Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [32]
But for some reason, I still wanted to connect with the cooks. To befriend them like they were some crazy stray dogs that just needed a little understanding and attention. To let them know that “hey, this guy at the garbage can eating the virtually untouched scallops wrapped in bacon was a real person too.”
One day the head cook, this guy named Dave Rubio, looked at me with his dead eyes and said, “How’d you get this job anyway?” This was my big chance to connect with my coworkers. It was almost like he’d invited me on a corporate retreat, except instead of trust exercises where we catch each other from falling from a forty-foot tree, we have a basic human conversation. I know it’s not much, but at the time it was huge. I was speaking to the cook. The Nic Cage of the kitchen, a guy who knew how to do more than just carry trays or pour sixteen ounces of beer into a sixteen-ounce glass.
And I said, “My brother Joe worked here last summer.”
And his eyes lit up. He goes, “Joey Bag o’ Donuts? Your brother is Joey Bag o’ Donuts?”
Now, what I should have said was “Why don’t I ask him and get back to you? I know for sure his name is Joe.”
What I did say was “Yeah.”
Dave turned to the rest of the kitchen and shouted out, “Hey! Get this! This guy’s Joey Bag o’ Donuts’ brother!”
This announcement was met by a chorus of approval, “All right!” “Yeah!” “Joe Bags’ little brother! You’re all right man!”
That day I went home and asked my brother, “Was your nickname at the restaurant Joey Bag o’ Donuts?”
And Joe said, “No. That was this other guy. That guy was awesome.”
For the rest of the summer, I had to live the lie that my brother was Joey Bag o’ Donuts. All the cooks, with their eyes lit up like I had been accepted in the Lit-up Eyes Society, would look at me and say, “How’s Joe Bags?”
And I’d say, “He’s great.”
One time one guy said, “Seriously, how much can Joe Bags drink?”
And I said, “So . . . much.”
The whole summer I felt this pit of fear in my stomach that one day the actual Joe Bags would walk in the door to that kitchen and they’d all put me on their shoulders and say “Joe Bags, we’ve been hanging out with ya’ brutha!” And Joe Bags would look at me and say, “That fag’s not my brutha.” And that’s when they would drop me into a cauldron of New England clam chowder.
Upon moving to New York after graduation, I realized that I needed money to pay for frivolous things like rent and bags of noodles. For my college graduation, my family bought me a thousand dollars’ worth of “Ask Jeeves” stock, which was immediately worth about three hundred and twenty dollars. I knew I had about six months to be successful. I lived for a month on my sister Gina’s couch in Brooklyn. She had a small one-bedroom, but was willing to trade me pizza for doing her laundry.
I didn’t have much luck getting stage time at comedy clubs, despite some somewhat clever marketing tactics. When I called bookers, they would ask for “dupes” of my tape. In order to get club owners familiar with you, you were expected to provide a demo tape of your work. My sister Gina worked at HBO so all the dupes had HBO stickers on them. It was a bit misleading.
“This Birbiglia guy has an HBO special? Wait a minute—this was shot on a hi-8 in the back of a comedy club next to a tray of clinking glasses! What the hell kind of HBO special is that?”
Calling club bookers is kind of like telemarketing, except you never have to say, “Is your mom there?” But you follow similar principles. Never leave a message. Always try and get a live person on the phone, and try to keep the conversation going. “Oh, you don’t want to book me this week? Okay, how about next week? Oh, you don’t like me in general? Well, maybe I could interest you in some hair care products?”
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