Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [37]
The night before my third day, I had been up doing the late night show at the Comic Strip, which started around 1:00 a.m. and went until about 2:00 or 2:30. After that, I did some more shows at other smaller venues. Starting out as a comic in New York City, it’s not unusual to get a five-minute slot at three in the morning performing in front of three other people, who themselves are waiting to do their own five-minute slot. These aren’t at comedy clubs; they’re in hotel lobbies or in dark, strange apartments that have been filled with long wooden benches and converted to performance spaces. It was kind of like I was living the life of a superhero: by day I was an administrative assistant, and by night I was an insomniac with five minutes of comedy.
So after these shows I got back to my apartment in Astoria, Queens, around 3:30 a.m. and don’t recall anything else until looking at my clock at 11:15 a.m. And I was three hours late for my job at the women’s magazine. I scrambled to the R line on the subway and by the time I got to the office it was almost noon. Maybe no one had noticed?
There was a woman working at the desk next to me, and she solemnly said, “Hey Mike, you’re supposed to call your temp agency.”
I said, “Okay,” and picked up the phone and called Diane.
“Hey Mike! They’re not going to need you today, so just fill out a timecard for your travel time to and from your apartment and we’ll get you paid for that.”
I felt a little bad. I looked over at my boss’s closed door and then I whispered to the woman who sat next to me, “Should I pop in her office and apologize?”
She looked at me like I had just asked her, “Is a fork the thing with the four sharp pointy things, or is that the spoon?”
She said, “Mike, I don’t think you want to go in there.”
I said, “Is it because I was so late?”
She said, “She didn’t like you before you were late. There was a whole list of things you didn’t do.”
As it turns out, there was an actual list. Because this woman who sat next to me pulled it out and started reading it. Things like opening and sorting the boss’s mail, getting her lunch, and a bunch of other very specific tasks. I was so much worse an employee than I ever could have imagined and on top of that, I didn’t even show up. On my way out, my cubicle neighbor said, “You know, Mike, we do like you. It would be great if you were here but you’re not.” She was right.
My agent Marcy called and said in her unusually high-pitched voice, “You need to fly to Hollywood immediately! Immediately!!”
I had just returned from the Montreal Comedy Festival where I had performed in the “New Faces of Comedy” category.
“I’ve set up some meetings for you.”
“Uh . . . okay.” I said. “What are these meetings about?”
“We gotta get you a deal!”
“What kind of deal?”
“A sitcom deal!”
Marcy told me stories about Ray Romano and then a bunch of people I had never heard of who got deals after this festival for ridiculous sums of money. This was a perfect situation. Someone was going to give me a lot of money and I needed a lot of money. At this point, my bank balance was in parentheses, which means, ”Let’s say you had money, it might be this much money, but since you don’t, you owe us this much money.” If I could get a deal, I could stop temping.
I said, “Count me in, Marcy! Let’s go get a deal!”
I didn’t even like sitcoms. I didn’t want to be on a sitcom. What I wanted to be was a traveling comedian. But I thought, This will be the thing that will get my parents off my back!
My parents had been urging me to get out of comedy and make a real living ever since I announced my chosen “profession.” The first time I told my father I was performing at comedy clubs he said, “Comedy clubs? What do they do? Strip? You can’t make a living doing that! You need some goddamn reality testing!!”
He had a point. Not about the stripping, but about the career choice. The overwhelming majority of comics lose money each time they perform. By the time you include your many expenses (gas, tolls, rental cars, Funyuns), the seventy-five-dollar