Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [4]
I started to shout “Dansez!” regularly in the middle of class, and Monsieur Girard, a good sport about this, indulged me for a while. At a certain point, however, it became not funny anymore. But that didn’t stop me. I carried on. And I noticed that sometimes it would be funny again. I began to experiment with David Letterman’s rhythm of saying something so many times that it’s funny, then not funny, then funnier because of the shared experience of its not being funny. Ultimately, I did okay in French. My comedy, that is.
I quickly discovered, however, that in the athletic community, absurdist comedy didn’t really fly. Generally the “You’re fat! You’re gay!” oeuvre of humor prevailed. And instead of fighting it, after a while I gave in and tried my hand at it.
My fellow soccer players and I constantly called each other gay. A common conversation would be like “Yo-uh gay.” “No, you ah.” “No, you ah.”
That would last an hour, and would provide at least five minutes of laughs. Every day, as we walked down the hill to soccer practice, we’d have a back-and-forth between the soccer and football teams that the other team was gay. So what developed was this all-out “yo-uh gay” war. I later found that one of my “yo-uh gay” grenades landed on a guy named Joey Grigio. Now, I didn’t know Joey Grigio. I still don’t. But he was from Worcester. He was tough. Liked to fight. He was like a cross between a white Allen Iverson and a velociraptor.
So one day I’m walking down the hill to soccer practice and I’m hit by what feels like a rock on the back of my head. I later found out it was a fist. (I forgot to mention: Joey Grigio had rocklike fists.) And the impact of the hit knocks me to the ground immediately. So I’m on the ground, being hit by the rock-fists again and again, until finally I’m like, I need to run away. I don’t even consider fighting back. I’m just like, I have to leave here . . . This is going terribly . . . This is the worst walk ever.
So he hits me four or five times. Mind you, he’s in full football gear and I am in nylon shorts and shin guards. If he had wanted to beat the crap out of my shins, no dice, but really anywhere else on my body was fair game. So I run down the hill. And he shouts, “Now who’s gay?”
At this point it occurs to me that Joey Grigio actually cared that someone called him gay. It never occurred to me that calling someone gay had any meaning. We called everything gay: the football team, some of our teachers, the water fountains, geometry (in fairness, geometry is one of the gayer maths).
So I try to go on with business as usual, but that day, in the middle of sprints at practice, I start crying. And when the coach asks me what happened, I tell him. So he talks to the football coach. And at this point, I assume Joey Grigio will be punished in some way—maybe expelled, suspended. But he isn’t. He’s suspended for one football game. I was shocked. They caught the guy who attempted to smash my brains in, and they were like, “Oh, don’t worry about old Joey, we’re putting him away for a long time—forty-eight minutes to be exact, plus halftime.”
So Joey gets one less game of football, which I thought was nothing. Apparently Joey didn’t feel that way. So he sent some of his fellow velociraptors after me.
One day I’m at my locker and this guy Bill Murphy says, “Hey Mike,” and I look over and he punches me in the face. Not really hard but enough that it makes the punch-in-the-face noise and he says, “That’s for Joey Grigio.” I was the victim of a walk-by punching, the younger brother of the drive-by shooting. I was stunned. I thought, Wait a minute. This guy’s smaller than me. And I didn’t even fight back. I just thought, I guess