You're Doing Great!

by Tom Papa

  They are there to listen to it all. All the stuff that you wouldn’t waste people’s time with at a cocktail party but that you have to get off your chest. No one wants to hear about every detail of your existence, every bug bite, and how you slept last night. That’s stuff you share with your lover.

  It’s also about having someone to share a meal with. A plate of cheese with fresh bread and wine is a great thing on the worst of days; add another person and it’s miraculous. It’s an act of fulfillment and nourishment that is stronger and tastes better when it’s with another human being.

  And getting the focus off of us is important, too. It’s good to have to think about someone else. We’re not all that important. We think we are, but we’re really not.

  When you are living with someone else, your mind is on them just as much as it is on you. You hear the shower turn on and your focus is on them and how long that will take and where they’re going.

  I am in tune with everything my wife does. She carries an energy that I have come to know in a way that doesn’t allow me to overthink my own. I know what her day is going to be like just by the way she comes out of the bedroom.

  I know from how she opens the bedroom door what kind of day she has planned. If she has shoes on and stomps down the hallway with a quick step, she’s not going to be here for long. She’ll shorten her morning routine, say good morning to the cat from the stairs, and head out the door with determination. She won’t get far. She never leaves just once. She’ll forget something—she always forgets something—and will come back in for her keys, her water bottle, or her earbuds.

  Or if I hear her come slowly out of her room and slowly down the hall, this is a day she doesn’t have to be anywhere anytime soon. She’ll stop at the laundry room, where the cat sleeps, she’ll whisper good morning, opening the sliding wooden cat door, possibly open the washing machine door and turn on the water.

  She’ll head upstairs and wake up the dog, who’s been asleep the entire time I’ve been in my office talking to you. She greets the dog the same way every time: “Oh boy. Look at you. Look at you.”

  With the animals taken care of, she’ll stop by my door and give a report of how she slept or, more pointedly, how I slept. “I couldn’t sleep at all last night. I fell asleep at first, but you snored all night. How many times did you get up to pee? Why did you get up so early?”

  She’ll head into the kitchen, turn on the lights, fill the teakettle with water, and take the coffee cup out of the cabinet. She’ll empty the dishwasher, banging glasses and dishes into the cabinets. It’s always loud, but I don’t complain, as it’s one of those jobs that she doesn’t mind doing and that I would rather not.

  I’ll hear the dog bowl being filled with water and the food being poured from the bag. The teakettle going off, tea being poured, the newspaper freed from its bag, the stool slid out and sat on. Morning routine complete.

  Eventually I’ll come in to grab another cup of coffee and there will be those two eyes, looking at me from across the room.

  “Where are you going?” she’ll ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know you’re going out, I heard your keys.”

  HAVE YOU EVER SHOWN YOUR CHILDREN A FAVORITE COMEDY FROM YOUR CHILDHOOD AND REALIZED IT WAS MISOGYNIST, CULTURALLY TONE-DEAF, AND RACIALLY INAPPROPRIATE? I HAVE … (REVENGE OF THE NERDS)

  THE GOOD OLD DAYS THAT WEREN’T

  Lately you hear a lot of people pining for the good old days. A desire to return to the past, when life was simple, carefree, and just plain better. That’s insane. The good old days didn’t exist, it’s a myth. We are so much luckier to be alive today. They didn’t know how to do anything back then. We’re just starting to figure out how to do stuff now and we’re still not that good at it.

  Have you ever seen the first bicycle ever built? I don’t know a lot about building things, but I know you don’t take the smallest wheel you can find and put that on the back and the biggest wheel on the planet and put that up front. That’s a bad bike.

  You couldn’t even climb into the seat by yourself. You had to have your friends fling you up by the edges of your handlebar mustache and hope you landed on the seat. And once you started pedaling you couldn’t stop, you had to pedal until you died, which was okay because your life expectancy back then was twenty-eight.

  Their hospitals were horrible. All they knew how to do was cut your leg off. It didn’t matter if you had a sore throat, acne, or a broken arm. You walked in and hopped right back out.

  There was no birth control, no cortisone cream, no Advil. Can you imagine a life without Advil? That doesn’t sound like the good old days to me. Sometimes I open the cabinet looking for an Advil and discover that we’ve run out, and I just lie on the ground and pray for death. What else am I going to do, take that twelve-year-old Benadryl from its decaying package?

  They didn’t even have Tums. You just ate, got gassy, and exploded like a salami-filled piñata.

  Things are much better now. Just look at all our beautiful fabrics and outfits. And you don’t have just one pair of clothes, you have a whole array. Not in the good old days. Everyone had one stiff woolen suit and a pair of hard high-heeled dress shoes made out of pig livers. And they wore burlap underpants. Can you imagine? Have you ever wondered why no one ever smiled in those old black-and-white photographs? Now you know—burlap underpants.

  The good old days didn’t even have plumbing. You did your business in an outhouse, which wasn’t a house at all. It was some planks gathered around a hole in the ground and your toilet paper was a stick. Some of my worst days were when we ran out of toilet paper and had to use napkins for a week. Can you imagine wiping yourself with a stick with poison ivy on the end?

  Forget a nice hot shower, all you got in the GODs was a pickle barrel. That’s how you got clean. Once every two weeks you took a bath in a pickle barrel, in the middle of the kitchen, with your entire family. Can you imagine? Can you imagine having to go last?! You’d dip in a pickle barrel filled with hair and grandma water, put on your burlap underpants, get on your dumb bike, and head to town.

  You can keep the GODs, thank you very much. They didn’t know nuthin’.

  People were confused even as recently as the end of the twentieth century. Look at their cars. They were death traps made out of stupid metal and glass, filled with leaded gasoline, and no seat belts. No wonder people were drinking and driving so much, they were scared out of their minds.

  The hospitals were still a mess. When I was born, my head was so big that it got stuck during childbirth. It’s the same-size head I have now, on a tiny infant’s body. Their solution was to take out a pair of rusty pliers used for carrying blocks of ice, grab my head, and pull. I don’t care what line of work you’re in, but you know you’re dealing with idiots if their only solution is to “give it a pull.”

  They pulled. And they slipped. And slashed my little baby face from my chin to my temples on both sides. That was my introduction to the world: being dragged out by idiots and slashed across the face.

  They were morons. Now I have a scar on my right cheek, like the Frankenstein monster, and my fate has been sealed—I’m now forced to wander the countryside alone, misunderstood, and chased by villagers with torches.

  This was around the same time that they stopped an entire generation of infants from breastfeeding. The God-given way that human beings have survived and thrived was replaced by stripping babies from their mothers and giving them formula.

  How did this turn out? Not great. Those same infants are now in control of Congress and the Senate. They have no empathy at all and don’t seem that bright. And then they took away their fruits and vegetables and raised them on Pop-Tarts and Hawaiian Punch. You wonder why they don’t care about global warming? Because they don’t know that the earth is where food comes from. The closest to farming that they understand is when the Keebler Elves take the cookies out of the tree.

  Good old days? They dumped toxic w
aste in rivers and oceans as if they were a toilet. It was acceptable to throw trash out of your car window and keep driving, no matter how many Native Americans they made cry. They were disgusting.

  In my home state of New Jersey, their idea of recycling was to light it on fire. Everything from leaves and boxes to newspapers and plastic bottles was burned right in your yard. Their small brains thought this was a good idea because if you light it on fire, it disappears. And so does your house. And your neighbor’s house. And any kid in town who has asthma.

  There were no good old days. It’s a fantasy. Everyone figures it must have been better before. It wasn’t. Every one of those beautiful Norman Rockwell paintings is a lie. Lawrence Welk, a lie. Disney Main Street, a lie. It’s called Fantasyland for a reason.

  So stop complaining from the comfort of your airbag-protected vehicle, press the automatic garage door opener, go inside, pop some Advil, and watch TV in your soft cotton underwear.

  MASSAGES ARE FOR SISSIES

  When my friend and fellow comedian Kira Soltanovich invited me to join her at a Russian bathhouse, she left out the part about when a man beats you repeatedly in your privates with a bundle of oak branches. This is why I don’t trust spas. I sign up because I’m exhausted and end up leaving more confused and tormented than when I went in.

  These partially naked misunderstandings happen all the time. I’m not an expert on these spa treatments, but I do know that if you’re getting your eyebrows waxed, they shouldn’t ask you to take your pants off. This happened to my wife when we were on vacation and she’s still trying to figure out what happened.

  But every once in a while I find myself standing in a terry-cloth robe and little white slippers with a glass of lemon water in my hand. It’s tough to feel manly in this situation. I always picture my grandfather, flanked by other men who fought in World War II, as he glares at me: “And just who the hell do you think you are?”

  I rationalize that it’s precisely my freedom to get a massage that they fought for. I know that’s not likely what they were thinking but sometimes I have a real kink in my neck and there’s only one way to get it out.

  When I met up with Kira I had been traveling too much, sleeping in way too many bad hotel rooms and cramped airline seats, and I was starting to curl up like a Japanese beetle. This can make you feel a lot older than you are, and if you don’t get straightened out once in while, you end up like those old people who are permanently in the shape of the letter “C.”

  Kira was excited by my pathetic condition.

  “We’ll go to banya for venik!” she said. (Venik is pronounced “veni-key.”)

  Kira was born in the Soviet Union and while she is very American she has a genetic obsession with banya, which is a Russian bathhouse. Like the rest of her people, she “enjoys the sweating very much.” She also has the Russian trait of being very secretive, and when I asked her for details about where we were going, she changed the subject and told me I would find out soon.

  “It sounds fun,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s not,” she said with a devious smile.

  When we checked in it seemed to have the same soothing spa vibe of the places I’d visited before. There was a nice eucalyptus smell, some soothing new age music, and a beautiful, spiritually centered woman at the desk. Kira told her that we were there for venik and we were handed locker keys, robes, flip-flops, and a thick, cone-shaped felt hat.

  The woman gave us a form to fill out that absolved them of any wrongdoing if we died during venik. Another form, another reason to go home. But like a fool, I signed it.

  She explained that we had the option of keeping our bathing suits on, but she gave us a look that said it wasn’t really an option. As we headed off, Kira explained that keeping our suits on was declaring our lack of respect for the people of Russia, the people who worked here, and most of all her.

  “Are you serious?” I asked.

  “We have no choice, this is banya. I told you it wouldn’t be fun.”

  I wasn’t anywhere near the steam room and I was already pouring sweat.

  I’m not saying I’m famous, but people do recognize me from time to time, and this was one of those times. Of course, the guy in the locker room didn’t acknowledge that he knew me until I was hopping around naked trying to slip into my flip-flops.

  “Hey, Tom Papa. You’re really funny.”

  My robe got tangled on the locker. “Hey, thanks, man.”

  “Have you ever done venik?”

  “No, first time.”

  He laughed, shook his head, and walked off. “Good luck.”

  I closed my robe, put on my weird hat, and shuffled out to the common area. This suddenly felt very Russian. All the softness and soothing tones of the check-in area were gone. Now I stood in a cavernous room covered in wet tile and concrete. Russian accents bounced off the walls as naked people waddled around in nothing but their banya hats.

  These hats looked like caps that gnomes would wear when they were hanging around the house. They are designed to keep the heat from escaping out of the top of your head and also give you something to focus on when you’re trying not to look at a giant Russian man’s penis.

  Everything was wet. The floors, the walls, the showers that opened up into the room, and the people. They were dripping wet from the Jacuzzis, the showers, and, of course, the sweat. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.

  “Robe over there,” said a small Russian lady while pointing to a series of hooks on the wall.

  It’s only when you’re naked that you suddenly become very aware that you have no place to put your hands. Dangling at my sides is nearly impossible. Putting them on my waist made it look like I was a superhero who’s a little too proud of his superfriend. What I really wanted to do was cover up, but no one else was doing that. Quite the opposite. They were all walking around like they did this every day, which they probably did.

  “Look at you!” Kira said as she came out of the locker room in her bathing suit. “You really went for it!”

  “You said we had to be naked.”

  “I was joking. But good for you.”

  You have to understand, Kira and I are pretty much coworkers. This is definitely a #MeToo moment, but who was being violated is anybody’s guess.

  “Let’s venik!” she said as she slapped me on my zhopa.

  First we went in a steam room. That was a good start, because it was so filled with steam that we couldn’t see each other. She kept asking if I was nervous for venik. I still wasn’t clear on what it was, so yes, I was very nervous.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

  I wasn’t sure if this was good or bad.

  Next, we went to a small swimming pool. This was uncomfortable, because we were no longer alone, we were no longer shrouded in steam, and I was naked. There were other men and women who had no clothes on, but they were much more comfortable with the whole thing than I was.

  My strategy was to move quickly. Towel off, dip in the pool, and stay underwater up to my eyes like an alligator. When women came in naked, I focused on staring straight ahead. I used the same strategy as when I go to a yoga class. I feel like it’s a female-dominated environment and I’m a visitor who should remain invisible.

  Not every guy sees it that way, and certainly not the very tall man who stood with extreme confidence at the edge of our pool. Why was he just standing there completely naked with his hands on his hips? Because apparently he felt that this was his chance to show everyone the burden that God had put upon him. This was his one moment to gain sympathy by showing the world that he had to carry this gigantic appendage around with him every day.

  I tried to look away, but it was like trying not to look at a T. rex who just walked into the room. I did my best to stare at the ladder, the lounge chair, anything but him.

  Kira didn’t even try to look away.

  Thankfully the Russian woman came in and yelled that it was time for venik. As I clambered out of the pool,
stumbling on the stairs like a man trying not to have his penis compared to this mythological creature, he asked, “Is this your first time for venik?”

  “Yes,” I said. Everybody laughed.

  I wrapped a towel around myself as Kira led me into a two-level sauna. Now as we all know, a sauna is hot. We also know that heat rises. The only reason to build a sauna with two levels is if you are Russian and want to test how strong you are at every turn. Kira smiled.

  We climbed the wet, hot tile steps and sat on the wooden bench. Across the room two large sweaty men were sitting in the corner. They looked like they had been there their entire lives. How anyone could stay in there for longer than ten minutes seemed impossible.

  Kira asked, “Are you nervous?”

  “No. Should I be?”

  “Probably.”

  “I am really hot.”

  “Just wait.”

  Suddenly one of the men stood up and said something in Russian and pointed at another wooden bench.

  “That’s you. Go,” Kira said.

  I stood up as he said something else in Russian. “He said to leave your towel.”

  Not totally trusting her translation, I dropped my towel and walked naked over to the bench and sat down. The other man picked up a bundle of sticks that looked pretty much like an entire bush and started walking toward me.

  I was no longer concerned that I was naked. I was so hot that I was willing to do whatever I had to do to get this over with. I thought that I might pass out or have a heart attack or even die, but I truly didn’t care anymore.

  He motioned at the bench with the branches.

  “He wants you to lie down,” Kira said with a laugh.

  As soon as I lay down on my stomach, this man, this large sweaty man who apparently lives in a sauna, started hitting me with the sticks. It wasn’t like he was whipping me as much as beating me. Then he dipped them in water and started beating me again, generating extreme heat. This wasn’t a massage. This wasn’t intended to feel good. What it did was generate extreme heat. More heat than I had felt up to this point. Not just in this sauna but at any point in my entire life.