My Life as a Goddess

by Guy Branum

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  For my father, Larry Branum, who would have hated this book.

  FOREWORD

  GUY AND I FIRST met when we were shooting a romantic comedy movie over a decade ago, playing parts of two people nobody cared about. Our roles in the movie were pretty much the same: the desperate but appealing side characters who turned to the good-looking leads and said things like “I can’t believe how single I am.” Guy was our director’s pet. His wife had seen him on Chelsea Lately and was obsessed with him. Everything Guy said made our director laugh and so I became jealous of him.

  We met again years later in the writing room of The Mindy Project, where I hired Guy to be a writer. My plan, of course, was to hire him only to torment him for his past imprudence of being funnier and better-liked than me. To my dismay, this was thwarted almost immediately and Guy was very popular on staff. Turns out that not only was he a very funny writer, he also went to law school and could give any of us ready legal advice on any subject, no matter how arcane. Thinking about my future prenup and eventual divorce legal fees, I kept him around.

  Time went by. My jealousy turned to indifference. My indifference turned to apathy. My apathy turned to light interest, interest turned to fondness, and that fondness turned to love. And the reason I loved Guy surprised me. It was because of his innate kindness. Although he is a very quick wit (a quality I assumed he gained from years of being a successful stand-up and being, well, a gay man) and could eviscerate anyone or anything he wanted, he never did, because Guy is . . . kind. I don’t know many people as funny as he is who care about being compassionate. But Guy does.

  But you didn’t buy this book because Guy’s kind. You bought it because he’s funny. In this book, he writes hilariously about his career, his family, his gayness. You can live vicariously through him as he got the dream job of working for Chelsea Handler, then feel scared for him when he pissed off Chelsea Handler. It’s so refreshing to read someone write truthfully about his family relationships, his love life, and his career in Hollywood, complete with juicy details. I didn’t even mind the part where he called me a huge bitch (just kidding, he said I was “kind of bitchy.” Just kidding, he said I was perfect). It’s all so good.

  And the secret bonus? You know that deep down, he’s a great guy.

  Mindy Kaling

  Los Angeles, California

  PROLOGUE

  LETO AND THE LYCIAN PEASANTS

  IN MY EIGHTH YEAR, my attentions turned to Greek mythology.

  This is hardly unusual for children of that age, which is somewhat strange when you consider how much of Greek myth centers on rape, sexual kidnappings, and adulterous rendezvous between princesses and gods in the form of farm animals. Somehow our culture has decided Greek myths are cool for third-graders, but safe and reliable birth control is too much for a sixteen-year-old to learn about. That said, I am not here to challenge America’s educational morality. I’m here to write a collection of humorous personal essays.

  Like most people who write collections of humorous personal essays, I was a bookish child. Other boys my age focused most of their time on yelling, trying to fart on each other, and generally not obeying rules. The vast majority of male eight-year-olds love to break rules. It is their greatest passion. Mashing their food together in the cafeteria and pretending it’s barf. Yelling “boobs” during a nice assembly where we learn about Irish step dancing. Maiming beauty. They love it. Their fierce defiance of what moms and teachers want out of them is what fuels their spirits. I have never understood these creatures.

  A small but resolute minority of eight-year-old boys love the rules. Rules are our only protection from the senseless engines of chaos we share classrooms with. They are that quiet, obedient opposition who would like silence and beauty and assemblies about Irish step dancing to be preserved. I was one of those boys. Third grade is a difficult place for us, so we seek the safety of a world where systems work and laws are obeyed: age-appropriate adventure books.

  I grew up in a town where absolutely nothing happened. It’s a farm town in California, but not the good part of California. We will get to that later. What you need to know is that it was a place devoid of importance—political, economic, or philosophical—and any story that happened there centered on alcoholism and/or domestic violence. No one went to college, no one started a business, no one traveled anywhere but Disneyland or a lake. I grew up in a place with no dreams.

  As a little kid in a little town where very little happened, Greek myths made me feel connected to the important stuff. There were kings, sorceresses, and human embodiments of abstract concepts: people who were in charge of things. If I was never going to meet any sophisticated folks in my real life, maybe I could learn how they operated from a book.

  And Greek myths were full of people performing tasks I was too scared and fat and indoorsy to do myself. I wasn’t like those idiots I went to school with. If one day I planned to do stuff that required being brave and bold, I would have to do a lot of research and planning first.

  In the sad, poor portable building that passed for a sad, poor library at my sad, poor public elementary school, I found a series of books. They were adaptations of stories from Greek mythology by a woman named Doris Gates; they had titles like Lord of the Sky: Zeus and The Warrior Goddess: Athena. They were full of shortish episodes from The Odyssey, or Theogony, or Metamorphoses, made palatable for children. I consumed them with an enthusiasm I normally reserved for meatballs or banana pudding.

  The Golden God: Apollo was yellow, naturally, and on its cover was a man of preternatural beauty, a 1970s decadence of oranges and yellows and black. One of the first stories in it told of the birth of the sun god, Apollo, and his sister, Artemis, the moon. I will now tell you that story to the best of my recollection.

  So Zeus had sex with Leto, who was one of his sisters, as was his wife, Hera, but Hera was jealous. That was what Hera did: She got mad at Zeus about the women he fucked. She couldn’t stop him, because he was the king of the gods, and she couldn’t punish him. Hera got the throne and the diadem and all the perks of being the wifey, but she knew he never really loved her. This was the cruelest of tortures for one of the fairest and finest goddesses, so she did her part to spread the punishment around to the women he had sex with and the children he impregnated them with.

  So Hera, regally pissed, banished Leto from Mount Olympus and placed the following curse on her sister: Not a place on earth, nor in the sea, nor under the sun, could give Leto shelter lest it be subjected to Hera’s powerful wrath.

  For nine months, Leto walked the earth. Slowly, she grew great with child, but no place would give her food or drink or a safe place to stay. In the hot sun of Attica, she paced and she paced, begging hills and meadows for comfort, and each one chased her away in some manner.

  Finally, in the height of summer, giant with twins, she came to a pond where some peasants were washing clothes. Leto knelt down by the pond and asked if she could drink from it. The peasants noticed that she was pregnant and asked where her husband was. Leto had no answer, so the peasants mocked her for being an unwed mother and kicked around the water in the pond until it got muddy and would be gross to drink.

  Leto, hot, thirsty, pregnant, tired, all of it—all of the k
inds of DONE—got up and started to walk again. Where? She had no answer. How was she going to have these kids when no one would even let her sit down? Her spirit was broken.

  Then she remembered that she was a goddess.

  It was the most beautiful, wonderful sentence I’d ever read: Then she remembered that she was a goddess.

  She turned around, raised her hands to the sky, and turned the peasants into frogs. “Kick in the mud forever, you basic amphibious bitches,” she cursed.

  That story changed me.

  It isn’t that Leto turned those asshole peasants into frogs; the frog part is an afterthought. The important part is that she remembered she was a goddess. She had been too caught up in the dirty, base realities of the life she was leading to realize the audacity of the situation. She was a goddess being condescended to by peasants. The peasants didn’t know who she was, but more important, she had forgotten who she was. I didn’t know you could be a goddess and forget it.

  I am not supposed to be a goddess. I am very fat. I am bald. I have a faggy voice. My family is poor. My parents are uneducated. I dress like a wet three-year-old. My handwriting is bad. I sweat a lot. My parallel parking is amateurish. I’m wholly devoid of the skills required to make any ball go into any goal, hoop, or pocket.

  I’m not supposed to like myself, and I’m certainly not supposed to think that I should matter. The world has spent a lot of time telling me that, and in the past thirty or so years, I often listened, because we all listen. The world is mostly full of fine facts and good lessons, but some of those facts and lessons were built to keep you down.

  And I got kept down for decades. Then I remembered that I was a goddess. I may not always feel like it, but I have powers.

  I am an amazing dancer. I’m quite ridiculously smart. I’m strong. I’m funny. Babies like me. I have very strong research skills. I make passingly good Punjabi okra. I have a law degree. I sparkle on panel shows. I’m very good at listening when I try.

  It’s not amazing. It’s not lightning bolts or control of the seas, I can’t turn myself into a swan and have my way with whatever man I like,1 but it’s enough for me.

  And Doris Gates gave me my most important power—the power to see myself. I can’t control what people see when they look at me. Most people see a weird, fat, unsexy guy who is wearing cargo shorts even though he should know better. I can’t decide if you think I’m beautiful, but I do get to decide if I’m going to feel beautiful, and from the moment I first tried it, I’ve been addicted.

  So that’s what this book is about, the life I was supposed to lead as a sad, fat, closeted bumpkin, and my decision to be something thoroughly more fabulous. My life has not been practical, it has not been meaningful, and it has been only periodically profitable, but it has at least stayed interesting. Because a goddess’s job isn’t to be good, it’s to have compelling stories lyre players can tell about her at the courts of kings and princes.

  Oh, and a goddess needs worshippers. You don’t need a lot; in a pinch, just one will do. On that Lycian field, Leto was just about the only person who believed in Leto, but it got the job done. There have been numerous occasions when I was the only person who believed in me, but I made it through.

  Thus, if you are at all interested in being a goddess, may I suggest starting this book by believing in yourself. If you’re nice enough to read my book, I at least owe you enough to believe in you, too.

  * * *

  1. In addition to not having the power to shift my shape, I also just don’t want to have to deal with all the think pieces such an act would prompt.

  A POOR FIT

  I WAS BORN WRONG.

  The first thing I did as a legally existing human being was get lodged in my mother’s vagina. I was too large. There were forceps involved, there was tugging, there was a warning that a lack of oxygen might have left me brain-damaged.

  This pattern was to recur.

  I don’t bring this up simply to call to mind my mother’s reproductive organs but to make a larger point: I am bad at fitting. I don’t smoothly, comfortably integrate myself. This is possibly the dominant theme of my life. Thus, let us step back from my existence for a few pages and set ourselves a scene. Let’s take a moment for some geography.

  Yuba City: A Horrible Place

  I was born in California, but not the California you think. I wasn’t born in the urban, sun-glazed beachiness of 90210 or The OC or The Hills or any other show where physically perfect twenty-five-year-olds play high school sophomores. I don’t mean to say that California doesn’t exist. It does: The high school students are sexually and emotionally mature monsters who are constantly doing drugs and using their parents’ money and influence to start clothing lines. They are horrifying and magnificent, but I’m not like them. If you would like to learn more about them, please consider following Patrick Schwarzenegger on Instagram. If you’d like to learn more about my sad, meager birthplace, keep reading!

  I was born in Northern California, but again, not the Northern California you think of. When you think of Northern California, you think of cabernet vines and marijuana and betatted lesbian sous chefs working at three-Michelin-star restaurants and liberalism and hippies. You think of your friend’s Instagram photos from that trip she took to Napa where Joel finally proposed to her (even though she swore things were over after the incident in Tulum). Northern California seems beautiful, and you don’t know why I’m complaining about it. Again, that’s not the place I’m from.

  I am from a place you don’t think about. I am from where almonds and peaches come from. I am from the long, wide, hot valley that begins just over the San Gabriel Mountains from Los Angeles and stretches five hundred miles north to the Siskiyou Mountains. This is where every glorious thing in your produce aisle begins its life. Just about every artichoke, almond, peach, plum, prune, walnut, kiwi, leaf of spinach, stalk of celery, bulb of garlic, floret of broccoli or cauliflower you have eaten in your life comes from this valley, and you have never thought about it. Nor should you have to.

  It is a horrible place. When people from cities think about rural life, they think about the charming fiction of farming that’s presented to them by tourist traps and America’s national mythos. You think of Vermont. Vermont isn’t farms, it’s a cute place for New Yorkers to take the money they earned running America and spend it on creating wacky ice cream flavors and electing socialist senators. I know all those charming general stores and Revolutionary War cemeteries seem very authentic, but it is simply a well-textured lie. Vermont is essentially just upper, whiter Central Park.

  Let’s be clear: Farming isn’t charming. It’s the bare, base existence that people are able to scrape by on from the narrow difference between what it costs to raise crops and the pennies our cruel overlords in the city are willing to pay for them. I would know. I was raised on a farm, and every day I prayed that one day I would be able to become one of those cruel overlords in the city.

  I grew up in Sutter County, California, just outside of Yuba City, a small farm town in the Sacramento Valley. It is California-small, currently around sixty-five thousand people. That would make it the fifth largest city or higher in sixteen states, the biggest city in Wyoming, West Virginia, or the aforementioned Vermont, but in California, it’s less than an afterthought. A place you think you may have heard of.

  When I say “farm town,” you also think you know who lives there. It’s a charming little community full of nice Caucasian characters who know each other and have petty arguments that last for decades but fall away in the face of an outside threat, like a flood or a big-city business lady. We’ve all seen that town a thousand times in movies. You’re essentially just remembering a three p.m. showing of Doc Hollywood that you saw on TBS in the early 2000s. I’m not from there. I’m from California.

  California is not a place. It’s the edge of human civilization. There is no sense of community because everybody arrived six weeks ago. The orchards of Yuba City, California, are
just as stark and impersonal a hellscape as any strip mall in Los Angeles; they just smell better.

  All four of my grandparents came to California from the Ozark Mountains of Northwest Arkansas. In Sutter County, most people’s grandparents did. Sometimes in L.A., I’ll do an impression of my grandfather, emulating the bulldog bark/chicken cackle of an Ozarks accent, and people always say, “But I thought you were from California?” Then I have to explain, or start to explain, then I get tired of the entire process and just ignore it. You all read The Grapes of Wrath junior year of high school. I don’t feel like it’s incumbent on me to explain how the Okie migration worked. Invariably, people wrinkle their brows and tell me I’m being Californian the wrong way. But the truth remains that in my trashy little Northern California town, the culture was biscuits and gravy, bird dogs in your pickup truck, Mom, Jesus, midlevel racism, and pecan1 pie.

  Except that we’re Jewish. Well, my mom is Jewish. Well, her mom is Jewish. My maternal grandmother is a Jew, descended from German-Jewish traders who came to the Mississippi River basin in the 1840s to sell things. They were very horrible at selling things and ended up living as sharecroppers in the Ozark Mountains. These are not nice polite southern Jews who moved south to teach physics at Ole Miss. These are not even German-Jewish shop owners who send their children to Jewish camp in Georgia and keep in touch with the relatives in New York. My grandmother is a legit hillbilly-trash Jew.2 I know, I am also being Jewish wrong. But as my grandmother would note any time one of her descendants commented on the fragility of our Judaism, “They woulda killed you just the same.” You think you know which “they” she’s talking about, but she’s from Arkansas. She’s got a much more expansive definition of “they.”

  One time when I was visiting her house, my grandmother referenced a well-trod story of Klansmen doing something terrible to her father back in Arkansas. I was like seven or something, so I understood what the Klan was from TV movies and stuff, but not why they would be attacking a person who wasn’t black. “Why did they do that to you?” I asked my grandmother. “Well, I reckon they wanted a change of pace,” she answered.