Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [2]
So I’m standing in a tree thirty feet above the pond with my three friends and my friend Pat says, “Dude, jump!” And I look down at the water, which is so far away, and I say, “That doesn’t seem like a good plan.” And they said, “Dude, we already jumped, it’s no biggie. What’s the worst thing that could happen? It’s only watah” (that’s “water” with a Boston accent), which is really flawed logic, that watah logic. I learn later that many bad things historically have happened in water. Shark attacks. Drowning. Bad sex. But my friend Nick makes an argument that in Massachusetts is irrefutable. He’s like, “Do it.” So I do.
And at first it’s going pretty well. And I start thinking, Hey, maybe I am a jump-out-of-a-tree guy!
And then two things happen. The first is that my back lands flat on the water and it makes a gunshot noise. The second is that about nine gallons of water rush so far up my ass that it feels like it’s coming out of my mouth. It’s like a back alley colonoscopy from Dr. Old Mill, whose instruments had been sterilized in frog piss and pond scum.
Underwater, I can hear laughter coming from above the surface and I think, I can hear that. It must be loud. I get out of the water and roll around on the ground, trying not to cry while explaining to my friends how much pain I have just experienced. But they won’t stop laughing. This is the funniest thing they have ever seen.
I enjoyed the laughs, but I knew there had to be an easier way to get them.
• • •
So I knew I wanted attention, but I didn’t have any skills. At our family dinner table, it was difficult to get in a word edgewise. Every once in a while I’d shout, “I have something to say!” And everyone would look over. But I didn’t have anything to say.
I didn’t fare any better at school. I wasn’t the “class clown.” The class clown was always the mean guy who walked into class and said, “You’re fat! You’re gay! I’m outta here!” Our class clown was Eric Smart. He’d pull his dick out in gym class and whack people with it like it was a wet towel. And those kids would cheer. They’d be like, “Yeah! He hit me! Eric’s hilarious!” And I’d be like, “He’s not hilarious. He’s elastic. That’s not a skill. That’s an attribute.”
Since I wasn’t as freewheeling with my anatomy, I needed to develop my own act.
In eighth grade I took Mr. Bobbin’s science class. Mr. Bobbin was in his second year of teaching, and the word on the street was that his first year hadn’t gone so well. According to one story, one day when Mr. Bobbin was writing on the board, everyone in the class threw pennies at his head in a vicious premeditated attack. One of Mr. Bobbin’s problems was that he wasn’t great at expressing anger. So he turned around and said, calmly, in his strangely high-pitched voice, “Could you please stop throwing pennies at my head?” He should have been like, “What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re throwing pennies at my head? Are you serious?” Then he should have flipped over a few desks, ripped open his shirt, pounded his chest, and shouted, “Don’t fuck with Mr. Bobbin!” That would’ve shaken everybody up. Like, “Mr. Bobbin’s crazy. I think he might murder us!” His milquetoast response, however, made the kids want to torture him even more.
Mr. Bobbin’s class was divided by tables. My tablemates included Alison Dibuono, who was adorable, and Andy McGreevey, who was this musclehead who wore the same pair of Toughskins every day and mentally didn’t seem all there. Sometimes he would look off into the distance and chuckle like a character out of Apocalypse Now. And with his personal hygiene, no one liked the smell of Andy McGreevey in the morning, or in the afternoon. Andy was known for his ability to start little fires in the woods, and had parents who would give him large outdoor knives on his birthday. He put them to use, carving his initials into high