Sleepwalk With Me

by Mike Birbiglia

  I drive home, defeated. And I sort of know at this point that this is her life, and I’m her secret life, like on Maury Povich.

  So I think, This is it. I’m going to stick up for myself. It’s either him or me.

  And I convince myself that given that choice, she would choose me because what we have is so special. So when we get back to school, I call her and say, “We need to talk. Let’s meet at the hockey game.”

  And she says, “Great!”

  So I go to the hockey game. And she’s not there. Hockey game ends. Still no sign.

  I have this pit in my stomach because I’m going to tell her that she has to pick me or that’s it. But I can’t find her. So I start walking around the school, to the library, the cafeteria, the places she might be. And I ask people where she is. And finally someone says, “I saw her with Keith Robbins down at the tennis courts.”

  I remember earlier that day, at lunch, Keith said to me, after licking his fingertips, “I’m sleeping with your girlfriend. You know that, right? Yeah. Yeah. Nice. Nice.”

  And I thought, Well, I haven’t even slept with my girlfriend, so that would be insane. And second of all, he’s a liar, so he must be lying. I remember I said to him, “Yeah, I know.”

  But at this moment it dawns on me that Keith is her new second boyfriend. And I’m done. And it’s that horrible lonely feeling where you’re walking around someplace and there are people all around and there’s only one person you want to be with, no matter how mean that person has been to you. I just want to hear that “Only kiddin’!”

  People are coming up to me and I can’t even hear them. I can’t even tell them what happened because even though I’m being dumped, the relationship itself is based on a secret.

  And that spring I graduated.

  Keith Robbins was expelled for making fake IDs in his dorm room. He had built an enormous driver’s license from Arkansas that people stuck their face in. And he would photograph them, and then laminate it. He later took a job at Goldman Sachs. That detail seems made up, but it’s actually true. Nice.

  Amanda was expelled the next year for dealing Ritalin. I’m pretty sure she wasn’t framed.

  At boarding school, you can’t go to the graduation if you’re expelled. It’s one of the shames of being expelled. And it’s very strict.

  I found out later that Amanda actually did show up to the graduation. In a disguise. She wore a wig and sunglasses.

  My friends laughed about this story when I told them finally, the way friends do to make you feel better when you’ve had your heart broken. But I could relate to her doing that. Because sometimes when you want to be in a place so badly, you’ll do anything.

  GODDAMMIT

  Being a dad has never appealed to me. It doesn’t seem like a job you’d apply for:

  Screaming child seeks adult man to pay for his entire life. Warning: When the child is fourteen he will tell you he hates you and forget about everything you’ve ever done for him. Requirements: Must have sex with your wife or girlfriend without birth control at least once. Also, your wife or girlfriend will hate you through most of the pregnancy, for a few years afterward, and intermittently for the next twenty years. Pay: No pay. Education: Grade school or equivalent. Benefits: Your child may bear some likeness to you. Also, if you take your child on walks, other women will be more attracted to you than you’ve ever experienced in your life, but you can’t have sex with them unless you want your wife (and children) to hate you even more than they already hate you, which is intermittently or always.

  Dads always seemed mysterious to me. Matthew Sullivan’s dad had an eighteen-foot motorboat in the backyard that never worked in the fifteen years I visited their house. We used to play hide and seek in it. Why was he keeping this boat that never worked?

  Pat Salazar’s dad was a state cop; every time he spoke, it felt like you were being arrested. I’d be over for dinner and he’d say, “Patrick, how was the pancake breakfast at St. Mary’s?” Pat would answer with trepidation in his voice—as though there were a right or wrong answer, and he was hoping to feel out the right answer as he went along, watching his dad’s every facial expression for clues as to which way he wanted his son’s answer to go.

  “It went . . . great?”

  “Good.” His dad nodded, as if to say, “You’re free to go.”

  I never saw Pat’s dad release the kind of fury that everyone anticipated, but it sure as hell seemed like someone had seen it.

  If I were to shoot a movie called Dads, it would feel a lot like Jaws, where you rarely see the shark, but there’s always a sense that the shark is coming and when he does, you best get yourself to the shore.

  My dad was no exception. But I was more afraid of my friends’ dads than of my own. Because when your dad starts going off, you know what he’s capable of. When your friend’s dad starts going off, you’re like, This guy’s a wild card. He just kicked the dog. What do you think he’s gonna do to us? There was this kid named Alex in my friend Eric’s neighborhood. And Alex had done something wrong one day when we were playing across the street. We didn’t even know what it was. And when Alex’s dad came home, he started yelling at Alex, and Alex’s response must not have been adequate because Alex’s dad started punching him. Right on the doorstep. He held on to his sweatshirt while he slapped his face and punched his chest. The ol’ face-chest punch-slap.

  We didn’t get involved with that punch-slap minefield. We were safely on Eric’s front steps. That was our property, kind of. I cautiously said to Eric, “Do you think we should do anything?” And Eric, holding back tears, said, “That’s just what Alex’s dad does. I don’t want to talk about it.” Understandable.

  My dad never said a lot when I was a kid. And when he did, I’d get worried, because it probably meant he was mad about something. It’s hard for people who have jobs where they are in charge to come home to anarchy and chaos and a family where no one listens to you. At work, he could say things like “Scalpel,” and someone would hand him a scalpel. At home, he’d say, “Someone find me a rake,” and I’d shout, “I’m not finding a rake. I’m watching the Celtics!” That wouldn’t go over so well. In instances like these, my dad would shout so loud it was like a rock concert. It was like a Dad-tallica concert. It shook you to your core. Even if the rock-and-roll shouting hadn’t made a sound, the sheer magnitude of the vibration would get you up to get that rake. “WHEN I SAY GET A RAKE, YOU GET ME A GODDAMN RAKE! THESE GODDAMN KIDS NEED SOME REALITY TESTING!”

  My dad has always been obsessed with “reality testing.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but apparently we needed it. I guess it meant we were living in some kind of fantasy world. It didn’t seem like I was in a fantasy world. At school Matt Backman would call me a faggot six times a day and regularly throw me down a cement hill. What the hell kind of fantasy was that? If my life was a fantasy, it would have things like girls liking me back and a dad who didn’t shout so loud it made me wince.

  Once, we were preparing for a Christmas ski vacation to Vermont. And my dad never bothered to make sure the rusty old ski rack fit our newer car. So when that freezing morning came, he realized that we needed a new rack and it would cost three hundred dollars or more. “We’re not going, goddammit!” He was literally canceling Christmas. I was petrified. Now we’d have all that excess pent-up anger in our own house for all of Christmas instead of letting it run wild in the mountains.

  But my brother Joe, always resourceful, realized he could strap the skis to the roof of the station wagon with bungee cords, just like in the olden days, and the vacation was back on.

  Joe wasn’t as intimidated by our dad. Somehow he was oblivious to it all. I think because he thought of Dad as another guy, not this larger-than-life stoic whose every word was chock full of meaning. Joe’s casual attitude toward our parents grew as he did. During his first visit home from college, he started addressing my parents by their first names: MJ and Vince. It was as though he had taken some
course about the oppression of names, and he decided to take charge, to throw off the shackles of “Mom” and “Dad,” like these titles represented some form of indentured servitude or something. Or maybe he just did it because he thought it was funny. It was a little bumpy at first. MJ, whose full name is Mary Jean, was fine with it. I believe her response was “That’s my name!” Vince was not so keen on being addressed like he was some sort of golfing buddy.

  I couldn’t believe what Joe was doing. I was fifteen years old and I asked Joe, “You can just call them MJ and Vince?”

  And Joe said, “I can do anything I want.” He was right.

  Every time Joe would say, “Hey Vince!” my dad would frown at him, give him a long judgmental stare, and then, if Joe hadn’t yet backed down in this staring contest, Vince would throw in the word “Enough.”

  That worked in the short term, but Joe was persistent. The nicknames eventually stuck. Now we all call them MJ and Vince. It’s pleasant. “Mom” and “Dad” always felt a little stodgy.

  Vince isn’t stodgy, but he’s certainly a bit formal and definitely private. He’s a doctor, and on top of that, he picked up a law degree in his spare time, for kicks. Vince is the kind of guy who knows stuff, which is intimidating because I’m the kind of guy who knows nothing. Well, not nothing. But we know different types of things. Like my dad knows the hemispheres of the brain and I know that if I spill Diet Coke on my laptop, it probably won’t start again. Which is why I think my dad was so disappointed when I became a comedian. He worked his whole life to send me to college so I could learn stuff. And I didn’t. And then I got a job making fun of him in front of strangers. His whole plan kind of backfired.

  Vince spends most of his free time at a fancy golf club. This runs in stark contrast to his upbringing. He grew up in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the son of Joseph Birbiglia, the original Joe Birbiglia. Joseph Birbiglia Senior ran a luncheonette in Brooklyn and during the Depression was a union electrician with crews digging subway lines. I recently learned that he often had to use a fake name to hide his Italian heritage.

  When I was a kid my dad occasionally said cryptic things like “There’s a lot of prejudice against Italians.” Which was confusing for me because I hadn’t experienced any of this prejudice at St. Mary’s School or at AJ Tomaiolo’s Restaurant. They hadn’t made me stand in a separate line or disguise my name with some kind of ethnicity-free shortening, like “Birdman” or “Birthdayboy.” Because my dad always said so little, he sometimes left out the whole story: “There was prejudice against Italians in the thirties.”

  My sister Patti, who has spent some time in Sicily, where the Birbiglias are from, traces my dad’s temperament to Sicily. She claims that the streets of Sicily are filled with Vinces, suspicious of everyone but members of their immediate family. And for them, Vinces reserve a special kind of suspicion.

  Growing up, whenever my dad got annoyed or felt taken advantage of or slighted for any reason whatsoever, he would yell, “Fine, I guess I’ll just send the check!” and storm out of the room.

  But when he played that card a few years ago, my grown siblings and I were all like, “We kind of get our own checks now. Are you still sending out checks? I feel like you might have the wrong address for me. Can I get direct deposit?”

  My whole life, the thing that struck me about my dad was that he was always in control. He drove the car. He decided where we’d spend Christmas. And he knew, or pretended to know, how to do anything that needed to be done. This all changed when personal computers became popular.

  Since high school I’ve had sort of moderate computer skills. My parents never got involved with personal computers until everyone they knew had a personal computer. That’s how they knew it was safe. They literally might have been the last people to join the digital age. In 1997 I sat next to my dad and showed him how to use the mouse on my iMac. He tried it for about two minutes, and then turned to me, scoffed a little, and said, “Well, these are never going to catch on.”

  I think it was the concept of email that really sold my dad on the need to have a home computer. For as long as I can remember, my dad would call the house several times a day and ask, “Any calls, any mail?” Now that there was a new kind of mail that someone somewhere might be sending him, he had to know about it. So they finally rolled the dice and purchased one of these newfangled contraptions that would never catch on.

  Shortly after college, I stayed with my parents for the summer and became their full-time, on-location tech support. I had previously done a lot of this work on the telephone:

  ME:

  Okay, do you see a file on your desktop that says, “Ten ninety-nine underscore Int”?

  MOM:

  I don’t see that anywhere. What is a desktop?

  ME:

  Like, when you turn the computer on, the stuff you see on the screen, that’s the desktop.

  MOM:

  It says here, “I cannot find the disk drive!”

  ME:

  What? Where does it say that?

  MOM:

  In huge black letters.

  ME:

  On the desktop? On the computer screen?

  MOM:

  It’s written right here on this Post-it note. Your father wrote it, and he stuck it to the desk, so I guess it’s on the desktop, yes.

  Again, I know very little about computers. I know how to create Word documents and surf the net. I had no idea how much I knew about computers until I met my parents.

  Learning about email has been the big step for my folks. My mom’s got a few of those friends who forward everything. And it’s okay when you get the email with the fifty cutest puppy pictures of all time, but when your mom forwards you emails like “Pepper is poison and other things the government doesn’t want you to know,” you gotta step in and be like, “Mom, you gotta tell your friend Martha that pepper is not poison.”

  For a while, my parents thought every email was written directly to them. They were a spammer’s dream. One day my mom said, “My friend Elizabeth at USAirways.com says I’ll get five hundred bonus miles if I send FTD flowers through USAirways.com.”

  “Mom, who’s Elizabeth at US Airways?”

  “Elizabeth, she sends me emails with special deals from US Airways. I think she’s the vice president of marketing.”

  “And how do you know her?”

  “We email each other.”

  The computer virus was a really difficult concept for my dad to take in. I think because he’s a doctor and he knows about real viruses. I remember him asking me, “But where do these viruses come from?”

  And I answered as best I could. I said, “I don’t know, some crazy hackers in Malaysia write these programs that travel around the world, infecting millions of computers.”

  And he had this facial expression I’ll never forget, like he was confused and sad and furious all at the same time. And he said, “But why?”

  It was kind of like a fourth grader asking why there are wars.

  “Trust us, kid. It makes sense.”

  One of the few things I know about computers is that you should never open attachments that you receive from strangers. My parents did not receive that information. They just click on every email attachment they get. They’re like, “We’ve got mail! Who is it from? XRXRzebars@monkeys.tv! A new friend!”

  MJ and Vince ended up with a porn virus that was so nasty it took over their entire computer. The wallpaper, the screensaver. The icons became dildos. A strange man jumped onto the screen and shouted, “Where’s your daughter?”

  My parents were very saddened by this, because when they picked up their computer at Circuit City, they had not thought this was one of the possibilities.

  So my Mom called me into the living room and she couldn’t bring herself to tell me about the virus specifically. She was like, “Michael, something happened with the computer.”

  And I’ve seen some porn in my time. Some accidentally, some not so accidentally, but this wa
s some really hard-core, truck-stop-style porn. And I’ve had some bad gigs before, but it must be really degrading if you work in porn and the only work you can get is being featured in a computer virus. And you go to the mall, and some guy sees you, and he asks, “Where have I seen you before?”

  And you have to ask him, “Has your computer ever been infected with the ‘me_love_u_long_time_nude_sex’ virus? Because I’m on the twenty-third pop-up window having a threesome with two bald clowns. You can’t miss me.”

  The porn virus made things very tense in the Birbiglia household that week. It seemed like MJ and Vince were suspicious of one another—that the other person had ordered this rapid-fire pop-up porn service for the computer. They were double-checking credit card statements. I wouldn’t be surprised if MJ shot an email to her friend Elizabeth at USAirways to ask her if this had happened to her too.

  It was also particularly awkward because I had never even talked to my parents about sex, never mind my porn preferences. The closest my dad ever came to bringing up sex was when I was in college and I had my first serious girlfriend, my dad stared at me cryptically for a long time and said, “You’re playin’ with fire.”

  That was the entire conversation.

  That was it.

  In the end, I figured out how to get rid of their porn virus. I Googled “porn” and fortunately there were a lot of results, like 60 million. Then I Googled “porn virus” and there were some answers and, finally, an antidote. But my parents still insisted on putting the computer in the corner with the screen facing the wall like the computer had done something wrong. And we’ve never spoken of it since.

  My dad is a neurologist, or a “head doctor” as I always explained to people. When I was a kid, I didn’t know what that even meant. I thought it meant if you got a scratch on your head, he patched you up. I had no understanding of the implications of a brain injury or degenerative brain diseases or anything. I just thought it was cool he sometimes saw college football players and even some guys who went to the NFL. Once he was quoted in Sports Illustrated in an article about Holy Cross star football player Gill Fenerty.