Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [16]
When I was in high school, my parents moved from Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, to Cape Cod, so I was separated from my childhood friends. There was a geographical midpoint between my friends and me at Great Woods, an outdoor concert venue. Basically these outdoor venues are a great opportunity for musicians to play for huge crowds and for teenagers to convert Porta-Potties into meth labs. I attended these types of festivals with much enthusiasm, in an earnest search for who I was.
One summer, when I was seventeen, I decided to wear a cowboy hat, not unlike that of Indiana Jones, to many of these summer concerts, not to seek out treasure nor to put to rest ancient curses, but to prop up a hibachi in a tailgate parking lot and eat salmonella-laced chicken kabobs while getting drunk enough to befriend strangers. What I discovered by wearing this cowboy hat was that people would remember who I was. I was “the cowboy hat guy.” And I was proud of that. I was like, That’s who I am! I’m the cowboy hat guy! And no one can take that away from me, unless of course they take the cowboy hat, in which case, they’d be the cowboy hat guy.
Well, at the time I didn’t think it through, so I was the cowboy hat guy.
And one summer while wearing the silly hat at a Steve Miller Band concert, I met this girl and fell in love. Well, I thought I fell in love. I actually just found her physically attractive and so attributed to her every positive quality I’d ever hope for in a woman. We ended up making out on the lawn of the Great Woods Center for the Performing Arts. For me, it was great. For the people watching, it was awkward, pathetic, or totally totally hot. But I went home with her phone number and address and I proceeded to write love letters to her. Or, I should say, elaborate fictional narratives that ended with the two of us reuniting in some strange way that included one of my heroes like Jimmy Connors or Bill Cosby and somehow we’d get to the next Steve Miller Band concert just in time for the encore of “Fly Like an Eagle.”
Well, after a summer of letters, I built up the courage to call her.
She was having a slumber party with all of her friends and so I spoke to the whole group. And it didn’t go as well as I had hoped. There’s something about women in groups. And beyond that, there’s something about women in groups on the phone that generally leaves the male on the other end of the phone at a severe disadvantage.
They decided to read excerpts of my letters aloud and after each excerpt there would be an eruption of laughter like a Johnny Carson highlight reel. None of my letters included jokes, but they seemed to bring these girls great joy. At first I was happy to be the hit of their party. After just a few of them I said, “Okay, well, I’m going to go now, that’s funny . . . I guess if you read it like that it does sound a little silly . . . I think I have to go to the store now with my brother . . . okay, good-bye!” A few weeks later, I started my senior year and I hung up my cowboy hat. I didn’t know who I was. But I knew who I wasn’t.
I had my first girlfriend, Amanda, during my senior year of high school. And she was great. She was beautiful and she played tennis. And she wrote for the newspaper. She was a bad girl, and I was kind of a dorky nerd, but not even a mainstream nerd, because this was at a boarding school that I didn’t board at. I was only there because my family lived nearby.
This was a big deal for me because it was the first time I fell in love and thought, Oh, there is someone for me. This is it. I found her.
Amanda had major street cred.
She had been expelled from her previous school for dealing acid. At one point she told me, “It was totally messed up because it was actually this other girl who was dealing acid and I was framed.” And I was like, Awesome.
I thought it was one of those things where we were opposites and we knew it. And that made it more exciting. Like she wanted to be a