Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [25]
I’d walk up to people’s houses, carrying this box that’s the size of my body. The Church was like my knickknacks pimp. I’d knock on doors, and when people answered, I’d say in a high-pitched voice, “Hello! I’m from Saint Mary’s School! Perhaps you would like to buy a Daffy Duck pencil sharpener or a ‘Kiss the Cook!’ pot holder!”
And they’d typically say, “We’re eating dinner right now.”
So I’d say, “I’m so sorry, but this will only take a few minutes!” Then I’d just walk right into their home and open up shop. I’d offer, “Perhaps you would like a desk set organizer or a popcorn-of-the-month club!”
And they’d say, “Please leave our home.”
So I’d start putting the stuff back in, but it never fit in the way they’d initially packed the case. So I’d be smooshing these items on top of each other and scissor-holding the whole thing together and apologizing, “I’m so sorry, I’ll be out of your way in just a minute!” After all that I didn’t even get my sunglasses. I wasted all this time hawking third-rate goods when I could have spent the time figuring out what the hell the Holy Spirit is.
For a while I thought that I would become a priest, right after I finished my careers as a rapper and a break-dancer. I was always considered the most religious of my siblings, the kid with promise in the pursuits of Catholicism. We had family friends named the Barkers who started making regular trips to Yugoslavia because they heard there were miracles going on there. They would come over for dinner and tell my parents all about statues of Jesus bleeding real blood and statues of the Virgin Mary crying. First of all, these didn’t seem like miracles. They just seemed showy. If Jesus had a revelation, I thought, he wouldn’t choose to show it through some gimmicky tchotchke you can buy for ten dollars. Second of all, I just didn’t buy it in a general sense. In my gut I felt like, This isn’t real. None of this is real.
I kept it to myself but then Mr. Barker got a public access TV show where he talked about Catholicism, and he was doing an episode about the youth. Knowing from my mother what a Catholic soldier I was, he asked me if I wanted to come on the show as a guest and talk about my faith.
I said, “Sure,” but I had serious reservations about it. He asked again and left a few messages, and I kept dodging his calls. I just couldn’t make the leap. Sure, I could believe that Jesus was watching me masturbate to Candy Stripe Nurses and listening to my sins regarding baseball cards through Father Fitzpatrick, but I couldn’t buy into this miracle thing. I wanted to so badly because it was this one thing that my mother and I had bonded over. For a short period of time, we both believed in Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit. All that stuff. And it was amazing. And I felt closer to my mom than I ever had. And then it faded away. So why couldn’t I just suck it up and believe?
Shortly after I finished college, my mom developed a condition where, as far as the doctors could tell, part of her spine was pushing into her spinal cord. They weren’t one hundred percent sure of what was happening, but she was experiencing chronic pain throughout her body. The best idea this team of doctors could come up with was to perform an operation where they shaved off a small, suspicious-looking piece of her spine. Unfortunately the pain still didn’t go away. So my mom was faced with both the original pain and the pain of the invasive operation. She was laid up for months.
I came home and stayed with her. My dad worked long hours, and someone had to be there