Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  They had been there for decades and it was very clear: this was their house. The moment our bags hit the floor, it was like we weren’t there at all. Several times a day, every day, I’d hear the son come to the bottom of the stairs and yell, “Ma!” at the top of his lungs and ask for a sandwich or something. The smell of cigarette smoke and some sort of ointment was constant, and either the Eagles or Creedence would blare from below us at odd hours of the night, startling us awake, worse for how quiet it was before it played. Sometimes our lights would dim, which meant downstairs they were warming up the hot tub they kept in their living room. Given how clearly I could hear them, upstairs I was terrified of making any sound whatsoever, gingerly closing the bedroom door and tiptoeing to the bathroom at night, holding my breath, the sound of some weird, Coors Light–fueled argument bleeding through the linoleum.

  I felt like Chevy Chase in Funny Farm, a movie I have never considered a comedy. And since I was home all day, I had plenty of time to marinate in my own personal upstate hell. When we first moved in, I had hoped that maybe everyone in the house went to work during the day, so I wouldn’t have to obsess over every little noise like a nervous, vigilant dog. But nope—everyone was home all day, every day—everyone, that is, except my wife, my only friend. It was just me and my three kooky roommates.

  What’s worse was that the thing that made me happier than anything, doing comedy, was now a huge ordeal. I hated driving an hour each way to do a three-minute spot for fifteen people—it didn’t make sense with gas and traffic. When I lived in Brooklyn, I would sleep in, write a little, wander, eat pizza, pop into an early movie, head home, nap, have dinner with my wife, and then take the subway to a show at night. After my set, I would feel so elated I’d have to remind myself to act normal when talking to other people, like the cocaine had just kicked in. I’d hop on the train blissed out, connected and relevant, picturing myself towering over the skyline, a happy giant dancing with joy. But now I was upstate, waking up at 8:00 a.m. when the first thing I had to do that day was at 11:00 p.m., and my wife had the car. There was no wandering, no good pizza, and no daytime movies except the ones I could hear through my ceiling.

  I was deeply depressed.

  I wasn’t even sure that living closer to nature was making my wife any happier. It was impossible to tell, honestly, because we never saw each other. We were commuting on opposite schedules, and some days I would see her only when she was handing me the car keys, me heading back toward the traffic she had just gotten out of.

  I could tell there was distance between us, but I blamed it on the move. I never would have guessed it was something more serious. An affair was so far from my mind, in fact, that one time I called her while, looking back, I know she was clearly with the other guy.

  I was on the set of my very first commercial shoot alongside my good friend Matt McCarthy. We were on a huge soundstage in LA—my first time in California—dressed up as the different terminals on a Sears DieHard battery. He was in a black jumpsuit—the sour negative terminal—and I was in a red one—the happy positive terminal, both of us with ill-fitting buckets spray-painted silver strapped to our heads.

  (I’ll pause here if you want to YouTube it. See if you can spot the circle in my front pocket where I kept my wedding ring while shooting.)

  So there we were, standing inside this gigantic gray plastic car battery about the size of a Manhattan RadioShack, when in between takes I decided to call home. My wife was acting weird, as I imagine you would too if your husband called you pre-, post-, or perhaps midboning some other dude, and I could tell something was wrong.

  “Is someone there?” I asked.

  “No,” she said unconvincingly. But I wasn’t buying. I’m a Holmes, after all. We’re good at mysteries. I saw the clues, I read the tension in her voice, then suddenly it hit me: someone was there.

  “Oh my God,” I gasped. “Are you being robbed?”

  I guessed “burglar” before “affair.”

  That’s how airtight I thought our marriage was. She’s acting strange. I bet someone is stealing our TV. Terrified that she was in danger, I did what any reasonable fan of Jason Bourne would do and asked her a security question, something we both knew the answer to, so in case she was in distress she could answer it incorrectly and alert me covertly, burglar none the wiser.

  Of all questions to ask a woman having an affair, I picked, “In what city did we get married?”

  What a pickle for her. Now, not only was she talking to her twenty-eight-year-old oblivious golden retriever husband while she was in the same room as her spicy secret lover (I picture him probably shirtless, flexing muscles I don’t have), she was having to answer trivia about our marriage.

  She got it right.

  “Gloucester,” she said, and I hung up the phone like a dope. Not only none the wiser, but relieved.

  After we split, she told me she had no idea why she answered the phone that day.

  I STILL DIDN’T THINK “AFFAIR”. INSTEAD, I THOUGHT maybe I had died.

  God and goodness felt so far away, I thought something must have happened to me, something supernatural. Prayer was no longer working, it just felt like talking to myself, and my old standbys, my Joel Osteen CDs—with his sunshiney message of prosperity and “God’s favor”—may as well have been in German. I thought back to a flight I had been on a few months prior where it had been so turbulent that the plane couldn’t land after several attempts and I thought we were going to die. As my life upstate got more and more confusing—my commute sadder and lonelier, my wife more distant and cold—I started to think that plane had crashed and everything from that moment on had been some sort of test, an afterlife nonreality, like a David Lynch movie I just had to escape.

  At home alone, I would lie on the bed and try to wake up. I would try to aggressively open my eyes. I thought perhaps if I opened them wide enough, I would snap out of it like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in the scene with the leaves.

  That’s how airtight I thought my marriage was.

  I guessed “dead” before “affair.”

  BRIDGET FINALLY CAME CLEAN A FEW WEEKS LATER, after taking me to my favorite restaurant in Park Slope for what I didn’t know would be our last meal together.

  I had linguini with clams, extra garlic—the official meal of husbands who don’t consider their wives—and “my usual,” a chilled pink glass of Beringer White Zinfandel, the official drink of husbands whose wives are cheating on them.

  After I had adequately carbo-loaded, we got in the car and sat through an hour of post–Yankees game traffic while I spun my sad, what’s-happened-to-us playlist, mostly Coldplay, until we came home, got on the bed—a place where we had all serious discussions during our marriage so any incurred discomfort could be squashed with adorable bouts of snuggling—and she read a script she had written out beforehand so as to not lose her nerve.

  Poor thing—I mean that. Breaking up with someone is really hard, I’ve figured out since. I’ve now been in the weird situation of dating someone for a month or two, realizing it’s not right, but being past the point where you can break up over the phone, as much as you’d like to. So sometimes you have to make a plan, a plan to break up, and you find yourself calling a person you’ve only ever texted and asking her to coffee when you’ve only ever met for dinner, praying that she gets wise to your intentions and ends it then and there. But no. You make a plan. You put it in your phone: “Saturday. Hurt Linda. All day.”

  And that was me. I was my wife’s Linda. She was barely able to look into my innocent, dopey face, clueless, sedated with heavy pasta and two baskets of bread, no clue as to what was about to happen.

  Her script was itemized. I still have it, in the same Altoids box I keep my old wedding ring. Maybe that’s weird, but I was never sure what a cuckold is supposed to do with his ring. I considered hucking mine into the ocean or something, but rings are terrifically difficult to huck. It’s the hole in the middle, you see.
I didn’t want anyone to witness me on the beach, arm cocked back, shouting, “See you in hell!” only to have the ring plop down into the wet sand a few sad feet in front of me. I considered melting it down and making a bullet and shooting her new lover, but that’s stupid. I’m not a revenge person, or a murderer, plus I liked the guy, and how would he know it was my ring that was killing him unless I stopped to explain it first, which would really ruin the moment.

  Anyway, this was her list:

  One. I love you and never want to hurt you.

  Two. You deserve to be with someone who is crazy about you.

  It’s worth noting that at this point I still thought we were about to make spoons and go to sleep after she wrapped this up.

  Three. I don’t want to be a cheating wife.

  That one seemed random. I guilelessly replied, “So don’t be!”

  Her stark silence afterward is what finally clued me in.

  “Is there someone else?” I asked, half laughing, as I didn’t know people really said things like that outside a particularly good episode of Melrose Place.

  More silence. My inner Jacuzzi jets of dread kicked on and filled my body with a swirl of heat and panic.

  “This is where you say no,” I said, to no response. “This is where you say no.”

  My first guess was another comedian—yes, that’s how much I love comedians. I thought, If my wife is leaving me, it’s only for a funnier, more successful comic. When she told me he was a teacher, I earnestly exclaimed, “You’re leaving me for a civilian?!”

  We didn’t cry or fight. I just deflated and fell asleep. (I fall asleep when I’m panicked.)

  In the morning I woke to the sound of her getting ready for work. The room still dark, I lifted my head off the pillow and asked her in a sweet voice, “Was that a dream? Are you really leaving me?” She looked as sad as I had ever seen a person.

  HERE’S THE THING: IF I’M BEING COMPLETELY HONEST, there were other emotions at play when she broke the news. There was shock and pain, sure, but there was also relief. I wasn’t crazy, I wasn’t dead, and I didn’t have to stay in a place that made me feel both crazy and dead.

  Living upstate made me feel like my legs had been taken out from under me. I couldn’t get over the fact that I used to live in an energetically inspiring place. A vibrant, living city, fifteen easy minutes from a mic and an audience and my friends and free chicken fingers, and then I was alone and horribly never alone and my wife had been acting strange. Next thing I knew, she dropped the great twist of my late twenties, and I saw my way out. What strange grace.

  If she had split while we were living in Brooklyn I would’ve been even more devastated and shocked and completely immobilized. Luckily for me, we had moved to a town most famous for its nightmarish quality, crammed between muffled daytime television and a son shouting up lunch orders, and I was totally miserable. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to go for walks in the woods, I wanted to pave the forest and build a city so I could do comedy in it. The pain of her affair tore a hole in my heart. But more than a hole, it was an escape hatch.

  I climbed through.

  tinker bell

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, I WENT ON THE ROAD FOR THE first time in my life.

  This was convenient because I didn’t want my friends to see me falling apart, so I did my tearing up in rental cars driving between Dakotas screaming along to the Dropkick Murphys. For some reason, their songs about my home state, Massachusetts, were now oddly moving to me. I had never felt that before, but after my wife split I really identified as a Bostonian for the first time in my life. I drew strength from it. My wife wasn’t from Boston—she sucks! I’m from Boston—I’ll get through this!

  (Years later, I would read how people tend to identify more strongly with their country and their clan after experiencing a trauma. Tragedies of many kinds provide other examples of this, and while mine was just a heartbreak, it was enough to get me to consider buying a Bruins hat.)

  On the road, I appreciated being sad where no one could see. It was a chance to get some grief out privately, like going on vacation alone while you wait for your hair transplants to heal. You come back to the office after three months: “I was writing my book.” “Sure. Why do you have hair now?”

  I got into a pretty good depressed-guy-on-the-road routine, too. I would fly to a college town to do a show, pretend to be cheery for forty-five minutes of light observational humor, then promptly drive to a Walmart to buy a bottle of wine (screw top; you can’t fly with a corkscrew) and a pack of American Spirits (the healthy cigarette) that I would drink and smoke alone in my hotel room while listening to a sad Counting Crows song on repeat (“Raining in Baltimore”). Once in a while I’d awkwardly notice a chipper student who had just been at the show while I was in line waiting to pay for my Yellow Tail. Eventually I got wise and started going to Walmart before the show. I’d leave the wine on top of the toilet tank as I headed out to perform, all but saying “See you soon, honey” as I closed the door.

  I know it sounds strange, but I look back on my depression fondly. So much anxiety in my life comes from not knowing what to do or how to behave, but everyone knows how to be sad. Mingling at a party is hard; drawing the blinds and drunkenly having a fake conversation with your ex-wife is surprisingly natural.

  I’d try to get a good cry going whenever I could. I’d watch sad movies. I’d look at old photos. I knew crying was like throwing up for your soul. You never really want to, but you know you’ll feel better if you can just get it over with.

  One of the best cries I ever had was while watching the movie Once in Salt Lake City. I had never heard of Glen Hansard before, but as I watched him play songs with titles like “Lies,” “Leave,” “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” and “Say It to Me Now,” I knew I had made the right choice. The film is tailor made for men whose wives have just left them, and it’s even better for men whose wives have just left them and who are lucky enough to be alone in a movie theater at 2:00 p.m. on a weekday in desperate need of a good weep. As the chorus to “Falling Slowly” rang out in the empty theater, I sat there, ducking my bobbing head down in my seat just in case the projectionist was peeking in to check focus, crying along in rhythm to the beautiful duet, feeling like this beautiful Irishman truly understood my pain.

  THERE WERE LAUGHS, TOO.

  One night, after playing a college in Orlando, as I found myself sitting on the floor, full of a cheap red blend and organic tobacco smoke in a hotel room so sparse and lonely that even Bukowski would’ve been like, “They should get a fern in here or something,” my pity party was strangely and hilariously interrupted. Turned out, my hotel was right next to Disney World. And turned out, Disney World has fireworks every night. Gorgeous, sensational fireworks.

  Imagine a man, drunk and alone, trying to get a good cry going, slurring along to Adam Duritz playing out of an iPhone speaker, as every joyful color bounces and pops, splashing into the night sky as a barely visible Tinker Bell zips lines to and from the Magic Kingdom, literally granting wishes to the hope-filled children below, all of them audibly cheering and gasping with delight as I lie on the floor motionless, like a pair of sad pants kicked off and waiting for laundry day.

  I had to laugh. There I was, Depressed Guy, being depressed as gigantic speakers blasted over the cracking fireworks,

  You can fly! You can fly!

  You can flyyyy!

  weedsmoke

  EVENTUALLY I GOT BACK TO NEW YORK, AND FOR THE first time in my life I had enough money to get my own place. It was weird doing fifty colleges and not having anyone to call after each show or to share the profits with. I felt like my wife had been an early investor in my company, supporting me and encouraging me through all the shaky early years, and then she sold her shares right before I went public. We were supposed to be enjoying the spoils together.

  Sad people emanate a heat and a frequency that is understandably difficult to be around. I wasn’t surprised when my friends
declined invitations to see my new place—I mean, who wants that tour? “This is the shower I crumble in . . .”—nor was I shocked when my married friends avoided me altogether as I, too, had stayed away from the freshly divorced when I was married, sharing in the weird, unspoken belief that a divorce is somehow contagious—but I still had break-up business to take care of and I didn’t want to do it by myself. I had tried changing my cell phone plan alone, and the clerk at the store just couldn’t understand why I would want to stop using the family plan when I was saving so much money linking my account with my wife’s. “These accounts are better together,” he said. “It makes no sense to separate them.” No shit.

  I had to go to the courthouse to get my paperwork finalized and asked my older brother, John, if he would come down and visit me. While so many people seemed to be avoiding me, for the first time in my life it felt good to hang out with family.

  We went downtown together and solemnly walked up to the clerk’s desk, where I handed in the final paperwork for my divorce. I don’t know what I was expecting, but it seemed so unceremonious and anticlimactic. The matronly woman collecting the documents didn’t even look up at me, she just coldly and loudly stamped the stacks of paper and handed them back, marking a huge turning point in my life—not that she cared. To my left, there was a young couple, clearly newlyweds, getting their marriage license. They looked bright, healthy, and in love, holding hands and giggling as the state’s acknowledgment of their perfect union was notarized. I felt like I was bitterly checking out of the hotel they were so happily checking in to.

  That night, I smoked pot for the first time in my life. My brother brought me some, like bringing a hot dish to sit shiva, and we sat in silence in my stuffy little one-bedroom as he rolled a joint with what I didn’t know was some very strong pot. I didn’t listen to enough hip-hop at the time to know about puff-puff-pass, so I just took a shift with it and smoked it like a cigarette, taking drag after drag of my inaugural joint. My brother’s “woah” should’ve been enough of a clue to slow down, but it was too late.