Thing Thank-Yous It’s January 20, 2005, and I’ve just performed at a college in Walla Walla, Washington. Now I’m staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn. Some people correct me when I say that. They’re like, “No, it’s La Keeen-tah.” I’m like, “That’s not fair. You can’t force me to speak Spanish. I didn’t press 2.” I’m asleep, and I have a dream that there’s a guided missile headed toward my room and there are all these military personnel in the room with me. And I jump out of bed and I say, “What’s the plan?” And the soldiers say, “The missile coordinates are set specifically on you.” And I say, “That seems very bad.” Well, the only difference between this dream and any other is that I literally leapt out of my bed, because a few years before that I had started walking in my sleep. SLEEPWALK WITH ME DON’T TELL ANYONE I’m sitting at a Starbucks in Manhattan. Starbucks is the last public space with chairs. It’s a shower for homeless people. And it’s a place you can write all day. The baristas don’t glare at you. They don’t even look at you. Every once in a while they walk around with free samples of banana-chocolate something. “No thanks. Just the two-dollar coffee”—cheapest rent in New York. Plus, they sell CDs and even Christmas gifts. If this place sold toilet paper, I probably wouldn’t have to shop anywhere else. Well, the reason I’m writing is that I want to tell you some stories. And they’re true. I always have to point this out because whenever I tell stories, people ask me, “Was that true?” And I say, “Yeah.” And they say, “Was it?” And I don’t know how to respond to that. I guess I could say it louder. “Yeah!” “It’s probably true. He said it louder.” Growing up, I was discouraged from telling personal stories. My dad often used the phrase “Don’t tell anyone.” But not about creepy things. I don’t want to lead you down the wrong path. It would be about insignificant things. Like I wouldn’t make the soccer team and my father would say, “Don’t tell anyone.” And I would say, “They’re gonna know when they show up to the games and I’m not on the team and I’m crying.” One time I built up the courage to ask him about this, which was tough because my dad is a very serious man. He’s a doctor—a neurologist. When he’s home, he spends most of his time in this one armchair reading these thick war novels. My dad goes through war novels like I go through boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. So I built up the courage to ask, “How come you play everything so close to the vest?” My dad said, “The more people know about you, the more they can use it against you.” This sent shivers down my spine because it had that kind of open-ended fear to it—like that feeling you get when you’re driving and you see a cop. And you’re not speeding. You don’t have drugs. But you’re just thinking, I hope he doesn’t notice I’m driving. Once in a while I told personal stories at the dinner table and my father would say, “Hush!” I’ll give you an example. In grade school, I was a terrible reader. We used to do these things at school called Student Reading Assignments, and the teacher would post on the wall a list of how many everyone had done—which is a great way to squash a child’s self-esteem. I remember there was this girl in my class named Jamie Burson who finished 146 of these things before I finished 2. And I distinctly remember thinking, I might be retarded. And then I looked at the wall and thought, Oh yeah, I am. So one night, I sat at the dinner table and said to my dad, “I think I might be retarded.” And he said, “Hush!” Which is one way to address a problem—just keep it under wraps. That’s what my father would say whenever anyone told uncomfortable stories. So I developed this habit of telling uncomfortable stories. So here goes . I HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY! The earliest memory I have of getting widespread attention was at age five when I was shitting in my backyard. I don’t want to set a dirty tone for this book, but it’s precisely what I was doing. Shitting, that is. The logic at the time made perfect sense. Our dog Duffer shat in the yard. Duffer and I were friends. We were also treated with roughly the same amount of respect. I had the urge. So I just pulled down my pants on the periphery of the woods (which is where Duffer did it too!) and laid one down. About four seconds into it I hear “Michael!” That was my mother. Then I heard laughter. That was my brother Joe and our neighbor Leslie. The thing about shitting in the backyard is that word travels fast. That’s a quick, easy story to tell: “Mike Birbiglia shat in his own backyard. Yes, like a dog.” JD Howarth lived across the street to our left. Mean, dangerous, and my brother Joe’s age (four and a half years older than me), JD had nicknames for everyone in the neighborhood. He called my sister Patti “Pat Pat Patterson.” He called my brother Joe “Jew-sef” (we’re Catholic). He called Gina “First Class Weiner-Burger” (not that similar to her name or persona, but catchy). He called our neighbor Amy Wall “Small Wall” (clever). He had a special name for me. In addition to shitting in the backyard, I had peed on Mrs. Jarvis’s lawn on several occasions. Mrs. Jarvis lived across the street from us and she didn’t want us anywhere near her house. As a matter of fact when we rode our bikes and big wheels on the sidewalk in front of her house, she came out and shouted at us, “Get off my lawn!” She must have had motion sensors on and around her lawn, because the moment you entered that space, Mrs. Jarvis was there. When my mother came out and explained that we weren’t on her lawn, Mrs. Jarvis explained that she owned the sidewalk. She owned the sidewalk? That was a strange claim: owning a public sidewalk. Well, I’m not sure what happened next, but I ended up peeing on Mrs. Jarvis’s lawn. I think I knew the response peeing would garner and was using it as a weapon. Well, Mrs. Jarvis was not happy about this. I mean, she thought she owned the sidewalk. My attack did not go unpunished, however. Mrs. Jarvis got a spotted lawn, but I got a nickname from JD: “Tinkles.” The summer after eighth grade, my friends Pat, Nick, and Eric invited me to Old Mill Pond to jump out of a tree into water. This is something they had been doing for a long time on their own. They had never invited me because they didn’t see me as a jump-out-of-a-tree guy. They did not think this was in my wheelhouse of skills. And they were right. My skills, at that point, included making English muffin pizzas, microwaving hot chocolate, and dipping English muffin pizzas in hot chocolate. So I’m standing in a tree thirty feet above the pond with my three friends and my friend Pat says, “Dude, jump!” And I look down at the water, which is so far away, and I say, “That doesn’t seem like a good plan.” And they said, “Dude, we already jumped, it’s no biggie.