Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [61]
But my parents really wanted me to get married. I think my dad thought if I got married, maybe my wife could get me to wear a collared shirt. My mother had other motivations. At one point she actually offered a prize to whichever one of her children got married first. The prize was a blue baby bonnet, which may have revealed a little bit about her ulterior motives. She even set my sister Gina up on a date, and when she got home my mother said, “How did it go?”
Gina said, “Well, I don’t think it’s going to work out because at the end of the date he called me Christina.”
And my mother said, “Well, you look like a Christina!”
My mother was willing to rename her daughter so that Gina-Christina could marry some random dude who didn’t know her name.
I knew my father wanted me to get married. Not because he said it—he never would have been that explicit—but he’d say these kind of cryptic things. On one occasion my father and I were watching golf in my parents’ living room, and he looked over at me and said, “Michael, at a certain point, you got to zig or zag.” It came out of nowhere like a UFO.
“Wait, about what?” He just stared at me. The UFO was gone and all I knew was that I had to zig or zag. I didn’t even know which was zigging or which was zagging but I knew it was important.
Abbie also wanted me to zig or zag. This was troubling because I had always wanted to marry Abbie from the moment we started seeing each other, but when the moment came nearer and fell into focus, I started to feel claustrophobic. I started to develop this fear that maybe marriage would be like school.
I remember when I was real little and I thought, Maybe someday I’ll get to go to school.
And then I went to school.
And the first week, I asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?”
And they said, “Seventeen more years.”
And I thought, Oh no. I never should have gone to school.
Now I found myself thinking, Maybe I should break up with Abbie.
Around this time I went to my brother Joe’s wedding. If you’re ever in a relationship that seems to be moving toward marriage and you’re not comfortable moving in that direction, don’t go to my brother Joe’s wedding. Because it’ll come up. Marriage was practically the theme of Joe’s wedding. I remember we were taking family photos and my mother pulled me into a photo and said, “Michael, do you want Abbie in the photo?”
I said, “Yes,” but not fast enough.
There was a slight pause.
And there was a reason for the pause.
That week I had just returned from a month on the road. I had driven Abbie’s mint-green Taurus across the country from club to club, making just a little more than gas money and living in awful hotels. But I loved it.
And one night I was backstage at this club and this waitress came up to me to take my order and we were making small talk and she said, “I just got back from my other job, which is at Hooters, which is crazy because one of my boobs is bigger than the other. Isn’t that crazy?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She said, “Do you want to see them?”
Now, whenever anything so out of the ordinary occurs in my life, I’m always suspicious that it’s a setup of some kind. Like this girl would take out her boobs and say, “What do you think, math jockey? Is one of the boobs greater than the other?”
I said to myself, Mike, you are not going to give up your relationship with a girl who sees your secret special skill and can talk you down from a karate pose for a girl with one boob greater than the other. So I said, “Actually I shouldn’t be here, because I have a girlfriend.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I know the drill.”
Which blew my mind. Because I did not know the drill. I thought, What is this drill and how can I find out more about this drill?
But I stopped myself and I left the situation. A few hours later, after several drinks, I reentered the situation and ended up in the back of Abbie’s Taurus with this girl. I was overcome with guilt and shame but I also felt like this kind of thing might happen again and I knew I shouldn’t be getting