Sleepwalk With Me

by Mike Birbiglia

  Pizza is probably my biggest weakness. I love pizza. I would marry pizza, but it would just be an elaborate ploy to eat her whole family at the reception. What’s not to love about pizza? I mean, look at the ingredients: you got cheese, which is comfy and salty. It’s more or less superfatty concentrated milk. Then you have crust, which is bread. Bread is always a winner in my book. I once went to Thanksgiving dinner at the house of our family friends the Naples and ate only dinner rolls. I’m not exaggerating; it was the best Thanksgiving ever.

  So basically you’ve got cheese curds piled on dinner rolls with some tomato-flavored custard mixed in and it tastes amazing.

  When I’m traveling, I will almost always order a pizza at the hotel or motel I’m staying at. As a matter of fact, my favorite time to eat pizza is the moment before I fall asleep. I think that could be a menu item: “pizza until you fall asleep.” And you call and order it and leave the door unlocked and you time it so the delivery guy walks in with a pizza shaped like a travel pillow and you wrap it around your neck and you eat it while doing neck rolls until you fall asleep.

  Sometimes when people find out how much I love pizza, they’ll give me a wink and a nod, maybe pull me aside and say something like, “I understand. I’m a foodie too.” A foodie, if you’ve never heard the term, is a trendy word for a gourmet or a food connoisseur. But I’m not a foodie. I wish I were. Being a foodie implies that I have good taste in food, which I don’t. Foodies are interesting and open to trying various dishes to diversify their palate. That’s not me. I want to eat the same thing until I pass out.

  I’m a binger. I love the act of eating. I love world-class pizza and I also love pizza from a gas station, provided the warming bulb is working. I will eat anywhere.

  I particularly like chain restaurants. They completely understand mass consumption and have amazing offers for people like me. For starters, bottomless soda. I just like the word bottomless. I like the implication that maybe this meal will never end. And combining it with soda, which is a nutritionless but flavorful beverage, makes for a sexy phrase for bingers like me.

  Get me some bottomless nothingness! And make it fast. I’m living over here!

  When it comes to eating I have no self-control. I simply can’t drive by a Cheesecake Factory without stopping. I love their chicken sandwich the size of a soccer ball and their piece of cake as large as an entire cake. I love the Factory’s generous portions. They’re like, “We could sell grilled cheese sandwiches for a buck fifty, or we could stuff a loaf of bread with three pounds of mozzarella and call it the Mozza Mountain.” And hey, if the Factory says it’s one serving, who am I to question them? They’re making this stuff to factory specifications.

  Sometimes I’ll go somewhere exotic like P. F. Chang’s, the pan-Asian staple of Chainville city, USA. Though I won’t use the chopsticks. I don’t like chopsticks because I can’t get food down my throat fast enough. It’s almost like those pan-Asians don’t get it.

  I’ve spoken to a lot of dieticians over the years, and most of them will say, “You can eat hamburgers. You can eat pizza. You can eat fried chicken. The key is that you don’t binge.” And I’m thinking, That’s my move. Bingeing is the best play I have in my book.

  Even now as I type this, I’m sitting at a chain called Starbucks, a quaint local coffee shop that does a decent blueberry muffin. Actually, the thought of food makes me want to get up and order some food, even though I ate lunch an hour ago and the Starbucks offerings today don’t look particularly fresh. I’m considering the cinnamon swirl muffin or the banana bread. But I’ll probably go with something healthier. The fruit and cheese plate. I will devour the cheese and crackers and then slowly insert pieces of fruit into my mouth as punishment.

  They say bingeing stems from the self-perpetuating idea that eating a lot of food might fix something or fill some void that needs filling. I’m not sure what void they’re talking about, but man, does that make me hungry.

  I actually still have The Promise of Sleep in my backpack. It’s beat-up and weatherworn. I still haven’t finished it, though I have skipped around a bunch. Maybe while I was obsessing over my addictions to vibrating phones and mind-numbing cable news and sleep-pillow-shaped pizza, the other kids with sleep disorders . . . read the book.

  SLEEPWALK WITH ME

  I’m going to tell you this one last story. This one is particularly personal. It’s actually the most terrifying thing that ever happened to me. It’s one of those very rare moments in your life where in retrospect you’re like, “What the hell?” But at the time you think, I guess I’ll continue living. It’s like if you went to the dentist and he asked you to take your pants off and you say to yourself, Um . . . He’s got a degree . . . But I’m gonna make a note of this, because this seems crazy.

  It’s probably the first event in my life where I fully understood my father’s warning: Don’t tell anyone.

  It’s January 20, 2005, and I’m in Walla Walla, Washington—which is a place. I’m staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn, and some people correct me when I say that. They say, “No, no, it’s not La Kwin-ta, it’s La Keen-Tah” and that’s not fair. You can’t force me to speak Spanish. I didn’t press two. So I’m at La Keen-tah Een in Wy-a Wy-a Wash-eeen-tahn. It’s one a.m. and I’m lying in bed. I have just performed at five colleges in four days and I’m exhausted. But I’m not going to sleep because I’m an insomniac. I’m sitting up in my bed with my laptop warming my thighs. I’m Googling myself. I’m watching the news. And I’m eating a pizza. At the same time.

  And I fall asleep.

  I have a dream that there is a guided missile headed toward my room and there are all these military personnel in the room. I jump out of bed and say, “What’s the plan?”

  And the general in charge turns to me and says, “The missile coordinates are set specifically on you.”

  This wasn’t the first time I had walked in my sleep.

  Let me start at the beginning. It all started around the time I met Abbie.

  When I was in college I fell in love with Abbie.

  Falling in love for the first time is a completely transcendent experience. It’s like eating pizza-flavored ice cream. Your brain can’t even process that level of joy. Love makes people do crazy things like kill other people or shop at Crate & Barrel. I think on some level it makes us all delusional. Deep down, our whole lives, no matter how low our self-esteem gets, we think, I have a secret special skill that no one knows about and if they knew they’d be amazed. And then eventually we meet someone who says, “You have a secret special skill.”

  And you’re like, “I know! So do you!”

  And they’re like, “I know!”

  And then you’re like, “We should eat pizza ice cream together.” And that’s what love is. It’s this giant mound of pizza-flavored ice cream and delusion.

  I fell for Abbie immediately because she had this big, beautiful smile. It seemed like her teeth were bigger than her head, but in a really sexy way.

  Abbie and I were both in theater at school. My first month at Georgetown I saw signs for auditions for an improv comedy troupe and thought, Well, of course I should be in that. I auditioned, not really knowing what I was doing. In high school I had been in Our Town because they were short on people and needed someone to play Howie Newsome, the milkman. I had taken drama because I heard it was easy. And it was. Plays are much easier to read than books. There are only five to ten words a line and they’re triple-spaced. I’d read plays like cereal boxes. I thought, Oedipus Rex is fantastic! I don’t know what the hell it’s about, but it’s fast! Bring it on, Angels in America! Glengarry Glen-so-few-pages! The acting part was fun too because I could basically just mess around. In life when I acted like a loud idiot I got in trouble. In drama they gave me course credit.

  When I got to college I discovered a more serious group of actors. So serious, they were . . . gay. It always makes me laugh when people are surprised that their favorite Hollywood stars are gay.
I’m quick to point out, “Remember how sixty-five percent of the drama club in high school was gay? Well, they graduated.” Anyway, I made it into this improv group and that’s how I met Abbie. My fellow improvisers and I hosted this big event on campus called the Washington DC A Cappella Fest, where a cappella groups from schools across the country would blow audiences away in the seven hundred-seat Gaston Hall and then bore people to death at the a cappella parties for five hours afterward with their “deeper cuts.” Abbie and her friend Hannah saw me playing a basketball player in a sketch and the sight gag must have done something for Abbie because the next day she recognized me in a coffee shop and said, “Hello.”

  Since people rarely wanted to talk to me, I quickly tried to come up with some artsy conversation.

  “Have you guys seen this play Harvey? It’s great.”

  Abbie said, “I’m the star of it.”

  I stumbled, “Well . . . then you’ve seen it a lot.”

  They laughed, thinking I had planned the joke, but I really didn’t recognize Abbie from the play. She had played Veta Louise Simmons and her performance was so transformative that it was nothing like she was offstage. Onstage she was a meticulous know-it-all and offstage she was a cool, adorable girl who seemed to want to know me. A little.

  So I fell for Abbie immediately. And I kept running into her on campus because I was following her. I would say, “Hey! We should hang out sometime like not by mistake” and she would say no, which was hot, because then I knew she was sensible.

  But I wore her down. Well, I tricked her.

  She had said no so many times that I threw an off-speed pitch. I said, “Hey, we should go to church sometime.” I hadn’t been to church much since I was a kid, but Georgetown had a really nice chapel on campus. “That way if the date doesn’t go well, maybe we’ll get something out of the homily?”

  She laughed.

  And we went to church on our first date.

  She was pretty focused on the priest and I was pretty focused on her, and when the mass ended, it was raining. I had remembered to bring an umbrella, so I was able to walk her home in the rain. And as we walked home, she held on to my arm. It was the happiest I’d ever been.

  Abbie lived off campus as she was a junior—I was a freshman—and when we got there, I didn’t want the date to end, so I told her about a ballroom dance class I had taken earlier that day, and I started showing her some of the moves. We didn’t kiss, but we did the cha-cha without music in her well-lit living room, which is somehow even sexier than kissing.

  I walked home in the rain and I had all this energy. So I went to the computer lab in my dorm and I wrote an email to Joe, saying, “I just went out with the girl I’m going to marry.”

  Abbie had to convince me to have sex for the first time. It was like a role reversal of the abusive boyfriend from the eighties high school movies where the girl says, “Devin, I can’t.” And Devin points out, “But you can.” Except she was Devin. And I was Molly Ringwald. I was always afraid of sex in high school. I was one of those kids who didn’t even understand the concept of sex. My nickname was “the math jockey.” And what’s sad about that is that I wasn’t even good at math, which means I was not the sex jockey.

  Abbie and I decided that for our first time we would go to a bed and breakfast, because nothing alleviates the fear of having sex for the first time like a really elaborate plan. We went to this place called the Philip Smith House. It was run by these two gay men named David and Leon. They had a really cute partnership where David cooked breakfast and Leon fucked David. At least it seemed that way.

  We drove Abbie’s mint-green Taurus to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We sang along with the radio. We arrived at the B&B and took out their bicycle built for two. We did everything you do on a romantic weekend away.

  Except have sex.

  At all costs we were both committed to using a condom. I wanted to because I was afraid of getting my girlfriend pregnant. Abbie wanted to because she was really afraid of getting pregnant. So we brought plenty of condoms and got started with the business at hand. It wasn’t a sexy turn of events. Somehow it felt like a medical operation where we were trying to insert parts of me into parts of her, and frankly it wasn’t working because every time we would get something started, we would go to put on a condom and realize one of the reasons people don’t use condoms is because they make you think about what you’re doing. I find that once you think about it, sometimes your parts lose their excitement for the project. We tried and failed about three times and finally she said, “Who cares about this? Let’s just go to the beach.”

  So we went to the beach, thinking it would be soothing. You know that thing they say about sex and pizza: when it’s good it’s good; when it’s bad it’s still good. Well, I thought that was also true of beaches. But I was wrong. We were sitting on the beach and we got attacked by bees. On a beach. I had just been emasculated entirely and now I’m running away from these half-inch insects. I have a new theory about sex: when it’s good it’s good; when it’s bad, don’t go to the beach, because there could be bees there.

  One week later, when we got back to school, Abbie and I had sex for the first time the way everyone should have sex for the first time: we got drunk and forgot it ever happened.

  It was clunky and awkward. But we were in love.

  • • •

  Abbie didn’t believe in marriage. She was a Women’s Studies minor and she believed that marriage was a social construct designed by a patriarchy that oppresses women. Thus, all ideas in this construct are null and void.

  Abbie had a lot of theories like this. She would meet up with me after class and say things like “Starfishes are bisexual, and I think it’s safe to say that people are bisexual too.” And I would say, “I don’t know much about starfishes, but when I see a naked dude, I don’t get a boner.”

  These discussions were so long and drawn out that finally I enrolled in a Women’s Studies class called Anthropological Perspectives on Gender. It was taught by a Professor Woods, who was very confused as to why I had enrolled in a class comprised entirely of women and two gay dudes. Little did she know that I was trying to build cunning arguments to use against my women’s studies girlfriend using the enemy’s own information.

  We read books with titles like Women and Poverty and Fraternity Gang Rape, the kind of uplifting literature often overlooked by the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. I got pretty obsessed with it. I was like, “They’re right! This is bullshit! The male patriarchy is keeping us down!”

  I would read all the recent feminist articles and occasionally there’d be one in the school paper. I remember one time one of the standout students in this department wrote a really explicit article in the school paper about how she’d been harassed by some guys on campus and how the school had ignored it. It really affected me. I thought, That girl is awesome. She’s so brave. I should tell her.

  Occasionally I would see this brave writer around campus and I’d try to build up the confidence to tell her how much I appreciated her piece in the paper. Then I’d get shy and wouldn’t say anything. Late one night toward the end of the year I was walking home to my dorm and I saw her on a secluded path. I got up the nerve to say something. And there was no one around, and I knew it would be kind of awkward, but I thought, She’s graduating. I shouldn’t hold in a compliment. This may be my only chance.

  I stopped her and said, “I know you don’t know me, but that whole piece you wrote about you being harassed by all those guys, it really meant a lot to me, and—”

  And she said, “That wasn’t me.”

  And I said, “All right, cool. See you around.”

  The girl who actually wrote the article did graduate and I never told her how much I liked her piece. But the girl who I thought wrote it had a few more college years in her, and I would see her around every now and then. We had that special bond two people have when they’ve encountered one another once and one of them has told the o
ther inaccurately that he admired her bravery in regards to being harassed by a group of men.

  As a result of my association with Abbie I became a feminist activist. There was an event on campus called “Take Back the Date,” which was this conservative group’s response to “Take Back the Night,” an internationally held march against rape and violence against women. “Take Back the Date” didn’t have much of a leg to stand on, parodying a group whose only goal was to raise awareness about violence against women. Their unofficial position on date rape was, “It doesn’t happen on every date!” Their platform was that we needed to end the era of “hooking up” and go back to the good old days of “dating.” “Remember the good old days when women were subservient but sassy?” Who knew this was an issue? I didn’t. No one was hooking up with me except Abbie. And those were dates, I think.

  Anyway, Abbie hated this rival women’s group. So Abbie and her friends decided to crash the Take Back the Date event. So I went along too. As we walked over to the student center for this event, we perused the Take Back the Date pamphlet and we started picking it apart. First in ways that made sense, but when we ran out of points that made sense, our criticisms became pretty irrational.

  One of the women in our group looked at the pamphlet and said, “This is so stupid. Who are they to tell us how we should see each other romantically?”

  Fair point.

  Then someone said, “How come there are no gay relationships in the pamphlet? Can’t gay people go on dates?”

  Okay, less strong of a point. But okay.

  Then someone was like, “How come there are no drawings of black people in the pamphlet? Can’t black people date?”