I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [38]
It’s time to take my bloated frame downstairs and catch a cab from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to the Upper East Side. I move slowly. Very slowly. It’s time for the next round of appetizers. And only one thought consumes me as I climb into the taxi heading for my next destination: If there really is a Saint Nick, they will be serving pigs in a blanket. Granted, it’s not an elegant offering, but they are delightfully simple and delish.
CHRISTMAS DAY, 5:30 P.M.
If It’s Really over the River and Through the Woods, I’m Not Going to Make It
In the cab on the way to my friend Neil’s apartment, once again I am alone. As I sit in the backseat in silence—New York City is pretty quiet on Christmas afternoon as we drive through Central Park—I have some time to think. That’s what I need, more time to think.
And boy, do I think.
I wonder why it is that the overwhelming drive that brings couples together to procreate somehow completely missed my gene pool. My brother and his wife never wanted to have children, either.
Salmon swim upstream to do it.
Penguins go through hell to do it.
Rams crack their skulls to do it.
At what point along the way did my DNA say, “Ah, fuck it!”? It wasn’t just my upbringing or a bad marriage. It has to be deep in the genetic blueprint of one’s being, like wherever it is that diseases come from.
Is it a mutation? Was there someone in my family tree who masturbated so much that the sperm forgot their purpose for being there in the first place?
Was a meal served to one of my ancestors that was so intoxicating that it created a genetic obsession with food that replaced the drive in me that ensures the survival of the species?
Did some woman chomp down hard on my great-great-great-grandfather’s nuts?
Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good.
Maybe my brain believes that since I look pregnant and feel like I am carrying a Baby Lewie down there, that I don’t need to procreate.
As I come to these unsettling—and un-Christmassy—conclusions, I knead my stomach like dough, in order to move Baby Lewie over to make room for more food.
The Upper East Side of the city, where Neil lives, is a part of town that’s a little more hoity and a bit toitier than the Upper West Side. Neil is neither. He is the kind of person who will surprise you. He doesn’t even look like an Upper East Sider, which in my mind is a combination of Donald Trump and Joan Rivers. For one thing, his hair is long—really, really long. It goes all the way down his back. He looks like he should be playing bass in a rock band. Not surprisingly, Neil has one foot firmly jammed in the heart of the sixties. On the Upper East Side, most people’s feet are jammed in the heart of the fifties—the 1850s, when servants did everything but wipe your ass for you (and maybe even did that). It’s the type of neighborhood where one feels entitled to feel entitled.
Neil is the antithesis of that. He works way too hard to ever assume that kind of attitude. He doesn’t tolerate that kind of attitude, yet he loves the neighborhood where the entitled flourish. He still says things like: “You’re either on the bus or off the bus.” Neil says it with real authority, like he is absolutely certain of its import and its meaning. Sometimes when he says it, it scares people.
More importantly, the reason he’s not a real Upper East Sider: HE WAS ACTUALLY AT WOODSTOCK!
He really was. Honest. I am not kidding. He even remembers some stuff that happened there. Sometimes I make him tell me about it, and then I forget that he told me, so it makes me feel like I was there.
Sadly, there will come a time very soon when there’ll be a television interview with the last person alive who was actually at Woodstock. I really hope it’s Neil.
The two of us met at the Yale School of Trauma—I mean Drama. He was in the technical program. I was never sure what these guys did there, but it was very technical. Neil now owns and runs Hudson Scenic Studio, the largest scene shop in New York. He has built the sets of an impressive number of