Comedy Sex God

by Pete Holmes

  A few minutes later I was in my tiny bathroom eating peanut butter with my fingers, staring at my sad eyes in the mirror and looking quite unfamiliar to myself. All I wanted to do was listen to Radiohead in the dark alone. Before returning to my brother, who was probably worried about why I had just locked myself in the bathroom with a jar of Skippy, I saw what I had become: a sad, stoned man with the munchies. “What a cliché,” I said to myself, mentally acknowledging that talking to your reflection while stoned was also cliché.

  I had never felt something like that before. I thought, This is what I wanted Advil to feel like. Everything was floating in honey. My brother, now also adequately stoned after having been left with the joint while I finger-brushed with chunky, was going on about dragons or the shadow government or how there’s fluoride in the water to make us complacent, which is why we don’t care that there’s fluoride in the water making us complacent, and I got a little paranoid at how on the nose the drug session was becoming. Munchies, conspiracies, and paranoia. I remember thinking, I have to get off this bus. I excused myself, went into my bedroom, and listened to Thom Yorke’s The Eraser in the dark.

  The next day, after I blew a very important audition to be on an improv team because I didn’t know weed hangovers were a thing, my brother took me out and we bought sad books to keep me company. I put the bag of Kerouac next to my bed. They would remain unread, but I took comfort in knowing they were there, like my crotchety roommates I never bothered to get to know.

  Sad people don’t really know what to do to make not-sad people more comfortable around them. I appreciated the company, but now that the weed smoking and book shopping was done, I wasn’t sure what else we could do. So I picked up my guitar and we sang a song I had been playing by myself alone several times a day—Ben Harper’s “Another Lonely Day.”

  We sang it, sweetly and with our real voices, like a two-person church.

  I had never heard my brother sing before.

  kicked in the nuts

  MOST OF MY LIFE, I HAD BEEN EITHER HAPPY, ANXIOUS, or sleepy. Now, faced with the uncomfortable reality of a divorce I was reminded of every time I washed my hands and felt the cool white indent where my wedding ring used to be, I was confronted with more challenging emotions, like dread, despair, rage, and disgust.

  As much as I tried to push them down, still going onstage nightly, smiling through light, fluffy jokes about ice packs and whether or not vampires were afraid of lowercase “t”s, these feelings eventually found a way out on their own: out of nowhere, I felt a deep, dull ache in my balls. After waiting for the pain to go away, occasionally icing them with cans of orange soda, or warming them with a sock filled with rice I’d heat up in the microwave, I asked my friend John Mulaney if he would go to the doctor if his balls hurt for no reason for over a week. I still remember the look on his face and the sound of horror in his voice: “For God’s sakes, yes!”

  It’s a weird thing, going to the doctor for a pain you think your broken heart might be causing. How do you explain it to a man of science? I thought maybe I would be better off going to a shrink, but it was too late. When the doctor came into the room I tried to lighten the mood and keep things funny for both our sakes. He asked me what was wrong and I told him, “It’s my balls.”

  He corrected me. “You mean your testicles.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I call them my balls.”

  He didn’t even smile. “In here, we’ll call them testicles.”

  Sure, I thought. But isn’t that rule for him, not me? I can call them whatever I want. It would be weird if he put on a rubber glove and said, “Okay, let’s take a look at your nuts!” But he wasn’t having it.

  I told him it felt like I had gotten kicked down there, but I hadn’t. He didn’t seem shocked. He told me that his only concern was that I might be infertile. Still going for laughs, I replied, “That wouldn’t be so bad. It would be like I’m on the pill.”

  He gave me zero, then told me there was nothing he could do. “The only thing you can try is to stop exercising, as the jostling may aggravate them, and it’d probably be helpful to masturbate from time to time.”

  I looked at him dumbfounded. “If the cure for this is not working out and masturbating,” I said, “how the hell did I get it? I’ve been living that lifestyle for years.”

  Again, not even a smile. He nodded his head, as in, “I heard you,” then told me that if I was still sad about my wife in seven weeks he would put me on meds.

  the hooraytheist

  EVENTUALLY, ALONG WITH THE JETTA, I LOST GOD IN the divorce.

  My whole life, I had done everything “right”: I went on mission trips to build houses for poor people in Uganda. I memorized scripture, wore khakis, and played a moderately funky bass in the worship team. I brought nonalcoholic alternatives to parties—I was supposed to be protected. But still, my wife and a small Italian man had slipped past God’s watchful eye and had blown up my life from the inside. How could this happen? It felt like the Lord hadn’t held up His end of the bargain, and I was pissed.

  From pissed came doubt. I started daring to scrutinize my faith, because for the first time in my life, I was alone. There was no mom, no wife, no Christian college roommates, no one to reflect my beliefs back at me, or to tell me that my logical objections were just God testing me. So I went deep, deeper than I ever had, thinking thoughts I had always been too scared to think, afraid that God was watching the voice in my head like a lifeguard, tallying up every lustful, hateful, or doubtful musing as a sin to use against me after I died. But things were so fucked, what did I have to lose?

  I listened to Julia Sweeney’s one-woman show Letting Go of God. I ordered Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, terrified Amazon would accidentally send the book to my mom’s house. It wasn’t easy, or fun, but I started to see how my faith, what I had believed to be the One True Faith, was really a product of where, when, and to whom I was born.

  When I first got married, my parents gave my wife and me a whole set of antiques from their house to help us fill our new apartment, and on those quiet days alone, my faith started to feel like those antiques—just another thing I had inherited. I realized I never asked for the oriental rugs, or the rolltop desk, or the belief that every Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, and atheist was going to burn forever in a lake of fire. I didn’t say yes to those things, I just didn’t say no to them, so they were given to me because I didn’t know how to listen to my heart or my intuition or how cheap a desk is if you buy it at Ikea and put it together yourself.

  Around this time, my ex emailed me and asked if I could come and pick up my stuff. She was moving . . . and pregnant . . . and getting married. I couldn’t stomach the idea of any of this, never mind going back to the upstate Hell House, but my roommate from my semester abroad in Israel, Kurt, cashed in his frequent flier miles and flew in from Michigan to help me pack up, forever cementing him in my mind as one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. We borrowed a car and drove up together and rushed into the house, me dreading the idea of running into Charlie, or Molly, or the mummy woman, and smelled the cigarettes and the ointments one last time as we quickly packed up my clothes and my PlayStation and sneaked out like thieves.

  Before we left, Kurt asked if I wanted the antiques. I said no. None of them were mine anyway.

  Just after we started driving back to my sublet in Bushwick, we pulled over and went for a stroll in the woods. The day had been heavy, and we needed a break. Kurt put his hand on my shoulder and asked if he could pray for me. I agreed and closed my eyes, as he asked God to help me in this trying time, that He would make me know that I wasn’t alone, and that people loved me.

  Tears ran down my face. This might be it, I thought. This may be the last time Jesus and I will ever talk.

  atheist crackers

  THE STRANGEST THING ABOUT BECOMING AN ATHEIST was how little things changed. With no divine rules or threat of eternal punishment hanging over my head, I still somehow managed to no
t lie, cheat, steal, or kill anybody. Although to be honest, I was a little confused as to why we weren’t lying, cheating, or stealing. Not killing people still made sense, but why, for example, should we not steal some peanut butter crackers from the unmanned mini-mart in this Holiday Inn?

  That was a real question I asked two of my comedian friends when we were on the road together and staying at a Holiday Inn that had an unmanned mini-mart that sold peanut butter crackers. Both of my friends were atheists, which came as no surprise—almost every comedian I know is an atheist, which makes sense when you think about it. A comedian’s job is to stand outside the thing and make jokes about it, not to be in the thing (the thing being marriage, or having kids, or believing in God). This is why the majority of comedians I know are the unmarried, childless, godless people making fun of everybody else from the back of the room. They’re supposed to be. Which is why it surprised me that both of them, who I knew proudly believed in nothing, told me not to pocket that sleeve of eight toasted cracker sandwiches.

  I’m a little embarrassed to say I pushed back. (We had been drinking.)

  “If there’s no God, and nobody’s watching, who cares? Let’s eat some fucking free cracker sandwiches!”

  My two friends looked at each other like parents deciding which one of them should impart the lesson. Their response was simple, but to me, it was a revelation.

  “If you steal them,” one of them said, “the receptionist on duty might get in trouble. When the money comes up short, she might get fired.”

  The other continued, “We don’t not steal or lie because we might get in trouble, or because God will be mad at us. We don’t steal or lie to help each other. We’re all we’ve got.”

  It was weird having my old values sold back to me with a different rationale. I had grown up with Jesus telling me to love my neighbor as myself, but here were two nonbelievers—people I thought were lawless nihilists like members of a postapocalyptic motorcycle gang—saying the same thing, but with different words: “Don’t be a dick,” they said.

  And there it was, the new summation of the law. If an atheist had climbed up Mount Sinai instead of Moses, he would have come down with just one commandment, chiseled big on half a tablet: DON’T BE A DICK.

  We’re all we’ve got.

  I HAD NEVER GOTTEN A CLOSE-UP LOOK BEFORE AT A beautiful atheist, but now I had dozens to examine and admire. Before, I had always looked at nonbelievers as tightrope walkers, risking their souls to the hellfire below with nothing to balance them but a long stick marked “science.” I thought they were all amoral hedonists ready to bum you out with a quick “everything is meaningless and then you die” if you ever found yourself in the unfortunate position of being stuck in a conversation with one. But suddenly it wasn’t hard to understand the beauty of their worldview. If this is all there is, then this is all there is.

  This is the Big Show! This isn’t a simulation! This isn’t a waiting room for later. This is it! Clearly you could be an atheist and still have a deep respect for human life and values. In fact, your respect may be more sincere, since you’re not doing it for the eternal reward you’ve been promised after you die. You’re not being bribed to love your neighbors, you’re loving them because they’re caught in the same confusing, frightening bullshit we all are. It’s not “no one’s watching, who cares!” It’s “no one’s watching, let’s watch each other.”

  I didn’t steal the crackers.

  “nothing”

  THE BIGGEST PERK IN BECOMING AN ATHEIST WAS nothing.

  When I was a believer, I had something. And not just any something, an important something. It was a something I was under constant pressure to sell, promote, and defend. It was a matter of life and death.

  It was exhausting.

  BEFORE MY DIVORCE, MY MOM, DAD, AND BROTHER came for a visit to New York. I was excited to show them how real New Yorkers lived, and after that failed, I took them to Times Square.

  I was sitting across from my brother at a chain restaurant overlooking a gigantic neon green billboard for Jenna Jameson’s new adult film, her huge boobs directly in my line of sight, when my brother, the least Jesusy of our group, got bored of listening to our parents discussing why a waiter should never clear the plates until everyone has finished eating and decided to grill me on my least favorite subject: hell.

  We’d had this conversation before. In fact, I’d had it hundreds of times with various people, though even with repetition, it never got any easier. Just the introduction of the topic got my lower back sweating.

  “So, dude,” he began, “if someone doesn’t believe in Jesus, they go to hell, dude?”

  I briefly considered jumping out the window and diving into the sanctuary of Jenna’s ample, two-story cleavage, but instead I took the bait.

  “Yes.”

  “So, you’re saying a Buddhist monk slips and falls into a ravine. He goes to hell, dude?”

  “Yes, dude.”

  I think, Baby on an island is next.

  “What about a baby born on a deserted island? They never hurt anybody, but they never hear about Jesus. They die, they go to hell, dude?”

  My pulse elevated, my jaw tightened. I hated being backed into this corner, even though I had been taught what to say—a blend of Psalm 19 and Romans 1:20—“The Heavens declare the glory of the Lord” and “men are without excuse”—then my answer: “Yes.”

  My mind flashed back to the VCR carts rolled into our church gym, where we watched low-budget skits of teenagers dying in car crashes, finding themselves in the afterlife, then “checking in” to heaven like at a hotel, only to have to watch their nonbelieving friends get turned away, their names not in the Book of Life, and pushed into industrial elevators going down, an eternal down, screaming to their more fortunate, saved friends, “Why didn’t you tell me about Jesus before it was too late?!”

  I was in my midtwenties, but I was still basing a lot of my answers on those videos. But I needed more, and my brother wasn’t done. Next, in the undulating glow of that Forty-Second Street restaurant, my brother pulled out the big guns.

  “So, six million Jews die in the Holocaust, they’re all in hell? After all that torture and pain and suffering, God just sucks them down for more torture, pain, and suffering?”

  The videos didn’t have an answer for that one. I didn’t know what to say. I was failing.

  “What about me, dude? I don’t believe what you and mom believe. Am I going to hell?”

  My stomach twisted. Suddenly, it wasn’t a nameless, clumsy monk or a hypothetical, improbable island baby. It was millions of innocent victims of genocide; it was my brother, who taught me how to shave and bought me my first beer, sitting right in front of me. I couldn’t stomach the idea of all those people, or my brother, getting in that dirty down elevator while I was whisked up to the penthouse in a soft robe holding a complimentary glass of nonalcoholic sparkling cider just because we believed different things.

  But my job was to convert people and save them, and you don’t save people with uncertainty, so I kept my conflicted feelings to myself. I could sense that what I had been taught just couldn’t be true, but my earnest what-is-this? had me pledging my allegiance to these ideas countless times. Admitting this internal struggle, yielding to my gut and admitting to my brother that I shared the same doubts he was voicing, meant turning my back on the good I had experienced in church—the joy, the comfort, and the community. Plus, worse, it would put me in line for the down elevator, sending me to a terrible place where I would have plenty of time to chat with my brother in between lava baths.

  My head throbbed, my fists clenched, my throat became suddenly dry. I had gone from zero to furious in five questions.

  I was angry at myself, I was angry at him. I was angry at this system of belief that had me answering yes to these terrible questions. My literal belief in the Bible wasn’t saving me, showing me the light, or setting me free. It was causing me pain.

  ONE DIVORCE AND ONE CON
VERSATION ABOUT KEEBLER peanut butter crackers later, I was finally able to put down all that something and replace it with a clean, simple, elegant nothing.

  I was really excited about nothing. And not just any nothing, but that satisfying, final nothing that comes after the question, “What do you think happens when we die?” That nothing. Oh, sweet Lord, that’s a great nothing. That’s the nothing you meet when your brilliant, kindhearted atheist friends quote Epicurus—“Why should I fear death? When I am, death is not. When death is, I am not”—and say things like, “Where were you during the Renaissance?”

  That’s the nothing. The nothing that you were during the Renaissance. I so enjoyed the steam release from my brain that came from accepting the idea that when you die, you go back to that nothing. And being nothing is nothing new. You were nothing far longer than you were Steve, or Cheryl, or Jordan. Infinitely longer, in fact, an uncountable nothing. And it didn’t hurt and you didn’t mind. You just weren’t, and there was no part of you there to panic about it.

  Some people freak when they think about slipping back into nothing, but for me, newly extracted from the Christian world—DC Talk still on my iPod—nothing was a welcome change. When you go from the possibility that you got it wrong, that Jews and Buddhists and my brother spent their entire lives—whoops—worshiping the wrong way or not believing quite hard enough and would therefore, despite their best efforts, burn forever in conscious, living torment, nothing is one hell of an improvement (pun intended).

  And a relief. I’ll take nothing over the chance of burning forever any day of the week and twice on Sunday. And my atheist friends weren’t reciting something they learned in churches, churches their parents made them go to; they had no moral or social obligation to reflect certain views in order to be part of a group; they were just using their adult, fully formed, college-graduate, science-loving, rational, thinking minds. And it makes sense! I can feel who I Am coming from my brain! It’s up there! I think, My name is Pete, and I can locate that thought in the smushy gray stuff behind my eyes! That dies, I die. No more brain. No more Pete. Goodnight.