Abbie had just started planning our wedding, but she could sense that I wasn’t entirely invested in it. Thus I was going to smooth things over in St. Lucia.
We were picked up at the St. Lucia International Airport in a limousine. That seemed like a nice touch, until we started the driving part. St. Lucia is made up of beaches, high peaks, and rain forests. Which are all beautiful, but maybe not the best terrain for a Buick stretch limousine. We really could have used a Ford Explorer or Subaru Outback or even just a regular car with shocks. Abbie and I bounced up and down for the duration of a thirty-nine-mile drive from one end of the island to the other that ended up taking two and a half hours. In the course of this drive, Abbie and I started by picking apart the skills of the driver and then, eventually, each other. For two hours we criticized each other’s jobs, families, even clothes. A lot of sentences started with “Well, if you’re going to bring that up . . . ,” and ended with something toxic. The phrase “Well, if you’re going to bring that up” never ends with “I’m going to tell you I love you.”
At the resort the bellman took our bags. Our room wasn’t ready yet, so they sent us to the beach, where they gave us free drinks while we waited. We sat down at a table, inches from the soft, perfect sand, and Abbie said, “I think we should break up.”
She only had to say it once. And I started tearing up like I had just witnessed the death of my best friend. And so did she. And we’re sitting there on the beach, just crying. And we’re looking out at the water. It was that perfect water. I could almost hear the “Caaahmmm to Jamaaaaaiiccaa!” coming off the ocean. The people at the tables next to us tried to pretend they couldn’t hear us. We were that couple who was ruining other people’s paradise vacation. Everything on the island was picture perfect except us. We could have had this argument at any coffee shop in New York, but we had to have it here. I sat there marveling at that water, crying. And so did Abbie. And that was day one of our Caribbean dream vacation.
Mitch Hedberg used to have a joke about how it’s hard to get into an argument when you’re staying in a tent: “What do you do? Slam the flap?” An island is even worse. It’s not so conducive to breakups. You’re on a strip of land in the middle of the ocean. What are you going to do, fly away? Maybe build one of those makeshift palm tree planes they made on Gilligan’s Island?
For the first couple of days, we stayed in the hotel room. Abbie would disappear for hours at a time. When she got back, I’d ask where she’d gone and she wouldn’t respond, as though I wasn’t allowed to know. She had a point. We were literally too close for comfort. At a certain point I was upgraded to her business voice, which, since then, I’ve witnessed in a lot of breakups. All of a sudden she got cheery, distant, and professional.
“What can I do for you?
“Do you want to go for a walk tonight?”
And she’s like, “We’re not open past six.”
“Okay. Do you want to get coffee?”
“If you’d like to admit you’re wrong, press one. If you’d like to discuss your faults in detail, press two. If you’d like to spend less time on the road, press all the buttons at once and give up your dreams.”
Finally I said, “Why don’t we try to enjoy the things that we’d normally enjoy on an island? We’re still friends, right?”
“Okay.” We opened the hotel activity brochure and she suggested that we go scuba diving. This was insane. Abbie was almost as afraid of the water as she was of flying. And scuba diving is like flying underwater.
So we went scuba diving. Scuba diving transcends every rule you’ve ever held on to. Rules like “You can’t breathe underwater” or “If you see a shark, you should run away.” But we did it anyway. We swam through schools of thousands of colorful tropical fish. We even swam by sharks. And when we returned to the resort, I was euphoric and so was Abbie and I went to put my arm around her and she pulled away with her business demeanor and said, “That was fun.”
That night we swam out to this floating trampoline. We were jumping up and down six or seven feet into the air and laughing. I thought, This is just like it was before. This is going to work out. Abbie made a giant leap into the water. And I jumped down after her and emerged right behind her putting my arms around her waist. And she pulled away. It was just inches away, but it felt like miles. And that was the distance I would feel for the rest of my time with Abbie.
The next day Abbie decided she wanted to leave the trip early. I had to stay, to host the World Travel Awards, but I said, “Okay.” I asked the event coordinator if there was an easier way to get to the airport. He said there was a helicopter and I thought Abbie would say, “No way.” But she said, “Great. A helicopter.”
Later that day I walked Abbie to the helicopter landing and we both realized that the helicopter driver must have been fifteen years old. At most a young seventeen. The helicopter looked about as airworthy as the palm tree plane on Gilligan’s Island and I thought Abbie would say, “No thanks,” but she said, “Great. I’ll see ya.”
Abbie flew off in a rickety helicopter over the rain forest and hilly terrain of St. Lucia. She had left a relationship that by all estimation couldn’t possibly end and left an island that seemed inescapable. She just flew away.
Abbie met someone named Nathan and they’re still together today. And I met someone named Jenny and we’re still together today. But the biggest difference was that Jenny was not okay with the jackal.
I got up on my bed and shouted, “There’s a jackal in the room!” She said, “No, there isn’t, and you have to see a doctor.”
“I will, but right now I’m really busy.”
That’s how I justify not doing things that are important. I think, I’m just so busy. People don’t understand how busy I am. If people knew how busy I was, they’d know that I don’t have time to see a doctor.
One night Jenny and I fell asleep watching Fight Club. There’s a scene in the movie where Brad Pitt holds down Edward Norton’s hand and he’s going to pour acid on it. And I had a dream that it was my hand. And I jumped out of bed and sprinted down the hall like I was in an action film, and I threw a chest of drawers in my wake because I knew that Brad Pitt is very cunning. I hit the elevator button and Jenny ran into the hall and shouted, “Michael, you’re dreaming!”
“Brad Pitt was gonna pour . . . ,” I insisted, but then I immediately apologized to Jenny and she said, “You have to see a doctor.”
And I said, “I will.” But I didn’t.
I did however continue to read The Promise of Sleep. I skipped to a chapter on sleep disorders. There are seventy-eight known sleep disorders. Things that range from sleep apnea to night terrors to narcolepsy. Narcolepsy is terrifying because there are people who fall asleep at any time. There are female narcoleptics who fall asleep the moment they reach orgasm. I think you could call these women “men.”
I came across something called REM behavior disorder, which is a condition where people have a dopamine deficiency. Dopamine is the chemical released into your body when you fall asleep that paralyzes you so you don’t act on what’s happening in your brain. I learned that people who have this deficiency have in rare instances been known to kill the person they’re in bed with while remaining asleep. In other words, the person would have a dream that there was a burglar in the house and he would beat the burglar to death and then he’d wake and see that “the burglar” was in fact his wife and she’s dead. And I read this and I thought, That sounds a lot like what I have.
And I still didn’t see a doctor.
So it’s January 20, 2005, and I’m in Walla Walla, Washington. I’m lying in bed at La Quinta Inn. I’m Googling myself, watching the news, and eating a pizza at the same time. And I fall asleep. And I have a dream that there is a guided missile headed toward my room and there are all these military personnel in the room and I jump out of bed and I say, “What’s the plan?” And they say, “The missile coordinates are set specifically on you.” And I decided in my dream and a
s it turns out in my life to jump out my window.
There are two important details here. One is that I was staying on the second floor. Two, the window was closed. So I jumped through the closed window. Like the Hulk. That’s how I described it at the emergency room. I was like, “You know the Hulk? You know how he just kind of jumps through windows and walls?”
So I jumped through the window, and this is the hardest part to explain because people who have REM behavior disorder are physically able to do things they couldn’t normally do because they don’t feel any inhibition or pain. So I jumped through the window, fell two stories, landed on the front lawn of the hotel, got up, and kept running.
I’m running and I’m slowly realizing that I’m on the front lawn of La Quinta Inn in Walla Walla, Washington, in my underwear, bleeding. And I’m like, Oh nooo. But at that moment, the only thing I can think is that I’m relieved that I haven’t been hit by the missile. That would have been a disaster. At least I’m still in the game.
It was the ultimate moment in my life where, in retrospect, I’m like, WHAT THE HELL? But at the time I was like, I guess I’ll walk to the front desk and explain what happened. Fortunately the person working at the front desk was mildly retarded. And I say fortunately because he was completely unfazed by what had just happened. It’s three in the morning. I’m standing at reception in my underwear, bleeding. The phones are ringing off the hook from people staying at the hotel who just saw the guy jump out the window. And I said, “Hello.”
Because you have to start somewhere.
“I’m staying in the hotel. I had an incident and I jumped out my window and I need to go to a hospital.” And I’ll never forget his reaction. He just said, “All right.” And I thought, That’s the best possible reaction I could receive at this juncture.
So I drove myself to the hospital. I didn’t see any other options. I was in the middle of nowhere. I wasn’t going to knock on people’s doors and be like, “Did you hear that guy screaming? That was me. I need a ride.” So I drove myself, like that scene in Reservoir Dogs. I was bleeding and shouting and I had to explain what happened three times: to the receptionist, the nurse, and the doctor: “I’m the Hulk . . . I’m the Hulk . . . I’m the Hulk . . . ” And one guy corrected me, “No, you’re Bruce Banner.” Point taken, nerd.
I was lying in a hospital bed with my clothes cut open and I could see glass shards coming out of my legs. It was the most pain I had ever felt. It was the physical pain of glass coming out of my legs combined with the emotional pain of There’s glass coming out of my legs . . . How did I get to a point where there’s glass coming out of my legs? It was cold. I was shivering. And I kept asking for warm blankets because I was afraid that if I moved, the glass would go deeper. I waited ten minutes and said to the nurse, “Is there a doctor? Because this is kind of an emergency. I know you guys have a lot going on, but I’d put my emergency head-to-head with anyone else’s.”
Eventually the doctor came and he took the pieces of glass out of my legs. Slowly. Very slowly. For about forty-five minutes. He pointed out glass right next to my femoral artery, and if the glass had cut it I would have bled to death. Then he said, “You should be dead.”
And I said, “No, you should!”
I zinged him.
Because I’m a comedian.
He put thirty-three stitches in my legs and then I drove myself back to the hotel. And got a new room. Because I felt like that one had a stigma. And a slight draft. A few hours later I flew back to New York.
So that’s the story. . . . But there’s one more thing.
ONE MORE THING
I went to a doctor. And she sent me to what’s called a “sleep study.” This is basically a sleepover at the hospital. One of those sleepovers where they stick electrodes all over your naked body and a strange Russian man stares at you while you try to sleep.
The sleep study was on the sixth floor of a New York City building. This was a concern. I had just jumped through a second-story window the week before, and if it had been anything above four, I would have most likely died. It seemed ironic that I could feasibly sleepwalk out the window of the sleep center. Ironic, but not all that funny. My girlfriend Jenny told the Russian sleep technician, “We have to block the window with something.”
“No problem,” he said in his thick, unsettling accent. “We’re watching him from the other room through these cameras.”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said. “By the time you see him out of bed, he’ll be out the window.”
“This has never happened before,” he said.
“We’re pretty new to it ourselves,” said Jenny.
I made it through the night, and after the doctor interpreted the results, I was diagnosed with REM behavior disorder, or RBD. It was recommended that I sleep in a sleeping bag and wear mittens—that way I couldn’t open the sleeping bag. More important, I was prescribed Klonopin, an anti-anxiety drug that has surprisingly good results with people who suffer from RBD. At the doctor’s suggestion, Jenny and I childproofed our bedroom. Whenever we traveled, Jenny insisted on placing large pieces of hotel furniture in front of the window. The cleaning people must have thought we were drug addicts or insane partiers because, in the morning, they’d walk into a Stonehenge of furniture.
It was a little lonelier when I was touring. I had to play a rigorous schedule of colleges and my agent Mike would have to call ahead and say, “Mike has to stay on the first floor.” And inevitably they’d ask why, and he’d cover for me. He’d be like, “Because that’s what Mike Birbiglia wants!” So I would show up and these people would hate me before we even met because I was this diva who had these strange requests that no one understood.
I never told these people the story. It’s a hard story to tell in a few sentences. I tried with one student event coordinator.
“I jumped out a window in my sleep.”
“You what?”
“I know. It’s strange.”
“Are you messing with me?”
“No.”
“It seems like you’re messing with me.”
“No, uh . . . no. I have a sleep disorder and I didn’t deal with it for a long time and it got worse and eventually it got so bad that I jumped out a window.”
“Oh.”
And then he looked at me sadly, and the conversation couldn’t return to a place of normalcy. I couldn’t say, “No, but it’s funny!”
The day I got home from the sleep study, Jenny told me that someone at her office had a sleep issue as well. This took me by surprise. I didn’t think we were going to tell people about what had happened.
“You didn’t tell people at your company about this, did you?” I asked.
“Well, yeah . . . I mean, I went straight to work from sleeping on the floor of the hospital. I was just telling my cubicle-mates where I was.”
“Don’t tell people.”
“Um . . . okay.”
“People are going to think I’m insane. It’s just not a good idea.”
So Jenny didn’t tell anyone. And I didn’t tell anyone. And this thing happened where I started to feel this distance between me and everyone that I met. Just the slightest distance.
Around that time I book a show at a college in Boston. I arrive at the hotel the students have booked for me. It’s on the seventeenth floor.
I’m seething with anger. But I don’t want to tell them why. And I drive over to the school and stumble through my set. Backstage after the show one of the students who had booked me comes up to me and says, “Hey, that was great. We’d like to take you out for dinner.”
And I say, “No.”
He looks confused. And I say, “I have to drive two hours to my parents’ house to sleep because you didn’t book me on the first floor.”
He looks even more confused and I shout at him.
“I HAD ONE FUCKING REQUEST. I HAD ONE THING THAT I ASKED FOR AND YOU FUCKED THAT UP!”
And I storm out and I’m driving h
ome and it hits me that I just had my first “Goddammit, I’m eatin’ pretzels” moment. And it destroys me.
I walk into my parents’ house around 1:30 a.m. and my dad is up reading in the living room and I sit down on the couch. And I’m so upset that I tell him what just happened.
And he listens to me.
He says, “How have you been feeling since the sleepwalking incident?”
“Actually . . . not great.” And I hesitate and then I say, “I’m starting to feel the slightest distance between me and everyone I meet.”
My father thinks about this. And he says, “That’s what happens when you get older.”
And I get him.
I never thought this was going to happen. I’m twenty-nine years old and he’s sixty-eight and he’s sharing with me a truth that we’ve both experienced. It’s something he knows and I know. And we both know. Right now, for that moment, we both know stuff.
So I tell him the whole sleepwalking story from the beginning. And that leads to other stories. I tell him things that I never thought I’d be able to tell my dad. A lot of stories I just told you. At the end of the conversation, my father stands up and he sits next to me on the couch. He puts his hand on my leg and says, “You know you’re gonna have to take care of this. You’re gonna have to see a doctor regularly. And get a neurological workup. You need to take time off from the road. And learn to relax. You’re going to have to deal with this because it’s not going to deal with itself.” And he walks into his bedroom. And when he’s about to close the door, he looks back at me for a few moments.
And he says, “Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone.”
THANK-YOUS
First of all, don’t read this unless you’re scanning for your name. And if you are scanning, stop it. Please. Let me just say that I have gone unthanked on so many projects that I’ve contributed to. It doesn’t make it right that I’m doing it to you. I’m just saying that accidents happen. Thank-you lists give me tremendous anxiety. What if I leave someone out? Then all of a sudden I’m Hilary Swank at the Oscars. That’s not fair! I’m not Hilary Swank. I’m Tom Hanks thanking his gay teacher after Philadelphia. That was cool. Yeah, I’m Tom Hanks.
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