Girl Walks Into a Bar (23 page)

This guy Paul asked if I needed a room done for my apartment. At first I was about to say no and then I realized, “Wait a minute! Yes! I have to somehow create a nursery in my bedroom since I live in a one-bedroom apartment and I’m having a baby.” Paul said he’d run it by the producers, and to my delight, I got a call a few weeks later that they were into the idea of doing my room!
I
get to have a room designed by Nate Berkus?! I felt like I had won some Oprah sweepstakes.

They came over and filmed the whole “before” segment, and Nate was just as charming in person as he is on TV, and incidentally, the room he came up with is great. He split my bedroom between my area and the baby’s area with a partition, and somehow it really feels like two separate rooms. Everything went off without a hitch. Well, that is, except for the Telltale Dildo.

Please. Please. Let me explain. I need to give you some background information. This may come as a shock to you, but if I may use
Sex and the City
terms, I am not a Samantha. I’m probably more of a Charlotte. At this point in life, I’m not interested in random sex with some stranger or a one-night stand. I’m not exactly looking for Mr. Goodbar. In my spare time, I’m not buying garter belts or Chinese sex swings, and I’ve never set foot in a sex-toy shop and I think I would die of mortification to do so. You know who wouldn’t die of mortification to do so, though? A sex addict—Addict Three. I need to specify here that when dating Addict Three, I had no idea of his addiction, because dating a sex addict is not all it’s cracked
up to be. The thing about a sex addict is, they are usually not addicted to sex with
you.
At least, as my luck would have it, that was my particular situation. Since I didn’t find out about his addiction until we had broken up, it’s not something we were
dealing
with, having long talks about, or trying to solve
together
as a couple. He revealed it to me afterward, so I really am not sure what manifestation it took—Porn? Hos? Watching someone in high heels eat fried chicken? I have no idea. It was no longer my concern. This is all background to tell you that he did buy me a sex toy … a bright red vibrator. No pun intended, but as it turned out, it really wasn’t my thing.

There it sat in my top dresser drawer, unused for years. I forgot all about it. Occasionally, I’d think, “I really should throw away that bright red dildo,” usually when I was boarding a plane and imagining it going down and my parents coming to deal with my apartment. “Oh, look, Paul, here are all the old photos. And here are her reviews from over the years. And here … Oh! My word!”

So I would think, I really should throw that away. Living in an apartment in New York City, the thought of disposing of a bright red dildo really just makes you go “meh” and leave it for another day. You can’t just drop it down the garbage chute. Well, you could, I guess. For my peace of mind, I’d have to properly dispose of it, making sure there were no identifying pieces of mail in the bag. That’s just me. So there it sat, alone in the top drawer of my dresser, hidden behind some belts and some bathing suits.

When the Nate Berkus staff came to redo my room, at some point during the day, I thought of that bright red dildo. “Aw, I
really should have moved that, I guess. To a place they definitely wouldn’t be stumbling across it.” But then I thought, “That’s silly. Why would they ever be going through my drawers to redo my room?” They were going to be painting, putting up a partition, moving some stuff around. Everything would be fine. I smiled—for what had I to fear?

Still, as the day went on, that vibrator transformed into the Telltale Dildo. I could almost hear it buzzing from time to time.

“I should have moved it.” “
Bzzzz BZZZZ! Bzzzz BZZZZ
,” it sounded in my imagination. “Why didn’t I deal with that years ago?” “
Bzzzz BZZZZ! Bzzzz BZZZZ!
” It grew louder and louder with each passing hour.

“What would have been so difficult about throwing away that bright red dildo, Rachel?” “
Bzzzz BZZZZ BZZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
”

“OK. Knock it off, Dratch. You’re being ridiculous. No, you’re being ridickulous. Ha! That’s—”

“Excuse me, Rachel?” said the producer for the segment, poking her head out of my bedroom.

“Yeah?”

“We’re putting up the partition and they were wondering if, to make it secure, they can drill a hole through your dresser to attach it to the partition.”

“Oh, sure.”

“OK, so they’ll just have to drill one hole, so they’re just going to need to remove the top drawer.”

“
BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ! BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!
”

I
wish
I were making this up.

If I were
using
the thing. If I were one of those girls who was like, “OK! But don’t mess up my sex toys! They’re all in order! Ha-HAAA! Cackle Cackle Donkey Laugh HAAA!” Fine. But I’m just not that girl! I went into fight-or-flight response. Milling around my room were two Latino workmen, several underlings, and producers, and there was about to be a horrifying reveal of the Telltale Dildo.

Oh God! What COULD I do?
BZZZZ BZZZZ. BZZZZ BZZZZ. BZZZZ BZZZZ.
Was it possible they heard not? No! No? Almighty God! They heard!—They suspected!—They KNEW!

Fooling
absolutely no one
, I told the producer I needed to get some things out of the drawer. She kindly shooed everyone out of the room while I did some of the worst acting of my life (and that’s saying something), pulling decoy items out of the drawer to fill a shopping bag—bras, bathing suits, you know, things you would just
die
if some people saw…. What! Underwear!?! Oh no! You would hate for a roomful of people to see that you wore underwear! Cast away your eyes, Latino workmen! For my dainty underthings you shall not see! No. I’m sure everyone in the room, including the Latino workmen, knew I was squirreling away some sort of sex device. Only they probably multiplied the actual item by a drawerful and threw in various shapes and sizes and colors and attachments in their imaginations.

Eventually, I did dispose of the Telltale Dildo, though it sat in my living room for a few weeks in that bag of bathing suits and bras, among all of the baby gifts that had started to pile up. Finally, the fear of a second discovery by my mom or some
helpful friend offering to put away all my baby gifts made me put it in a bag and then another bag and drop it down the garbage chute. It’s probably lying in a landfill somewhere now. And some say, when the moon is full, you can still hear its angry roar.
Hark! Louder! Louder! LOUDER!! It is the buzzing of the Telltale Dildo!
BZZZZ BZZZZZZZ! BZZZZ BZZZZZZZ! BZZZZ BZZZZZZZZZZ!

’Tis ’Mones

I had the good fortune
of being pregnant at the same time as my friend Amy Poehler. Amy had been through pregnancy before, so she was helpful and gave me lots of good advice. She didn’t follow all the strict rules about alcohol. She ate sushi, for God’s sake. One night, we went to a restaurant. She was more visibly pregnant than I, and the waiter asked if I would like a drink and then turned to Amy and said, “And
you
can’t
have
a drink!” To which Amy shot dagger eyes and said pointedly, “
Yes
, I can!” Don’t stand between a pregnant lady and her wine.

I didn’t have too many problems with hormones. Usually, I felt like I had happy hormones running through me—I took everything in stride in a new way. But if Amy was having a hormone day, she would say, “’Tis ’mones, my friend, ’tis ’mones!”

I did have one incident of ’mones. John and I were at a wedding in Wisconsin. We were sitting at the bar after the rehearsal dinner. Some of the guests were singing karaoke. I was six
months pregnant and drinking a seltzer with lime. John had a beer. The familiar strains of the harmonica came on the speaker system—the beginning of the Billy Joel song “Piano Man.”

“Oh no! This song makes me sad,” I said.

“I love this song! Why does it make you sad?” said John.

“
Why
does it make me sad? Have you listened to the words?”

“Not really,” said John.

“You’ve never listened to the words of ‘Piano Man’?!” And I started singing along, staring at him pointedly to emphasize the tragedies he’d been missing out on by not listening closely enough.

“He says, ‘Son, can you play me a memory? I’m not really sure how it goes. But it’s sad and it’s sweet and I knew it complete when I wore a younger man’s clooooothes!’”

“OK, OK. So? I still love this song!”

I continued singing along, banging on the bar with my hand for emphasis.

“He says, ‘BILL, I beLIEVE this is KILLing me,’ as a smile ran away from his face. ‘Well, I’m SURE that I COULD be a movie star if I could get out of this place!’”
I was looking John right in the eyes and laughing, but at the same time my eyes were filling up with tears, welling up right there in the bar.

John started laughing. “OK! OK!”

“It’s sooo sad!!” Next verse. I was not letting up. No siree.
“Now Paul
is a real estate novelist, who never had time for a wife. And he’s talking with Davy, who’s still in the navy, and PROBABLY WILL BE FOR LIFE!”

“Oh my God! Okaaay! Take it easy!”

At this point, in spite of my laughter, I had tears of melancholy streaming down my face. I was wiping them away with my hand. I grabbed John’s wrist with my free hand.

“‘SING US A SONG, YOU’RE THE PIANO MAAAAAN! SING US A SONG TONIIIIIGHT! WELL WE’RE ALL IN THE MOOD FOR A MELODYYYYY. AND YOU’VE GOT US FEELING ALL RIIIIIIGHT!’”

Now I had a bar napkin to wipe away my tears, crying and laughing uncontrollably. I was like a hysterical woman out of an old movie who needed to be slapped across the face.

A week later,
I heard the song come on the radio again. I texted John—“Guess what song is on right now. ‘Piano Man’!”

He texted me back. “I used to like that song ’til some girl ruined it for me.”

What can I say? ’Twas ’mones, my friend. ’Twas ’mones.

The Day I Became a “Baby Person”

The baby was due
September 20. About six weeks out from that date, I learned Herc had turned around and was breech, poised to come out feetfirst, which usually means you have to have a C-section. There are homeopathic remedies to get the baby to flip. I’m not sure what was making me all nature girl about this stuff, but I was trying to avoid having a C-section. I went to a chiropractor who specializes in baby flipping. I went to an acupuncturist—a different acupuncturist than the Chinese storefront place, needless to say. (That’s “needless,” not “needle-less.” Ba-dum-bum.) According to the world of acupuncture, one of the ways to get your baby to flip—and this is for real—is to hold up lit incense a few inches from your pinky toes for twenty minutes a night. This is actually some ancient, 2,000-year-old Chinese secret called moxibustion. Something about the heat channeling into that particular meridian can flip your baby. (OK, at this point, I may as well just own that
maybe I
am
into the idea of a metaphysical, other-plane, nonscientific world. Damn, as I look back, I’ve talked about prophetic dreams, channelers, messages from pigs, Blue Dot spirit guides, and now smoking up your toes—maybe I need to reconsider my self-perception.) Anyway, John was along for the ride: The guy who last year at this time was at the San Fran Food and Wine Fest, wearing a Vineyard Vines shirt, now found himself holding incense up for twenty minutes a night to the toes of a Jewess.

By now, Amy Poehler had had her baby, Abel, a week prior, and I went over to see him. There he was, newly born, tiny and frail and birdlike as any week-old baby would be.

“Here, do you want to hold him?”

“Noooo!”
I thought. “Yes!” I said.

Mind you, my baby was due right around the corner; I was going to be in charge of one of these baby birds in
five weeks
! What if I let the head flop back? How do I hold the head? The head! The head! The neck. The head! I instantly wanted to toss him out of my hands like I was in a game of Hot Potato, but social decorum and human ethics prevailed. I held him for about two minutes, all the while having what would be my last panic attack on the topic of Whatifisuckasamom? I left Amy’s apartment full of anxiety and self-doubt. The topic of panic trended with me for the rest of the day: Whatthehellamidoinghavingababy?