Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [59]
“Do you think maybe you should see a doctor about that?”
“Yeah, I will, but right now I’m really busy.”
In addition to lying to our parents about living together, we also lied about our career plans. Abbie was pre-med but had decided that she wanted to be an actress. And I was an English major but wanted to be a comedian. So Abbie started applying to grad school for acting. I was working the ticket window at the DC Improv. I kept this a secret for a while one night I let my guard down and mentioned my side job to my dad casually on the phone. It didn’t go so well. “Goddammit, Michael. School is your number one priority. Sounds like you need some reality testing!”
I said, “Okay,” but it wasn’t my number one priority.
I wanted a career in comedy, though I had no idea how to get there. Somehow, I figured, on the day of my college graduation they would hand me my diploma and I would hop in the back of a black van waiting for me outside the front gates of school and it would take me to New York.
There was one big problem: Abbie had been accepted in a graduate acting program in DC, which meant that while I escaped to New York, she would still be in school. I hadn’t told Abbie about my plan. I mean, I had told other people when they asked and Abbie was there. But I never said it to her directly. And on graduation day the issue came to a head.
Abbie and I were at our apartment packing up the last few things of our still-secret living arrangement, and Abbie said, “So I guess I’ll see you . . . ,” and then she started bawling. This destroyed me. She was the girl who saw my secret special skill and I couldn’t handle her crying.
I held on to her and said, “It’s what I have to do right now.”
She said through tears, “You didn’t even tell me. You were just going to leave and not even tell me.”
I said, “It’s hard to talk about because I love you and I want to be with you.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should just break up then.”
And then she went cold. Coldness was worse than crying because crying at least had a pulse. The patient was dying on the operating table and so I took out the electrical revival thingies and said, “We can make it work.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I can still work at the DC Improv half the time and commute to New York and live on Gina’s couch.”
This was pretty close to a lie.
There was almost no way I could make that work, with how difficult it would be to make my way in a new field and move between cities and make a living at the same time. But I said it. And she got less cold. She was coming back to life. So I embellished toward the warmth. I said, “I’ll do anything to make it work.”
We were alive. Two patients in critical condition on the operating table, telling ourselves, We’re doing fine. We’re in love.
Two years later Abbie graduated from school and moved in with me in New York. We lived in Brooklyn in this tiny one-bedroom and it was comfy. We had two cats and a big puffy couch. And we made our first major purchase. We bought a TiVo. We had gone through some rough patches in the past few years, but living together was going to fix everything.
One night I had this dream that I was in the Olympics, in some kind of arbitrary event like dustbustering. And they told me I got third place and I climbed up onto the third-place podium. Even in my dreams I don’t win. In my wildest dreams I place. And then the Olympic judge approached me and said, “Actually you got second place.”
I moved over to the second-place podium and it started wobbling. And wobbling. And I woke up as I was falling off the top of our bookcase in our living room, I landed on the top of our TiVo, which sat on our hardwood floor. It broke into pieces and I was totally disoriented. It was like one of those stories you hear where people black out drinking and they wake up in Iowa and they don’t know where they are and they’re looking around, thinking, Oh no . . . Hardee’s. But it was in my living room. I thought, Oh no . . . TiVo pieces. And I went to bed.
Abbie woke me up in the morning and