I had no idea what that meant.
I also had no idea that wrestling practice is not like soccer practice where you can sort of blend in. You have to wrestle. Or, in my case, be wrestled upon by these young, muscly gentlemen whose crotches would inevitably be pressed up against my face as if they were doing a victory dance. All the while I’m wearing an ill-fitting women’s bathing suit. But I was building character and that character was a lifeguard from the 1940s.
In practice we would wrestle and do push-ups, which has never been one of my strong suits. At a certain point in life I lost the will to push up. I’d get into that first, facedown position and think, This is a nice, new lying position. Then I’d lean my head into my hands and take a break. I’d think, These are soft, comfy hands. These are nature’s pillows!
I was in the 152-pound weight class, but because I was so terrible at it, Coach Shann paired me up with our 102-pound wrestler. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a 102-pound person before. Most of them are fat babies. They compete at fairs across the country with dreams of gracing a quarter page in the Guinness Book of World Records. This was no fat baby. This was a young, strong high school junior who would pin me countless times every day.
It was like watching a paperweight be pinned by paper.
I wouldn’t compete with the wrestling team but I would travel with them. And I would wear the same outfit so that in case there was some kind of brawl, the other team could identify me as low-hanging fruit.
After the competition, time permitting, they would send us B teamers out to compete against their B teamers. And I developed a strategy where I would be pinned as quickly as possible so this portion of my life would be over.
This strategy ran into a snag when I encountered an opponent who had the same strategy. So we’re both out there treading water, trying to flash each other signals with our eyes.
You can pin me!
No, you can pin me!
Here’s my knee!
Here’s my head!
I don’t even do push-ups.
These hands are nature’s pillows!
It was a stalemate. But in the second round I started with an advantage.
There are three starting positions in wrestling. There’s
1. I hump you.
2. You hump me.
3. Who humps whom? (That’s called “neutral.”)
I was in the “I hump you” and the ref blew the whistle and somehow, and I do not know how to this very day, I found myself pinning this guy.
I couldn’t believe it. My opponent couldn’t believe it. My teammates really couldn’t believe it. They jumped off the bench. They shouted, “Mike, squeeze!” Which, in wrestling, means “squeeze!”
So I was squeezing and squeezing. And I noticed there was all this blood on the mat. I thought, Oh no, I killed this guy. I’m gonna be on the run for the rest of my life. They’ll say, “Birbiglia the wrestling bandit. One pin, one kill! Couldn’t do a single push-up but he murdered a guy with his bare hands.”
Then I realized that it was my own blood streaming out of my nose onto the mat based on no injury whatsoever. Just from the sheer nervousness of possibly winning anything at all.
The ref blew the whistle and shouted, “Blood on the mat!” which was redundant. A little blood boy ran out and he wiped it up with a rag, then jogged off and threw it into the blood castle.
My teammates plugged my nose. They said, “Mike, get out there and do what you just did.” I had no idea what I had just done.
I walked back onto the mat and struck the “I hump you” position and the ref blew the whistle, and as quickly as I had pinned this guy, I myself was pinned.
That was the closest I would ever come to winning a wrestling match.
As embarrassing and pride swallowing as that sounds, I remember it to this very day, and I’m glad that I did it. I’m glad that after I lost again and again and again in increasingly embarrassing ways, I still showed up. I was building character.
I was pulling myself onto the ottoman.
I was trying.
When my daughter learns to use the toilet
… we sing to her poops to coax them into this world:
Come out come out come out little poop
And say hello to daughter and me
Come out come out come out little poop
And say hello to mommy and me
My daughter poops a treasure more valuable to Earth,
says Earth,
than any contribution of the high arts.
THE LEGS DON’T REACH THE FLOOR
One night we’re sitting on the couch and I say to Jen, “I feel like I’m trying so hard and it’s not helping.”
Jen says, “You try hard for me but it’s not for Oona. You don’t try hard for us.”
I pull out my laptop and start surfing travel sites. This is something I know how to do. I’m a professional traveler. I’m sick of being the vice president of the family. I think, I will plan a family vacation and be promoted to president.
This will be our “babymoon,” but this time everyone will show up.
I email all my co-workers: “I will be away for the next two weeks.”
I plan a family vacation to the beach.
My fondest memories of childhood vacations took place on the beach. When my parents took us, it was one of my first experiences of pure joy. Going in the ocean. Experiencing that sensation where you can’t see your feet, and at any moment a shark or a fish or a crab might swim by and you wouldn’t even know. My mom always used to point out that the ocean was medicinal. She’s a nurse. She’d say that if you had a cut from falling down on the pavement that you could go into the ocean for a few days and it might not be cured but it would be on its way to healing.
I book my family flights, a rental car, and a beachside hotel room in California. The travel websites are so desperate to sell you more stuff: You wanna add a rental car? How ’bout some cigarettes? What about an old-fashioned bicycle with that super-big wheel? How about a kickboxing lesson with my uncle Fred? How about you don’t bring your family on this trip at all?
I splurge on a fancy hotel on the beach in Santa Monica.
We fly across the country. We’re carrying a stroller and sixteen suitcases and three baggies of bananas and Cheddar Bunnies and sippy cups. Oona is screaming and people are staring at us but now I’m flashing them looks like, How dare you judge this baby who wants to see the world!
We pick up our rental car in Long Beach, and the rental agency hadn’t installed the car seat. They just plopped it in the back seat, which is like giving someone an Ikea nightstand for their birthday with a note that says, “You figure it out.”
It’s pouring.
I take out my phone and find a YouTube instructional video for putting in car seats. It’s some camp-counselor-looking guy with a British accent, saying, “Three simple steps. You strap, latch, and cinch!”
I’m shouting at my phone as I hold the car seat parts: “You cinch WHAT?!” Oona’s screaming.
The British camp counselor says, “Now that it’s installed, you can shake the car by just shaking the car seat.”
“But it’s not installed! Slow down! We’re not all British Car Seat Fucking Superheroes.”
Jen says, “I can do this in five seconds.” She pushes me aside, then straps, latches, and cinches. Uncle Googlemaps tells us it’ll take twenty minutes to get to our hotel, but, since it’s rained only several times in Los Angeles in the last century, the city is in chaos and it takes an hour and forty minutes.
We arrive at the hotel at ten o’clock at night. We’re in a room with a queen bed and a pullout couch. With my sleepwalking, I have to sleep in a separate bed. But when I try to pull out the couch, it won’t pull out. There are couches that hug you. But this is not that.
I’m using the wall as leverage to pull out the bed, and it finally pulls out but the legs won’t reach the floor. I call the front desk.
I say, “Hey, could someo
ne take a look at our pullout couch?”
The hotel engineer walks in a few minutes later and tinkers with it. He pretty much does the same few experiments that I had done but with more confidence. Then he says, “I can’t fix that couch.”
I say, “Do you know anyone who could?”
He says, “There’s not much you can do. The metal on the legs is bent.”
I say, “Right, I didn’t do that. Do I look like the metal-bending type? I’m the pizza-bending type or the yoga-mat-bending type but not the metal-bending type.”
Oona’s asleep.
Jen says, “I don’t think I’m going to be able to sleep on that couch.”
I say, “That’s fine, I’ll sleep on it.”
She says, “No, you can’t, because of your sleepwalking.”
I say, “What do you want me to do?! I can’t leave my own body. I’m stuck with this. There’s no cure for me.”
I decide to appeal to the front desk. I bolt out of the room for the elevator. The people at the front desk can tell how angry I am from forty feet away. It must have seemed like my eyebrows were angled off my head like a cartoon.
I’m rushing through the lobby. The bellman crashes into me with that cart thing and it almost tips over. I say to the man at the front desk, “We have a pullout couch in our room that doesn’t touch the floor in any way. There is nothing that makes it furniture. I was very clear that I needed two working beds!”
He types away at the computer for ten minutes to give the illusion of progress and then says, “We don’t have any other rooms.”
I am speechless. I don’t know what to do. I return to our defective hotel room. Jen and Oona are cuddled up in the bed, asleep. I lie on the pullout. There’s a bar pushing into my back as I try to sleep. This combined with Oona screaming starts infusing into my dreams. Every time I nod off, I start to have this dream that my daughter’s scream is a fire alarm, and I fear, as I lie in bed half-asleep, that I’ll try to throw her through the window.
I don’t sleep.
The sun comes up, and it’s that infuriating feeling when you haven’t slept and the sun comes up and you think, But I didn’t do the thing!
I get out of bed and Jen suggests that we walk down to the beach.
She opens the glass sliding door in the room and I hobble over to the doorway and step onto the beach. I haven’t had coffee so I can barely open my eyes. Oona jogs onto the sand and says, “San.’” This is why we’ve come all this way. As we walk towards the water I step on something sharp. I look down and see a plastic lighter just sitting there on the sand.
I look a few feet to the right and there’s a bottle cap.
I look around and there’s a Starbucks cup and a used condom.
I realize there’s garbage all over the beach from the storm the night before.
The shoreline is a zigzag line of seaweed and stones mixed with plastic bottles and candy wrappers and lighters and… then what really sets me off… is an empty can of tuna fish.
This idea that we’re consuming so much that we’re throwing the excess back into the place where the fish live. I think, My God. There are actual tuna fish in the ocean trying to make it work and you’re gonna throw an empty can of their dead brother into their own house?
Oona reaches for this sharp, rusty can of tuna fish and I tackle her.
And I start crying.
I’m trying and failing and the earth is burping garbage. Fuck.
A few days later we board our return flight. I have not been deemed a hero. I have not been elected president of our home.
A toast to something beautiful flapping in the wind
To something beautiful flapping in the wind above the beach houses—A blue bird?—No, a blue bag.
To her breath—raindrops in the begonia bed. My eyesight is rainstorms.
Drop,
drop—
To 4am, her first ocean—
Everyone is sleeping except Oona and the ocean,
Oona and the ocean.
I try to explain in whale song I try to explain in rainstorm. Cloud and water droplet.
Drop,
drop—
Spending time with a baby is like spending time with something that has lived in an ocean her entire life and just sprouted legs for land—
I am like Copernicus using the planet of my body to umbrella the wind as she feeds—Ouch! I stick my fingers in her mouth and she’s grown sharp little fish teeth—
Drop,
Everyone is sleeping
except Oona and the ocean,
Oona and the ocean and the little fish teeth.
Drop,
drop,
drop,
drop,
I tell time by counting teeth-marks around the crooked nipple.
IT IS WHAT IT IS
I wake up at 5:30 a.m. on a Saturday to drive to Potsdam, New York, for a gig at Clarkson University.
I make coffee and pour it into a mug that dons the phrase “it is what it is.” This is part of an ensemble of mugs my mom had given to me and Jen at Christmas. Mine says “it is what it is” and Jen’s says “follow your heart.” If I followed my heart, it wouldn’t lead me to Potsdam, New York, so I guzzle some watery coffee from “it is what it is.”
Uncle Googlemaps insists that it’s a six-and-a-half-hour drive, but Uncle Googlemaps has not visited the far reaches of New York State. He has only photographed it from afar. A drive to Albany is a quick jaunt on the New York State Thruway. The voyage to Potsdam could take days. It takes you from I-87 to Routes 28 to 30 to 56 and, at some point along the way, it takes you through the West Canada Lake Wilderness, which isn’t even in Canada but might give you the sense that we are pretty far from home. Or anywhere.
Joe is concerned about me doing the whole drive myself, so he offers to join me. I insist that we stop for a meal two hours from the show and check into our hotel room, drive two more hours, do the show, and then drive two hours back to our hotel room afterwards.
Joe thinks this is a bad idea because—it is a bad idea.
But I insist. I have this distinct feeling of guilt whenever I’m away from Jen and Oona, so I always make plans for how to get home faster.
By the time we get to Clarkson I’m so exhausted that I can’t even imagine walking onstage.
It’s 8:50 p.m. The show is at 9:30.
I say to the students who had booked me, “Is there a dressing room?”
“We don’t have that.”
“Do you have a private room with a couch?”
“Pretty sure we don’t have that.”
“Is there a private room with a door handle?”
“Yes!”
They take me to an empty room and I turn off the lights and then lie down on an industrial-carpeted floor.
For the next forty minutes, the door opens every ninety seconds. A wide stream of light blares in. Then the door closes. These intermittent disturbances happen with such regularity that I start to get the sense that the word has gotten around campus: “If you open that door, you can see a comedian sleeping on a floor.” It’s possible that someone is even charging admission. That person may be my brother, Joe.
After forty minutes on the floor, I stand up and perform an hour of comedy that starts at 9:30, and then we set off around 11:00 p.m. After the show, I insist on driving. But on the drive home we hit torrential rains, and white-knuckle driving ensues. The rain crashes down so hard on the windshield that the sound is mesmerizing, and it starts to suggest ways I might want to drive my car into the “West Canada Lake Wilderness.”
That’s when I know I need to pull over.
Joe and I hop out of the car in the pouring rain to trade places. I instantly fall asleep in the passenger seat and Joe drives the rest of the way to the hotel.
At 1:00 a.m., after an eleven-hour travel day and a stand-up comedy show, Joe wakes me up and I groggily head to my room. It’s on the second floor, and I’m on the phone with Jen and she’s worried. She can
hear in my voice that I’m on the edge. There’s a level of fatigue I sometimes hit where Jen can feel a sleepwalking incident coming on.
Jen coaches me on where to put the furniture in the room. She suggests that I push a dresser in front of the window and an armchair in front of that. I am Birbiglia-proofing the room. We do our best, but we both know it’s not a good situation.
I take my medication. I slide into my sleeping bag and fall asleep.
I have a dream that I’m in that scene from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where the walls are closing in and I sprint away as I hear a musical composition that sounds like the score to the end of my life. And these dreams, when I have them, feel as real as anything in my waking life.
I sprint away, but I’m wearing a sleeping bag so my legs are stuck and my face smacks against the floor like a flyswatter. My face is skinned and bleeding and I’m waking up realizing I’m not in the Temple of Doom… I’m in upstate New York.
I hobble back to bed, because… what am I gonna do? I can’t go to the front desk and say, “I have a complaint about my dreams.”
The next morning I wake up and the sheets are covered in blood.
I meet Joe at the breakfast buffet. We don’t say much over eggs and toast, but finally Joe says, “I don’t like the safety profile of that trip last night.”
I say, “I don’t like the safety profile of my life.”
That morning I write in my journal: “I don’t know if I’ll live much longer.”
There’s something in the lack of control I’m feeling that is new. And scary. I’m barely sleeping. I’m having these sleepwalking incidents that feel like the one that nearly killed me, and the person I’m closest to in the world is dealing with a struggle of her own: raising our child.
When I get home I crash on our bed and Jen comes in.
I say, “I wrote in my journal that I think I might die soon. Like Mitch or Greg. I’m embarrassed to tell you that, but I thought you should know.”
Jen says, “I’m sorry. I used to be able to protect you in these situations, but I’m spread too thin right now and I don’t know what to do.”
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