Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [53]
It was like, “Pachoo! You’re p’awkward!”
Thanks for the heads-up, Google. Not feeling great about myself to begin with, but perhaps I did need a reminder.
Well, with a laptop on my crotch and the news pumped up to a volume level of thirty-four, I can effectively take in a huge amount of nothing. I can multitask nothingness to an extent that the writers of The Matrix wouldn’t even understand. And while that’s all going on, I can grab my phone in case I need some pizza.
The last item on Dr. Dement’s list of things to avoid before bed is big meals. This is especially tough for me.
Whenever I tell people I’m trying to lose weight, they say, “You don’t need to lose weight . . . that much.” And it’s true, I don’t have a weight problem, but I am the guy who could really put the brakes on an orgy. Everyone would be like, “Was he invited? Why is he eating a stuffed crust pizza? That is not sexy at all.”
I come from a family of bingers. The Birbiglia family is Italian, but we’re not real Italian, we’re Olive Garden Italian. We don’t eat capellini primavera. We eat unlimited salad and breadsticks and drink a mean white zinfandel.
When I was in high school, my father took our family on a trip to Italy. My brother Joe was spending a semester in Florence and my dad thought it would be the perfect opportunity to visit the motherland. Our whole lives, my dad had espoused the virtues of Italy. How Italians treat each other. How cultured Italians are. And most of all, how they eat. We’ve been regulars at the Olive Garden since its proliferation in the early nineties. And when we go, my dad attempts to order food with an authentic accent. He’ll be like, “I’ll have the pasta fa-jool.” I’m like, “We’re sitting in a strip mall in Hyannis, Massachusetts, between a Build-A-Bear and a Spencer Gifts. You’ll have the pasta fag-eee-oh-lee like everybody else.” So there we were, the Birbiglia family, educated at the Olive Garden, and now we were ready to go to the source. Joe made arrangements for us to eat at one of the finest restaurants in Florence. We looked at the menu put together by a world-class chef, a menu thoughtfully designed for hours and time-tested through years of serving discerning customers, and my dad looked at the waiter who didn’t speak English and said, “I’d like a spaghetti with tomato sauce and one meatball and one sausage.” Joe jumped in and explained to my dad that the waiter didn’t speak English and that it would be better to choose something on the menu since we didn’t want to offend the artistry of the chef.
My dad looked at Joe sternly and said, “Tell him one”—my dad slowed down as though now Joe no longer spoke English either—“meatball . . . and one sausage.” We had traveled four thousand miles and he was ordering his Olive Garden favorite. Joe spoke to the waiter in Italian and, without offending, cobbled together some combination of two dishes that we shoveled onto one plate. I didn’t blame my dad. He’s like me. He doesn’t like interesting food. He likes comfort food. And he likes it now.
Pizza is probably my biggest weakness. I love pizza. I would marry pizza, but it would just be an elaborate ploy to eat her whole family at the reception. What’s not to love about pizza? I mean, look at the ingredients: you got cheese, which is comfy and salty. It’s more or less superfatty concentrated milk. Then you have crust, which is bread. Bread is always a winner in my book. I once went to Thanksgiving dinner at the house of our family friends the Naples and ate only dinner rolls. I’m not exaggerating; it was the best Thanksgiving ever.
So basically you’ve got cheese curds piled on dinner rolls with some tomato-flavored custard mixed in and it tastes amazing.
When I’m traveling, I will almost always order a pizza at the hotel or motel I’m staying at. As a matter of fact, my favorite time to eat pizza is the moment before I fall asleep. I think