Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [6]
Right then a couple of women come up to us and say, “You guys lookin’ for dates?” We look up and realize that they were the mobster dates from the show.
They were hookers.
And it’s not outside the realm of possibility that the men in those nice tailored suits had thought about killing me and had the means to do it. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have called those guys’ dates hookers, but I had something to say.
DELUSIONAL
When I was a kid, I wanted to be a rapper, a comedian, a poet, a professional basketball player, a country singer, a break-dancer, or the owner of a pizza restaurant where third graders could hang out.
Break dancing was the least realistic of these early goals. I mean, first of all I’m not good at it. I have no flexibility and very little rhythm. On the other hand, I did have some large pieces of cardboard in the attic above my parents’ garage as well as a mix tape called Awesome Summer ’82. But even if I’d gotten my popping and locking figured out, it’s really hard to pay rent with a day’s worth of nickels thrown at you on a subway platform. But I didn’t know all that on the blisteringly hot summer day in 1984 when my siblings took me to see the movie Breakin’. I was only six, but since I was the youngest of four kids, my mom had finally given up on asking questions like “Is this movie appropriate for a six-year-old?” Instead she just asked my sister Gina, “It’s a full two hours, right?” We climbed out of the station wagon and our mom sped away.
Inside the theater I was instantly sold. I was just like those urban teenagers who break-dance competitively. And besides, my older siblings and I were the only people in the theater aside from a mother and her son. So we danced along with the movie. First we break-danced in the aisles, and when no one objected to that, on the carpet separating the screen from the seats. We break-danced our asses off. Everyone had a great time, but I had an epiphany: I’m a break-dancer! This is what I do. My dad’s a doctor and I’m a break-dancer.
My siblings were completely behind me. The next day they invited their friends over to our house and said, “Mike, show them your break-dancing moves. They’re so good.” And I was off to the races. I started flopping around on the floor, my legs were flying around in the air. And everyone was laughing and having a great time. I was so good I didn’t even need music! It was my first brush with live performance. And delusion.
I was a big dreamer and never particularly good at anything—a real dilemma. I wasn’t terrible. I was just . . . okay. If you’re terrible, you can write everybody off, like, “I don’t know what the hell those idiots are doing?” I knew what those idiots were doing. And I knew that they did it better than me.
In the third grade I was selected to compete in the fifty-yard dash at the town track meet on behalf of St. Mary’s School. The town track meet brought together kids from our town’s three enormous public grade schools—Spring Street School, Patton School, and Beal School—and St. Mary’s, my tiny Catholic grade school. My best friend Matthew Sullivan had won all the qualifying events held beforehand at school, but it was school policy that he could only choose one for the town track meet. That way, more kids could participate. It’s kind of like the same policy they have at the Olympics. Regardless of this technicality, it was a huge honor to be named to the St. Mary’s squad.
For a third grader, the Shrewsbury town track meet is the most cosmopolitan event in your life. There’s an ice cream truck. The black family is there. There are tons of those public school kids that we Catholic school kids had been warned about. From an early age we had been told that public school kids were rapists and people who would stab you for looking at them the wrong way. Public school kids heard from their peers that we were fairies. Unfortunately, the word fairy rhymes with St. Mary. And rapist doesn’t rhyme with anything.
At the time