Sleepwalk With Me_ And Other Painfully True Stories - Mike Birbiglia [66]
I never told these people the story. It’s a hard story to tell in a few sentences. I tried with one student event coordinator.
“I jumped out a window in my sleep.”
“You what?”
“I know. It’s strange.”
“Are you messing with me?”
“No.”
“It seems like you’re messing with me.”
“No, uh . . . no. I have a sleep disorder and I didn’t deal with it for a long time and it got worse and eventually it got so bad that I jumped out a window.”
“Oh.”
And then he looked at me sadly, and the conversation couldn’t return to a place of normalcy. I couldn’t say, “No, but it’s funny!”
The day I got home from the sleep study, Jenny told me that someone at her office had a sleep issue as well. This took me by surprise. I didn’t think we were going to tell people about what had happened.
“You didn’t tell people at your company about this, did you?” I asked.
“Well, yeah . . . I mean, I went straight to work from sleeping on the floor of the hospital. I was just telling my cubicle-mates where I was.”
“Don’t tell people.”
“Um . . . okay.”
“People are going to think I’m insane. It’s just not a good idea.”
So Jenny didn’t tell anyone. And I didn’t tell anyone. And this thing happened where I started to feel this distance between me and everyone that I met. Just the slightest distance.
Around that time I book a show at a college in Boston. I arrive at the hotel the students have booked for me. It’s on the seventeenth floor.
I’m seething with anger. But I don’t want to tell them why. And I drive over to the school and stumble through my set. Backstage after the show one of the students who had booked me comes up to me and says, “Hey, that was great. We’d like to take you out for dinner.”
And I say, “No.”
He looks confused. And I say, “I have to drive two hours to my parents’ house to sleep because you didn’t book me on the first floor.”
He looks even more confused and I shout at him.
“I HAD ONE FUCKING REQUEST. I HAD ONE THING THAT I ASKED FOR AND YOU FUCKED THAT UP!”
And I storm out and I’m driving home and it hits me that I just had my first “Goddammit, I’m eatin’ pretzels” moment. And it destroys me.
I walk into my parents’ house around 1:30 a.m. and my dad is up reading in the living room and I sit down on the couch. And I’m so upset that I tell him what just happened.
And he listens to me.
He says, “How have you been feeling since the sleepwalking incident?”
“Actually . . . not great.” And I hesitate and then I say, “I’m starting to feel the slightest distance between me and everyone I meet.”
My father thinks about this. And he says, “That’s what happens when you get older.”
And I get him.
I never thought this was going to happen. I’m twenty-nine years old and he’s sixty-eight and he’s sharing with me a truth that we’ve both experienced. It’s something he knows and I know. And we both know. Right now, for that moment, we both know stuff.
So I tell him the whole sleepwalking story from the beginning. And that leads to other stories. I tell him things that I never thought I’d be able to tell my dad. A lot of stories I just told you. At the end of the conversation, my father stands up and he sits next to me on the couch. He puts his hand on my leg and says, “You know you’re gonna have to take care of this. You’re gonna have to see a doctor regularly. And get a neurological workup. You need to take time off from the road. And learn to relax. You’re going to have to deal with this because it’s not going to deal with itself.” And he walks into his bedroom. And when he’s about to close the door, he looks back at me for a few moments.
And he says, “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone.”
THANK-YOUS
First of all, don’t read this unless you’re scanning