I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

the off-season of 1919–1920. Before the sale of “the Bambino” the Red Sox had been a successful baseball franchise. The 2004 Red Sox referred to themselves as “the Idiots”—an almost Zen declaration that the game they played was one of camaraderie, hope, and joy. It was to be played one pitch at a time and it didn’t matter whether there was a curse or how many RBIs (whatever those are) a guy had.

Most people from Massachusetts know a little bit about the ride of Paul Revere but “a lot a bit” about the curse of the Boston Red Sox. It served as a metaphor for all of our lives on an as-needed basis. If something didn’t go right in your life, you could remember that nothing was going right for the Red Sox either. The entire state was cursed. The entire state was an underdog. Sometimes things don’t work out and maybe we’re working against a punishing power higher than ourselves that doesn’t want us to win. That kind of “I’m the piece of shit that the world revolves around” attitude is unique to Massachusetts and I think it’s why so many comedians are from Boston, and why most people in Boston are sarcastic, angry, and wicked drunk.

WHEN I TURNED thirty a few weeks later I was still single and threw myself one of those parties that is no longer appropriate past the age of thirty—the type where you send out an Evite and ask everyone to meet you at a bar and pay for their own drinks. I heard that Matt showed up that night, although I didn’t see him. I was busy flirting with an artist who, according to my friend, thought I was cute. I think the only reason he thought I was cute was because we had met months earlier at a party and I completely ignored him. Not on purpose. I just didn’t know he was there.

If I like a guy, I can’t ignore him. I can only try to own and occupy him like a celebrity does a small island. I followed the Artist back to his house in a drunken stupor after my party. I slept over. We made out. I fell asleep halfway through our fooling around so I really did only “sleep” with him. The next morning, the sunlight streaming through his window and onto his bed made me self-conscious. Who knows what kind of cellulite could have developed overnight as I transitioned from age twenty-nine to thirty? I left and hoped that he would call me. He didn’t call me. I called him. A lot. A week later, I invited him to see Manhattan at a revival theater. (He had told me on my birthday that it was his favorite movie.) He said he couldn’t go. But why would he not want to see it with me after he told me it was his favorite movie? It couldn’t be because I had called him fifty times since we had first met, right? At least I didn’t drop a special-edition DVD of Manhattan on his doorstep—only because I couldn’t remember where he lived.

September rolled around and I hadn’t run into Nice Matt from Boston anywhere. I decided that it was time to invite him to my regular Sunday-night karaoke party. I’d never once actually corralled a group of people together for a Sunday-night karaoke party, but Matt wouldn’t know that. Besides, I’d always wanted to be the type of girl who has a regular Sunday-night karaoke gathering. I sent out an e-mail to a bunch of friends—including Matt—and said, “It’s a Sunday Night Karaoke Party! At the usual place—Sardo’s in Burbank.” Interestingly, nobody wrote back to say, “What the hell are you talking about? We don’t have a regular karaoke night. Are you trying to get something going with a boy?”

Matt showed up. I sang my usual karaoke song, Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart”—if you ever see me sing that song at karaoke, it means I’m trying to impress you. And if you’re a cute boy, it means I’m trying to get you to impress your penis on me.

Later Matt sang a nervous rendition of “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass. Eventually we were the last ones there. It was like our friends and the patrons of Sardo’s were trying to make the decision for us. Come on, you two, make a move already!

You know when you want to make out with someone and you’re pretty sure that he wants to make out with you because you’re both touching each other’s arms? You think to yourself, This is Body Language 101. He’s touching my arm because he knows it’s sending me a signal that he’s interested. But wait, who would be so obvious and actually touch someone’s arm? He’s not reading Cosmo. Maybe he touches everyone’s arm. I’ve never hung out with him before. That could be his “thing.” I better not act on this and ask him if he wants to leave and go somewhere else. Nope. His flirtation is so by-the-book that I’m suspicious. We should just keep sitting knee to knee in this booth and ignoring the fact that we are blind to everyone else at our table but each other.

Eventually he walked me to my car because he is a gentleman and because my car was right next to his.

We started talking and talking… and talking, because it was easier than one of us making the awkward first move. I offered super-smoothly, “Hey, so, if we’re going to keep talking, we might as well sit in my car. It’s cold.” It wasn’t cold. Matt got in the front seat and I immediately pounced on him. He flinched. When we talked about it later he said that it just seemed like I was about to hit him. To be fair, I do have a lot of testosterone and I did come at him like a flying squirrel, but I landed like a butterfly and found myself having my first kiss with the man who would become my husband. (I mean, not that night, although there was a ceremony of sorts when Matt had to pee in between our cars.)

The whole next day I tried to remember what song he had sung at karaoke so I could buy it, but I didn’t want to ask him what the song was because I knew that if you asked a guy what song he sang at karaoke, he would know you’re planning to buy it and listen to it over and over while reimagining your first kiss. I was thirty, but I was not naive.

Matt and I spent the next week fucking off at our day jobs and e-mailing each other all day instead—those types of stories that you’ve told a million times and can’t wait to have a new audience for. He told me his favorite childhood memory about the time his middle school gym teacher murdered his wife and claimed that the blood on the walls was marinara sauce. I reminisced about the time that a priest at our church wore a lavaliere microphone and ranted in his Sunday sermon about how gay people were destroying parades because they throw condoms off floats and into the street, and he let out a fart under his robe that was amplified through the speakers that hung next to the stations of the cross on the sides of the church.

I don’t know why that happens—that when you’re hanging out with someone you know you’re going to fall in love with, you just don’t know where to begin and you start picking up pieces of your life as though they’re old photos randomly gathered in a box and handing them over to a virtual stranger for safekeeping. It’s like saying, “Here. I’m excited and hopeful and I don’t know where to begin but I think one day we’ll eventually have enough time to unpack this thing and make some sense of it all.”

When the Red Sox won the World Series in October 2004, I felt like I had reversed my curse too. I wanted to tell Matt that I loved him but I didn’t want to overwhelm us. (We were already crying like a couple of postmenopausal women who had just won bingo on a seniors cruise.) I liked a boy who liked me back. He wasn’t a creep who only wanted a one-night stand. He didn’t find me more attractive the more unavailable I was. We were grown-ups.

Except for one thing. He was renting a bedroom in the very nice house owned by his always-home-and- hogging-the-living-room friend. I was sleeping on a borrowed (stolen) futon from a(n) (ex-)friend while renting a small apartment the size of a Cracker Jack box that was across from an actual crack house with my constantly suicidal and oft wailing friend Krista. Without our own places and living in neighborhoods we either couldn’t afford on our own or couldn’t afford to move out of, Matt and I were not grown-ups. We were grown-up-adjacent.

BECAUSE I’M A stand-up comedian and I talk honestly about my life onstage, and because he was obviously lurking around my gigs all the time, waiting for me to forget I’d met him, Matt knew intimate details about my life before he and I ever had our first conversation. One of the first sentences Matt ever heard me utter was a joke that goes, “When I’m in love with someone it doesn’t dawn on me to want to have their baby. I just don’t think I’ve ever had that urge to… ruin our lives.” So by the time we went on our first date, we’d already had an important (albeit one-sided) discussion about me not wanting to have children.

Matt knew what he was getting into with me—or what he was not getting into, like late-night feedings (except for my two-in-the-morning burrito cravings). After we finally said “I love you” and realized that our thing was going somewhere, because neither of us was looking to go anywhere (else), I revisited the kids topic with Matt almost monthly—and not just when my period was late.

I was very concerned with making certain that Matt was absolutely sure that he didn’t want children. I didn’t want him to just go along with what I was saying simply because his current circumstances led him to not even be able to fathom what having a kid would be like. I wanted Matt to picture himself coming home at night to a