I Know What I'm Doing (34 page)

Tim and David drove out to my parents’ house in the suburbs to meet them, so that my mom could put faces to her daughter’s future rapists’ names. Their goofy demeanor and general innocent vibe won her over. She agreed to cosign the lease and let me move in with the guys who were such sweethahts—and I’m happy to say they never sexually violated me.

EVEN THOUGH I didn’t think I had to ask permission to sleep at Blake’s house now that I was a college graduate, it wasn’t really a one-on-one, eye-contact-filled conversation that I wanted to have with my mom. I knew it would be awkward enough for her to see me leaving the house with an overnight bag. On my first night back, I finished unpacking and setting up my childhood bedroom to my liking and then turned right around to head into Boston to spend the night with Blake. I left a note on the kitchen table for my mom and dad—
Staying at Blake’s tonight
—and hopped in my dad’s spare Oldsmobile.

Blake and I were tangled up in his paisley sheets while Nag Champa incense burned in swirls around our heads, and my parents didn’t know where Blake lived and had no way of contacting me. I think cell phones existed in 1996 but nobody I knew had one yet—if
they did, it was in the form of a car phone with a long cord connected to the cigarette lighter. My folks never crossed my mind once. Why would I go home for the night? I’m an adult in the city and there’s no need to drive home at two in the morning—and I have an irrational fear of getting in my car in the middle of the night and forgetting to check the backseat, only to be stuck on the road with a monster behind me, ready to strangle away. The next day, I walked in the front door and saw my mom sitting at the kitchen table. It was unusual for her to still be in her bathrobe at noon. That was her physical signal for “I’m so upset that I can’t even get dressed.” My mom sat there and flipped the pages of her newspaper very quickly, staring at me instead of the articles. I got the same feeling I used to get in my stomach when I was a little kid and I was in trouble. (Not that as a kid I ever got in trouble for sneaking out to sleep with my stoner boyfriend, but you know what I mean.) My mom said, “You didn’t come home last night.” I said, “I left a note.” She said, “I know you did. Your father and I found it to be very bold.” I said, “I have a boyfriend!”

And she said, “If you live under this roof, you live under my rules, and we do not allow sleeping over at a boyfriend’s. If you want to be a trash bag, then you get your own house and behave like a trash bag there.”

I’d never heard of being called a “trash bag” before, as opposed to just “trash.” My mom was really throwing down. If we were the Real Housewives of Massachusetts, she would have ripped a crucifix off her neck and stabbed a hole in my Red Sox T-shirt. When I think about it, it’s actually kind of a compliment, because my mom was implying that I’m strong, durable, and can be relied upon for clean up after a house party. I decided to respond like an adult, and since I didn’t know how to be an adult, I got hysterical and stamped my feet. I slammed my fists on the creaky kitchen table and took a stand against living for free with my parents and driving their car. I screamed a few things about being in love and how they couldn’t keep us apart. I grabbed the suitcase that I’d just unpacked the day
before and started repacking. Had they not assumed I’d shared my bed with boys in college? Maybe they hadn’t. When your daughter is in a sketch comedy troupe, maybe all you assume is that she isn’t getting any.

At the last minute, I realized the Oldsmobile wasn’t really
my
car and I’d have to walk with my stuffed suitcase to the commuter rail train that came once every three hours.
Fuck it,
I thought, and like a grown-up, I dragged my suitcase sans wheels down the street and a few flights of platform stairs, where I pouted and waited for a train heading to the city limits.

Blake lived in a part of Boston called Brookline Village, with three other guys. I figured what’s one more person? When I arrived with my suitcase, his roommates were happy to see me and I went into Blake’s room and immediately unpacked my things and hung them in his closet. While he was at class, I got all domestic, cleaned up his incense ashes, rinsed out his bong, and put his dirty clothes in the hamper. Later that night as we lay entwined on his futon, Blake asked, “So, have you thought about where you want to get an apartment?”

“Oh,” I said, trying to conceal my disappointment, but it was hard to play it cool with a quivering lip and a bridal magazine in my hand.

Blake said, “I’m sorry, baby, but I can’t have a live-in girlfriend my senior year in college.” I ignored the fact that him calling me “baby” made me cringe. Sometimes Blake really thought he was a member of Earth, Wind & Fire. I told him that he needed to grow up. He came back at me with, “I’m not supposed to be grown up yet. You’re twenty-one years old and a college graduate. You’re the one who needs to grow up.”

The next day, after Blake let me know that our committed relationship couldn’t handle the extra commitment of permanently sharing his bed and his stolen cans of tuna, I went by myself to a party. My friend Zoey had just come back from New York City and was carrying around a copy of their free weekly newspaper the
Village Voice.
There was an article about a new alternative comedy show on the Lower East Side called
Eating It
at a bar called the Luna Lounge. Although it wasn’t a normal “comedy club,” it was highly respected and a place where all of the coolest comedians went to try out new material. Getting up in front of people and just sort of talking had been something I’d wanted to explore ever since I was fifteen and I saw that episode of
Beverly Hills 90210
where Brenda Walsh started hanging out at a spoken-word open mic night at a coffee shop. She called herself a “hippie witch,” moved out of her parents’ house for a short stint, and sat on a stool, telling stories about high school.

I never went apartment hunting in Boston. After that party, I decided that becoming a stand-up comedian and getting my start in Manhattan was my destiny. If Blake thought that I should grow up and my parents thought that I wasn’t adult enough to sleep at my boyfriend’s house, I’d show everyone. I’d move to the toughest city in the world. I’d wanted to live in New York City ever since I saw my first black-and-white photo of James Dean smoking in a Manhattan diner. Sadly, I can’t say that I’ve grown out of my urges to do things because I think that technically, if I were photographed doing them, it would make a really cool and iconic picture.

Even though the “plan” was to be a serious actress, I had always secretly wanted to be a stand-up comedian. It’s safe to say I had about as much ambition and understanding of how to actually become a stand-up comedian as my mom had of how to become a high-priced call girl. But that article in the
Village Voice
seemed like it was written specifically for me to see. The closest I had come to doing comedy since This Is Pathetic was becoming a member of a local Boston improv group. (Improvisation—that fine art where a group of people stand onstage with nothing prepared and one of them asks the audience for a suggestion like an occupation or a location and someone inevitably shouts out, “Rectal exam!”) I enjoyed messing around onstage and making people laugh, but I wasn’t great at playing with others. It’s not that I don’t enjoy sharing the spotlight—I just don’t like having to be responsible for other people.
Improv is all about supporting your teammates. (By the way, I hate when anything other than a professional sports team refers to itself as a “team.” It has this air of forced camaraderie that has always made me uncomfortable, along with people who talk in baby voices to babies and to adults during sex.) Improv is similar to war in that you’re expected to do anything to save the life of your partner. And as with war, people don’t really understand what improv is “good for.”

Improv requires one thing I lack that I think all mothers need—that basic instinct to put someone else first. I can barely forgive myself for the time when I negged Billy from my improv troupe onstage. He said, “I have a gift for you,” and my first instinct was to say, “No you don’t.” The scene died right then and there. See what happens when I try to nurture something? I know it seems dramatic to relate destroying an improv scene to possibly destroying a child’s life, but improv and child rearing are not so different. Both are jobs that people volunteer for and complain about endlessly, and they bore everyone around them as they talk about the process.

I broke the news to Blake that I was moving. He was surprised, since only twenty-four hours earlier I’d wanted to settle down and play house. I explained to him that if I wanted to do something as drastic as become a stand-up comedian, I had to really make a bold move and change cities. I couldn’t become a new person in my old hometown. Blake agreed. He always agreed with me when I spoke excitedly and loudly about something—even if I was talking out of my ass.

My parents had changed the locks on me after I decided to leave them and attempt to move in with Blake. I never understood their reasoning for that move. Wouldn’t that only ensure that I’d spend even more nights having patchouli-scented sex with my boyfriend at his off-campus apartment? I had to arrange a time so they could let me into my own bedroom to get the rest of my things. Blake was in the driveway, hiding from my folks and manning the small U-Haul truck that I’d rented to get me to Brooklyn, where I was going to live with my old college friends Amy and Ed. I didn’t even have
any furniture, just a couple of lamps and a wicker nightstand. The inside of our U-Haul looked like a Pier 1 had been renovated by a crackhead.

As ballsy as it may have been to move to Brooklyn without knowing anything about it—except what I’d seen in the opening credits of
Welcome Back, Kotter
as a kid—I was still a wimp in a lot of ways. I knew I had my parents’ love but I wanted their approval. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mom and dad that my reason for moving to New York City was that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. They never said point-blank, “Don’t become a stand-up comedian,” but I think that’s an implied desire that parents have for their child from the moment he or she is born. That and “Don’t become a stripper or a junkie, or a musician.”

Being a comic is even harder than being in a band. A stand-up comedian wanders cities alone, saying dirty things into germ-ridden microphones to drunk people, whereas a musician sings things into a germ-ridden microphone to drunk people who at least want to give them free drugs and sleep with them after. So for the time being, I just told them that I was moving to New York City to get another job in some kind of box office and to start going on auditions as an actress—really put that BFA in theater arts to work.

In the front seat of the U-Haul Blake and I discussed our relationship. We wanted to remain a couple and try to do the long-distance thing. We agreed that we were only a four-hour train ride apart and it would be even more exciting when we saw each other. Right outside of the Bronx, I had to pee really badly, but the highway was basically a parking lot. The traffic wasn’t going to move for a while, so I took a Snapple bottle, pulled my pants down, and squatted. I missed and peed on the floor of the van and on Blake’s sneaker. Jewish people step on a glass after they take a vow, and in our fucked-up way, we sealed a long-distance relationship deal with my urine on Blake’s foot.

Blake helped me carry my suitcases up the narrow staircase to my new third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. My roommates weren’t
home but they’d left a key under the mat and a welcome note. When I saw my bedroom for the first time, it felt more like a giant fuck-you note. The room was so small that there was only space for a single bed and a small nighttable—which had to sit on the other side of the room if I ever wanted the door to open. I moved from living under my parents’ restrictions to a room that physically restricted me from having any space to invite a boy to sleep over unless I moved my bedside table into the living room.

Blake had to get back to Boston to return the U-Haul before we were charged for an extra day. Before he left, he sat on my bed with me. He held me and we cried. The mutual tears seemed romantic, but the truth was that I was mourning my jail-cell-size bedroom and Blake was probably coming to grips with the fact that he had a four-hour drive in a van that reeked of fresh urine.

That night, I went by myself to a comedy show at a swanky club called Fez. I already had an intellectual inkling of becoming a comedian, but watching it live onstage—I got what can only be called an urge. I couldn’t just sit there like a normal audience member. I wanted to get out of my seat and run up on the stage and just start talking. I wanted to wave to the audience members and say, “I’m one of them! Not you!” The pull was strong. I had to do this comedy thing and I wanted to do it at the expense of everything else and I wanted to start right away. This was my proverbial moment of ovulation and I wanted to lie down on the ground with a pillow under my butt and let comedy just come inside me, and one day it would blossom and grow into a career baby.

I was disturbed from my sleep later that night by the loud noise. Yes, I lived over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but the screeching that roused me wasn’t the cars; it was my roommates having a fight. Did I mention that
Amy and Ed were a couple? It was like living with my parents all over again. Amy had always been volatile in college, but I couldn’t understand what there was to yell about once you’d moved in with a guy. So far, in my limited life experience, the yelling happened because the guy
wouldn’t
move in with you. But now Amy was upset at Ed because she wanted marriage and kids and was wondering why their cohabitation hadn’t brought out that urge in him yet.

I understood her urge—not to get married and have kids but to have the life you envisioned for yourself. To fill up that pit in the gut that just says, “Gimme, gimme what I want. I promise I’ll be good if you just gimme what I want!” That’s how I felt about stand-up comedy. And if anyone had told me that I couldn’t have it, I would’ve been yelling too. Although I related to Amy’s feelings of longing, falling asleep to them was not soothing. I opened my window so that the sounds of the Mack trucks would drown out the sounds of the train wreck in their bedroom.