Nice Try

by Josh Gondelman

  Dedication

  To Maris, in hopes that having a book dedicated

  to her will make her enemies jealous

  Epigraph

  I want you to be nice until it’s time to not be nice.

  —Dalton, Road House

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  If at First You Don’t Succeed . . .

  Nice Guys Finish Dessert Last

  Just Give Me a Minute

  A Few of My Greatest Fears, in No Particular Order

  1-800-GOOD-PORN

  A Technicality

  You Don’t Know, Now You Know

  Things That Make Me Feel Grown-Up (in Order of Increasing Adulthood)

  A Worthy Adversary

  The Present-Tense Conjugation of the Spanish Verb Nadar, Which Means “to Swim”

  Screech

  I Hope These Years Aren’t the Best of Your Lives

  It Was Funny at the Time

  Don’t Aim, Just Throw

  . . . Try, Try Again

  Weathering the Tantrums

  The Thanksgiving Dragon

  Some Things That I, a Childcare Professional, Was Professionally Obligated to Say to Kids

  Good Deeds, Unrewarded

  Have Fun

  The Blank Postcard

  Things I Have Tried (with Varying Degrees of Success) at the Behest of Women I Was Dating at the Time or to Whom I Am Married

  Good Will Hunting Isn’t Science Fiction

  Sorry, Not Sorry

  Gap Years

  Third Time’s a Charm?

  The Three True Stories of How We Met

  Fish Tacos

  Tickle Me Fancy

  A Good Game

  The Unsung Virtue of Telling People What They Want to Hear

  An Element of Style

  Bizzy

  A Partial List of Names I Call My Dog, Whose Real Name Is Bizzy

  “I Also Do Michael Jackson”

  The Best Moments of My Wedding #3–10

  Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Before I left for college, my dad sat me down on the living room couch and gave me some advice.

  “When you go away to school, I want you to remember—” He paused, leaving me enough time to wonder exactly what kind of wisdom he was about to bestow on me. My dad is not prone to grand proclamations, and he also wasn’t a big fan of his own college experience. “I want you to remember,” he continued, “when you leave for college, don’t bring dirty clothes with you. You’ll have to do laundry right away, and you’ll go through all your change. Here, I want you to have this.”

  My father then got up from his chair, reached into his pocket, and pulled out an orange pill bottle, which felt like a hard turn for the conversation to take. Had my dad been dealing Adderall on the side, like a low-stakes Breaking Bad? He dropped the bottle into my hand, and it landed with an unexpected heft and a jingle. It was full of quarters. He sat back down, waited another beat, and continued his heart-to-heart in a way that felt less thoroughly prepped. At the very least, he hadn’t brought any props for the second part of the talk.

  “I think you’re going to do really well in college,” he said, and then he paused again, as if considering whether to say the next part out loud or keep it to himself. “You know, when you started high school, I never told you this, but I was worried you’d be too nice and people would take advantage of you. I’m really glad that didn’t happen.”

  If I’m being honest, I have to admit that I gave him good reason to fear for my safety and social well-being as I entered ninth grade. I’d always had a wet paint personality, bright and shiny and vulnerable to the elements. I was proud that he trusted me to go off into the world, or at least as far as Brandeis University.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  We hugged, and he left the room, and I sat there with my medicine bottle full of quarters, most of which I probably ended up lending to someone who never paid me back.

  Years later, people still got the same impression of me.

  “Have you met Gondelman?” my friend Andy said to his friend Dave at a party when I was twenty-five. “He’s super nice.”

  Dave’s face fell.

  “No, but he’s funny, too,” Andy reassured him.

  My reputation often precedes me in social and professional circles, and not always in positive ways. For a comedian, “nice” can be shorthand for someone’s work being bland. And on a personal level, “nice” is about as meaningful as saying someone “has decent breath” or “is usually punctual.”

  But, still, where I’m known at all, I’m known as a nice guy, which I think I am. But I’m trying to be other things, too, even though sometimes I’m not great at that. After all, it’s nice to waste eighty dollars trying to win your date a stuffed animal on the Coney Island boardwalk. But it’s certainly not financially responsible. And when you lose the carnival game, and the carny1 feels bad and gives you the prize anyway, it’s a little undignified, and you’ll wish you’d set firmer boundaries. This is not a hypothetical example.

  There’s a scene from the movie Road House that I think about a lot. I mean, there are a lot of scenes from that movie that play often in my mind: the ones where Patrick Swayze rips out a guy’s throat, the one where Ben Gazzara’s character watches smugly as a monster truck drives over all the cars at a dealership owned by his enemy, the one where after receiving stitches from a doctor who asks if he enjoys pain Swayze responds, stoically, “Pain don’t hurt.” Road House is either one of the best terrible movies ever made or the worst good movie ever made.

  But there is one scene in particular I look to more than the others. Patrick Swayze (in the movie, he’s called “Dalton,” but come on . . . it’s Patrick Swayze) has just taken over as head of security at the Double Deuce, a Kansas City dive bar where patrons throw bottles at the live band and employees have (uncomfortably explicit, if you’re watching with your dad) sex with each other on their fifteen-minute breaks. Swayze/Dalton is outlining his new guidelines for the bar’s bouncers. The final tenet of his code is both simple and unexpected to the team of fistbrains working the door.

  “Be nice,” he advises them. And when the staff questions him, he elaborates. “If somebody gets in your face and calls you a cocksucker, I want you to be nice. Ask him to walk. Be nice. If he won’t walk, walk him, but be nice. If you can’t walk him, one of the others will help you, and you will both be nice.”

  Then there’s a little back-and-forth between Dalton/Swayze and his employees regarding contingencies such as “What if he calls my mama a whore?” It’s not important for our purposes here. What’s important is how Swayzeton concludes his speech:

  “I want you to be nice until it’s time to not be nice.”

  “So, uh, how are we supposed to know when that is?” says a large, violent employee with the IQ of chewed gum.

  “You won’t,” says Patrick Swayze. “I’ll let you know.”

  That last part always feels like such a relief to me. How great would it be to have someone in your life to tell you when to flip the switch from Nice to Badass; or, in my case, from Nice to Irritable? Because not every problem can be solved by nice-ing your way through it. And being Not Nice doesn’t always imply being Mean. It could mean being Firm or Uncompromising or Indignant or Guarded or Assertive (all of which I am historically bad at being).

  And I’m not saying the right thing to do is to be, in all circumstances, Not Nice. That is an o
ccasionally effective strategy that doesn’t scale. There’s no valor in being a person who “tells it like it is” if you use that as a license to tell it mean and racist. Sometimes you are still working under the umbrella of Nice, but just being polite and agreeable isn’t enough. It’s much better in many cases to be Generous or Righteous or Considerate or Forgiving or Understanding. You can’t do any of those things without being nice, but you sure as hell can be nice without doing that stuff, too.

  All of this has been confusing to me, as a former Nice Boy who is trying to be a Good Guy. Because that means by turns being nice, and being kind of a dick if the situation calls for it. And then sometimes you have to be assertive. And other times it’s about taking a loss so someone you love can win, and weathering hard times while staying tender. And then sometimes being a good person means doing drugs in a bathroom stall in a bowling alley. And other times it means accepting a trophy for a film you didn’t make that was entered into a festival it had no business being in. At least, I think that’s what it means.

  If at First You Don’t Succeed . . .

  Nice Guys Finish Dessert Last

  During my wife’s wedding vows, in front of all the friends and family that could fit in the room (plus the DJ/Michael Jackson impersonator we’d inadvertently hired), she told me that I wasn’t nice. It wasn’t something I was used to hearing. Sure, strangers on the internet had called me an idiot. And women I’d dated in the past had, as things were deteriorating, told me I was inconsiderate or selfish or distracted. But the problem was never that I wasn’t nice. On at least one occasion in my early to midtwenties, I was told I was “too nice,” which is a very sweet euphemism meaning “simply not a person I am interested in having sex with in the foreseeable future.” Which is, you know, fair.

  So when Maris, which is my wife’s name (sorry I didn’t mention that before), said on the day of our wedding that I was “not nice,” it really felt like she saw something in me that no one had ever noticed before. And I almost cried in a good way, but the tears stayed inside until midway through the reception when the DJ stepped out from behind his equipment in a red leather jacket and a silver rhinestone glove, and I laughed so hard I couldn’t hold them back anymore.

  Although, not to contradict my wife, but I am actually very nice. I think it’s probably genetic.

  There’s a Gondelman family legend about my grandfather that explains pretty much my whole personality. None of my living family members were present for these events, so a few of the details might be inaccurate, but the emotional center of this story reverberates in my bones to this day.

  Decades ago, my dad’s parents were invited to a dinner party. I imagine that it being a social gathering in the 1950s, it consisted of a lot of smoking indoors, and all the men were wearing full suits for some reason. One guy probably played “God Bless America” on a piano while his wife sang, and then everyone saluted. I am, of course, extrapolating this from Mad Men episodes I sort of remember.

  When dessert came out, the evening took a turn. The guests were presented with plates of homemade pastry. No one knew it at the time, but apparently the party’s hostess had tasted a version of the dish served by a friend, and, smitten immediately, she had requested the recipe. The hostess’s friend was reluctant to give the recipe away; it was a family secret. But she didn’t want the hostess to know how petty she was. So, instead of outright refusing, she wrote down a version of the recipe with an ingredient missing. The hostess had no idea she’d been sabotaged, set up to fail by someone we would now call a “frenemy” but back then people referred to as “a real piece of work, if you know what I mean.”

  At the party where the booby-trapped dessert was served, no one took more than two bites. Each guest managed a single nibble and laid down their fork as if toppling their king to concede a chess match. Some held their napkins to their lips as if they were sharing secrets with them and spat out what they’d bitten off whole.

  Not Morton Gondelman,1 though. My grandfather, undeterred by the horrible taste of the food in front of him, dug in hard like he was burying a body in the woods. The other guests alternated staring and trying not to stare in horror as he cleaned his plate. Then, without flinching, he requested a second helping and devoured that, too.

  “Papa,” I said, on hearing this story for the first time (with the accent on the first syllable, not the second, the way a fancy European toddler calls for his father), “why did you ask for seconds?”

  His response was immediate, as if he could imagine no other answer. “I didn’t want her to feel bad.”

  Even as a child, I recognized this as a tremendous act of generosity. Sure, they say Jesus died for our sins, but did he ever choke down two slices of chocolate cake, dry as hairballs because the recipe deliberately excluded eggs, in a desperate effort to spare the feelings of just one person? I think not. Incidentally, there is no way that plan worked. Considering not a single other attendee got even halfway through the dessert, my grandfather’s gambit undoubtedly came off less as “This food is delicious!” and more like “My taste buds were destroyed years ago in a horrible scalding-hot-pizza incident!”

  By both nature and nurture, that is my heritage. Technically, I’m Jewish. I was bar mitzvahed, and I enjoy the ritualized eating of carbohydrates. But more than that, I was raised nice. I have a nice mom and a nice dad, and their niceness was instilled in me at a very young age. They’re not just nice, they’re good, too. My dad was active for years in his local chapter of the Painters and Allied Trades union, a vocal advocate for his colleagues. My mom was a devoted educator. My sister, Jenna, a pediatric physical therapist, is also both nice and good.

  As a child, I was a nice boy, and when you’re a kid, niceness is enough. Or at least, that’s the feedback I got. You say please and thank you. You wait in line without wandering off. You refrain from punching other kids in the face, no matter how annoying they are. You follow directions. And if you do those things, you’re a Good Kid, which is pretty much the highest level of being a kid other than Child Prodigy, which comes with way more baggage, and honestly, who needs that?

  But niceness is only enough under the best possible conditions. It relies on having adults in your life looking out for you, and on not facing prejudice, even as a child, based on your race, gender, religion, economic background, physical and mental ability, or sexuality. But these are all thoughts I had as a grown-up, not as a kid.

  So, let’s say you’re a Good Kid, and you ask people how they’re doing when you see them, and you share your fruit snacks with your friends. Under ideal circumstances, that’s all that anyone expects, and nobody asks much more of you. My parents instilled me with a habit of being respectful toward everyone I encountered, not to mention impeccable telephone manners that often got me mocked once everyone I knew had a cell phone.

  “Hello, may I please speak to Eric?”

  “Who the hell else would be answering my phone? It was literally in my pocket until you called.”

  And then you grow up, and everything’s different. Being a Nice Kid is commendable. It’s a credit to your parents, and it buys you a lot of goodwill with authority figures.

  As an adult, I avoid self-identifying as a Nice Guy for two reasons. Reason number one is that “nice” is one of those things that when you tell someone you’re it, it probably means you’re the exact opposite. Like when someone says they are “super chill and low maintenance,” it means scheduling lunch with them will take a full week of emails while they bend you to the will of their rigorous schedule and dietary preferences. Then, when you get something on the books, they will send you an online calendar invite, the type A person’s reminder that they don’t trust you to show up when you promised to show up. Similarly, when you say you are a nice person, it’s often cover for sentiments like, “So if I scream in your face, please know that it is your fault and not something I, a nice person, would otherwise be doing.”

  Secondly, though, there’s the issue of the capita
l N, capital G Nice Guy. The Nice Guy is always bemoaning how nobody respects him. More specifically, he’s always upset that women won’t date him. Women just don’t want Nice Guys anymore, they lament. But, of course, underneath that refrain is a sense of entitlement for doing the bare minimum. “I held the door open for you! Isn’t that enough?” Or, “I paid for dinner! What more do you want?” It’s gross, and it’s sexist, and it really fucks it up for everyone who takes pride in writing prompt, courteous thank-you emails and doesn’t expect a hand job for it.

  But those are small-time problems. The big issue with being nice as an ethos is that it’s not a code that prepares you to solve every conflict you face in the adult world. Just saying please and thank you doesn’t get you very far in a job interview. A handpicked bouquet of flowers won’t solve systemic racism. Gentle, collaborative play is not helpful when your partner asks to be choked in bed. Being nice isn’t just insufficient; it’s sometimes the straight-up wrong thing to do.

  Plus, when you’re outwardly nice, people assume you’re a pushover, which in my case is fair because I am one. But if you’ve got a cheerful, friendly demeanor, people act like you don’t know better, like you’ve never heard of poverty or broken a bone. Optimists never get credit for the effort it takes to keep believing things are going to be okay. Here’s a secret: most optimists know the world is full of horrors. They just think it can be improved. But especially in New York City, where I live, if you show a glimmer of hopefulness, everyone acts like you’re a Disney princess who just woke up from a thousand-year slumber after a prince with a pure heart kissed your cold, cursed lips. And while we’re on the topic, how come every fairy tale is about a prince saving a beleaguered damsel? Forget the problems with painting women as frail; are we really supposed to believe no one ever puts men in magically induced comas?

  People especially love a guy who is secretly nice. There’s no personality type people love more than a dude who’s salty on the outside and sweet on the inside, like a gourmet caramel.