Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Heeb Media, LLC
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Grand Central Publishing
Hachette Book Group
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New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
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First eBook Edition: October 2009
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for use of their artwork: page 1, Adam Mutterperl and Matthew Shultz (Why I Only Date Shiksas comic); page 23, Sarah Maxwell (photograph); page 35, D. C. Benny (cartoon); page 47, Johnathan Ryan Storm (illustration); pages 64–65, Julie Klausner (Mulatto Incident comic); page 71, Alicia Fairclough (illustration); page 84, Margot Liebman (illustration of Big Foot); page 101, Nick Kroll and Julie Klausner (Pool Party Joke comic); page 151, Jon Feinstein (photograph); page 163, Sophie Crumb (comic).
Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
ISBN: 978-0-446-55882-2
For Michael
Acknowledgments
FIRST AND FOREMOST thank you to all the wonderfully talented, good-humored Heeb storytellers who gave us their best seven minutes for zero financial compensation—Heeb-style. To our incredibly cool editor, Ben Greenberg, and whatever he smoked or drank the night before he dreamed several fantastic covers for this book. To Mike Garten and Yasha Wallin for making that cover come to life, and to Rebecca Weiner for helping me edit the stories. Also many thanks to some of the longtime organizers of Heeb Storytelling: Ean Seeb and Eric Elkins in Denver, Amanda Marks in Atlanta, Alessandra Rizzotti in L.A., Amy Tobin and Angela Petrella in San Francisco, Julia Young in Ann Arbor, Byron Kerman and Ran Mano in St. Louis and Kevin Coval in Chicago. We’re also grateful to our favorite accordionists Adam Shenkman in L.A., Adam Baruchowitz in New York, Josh Dolgin in San Francisco, and of course, all of our hosts, notably Andy Borowitz in Chicago, the Sklar Brothers in L.A., and Todd Barry—who launched it all on the Lower East Side. A thousand thanks, hugs and apologies to the brilliant Josh Neuman. And last but not least, to my amazing family, for laughing even when it wasn’t funny.
Contents
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface
SEX
Losing It
The Anti-Mensch
SJF Seeks Donor
Me Make Fire for Lynn
In a Different Light
All Eighteen Inches
DRUGS
Let It Breathe
Grandma Betty
I Am Anxious
Benzos and Breast Cancer
Unprotected: A Confession
Out of the Bag
WORK
Prime-Time Playa
My Stalker
The Professional
The Money Was Good
A Field Guide to the North American Bigfoot
Approaching a Lunatic
Hollywood Sucks
YOUTH
Baruch Atah Nathaniel
We Want Bo Derek
Gershon
The Mossad Bought Me Nachos and a Sprite
Exodus
Helping Hand
Freaking
One Night at Gimbels
The True Meaning of Christmas
Poop Sandwich
As Time Went By
FAMILY
And Baby Makes… Four
Lesbians at Temple
Mama Ann
Phone Home
Little Isaac’s Nozzle of Love
True Tales from Katzalot
Bar Mitzvah: The Musical!
Herzog Versus Davis
Fake Farm
BODY & SOUL
My Whole Hair Story
Half and Half
Weight Watchers at Gunpoint
Mustorderitis
Boiling Point
The Eyes of the Beholder
Finding My Kegel Muscles
Body Hair
Masturbating Class: A Hands-on Experience
Contributors
Foreword
By A. J. Jacobs
A FEW WEEKS AGO, I went on vacation with my family to the Dominican Republic. I expected some snorkeling, some beach reading, perhaps a mojito or two. Instead, I spent three days in the hospital with severe pneumonia.
Have you ever been to a third-world hospital? If not, let me tell you: There is much to keep you occupied. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what liquids the doctors were pumping into my body—my IV drip had no less than four bags of mystery fluids in a range of colors (yellow, clear, red, blue). I also had to puzzle out the best way to swallow the bizarre backgammon-piece-sized pills they kept handing me. That took some time. I got to learn the Spanish words for mucus and searing pain. I spent hours staring out the window searching for the rooster that had woken me up at 5:30 a.m. every morning. Oh, and I passed several minutes writing my own obituary in my head.
Meanwhile, back at the hotel, my wife was busy freaking out. She was trying to take care of our three sons without my help, and worrying about whether I’d get out of el hospital with a pulse. My father, I later learned, assured her that I’d make it. Plus, he pointed out, perhaps the most important fact of all: I’d get to write about the experience later in an article or book.
My dad knows me well—because that’s exactly what I was thinking. Even as I was wheezing and groaning in pain, I was noting the details of the hospital for future use (the cheesy needlepoint flower on the wall, the sound of retching in the next room). It helped get through the ordeal. As horrible as the experience was, a part of me felt almost gleeful. I got me some material!
I think there should be a word for this phenomenon. It’s not quite masochism or self-pity, though it might have a trace of each. It’s more akin to schadenfreude, but schadenfreude directed at oneself. It’s the pleasure you derive from your own humiliation, pain and foibles, fueled mostly by the knowledge that you’ll get mileage out of it later. Let’s call it auto-schadenfreude.
Auto-schadenfreude isn’t restricted to one race or ethnicity. But I will say, we Jews seem to have a knack for it. Almost every good Jewish story I’ve ever heard is about the pain and humiliation of the narrator, and I bet that a small part of the narrator felt paradoxically proud of the level of his humiliation.
This collection of Heeb stories is one of the best examples of auto-schadenfreude I’ve ever read. These stories overflow with humiliation and pain. And the results are hilarious and tragic and profound. Just a sample:
Ophira Eisenberg’s fantastically horrible sex with a guy who collects stuffed Garfield cats.
Todd Rosenberg’s hilariously disastrous experience with the Hair Club for Men that led to him to weep in front of his parents.
Wendy Shanker’s fear and resolve (never to diet again) after being held up at a Weight Watchers meeting.
A few years ago, I told my own self-lacerating story at a Heeb Storytelling event. I was on the bill with former Gawker editor Jessica Coen and Schmelvis, the Jewish Elvis impersonator. I told one of the most humiliating events of my life—the time I got a review in The New York Times in which the reviewer called me a “jackass.”
That was a horrible time in my life. But telling the story to a bunch of appreciative people in a downtown bar—that was freeing and empowering. There’s something to owning your pai
n. It’s like you’re saying, “Listen, I’m strong enough that I can expose my own flaws.” I don’t hang around with extreme athletes, but I imagine it’s the same pleasant feeling they get when they show each other scars from their motocross accidents and such.
It’s especially helpful if you can somehow wring a lesson out of the pain. That’s another thing about Jewish stories in general, and the tales in Heeb’s great collection in particular. There’s often a moral. Jonathan Kesselman tells a heartbreakingly funny story about how he takes meds for his crippling OCD, but that means he can’t ejaculate (retarded ejaculation is the medical term). His lesson: Freedom comes with costs.
My lesson was that publishing a book was like having a kid. You can do everything right—feed him, clothe him, show him Baby Kierkegaard videos—but a bully in kindergarten can still make him eat clumps of dirt. You have to come to terms with that. And you have to appreciate that your child is able to run around the playground at all, and is even having fun on the jungle gym most of the time.
While writing this foreword, I happened to be reading a book by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert called Stumbling on Happiness. Gilbert talks about how reframing stories is a key to our sanity. Our brains need to create a lesson. Often these lessons are manufactured rationalizations. They are delusions, but they’re necessary delusions. “Getting dumped by my wife, run over by a golf cart and addicted to Vicodin was the best thing that ever happened to me. And here’s why.”
In a sense, the Jewish people have done a brilliant job at reframing their history. Thank God we were slaves in Egypt. Now we know from suffering and can have empathy. Thank God we were attacked by the Romans/Philistines/Egyptians, so that we can have holidays and eat and revel in God’s love. I thank the writers of this Heeb collection for turning their suffering into wonderful stories—with real or imagined lessons. Their pain, our gain.
Preface
By Shana Liebman
I WAS NOT A HAPPY CAMPER. Every summer from 1983 to 1988, I pleaded with my parents to spare me from what many girls my age considered paradise: arts and crafts, horseback riding, sing-alongs, dances with prepubescent boys. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy staying up late eating Ding Dongs, but I felt different from my fellow campers—most of whom changed designer outfits between activities, spoke wistfully of acquiring bulimia and taped photos of their Hebrew-school boyfriends to their trunks. (I had filled mine with novels and double-sided stationery.)
My parents, however, thought of summer camp as a luxury that they could never experience, and therefore wanted to give to their kids. So even after four miserable summers at four different camps, they wouldn’t give up. Instead they devised a plan: They would send me away with my best friend Michelle. Surely if we were together at camp I wouldn’t be so unhappy, they reasoned. Little did they realize Michelle and I had our own plan—to do everything in our power to get the hell out of camp. It started with this letter.
Dear Mom and Dad,
I hate camp. This is the worst summer of my life. It’s a nightmare. Today was boring and awful. I cried all day and I didn’t eat a thing. Then I felt sick and threw up. I will kill myself if you don’t pick me up soon. I mean it. Michelle is miserable too.
Sincerely, Shana Liebman
As if the message wasn’t clear enough, I added a visual:
Several similar letters followed.
In the past 20 years, I probably confessed my summer camp suicide threats to three people. It’s sort of hard to make the transition to… but now I’m totally well adjusted. Recently, however, my parents dug up that humiliating letter in their basement and I decided to tell the story to a bunch of people at a party—some who knew me and some who didn’t. I was nervous until I heard everyone laugh, and keep laughing and even moan with empathy.
This was the experience that came to mind in 2003, when the editors of Heeb asked me, the Arts Editor, to start a Heeb literary series: I didn’t want to hear young Jews reading from their novel-in-progress; I wanted to create a forum for people from all walks of life to give voice to a panorama of Jewish experiences—no matter how embarrassing.
In the beginning we borrowed heavily from the Moth, a storytelling series created by George Green in 1997. The Moth asked people to tell (not read) stories, so their shows were more dramatic, spontaneous, personal and fun than a literary reading. We did change the format a bit—most importantly, we asked people to tell “Jewish” stories but encouraged them to take liberties to interpret that as they pleased. Like the magazine that launched in 2002, we wanted the series to defy a traditional definition of “Jewishness,” challenge conventions and in its own audacious questioning, bring together an unlikely community—those who didn’t identify with many of their parents’ customs, but still “felt” Jewish.
We rarely rehearsed the shows and we replaced the Moth’s timekeeping classical violin with an old-school accordion—which, by some uncertain criteria, felt more Jewish. But the concept was the same, and at the time, we gave credit where it was due. We called our series the “Shmoth” as a friendly homage. When the series began appearing before sold-out, standing-room-only audiences nationwide, we realized we had found a voice all our own and “Heeb Storytelling” was born.
The capacity for self-deprecation, extreme guilt, analysis, comedy as coping, therapy-induced self-awareness and obsessive record-keeping are, for better or worse, typically thought of as Jewish qualities, so it wasn’t hard to find Jews who could tell a good story—even those who had never been on a stage or had never considered talking publicly about bleaching their arm hair or their search for a tall handsome Jewish sperm donor.
And one of the things that made Heeb Storytelling work was that we weren’t asking for vetted and perfected routines. As a result, comedians abandoned their schtick; journalists told what actually happened; musicians made up songs with narrative arcs. And the audience ate it up.
From the beginning our shows sold out, and over the last six years the series has traveled to virtually every city in North America. It was only recently however that we started to transcribe, edit, illustrate, edit again, argue about over drinks, reorganize, re-edit… ah, publishing.
So here in all their well-deserved published glory are the stories of nerds, ex-girlfriends, liars, rockers, goody goodies, sex fiends, neurotics and, yes, summer campers. The authors are not all Jewish, but their stories are… sort of.
SEX
Losing It
By Josh Swiller
I WAS FIFTEEN, IT WAS 1986, and I really wanted to have sex. I know that seems young, but my parents had HBO. And all my friends had done it. Hunter had done it, with Susan. Pat, the basketball star, had done it, with Mary, Dana and Susan. Even Dan, who grew up to become a rabbi and write books about the secrets to a healthy, loving Jewish marriage and raising your kids without scarring them too terribly, had done it, also with Susan.
I’d never met this Susan, but I really wanted to.
Why couldn’t I meet girls like Susan? Maybe, I thought, it was because I couldn’t hear. I am deaf and wear hearing aids and read lips, and in social situations—especially back then—I was usually a beat or two behind the action. I had, in other words, no game. No game whatsoever.
So I went on a teen tour to Israel—which people do during that year when you’re too old to be a camper at your Jewish summer camp and too young to be a counselor. So they pack you on a bus with 20 or 30 other kids for six weeks and drive you back and forth and up and down the country.
You go to the Dead Sea—ooh, the Dead Sea! You can float on it! And man, do your eyes burn! You go to Masada and walk up the cliffs at dawn and see the sun rise blood-red over the desert and think about sacrifice and feel unworthy of your spoiled selfish life. And then kibbutz! You can pick plums for eight hours in a row with one fifteen-minute break to crap behind a bush!
All wonderful experiences, but what I really wanted was to get laid.
Once I got to Israel, I took a weekend away fro
m the tour and through a family connection went to pay homage to a famous rabbi. He was the leader of a big community of scholars and I really wanted to ask him, “Rabbi, when will I meet someone who will love me completely?” (meaning: “Rabbi, when will I get laid?”) He was in a room with a big crowd of disciples around him. His beard went to his waist and looked like cotton candy. At the last minute I chickened out and didn’t ask him about when I would get to do it. “Rabbi, why am I deaf?” I asked instead.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m not a doctor. Maybe you had a fever?”
Luckily, I had a girlfriend, which is kind of important. You can’t have sex with someone you’re not dating. Unless you’re Richard Gere. (I have no idea what that means, but did you just think of a gerbil?)
Anna was from Connecticut and she was a couple years older than me and she’d been around the proverbial block. That block, like everything else, has gentrified quite a bit since then, but back in those days, there was still hope for a poor, upper-middle-class teenaged Jew-boy. After a month of my pestering, Anna finally said, “OK, Josh, tonight’s the night.”
I could barely believe my… well, my hearing aids. I couldn’t control my excitement. We were staying in a tent camp at some kibbutz in the Galilee. There were about forty tents, and we, our tour, took up five of them and the rest were empty. Anna and I took my sleeping bag and walked out through the campground to find an empty tent as far away from the others as possible. My heart was pounding.
We picked a tent, went inside, took off our clothes, lay down on a cot and pulled the sleeping bag over us. And then we started doing it. Now, I could lie and tell you I put in your standard four-song-and-an-intermission porn performance, but the truth is, having no idea really what it would feel like, having no frame of reference, I would say that 0.2 seconds after entering my lovely girlfriend, I started coming. And that I came for about two minutes straight.
Sex, Drugs & Gefilte Fish Page 1