Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [47]
I had this idea that if we went out on tour, we could play tennis, maybe see local sites, and somehow my non-drug-using habits would catch on. Even thinking about that now, it’s delusional. It never would have happened. Mitch didn’t want to stop. And no one was going to stop him, certainly not me.
• • •
I’m at the Friar’s Club in Los Angeles. I’ve never been here before, but there’s a memorial service being held for Mitch. I don’t know if Mitch was a “friend” as much as he was someone I looked up to. Someone who sometimes called me back when I called him. Someone who took me under his wing in a slightly removed kind of way. To call him a friend would be a compliment to me, and I don’t want to be presumptuous. Especially since he’s dead. If he were here, I could imagine him saying, “I’m having a memorial service and Birbiglia is speaking. That is ridiculous,” and then laughing, but in a mysterious way so I don’t know if he’s laughing with me or at me.
I’m up late every night combing the Internet for articles about Mitch. There are thousands of blog entries and message board postings, an outpouring of support from devastated fans who were touched by his work. I come across comedian Doug Stanhope’s blog entry about Mitch’s death.
Doug wrote: “Nobody has asked me how Mitch lived. And Mitch lived like a motherfucker. More than most any of us will live. That isn’t sad or tragic.”
Mitch was the number one search on Google that week. I learned that Mitch, who died at age thirty-seven, had heart problems from childhood that manifested in a deadly way when he combined heroin and cocaine in a hotel room in New Jersey. I didn’t know this about Mitch. I didn’t know anything. Mitch didn’t talk about himself much and I was afraid to ask.
There was a second memorial service a few weeks later. The way Mitch’s death was dragged out was testament to how much people loved him, but also to the fact that people didn’t know quite what to do. Maybe if we kept having memorials, we’d get it right? I’m standing out front before the second service and Dave Attell says to me, “Are you gonna say something?”
I say, “I don’t know. I feel like I didn’t know him well enough.”
Dave says, “Me neither, man.”
It becomes clear to me in that moment that Dave looked up to Mitch as much as I did. He’s feeling the same inadequacy I am. That he wasn’t close enough to Mitch do him justice. That somehow there must be someone who understood Mitch more as a peer who could eulogize him the way he deserves.
But Dave speaks at the service. And so do I. We do our best, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
When I think about the people I’ve looked up to in my life, they all tend to be people who can’t stop. Mitch spent his final months playing comedy clubs, often doing two or three shows a night—three or four hours on stage. Not much rest, then on to the next city—not returning home for months at a time. Lynn once told me that Mitch never turned down a job. That he had been told “no” so often early in his career that he felt like if he didn’t say “yes,” he might not be given the opportunity to perform again.
It felt a lot like my life at that moment.
Some people are sad about Mitch’s death. Some people are angry. Some people feel like he died the way he wanted to. But one thing is clear: we all looked up to Mitch, but maybe we should have looked straight at him.
SOMETHING IN MY BLADDER
When I was nineteen, my doctor found a malignant tumor in my bladder. But it’s funny—stay with me—because I was a hypochondriac, and the funniest thing that can happen to you as a hypochondriac is that you get cancer, because it confirms every fear you’ve ever had and allows you to say to your family, “See? I told you! Remember last week when I was overtired and I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There are gonna be a lot of changes around here!”
I’m not a hypochondriac anymore. I avoid going to the doctor at all costs. I really