Tre, played by a young and passionate Cuba Gooding Jr., is trying to impress his girlfriend, Brandi, as played by Nia Long.
TRE: Hey! Why don’t you all act like gentlemen and let these ladies eat first?
Tre motions to Doughboy for backup, and he grudgingly obliges.
DOUGHBOY: Yeah. Y’all act like you ain’t never had no barbecue before! Let the ladies eat. Hoes gotta eat too!
SHALIKA (PLAYED BY THE INIMITABLE GODDESS REGINA KING): Wait a minute, nigga, who you callin’ a hoe? I ain’t no hoe!
DOUGHBOY, FEIGNING CONTRITION: Oh. I’m sorry—bitch.
The first real entry on my blog was about this ’90s show called The Practice, which I watched religiously, because Dylan McDermott is very handsome, and because I am obsessed with Camryn Manheim, an actual fat woman on TV! I incorporated some of my old MySpace posts that I thought were too funny to lose, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure what a blog was supposed to be, or how to maintain it or build it into a thing that might actually be a thing. All I knew was that I didn’t want to do anything that felt like a fucking job, because I already had one of those. Also, it couldn’t require too much computer knowledge or time, because, like I said before, I hadn’t gotten a computer until a few years earlier and I was working eleven hours a day and usually wrote on my lunch breaks on whatever work computer wasn’t being used.
My OkCupid handle back then was “FARTTHROB,” which probably explains why I never had much romantic success on that website. Although, can I just pause for a minute to interject that having a funny name that is indicative of my entire personality is a detriment only if you’re satisfied with attracting people who would never be interested in who you really are. Sure, I could have chosen the screen name “Loves2CookandClean4U” or “MadeForConstantSex,” but that is just setting up some unsuspecting person for extreme disappointment, and I don’t want to do that. Somehow, despite my true advertising (is that what the opposite of false advertising is called?), I went on a bunch of increasingly unsuccessful dates. Because I wanted a partner and feel like I’m a smart and interesting person, this was devastating to me. Because I try to have a sense of humor about all my devastation, I decided that I should write about it. I don’t have good processing skills—at least I don’t think I do, because I turn everything into a fucking joke and then bury it in a shallow grave in whatever part of the mind something you never want to think about ever again goes … until its decomposing hand emerges from the dirt on a random Tuesday at 3 a.m. to remind you of that embarrassing thing you thought you’d forgotten. But the idea that bad things can’t hurt me if I tell everyone about them in a funny way first seemed like a fun way to grieve these tiny deaths. So I put them on my blog.
I wrote about the time I wore a diaper to speed dating because I was in the middle of a Crohn’s flare-up, and I pooped in it a little while talking to a gentleman named Terrence. I wrote about the time I started sleeping with this trainer at my gym who was obsessed with watching me eat whole chickens while he jerked off. That kind of shit can really ruin you, you know what I mean? I was having the kinds of dating experiences that, if I’d recounted them on a therapist’s couch rather than on a free blog on the utterly terrifying information superhighway, that person would’ve been like, “Hold up, have you ever heard of self-esteem?” And no, I haven’t! Which is why I ate a glazed donut off a dude’s dick one time!
There was a freedom in shouting these sordid stories into a faceless Internet void, and the responses I got were positive, so I kept doing it. Turns out a lot of people identified with trying to wring a drop of humor out of the filthy wet mop of dating in the modern era. A lot of my friends wondered, aloud, TO ME, whether I was shooting myself in the foot by writing so candidly about my sex life. Who wants to fuck the bitch who is immediately going to post a description of your orgasm face online? First of all, my audience wasn’t that big. Second, I wasn’t sleeping with the kind of people who did shit like read blogs. Skim the sports pages in a newspaper someone left behind on the train? Maybe. Fire up the old desktop to read some garbage a girl they met on BlackPlanet wrote? Dude, no. Dating online never worked for me in the pre-swipe stone age (I shudder to think about the constant rejection I would suffer if I ever had to get on Tinder or whatever the fuck people have to be on now), because I posted real pictures of my actual torso and answered the prompts in full paragraphs that I’d workshopped with all my coworkers. Remember those days, back when it seemed plausible that someone might actually be curious about your top-five desert island books? Anyway, everything changed when I started performing the shit I’d written onstage.
The first time I ever read some obscene piece of garbage I had scribbled in my diary while crying aloud in front of a crowd of people was late on a Sunday night eightish years ago at this bar in Logan Square called the Burlington. It’s a windowless, dimly lit storefront dive dimly lit by dollar-store candles (you for real need Silence of the Lambs night-vision goggles to find your way to the bathroom—it’s amazing), with taxidermy animal heads mounted behind the bar (many whiskeys, two-dollar PBR specials, no mixologist concocting drinks with seven ingredients), and long wooden church pews running along the east wall. Lots of fixies chained to the parking meters out front, dudes with slicked-back hair and hand tattoos in super skinnies rolled halfway up their calves—you get it.
The Sunday Night Sex Show was a reading series hosted at the Burlington by my friends Robyn and Allen. It wasn’t like any lit show I’d ever been to before, not that I was ever a person who would go to things like literary shows, but it certainly wasn’t the type of show I’d anticipated, which would be filled with earnest middle-aged white people in cardigans listening to their contemporaries read long-winded pieces about their stamp collections and artificial hips while crammed into the back of an indie bookstore. The Sex Show was an entirely different thing, a show in a bar featuring unfiltered true confession and creative nonfiction stories about sex and sexuality. Basically, the last Sunday of the month, the bar would fill up with nerdy writers and drunk regulars who’d use crayons to write anonymous sex questions (e.g., Is there an easy way to make my girlfriend have a squirting orgasm?) on blank postcards that had been left around the bar, which the hosts would answer between stories about bad dominatrix experiences, public blow jobs, and a predatory personal trainer who liked to seduce fat women at the gym to eat large amounts of food while he watched and masturbated. I have no idea who might have written that last one. *tugs collar nervously*
After I’d read aloud a few times at the Sex Show about the exploits of my various orifices, Allen retired from nightlife to teach kindergartners about foot fetishes and roman showers (JK, JK, JK), and I briefly joined Robyn as cohost. I’ve never done anything more difficult in my life: weeks were spent hassling everyone I knew to pour out their vulnerabilities all over an audience of strangers in a bar full of people who probably weren’t paying attention to them anyway. I’d leave my cozy apartment at seven on a Sunday night in the freezing cold, trying to give my rapt attention to boner stories despite many rounds of free bourbon from Mike behind the bar, trying to remain coherent and awake until almost midnight. I had a good time, though, and I was good at it. I made a lot of friends. I grossed out a lot of people.
I know a lot of poets, and poetry is cool, because when you say that’s what you do people have at least a general idea of what you’re talking about. I have a lot of comic friends, too, and if I say “stand-up,” then you think “perform a tight five in front of wasted people who will yell ‘fat bitch!’ though four of them are in a coma or have an alcohol or drug problem.” If I mention “improv,” you connote: “worst person in the school play.” There’s no good way to distill “trying to make tearing open your neuroses interesting and funny in front of six people and a child who wandered over by accident in a darkened corner of the library” into a title that fully encapsulates what it is overly confessional people actually do in live lit storytelling.
One night, I was si
tting at the bar drinking whatever well whiskey they gave me for free in exchange for hosting the Sex Show when this dude I knew from ~the scene~, someone who worked for an indie press, asked me if I’d ever thought about publishing a book. Sometimes people don’t believe me when I say that I don’t have any goals, but seriously, it’s the damn truth. No, I’d never thought of publishing a motherfucking book. That sounds like a lot of work. And I already had a job cleaning up cat puke and calming your mom down that time her beagle got stung on its nose by a bee.
Nothing seemed like a bigger nightmare to me than spending a lot of time putting together a thing that people may or may not want, that I would be forced to sell for the rest of my life, that would never make me enough money to solve any of my problems while also creating new ones like one-star reviews and people tweeting me dumb fuckshit, which would literally never go away. WHY DOES ANYONE WANT THAT? Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here is a loose approximation of my first book contract: “You, Samantha Irby, will write us a book that we may or may not edit. When it comes out, we’ll give you a box of books you can keep in the trunk of your nonexistent car and sell them to fans at shows, i.e., to your friends who feel bad for you.” That was a good fucking deal! It’s a better deal than most! I mean, the fact that they had distribution was like, “Wow, this is a real thing.” But still, no thanks!
It’s one thing to have a useless Internet hobby a handful of people read; it’s another to have someone walking around with your fifteen-dollar words in their coat pocket. Also, writing a book feels like it should be an event, a thing that serious people sit down and plan to do. I’ve never planned anything in my whole life. I still don’t. This essay you’re reading wasn’t in the book I pitched to my editor, and other than some notes I made on a Subway napkin, I didn’t map it out or properly outline it or do literally anything else I imagine successful people do. I don’t say this to brag—I’m admitting to you that I am an ill-prepared child-person.
I don’t do anything hard, because my life has already been hard. You know those people who are always running and jumping and diving into some challenging bullshit to test themselves? That’s not me. I have lived without electricity before—no need to thrill seek! While “pragmatic” isn’t necessarily an adorable quality I’d list in my dating profile, I’m pretty good at determining the cost-benefit analysis of activities that have the potential to be irritating to me. But I am not immune to constant flattery. And the editors I knew all made it sound so easy. Every time I’d run into someone who worked for or knew of or had read a book put out by Curbside Splendor, the indie press I first published with, they were like, “Have you thought about putting out a book with them?” Finally, outside an open mic night at Cole’s, I caved. Of course, I’m a sniveling egomaniac hungry for praise, and I could not resist the idea of an ISBN being forever attached to my name. Plus, they really did make it sound like something I could just wake up and do, which is my main criteria for 99 percent of the things I take on. It seemed almost disrespectful to turn down repeated offers to compile a bunch of swear words and poop jokes and have them be turned into an actual book, so I finally relented and said, “Ugh, fine.”
I signed the contract over a couple bottles of sake in a dimly lit Japanese restaurant, a place I dragged myself to reeking of dog saliva and coated in many layers of hand sanitizer at the end of an endless work day. Then I took the train home and immediately regretted the decision, because I hate signing up for things and having people depend on me. I wasn’t too keen on exposing my innermost thoughts and feelings to the clogged toilet that is unverified customer reviews and obnoxiously snitch-tagged tweets. Imagine feeling like the nine dollars you spent on a discounted paperback book entitles you to rip the shithole out of the person who wrote it! I know you wouldn’t do that, but many people are not graced with your impeccable manners. I didn’t have any ideas for a book, or any idea of how to put together a book, and I’m not a perfectionist (clearly), but I still didn’t want to spend the rest of my life embarrassed by this dumb thing I made, like when your firstborn somehow grows up to be a studious, responsible attorney instead of a rock star.
That was in the winter, and I basically wrote nothing even though I was inside twenty-three hours a day and spent my time at home watching old episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on my phone. I’d write something, read it back, curse myself for being an idiot, and not write another word for a week. Which I justified to myself by saying that I had a full-time job and my brain was tired, but I was too invested in Cristina Yang’s fictional life for that to actually be true. I think this might be a symptom of a little thing called D E P R E S S I O N, but I’m not a doctor! My friends Cara and Ted are real adults with a guest room and air-conditioning, and when I finally dragged myself out of bed the spring or summer before my book was due, I basically moved into their house and sequestered myself in their back room and wrote down a bunch of stuff that made me laugh plus a couple things that made me cry. Then I sent it all in the day it was due with a very sincere-sounding apology for why it was such a mess. And that became Meaty, a gross book about a dumb slut.
One of the things that sucks the most about me, a deeply embarrassing personality flaw that I cannot change, is that I truly don’t have any goals. Because of that, I am a terrible person to make things with. No, I’m saying this wrong. I’ll do a thing, or make you whatever you want, or show up every day, but I’m never going to humiliate myself by, say, going door to door to sell that thing to people who probably don’t want it. I’m never going to haul a box of books across the country and try to convince people to spend money on them, you know? I mean, I already wrote the book, so I’ma just tweet about it and keep doing what I’ve been doing, and if someone wants to buy it, then great.
I understand how that can be frustrating to a certain kind of person—a hustler, a swindler, a grifter, a snake-oil salesman—but for me it worked. People I didn’t know, who weren’t related to me, in parts of the country to which I’d never been, were buying my book. Copies were in libraries and in bookstore windows and on end caps in Barnes & Noble. I had written a bunch of butt jokes in my sweltering studio, in an empty exam room at the hospital on my lunch breaks, on a futon with my friend’s dog curled up next to me, and somehow it had become a book that you could walk into a store and buy, and that was just fine with me. It was a nice achievement, and I was proud of it. There had been no advance (okay, cool, who cares?), and royalties were a dollar a book and paid out quarterly (also great, it doesn’t matter), but that meant I had to keep working my regular-ass job. It’s hard to feel like you did a big thing and your life is going to change in any demonstrable way when you’re on a packed, sweltering bus after a day of getting screamed at about prescription dog foods.
My little meat book was out in the world, and I immediately retired. The book could serve its purpose of impressing potential love interests whether or not I wrote anything new and, honestly, I didn’t want to work that hard ever again. Especially not for free. I wish I had that gene that makes you feel good when you’ve completed something, but sadly, I do not. What is that called? Ego? Pride? Whatever it is, I ain’t got none of it, and that’s fine. So I just kept living my best possible life: spending too much on lunch at work every day; reaping the rewards of steady employment, like a working mobile phone and rebated pharmaceuticals; filling out the eHarmony questionnaire with the most clever anecdotes I could come up with between scheduling growth removals for suburban pets; drinking shots of Four Roses and Old Grand-Dad with Melissa at Big Star once a week; fiercely participating in a Bachelor contestant fantasy league. Then I got an e-mail from a man named Kent asking if I had an agent.
I had proudly negotiated my one book deal by myself! So I e-mailed him back and told him I did not. Then he e-mailed me back and asked if I wanted one, and the last thing I want to do is disappoint a well-dressed person in a tall, fancy building in New York City, so I told him sure and assumed that meant he now represented me. This was a couple
months after Meaty came out in the fall of 2013. I received another e-mail from him late in January asking if I’d given it any further consideration, which was a funny thing to ask because I don’t, uhhh, consider anything. I just say yes if it’s a thing that sounds easy enough for me to do, or no if it doesn’t. Am I really going to do research? No, I am not. I looked at his Twitter and googled his agency to make sure it existed and just assumed my informal, lowercase, misspelled e-mail response was enough. Turns out I needed to talk to him on the phone first, which I did while watching the Oscars red carpet muted on my TV. Then he sent me a contract I didn’t read before signing.
A few weeks after that, he hit me up to let me know that I should start thinking about what my next project was going to be, and I was fucking SHOCKED. I say “I’m dumb” all the time, and people are quick to fight me when they assume it’s just my inner saboteur jumping out, but here is a shining example of the ways in which my synapses sometimes do not connect: I thought I would sign with an agent on the off chance that if a new idea ever came to me, I’d have someone to call who would find someone else who might want to pay me for it. It never occurred to me not to take this next step without an idea, because he wanted to make some money because this is his job. But I didn’t have any ideas. TBH, I still don’t. And of course this is something I would do. Of course I would sign up for a new thing that requires something I wasn’t prepared for. Even now, I chastise myself for being such a weird scatterbrain. I don’t know if I’m putting a fine enough point on this, but I truly thought he was just my new friend who I might ask to take a look at something I might write several years down the line. What a fucking asshole!
Wow, No Thank You. Page 25