Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [44]
I’m driving to school four. At this point, I’m driving through the night through the Cascade Mountains to get to another nooner the next day and one final show the next night. About halfway through the mountains my gas tank is on empty and so I do what any logical person would.
I drive faster. That way I can avoid the suspense of running out of gas and just cut to that desperate standing-on-the-side-of-the-road thing.
It’s late at night and there are very few streetlights. The road is windy and I’ve been on my phone talking to my sister Patti. So now that I might actually need my phone, it’s dead. At this point I’m thinking only the darkest of thoughts. I will be stranded in the mountains. It’s freezing. I’ll die. At the very least, I won’t get to the nooner that’s going to pay my rent for April.
So I’m driving like a hundred miles an hour over a mountain and I’m making all these resolutions with myself, like, If I get to a gas station, I am going to donate all of my clothing to the tsunami fund and I’m going to eat only vegetables. Eventually I get to a gas station and I think, Forget that plan. I’d like a full tank of gas and some Funyuns. It’s amazing how quickly your thoughts can go from I think I’m gonna die to I think I’d like fake onion rings.
School four is easy. People show up. They eat hot dogs and cotton candy in some kind of carnival-themed student center event that I don’t even bother asking about, but it’s fine. On to school five and then fly home.
School five is in Walla Walla, Washington. They booked me to perform in the center of the gymnasium during an all-night “Walkathon for Lupus.” When I arrive the young man who booked me looks at me with a straight face and says, “I know it’s not ideal.” And he’s right, because I have to hold a microphone and kind of oscillate like a desk fan that blows jokes. All night these participants walk around the track and sort of glance uncomfortably at me as they pass. It’s like having a steady stream of people steadily walk out of my show, and then return, not miraculously, just a few minutes later on the other side of the track. It’s not ideal. As ideal as it might sound, I can assure you it is not. But I am not going to take the fall for the tepid response I receive at this show. If you’re walking around an indoor track for seven hours to raise money for charity, the last thing you want to see is me in the middle, chasing you with a microphone and yelling about the Teletubbies. The first thing you want to see is a cup of water, maybe some orange slices.
I have nothing left. I have made my rent. I return to the La Quinta Inn where the students booked me. It’s 1:00 a.m. I’m completely exhausted. But I’m not going to sleep. I have one more thing to do. I have to check my email to see if any more gigs like this have come through. Because when you’re self-employed, email becomes a sort of slot machine.
You log on to Yahoo with the thought, What am I doing next week?
Oh. Nothing.
Refresh . . .
Nothing.
I fall asleep with the laptop in my hands.
MY HERO
When I was in college my sister Gina had a job at HBO, and she would send me the latest comedy specials of comedians like Mitch Hedberg, Chris Rock, and Dave Attell. They were comics’ comics. Guys whose comedy was so good they were above comparison, guys who I wanted to be.
Mitch was my favorite of these comics. He defied standup comedy convention entirely. His style was defined by his shyness offstage. Instead of trying to be something he wasn’t and project confidence, he was vulnerable in his delivery. He’d look at the floor or even at the back wall away from the crowd and deliver lines like, “I wrote a letter to my Dad. I wrote, I really enjoy being here, but I accidentally wrote rarely instead of really. But I still wanted to use it, so I wrote, I rarely drive steamboats, Dad—there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about me. Quit trying to act like I’m a steamboat operator. This letter