Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  “Excuse me,” she says. “I wanted to ask if you’d like join me for a drink at my club.”

  It is Caroline Hirsch—the legendary namesake and owner of Carolines on Broadway. I nod yes, and she welcomes me into her chauffeured town car. As we ride the few blocks up to the Times Square staple, she speaks of the old days when Letterman and Leno were friends. I follow her downstairs to the velvet-covered, rainbow-lit room and we join Howie Mandel at a table. He does a fist-bumping hello, and I remember how he speaks openly about his obsessive-compulsive disorder.

  “My mom has OCD,” I say. “So I totally get it.”

  “Oh wow,” he says, the same way I react when I find out someone else is divorced. “What does she take for it?”

  I rattle off meds and feel like I’m living in bizarro-land, where I’m suddenly reaching into my TV screen, having conversations with people I’ve watched and admired from the sidelines for years.

  On Friday, I see Jim Norton perform, and at the after-party at the strip club Headquarters, I sit down next to a tall, good-looking guy in a nice suit.

  “So, what’s going on in your life?” he asks.

  “Well, I’ve been kind of depressed lately and calling phone sex lines,” I say.

  He laughs.

  “That’s refreshing,” he says, and introduces himself as Jonathan Brandstein, Norton’s manager.

  “So where do you live?” Jonathan asks.

  “Park Slope with two lesbians,” I say. Then I add, “I pay my rent in pussy.”

  He laughs, and I mumble, “Just kidding.”

  Jonathan then says one of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me about comedy: “Don’t step on the punch,” he says.

  And I get it. Own it. Just like in writing, in comedy—and in romance. We are both not filled up on strip club food, and when I mention I’ve never been to a Gray’s Papaya, he insists. We travel outside, and he tells me hilarious celebrity stories, like how Richard Grieco supposedly likes to pretend to read Nabokov in bars to pick up chicks.

  As 3 a.m. nears, he grabs me a cab.

  “You know something I like about you?” Jonathan asks as the taxi pulls up. “Your height. That’s very Our Bodies, Ourselves of me, isn’t it?”

  “Wow,” I say. “Nice reference.”

  He kisses me good night, and in the days following, I tell Norton about my crush, who texts me asking if Jonathan and I are in “looove.”

  “Not quite,” I text back. But I do like him.

  Over the next few days, Jonathan asks if my job will be sending me to Las Vegas for the upcoming comedy festival there.

  “No . . .” I say, “but I could probably go for fun.”

  We make last-minute plans for me to join him on the trip, and I arrive in Vegas complete with an overpriced $800 Cole Haan leather jacket I’ve put on my charge card to give me a confidence boost. Jonathan takes me back to his room, offers me a drink, and we both kind of laugh uncomfortably.

  “This is kind of weird, isn’t it?” he asks.

  “I’m not going to sleep with you,” I say, “just so you know.”

  “That’s fine,” he says. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  He sneaks me into the greenroom, where I stand next to Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Kimmel, who are cozying up to each other; then I get a few quotes from Ray Romano for Page Six about his wife being horny. I walk around the party and begin talking to an older man bathed in the light of a tiki lamp hanging above. Jonathan whispers to me, “That’s George Schlatter, the guy who founded Laugh-In.”

  George takes one look at me and says my height reminds him of an old vaudeville joke.

  “Here’s what you need to tell guys,” he says. “You say, ‘It’s easy . . . you make two trips.’ ”

  After the festival in Vegas, Jonathan and I talk fairly regularly. But then the calls become less frequent. When one of my friends suggests I play hard to get, I don’t answer. Then, when I call him back a full two days later I can’t reach him. Then I don’t hear from him for days upon days.

  I start to regard my phone as this thing of dread. I turn it off, then obsessively turn it on for a few minutes, then back off, then just hide it.

  During that time, I hit upon a discovery. I can simply change Jonathan’s name in my cell phone. From Jonathan to the catchy “Was Lucky That He Even Knew Me and Would Be Lucky if I Even Picked Up the Phone if He Called Again.”

  I tell the secret to my girlfriends, and they start doing the same. One friend changes “Richard” to “Doesn’t Feel the Same Way.” Another updates “Robert” to “Lives with Girlfriend.” My friend can’t help but be tickled when his latest text to her pops up as: “Lives With Girlfriend: What are you up to?”

  When my phone does finally ring and the long acronym WLTHEKMAWBLIIEPUTPIHCA that I’ve entered for Jonathan comes up, I am pretty chill, I have to say. We decide it’s better for us to just be friends.

  Which is lucky, because Jonathan is the big brother I’ve made out with a few times I never had. When I start dating a comedy writer, Jonathan gives me all manner of advice. Mostly to just be myself and not play all those stupid phone games again.

  The comedy writer is fine and all, but after I take him to the absurdly lavish News Corp Christmas party at the Hilton, I mention offhandedly my awful night where I blacked out and hooked up with the comedy TV producer.

  “So you don’t really know what he did to you,” he says. “He could have fucked you in the ass with a razor blade for all you know.”

  I slink away and tell him that incidentally I’m “off” sex for a while. He breaks up with me shortly after that.

  * * *

  CAROLINE HIRSCH SENDS me a bottle of Veuve Clicquot after my New York Comedy Festival coverage and an invite to her club’s holiday party. I have a great time, and Norton suggests I text Jonathan inquiring as to his dick size, which is always a good look. But somewhere between my first glass of cabernet and my tenth one, everything gets fuzzy.

  I remember instructing the cabdriver to stop at McDonald’s so I can get fries. Then at a bodega so I can get a Chunky bar. And I definitely remember the cabdriver screaming at me when I realize I’ve lost my wallet to get the hell out of his cab.

  The next day, I scrounge five dollars in quarters from the lesbians’ change drawer to take the subway in to work, and, not really knowing who to call, I reach out to an uncle who I know is a minister.

  I cry and talk, cry and talk. He asks me if I will agree to accept Jesus Christ as my personal lord and savior.

  “Sure,” I say.

  My uncle shares with me passages of scripture from the New Testament, like “The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.”

  That sounds good. I ask him if maybe he will call me every day to check in.

  “Oh well,” he says, “every day might be kind of hard.”

  “No, no, don’t worry about it,” I say.

  Awesome. I am just as needy with him (“if I accept Jesus as my savior, will you be my friend?”) as I am with guys I’m dating. I feel like I’m just good for a one-night thing, either with Jesus or with sex. Still, I’m grateful for the talk and I don’t mind the foray into spirituality either. Overall, my feeling about religion is this: If it works, it works. Even though that conversation doesn’t quite lead to a long-term personal connection, I do appreciate the notion of welcoming God more into my life, no matter how bumbling I am in the application of it. Prayer is calming and focused and love. And—when it works, boy does it work.

  Being alone does have some upsides, though. For my final story of the year, Steve agrees to let me do a piece where I go out on dates with all the randos who contact me on MySpace. The news peg? Social media folks are Time’s “Person of the Year.”

  While I’m writing the first draft of the story, Steve comes over to my desk and says, “It reads too much l
ike a stand-up comedy routine.”

  I always forget that he can get into my “basket” (as our personal or shared server files are called, with editors able to read ours, but reporters unable to read editors’), and so Steve is reviewing as I am writing.

  Steve looks at me uncertainly, and my heart sinks. I don’t want to disappoint him.

  “Go deeper,” he says.

  To do that, I focus on my favorite person from the story, forty-eight-year-old George Jack.

  “We meet in Union Square,” I write of George Jack, who I realize upon reflection might not have been using his real name. “And it’s kind of like Sleepless in Seattle except that he lives in his parents’ basement in the Bronx and I want to kill myself.”

  But then I get more honest, less jokey, at Steve’s prodding.

  “Let’s be fair. George is pretty cool,” I write. “He says he likes me because I’m not fake like some of the women on there. He tells me some ladies will try to get him to pay for their journey to America. I’m not like that at all, and I feel really great about myself. We part ways, and he tells me when he will be online next. The schedule depends on when the computer store is open. George isn’t ashamed, and I kind of respect him for it.”

  When the piece publishes, I’m flooded with email from people all over the world who connect with the loneliness and the desperation. But the best email is from George himself.

  have merry xmas and thanks to myspace, me and my ex are probably getting back together and yr article sealed it ty george.

  I am still single at the end of 2006, but at least George isn’t.

  chapter five

  * * *

  The Dating Column

  2007

  I welcome in the New Year with comedian Julie Klausner at a small dinner in Chinatown then a “Get Lucky in ’07” party in Greenpoint. After taking a few long drags of a joint with repeats of Intervention playing in the background, I walk stoned and blissed-out in the rain to find the subway. On the F train home, with the mellow numbness of the buzz kicking in and the orange-and-cream colors of the seats fuzzing around me, I have a moment of clarity.

  I keep waiting for my life to begin. I keep waiting for everything to be okay. But what if I stopped waiting?

  Gazing around the rattling subway, soiled newspapers and trash everywhere I look, I sit down, close my eyes, and imagine myself on a ride at Disneyland. I repeat to myself the question: What if I just decided everything was okay right now?

  Waking up the next morning, the feeling hasn’t totally vanished, and I start enjoying how different things look. Maybe the fear that constantly wracks me could be processed as something else: excitement.

  As part of my “everything is awesome” initiative, I decide I am going to be the best me possible—by trying to fix all my physical imperfections. So when a doctor I barely know says he is willing to give me a free laser treatment on a few veins near my ankles, I’m stoked.

  I originally met him during my piece on the “detox-retox” lifestyle in New York, and a friend told me I should talk to this guy because he partied the hardest. I left the doc a message at the time, and he called me back.

  “New York Post, Mandy speaking,” I answered.

  “You just feel like the coolest person in the world answering that way, don’t you?” the doc said derisively.

  “Oh hey, hi,” I said. “Yeah, I was wondering if I could talk to you for—”

  “Do I want to be quoted in a story about getting fucked up all the time?” he cut me off. “No.”

  But we kept in touch, and when the opportunity for the free laser comes up, I am excited to try it. In his posh office now, he looks over my chart.

  “You’ve had a pectus excavatum?” he asks. “Interesting. Can I see?”

  I lift up my dress, and he gets a nice long look at my breasts and the surgery scar from when I was nine.

  “Very nice,” he says, and I realize I have just shown my tits for the sole purpose of him wanting to see. I’m there for my ankle. Not my chest.

  Pretty soon, he fires up the laser and goes to work on my ankle. It feels like I am being shot, and afterward, I stare down, and a huge red welt appears.

  “That’s normal,” he says.

  And I nod. But as weeks go by, it doesn’t get any better. It gets worse, in fact, and I think about how much the increasingly ugly tissue reminds me of the pectus excavatum scar he had unnecessarily asked to see.

  The scar from my childhood still haunts me.

  I was just nine years old when I stood naked for another creepy physician who conducted a full examination, breaking down what was wrong with me.

  “Well, do you see right here?” the doctor pointed out to my mom, touching my undeveloped breasts. “Her chest, it’s concave. Now, you wouldn’t want her to be embarrassed when she goes swimming, would you?”

  No, no. We wouldn’t want her to be embarrassed about that.

  To counteract the very slight chest concavity that no one would have ever noticed in the first place, major surgery was required. In the next few weeks, I was anesthetized and laid out on the operating table, my chest was cut open, the ends of my ribs were removed, and my sternum was broken then straightened out, with a metal bar put temporarily in place.

  I look at pictures of myself before the operation and it still blows my mind that this was done so that I could feel better about my body. Pictures of me before the surgery show a twinkling light in my eyes that just went dark.

  My surgical scar after was hideous: bulbous, jagged, thick, inflamed, and deformed. It never fully faded. It just grew uglier, hardened and ropy, like I had been soldered back together by a drunk welder’s apprentice.

  I’ve learned as an adult: Pectus excavatum surgery is not recommended if you have no symptoms, like decreased lung capacity. Failing the bathing suit competition at the Miss USA pageant is not actually a medical symptom.

  “Who did this to you?” I’ve had other doctors say to me since.

  I just shake my head when people do. Because I don’t want to talk about it.

  Honestly, it wasn’t even the surgery or the ugly scar that fucked me up the most—it was the abandonment that came with it. That first night in the hospital, I was in so much pain, I kept crying out to my mom to comfort me. By that time, she was on heavy drugs for her OCD. She was passed out and couldn’t hear me, no matter how loud I yelled. I just kept calling for her.

  “Mom . . . Mom . . . Mom.”

  That experience stayed with me, psychically and emotionally. It was such an ugly slash and for the rest of my life, anyone who ever saw me naked seemed to react with this barely contained sharp exhale of disappointment. Like I had an Alien-style creature thumping out of my chest that I hadn’t told them about. “What’s—what’s this?” men would ask, touching it, mildly pissed, filled with buyer’s remorse.

  For a long time, I wanted to write up a simple-to-read, handily illustrated pamphlet that explained the situation beforehand so that I would never have to hear that fucking exhale again.

  That way, at bars, I could just slide my disclaimer on over: “Hello. We’re enjoying a drink together right now but in the event that you see me naked later, I want you to know exactly what you are in for, because I can’t bear to see the look of disappointment on your face.”

  And now my old chest scar has new company. The ankle disfigurement never goes away.

  * * *

  WHEN VANITY FAIR’S Graydon Carter announces the opening of a new ultra-exclusive restaurant called the Waverly Inn, everyone in New York is abuzz. Press is not allowed to report (which, of course, is a surefire way to gurantee press), so the Sunday editor, Lauren Ramsby, wants me to go undercover.

  “I want a nice, great, reported read,” she says. “Not just opinion, but tell readers what it’s like having spent a week there. Do they let in Wall Street VPs for the first seating? Do Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg come every Thursday? Is someone palming twenty dollars on the way in? Really j
ust a fly-on-the-wall thing, but an aggregated, authoritative look at what’s going on.”

  I have a week’s worth of expense budget to spend at the Waverly, but it’s seemingly impossible to get a reservation. Even getting the secret reservation number is a challenge. Corynne Steindler, a junior reporter for Page Six, finally hooks me up, but she warns I can’t say it came from Richard Johnson. When I call, a man answers and immediately asks who I am and where I got the number. “I’m a model?” I improvise. “I got it from . . . friends?” He hangs up.

  One of the first nights there, I wait at the Starbucks around the corner until I hear from the paparazzi that Gwyneth Paltrow has just arrived. I show up a few minutes later and meet Mackenzie at the bar, where we work very hard to act unimpressed that SNL’s Maya Rudolph is incognito next to us in a bulky sweater and Paul Rudd’s ice-blue eyes are betraying his identity above his thick beard.

  Despite the celebrities everywhere, I’m more interested in Rick the busboy. Not only is he cute, I may be able to get his number and turn him into a spy.

  When our table companion asks Mackenzie if I am really going to get Rick to divulge information using flirtation as a motivating factor, Mackenzie responds, dry as ever: “Journalists are emotional prostitutes. Didn’t you know that?”

  Another night, I go with Page Six’s Corynne, and we recognize then Men’s Health editor in chief David Zinczenko sitting with Richard Johnson. We go over to say hello. I tell David I wrote about his book a year ago (in which I also mercilessly made fun of it).

  “You wrote that fucking article,” David says, glaring.

  “What?” I say. “I was nice.”

  I’m such a pussy.

  Corynne then takes me to Bungalow 8, where, once I am inside, I suddenly understand what people mean when they talk about secret celebrity worlds. In one corner, I see the club’s owner, Amy Sacco, holding hands with a cornrow-bedecked Axl Rose, jumping up and down near a giant indoor palm tree. In another corner is Mary-Kate Olsen, alternately chain-smoking and making out with her date.