Fork-by-fork,
I watch these graceful creatures
pull meat from their mouths
& plate them & knife them whole.
Bucket-loads of tuna
moving backwards in the fisherman’s boat
remember how to breathe—
& the gasping fish
spool in
to swim on & live their lives.
& human beings,
one step behind another behind another,
are heroes of the earth.
Axes like tree-erecting wands, harpoons like Band-Aids.
Bombs & guns like surgeons
extracting shrapnel & mushroom fire.
Such superior intellect, one step behind
another behind another,
walking my soil?
It always comes back to the soil, says Earth.
Flybys unpoison the crops
which unkill the animals
& untumor the children
& hospitals release them all—
into parking lots.
Moving backwards in their vehicles
they remember
how to breathe.
Swim on & live their lives—
Inside the mouth-cheeks of human beings
I see tongues
word-by-word,
in reverse:
EARTH as HTRAE and TREE as EERT
when you say it backwards
Soldiers escorting citizens
to their rightful homes.
But human beings, barefoot
one step behind another behind another,
across the bedroom carpet
have their pleasures to pursue—
The unrumpling
of underwear leg-by-leg,
the fingers help it, thigh-high
over the smooth or hairy face
of the ass.
This is the only animal that does this, says Earth.
First with the mouth,
then the hands—
The cupping, strapping,
click of fastenings.
The garment-by-garment dressing of the waist & torso.
The slipping on
of fabrics—the shirting,
zippering, the loop-by-loop
buttoning, belting, skirting.
The (more mouth)
smothering of the lips
until both parties are fully clothed
& embrace for the first time.
Of perspiration & recollection
they neaten each other’s hair.
Of fingers-tips. Separate–
EARTH as HTRAE, TREE as EERT.
7
PEOPLE AREN’T GREAT
The conventional wisdom is that people are generally good, but are they?
I’m not sure.
I think women are okay, I think men are on thin ice. Of what I know historically (if you zoom out), and currently (if you zoom back in). And even personally. I mean, think about the men you know. Think about the men you’ve met in your life. When I do that, I think three or four are horrible. Like, unspeakable. I think the majority are decent.
I think that’s sort of the ceiling for men.
I think good is aspirational. I think great is a fantasy. If you’re with someone who’s great, get outta there.
The men we used to think were great were priests, politicians, and gymnastics doctors. It hasn’t ended well for “great.”
Sometimes it’s hard to tell. When I was twenty-three, I was in Amsterdam with a friend of a friend, which is a cautionary type of person. A friend of a friend is someone you murder people with or who sells you steak knives. We were walking through one of the red-light districts. This is how naive I was at twenty-three: I didn’t know what that even meant. If you don’t know, red-light districts are these neighborhoods in Amsterdam that have, literally, hundreds of prostitutes in windows that are illuminated by red lights. So, we’re walking through one of these neighborhoods and I’m thinking these red-light establishments must be bars or maybe strip clubs.
And I said to my friend of a friend, “Should we go in one?”
He said, “Yeah, but we gotta choose carefully.”
“How come?”
“It’s expensive.”
“How expensive?”
“It’s about two hundred dollars.”
I said, “Two hundred dollars to go into a strip club?!”
He said, “No, they’re prostitutes.”
I said, “We gotta choose carefully.”
I want to be very clear: I don’t want to tell you this story. It’s the only story I will tell you in this book that I really don’t want to tell, but I feel like it’s essential to the larger story I’m telling…
I chose someone who didn’t have a long line.
There was something about the line that made it too real. Like, if I were waiting in a line, I could imagine thinking, The line for this prostitute is outrageous!
I chose someone who sort of looked like me. She was a cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly. She walked me up these rickety steps into this room that was brightly lit and spare—there was only a bed the shape of a gurney. Then she said, “Take off all your clothes and sit on the bed.”
And I did that.
And my body was not excited, which is a euphemism.
For my penis.
And, I thought that would be it. I thought she’d call it like an umpire at a baseball game. She’d throw her hands up and shout: “Rain delay!” But that’s not what happened. What happened was she put a condom on… the thing… which I didn’t know was physically possible. I grew up in central Massachusetts and we had health class in seventh grade and we put a condom on a banana but never on a water balloon.
She put the thing on the thing and started fellating the thing. And then, if I were to guess, I’d say that about forty seconds later, I concluded the aforementioned activity that I’m uncomfortable describing in detail because of my Catholic upbringing.
And then she said, “I guess you’re done.”
And I said to her, and I’ll never forget this, I said, “Can’t we just hang out?”
I’m telling you this long, embarrassing story to make the point that I consider myself…
Decent.
So, I explain all of this to Jen. Because it’s part of my larger point. I say, “Clo, why would you want to bring a child into this world with me? I’m miserable, my body’s a lemon, I’m a walking preexisting condition, the earth is sinking into the ocean, we’re about to be living in the movie Waterworld, which did terribly at the box office. People are horrible and I’m not great.”
Jen listens to me, then utters in her sweetest, softest, thread-counted voice:
“I know all of that and I think you’d be a good dad.”
Then there was a lot of space.
II.
VOWS
I’d be remiss if I chalked up our decision to have a child to one single moment.
Nothing ever is.
In movies and plays it’s always a moment that determines a major life decision, but in life it’s more fluid—a series of moments that form an evolution.
Years ago, after a series of hundreds if not thousands of discussions about marriage, Jen and I decided to go to city hall and take our vows. But those weren’t the real vows. The real vows took place in our bedroom and on our green/gray couch, where we talked for hours about what we wanted in our lives.
Our informal marriage vows broke down to three basic tenets:
A. We would never hold each other back.
B. I would be allowed to talk about us onstage.
C. Jen could disappear when she felt like it.
Now we were in the same bed and on the same couch talking about having a child and breaking open the aforementioned seven reasons that might present obstacles to maintaining these vows.
Jen said, “A baby wouldn’t have to change the way we live our lives.” I knew it would. I was wil
ling to go for it. I wanted to be with Jen. I was committed to her. She was committed to us, though neither of us had met the new us.
But we were about to.
Just Married
Husband is food. I mean good
or roof. Which husband? Men,
women and snowmen—Where…
is my underwear? Husband wakes me
with licking cheeks. I make pillow
of husband’s shoulder & husband.
Sousing the dishes topless for husband:
I douse the mugs & bowls with warm
lemon froth & bubble; I sponge
our utensils: spoon, knife & prong,
for food we will eat next Tuesday
& Sunday & Tomorrow; I scrub
& bristle & muscle the pig-headed pans
with sporadic splash & suds to skin;
I rinse & fill & rinse & empty & fill & empty
& fill & empty to the music of water on twice the dishes.
Husband puts his face in a bowl of afternoon
cereal & we sing: Where, where is my underwear?
In the phenomenal
sock project, I watch husband place lone socks
across the kitchen table:
could be inside a pair of pants or suitcase.
In the earth of blankets, I gladden husband by the glow of lamplight
through the sheets. (Where is my underwear?) The sky drools sweetly to the ear, the purring animals in our bed. Light snore, the seashore at night.
III.
IT’S HAPPENING
RELENTLESS
Jen and I start having sex without a condom, which, if you haven’t tried it, by all means give it a chance.
Not with my wife, but with your partner.
It’s a phenomenal activity. There are videos of it online. But I’m anxious when we’re doing it. I say things like, “I’m not sure!” which is not sexy language. That’s right up there with “Is the oven on?” or “I’m gonna wear my shirt!”
Sex is the most outrageously dynamic activity because sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad and sometimes another human being is born afterwards. What other activity has that range of outcomes? Shakespeare called sex “the beast with two backs”—the imagery meaning that a man and a woman in missionary position merge to form the picture of a single beast with two butts, or “backs.” I find Shakespeare’s language offensive to beasts. Here you are just this beast—minding your own beast business, and then this Hall of Fame playwright comes along and says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you had two assholes?” You’re like, “No, it wouldn’t. Not to me. Can you just leave me alone? I’m literally a beast.”
So Jen and I are creating this beast with two backs, and I’m anxious because I’ve never had sex without a condom, which is a shocking experience. Having sex without a condom is like going on a road trip and then halfway through the trip, the car just… flies.
You’re thinking, This is better!! There’s no traffic and we can go ANYWHERE!!
That said, I’m anxious during our car-flying sex to the point of pain. I have this embarrassing symptom where I have a pins-and-needles sensation in my urethra the moment I ejaculate.
Which at first is exciting.
I think, Oh! Maybe this is a new type of orgasm. Maybe I’ve broken through!
But then the pain doesn’t go away. I think, Oh no. It’s like when you’re eating spicy food and you think, That’s hot. That’s hot! That’s too hot!!
But it’s with my penis, which is much higher stakes than my tongue.
Dr. Kaplan is not worried. He says, “It’s probably just a muscular thing. You’re just trying too hard when you’re having sex.”
I think, You’re telling me.
He tells me to relax during sex, which has echoes of “Relax your butt,” another one of Dr. Kaplan’s catchphrases. I’ve never been good at relaxing. I think somewhere deep inside me I’ve always thought, Why would I relax when I’m about to fail? I need to try hard as I fail! And they definitely didn’t have a relaxed attitude when they taught us about sex in Catholic school. In fairness, they didn’t teach us about sex. They just implied that we should imagine Jesus crying.
So I try to relax during sex but I still have some trepidation about the whole idea, so the next day I call Joe and I say, “I’m freaking out because I’m flying the car.”
Joe says, “What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
I say, “I don’t think you’re following the analogy. I’d have a kid.”
He says, “What’s the second-worst thing?”
I say, “Two kids.”
He says, “That’s my life.”
I say, “Right.” And then I say, “Is there anything I should know?”
Joe says, “You can’t know what it’s like to have a kid until you have a kid.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Joe takes a long, deep breath and says, “It’s relentless.”
“What do you mean by relentless?”
“You know how you go to the gym and you push and you sweat and it sucks?”
“Yeah.”
“When you have a kid, you can’t even go to the gym.”
Then Joe says, “Look, Mike, I’m not worried about you because whatever happens, whether you have a kid or not, it’s not gonna be better or worse. It’s just gonna be… new.”
FLAT SODA
Jen and I attempt to conceive for eight months, and it doesn’t work because my body is a lemon and my boys don’t swim.
Which killed me because if I knew that in my twenties, I would have had a much better time. In my twenties I treated my sperm like it was plutonium. I thought, Don’t let that sperm anywhere near those eggs! Like there’d be an outbreak of these tiny, neurotic Mike Birbiglia toddlers running around the playground saying, “Why would I slide down the slide when I could just walk down the steps?”
Turns out I don’t have plutonium. I have flat soda and my boys don’t swim. Which isn’t surprising because I don’t swim. I mean, I occasionally swim, but I prefer to float in circles and I’m always ordering hot dogs at the side of the pool, which is not a quality you want in your sperm, that hungry, lethargic quality.
I discover that my boys don’t swim when I go to Dr. Kaplan. He asks me to masturbate into a cup.
I say, “That’s rude.”
He says, “It’s a medical procedure called masturbating into a cup.”
I say, “If it’s for science, sure.”
Two things about masturbating into a cup at the doctor. I’ll limit it to two. I could write about this for sixty pages.
1. Everyone knows what’s happening—the doctors, the nurses, the people in the waiting room, the UPS guy down the hall. Meanwhile, you’re trying to play it cool, casually whipping off phrases like, “What I’m worried about is Brexit!” or “Sea levels sure are rising rapidly!” Everyone’s looking at you as if to say, You’re about to ejaculate into Tupperware.
2. They give you porn—and it’s the most extreme porn I’ve ever seen. I think, Easy, medical porn. Here I was all these years thinking that I’m taking in the USDA-recommended level of porn. Turns out that was not enough. Apparently, I needed a “multi.”
So Dr. Kaplan calls me a few days later with the results and says, “You’re gonna have to come back in and masturbate into a cup again.”
And now I’m thinking, Is this a joke? Because I’m in the jokes business, and, actually, that would be a pretty good joke where you ask a complete stranger to masturbate into a cup and then, if he falls for it, you’d be like, “He did it!” Everyone would be like, “He did?” You’d be like, “Yeah! Now what do we do?” “Ask him to do it again!” “Ask him to do it again?! Why would he do it again?” “I don’t know! I don’t know why he did it in the first place! This whole thing is a sham!”
A cup, by the way, being the least-conveniently-shaped receptacle one could attempt to masturbate into. A cup assumes a level of composure and accuracy t
hat is frankly rare in this particular activity. A cup assumes the precision of an archer, as though you shoot your sticky arrow and it lands in the cup with a bing!!
But it’s not like that.
It’s more like you shoot your sticky arrow and the arrow breaks apart and some of it gets stuck in the bowstring and some of it is on the floor and you don’t know what to do so you bend over and start shoveling the arrow pieces into the cup, screaming, “It’s everywhere! Get me some gloves!”
And now everybody knows.
So I go back to the archery lab, I do the thing with the cup again, but this time I wave off the medical porn. I think, I’m gonna use memory porn ’cause I’m a Christian!
Dr. Kaplan calls me into the office a few days later with the results and he says, “Mike, you have what’s called a ‘varicocele,’ which is an enlargement of the veins within your testicles. If you wanna get your wife pregnant, I recommend you get what’s called a varicocele repair.” I had never heard this term. He says, “We make an incision in your abdomen and we go into the vein adjoining your testicle, we squeeze out the excess blood, we patch ya up, and you can’t walk for about a week.”
I say, “I don’t even want to have a kid.”
I have to level with him because it’s escalating so rapidly. I say, “Dr. Kaplan, I wasn’t planning to tell you this, but I don’t even wanna have a kid and now you’re describing a Black Mirror episode and I don’t want to be in that one.”
Then he says something I never expected anyone to say to me, never mind a medical professional.
He says, “Look, Mike, here’s what they don’t tell ya: No men want to have kids.”
I think, That’s not true.
But tell me more.
He says, “Our wives want us to, we all go along with it. It’s the best thing that will ever happen to you. You’ll call me and you’ll thank me. It’s the most joy you’ll ever experience.”
I walk out of his office in a daze. I nearly wander into traffic and then I turn around and I walk back in and I make an appointment for a varicocele repair. They ask you to sign these extreme forms that I’m pretty sure I didn’t read. They could have said, “We may accidentally cut out your balls.”
The New One Page 4