Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [20]
Vince isn’t stodgy, but he’s certainly a bit formal and definitely private. He’s a doctor, and on top of that, he picked up a law degree in his spare time, for kicks. Vince is the kind of guy who knows stuff, which is intimidating because I’m the kind of guy who knows nothing. Well, not nothing. But we know different types of things. Like my dad knows the hemispheres of the brain and I know that if I spill Diet Coke on my laptop, it probably won’t start again. Which is why I think my dad was so disappointed when I became a comedian. He worked his whole life to send me to college so I could learn stuff. And I didn’t. And then I got a job making fun of him in front of strangers. His whole plan kind of backfired.
Vince spends most of his free time at a fancy golf club. This runs in stark contrast to his upbringing. He grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the son of Joseph Birbiglia, the original Joe Birbiglia. Joseph Birbiglia Senior ran a luncheonette in Brooklyn and during the Depression was a union electrician with crews digging subway lines. I recently learned that he often had to use a fake name to hide his Italian heritage.
When I was a kid my dad occasionally said cryptic things like “There’s a lot of prejudice against Italians.” Which was confusing for me because I hadn’t experienced any of this prejudice at St. Mary’s School or at AJ Tomaiolo’s Restaurant. They hadn’t made me stand in a separate line or disguise my name with some kind of ethnicity-free shortening, like “Birdman” or “Birthdayboy.” Because my dad always said so little, he sometimes left out the whole story: “There was prejudice against Italians in the thirties.”
My sister Patti, who has spent some time in Sicily, where the Birbiglias are from, traces my dad’s temperament to Sicily. She claims that the streets of Sicily are filled with Vinces, suspicious of everyone but members of their immediate family. And for them, Vinces reserve a special kind of suspicion.
Growing up, whenever my dad got annoyed or felt taken advantage of or slighted for any reason whatsoever, he would yell, “Fine, I guess I’ll just send the check!” and storm out of the room.
But when he played that card a few years ago, my grown siblings and I were all like, “We kind of get our own checks now. Are you still sending out checks? I feel like you might have the wrong address for me. Can I get direct deposit?”
My whole life, the thing that struck me about my dad was that he was always in control. He drove the car. He decided where we’d spend Christmas. And he knew, or pretended to know, how to do anything that needed to be done. This all changed when personal computers became popular.
Since high school I’ve had sort of moderate computer skills. My parents never got involved with personal computers until everyone they knew had a personal computer. That’s how they knew it was safe. They literally might have been the last people to join the digital age. In 1997 I sat next to my dad and showed him how to use the mouse on my iMac. He tried it for about two minutes, and then turned to me, scoffed a little, and said, “Well, these are never going to catch on.”
I think it was the concept of email that really sold my dad on the need to have a home computer. For as long as I can remember, my dad would call the house several times a day and ask, “Any calls, any mail?” Now that there was a new kind of mail that someone somewhere might be sending him, he had to know about it. So they finally rolled the dice and purchased one of these newfangled contraptions that would never catch on.
Shortly after college, I stayed with my parents for the summer and became their full-time, on-location tech support. I had previously done a lot of this work on the telephone:
ME:
Okay, do you see a file on your desktop that says, “Ten ninety-nine underscore Int”?
MOM:
I don’t see that anywhere. What is a desktop?
ME:
Like, when you turn