Stay Hungry

by Sebastian Maniscalco

  Then the baby was on Lana’s chest, and I circled them both with my arms. Our relatives knew the gender, but we hadn’t told anyone the name: Serafina Simone. Lana had designed a little embroidered patch that was sewn onto a little cotton hat. Oh, that’s right, the embroidery guy also knew the name, and Lana made him swear to secrecy. I had the hat in my pocket and put it on the baby’s head. At that moment, my mother-in-law found out we’d named our daughter after her. Needless to say, she started bawling, too.

  WE HIRED KARRIE, a night nurse, to educate us on what to expect—sleep training, bottles, bathing, everything. She was basically our baby therapist. She and Lana would talk for hours every night about all things infant.

  To be honest with you, at first I was uncomfortable with Karrie being there. A stranger sleeping on the couch in my newborn baby’s room? Shouldn’t we be going through the trials and tribulations of raising the baby by ourselves? That was how my parents did it. But then again, unlike Mom and Dad, Lana and I didn’t have a lot of family around to help us. My mother had moved to Los Angeles by then, but she lived forty-five minutes away, not “Mom, I need you now!” distance. And regardless, my mom is “fun grandma.” She comes to play, not to implement schedules. When you don’t have immediate assistance, you hire people. Despite my initial hesitation, I quickly came to see Karrie as a blessing. She taught us what we needed to know and did whatever she could to help us get a decent night’s sleep.

  Being a father played into all of my anxieties. As a new parent, you’re always concerned. Should we swaddle the baby? Should the baby be doing that? Is that a rash? What’s that mark on her cheek? What does all that mean? Having a pro right there in our house to bounce stuff off eased our way into parenthood. Any questions my wife had during the day about breast-feeding, napping, and you name it, were bounced off Karrie via text or phone call or when she came in. She obviously knew what she was doing. Karrie had Serafina sleeping through the night at six weeks old.

  During our non-sleeping hours, we didn’t leave the baby’s side. Lana was breast-feeding, so she was literally attached to Serafina every two hours. My father had been old school, leaving the grosser parts of parenthood—diaper changing, cleaning spit up—to my mom. I was not going to emulate my father in that way. I did it all. One morning, I was bringing Serafina to Lana for her morning feed. I had no shirt on and Serafina latched onto my nipple. I didn’t know how to take this, but I laughed it off and did extra bench presses for the next two weeks.

  As a father you have to find your role. My role became the butler to my wife. Lana would sit down to breast-feed and I would get her all of the things she needed one by one. She would say, “Babe, can you please bring me my phone and a water?”

  “Right away, ma’am,” I’d say.

  As soon as I would sit down, she would throw me another “Hey, baby.”

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Can you please grab the frozen grapes?”

  “Right away, my love.”

  I didn’t dare say no, because she had literally grown this magical little human in her belly and was giving Serafina all of the nutrients she needed to keep growing. I really came to appreciate and understand the role of a mother, and being her butler was the least I could do.

  If Lana and I went into a different room when Serafina was napping, we watched her on our phones via the live streaming app that connected to the Nest camera by her crib. Whenever I was out of the house for any reason, I found myself checking the baby camera app constantly. It was addicting. At any time I could look at my daughter and see that she was safe.

  Serafina was ten days old when we decided to go have our first dinner out. I knew plenty of people who, after they became parents, never carved out time for themselves. We once met this couple for dinner and they said, “This is the first time we’ve been out since the baby was born a year and a half ago.”

  I said, “You couldn’t get a babysitter?”

  My buddy said, “Babysitters are expensive.”

  I almost said, “You think babysitters are expensive, how about marriage counselors?”

  We’d stayed in a lot more than usual during the pregnancy, and now I wanted to go out. It’s important to get a little break. Our lives were centered around the baby, but if we didn’t get a few hours to detach once in a while, we were going to go nuts. I said to Lana, “Why not go out to eat instead of sitting here, watching the baby sleep? We have the help.”

  So Lana, my mother, and I went to Il Piccolino for dinner. It was only a five-minute drive from our house. As soon as we sat down, Lana opened the app and checked the baby. In the grainy black-and-white picture, it looked like a blanket was covering the baby’s face.

  We called Karrie, but she didn’t answer. Where the fuck is she? Sleeping? Does Karrie have a blanket over her head, too? I was boiling, but trying not to stress Lana out too much. We even did the walkie-talkie through the Nest cam, but we were getting no response. We told each other, “I’m sure it’s fine,” and tried to go on with our dinner, but Lana was crawling out of her skin.

  She said, “What do we do?” We tried calling and texting a few more times to no avail. There was no way we could continue our dinner assuming everything was okay.

  I told Lana, “Go home and check on the baby. We’ll stay here.”

  About ten minutes later, my mother and I watched on my phone as Lana walked into the baby’s room and checked the crib. She texted, “All good. It was just the angle of the camera that made it look as if the blanket was over her face.” When Lana got back to the restaurant, she told us that Karrie had turned off her ringer to let the baby sleep. We all decided from then on that the ringer was on when we were out.

  My mother said, “When you were a baby, you didn’t have a camera in your room.”

  No kidding, Ma. Just ask our neighbors from back in the day.

  MY PARENTS HAD no idea what was going on in my room after they tucked me in. One time when I was around ten, I sleepwalked out the screen door, hopped a short fence, and ran through dewy grass in my Pittsburgh Steelers pajamas. I think I was dreaming about being Franco Harris running down the field, but I was running down Shag Bark Lane to my next-door neighbors Bonnie and Frank’s house. My parents had no idea that I was even gone.

  Bonnie was forty years old at the time. I knocked on her door and she answered in her negligee. Theirs was the house in the neighborhood that nobody ever saw the inside of. Maybe it was the mystery that lured me there in my sleep. So she invited me in. I do remember getting a glimpse into their entryway, and seeing two metal armored knights standing there like something out of medieval times. As I progressed through the house, it looked like a mix of King Arthur and Scarface, lots of black and red with dim lighting. She took me into her bedroom with a gold rotary phone and gold silk sheets on the bed. It looked like the movie producer’s bedroom in The Godfather. The only thing that was missing was a horse’s head.

  My father is the type of sleeper where he didn’t budge until his internal alarm clock woke him up for work. My parents were sound asleep, comfortable. They had a waterbed. It had a mirrored canopy. I think my dad got a deal on it from a porno set clearance sale.

  When you’re a kid, you just think the mirrored bed is sort of cool. To this day, I’ve never had a conversation with my parents about this. How do you even bring that up over breakfast? “Hey, Mom. Do you like the mirrored bed because . . . er, never-mind. Um, can you pass the biscuits?”

  So how this went down was Bonnie called my house and said to my mom, “Do you know your son is in my bedroom right now?”

  Needless to say, my parents were clueless that Bonnie and I were hanging out in our PJs in her bedroom next door.

  Mom said, “What do you mean? Nobody in the Arlington Heights vicinity has ever made it past your welcome mat! I’ve been dying to see the inside of your house for fifteen years! How did Sebastian get an invite?”

  “Rose, he didn’t,” said Bonnie. “He sleepwalked over here. Can yo
u come get him, please?”

  “Only if you show me your front room!”

  That will not happen with Serafina, because we will get an alert if she so much as twitches. Obviously, human babies have survived until adulthood without cameras in their faces 24/7. But the technology exists now, so we were going to use it. I knew it was intrusive, and might cause more anxiety than it quelled, but I liked being able to look at my baby to see what she was doing when I was away from home. And that was how we were going to raise her.

  I realized that dinners out from now on were going to be with phones on the table and camera apps open. Our lives were completely changed. We’d been to this restaurant millions of times, not a care in the world. Before, we’d have pasta and a glass of wine and talk to each other. Now, as soon as we sat down, we were glued to the app, trying to see breathing movements. Before, we’d linger between courses. Now Lana raced home to check the baby.

  Sometimes, as a new parent, you need to be crazy. You need to check in. You assume nothing. Your baby is your heart existing outside your body. This is a whole new level of responsibility I’d never had before, and it hit me full force. It took me forty-three years to get here, but I was ready for this.

  WHEN SERAFINA SMILES, she looks like Lana. When she’s annoyed with people, she looks like me. When I’m there, Lana and I wake the baby up together. As soon as she sees us, she starts smiling and kicking her feet and flailing her arms in cheer. I jump out of bed to see that. In my previous life, I would never get out of bed so early for anything. But the promise of seeing Serafina focus in and freak out in happiness is the best alarm clock in the world. Even if she’s hungry or has gas and starts crying, it’s exciting to see this tiny person expressing herself with such gusto.

  Making people laugh has long been my connection to humanity. If I can make you smile or crack up, we are bonded, at least for the moment. I feel the energy pass between us. When I play a large venue like Mohegan Sun, I feel that energy times ten thousand.

  Well, making Serafina laugh is like ten thousand Mohegan Suns. It’s the greatest joy of my life. She smiles at me, and I’m done. I travel all of the time for work, and it has become painful to leave home. I was in New York recently to scope out some locations for my next special, and every second I wasn’t in a meeting, I played a video Lana sent me of Serafina in the little activity chair we call her desk, laughing. I put it on a loop and lost an hour before I realized what had happened. Since I had a baby, it’s been hard to get anything done.

  My friends with older kids tell me to enjoy every moment. I already have a sense that it’s going by too fast. One day, she lifts her head. The next, she rolls over. The next, she’s off to college. Right now, she might be grabbing my shirt and spitting up on my shoulder, but in a blink, she will be asking me, “Dad, aren’t you embarrassed?” I can’t wait to get to know this tiny person who already can make me melt with the way she bats her eyes.

  And now I’m welling up again.

  I’m new at this, but I have figured out a few things about father-hood: It has doubled my joy—and anxiety. It’s put a permanent lump in my throat. And it involves a lot of crying—by me.

  12

  * * *

  ACTING CHOPS

  In the last few years, I’ve noticed that I’m getting a lot of calls about acting. Ironically, when I first started out as a performer, acting was what convinced me to go west to L.A. I wanted to do standup, but all of my experience was in theater.

  After graduating college, I was in a very different boat than my friends. They’d lined up jobs in the fields they majored in. Basically, nothing in my life had been planned besides the dream of being a comedian. I majored in corporate organizational communications. The reason I majored in this was because it was the only major that didn’t require a test to get in.

  Out of college, I had been working as a temp at the United Airlines Employees Credit Union. My job was to enter codes for preordered specialty meals into the system. There is nothing more boring than entering in the code for an airline meal ordered by a stranger in 32B. If you flew on United Airlines in the early ’90s and received Salisbury steak instead of the vegetarian meal you requested, it was because I was working the graveyard shift and did not give a shit. The last thing I was concerned about was who was pissed off about the meal mix-up on the way to Dulles International.

  During this job hell, I saw an ad in a local paper looking for actors to appear in an interactive dinner theater production in Chicago. I had never done anything like that before, but sometimes, when you don’t know what to expect, you’re better off.

  It was for a show called Joey and Mary’s Irish Italian Comedy Wedding, like Tony and Tina’s Wedding, but with an Irish twist. I auditioned for the part of the best man, Gino Cappellini. I went into the audition and knocked it out of the park just being me. I had no fear or expectations. I just did it because I thought it would be fun, and they gave me the part in the room. I took my place in a cast of real theater actors who were in the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, a prestigious notch on any actor’s belt. While these people were studying acting meticulously, I was pretending to care about my corporate organizational communications degree, which must have indirectly given me some acting chops.

  I had no formal acting training at all, but what I did have was the bluster of youth and positive prior experience being on stage in front of a large group of people and making them laugh. Back in college, there was this bodybuilding contest called Greek Physique. All the fraternities and sororities would do a skit and then one representative from each house would come out and pose. I wasn’t the bodybuilder for my frat, but I did write the skit and MC the event, and I killed it. I figured Joey and Mary’s Wedding would be an extension of that.

  I was still living at my parents’ house in the burbs, so I had to drive to the city for daily rehearsals. The director’s plan was to do shows at different banquet halls around the Chicago area. We’d go into a catering hall in, say, Addison, Illinois, turn the space into a wedding set—tables, a DJ, a cake, flowers—and put on the show.

  If you haven’t experienced interactive dinner theater, you really need to do it once. The concept is that you are attending a real wedding reception as a guest, and you sit at an assigned seat at a table with other people, some of whom are actors. The more you get into it and play along, the more fun you’ll have.

  There was a loose script, but pretty much it was up to each actor to get the people involved in the drama. I would jump right in at my table with typical wedding icebreakers, like “Which side are you on? I haven’t seen you in the family, so you must be with the bride.” Or I’d say to a woman, “I saw you looking at me but I got a girlfriend, so back off.” You had to be willing to play with me for the joke to work, but a lot of people wouldn’t say anything. They’d get embarrassed and I—excuse me, Gino Cappellini—would have to monopolize the conversation.

  There’s a hilarious episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry David went to an interactive show like this, and he knew one of the actors. He kept trying to get the guy to break character. When they were in the bathroom together, Larry said, “So, John, how you been?”

  The guy said, “Who’s John?” Larry wouldn’t let it go, and chaos ensued.

  When my family came to the show, it was a real challenge for me to stay in character. I’d see my mom was on the dance floor and I’d have to say, “Hey, how you doing? I’m Gino Cappellini.” She’d crack up, and I’d say, “What’s so funny? I got something in my teeth?” In the middle of the evening, the Irish brother of the groom and I broke out into a dance number, and we always brought down the house. We did twelve Saturday night shows in a row. Gino had a girlfriend named Jodie, played by an actress I got to be friends with, and we’d go out with the rest of the cast after a show to party at somebody’s house, at a bar, or what have you.

  I had a ball doing the show. It was an unforgettable summer for a twenty-two-year-old kid. But, as far as acting goes, I wou
ldn’t say that I learned a lot. Maybe I picked up more than I would have in doing improv, but not much. There was no dialogue to memorize. My costume was a tux. All I had to do was eat and talk (and dance), skills that were already in my wheelhouse. It got my feet wet in dealing with an ensemble of actors and actresses, and I outshined a lot of them. I consistently made people laugh. I thought, I can perform. I can make people happy. The whole experience spurred me to pursue performing for real. I’d been thinking about moving to Los Angeles for months, but I hadn’t been able to pull the trigger. Getting the Gino role and doing it well gave me the confidence to say, “I might have something here. I think performing could be a career.”

  It’s not like I was landing any other jobs at the time. The writing was on the wall early that I was not cut out for a cubicle. I thought it was because I wasn’t a “good fit” at the Chicago Convention Hall Career Day. In hindsight, I think what turned off potential employers was my metallic silver double-breasted three-piece suit with a red handkerchief and matching red tie from Taylor Street, while everyone else was in a navy business suit and getting hired left and right. I looked like John Travolta from Saturday Night Fever going out on Career Day. I had no guidance. Nobody put me in check. My father thought I looked sharp and my mother thought I would get a career as a model.

  After landing nothing at Career Day, I began thumbing through the newspapers, and the ads for musical theater kept glaring at me. I just felt bad for my parents, because their friends and neighbors got to brag about the cush jobs their kids were landing. Mine would have to act as if they were proud that I was making less than minimum wage at a part-time gig, after they’d gone through two years of what they called “mall withdrawal” to save up to put me through college. Most parents had an education fund for their children so that when the time came, it was ready to roll. Mine began saving three weeks before orientation.