You log on to Yahoo with the thought, What am I doing next week?
Oh. Nothing.
Refresh . . .
Nothing.
I fall asleep with the laptop in my hands.
MY HERO
When I was in college my sister Gina had a job at HBO, and she would send me the latest comedy specials of comedians like Mitch Hedberg, Chris Rock, and Dave Attell. They were comics’ comics. Guys whose comedy was so good they were above comparison, guys who I wanted to be.
Mitch was my favorite of these comics. He defied standup comedy convention entirely. His style was defined by his shyness offstage. Instead of trying to be something he wasn’t and project confidence, he was vulnerable in his delivery. He’d look at the floor or even at the back wall away from the crowd and deliver lines like, “I wrote a letter to my Dad. I wrote, I really enjoy being here, but I accidentally wrote rarely instead of really. But I still wanted to use it, so I wrote, I rarely drive steamboats, Dad—there’s a lot of stuff you don’t know about me. Quit trying to act like I’m a steamboat operator. This letter took a harsh turn right away.”
Mitch’s shows were like a guided tour of his brain, where he’d walk around and point out ridiculous things our brains have actually known all along, about things like foosball: “a combination of soccer and shish kabobs,” and rotisserie chicken—“It’s like a really morbid ferris wheel for chickens.” But to call Mitch a one-liner comic would be a disservice to the strong connection he made with his audience. Mitch liked the people in the audience. You could tell. This is rare for comedians. Mitch had long hair over his eyes and wore sunglasses and often spoke with his eyes closed. He occasionally referenced this on stage. “The reason I close my eyes sometimes onstage is that I have drawn a picture of an audience enjoying the show more on the back of my eyelids.” To Mitch, his jokes were like his children. Some of them were accomplished. Some of them weren’t. And some of them didn’t even make a lot of sense. But he loved them all equally. He just loved jokes. When people didn’t laugh, he’d pause a second and go, “All right . . . that joke was ridiculous.”
Sometimes people would misunderstand Mitch. They’d ask, “What is he doing? Why is he lying on the floor? Why is he walking behind the curtain?” During one famous theater performance, the promoter placed a dozen seats on the stage, behind the performer—something about making more money by adding more front row seats. Mitch walked on stage and performed his entire show to those twelve people, ignoring the hundreds of people laughing hysterically behind him. Mitch straddled the line of what people considered a show, and no two shows were the same. He was the Iggy Pop of comedy. He was a rock star.
When I moved to New York I was confronted with the reality that only one club out of forty would give me regular spots. I knew that I needed to take my act on the road, the way I had seen all those other working comics do when I worked the door at a comedy club in college.
If I could just become a “middle act,” the guy who performs after the emcee and before the headliner, I could make enough money to live. I needed to “middle.” That’s the technical name for it. I’ve always found “middling” to be a little bit of an insulting term. It implies mediocrity by definition. It’s like if someone said, “What slot are you on the show?” and you’re like, “I’m doing some mediocre comedy before the headliner.”
“Yeah? You’re mediocreing? Sounds like you’re not very good.”
“Well, no. That’s misleading. To be specific, I’m neither good nor bad. I used to just emcee. I really sucked then.”
Anyway, I wanted to middle but I wasn’t experienced enough so I hit the road and worked as an emcee for about a year. I’d do ten minutes at the top of the show, remind people to turn off their cell phones, and bring out the other acts. I drove my mom’s Volvo station wagon all over America, making somewhere between zero and three hundred dollars a week. It’s really hard to convince club managers to let you middle when they see you as an emcee, so after these emcee engagements I’d drive hundreds of miles to do “guest spots” at clubs for free. I thought it was the only way to convince club managers that I could middle. Sometimes people enjoy the middle act more than the headliner, but almost nobody remembers an emcee. I was a traveling salesman of comedy, and I needed to make a sale if this comedy career delusion was going to pan out.
I caught a break from Lisa, the booker at Joker’s Comedy Club in Dayton, Ohio. I had driven all the way there to do guest spots for the Amazing Johnathan, and he didn’t want any openers. I spent one night operating the lights and doing sound cues in the back, and I wasn’t even good at it.
At the end of the week I walked into Lisa’s office, and she felt bad too. She said, “I’m going to give you a week to middle.” She flipped through her calendar and stopped in April. “We need someone for Mitch Hedberg.”
My life couldn’t possibly get better.
On April 23, 2002, I opened for Mitch at Joker’s Comedy Club in Dayton, Ohio. I know the exact date because I had written it in my calendar six months before and stared at it whenever I had a free moment on the subway or in the back of a car. I highlighted it in blue and put stars next to it.
I tried to conceal my awe for Mitch the first time I picked him and his wife, Lynn, up to go to the club. Sometimes that’s part of the job of an opening act, to drive the headliner from the hotel to the club. Which is really degrading if you think about that occurring in any other art form: “The central pieces in tonight’s exhibition are done by painter Gustav Bringow and the supporting pieces are done by Bill Wilson. They’ll both be arriving momentarily. Bill is picking Gustav up at the Holiday Inn Express in his mom’s station wagon as part of his contractual obligation.”
When the club owner asked me to pick up Mitch, I was in shock. First, I couldn’t believe Mitch Hedberg was going to ride in my mom’s Volvo station wagon. And second, I couldn’t believe Mitch Hedberg rode in cars at all. I had always kind of envisioned him riding in a spaceship or just kind of teleporting onto stage. But I was thrilled to have the chance to pick him up. Picking Mitch up would make it more likely that he’d speak to me.
When I picked up Mitch and Lynn in my mom’s Volvo wagon, I was surprised at their appearance. Their hair was still wet. They were disheveled and not ready for the show. They were just like real people.
The first show went pretty well, and afterward I asked Mitch and Lynn if they wanted to go bowling. I had just bought my own bowling shoes at a flea market so it seemed like a good opportunity. So we went, but I was so rattled to be bowling with my hero that I was awful. I rolled all kinds of ones and threes. I was so embarrassed. When we were walking out, Mitch said to me, “When you said you wanted to go bowling, I thought that you would be good at bowling.” I laughed. It was like he made a Mitch Hedberg joke just for me.
That night Mitch was onstage and in the middle of his set he said, “Oh no, I got to go to the bathroom. Can someone come onstage and tell a joke?” There was this long gaping silence, then he said, “I’m serious, you guys. I really gotta go.” And it’s still silent. People didn’t know what to do.
Backstage I turned to Lynn and said, “Are you gonna go up?”
“Will you?” she said.
“Okay.”
I walked onstage and approached Mitch. He didn’t know I was there because his eyes were closed. I said, “Mitch, I’m here.”
He said, “Oh, thanks, man.” And walked off like this was an everyday thing. The audience looked at me and I looked at the audience and everyone was laughing hysterically.
I took the microphone off the stand, looked down at the floor, and did my best Mitch Hedberg. “I am pretty good at tennis, but I will never be as good as the wall. The wall is relentless . . . There was a jar of jelly beans at the state fair that said ‘Guess how many and you win the jar,’ I was like, ‘C’mon man, lemme just have some.’”
Like a lot of his fans, I knew Mitch’s act so well that I could recite it on cue. It was thrilling. F
or one moment I was in Mitch’s shoes. Mitch came back onstage, laughed, and said, “Aw, man. He did my best jokes.”
A couple of years later, Mitch offered to perform at my CD release party at the Comic Strip in New York City. He flew himself in, put himself up at a hotel, and, when I tried to pay him, refused the money.
That night I opened up to Mitch and told him that my sleepwalking had gotten much worse and had started to become dangerous. There was clearly something going on that I wasn’t dealing with. Mitch seemed to understand. It was as if, before that, Mitch didn’t think that anything in my life could resemble anything in his life, but at that moment he did.
People always talked about Mitch’s drug habit, but I never witnessed it, so I thought maybe it didn’t exist, the way a kid puts his hands over his eyes and pretends no one’s there. Mitch told me that he wanted to go on tour with me that fall. I couldn’t believe it. I was blue highlighting it in my brain already. That night we talked about how we should play tennis together. We had planned stuff like this before, but except for our one bowling adventure, he had always cancelled.
I had this idea that if we went out on tour, we could play tennis, maybe see local sites, and somehow my non-drug-using habits would catch on. Even thinking about that now, it’s delusional. It never would have happened. Mitch didn’t want to stop. And no one was going to stop him, certainly not me.
• • •
I’m at the Friar’s Club in Los Angeles. I’ve never been here before, but there’s a memorial service being held for Mitch. I don’t know if Mitch was a “friend” as much as he was someone I looked up to. Someone who sometimes called me back when I called him. Someone who took me under his wing in a slightly removed kind of way. To call him a friend would be a compliment to me, and I don’t want to be presumptuous. Especially since he’s dead. If he were here, I could imagine him saying, “I’m having a memorial service and Birbiglia is speaking. That is ridiculous,” and then laughing, but in a mysterious way so I don’t know if he’s laughing with me or at me.
I’m up late every night combing the Internet for articles about Mitch. There are thousands of blog entries and message board postings, an outpouring of support from devastated fans who were touched by his work. I come across comedian Doug Stanhope’s blog entry about Mitch’s death.
Doug wrote: “Nobody has asked me how Mitch lived. And Mitch lived like a motherfucker. More than most any of us will live. That isn’t sad or tragic.”
Mitch was the number one search on Google that week. I learned that Mitch, who died at age thirty-seven, had heart problems from childhood that manifested in a deadly way when he combined heroin and cocaine in a hotel room in New Jersey. I didn’t know this about Mitch. I didn’t know anything. Mitch didn’t talk about himself much and I was afraid to ask.
There was a second memorial service a few weeks later. The way Mitch’s death was dragged out was testament to how much people loved him, but also to the fact that people didn’t know quite what to do. Maybe if we kept having memorials, we’d get it right? I’m standing out front before the second service and Dave Attell says to me, “Are you gonna say something?”
I say, “I don’t know. I feel like I didn’t know him well enough.”
Dave says, “Me neither, man.”
It becomes clear to me in that moment that Dave looked up to Mitch as much as I did. He’s feeling the same inadequacy I am. That he wasn’t close enough to Mitch do him justice. That somehow there must be someone who understood Mitch more as a peer who could eulogize him the way he deserves.
But Dave speaks at the service. And so do I. We do our best, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
When I think about the people I’ve looked up to in my life, they all tend to be people who can’t stop. Mitch spent his final months playing comedy clubs, often doing two or three shows a night—three or four hours on stage. Not much rest, then on to the next city—not returning home for months at a time. Lynn once told me that Mitch never turned down a job. That he had been told “no” so often early in his career that he felt like if he didn’t say “yes,” he might not be given the opportunity to perform again.
It felt a lot like my life at that moment.
Some people are sad about Mitch’s death. Some people are angry. Some people feel like he died the way he wanted to. But one thing is clear: we all looked up to Mitch, but maybe we should have looked straight at him.
SOMETHING IN MY BLADDER
When I was nineteen, my doctor found a malignant tumor in my bladder. But it’s funny—stay with me—because I was a hypochondriac, and the funniest thing that can happen to you as a hypochondriac is that you get cancer, because it confirms every fear you’ve ever had and allows you to say to your family, “See? I told you! Remember last week when I was overtired and I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There are gonna be a lot of changes around here!”
I’m not a hypochondriac anymore. I avoid going to the doctor at all costs. I really think my willingness to visit the doctor was just based on positive associations with doctors as a kid. When you’re a kid, going to the doctor is fun. My mother used to take me to Dr. Barrett’s office and the waiting room would be packed. There were toys and blocks and lollipops. Dr. Barrett was funny. He’d look in my ear and say, “I see a kitty in there.” Wait, does he? Oh no, it’s just a joke. This place is awesome. My parents liked him because he went on his instincts. “He smelled sickness,” my mom told me.
When I was three years old I came down with a gastrointestinal virus. It came on all of a sudden. My family was all in the TV room in our house and I kept getting up to go to the bathroom. I had been potty-trained days before, so at first they thought maybe I was just showing off. At a certain point, Gina pointed out that I was having diarrhea. Minutes later I was throwing up repeatedly. And then my body went limp and I passed out on the rug. When they got me to the emergency room, Gina couldn’t even get me to stand up on the scale. I was nearly unconscious. My parents were answering questions from the young fresh-faced interns: “Height? Weight? Allergies? Has he eaten anything today?” The question that set my dad off was “Was he breast-fed?”
“What does that have to do with anything? He is dehydrated! Get him an IV and get him in a room and get him a doctor!” My mother likes to point out that “those interns weren’t using their instincts. They were just going by procedure, and sometimes that can be dangerous.” They got me a doctor, a room, and an IV, and in a few hours I was pretty close to my usual self.
I remember from this point on very well, because there was a steady stream of visits, gifts, and attention. Gina read to me. My dad bought me a Curious George doll, which I kept for many years. I got balloons and pizza. Dr. Barrett came by and checked out the wildlife hiding in my ear. I stayed overnight and had a great time. It felt like a sleepover.
The next day I was good as new. Everyone else knew that I had a brush with death, but as far as I was concerned, I was having a pretty good week.
In 1998 I was driving home from college to see my parents for Christmas break when I stopped at a rest area and saw blood in my pee. I knew this could mean about five things and three of them meant I would die and the other two weren’t exactly a trip to the Bahamas.
It was particularly disappointing because sometimes when I’m on road trips alone I’ll have water-drinking contests with myself to see how clear I can make my pee. So I’ll drink all this water and go to the urinal and my pee will be clear and I’ll be like, Bingo! So when it was red, I thought, Oh man. I lost big-time.
I got very anxious. And when I get anxious I sometimes get this shallow breathing thing where I feel like I can’t breathe and then I feel like I’m going to die because breathing is one of the building blocks of living.
I pulled into the driveway about 1:00 a.m. and my dad was sitting up reading. He’s a bit of an insomniac. And I told him what happened. And he got a very grave look on his face because he’s a doctor, so he knows about the B
ahamas.
In the morning he took me to see his urologist friend, Dr. Del Vecchio. At the time I didn’t know what urologists do. I’m older now, so some of my friends have gone for prostate exams, but when I was nineteen I was very naïve. In the examination room the nurse had me undress and put on a gown and I sat on that hygienic disposable paper. On the wall of the examination room there was a giant diagram of a penis, with all the parts labeled, and on the counter was a plastic model of a penis that clearly came apart like some sort of sexy science toy puzzle. They really cut to the chase in the urologist’s examination room, and I tried to laugh. If this office were a movie, it would have been rated R.
After I spent a few minutes staring at penises Dr. Del Vecchio rushed in. He made some obligatory jokes about how bad my dad’s putting was, and then he said, “Okay, Mike, I want you to put your hands on the table.” I thought, You’re darn right I can put my hands on a table! This is totally no big deal. I wonder why he wants me to put my hands on the table? And then he stuck his finger into the place where they do the prostate exams. And I didn’t see that coming at all. No amount of staring at penis diagrams could have prepared me for that experience. So I shouted, “Oh my God!” And then he said, “Cut the theatrics!” And I felt so bad. I was like, “Sorry about the theatrics.” As though I had intended it. Like, This’ll be my big moment. When he sticks his finger up my ass, I’ll prove I should be the star of Our Town!
I don’t know how one is supposed to react in that situation. I mean, even if I were a robot, I’d be like, “Sys-tem er-ror . . . oh-my-God.”
So the doctor said, “Listen, Mike, you gotta come in tomorrow morning for what’s called a cystoscopy.” And doctors always dress this stuff up. He said, “It’s no big deal. You come in. They put an IV in. You fall asleep. You wake up. You eat a muffin. You go home.” And I said, “Okay. I’m still a little shaken up by the table incident. But what’s a cystoscopy?”
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