I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas - Lewis Black [39]
While he’s accomplishing all of these amazing feats of stagecraft, he also found the time, energy, and stamina to be married three times. Physicists haven’t come up with a formula for that kind of energy. He really seems to like being married. He married young, and like many of those young marriages of our era, it ended nineteen years later in divorce court. His second wife, Laurie Beechman, was an extraordinary theatrical performer and exceptional singer. She died of ovarian cancer. They fell in love when she was in remission, and after they were married the cancer returned. Love doesn’t conquer all, but that’s because life is brutally unfair.
If it were me, I probably wouldn’t have gotten married again. But while life may be unfair, it also has its beautiful moments, and so Neil met Machiko, who is now his wife. She worked for a company that did all of Michael Bloomberg’s financials, taxes, and God knows what else. Yes, that Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s billionaire mayor who has more money than God. She was a financial analyst. I don’t know what they do but when they do it right, somebody makes a lot of money, and if they are wrong, somebody gets fucked. She is razor sharp and has a keen mind and, with all of that, even a lovely smile. How my friends manage to fool these beautiful, intelligent women into marrying them is a mystery for the ages.
Machiko spends her time taking care of their daughter and works on a variety of fund-raising projects and figures out where we are all going to go for Thanksgiving. They are very happy. She has made Neil slow down, which means he still uses more energy than any three people I know.
The story of their marriage is unusual, which is putting it mildly. Before Neil and Machiko met, Neil had what can only be described as a one-night stand with a beautiful young woman, the result of which is she got pregnant. (Please, hold whatever recriminations you have to yourselves.)
In light of all the couples I have known over the years who’ve taken years to conceive and have turned to fertility specialists, here is my pal Neil, who falls into bed with a woman he barely knows and in one shot he does it. I can only call it astonishing. (I’d love to know what the statistics are on pregnancies after a one-night stand, but as this is a Christmas book and we’re veering into some unusual territory here, let’s move on. Then again, Christmas is all about a certain baby. . . . Nah, better not.)
You can certainly ask what were these two people thinking, but you could also ask: What was God thinking? Surely he knows better than that.
It turns out, he does.
And then, Bingo! Neil’s a dad.
The woman wanted to be a mother. And even though Neil is Catholic and wasn’t looking to get married or to live with the mother, he was thrilled about becoming a father. So he and the child’s mother came to a legal arrangement and several months later, a beautiful baby girl was born—hang on to your hats, and your sense of irony—on Christmas Day.
I realize that for the traditional family-values folks, this is way too far-fetched a way to make a family. There are numerous Americans that hold on to the concept of the traditional marriage like a dog and its favorite bone. It makes them feel better to believe that a family unit is a mother and a father and their children and that’s that and that’s the way God planned it. For years this concept kept alive millions of loveless marriages and no doubt created sexual arrangements that ranged from the Neanderthal to the Gothic, in their wake creating family environments that were nastily toxic, not only to the parents but to their offspring as well.
I don’t know at what point the traditionalists will finally get it, but a family now comes in many, many forms, and as long as there is a loving environment, then one could be raised by wolves—gay wolves, for Christ’s sake. If I learned anything from having a child that wasn’t mine, it’s that