Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [11]
He takes out fifty dollars and hands it to me. And I say, “Thanks,” as though that gun scenario has never crossed my mind.
He says, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“Do you have an eight-by-ten photograph of yourself?”
“No.”
“Can you send me one?”
“Okay.”
I drive home and I know what I have to do if I want a comedy career: I need to get an eight-by-ten photograph of myself immediately.
At one a.m., I walk into Abbie’s apartment and she asks me, “How did it go?”
I pause, and think for a moment. And then I say, “It was amazing.”
PLEASE STOP THE RIDE
In seventh grade, people started making out with each other. This was very upsetting to me. I didn’t even understand the concept of making out. I was like, People we know are making out with other people we know? But how?
My sex education to that point had been minimal. I had certainly always been interested in girls, but I wasn’t so sure they were as interested in me.
Leslie Saliba lived across the street from our house when I was four. Two years older than me, smart and pretty, Leslie was “the girl next door,” both in the way she’d be characterized in Hollywood and in her location. She was the first of a string of women in my life who have viewed me as a very good friend.
When Leslie and I became friends, I was so young that I could barely speak. I’d call her on the phone (which was absurd because she lived seventy yards from my house), and if she wasn’t home, I’d let the phone ring endlessly, while staring across the street at her driveway waiting for one of her parents’ cars to pull in. I was three; I did not have a lot of other appointments.
“Hello?” (Out of breath.)
“Can Leslie come out and play?”
“What? No. Leslie’s not home, Michael. Leslie will call you later.” I wouldn’t wait until later. I’d call back in about forty minutes. It felt like four hours.
When Leslie and I did play, usually we’d walk in the woods and Leslie would invent fantasy scenarios. Queen-servant. Princess-ogre. Occasionally we were fellow explorers, but even then I would take the fall. She’d make a mud pie (out of dirt, not chocolate) and ask me to taste it. I would. I was the same person who shat in the backyard.
Leslie and I played almost every day for the better part of seven years, after which Leslie went to middle school. I’ll always remember the day she came home and said to me, “I met a boy.”
And I thought, I’m a boy. But I said, “Cool.” I knew I didn’t stand a chance with those middle-school kids. I was Tinkles.
Around the corner from us lived Jesse Nolan, who was responsible for my sex education from ages nine through thirteen. Jesse was also two years older than me and very wise in the ways of women. At least that’s what he told me. He’d say, “I don’t know what it is, girls just like something about me. I can’t put my finger on it.” And I couldn’t put my finger on it either. Jesse was this hyperactive, eye-shifting, husky guy who used to trade baseball cards with me in a way that left me with fewer and less valuable baseball cards after every session.
One day Jesse took me into the woods behind his house and showed me a stack of porn he had stolen from older kids. He kept these issues of Penthouse and Hustler in tree trunks, not the most weather resistant of hiding spaces. So we’d leaf through pages of soggy old porn. This was my first experience with nudity other than my own. The closest I had come to seeing a woman naked was in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Since my parents never gave me a sex talk, all I knew was that sex had something to do with swimming.
Jesse had a discrete furnished basement and a TV with HBO, which in the eighties played soft-core porn around 2:30 a.m. So if we could coax our bodies to stay up with the help of candy and soda, we would find ourselves watching a film that might or might not have a woman in skimpy or no clothing. Sometimes we got burned. One time we stayed up late to watch Candy Stripe Nurses. The description in TV Guide was “Young sexy nurses and their hospital adventures.” Perfect. Adventures! We know what