Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [55]
It’s probably the first event in my life where I fully understood my father’s warning: Don’t tell anyone.
It’s January 20, 2005, and I’m in Walla Walla, Washington—which is a place. I’m staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn, and some people correct me when I say that. They say, “No, no, it’s not La Kwin-ta, it’s La Keen-Tah” and that’s not fair. You can’t force me to speak Spanish. I didn’t press two. So I’m at La Keen-tah Een in Wy-a Wy-a Wash-eeen-tahn. It’s one a.m. and I’m lying in bed. I have just performed at five colleges in four days and I’m exhausted. But I’m not going to sleep because I’m an insomniac. I’m sitting up in my bed with my laptop warming my thighs. I’m Googling myself. I’m watching the news. And I’m eating a pizza. At the same time.
And I fall asleep.
I have a dream that there is a guided missile headed toward my room and there are all these military personnel in the room. I jump out of bed and say, “What’s the plan?”
And the general in charge turns to me and says, “The missile coordinates are set specifically on you.”
This wasn’t the first time I had walked in my sleep.
Let me start at the beginning. It all started around the time I met Abbie.
When I was in college I fell in love with Abbie.
Falling in love for the first time is a completely transcendent experience. It’s like eating pizza-flavored ice cream. Your brain can’t even process that level of joy. Love makes people do crazy things like kill other people or shop at Crate & Barrel. I think on some level it makes us all delusional. Deep down, our whole lives, no matter how low our self-esteem gets, we think, I have a secret special skill that no one knows about and if they knew they’d be amazed. And then eventually we meet someone who says, “You have a secret special skill.”
And you’re like, “I know! So do you!”
And they’re like, “I know!”
And then you’re like, “We should eat pizza ice cream together.” And that’s what love is. It’s this giant mound of pizza-flavored ice cream and delusion.
I fell for Abbie immediately because she had this big, beautiful smile. It seemed like her teeth were bigger than her head, but in a really sexy way.
Abbie and I were both in theater at school. My first month at Georgetown I saw signs for auditions for an improv comedy troupe and thought, Well, of course I should be in that. I auditioned, not really knowing what I was doing. In high school I had been in Our Town because they were short on people and needed someone to play Howie Newsome, the milkman. I had taken drama because I heard it was easy. And it was. Plays are much easier to read than books. There are only five to ten words a line and they’re triple-spaced. I’d read plays like cereal boxes. I thought, Oedipus Rex is fantastic! I don’t know what the hell it’s about, but it’s fast! Bring it on, Angels in America! Glengarry Glen-so-few-pages! The acting part was fun too because I could basically just mess around. In life when I acted like a loud idiot I got in trouble. In drama they gave me course credit.
When I got to college I discovered a more serious group of actors. So serious, they were . . . gay. It always makes me laugh when people are surprised that their favorite Hollywood stars are gay. I’m quick to point out, “Remember how sixty-five percent of the drama club in high school was gay? Well, they graduated.” Anyway, I made it into this improv group and that’s how I met Abbie. My fellow improvisers and I hosted this big event on campus called the Washington DC A Cappella Fest, where a cappella groups from schools across the country would blow audiences away in the seven hundred-seat Gaston Hall and then bore people to death at the a cappella parties for five hours afterward with their “deeper cuts.” Abbie and her friend Hannah saw me playing a basketball player in a sketch and the sight gag must have done something for Abbie because the next day she recognized me in a coffee shop and said, “Hello.”
Since people rarely wanted to talk to me, I quickly tried to come up with some artsy