This is where the wheels fell off the trailer. I don’t think the Take Back the Daters were racist per se, but that didn’t stop us. We were like, “Yeah! Why no black people?”
With this bit of momentum we walked into the event, taking seats like regular pro-daters and blending in with the crowd.
After the panel of pro-dates spoke, they took questions. This is always the activist’s sweet spot. The Q&A!
First question.
Someone from our group stood up and said, “This is homophobic. It’s offensive to women. And it’s a step back for women everywhere!”
It wasn’t so much a question as it was a statement. And with that, our entire group stood and started walking toward the exit. I hadn’t been told we were going to leave. To make matters worse, while they were leaving, Abbie shouted to the stage, “How come there are no black people on the cover?” The pro-daters were confused. I was even more confused and, sadly, I was the only person left in our group still there, the lone representative of the anti-daters. I was like, “I’m with the people who hate dating. I’m actually dating one of the anti-daters. Okay . . . so, good luck with everything.” I slunk out the back of the room and reconvened with my fellow protestors at a local bar.
Abbie and I argued about feminist issues a lot, and it was productive. It made me think that if people had more open talks about gender, we wouldn’t have so many books about the various planets men and women are from. One time our discussion of gender issues got so contentious that I actually started crying. We were talking about marriage and she told me that she didn’t believe in it and was never going to get married. I think the reason I was crying was that before I met her, I didn’t believe in it either.
Abbie and I were living together and it was a secret. This was her idea. She said, “We should live together.” Now, what I should have said was “I don’t know if my parents would go for that because they’re very conservative.” What I did say was “Yeah!”
So when my parents visited, we’d put all her stuff in the bedroom and close the door to the bedroom. It worked. And it was exciting. But lying to my parents caused me anxiety. That was when I started walking in my sleep.
It was the fall of 1998. I was secretly living with Abbie, secretly working at a comedy club, and nearly failing out of school all at the same time. I started having this recurring dream that there was a hovering, insectlike jackal in my bedroom. Each time I had this dream, I would jump up on our bed and strike a karate pose. I had never taken karate, but I had the books from a book fair. So in this book-fair karate pose, I’d say, “Abbie! There’s a jackal in the room!” She got so used to this that she could talk me down while remaining asleep.
“Michael, there’s no jackal. Go to sleep,” she’d mumble.
“Are you sure?” I’d ask, continuing to hold my karate pose.
“Yes, Michael, there’s no jackal. Go to sleep.”
And I would lie down, knowing there was a jackal hovering right above, ready to swoop down and kill us.
When I would have these episodes, Abbie would say, “Doesn’t that sleepwalking stuff seem strange?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think maybe you should see a doctor about that?”
“Yeah, I will, but right now I’m really busy.”
In addition to lying to our parents about living together, we also lied about our career plans. Abbie was pre-med but had decided that she wanted to be an actress. And I was an English major but wanted to be a comedian. So Abbie started applying to grad school for acting. I was working the ticket window at the DC Improv. I kept this a secret for a while one night I let my guard down and mentioned my side job to my dad casually on the phone. It didn’t go so well. “Goddammit, Michael. School is your number one priority. Sounds like you need some reality testing!”
I said, “Okay,” but it wasn’t my number one priority.
I wanted a career in comedy, though I had no idea how to get there. Somehow, I figured, on the day of my college graduation they would hand me my diploma and I would hop in the back of a black van waiting for me outside the front gates of school and it would take me to New York.
There was one big problem: Abbie had been accepted in a graduate acting program in DC, which meant that while I escaped to New York, she would still be in school. I hadn’t told Abbie about my plan. I mean, I had told other people when they asked and Abbie was there. But I never said it to her directly. And on graduation day the issue came to a head.
Abbie and I were at our apartment packing up the last few things of our still-secret living arrangement, and Abbie said, “So I guess I’ll see you . . . ,” and then she started bawling. This destroyed me. She was the girl who saw my secret special skill and I couldn’t handle her crying.
I held on to her and said, “It’s what I have to do right now.”
She said through tears, “You didn’t even tell me. You were just going to leave and not even tell me.”
I said, “It’s hard to talk about because I love you and I want to be with you.”
“Then what are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“We should just break up then.”
And then she went cold. Coldness was worse than crying because crying at least had a pulse. The patient was dying on the operating table and so I took out the electrical revival thingies and said, “We can make it work.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
“Well, I can still work at the DC Improv half the time and commute to New York and live on Gina’s couch.”
This was pretty close to a lie.
There was almost no way I could make that work, with how difficult it would be to make my way in a new field and move between cities and make a living at the same time. But I said it. And she got less cold. She was coming back to life. So I embellished toward the warmth. I said, “I’ll do anything to make it work.”
We were alive. Two patients in critical condition on the operating table, telling ourselves, We’re doing fine. We’re in love.
Two years later Abbie graduated from school and moved in with me in New York. We lived in Brooklyn in this tiny one-bedroom and it was comfy. We had two cats and a big puffy couch. And we made our first major purchase. We bought a TiVo. We had gone through some rough patches in the past few years, but living together was going to fix everything.
One night I had this dream that I was in the Olympics, in some kind of arbitrary event like dustbustering. And they told me I got third place and I climbed up onto the third-place podium. Even in my dreams I don’t win. In my wildest dreams I place. And then the Olympic judge approached me and said, “Actually you got second place.”
I moved over to the second-place podium and it started wobbling. And wobbling. And I woke up as I was falling off the top of our bookcase in our living room, I landed on the top of our TiVo, which sat on our hardwood floor. It broke into pieces and I was totally disoriented. It was like one of those stories you hear where people black out drinking and they wake up in Iowa and they don’t know where they are and they’re looking around, thinking, Oh no . . . Hardee’s. But it was in my living room. I thought, Oh no . . . TiVo pieces. And I went to bed.
Abbie woke me up in the morning and said, “Michael, what happened to the TiVo?” “I got second place,” I said. “And I am really sorry.”
This was the first time I thought, This seems dangerous. Maybe I should see a doctor. And then I thought, Maybe I’ll eat dinner. And I went with dinner. Partly because of my fear of doctors based on the bladder incident I explained earlier. And partly because sleepwalking is a terrifying concept. Your body is making a decision that is distinctly different from your conscious mind’s. Your conscious mind is like, We’re gonna rest for a while, and your body’s like, We’re going skiing!
Sleepwalking also involves your brain, which is a very precarious area. The list of fun and easily fixed brain diseases is very short. So I didn’t see a doctor. That’s when I bought The Pr
omise of Sleep by Dr. Dement, who, like I said earlier, told me to turn off the news, turn off the Internet, turn off my phone, and to not eat big meals—the tetrad of my favorite pre-sleep activities. There is a lot in The Promise of Sleep about anxiety and how anxiety can be a major heightening factor with sleep issues. At this point, I was experiencing the height of my anxiety.
I was twenty-three years old and it was becoming clear that Abbie wanted to get married. I could tell because there were two shows that kept popping up on our TiVo and one was called A Wedding Story and the other was called A Baby Story. These are reality shows on the TLC network about weddings and babies. And they’re not the most exciting depictions of weddings. It’s always two people whose names have some kind of alliteration. Like, Tommy and Tammy! And they’ll ask Tommy, “Tommy, what’s your favorite thing about Tammy?”
And Tommy will say, “I saw that Tammy was beautiful on the outside and now I know that she is also beautiful on the inside.”
And they’ll ask Tammy, “Tammy, what’s your favorite thing about Tommy?”
And Tammy will say, “I didn’t know what Prince Charming was until I met Tommy and now I know what Prince Charming is.”
I’ve never seen Baby Story, but I imagine it’s a bunch of babies saying, “I didn’t know I was a baby until I was a baby and now I’m a baby.”
I knew Abbie wanted to get married and I knew my parents wanted me to get married, which was strange because it never seemed like they wanted to be married to each other. I always thought they were going to split up when I was a kid because Vince would fly off the handle suddenly and no one knew why. He’d shout something like, “Goddammit, I’m eatin’ pretzels!” And I would think, Is he angry? Is he hungry? What is the emotion being expressed?
My whole life my dad was constantly searching for the portable phone. He’d yell, “Where’s the goddamn portable phone?” My mother’s role in the household was to find the portable phone, and when I was in high school someone invented that pager function that locates the phone and I thought they’d get divorced and on the divorce papers under “reason” he’d write, “I found the phone. Goddammit!”
But they never got divorced. They’ve been married forty years.
That is too long.
If the people who invented marriage knew that people would be married for forty years, they’d be like, “This isn’t what we intended at all.” Back then, people only lived to be forty, if they were lucky. Those marriage inventors would be so confused. They’d be like, “Forty years?! When were they married? As babies? We don’t approve of babies marrying one another!”
Maybe I’m cynical but there’s a part of me that thinks that in the future, marriage will be the new divorce. People will say things like, “Yeah, I’m pretty messed up. My parents are still together.”
And you’ll say, “Wow. That sounds really hard. Is it a first marriage?” And they’ll say, “Yeah, it’s rough. I have this fear that I’ll love someone and then eventually hate them.”
I’m comfortable saying that, by the way, because it’s not just my family. I grew up in a very Catholic town where everyone was afraid to get divorced because it would reflect badly on their family. You know what else reflects badly on the family: them yelling so loud I can hear it at the paint store three blocks away.
But my parents really wanted me to get married. I think my dad thought if I got married, maybe my wife could get me to wear a collared shirt. My mother had other motivations. At one point she actually offered a prize to whichever one of her children got married first. The prize was a blue baby bonnet, which may have revealed a little bit about her ulterior motives. She even set my sister Gina up on a date, and when she got home my mother said, “How did it go?”
Gina said, “Well, I don’t think it’s going to work out because at the end of the date he called me Christina.”
And my mother said, “Well, you look like a Christina!”
My mother was willing to rename her daughter so that Gina-Christina could marry some random dude who didn’t know her name.
I knew my father wanted me to get married. Not because he said it—he never would have been that explicit—but he’d say these kind of cryptic things. On one occasion my father and I were watching golf in my parents’ living room, and he looked over at me and said, “Michael, at a certain point, you got to zig or zag.” It came out of nowhere like a UFO.
“Wait, about what?” He just stared at me. The UFO was gone and all I knew was that I had to zig or zag. I didn’t even know which was zigging or which was zagging but I knew it was important.
Abbie also wanted me to zig or zag. This was troubling because I had always wanted to marry Abbie from the moment we started seeing each other, but when the moment came nearer and fell into focus, I started to feel claustrophobic. I started to develop this fear that maybe marriage would be like school.
I remember when I was real little and I thought, Maybe someday I’ll get to go to school.
And then I went to school.
And the first week, I asked, “How much longer do I have to go to school?”
And they said, “Seventeen more years.”
And I thought, Oh no. I never should have gone to school.
Now I found myself thinking, Maybe I should break up with Abbie.
Around this time I went to my brother Joe’s wedding. If you’re ever in a relationship that seems to be moving toward marriage and you’re not comfortable moving in that direction, don’t go to my brother Joe’s wedding. Because it’ll come up. Marriage was practically the theme of Joe’s wedding. I remember we were taking family photos and my mother pulled me into a photo and said, “Michael, do you want Abbie in the photo?”
I said, “Yes,” but not fast enough.
There was a slight pause.
And there was a reason for the pause.
That week I had just returned from a month on the road. I had driven Abbie’s mint-green Taurus across the country from club to club, making just a little more than gas money and living in awful hotels. But I loved it.
And one night I was backstage at this club and this waitress came up to me to take my order and we were making small talk and she said, “I just got back from my other job, which is at Hooters, which is crazy because one of my boobs is bigger than the other. Isn’t that crazy?”
I said, “Yeah.”
She said, “Do you want to see them?”
Now, whenever anything so out of the ordinary occurs in my life, I’m always suspicious that it’s a setup of some kind. Like this girl would take out her boobs and say, “What do you think, math jockey? Is one of the boobs greater than the other?”
I said to myself, Mike, you are not going to give up your relationship with a girl who sees your secret special skill and can talk you down from a karate pose for a girl with one boob greater than the other. So I said, “Actually I shouldn’t be here, because I have a girlfriend.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I know the drill.”
Which blew my mind. Because I did not know the drill. I thought, What is this drill and how can I find out more about this drill?
But I stopped myself and I left the situation. A few hours later, after several drinks, I reentered the situation and ended up in the back of Abbie’s Taurus with this girl. I was overcome with guilt and shame but I also felt like this kind of thing might happen again and I knew I shouldn’t be getting married. But I couldn’t say it.
So here I was at my brother’s wedding and they asked me to put Abbie in the photo, I paused. Later that night, when we got home, Abbie said, “Michael, what was that pause?”
“That didn’t mean anything,” I said. “It was just a pause. I’m a pauser.”
“Michael, if this isn’t serious—”
“Of course it’s serious. I love you.”
“If you’re not ready to get married, I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Abbie, I do want to marry you.”
“When?”
Now, what I should have said was “Can we talk about this next summer?” What I did say was “Next . . . summer.”
And that’s how I got engaged, without actually getting engaged. I should have paid a little more attention to those episodes of Wedding Story. When you agree to get married “next summer,” it is game on.
Abbie called everyone we knew and told them we were getting married. We started planning the wedding. I started having trouble breathing again, like when there was something in my bladder. I also began sleepwalking more frequently. I thought, Maybe I should tell Abbie the truth, and then I thought, Maybe I’ll eat dinner. And I went with dinner.
A few months later I was asked to host the World Travel Awards at the Sandals Resort in St. Lucia. I had never heard of the World Travel Awards. I don’t believe they are televised. Or even webcast. Or even really attended. Basically it’s this completely made-up event where resorts reward themselves for being the best resort: “This year the award for best resort goes to . . . Sandals resort in St. Lucia!” Oh, that’s funny. We’re at Sandals Resort in St. Lucia. I hosted the event and the awards were presented by a cavalcade of minor celebrities, the most exciting of whom was Lydia Cornell, star of the eighties sitcom Too Close for Comfort.
But the reason I was most excited was that Abbie and I had never been on a vacation together and they were going to pay our way to this tropical resort. My whole life I had seen those commercials for the Caribbean where the water is unimaginably clear and as warm as bathwater and that voice says in a local accent, “Caaahmmm to Jamaaaaaiiccaa!” I’d watch these commercials and think, I want to caaahm to Jamaica, but I can’t afford it.
Abbie and I had never been on a vacation partly because flying was the thing that terrified her the most. And partly because we had no money and the idea of a vacation is very strange when you have no money, because you’re like, My life usually costs a hundred dollars a week, but on vacation it’s going to cost two or three thousand dollars a week. So when I found out that I could take my girlfriend on one of these trips for free, I thought, This is going to fix everything.
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