Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [13]
The non-makeout club was lonely. I started thinking, I want to be part of the makeout club. My only prospect was Lisa Bazetti, an adorable girl I’d become friends with—thanks to an alphabetically ordered seating chart. We spoke daily on the phone about homework and one time I made her laugh. And I thought, I gotta do that more. So I did. And then at one point I got her laughing so hard, she said, “You gotta stop, I’m gonna pee myself!” It was the closest I had ever come to a vagina. I spent the next fifteen years trying to get Lisa Bazetti to pee.
Lisa had many suitors; Tim, Rajeev, Jeff, and me. I was in fourth place in all the trade publications—7th Grader Weekly, Middle School Monthly, Pre-Teen Beat. Lisa was a popular gal, always on the verge of peeing. One night when we were on the phone, I built up the nerve to ask her to go to the carnival. And she said yes.
So this was going to be it. My night. I would play a carnival game and win her a stuffed bear larger than her bedroom. Then we would make out. Simple.
When you’re twelve years old, you don’t understand certain things about the digestive system. For example, you don’t know that you shouldn’t eat popcorn and peanuts and cotton candy and then go on a machine called “the Scrambler.” Cotton candy is of course the most absurd of those items, almost as if the inventors said, “We’re going to take sugar, which everyone knows is bad, but then we’ll dress it up like insulation.”
And the general idea of the Scrambler is that you sit in a two-person pod with the person you are in love with—and that pod goes in a circle—which is part of an even grander circle—which is part of an even grander circle.
As I understand it, it was originally designed as a medical device for constipated patients, and it was called the Shitzyourpantserator. And then the Carnival Workers of America, CWOA, co-opted the Shitzyourpantserator. And they said, “We feel like the name is something of a turnoff.”
And then somebody suggested, “What about the I-think-I’m-gonna-die-erator?” And they responded, “That’s good because it gets at the essence of how you feel when you’re on the machine. Plus it has the added word play with diarrhea, which is a nice homage to the original intention of the machine.”
And then someone said, “What if we call it the Scrambler?”
And the boss jumped up and said, “Nailed it! But who will be in charge of this dangerous piece of equipment?”
And this one guy said, “Well, I have a nephew who’s sixteen years old and smokes pot twenty-four hours a day. I feel like he might be available.”
And the boss said, “He sounds amazing. We don’t even need to interview him. He sounds completely qualified.”
So Lisa and I go on the Scrambler. And from the moment I sit down in the Scrambler and they latch on the bar seat belt, I know I’m going to throw up for sure. The bar seat belt is not a reassuring piece of safety equipment. That is not a Ralph Nader–approved device. I don’t think the bar seat belt has ever saved anyone’s life, though it has probably pinned someone’s esophagus to the pavement in a Scrambler accident, ensuring that the Scrambler victim won’t ever talk about the Scrambler accident.
So they latch the bar seat belt shut and I think, This is bad. And I even say to the sixteen-year-old stoner, “Hey, actually—” And then he is gone. Apparently he doesn’t enjoy the second halves of sentences. So I grab the bar.
And Lisa and I start scrambling. And I know that I’m going to throw up.
And I think, I need to stop this from happening.
So I come up with a strategy: Don’t look at Lisa and don’t look at any other people.
Don’t look at Lisa or any other