I'm Fine...And Other Lies

by Whitney Cummings

  When I saw his sweet face and learned that he was abused, I threw all logic and reason out the window. I felt entitled to the happiness Disney movies promised me as a kid. I wanted love to conquer all, I wanted love to be blind, I wanted us to be soul mates, everything Céline Dion said on the Titanic soundtrack. As Carrie Bradshaw said in the finale of Sex and the City, which was later plagiarized by a Bachelor contestant and now me, “I’m looking for love. Real love. Ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming can’t-live-without-each-other love.” I wanted to be Carrie and I wanted Billy to be Mr. Big.

  Billy wasn’t Mr. Big, but he did become my teacher. It took losing an ear for me to learn to take it slow with people, friends, work relationships, house hunting, hair color decisions, and the animals I bring into my home.

  Today I try to take people at face value instead of projecting my hopes and dreams onto them. I no longer believe people change unless they’re working their asses off to change. And someone saying they want change doesn’t count. Downloading an app of daily meditations does not count as changing either. Someone saying they want to do work or intend to do work doesn’t count as actual work. Me doing work for them does not count as them doing work. If these adages had only been in a fortune cookie when I was sixteen, I would have saved a lot of time and money in two A.M. cab rides to weird neighborhoods and getting into fights about Facebook comments. I no longer think my “love” can change someone’s neurology or value system, which is huge progress given I truly used to think that a well-written Valentine’s Day card outlining how much I love someone was going to do in one day what psychotherapy can hardly do in ten years.

  Of course, being a pit bull myself and also having had very little impulse control training, I ran right at Billy a thousand miles an hour. I didn’t want him to live in fear for another minute, I wanted him to have the love he deserved. In doing so, I forgot a crucial thing: The kind of love I wanted to give him was not the kind of love he actually needed at that stage in our relationship. He wanted hugs and kisses and constant affection that would never end, but what he needed was a careful kind of love, a methodical love that would make him feel safe by providing safety and structure, not one that would implode from impossibly high expectations and enmeshment. As I write this, I’m realizing that I’m not even sure what the definition of love is or should be. Unlike Forrest Gump, I may not know what love is, but I certainly know what it isn’t: It isn’t urgent, it isn’t stressful, it isn’t about pity. I don’t think that to love someone else you should have to abandon yourself. I should probably write things like “Love is about loving yourself first” or “You have to be in a relationship with yourself before you can be with someone else,” but I’m not a motivational speaker or an expert on love and I don’t want this book to read like an annoying Pinterest feed.

  I learned a lot the day I had my ear bitten off. I learned that cartilage doesn’t heal the same way bones do. I learned that we should all memorize at least three people’s phone numbers and I learned to never underestimate a cute blond nurse even though porn has conditioned us to. I learned that blood hardens like nail polish, and that my blood tastes like sweet-and-sour soup. One of the most important things I learned is that sometimes we file very unhealthy behaviors under the term love. I feel really lucky to have learned this in a dramatic enough way for me to pay attention, but not so bad that I couldn’t live to tell about it. If it hadn’t been for Billy, who woke me up and inspired me to rethink my behavior in relationships, I’d probably be married to some sicko and trying to raise a kid my baby daddy named after himself.

  When I think back on that surreal moment, I really do feel lucky. Given all the other ways it could have gone, I have to admit that the way it all turned out is something of a miracle. And for those of you who still think pit bulls are inherently bad or that he did indeed attack me, I promise you that if he truly wanted to kill me, he could have done so in an instant. If you take a look at the alligator jaw that dog was born with, it’s hard to imagine how he did as little damage as he did. If he had nibbled anywhere else on my face, I’d look like spaghetti Bolognese.

  As you may know, a dog’s mouth is his “hands,” so perhaps he was grabbing me by the ear the way a strict mother would to teach me what I needed to learn. I’m not looking at the event as a near miss to put in the rearview mirror. I want to hold on to what happened as an important reminder to slow down in relationships instead of diving in headfirst, without knowing if there’s any water in the pool. The goal for me now is to slow down and play things by ear. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

  The scar on my ear is still prominent, and it didn’t totally attach symmetrically at the top, but I like it this way. I mean, ears are incredibly weird, so now mine is just weird in a different way. Even if I look like half a Hobbit, it’s a lesson that’ll always be right there when I need it. Today all I have to do is look in the mirror and be reminded how quickly I can end up sabotaging myself if I get into an addictive relationship.

  My wonky ear reminds me on a daily basis not to confuse love with sympathy or rescuing someone with intimacy. I no longer let myself get emotionally attached to people who confuse me, deplete me, or pose a danger to me. Although danger is the ultimate aphrodisiac for me, such behavior is a negative contribution to my future. As Vera says, “If you’re attracted to someone, that’s a red flag.” So if I’m too magnetically attracted to a person, that probably means something else is going on, like I’m getting adrenaline from their craziness, which means I may not get to date them, the same way I don’t get to eat pizza for every meal or buy every pair of vintage cowboy boots I see online at two A.M.

  My Van Gogh ear is a gift from Billy. Every day it’ll remind me to meet others the way they are, not how I want them to be. It’ll remind me to practice a patient love, a love where boundaries, self-respect, and self-love come first. Most of all, it will remind me to be humble. Especially on bad hair days when my hair is up in a bun.

  See? My ear is totally fine.

  THE MIDDLE EAST CHAPTER

  According to The Guardian newspaper, I’m the first woman comedian to do stand-up in the Middle East. I have no idea if that’s true. I’d Google it, but I’m too afraid I’ll be put on a watch list or something. Plus, if The Guardian says it’s true, that’s between them and their fact checkers.

  That said, there’s no way it’s true. I’ve met tons of Persian women in Beverly Hills, and they’re hilarious. Plus, the Sphinx was a female, and she told the world’s best riddle 4,500 years ago, which I think caused people to die if they didn’t answer it correctly. So like all great comedians, she killed.

  If I’m the first woman to perform stand-up in the Middle East, that would be very cool, but a dubious honor because I would have liked for a Middle Eastern woman to have been the first woman to do stand-up in the Middle East. Maybe that just wasn’t in the cards. Although I’m flattered, it pisses me off that Middle Eastern women wouldn’t have had that opportunity. Look, there’s a lot of heavy, third-rail emotion swirling around everything Middle Eastern and I’m not going to pretend to be any kind of authority on it, but what I do know is that all my life I’ve been drawn to things that make me uncomfortable—and not just karaoke, eye contact, and Spanx.

  Like any uncomfortable topic, the Middle East is a very important and flammable one. There have been many comprehensive books about the layers of complexities of female identity in the Arab world. I haven’t read them and this isn’t one of them, but I do have a friend named Ahmed Ahmed, a comedian who organizes comedy tours all over the Middle East, and he asked if I wanted to go to Dubai and Lebanon with them. He warned me that female stand-ups weren’t really a thing in the Middle East, although from what I knew, females were treated exactly like they were, well, things. He couldn’t guarantee my act would be well received, but I jumped at the chance because at the time I wasn’t being received particularly well in a lot of places in America either. I probably s
hould have been scared, but I was doing shows in parking lots in downtown L.A. at the time, so nothing really scared me anymore.

  Like any American, I had heard plenty of stories in the news about sexism and misogyny in the Arab world—reports about girls being deprived of their basic freedoms and education, and of grown women in Saudi Arabia being banned from driving. Everybody I knew was obsessed with that particular injustice, the not-being-allowed-to-drive thing—that was like the final straw for people in L.A. In America the idea of women not being allowed to drive is, of course, outrageous. Instead of being unable to drive, we just get constantly made fun of and meme’d for being bad at it.

  I figured that this trip could be an opportunity to help out with all of this. Perhaps I could go to the Middle East and use stand-up as a way to show men that women could be in control without breaking things, be slightly masculine without the world collapsing, and have an opinion without anything catching on fire. For the women, maybe I could be a role model. By doing stand-up, I could show them how to, maybe even literally, stand up for themselves. Perhaps I could inspire them to fight their oppression and live their dreams. I saw myself as Liam Neeson, jumping into action to smuggle these people out of the Stone Age. I may not have had Liam Neeson’s very specific set of skills, given that my abilities didn’t involve masterfully killing people, but they did involve telling Cosmo magazine and Myspace jokes. Be nice. It was 2007.

  I’m already terrible at packing for trips, but packing to go to the Middle East was particularly challenging. I usually pack for every possible catastrophic scenario. I’m the person who packs an umbrella to go to the desert and sunscreen to go to Scotland. But packing for the Middle East was slightly more daunting because the catastrophes didn’t live only in my paranoid head. It seemed like dangerous things really did happen there. I made about twelve copies of my passport and packed a comical amount of lip balm, but I wasn’t sure what clothing to pack, since women expressing themselves over there didn’t seem like a big hit. From what I gathered, women had to cover up most of their bodies, but I also gathered that it was incredibly hot, so I was confused about what to pack. I settled on everything I owned.

  My experience in the Middle East started the moment we boarded Emirates Airlines. The plane was very modern, and the flight attendants were tall, beautiful, and impeccably dressed, like the central casting Pan Am stewardesses in that Leonardo DiCaprio movie. Perfect skin, perfect bodies, perfect lipstick, not one flyaway hair on their heads despite constantly flying. That said, I was perplexed by the color choice of their bespoke lady suits. Beige. Possibly the most neutral color available. I had never seen a flight attendant in beige, and wondered why anyone would pick such a noncolor that doesn’t look good on anyone except maybe Viola Davis. A color that flatters no one, but also offends no one. Interesting. Right off the bat I got the message: Don’t offend anyone. Just fit in. Be beige.

  Luckily I was seated next to Sebastian Maniscalco, another comedian on the tour. Sebastian became my lifelong friend despite having to sit next to me for the duration of a fourteen-hour flight. I fumbled with the TV, trying to take a selfie with the map-screen thingie, and when the world map came up to show us where we were flying, I made the big mistake of asking him “Are we going over Hawaii?”

  I’m not sure why I even asked that. I had always wanted to go to Hawaii, and maybe flying over it would have been sufficient for me at that point. Sebastian seemed more disgusted than shocked by my question. He couldn’t understand how a person could get on a plane and not know which direction they were flying. I was a very lost person at that point in my life, so the direction of the Middle East from L.A. wasn’t even in the top ten directions I needed to focus on.

  After fourteen hours of watching prison documentaries, we finally landed. The pilot said that we were in Dubai, but from above it looked way more like a three-dimensional Candy Land. I had never seen anything like it, not even in video games, not even in my dreams, not even on LSD. It was glittery and glossy and colorful—as if a bunch of five-year-olds were given a billion dollars and used giant fancy silverware to build a city. It’s like a Disney movie, but with a dark, unsettling undercurrent. Malice in Wonderland, perhaps.

  The most fascinating part of Dubai is the bipolar nature of it: It’s both modern and old world, ancient and futuristic at the same time, everything colliding in a frenzy of hypocritical mixed messages. Giant indoor ski slopes have been built next to thousand-year-old mosques. It kind of felt like the city version of your ninety-year-old grandma getting brand-new breast implants.

  At the bottom of a new hotel under construction, I saw a plethora of Rolls-Royces, but at the top of the building, emaciated, sweating laborers worked in the scalding sun for minuscule pay. The juxtaposition of old and new, high and low, rich and poor made Dubai seem to me like the city version of a girl wearing a miniskirt with Ugg boots. This city just refuses to pick a lane.

  Although the extreme wealth and caste system was upsetting, it wasn’t why I was there. I had to stay focused on the treatment of women. But how would I find them and rescue them if they were all holed up, unable to drive or read? Do I embark on a door-to-door deal like the Mormons? Or maybe like a Mary Kay saleslady, since the Middle East seems pretty set in terms of having committed to a religion? Should I hand out flyers letting everyone know that I had landed and was ready to inspire them? I guess I was just going to have to really “lean in” and scale the walls of the tyrannical domiciles to find which women needed rescuing. Look, nobody said being a hero was going to be easy.

  Imagine my surprise when we got to the hotel and everywhere I looked there were women, but not the type of women I expected to see. I thought they’d all be in opaque flowing garb, covering everything but their hollow eyes, floating around like cartoon ghosts. Instead, I saw women in—gasp—jeans, short shorts, belly-baring tops, strappy sandals. I was very confused. This was not the Middle East I signed up to save! I went to the pool of my hotel and women were in bathing suits! Some of them didn’t even seem to be wearing sunscreen, much less a hijab. I thought I was going to have to help these women fight oppression by giving them permission to remove their garb, but every woman I saw made me turn into a mom and want to cover them up.

  I was quickly informed that my hotel and the area I was staying was filled with mostly tourists and high-class prostitutes, so I wasn’t getting a real sample of what the Middle East was really like. Hanging there was like eating spaghetti from the Olive Garden and saying you’re Italian, so I was gonna have to venture out of the westernized bubble I was staying in to actively seek the women I needed to rescue. After all, Liam Neeson didn’t just mosey on over to France and bump into his daughter’s captors at the Auntie Anne’s Pretzel stand at Charles de Gaulle. He had to seek her out. Oppressed women weren’t going to be in my hotel lobby waiting for me. I was going to have to track them down, so I decided to go where all sad, oppressed people who don’t work or drive usually hang out: the mall.

  The mall was the most mall-y mall I’ve ever been to. The mall in Dubai makes the Mall of America look like one Lego. It’s kind of like an airport with shops you’d actually want to shop at. The moment I got there, I found exactly what I was looking for. Well, the two things I was looking for. I found bootleg designer purses, but more importantly, I found women in hijabs and even some in burkas.

  If you don’t know the difference, don’t worry, neither did I back then, and to be fair, I probably still don’t. What I gather from my Middle Eastern friends and Wikipedia is that the hijab looks like a headscarf that covers the head and ears, but not necessarily the face, whereas the burka covers women completely. There’s also something called a niqab, which is essentially a remix of both: a burka that leaves the eye area clear. There are other incarnations of these, like a shayla, a khimar, and a chador, but I don’t know enough about this to tell you the real difference, and frankly, I’m worried the Internet doesn’t know either, especia
lly since I’ve gotten two Google alerts in the past five years giving me breaking news that I died.

  Seeing the burkas in person was a real bummer. And not like the buying-a-jumpsuit-online, then getting-it-in-the-mail-and-realizing-only-JLo-could-successfully-wear-it kind of bummer. It was more of the heartbreak variety of bummer. I had only seen burkas in horrific post–9/11 news footage and seeing them in person sent chills down my spine.

  They looked nothing like what I thought they would. Maybe it’s the tragic romantic in me, but for some reason I expected them to at least be kind of pretty, made of diaphanous fabrics, gorgeous colors, and ornate beaded designs. I guess my naive brain assumed that women must have agreed to this uniform because it was undeniably luxurious and—I don’t know—somehow worth it. I also thought, wrongly of course, that everything in the Middle East was beautiful, comprised of silks, golds, and unicorn dreams. My ignorance isn’t surprising given the extent of my experience with the Middle East included watching parts of Lawrence of Arabia and dozing off while my niece watched Aladdin.

  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that most of the burkas and hijabs were made of cheap-looking fabrics, as if the whole thing was more a synthetic formality than a sacred ritual rooted in traditional beliefs. I didn’t understand how such an ancient cultural norm could have such an ersatz incarnation. I guess I assumed, or at least hoped, they were still using intricate handmade fabrics that were threaded during the time the beliefs actually came about. But no, no. Most of the burkas and hijabs I saw were made of a cheap black fabric, which to me felt like it added insult to injury.

  These women are made to wear these fabrics 24/7 and the fabric isn’t even soft? For me, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Another thing I expected to see based on movies but didn’t get to see: a camel! The Middle East really needs to work on its PR.