Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [1]
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