by Pete Holmes
I could finally put down those heavy bags. Up until that point, every single person I met outside church was just another person going to hell, and all that quiet condemnation took a lot of energy. Now that energy was freed up to relax and start trying to actually appreciate people—especially people of different faiths—for who they were without looking for a window in to change them into me.
It’s a fucking shitty way to go through the world, trying to make everyone you meet think and behave like you, and I was happy to see that go. Not only is judgment toxic and ugly, it’s also exhausting. With my religion out of the picture, I was free to actually love my friends who’d had abortions, or were gay, or got hand jobs at massage parlors, or were egomaniacs or drug dependents, not just pretend to love them while quietly thinking they were lost, criminals, or deranged perverts. Suddenly, instead of being phony holy and nodding my head, fake smiling, all the while condemning them to eternal hellfire in my mind (“That’s a shame”), I could just stop and see another version of myself in different circumstances I couldn’t even begin to understand and just love. I could stop hoping for who they might be tomorrow and just say yes to who they were today.
This seemed more holy to me. The Jesus I knew didn’t go around wagging his finger or condemning people. He ate with sinners and thieves. He knew, and He loved. That’s the funny thing. I felt far more Christlike when I stopped calling myself a Christian.
I EVEN STOPPED GOING TO CHURCH. EXCEPT WHEN I visited my parents for the weekend—I mean, I’m not crazy.
Like a lot of new nonbelievers, I saw no way out of going to church with my family that didn’t involve a briefcase full of cash and a passport. Plus, I couldn’t stomach the idea of breaking my mother’s heart and telling her that God and I had split while she was still recovering from my human wife and I parting ways.
It was painful, sitting in the same pew I had sat in as the Peacemaker, now as Someone Else. I could feel the hum of judgment behind the nice words and upbeat songs that didn’t include gay people, or nonbelievers, or sexually active single people. Sitting in the second row behind the hearing impaired as we always had, I sang the songs, I bowed my head, and I listened to the sermon, but inside I was shooting holes in the service the entire time. Look at this guy. Why is he smiling so much? Is he really that happy to be reading the announcements? Or during the music, The only reason we sing so many songs about God being “above” is because it rhymes with “love.” Should how we think of God really be dictated by which words in our language rhyme? If the word for “love” was “schmoverthere,” we’d be singing about God being “over there.”
For years after my divorce, if I went home for a visit or a holiday, I would always agree to go to church, not seeing a way out. But after one service in particular, I stopped going altogether.
It started out innocuously enough, but it ended up being the last time I ever sat in that pew. The pastor was preaching about being holy, as you never know when you might die. And as he rolled out the phrase “I can think of one group of people that knew this on a fateful Tuesday morning . . .,” the words “fateful Tuesday morning” stuck out to me like Rick James at a Chipotle. I hadn’t been tearing the sermon apart as much as I had the other parts of church, because I genuinely liked our pastor. My whole time sitting in his congregation, when I believed and when I didn’t, his sermons had always been my favorite part. His talks were filled with love, and practical advice, and humor. He was modern, using one of those TED talk face microphones, and kind, and earnest, and a great performer who had done some acting, and it showed.
But looking at my dad counting the pipes on the organ, and the empty seat where my brother would have been if he hadn’t plucked up and told my folks he didn’t want to go anymore, I was looking for a way out. I wanted him to give me a reason. I didn’t want to smell that carpet anymore or taste the crumbled-up Saltines or Welch’s grape juice we called the body and blood of Christ.
I was eyeing the exits.
So I made a pact with myself. If this guy tells a 9/11 story right now, I thought, I’m never coming back. I waited, holding my breath, the backs of the heads in front of me suddenly irritating me, the clean lines of the pastor’s beard now somewhat annoying as he launched into a story about United Flight 93. And that was it. This wasn’t that long after 9/11, and the attacks were still very much being used in politics as a way to get us all to act and vote and think a certain way, and I couldn’t have my government and my church using the same fear tactics to keep us in line. I was done.
At Legal Sea Foods afterward, I told my parents over smoked salmon that I wouldn’t be going to church with them anymore. I didn’t debate. I didn’t explain. When my mom asked why, I offered the simple, irrefutable phrase “Because I hate it.”
That was the last time I went to church. Except for Easter and Christmas. I mean, I’m not crazy.
I liked the feeling of warmth and cheer I got being in church when our usual wooden cross was draped with a purple cloth or framed by two pagan wreaths. I liked the music, and the vague, crowd-pleasing sermons about kindness and brotherly love the pastor gave when the Christmas/Easter crowd filled in the usually sparse upper balcony. So I went for a few more years, suppressing any discomfort I felt with a rousing choral rendition of “Jingle Bells,” or giggling through a skit about inviting homeless people over for dinner. It was nice, and I made it through a few years of High Holidays before the last, last time I ever went to church.
By this point, a few years later, I had made my television debut as a stand-up and had started writing “comedian” on my W-2s, so things were going pretty okay. I was by no means famous, but my mom had stopped telling people I was a waiter at Bennigan’s.
On my way out of the service, in the sun-drenched lobby the church calls “Fellowship Hall,” one of the associate pastors, Paul, whom I had known my entire life and was actually quite fond of, came up to me and shook my hand, but he didn’t let go, like a loan shark to whom I owed a lot of cash. I smiled nervously.
“We were just talking about you,” Paul said. “We have a mutual friend, someone you went to college with, and we just had a long conversation about how it could be possible to be a man of faith and pursue show business at the same time.”
I stopped smiling.
“So, I wanted to ask you, how do you reconcile being a comedian and a Christian?”
My body felt queasy, like I’d just swum through a warm patch in a public pool.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“There just seem to be so many compromises,” Paul said. “The shows in bars, the drinking, the language. So many comedians start out with good intentions but end up talking about sex, or drugs, or making fun of God. How do you navigate around that?”
I realized at this moment that my former pastor had probably watched some of my stand-up, maybe some clips online, clicking the links curiously in his office, the framed painting of Jesus happily hugging the guy arriving in heaven hanging behind him.
The young man, Paul explained, our mutual friend, had given up his pursuit of comedy and had gone into ministry instead.
“Isn’t that great?” Paul said. “He found a way to use his talents for the Lord.”
I found myself fighting to keep down my breakfast. I knew who he was talking about. This kid and I had gone to college together, and he was hilarious and talented, so much so that he actually made me jealous. But apparently all the swearing and sex talk had been enough to push him away from Go Bananas in Cincinnati and into ministry, and this had in turn become a bragging point for the man who’d talked him through that decision.
I considered telling Paul exactly what I thought: That God and life and sex were complicated, and that exploring those ideas in humorous ways often felt beautiful, and unifying, and sometimes reminded me of Jesus having dinner with the sinners and the tax collectors, loving and breaking bread with them instead of offering judgment. I considered telling him that equating holiness with not swearin
g—saying “frek” instead of “fuck”—wouldn’t fool any sort of God worth believing in. But instead, finding no warmth in his icy blue eyes, I quickly searched for and found the combination of words I needed to say in order to end the conversation as soon as possible.
“We have a lunch reservation,” I said, and pried my hand from his.
And that was the last time I went back to my home church, the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was out in the world, pursuing my dream, speaking my truth, using my talents, summoning the courage to share my fears and insecurities in front of strangers to entertain them and leave them happier and feeling less alone, and this guy thought I had fallen from grace because I occasionally said dirty words?
Well, fuck that.
I never went back.
makeover
I HAD BEEN IN, AND NOW I WAS OUT.
I was set loose on New York City in 2007, young, single, and with a little money to burn. With no wife waiting for me at home, and no god policing my every thought and action, I began my own mild, mini-Rumspringa, staying out later after shows, eating lots of late-night two-topping pizza, and drinking without feeling the need to reference Christ’s first miracle.
I thought I was acting wild, but no one noticed. It turns out, everyone in New York in their twenties parties as hard as a newly divorced Christian “going nuts.” I remember staying out past 2:00 a.m. for the first time, thinking I was on a bender, but the bar was still full. I looked around, wondering what terrible calamity had driven everyone to behave this way. Were we all on benders? Did your wives leave you, too? I had no idea people just did that.
Staying out drinking instead of going home to a wife people weren’t even sure was real had its benefits, and I quickly made more friends and became closer with the ones I already had. I never thought I would live this way, and there was so much I didn’t know—like, could you get an STD from a blow job? How worried should I be about HPV, or herpes? Do all vaginas look the same or do I need to prepare myself for unveiling some as-of-yet unseen variety?
It was baffling to me how people were so effortlessly navigating such a crazy and unpredictable landscape.
I quickly noticed that everybody looked more grown up than me, for a start. I stood out at every bar, the only one of my friend group who still looked like a man-child. North Face fleece. Velcro wallet. Somehow, getting married at twenty-two had frozen my taste to that age. My development had been arrested by the unsexy notion that I was “done” when I found my wife and no longer needed to update my fashion sense or try to look appealing. Now, in a bar filled with single people, I suddenly recognized myself as the schlub my wife probably saw me as. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I was still wearing the same pair of baggy tan pants every day with dirty white Adidas and a free T-shirt I had gotten at some college where I’d performed. I was still using the same deodorant I had used since puberty hit in high school—Old Spice Pure Sport—still employing the same technique of four generous glides under each almost-hairless Lithuanian armpit and one quick “cologne swipe” across my chest right at nose level for any lady lucky enough to stand directly in front of me. On top of all this mess, I was still parting my hair ’90s style with a loose center part, all hidden under a free black Guinness hat they gave me when I was a waiter at Bennigan’s. I looked simultaneously like a twelve-year-old and a single dad raising a twelve-year-old.
I needed to be Queer Eye’d.
Luckily, I was surrounded by comedians.
Comedians, like older brothers and sisters, teach by teasing, and before long I started to pick up what they were laying down. Kumail had recently moved to New York with his new wife, Emily—they lived right across the street from my bachelor pad—and he roasted me out of wearing white socks every day by asking me when the soccer game let out, or when I was going to get in my minivan and pick up the kids. Emily was less subtle and simply told me point blank to buy new clothes if I didn’t want to end up drunk and alone in a Winnebago in Milwaukee surrounded by microwave burrito wrappers.
The hits kept coming. Over brunch, John Mulaney eyed my billowing khakis and said, “You dressed like you were divorced before you were divorced.”
John told me to go to Barneys, a fancy department store on Fifth Avenue, but I was scared. The people who worked there intimidated me. “Why?” Mulaney said. “The salespeople in fancy department stores are just pretending to be rich and better than you, but they’re not. They’re just old people who work in a department store.” This steeled my nerves and I went, walking into the palatial marble store, nervous some low-class alarm would go off, and I was quickly talked into a complimentary personal shopper service by a not-old and surprisingly very attractive saleswoman, who easily got me to spend over $900, leaving me with some nice stuff but also some regrettable $300 side-zip-up boots that she said looked “sexy” and I never had the courage to wear outside of the store.
Other comics chimed in. Christian Finnegan got me to stop wearing my cell phone in a soft, clear plastic case I clipped onto my belt with two words—“Belt clip?”—and Thomas Middleditch got me to stop parting my hair in the middle by telling me that I looked like the lead singer of Silverchair.
This was my makeover montage. And it worked.
I remember the first time I threw on a Barneys age-appropriate single-guy-in-the-city outfit and didn’t seal my hair in under a sweaty black ball cap and walked out of my apartment toward the L train. Emily and Kumail saw me from across the street and leaned out their second-story window like the old lady on 227 and yelled, “Is that Pete Holmes or a grown-ass man?!” I waved and smiled, knowing the answer was somewhere in the middle.
second virginity
I HAD FINALLY STOPPED LOOKING AND SMELLING LIKE the weird boy at a junior high dance hovering over the snack table with a kiss of sky-blue deodorant across his midriff, and suddenly I more closely resembled a young man who lived in New York.
I eventually even managed to have some sex, and I’m so happy to tell you this: it wasn’t easy. Why is no one talking about this? It’s really difficult and scary to get back on the horse, especially when the horse emasculated you by trotting off and fucking some other guy. (And yes, I know that image sounds like I was fucking or getting fucked by a horse, but I’m keeping it.) Every movie I’ve ever seen about a divorce or a breakup always starts with a montage of the sad, newly freed man going on a random sex spree to get over his heartbreak. This was not my experience. I wasn’t effortlessly hitting the bars and diving into some strange, I was terrified!
Nevertheless, it happened.
I met a girl, a friend of a friend, and after fifty or so drinks I somehow managed to ask her out. The problem was, even though I looked like a new person, on the inside I was still secretly the same: a scared, shameful church kid. Drinking and smoking was easy, but when it came time to have sex with someone I wasn’t married to, I faced a whole inner battle that I wasn’t sure I was going to win. When you spend the first quarter of your life cramming in the idea that sex is to be shared with one person and one person only, if that person leaves you, you can’t just Select All and delete that shit like a shameful browser history. It’s in there.
My new girlfriend—or “rebound,” as all my friends were calling her—lived in Boston, which meant I’d get to see her only every other weekend or so, which, frankly, was perfect. This meant I still had plenty of time to do what I wanted to do. I could brood, draw the blinds, and day drink in slippers all day, and then shower, comb, and brush my way to presentability for a nice weekend with a sweet girl when my calendar reminded me she was coming.
After weeks of dating, we hadn’t had sex. We had just performed the usual grab bag of sexual B-list activities usually reserved for teenagers and, well, divorced Christians back on the scene, but I knew she was a grown woman and I was kind of a grown man and those placeholders would do for only so long. I mean, I had gone back to the moves of my Christian college days, dry humping—which is never great—but in your late twenties,
it gets even more difficult to close your eyes and ignore the smell of a building Levis friction fire just below your beltline, especially when you know that the natural alternative feels so much better and nothing at all like shaking someone’s hand through the wall of an army tent.
All my church sex-is-evil programming was still very much kicking around in my brain. I used to have to psych myself up the day before she would come to town, literally trying to reprogram my Christian mind into thinking that sex was okay and not the cheese left out on the devil’s mousetrap.
It wasn’t easy. I had to perform all sorts of mental gymnastics to prep for her arrival. I’d watch pornography and not masturbate, like the near-extinct celibate zoo pandas they’re trying to whip into a frenzy for the good of their species. “See?” I would tell Panda Pete. “They’re doing it. They seem okay.” I’d listen to rock ’n’ roll, which, it turns out, the overly concerned parents of the ’50s and ’60s were right about—it is baby-making music; it will put ideas in your head. And those were the ideas that I wanted. I would listen to the White Stripes’ “Instinct Blues” on repeat, prepping for a brassiere that hadn’t been filled by my wife to hit my sad, dirty floor.
I was like a lacrosse player listening to Metallica on the way to the game. I don’t know what they do in those horrible homosexual “deprogramming” camps, but I think I was trying to do the same thing to myself, only the gay men I was trying to wean myself off of was just one person, and a woman, and my ex-wife.