And here are some pieces from our readers:
FUCK THIS SHITHOLE
By Bob Powers
Part One – In which our hero discovers that his living situation is about become really stupid
There is a large, black goiter growing on the neck of Manny, the Mexican man who is making my egg sandwich. The goiter is a wild mass of nubs and ridges that measures three or four inches in diameter. It resembles a patch of mountainous terrain as represented on a raised relief world globe, except it’s pitch black. Manny’s goiter is unappetizing, but he’s the only sandwich maker at the bodega on the bottom floor of my building. The convenience of the location wins out over my disgust.
It feels like a morning like any other. I wait for my egg sandwich to cook while averting my eyes from Manny’s little friend. I take the sandwich from Manny and I give my money to Ali, the Egyptian owner and manager of the deli, who also happens to be the landlord of my three-bedroom apartment share four flights up. Ali hands me my change in silence. I don’t know it yet, but what makes this morning different is when I walk out the door of Ali’s bodega, it will be the end of our relationship as we know it. When I get upstairs to my apartment, I’m going to find out that Ali wants to move in with me.
My roommate Denni gives me the news that Ali is divorcing his wife and he needs a place to stay, so he wants to move into to our soon-to-be-vacant third bedroom. I don’t bother to fight Denni’s decision because I know my options are either go along with it or move out. But I can’t help but worry, are my landlord and I ready to take this step? Granted, he is more than just a landlord. He also runs the bodega where I buy my light bulbs and my single-serving Advil. He certainly seems nice when he’s ringing me up, and he keeps a clean store. But I’ve been warned that no matter how great you get along with your bodega owner, the minute you decide to move in together it all goes to shit.
These fears are valid, but the reality is that I live on the Upper West Side for only $625 a month, and we have washing machine in the apartment. Just as I tolerate the goiter on my sandwich chef’s neck, I decide to stick it out and hope that my 52 year-old, recently divorced landlord / bodega owner will prove to be a fun and considerate roomie. Up to this point, my most intimate and endearing moment with Ali was the Saturday night I stopped in very late and he illegally sold me some beer after the 4 AM cutoff time. We were so innocent then, completely oblivious to the fact that we would one day see each other in our underwear.
PART 2 – In which our hero learns that there is good and bad with everything, and sometimes the bad includes a large white bucket full of soiled toilet paper.
My first few weeks living with my landlord prove not to be the multi-cultural, intergenerational, light-hearted romp that I hoped for. We don’t knock on each other’s doors late at night to rap about girls, me complaining about my latest dating disaster and him complaining about the technicalities of divorce under the Muslim law of Shar’iah. But neither is it the nightmare that I feared. Ali proves to be a quiet man who gets up early and works in his bodega all day, and then cooks himself a meal and retires to his bedroom at night.
Nonetheless, it takes a few weeks before I stop constantly being shocked at the sight of Ali in my apartment. Just imagine if every time you opened your bedroom door you learned another dazzling intimate detail about the man who works behind the counter at your corner bodega. Oh look, Ali cleans his ears with Q-tips seventy five times a day. Oh look, Ali wears white cotton briefs and it’s time for him to buy some new pairs. Oh look, Ali thinks that the plumbing is delicate so he throws all of his used toilet paper into a bucket that he keeps behind the tub.
That last surprise is the cause of some consternation in the apartment, especially when Ali tries to push for a house-rule dictating that none of us ever flushes our toilet paper again. I had been acquainted in the past with the mistrust of indoor plumbing held by people who had not grown up in America, but this is the first time anyone has ever tried to force that mistrust upon me. Eventually, we reach a compromise. Denni and I will continue to flush our toilet paper, and Ali will continue to drop his filthy wads of tissue into a tall white bucket partially filed with water to stifle the smell. The bucket is kept out of sight, but its presence dominates like the monolith in 2001.
It’s not all easy street, but there are perks to having a bodega owner as a roommate. For example, when we discover we’ve run out of trash bags, Ali makes a call downstairs and quick as the wind Manny and his goiter are knocking on my front door with a fresh box of bags. For once, I am distracted from his goiter by the smirk on his face, as if he’s thinking, “I might have something growing out of my neck that terrifies children and adults alike, but you live with my boss.” The smirk upsets me, and I consider asking him whether he’d like me to report his goiter to the INS. But I forget about the smirk and focus on the fun of having an entire bodega at my disposal whenever we run out of stuff.
Ultimately, my first few weeks with Ali prove promising and by the time he leaves for two weeks overseas to finalize his divorce, I feel optimistic that I’ll be able to stay in my share for a long time.
PART 3 – In which the couch gets sawed in half for no discernible reason.
My landlord’s got a man in his room. I saw him in there. Just before he closed his door, I saw a middle-aged man dressed just like Ali, in a white hanes undershirt and very loose white briefs. Ali just got back from Egypt the other day. He brought lots of sweets and a suitcase full of knickknacks that he’s been placing around the apartment, but when he was cataloging his souvenirs he didn’t mention anything about buying us a full-grown man.
Denni is away for the weekend and I’m too filled with dread to knock on the door and find out what’s going on. Instead, I go into my room and put my ear up against the wall praying that I’ll soon hear the sounds of loud gay sex. If Ali’s gay and this man is just a lover, this could easily be just a one-night thing since it’s so hard for people in this city to truly connect. Unfortunately, I hear nothing more than light conversation and the sound of a radio. This man is no lover who’ll be sneaking down the steps before dawn. Far more likely and far more terrifying, the man in Ali’s room is a houseguest. And who knows how long a houseguest might stay?
When Denni returns, he speaks with Ali and then sets me straight. The man in Ali’s room is not Ali’s gay lover, as I hoped, but neither is he Ali’s houseguest, as I feared.
The man in Ali’s room is a tenant.
His name is Omar and he is a friend of Ali’s from Egypt. In the daytime, he will be helping Ali run the bodega downstairs, and at night he will share Ali’s 8X10 foot bedroom for what I’m promised will be no more than one or two months. Since Ali owns the building and neither of us is on a lease, we choose to focus on the rent decrease and hope for the best.
Denni starts spending the night at his girlfriend’s apartment, and I do everything I can to stay in my bedroom with the door closed. Ali and Omar interpret our quiet surrender as permission for them to start sawing all of the furniture apart.
At first I assume they’re just trying to shrink the furniture and open up more space. But when I see the state in which they leave the furniture, I conclude that they must just hate furniture. They chop off half of the kitchen island and push the remaining half against the wall, but none of the remaining cabinet doors close and all of the shelves are slanted. They saw through the middle of the couch, perhaps to turn it into a sectional. But one section is forced to balance on only two legs, and both sections are left to constantly hemorrhage foam cushioning.
Finally, they put up a makeshift divider in the living area to section off a not-private-at-all bedroom for Omar. The divider consists of a bedsheet draped from the ceiling and a mattress leaned on its side in the archway, insuring that it will constantly topple over. We are left with one small half for a TV room. The other half is where Omar will unconsciously release gas throughout the night, until he wakes up with a loud yelp anytime we pass his bunk for a late-night trip to the bathroom.
Three months after Omar has arrived, it’s clear he has no plans to leave. My apartment has been turned into a youth hostel with crappier furniture and without any youth. I can’t ignore it anymore. If the upper west side was a Mexican sandwich maker’s neck, my apartment would be the goiter. There comes a point in the life of every goiter where people stop ignoring it, and they say, “This is fucking awful. I can’t take this anymore. I have to get away from that goiter.” Within three weeks, I move into my own studio, with a new and wonderful landlord. She lives off the premises, very far away, and she prefers that I use the mail to send her my rent and any other communication, so that we can keep our physical contact to a minimum. I am home.
I'VE NEVER KILLED A GRIZZLY BEAR
By Tanner Dahlin
Five years ago, I killed a Grizzly Bear with my bare hands. When that Grizzly Bear was on top of me, I knew I was going to win. I had my legs scissor wrapped around its waist and I was about to start squeezing them together in a tight lock, scissor leg-pinch of death. That bear was screwed! God dammit! I wish that was a true story. But it’s not.
The sad truth of it all is that this whole thing should have started out with the truth, which is this: I am addicted to over exaggerated theatrical whimsy.
To even describe the refreshing taste of a delicious Coca-Cola, or imbibe an ice cold, Taste of The Rockies, Mountain-Fresh, Coors Lite without trying to spice it up a little bit is a difficult task. Actors commonly have an addiction to over exaggerated theatrical whimsy. Walk through any green-room, or backstage hallway, or college theatre department and you will see actors throwing themselves about and wildly recounting their recent Starbucks purchase with such glorious oomph. My family forgives me of this same affliction and sometimes even indulges it. This usually ends up with my family feeling concern for the well being of fragile items within reach of my wildly gesticulating arms. “The Vase, Tanner! The Vase.”
This last Christmas, I went back to Wyoming for the first time since moving to New York. I told many a fancy tale to many relatives, and naturally, while spending a quiet dinner with my Grandparents, I had to try to incorporate jazz, high kicks and various accents. My grandpa is 147 years old, and my grandma always has ice cream that tastes like a long since opened can of diet ginger ale. They sat there as I boldly and physically re-enacted my first interaction with a crack-whore on the A train.
“… so she was scratching her bare feet while she was staring right at me, and then she put her fingers in her mouth and a guy in the back of the car went, “Ohhhhh”.
My grandmother’s mouth dropped. “That doesn’t sound very nice.”
“That’s nothing Granny!” I shouted, while climbing onto the dining room table. “All winter long I slept, afraid, in my grimy studio apartment in Bed-Stuy. They were freezing lonely, winter nights. I would lay on my $12.00 air mattress and snuggle a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. Now Granny, I’m broke, so the air mattress I had out of financial necessity.”
“Oh that worries me Tanner” she said in a whispered breath.
“But the slugger was thrown into my night routine after hearing the upstairs neighbors angrily wrestling and shouting in Jamaican. “Ya dirty Bumbaclot Whore, ya gwan git your ass beat!” followed usually by, “Blood Clot man, Teeny Dick aint gwan do it!” and the wrestling would begin. Sometimes the arguing and wrestling got so intense that the woman would just loose her mind. Over the months I got to know the intricacies of their relationship through hearing them wrestle. As with many married couples there arrives a point in an argument where someone crosses the line. For instance in a more Midwestern family, you might here this:
John: Mildred I think you are becoming more and more like your mother every day.
He’s crossed the line and you can tell when she goes:
Mildred: Well, John, I am sorry to say it, but … … fuck you.
With my upstairs neighbors it would go down like this:
Teeny Dick: Yo Bloodclot gwan fuck you like a Biatch! No-ting but a slut, a bumbaclot slut!
Here is a hint that I could tell he crossed the line. She would go:
Bloodclot: WoOOOOOOOOOOOO
… and the walls would shake and the dish would rattle and my air mattress would quiver and the lights would dim in and out and my one can of Hormel Beef Chili would tumble out of the empty cupboard.
My grandpa smiled but my grandmother started to frown and drink wine quickly. “Well Grandpa, I was pretty sure that after Teeny Dick was done upstairs he was going to be looking for another ass to beat so I grabbed my little league baseball bat and curled up from that night on with protection.”
“Well, that sounds interesting, my pudding is done.” My grandmother scooted out of her chair like a spry teenager and made a lunge for the kitchen. “Pudding needs to cool,” I heard from the kitchen, muffled only by a cork popping out of the wine bottle and a glass being filled to brim with wine, then slurping sounds, then the sound of topping it off.
My Grandfather covered the sounds of my Granny’s fervent wine pouring. “So the man upstairs sounds like the abusive type.”
“Actually, I thought they were wrestling upstairs cause of all the angry talk, but, Grandpa, it turns out they were just fuckin.” This made him laugh as my grandmother scooted back to her seat. “Pudding needs to cool.”
The energy had died down a bit so I had to start with a fresh story. “The night the man was shot right outside my window, I watching Amilie on my laptop stoned out of my mind on some fancy New York City marijuana.” They both frown. I realize not all of the story needed to make it in. They are disappointed at my casual drug reference. I’ve lost my audience, and my addiction tells me that the only way to make up for this is with a big finish, possibly with fireworks or some form of pyrotechnics. I eye the candles and the drapes and make a mental note.
“Bang” I shouted as I pounded on the table, bringing both of my dear, elderly-grandparents to the verge of a heart attack. “I heard gunfire so close to my window that even though I had the headphones on tight I jolted upright. Bang! Bang! Bang! I grabbed my Louisville slugger and threw off my two jackets and one of my overpants and hid behind my fridge (no heat in the winter makes you wear a lot of clothes). Bang! Bang! Bang! I threw off another overpant, and two sweaters so I could more easily maneuver for the moment when whatever was happening outside came in. Then I heard about a billion gunshots happening at once so I took off all the rest of my clothes as fast as I could and monkey crawled to the bathtub, where I dove in and shivered in my Def Leopard thong underpants. They were a joke gift I recieved last May and were now the only remaining piece of clothing I wore.”
“Tanner, stop it!” My grandmother pleaded as she clutched her chest. “Now Lee, this is just getting good,” my grandfather said.
Taking wind from his endlessly encouraging remark, I grabbed the lit candle and jumped off the table and ran to the corner and dimmed the lights. I held the candle up to my face and continued. “I was so scared. I didn’t know what to do and I was so cold and so scared. I thought I was never going to be able to see you two again (which I always say directly to whoever I am telling this story too.) I was sure I was going to die and they would find me three months later in these ridiculous underpants.
Sometimes you have to cry in a story right before the big finish. This makes everyone feel uncomfortable, and will be invariably the part of the story they remember most, so it is important that you say wonderful things when you cry, like: “That’s when I started to think about how much I love you both.” This really sets the table for the big finish.
I ran to the window pushing aside the drapes and holding the candle out as if to see into the night. “That’s when the police helicopter started hovering right over my building with its 500,000 kilowatt searchlights pounding into my 1st floor apartment window.
“Oh my god, Oh my god, Oh my god.” I waved the lit candle in front of my face dripping wax on the floor. “It was no longer time to hide in the bath or stand frozen in the window held by police light, I needed to act. … Grandpa, hand me that knife.” He refused knowing that it could only spell disaster, but I grabbed it anyway. “I gathered as many weapons as I could find; my bat, a knife, and a frying pan. There was a murdering lunatic right outside my window, and I needed to be prepared. I stood by the door with the bat cocked in my hands ready to deal a deadly blow to whoever entered.”
The candle was my bat and I held it close to the window, which stood for my door and the flame hit the drapes. Both grandparents made an audible gasp because my storytelling was so good, but the flame went out the moment it hit the drapes. I heard a misplaced sigh of relief, but I wasn’t done yet so I shouted, “GRANNY DO YOU HAVE ANY MATCHES!! GRANNY, MATCHES!! MATCHES!!”
She could only muster up “My pudding!” She was breathing heavy and sweating and her eyes were wild. My grandpa was laughing his ass off, which made me want to go for broke and try to get some matches, but I think that might have killed her old, fragile body. I didn’t want to light the drapes on fire, but I figured if they were lit up, I could easily put them out with a glass of water, but my Granny was so scared and I think hyperventilating a bit.
I froze in concern for her, and she slowly raised out of her chair, turned on the light, and went to the kitchen. I sat down in my chair and took a big gulp of water to refresh my instrument. Grandpa’s laughing subsided enough for me to hear the uncorking, the gluging, and the slurping noises of my grandmother patiently dealing with my addiction.
Drugs and Spider Solitaire
by Emily Epstein
IDrugs and Spider Solitaire
I’m not an “addiction” kind of girl. At worst I might be a little compulsive. For instance, I have a problem closing out of Spider Solitaire without winning the game. I might attack someone if they won’t share my mom’s banana chocolate chip cake and I haven’t had my fill. I have a hard time leaving the house without checking the weather online twice. In fact, I once canceled a housewarming party the day before because it was supposed to snow for twelve hours the day of the event. After much contemplation I decided to reschedule it and congratulated myself for planning ahead. I then spent the next day glued to the window to watch the snow fall and feel good about my decision. When it only snowed for a total of an hour and barely coated the sidewalk, my boyfriend, who is black, and I decided this all happened because God hates interracial couples. See? Just a little compulsive and maybe a dash of paranoid.
While I’m a straitlaced girl these days, I do seem to attract addictive types. In high school and college, I was surrounded by potheads. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve smoked out of everything from apples to Mordechai my glass pipe to seven-foot bongs, but I made sure my homework was done.
When I first moved to New York, I ran with a crowd that really loved to party. We’d routinely go out until the sun came up starting with a group of about ten of us and somehow ending up at some investment banker’s loft apartment in midtown with twenty people I didn’t know in tow. As with any out of control group, there were drugs around. So, of course, we had Ricky, the group’s drug dealer. I was never sure if he hung out with everyone because he was actually their friend, or they were just good customers. Ricky was a short Indian guy from the Bronx by way of Bangalore who had a deep scar that reached from just under his eye to his chin. He never explained how he had gotten it but he had been a dealer for a long time. I imagined some kind of crazy drug standoff, where Ricky the “good bad guy” was trying to get his money from someone who owed him and his assailant panicked, grabbed the closest thing he could find, obviously a beer bottle, cracked it in half and came at him like some kind of drug filled Western standoff. But that’s just a guess.
When he talked Ricky sounded like Al Pacino in Scarface with just a hint of an Indian accent (which I won’t even try to imitate). I took a liking to him, perhaps because I was the only one in the group without a trust fund and felt a little fish out of water. Or maybe it was because I respected his entrepreneurial spirit. We often talked about his family back in India and what he could do to get out of dealing. Almost every time I saw him it seemed he had had yet another interview—usually something to do with computers—but was never hired. “It’s this freaking scar, man,” he would always say. And so, he would never stray far from dealing.
At some point that fall, Ricky decided that he wanted to date me. I was not so keen on the idea. Maybe it was because I was young and didn’t want to be tied down. Maybe it was because I had no urge to visit “his palace,” as he called it, in the Bronx. OR Maybe it was because it was because he was a drug dealer. But that didn’t stop him from trying.
When I would leave at the end of the night, Ricky always insisted on getting me a cab and trying to pay for it. For some reason, the cab driver would then think that I was also Indian and would try to speak to me in his particular dialect, which is interesting because they speak 22 languages in India. I would then spend the rest of the ride trying to convince the cab driver that I wasn’t Indian, insisting that it was just the lighting, only to have him agree with me as soon as I stepped out of the car. This happened almost every time he put me in a cab.
Ricky also enjoyed courting me by sneaking up behind me, holding up one of his keys dipped in cocaine and when he’d tap me on the shoulder and I’d turn around he’d try to surprise me by sticking it right under my nose. Though I found his game of “dodge the cocaine key” surprising every time, I was also slightly flattered, as Ricky didn’t usually give his product away for free. Through it all we stayed friends.
In time, I drifted away from that group. There are only so many nights in a row where one can go to work on two hours sleep without the aid of drugs and I didn’t trust myself. Sadly, Ricky and I lost touch. A year later, I got a phone call. I look down and it was a blocked number, but I felt compelled to pick it up anyway. It was Ricky.
“You will never believe where I am calling from, baby.” He had finally been busted for selling drugs. He was at Riker’s for nine months, which sounded awfully intimidating to me, and he wanted me to come visit him. Through the bravado he sounded sad and lonely. I felt bad for him but I am no incarcerated man’s shortie, despite the fact that I find conjugal visits fascinating.
I just couldn’t do it, so I decided to write him instead. (Speaking of addictions, there are a lot women out there who really have a fetish for bad, incarcerated men, because here are a TON of prisoner pen pal websites. I really enjoyed reading writeaprisoner and prisonpenpals.com.) The letters I wrote to Ricky were some of the most difficult letters I have ever had to write. What can you possibly say that doesn’t sound like you’re bragging because you’re “on the outside?” So I chose to fill the letters with questions for him. Any new homemade tattoos? Are you getting along with the other guys? Are you seeing anyone? Is it mutual?
But after that first phone call, I never heard from him. These days I still find myself around addictive types but no more drug dealers. My boyfriend is definitely addicted to Facebook. I am pretty convinced that my old roommate is addicted to milk. She would drink a gallon in a matter of hours and walk around the apartment sounding phlemgy and looking glassy-eyed, probably jonseing for some cereal, although it’s most likely impossible for her to break a bone. As for me, whenever I have a vaguely Indian-looking cab driver who asks me where I’m from I think of Ricky. Then I go home and check the weather again.
ADDICTED THROUGH THE BOMB
By Sue Funke
Picture if you will, a comedy club on Long Island in the early twenty-first century aughts. The waitresses mulling about before the show starts, exhausted from their first job. They had no expectation of enjoying a moment of the show they were going to work through. They trudged between the tables on sticky floors setting an overall mood of despair.
Behind the main showroom there was a bar with windows where comedians, like myself, waited to get on stage. I was 22 years old, I was about to do my first “booked” show and I looked out at the crowd. There was a whopping total of six people in the audience seated as a group of four, and a group of two. They’re all front row facing the empty, grey stage.
I paced back and forth nervously going over my jokes. I played with the order, the inflection of my voice. Over and over I say the words that if put precisely in the right order, pattern, and tone should result in hilarity. I closed my eyes and pictured the reaction. I made myself laugh at the ideas I was putting forth. This is going to be fun for me, I thought, this will be my writing’s transformationin to life with spontaneous reactions of laughter... I hope.
The emcee leapt onto the stage. He was a frightening ball of energy known as “Wild Willy”. I have no idea if he still performs today, but it would not surprise me in the slightest if he was doing the same routine he went through that night.
Wild Willy talked at a ridiculously fast speed, and it became apparent just as rapidly as his words firing out of his mouth, that we were losing the audience. It’s his job as the emcee to get the crowd excited for the show. Instead, they sat with their drinks unsure as to how to react to this self-titled wild man jumping around a tiny stage.
He finally called out my name. As I walked into the showroom, I finally got the full portrait of my six audience members.
The pair that were sitting to the right of the stage were obviously on a first date. I say obviously, because people who know each other shouldn’t be as nervous and awkward as these two were. The man was doting upon the woman. The woman looked around the room as if looking for a trap door she could escape through.
The group of four was an even more desperately pathetic sight. It was a typical nuclear family: mom, dad, daughter and son. As I took control of the mic and introduced myself to the family I established that it was the daughter’s birthday…with help from her drunken mother.
“My daughter’s 21 today!” she slurred.
The daughter appeared as if she wanted to crawl into her skin. The son had long ago stopped paying attention to his family. I could almost see him in his “happy place” far away from this humiliating, but possibly familiar table scene. And the father tried to take control of his wife by grabbing her arm, and shot her a stern look.
As I labored to get their attention with my jokes, the mother succumbed to alcoholism and gravity - and fell off her chair and onto her stage.
In hind-sight this fall was rather humorous, but in the moment it was as if time had stopped. I hated this woman and her drinking problem almost as much as her daughter did, probably more. She was ruining the opportunity for people to laugh at my jokes!
The family and I tried to regain composure. We all worked to pull ourselves back towards the show. The husband resolved to try to hold up his wife, the daughter tried not to cry, and the son was most likely playing Final Fantasy in his head. I turned my attention towards the awkward couple.
“So, how are things over here?”
The girl looked up at me and replied, “Awful.”
“Alright! Let’s try some relationship jokes shall we?....”
I went on autopilot and told my jokes, the precise timing of which had been factored out after hours spent at open mics, i.e. the dregs of the comedy world.
An open mic is a place where comedians perform and are barely listened to by other comedians, but also are highly judged by said peers. All that time spent going through what I thought was hell, only to end up face to face with true hell fire in a crappy club with “real audience” on Long Island.
This is when I wondered if I’d chosen the right way to spend my night. I knew this crowd wasn’t into it. I could feel from the second I saw them being ushered to their seats. Why did I go up and subject myself to such torture? Because I needed that rush. The rush only stand up could give me.
I’m always chasing the high of a good show. The rush of performing a great stand up set is better than the most magical night of sex, drugs, and rock that you could imagine. I literally lead people to an emotional response with my words. Once you had that kind of power, would you relinquish it?
The mic stand is my cigarette, people’s laughs are my lighter.
There’s no patch for this kind of high.
This is what I reminded myself as I launched into another joke, silently praying between words that this will be the one that makes them break into uncontrollable laughter.
The silence that rebounded instead was like God’s mighty middle finger extending up, right at me.
Bombing that badly was awful enough to make me second guess the need for that rush. Like a painful hangover on a sunny Sunday morning, a bad stand up experience will lead even the greatest to think – never again.
When the set was finally over, after what I approximated to be the longest a person had ever stood on stage performing without garnering a semblance of positive response, I thanked the ungrateful audience.
I walked off the stage hating everyone in that room. I hated the daughter for being born, she probably lead the mother to drink, the father for being so distant, and the son for being a replica of the only male role model he had. I hated the couple for even trying to get so far as the comedy club when they should’ve known at first sight how much they were not going to love each other.
But most of all I hated stand up.
I drove to my college roommate’s new apartment and knocked on her door.
I had a bottle of rum in one hand and a blunt in the other.
“Let’s drink until I forget tonight,” I said as I walked in.
My friend, Nikki, a non-performing person (which comedians sometimes refer to as a “normie” short for normal person) had little to draw upon in the way of parallels to my horrific stand up experience, yet patiently listened.
“I went to school to be a writer, and this comedy bullshit is nothing like where I should be at. I work my ass off for what? So people can get drunk and judge me? Isn’t that why I avoided all those sororities and frat parties in college? I suck at this shit and I’m not doing it again.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Nikki said to me in her no-nonsense bull shit detecting voice. “You’re not gonna quit, you’re not shit, it was just a bad fucking night. Get over it.”
Nikki always wanted to be a mother. And in a way, she was the mother I always wanted. Sure, it wasn’t the sweetest way of saying don’t stop belivin’ but we can’t all have the lyrical genius of Journey.
I wish I could tell you that there and then I realized that bad nights are bound to happen as a comedian. That I walked out of her place that night with a clear head and continued on to be the best damn comedian every time, no matter what. That I never gave up on the crowd again, even if they’ve given up on themselves.
But that’s not true. I had many other nights where things didn’t work right and I felt just as shitty, sometimes worse. When you put yourself up to have others laugh at your vulnerabilities you’re basically giving someone a chance to pour lemon juice on an open wound.
That night, as I was drunkenly passing out on Nikki’s couch after, I realized that my drinking and slouching wasn’t all that different from drunk mom.
Maybe that woman won’t even remember how awful she was tonight. I thought. Maybe she got all black out drunk and won’t believe the stories of her behavior in the morning.
I’m not like her though, because I don’t get black out drunk.
No, I’m more of a rolling brown drunk…
I suddenly stopped my eyes from being heavy. There was a joke in this. I wrote it down and excitedly planned for the next open mic I could perform it.
As far as I know, no one has directly died from stand up comedy – just the substances and stressors to keep them keep doing it. It’s odd to claim stand up comedy as addiction, but I will say that if you asked me to stop I wouldn’t, because I have this one new joke I just have to try…
THE FAIRY AND THE VAMPIRE
by Elicia Berger
I grew up Jewish so my parents never had to deal with the whole Easter Bunny or Santa Claus thing. Whether or not they existed was irrelevant to me and if they did, they visited other kids (who had smaller noses) and that was that. But I did still have The Tooth Fairy and boy, was I a believer.
I lost my first tooth at the hand of a slamming door with a string tied to the knob. I was seven years old. With both hands, my brother held a gigantic black tape recorder up to my head and taunted me.
“Leeshaaaaa, Leeshaaa, does it hurt?”
“Yeeeaaaaa,” I gurgled and moaned in fear. My dad was preparing the string.
“Get that away, Jason!” my dad ordered. “I know, I know...” he cooed and smiled at me.
The recording stops, just seconds before it happened. But the door never needed to slam. Once we got the string tied around my tooth, it fell out, a little wet pink seashell in my clammy hand. What a relief.
We cleaned the tooth and found a home for it in a mini-cassette tape case. It clinked around like a bug in a jar. I decided to write The Tooth Fairy a note, as if she woke up in a Quantum Leap episode and couldn’t figure out what a tooth was. I put it and the cassette tape case under my pillow that night and tried my hardest not to fall asleep.
The next morning I awoke crushed that she had not come. I had waited up for her all night. I slid my hand under my pillow, and there I was surprised to find an envelope with a five-dollar bill and a letter from The Tooth Fairy! The five was slightly folded and worn. I couldn’t believe I didn’t know when she came.
“Dear Elicia,” the letter read. “What a lucky little girl to have lost your first tooth!” (I was not sure that luck had anything to do with that string and doorknob.) “Congratulations! This was a big day. I know that you must have been very brave.”
The letter was typewritten, dated, and signed “The Tooth Fairy, Region 6 Zone 7.”
“Dad?”
“Yes, honey?”
“How come The Tooth Fairy has the same stationery as us?”
“Because The Tooth Fairy gets your letter in the middle of the night, and then writes you back here on our stationery with our typewriter.”
“Oh, right…” I hadn’t figured that much.
“Dad?”
“Mm?”
“So, there’s more than one Tooth Fairy?”
“Well, there are lots of children who lose teeth every day, all over the world. You can’t think that one Tooth Fairy could visit them all in one night?”
“Yeah,” I agreed with great enlightenment.
Of course one Tooth Fairy couldn’t get to all those kids. That would be impossible. Each place had to have one. This Tooth Fairy business was starting to make sense.
Although my dad never mentioned, and one could not tell from The Tooth Fairy’s letters, I just knew that my Tooth Fairy was a lady. Since my dad had clued me into the finer nuances of Tooth Fairy-hood, I dropped my suspicion that the Tooth Fairy was a miniature flying woman who snuck through the cracks in my bedroom window. But I still wondered how she got in, past our various locks and chains, and didn’t trip over our piles of shoes and boots, to deliver my money and much-savored letters.
“Dad?”
“Uh-huh?”
“How does The Tooth Fairy get into our house?”
“I gave The Tooth Fairy a copy of our house key.”
“You did?”
“Yes.”
I started developing a somewhat sadistic outlook on losing teeth. You could say I was becoming quite vampire-like. I looked forward to and savored the salty taste of blood in my mouth, and didn’t sleep at night (or at least, tried not to) in case The Tooth Fairy had a slow night and decided to visit. I looked forward to wiggling teeth and the gruesome feel of jamming my tongue into a freshly vacated gum. When my second front tooth was loose enough, I flipped it around entirely backwards and called my brother over.
“Siiick!” he proclaimed, as I beamed.
After the first five-dollar score, subsequent teeth were clocking in at two-dollars apiece. But this was not about money. The Tooth Fairy and I were building a relationship. She was unlike my other pen pal because she didn’t neglect to write me if she had gotten a new puppy, or if she were rendered busy by a big book report. She had to write me, and I had control over when she did.
Once I decided that The Tooth Fairy and I were getting chummy, I wanted to get her a gift. My mom and I went to Cobbs’, the local stationers, to pick out a writing tablet for her. I chose a white paged 6”x10” clean-tear tablet with a brown cover. I was very satisfied with my choice and couldn’t wait to leave it for her.
“Dear Elicia, Thank you for the lovely gift. It is exactly what I would have picked out.” It was simply a pad of white paper, but it pleased me to no end to hear this. I added The Tooth Fairy’s letter to the cigar box in which I kept all her correspondence.
A few days later, a new writing pad mysteriously appeared in my mom’s sewing room. The cover was torn off.
“Mom, what happened to the cover of this?”
“Oh, I threw it away because I spilled something on it.”
“Oh.”
I felt uneasy. After that day, everything about my and The Tooth Fairy’s correspondence remained the same, but something inside me changed. Though I couldn’t make sense of it all, I felt there was something not kosher going on. Had my mom stolen my gift to The Tooth Fairy? All I knew was that The Tooth Fairy was not using the new paper I got her. And I was running out of teeth.
Not too long after, I saw something on my dad’s dresser that I did not want to believe. It was a letter I had written—to The Tooth Fairy. I had had my suspicions, but was still crushed. I never said anything to my dad about it, not ever. Maybe I was outgrowing The Tooth Fairy. Maybe she was outgrowing me. Her next correspondence was brief: “I have to get going, I have a lot of kids to visit tonight!”
The Tooth Fairy had driven a stake through my heart. But ask me any time, and I’ll still say, “Go ahead, tie that string around my tooth and yank the knob. Hard.”
JESUS IS MY HAPPY DRUG
By Jennifer Coates
We stood in the driveway in our pajamas: me, my brother and sister. Silhouetted in the night, the back seat of our van sat on the ground, like a lawn ornament in a trailer park.
“Go on,” said my stepdad. “See if you can fit.”
Dutifully, we climbed in the van and lay down where the seat used to be. I nosed my face up between the front seats, barely clearing the console. This had to be the stupidest idea ever: riding all night to Ohio in the back of a mini-van. At 14, I was a full-grown 5-foot-3, and I did not want to spend my summer in Jesus Town.
Jesus Town, or sometimes Jonestown, was what my friends had nicknamed my family’s summer destination: Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, a depressed steel-mill ruin outside Pittsburgh. That was where we were headed to spend a week in a religious commune: my stepfather, a non-practicing Jew; my mother, an Episcopalian; and us kids. Afterwards, we’d been promised a trip to Cape Cod, where I hoped no one would attempt to baptize me in the ocean.
I was used to Jesus. It was a kind of uncomfortable familiarity, but not one which bred contempt. I grew up in the Bible belt and considered myself a Christian, although I supported a liberal, fringe political group called the Democrats, had no wish to send my Jewish relatives to hell—okay, maybe my crazy grandmother—and also had never been “saved,” unless you count the time I cracked my head on the high dive during practice and the totally hot lifeguard had to fish me out of the pool.
As Karl Marx famously said, “Religion is the opium of the masses.” At 14, I was beginning to suspect he’d meant crack. All the adults I knew were suddenly doing hits of Jesus. My parents kept talking about the “Holy Spirit”— and my sister’s godfather, CEO of our local hospital, had actually packed up his family and moved to Jesus Town. Before leaving, he’d made us promise to visit. And that’s why I lay face down, in the middle of the night, as our family set out on our trip in the Mini-van for Christ.
Like holy bandits, we slipped onto the dark highway for our all-night drive. With his typically bad reasoning skills, my stepfather claimed we’d gain an entire day by driving while the family slept. But this brilliant plan had one flaw: although I could lie face down in the van, I could hardly sleep in this position. I remember a long, blurry night of my sister body-slamming into me, my stepdad stopping every half hour for coffee, and a violently sore neck. By the next morning, I was pretty sure I’d already been to purgatory.
My mother passed out donuts for breakfast as we sat cross-legged on the extended van floor.
I began to sing. “Won’t you take me to … Jesus Town?”
“Shut up, goddamnit!” hollered my stepdad, who hadn’t slept a wink.
I grabbed my brother’s Cabbage Patch doll and made it dance.
Late that afternoon, we rounded the crest of a hilltop, and Jesus Town came into view. Broken, beat-out windows looked blindly from crumbling buildings. Aimless people wandered the streets in the summer heat. Cramped tenement housing sported gang graffiti. Jesus Town scared the shit out of me.
“Godmamma and Day-Day live here?” asked my five-year-old sister.
“Yes,” said my mother piously. “They’re part of a spiritual community to help the poor.”
“Doesn’t look like they’ve done much,” I observed.
Godmamma and Day-Day’s commune was in a safer section of Jesus Town, known as The Rowhouses. These opened onto a vast expanse of lawn where the children frolicked and the gay, graying hippies—who comprised most of the group—plucked their guitars by night. That night, the entire commune held a barbeque for us, singing hymns and raising their hands in the air. I don’t know why they raised their hands in the air. Did they think God needed a signal to find them? Like an air-traffic controller?
I sat back and watched the scene in horrified fascination. “Who’s that?” I asked my mother, pointing to the fattest, gayest-looking hippie of them all.
“That’s Father Graham,” she said. “He’s the leader of the Community.” My mother lowered her voice. “They say, that he once calmed a rabid dog by calling on the Holy Spirit and ordering it to lie still.”
I checked her glass for Kool-Aide, and asked if Father Graham also did tricks with snakes.
The next day, my parents asked if I’d like to hang out with some girls my age. The alternative being long-haired homosexuals who did weird things to dogs with the Holy Spirit, I said yes. But secretly, I was terrified. I didn’t get along too well with the Bible Kids at school—the ones who “met you at the flagpole” to pray before school, and listened to Michael W. Smith instead of Michael Bolton and D.C. Talk instead of M.C. Hammer.
You see, it was hard to hold the line as a Christian but not that type of Christian. And lately, with my parents becoming Jesus junkies, it was getting even harder. The right wing of the church was pulling everyone in. Come on, get Evangelical … everybody’s doing it.
After church at Jesus Town on Sunday, which involved dancing, babbling in tongues—and an elderly lady convulsing in the aisle while everyone stood around her and cheered instead of calling 911—my parents walked me across the street from the Rowhouses to hang out with Kate and Christy. I steeled myself for Bible verses and an angry debate on abortion, but instead I found them sitting on their couch, doors and windows wide open to the filthy street below, watching MTV.
“This show is creepy,” I said after an awkward silence. “I can’t believe they just follow people around a house with a camera.”
“Yeah,” said Kate.
We watched as another episode of The Real World cued up on the screen, and I wondered what television had come to.
“So, I’m pregnant,” said Kate.
“Oh? Really,” I said. I didn’t know how to address this; none of my friends had ever been past second base. We were, after all, 14.
“Yeah,” Kate said. “The father’s black. He eats a lot of chicken.”
“Why?” I asked. I looked to Christy, but she continued to stare at the television.
“I don’t know,” Kate said. “Black people like chicken.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that,” I said.
At that moment, a horrible thought occurred to me: something unspeakable, that I’d dreaded having to confront in my maturing, adolescent years.
“Are you guys … um, high?” I asked.
“No way,” Christy said, keeping her eyes on the tube. “Jesus is my happy drug.”
At that point, I made an excuse about needing to find my parents, and ran across the dilapidated street on my own. I spent the rest of my vacation playing with my brother and sister, and keeping them away from the ravine where a prostitute was found strangled the night before. When we left, I had a huge, red, peeling rash around my mouth from having drunk the tap water.
“I’ll pray for you,” said my mother as we pulled away.
“Just keep driving,” I said. “I want to be in Massachusetts by sunset.”
Within a year of our visit, Father Graham was defrocked as a pervert, for having sex with his married male parishioners. Godmamma and Day-Day returned home and opened up a Domino’s pizza. My parents found a normal Episcopal Church with incense and choirs and funny language from an old prayer book. But as for me, I gave up religion altogether after that terrifying run-in with Jesus Town. If anyone ever tells me that Jesus is their happy drug … well, I just say no.
MY PIECE:
Horses
I’m a little worried about myself. I’ve always been the girl in the group who’s been one of the more sexually outspoken ones. You know, the “Samantha”. I’m the friend who first showed you how to “really” play with Barbies. And probably made you take your first trip to Toys in Babeland.
But you could also say that I’m quite comfortable with myself. I can say “vagina” without flinching, though I think it’s a really unsexy word. Maybe its because my dad’s a gynecologist and fertility specialist and we talked about his work day at the dinner table growing up. So a typical conversation would be like:
“Hey dad, what’d you do today?”
“Well kiddo, I’m glad you asked. One of my patients today was a very religious Baptist woman who thought something was wrong with her hymen, when actually; she was a virgin with an impotent husband! Nothing a vaginal dilator can’t fix!”
You know. Just your average Shabbat dinner with the fam.
Or maybe I’m this way because of my friends. One night in high school, a group of us went to a friend’s house to watch a “very scary movie” my boyfriend was bringing over. I love scary movies so I was psyched. Once the popcorn was popped, my boyfriend put the tape in the VCR (you know, because this was olden times). The opening scene showed a good-looking young couple lost on a farm road. They decided to pull over to what looked like a welcoming farmhouse. I had to run to the bathroom for a second thinking I wouldn’t miss much. But by the time I got back, the entire farmhouse family was having sex with the girl while her boyfriend and the goat watched.
“See, I told you it was scary!” said my boyfriend, laughing hysterically.
All my girlfriends were horrified, so they ran to the basement to practice a choreographed dance. I stayed upstairs with the guys to uh…see if the young couple ever made it back home.
In college my guy friends showed me that you could download porn for free on the Internet. Well, you know how in college, there’s like that free food mentality? How even if you’re not hungry you still eat the nasty cold pizza in the dorm lobby because it’s free? So, I started downloading the free porn, because IT WAS THERE. I told all my friends about it. It was all very “Red Shoe Diaries” kind of stuff: Women getting seduced on trains by sexy conductors, mailmen delivering “big packages”. Instead of comparing last night’s episode of Sex and the City we’d be like, “Did you watch “Stunning Sylvia Gets A Good Spanking?” or “Sexy Masseuse Receives Extra Service?”
Of course, my guy friends at the time were into things like “Woman Getting Nailed by Donkey in Istanbul” and happily showed us such videos at our dorm parties. I couldn’t imagine how on Earth this could be a turn-on. I mean, look! We could be watching Woman Getting Hosed Down by Sexy Fireman! Or if we were feeling really frisky, Schoolgirl Seduced by Naughty Teacher. C’mon guys, a donkey?
But after a while…The naughty conductor, the mailman, Stunning Sylvia—they started becoming kind of old hat. I’d be watching it and be like, “meh”. With voyeuristic sex stuff I feel like there’s this novelty factor. So before I knew it I was like, suddenly all about the girl on girl porn. And then the locker room orgy became my thing. Until that got old too. And now, here I am in a place that I’m a little concerned about. I have a serious addiction. To gay porn. Guy on guy.
Do you know how hard it is to find guy on guy porn that doesn’t look "gay gay”? It’s really hard. It requires a commitment. Next to Facebook, this is one of life’s major timesucks. Non-gay-gay gay man porn is a specific area within the porn genre that does not include leather, skinny little boys, pretty faces, or quiet moaning. You have to find manly men that look like the kind of men that might want to gangbang a woman, but actually decide against it, and go for one another. Aggressively.
Oh, just so you know? I’m watching all this shit BY MYSELF. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because this is like, a me-time kind of thing. And also because that’s what you do when you’re unemployed and bored and it’s 10 in the morning. Also, I think this is the first time my husband is learning about my little hobby. Sorry honey. But if you’re into that kind of thing? Totally cool.
And sometimes I’m wondering, can the neighbors hear? What do they think about the sounds of groaning men coming from my apartment when my husband is away at work? Do they think I’m being unfaithful? Or attacked? And if so, why haven’t they called the police?
Occasionally I fear that my Super might walk in mid-video. You know, like, “Hello, I’ve come to uh, fix your plumbing.” Which wouldn’t be SO bad…And there I go again.
But here’s why I’m really worried. I’ve tried to broach the topic with friends of mine, and explain my fascination and no one gets it. I understand that its more acceptable for women to like lesbian porn and that women are supposed to like watching other women get it on. But if you like penises, why wouldn’t you want to see two of them at the same time?
Even when I put it this way, the look I get, is one of disbelief and general ick. Like WTF Alexis, seriously, get more therapy. And I agree! What is wrong with me? How did a nice straight A Jewish girl from New Jersey find herself typing in the words “male, gay, cumshots” into porn search engines as an adult? I mean, I’d like to think I’m a good person. I give money to the homeless on subways—especially the people who don’t have shoes. I call my mom twice a day—even if it’s just to tell her what I had for lunch.
I guess everyone is allowed a vice. I just would have been content with mine being like, an addiction to Project Runway, or Cadbury Eggs. But no, my lot is two cocks at once, battling each other out. At least for now. But what’s next?
Now I understand why my guy friends in college were watching that woman get mauled by the donkey: They had already exhausted themselves on every other type of porn, and it had become yesterday’s news. They had to keep upping the ante. So after the girl guy, the girl girl, and the gangbangs, they had to go to the animal porn. I don’t know what follows animal porn. Snuff? Or...Don’t even get me started on the Two Girls One Cup madness. That’s just gross. That’s just a big old heap of No.
So get this: Recently, I saw this link on Perez Hilton, to a video about a guy named “Mr. Hands”. His goal in life was to have sex with a horse. So he like, set up a night to have his friends videotape the event. And they actually did. I nearly vomited the first time I watched it, because in the fuzziness of the tape, I kind of saw the horse’s wang violate “Mr. Hands”. I know, I know. And then, afterward, I found out that “Mr. Hands” got internal bleeding and died. Ok, full disclosure: I watched this video five times.
Seriously men in the audience, maybe you can help me. I think I’m probably at your level now. Is there some extreme porn website I don’t know about—something that can save me from getting to the donkey and horse level once I’ve exhausted my gay porn fascination?
I’m a big believer in mantras helping me get over my problems. I like to write them on post-its and tape them to my computer: Some of my favorites include: “No Hurry, No Worry” and “Peace is in Every Step”. These help me with my anxiety issues. I just found a new one on the Internet that might help me with this: “Every Time You Masturbate God Kills a Kitten”.
So I just got a puppy. The cutest, snuggliest, giant muffin headed puppy in the world. Strangely enough, it seems that the maternal instinct trumps the desire to watch non-gay-gay, gay man porn. For example, I was “researching” this piece for you all, and what do you know? Youporn had some new videos. Some pretty nice sounding ones that I hadn’t seen before. For example: “Asses Pounded in the Grasses,” and “Two Gay Gladiators Working Out”. But then my puppy whimpered. And I looked at his cute little puppy eyes saying, “Mommy, you’re a nasty nasty whore.” So I X’d out of youporn with a sigh, closed down my computer, and hopefully, HOPEFULLY, also closed a chapter in my disturbed sexual life.
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