Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [38]
It’s 11:30 p.m. and I get off the phone with Marcy and I book the first flight I can to Los Angeles. For the next few days, I do what everyone in Hollywood does instead of their job: I take meetings.
I’m taking meetings with people who are theoretically going to give me a deal. I have no idea what I am doing. I later found out that neither did Marcy. She would call these production companies or networks I was meeting with and say, “Mike needs a deal!” Which, I think, is the opposite of how you get a deal. You have to pretend you have all kinds of deals about to happen. Like you’re gonna pass out if you get handed one more deal. You can’t tell them you need a deal. I thought Marcy and I had a kind of secret code language. Nope, that was our strategy: Mike needs a deal.
For six days I stayed on my friend Adam’s couch and he chauffeured me around town. I couldn’t get a rental car because they don’t accept parentheses. He would drive me from meeting to meeting. Adam is gay, in the stereotypical way where he criticizes the way I dress and look and act. He’s like Perez Hilton except he’s willing to rip apart your appearance even if you’re not famous. I would go to these meetings, and it would go okay. Then I’d come out to the car and Adam would say, “You look fat in that shirt.”
I’d be like, “Well, thank you. I was feeling pretty good a second ago, but I had been meaning to have my self-esteem knocked down to negative a thousand.”
Executives call these “general meetings” though they really ought to call them “meaningless events that make it seem like I shouldn’t lose my job, which I should.” These are meetings with networks and companies who have quirky names like Pinball Machine Productions or serious names like Serious Productions. You know—those companies that have their names on the end of TV shows but you don’t know what the hell they do. Well, I’ll tell you what they do. They have “general meetings.” These meetings are about thirty to sixty minutes long and they’re kind of like a speed date.
“What do you do? How’d you get started?”
The way to look cool in these meetings is to act like you have no idea why you’re there or why you’d ever want to talk about show business. You say stuff like, “Isn’t it crazy that polar bears can hear their prey from thirty miles away?”
And they say, “Mike Birbiglia is so interesting. He doesn’t care about show business at all!”
And then immediately after the meeting my agent Marcy would call and say, “Mike needs a deal!”
I would go into these meetings and the people in the meetings would insist that I was going to get a deal. They’d say things like, “You’re definitely going to get a deal.” And, “You don’t have a deal? You will.” Then they’d wink like they knew something I didn’t. After a few days of this, I started to believe it. I was calling everyone I knew. I was like, “I’m about to get a sitcom deal.” I think “about to” are two of the most dangerous words in the English language. Never trust people who say things like “I’m about to” or “Because I’m high.”
At this point, I’m calling my parents, my brother Joe, my friends from college. “You were wrong about me! I’m gonna get a deal! I’m gonna have my own sitcom! I’m about to date Heather Locklear!”
Even my dad, always skeptical, took note: “How much do they give you for these deals?”
I said, “I think like a hundred thousand dollars.”
My dad said, “Well, I guess I’m in the wrong profession.”
I said, “Yeah, I know.” And I thought, Who needs some reality testing now?
A few days later I fly home, and as I’m sitting on the plane it’s occurring to me that I don’t have a deal. I think, What about my deal? That lady from Siamese Twins Entertainment told me that I was going to get a deal! The guy from Choco-Taco Productions told me I was a genius, and should maybe co-host some kind of polar bear animated feature thing!
I land in New York and check my messages.
No messages.
I call Marcy.
“Hey . . . what’s up with the deal?”
Marcy says, “It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen. No one’s getting deals this