It should tell you something about where I was at, that an evening spent hobnobbing with rich, drunken Los Angelenos sounded like a vacation. So I say, “Cool,” and we go to L.A.
I get to the fund-raiser, at which point I find out that I am cohosting this event with another controversial luminary of parenting, Dr. Richard Ferber. For those who don’t know, Dr. Ferber is the author of a book called The Ferber Method, which is a sleep-training concept.
I haven’t read the book, but I’ll try to summarize it for you. In essence, Dr. Ferber’s method stipulates that if your child is crying, you ignore that child. You let them “cry it out,” thus teaching them to self-soothe. And also that the world is a cold, horrible place, filled with people who only pretend to love them.
By contrast, what we were practicing with Vivien is called “attachment parenting.” Attachment parenting dictates than when your child makes a peep, a whimper, the slightest sound, you rush into their room, grab them, cradle them in your arms, and tell them that you love them.
Thus ensuring that the child will sleep in your bed until she leaves for college. Or in some cases, grad school.
So I wasn’t really sure how this fund-raiser was gonna go. But I meet Dr. Ferber, and he’s a nice, avuncular guy. We have a nice chat. And then the fund-raiser commences, and I begin to drink.
Dr. Ferber’s role, however, is a little more involved than mine. At a moment when inebriation has settled heavily on the crowd, Dr. Ferber pulls down a screen and begins to give a lengthy, highly detailed slide show about how to put a baby to sleep.
The problem is that he and I are probably the only people here who’ve ever put a baby to sleep, because the rest of these people have nannies who do that. So nobody’s really interested.
The highlight of the slide show comes when a picture of me from Go the Fuck to Sleep flashes on the screen.
It’s me sneaking out of a child’s room, and Dr. Ferber’s like, “This, right here, this is what you should never do. This is completely wrong.”
I’m like, Dr. Ferber just threw me under the sleep-training bus. Everybody turns to look at me, and I just keep drinking.
I go back to my hotel room, and I wake up the next morning, and I find in my inbox an e-mail from Dr. Richard Ferber. The subject heading of the e-mail is “Why didn’t you tell me that I know you?”
I’m like, Dr. Ferber has lost his mind.
Then I opened the e-mail, and my mind is blown, because it turns out that unbeknownst to me, I went to summer camp with Dr. Ferber’s son, the unforgettably named Thad Ferber. He and I were friends and campmates, until I got kicked out of the camp. He lived two towns over from me, which at thirteen means you only see that dude like once a year.
But in 1990 the play date I had with Thad Ferber consisted of a trip to Tower Records on Newbury Street in Boston to buy rap records. I was a deejay and an emcee, and this is what I did.
We get to Tower Records and find that the rap section is being guarded by a life-size cardboard cutout of MC Hammer, who was himself a very controversial figure in 1990—not considered to be the most authentic or talented dude by hard-core hip-hoppers like myself.
So naturally I rip the head off of the cardboard cutout and stuff it into my jacket—not in an act of theft, as much as decapitation. And as I attempt to sneak out of Tower Records, Thad Ferber and I are accosted and captured by Tower Records security. Thad Ferber—guilty only by association—and I are taken down into the dungeon, deep in the bowels of Tower Records, where we are seated, informed that the cardboard cutout of MC Hammer is worth five thousand dollars, which seems spurious in retrospect, and told that we will be released only into police or parental custody.
Now, this was not my first rodeo. I got in trouble all the time. This was like a regular Tuesday for me. So I gave the Tower Records police a phone number that I had memorized for occasions such as this, one that I knew just rang and rang and rang, and nobody ever picked up, and there was no answering machine. This was an incredibly important phone number for me to have at thirteen.
And it would have worked. They would have tried it three times, gotten bored, and let us go.
Thad Ferber, however, had never been to the rodeo. So he gave them him his actual phone number, and in short order Dr. Richard Ferber shows up at Tower Records. I am released into his custody, somehow, and he drives me home.
Oh, and Thad Ferber and I are banned for life from Tower Records. Which turned out to be their life, not mine, because they’re defunct now.
All this came flooding back to me as I read the e-mail. And it was a great weight off my shoulders, because clearly, even the great and powerful Dr. Richard Ferber is not so infallible as a parent, in that he had let his kid hang out with me.
I start to think that maybe all of the worrying I’ve been doing is unnecessary. Maybe I am as much of and as little of a parenting expert as anybody else who’s ever had a child.
Maybe I’m not actually faking this. Or maybe we’re all faking this equally. And maybe I do know a couple of things. Like keep your sense of humor at all costs. Or embrace the absurdity of the situations in which you find yourself.
Or even, realize that there are worse things than spending two hours trapped in a room with the person you love most in the world.
I mean, you could be in the basement of a Tower Records.
Or listening to a slide show by Dr. Ferber.
So with a sense of profound relief, I packed up my family. And for what felt like the first time in a very, very long time, we went home.
ADAM MANSBACH is a novelist, screenwriter, cultural critic, and humorist. He is the author of the number-one New York Times bestseller Go the Fuck to Sleep, which has been translated into forty languages, named Time magazine’s 2011 “Thing of the Year,” and sold over 2 million copies worldwide, and the 2014 sequel, You Have to Fucking Eat. His novels include Rage Is Back, Angry Black White Boy, and The End of the Jews, winner of the California Book Award, as well as the thrillers The Dead Run and The Devil’s Bag Man, and several middle-grade titles. He also wrote “Wake the Fuck Up,” a 2012 campaign video starring Samuel L. Jackson that was awarded a Gold Pollie as the election’s best by the American Association of Political Consultants. Mansbach was the 2009–11 New Voices Professor of Fiction at Rutgers University, a 2012 Sundance Screenwriting Lab Fellow, and a 2013 Berkeley Repertory Theatre Writing Fellow, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Book Review, Esquire, the Believer, the Guardian, and on National Public Radio’s This American Life and All Things Considered. He is also the coauthor, with Alan Zweibel and Dave Barry, of For This We Left Egypt? A Passover Haggadah for Jews and the People Who Love Them, forthcoming in 2017. He also wrote the screenplay for the motion picture Barry, about Barack Obama’s first year in New York City. Starring Devon Terrell, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Ashley Judd and directed by Vikram Ghandi, it will have its theatrical release in late 2016.
This story was told on September 21, 2015, at the Boulder Theater in Boulder, Colorado. The theme of the evening was High Anxiety. Director: Sarah Austin Jenness.
The least comfortable situation I can imagine myself in is being seated in a conference room with five hundred Lutherans.
It’s super uncomfortable for me, even if, technically, I am a Lutheran pastor.
When I indeed found myself in that very situation a few years ago, I ended up spending most of the meeting in the lobby, having found the other half dozen misanthropic clergypeople to hang out with and talk smack about other people.
Then one of them said, “Hey, we should go around the circle and say what adjective, if someone used it to describe you, would be, like, the worst.”
And someone said, “Stupid.”
I thought, Ooh, yeah, that’s bad.
And then someone said, “Boring.”
And I was like, Ooh, yeah.
But when it came to me, I knew, absolutely, what it was going to be: “needy.”
I would so much
rather be described as stupid or boring than needy.
It’s super important to me that everyone know that I’m strong as hell and can handle everything myself. As a matter of fact, my mom said that the first time I spoke more than one word at a time as a kid, I skipped two-word combinations altogether and went straight to “Do it self.”
I will do it myself.
Usually that works out pretty well for me, but not when I had an opportunity to go to the Holy Land as a Lutheran pastor. I really wanted to go, even if it was on a tour with twenty Super-Nice Lutherans from Wisconsin.
And so I had a strategy for dealing with being in close quarters with twenty Super-Nice Lutherans from Wisconsin. I decided that I would keep my distance. I wasn’t going to get close to anyone or engage with them very much, mostly out of fear that they might want something from me, like to laugh at corny puns or look at lots of pictures of their grandchildren.
So I chose to keep to myself. And that plan worked pretty well until about five days into the trip, when we went on this day trip that we were taking from Bethlehem to Jericho. Since I hadn’t really made much of a connection with anyone, nobody knew that I had this horrible fear of driving on mountain roads—an actual anxiety disorder (which is not completely convenient, because I’m from Colorado…).
But nobody knew this.
I knew that Jericho was the lowest habitable place on earth and that Bethlehem was just at sea level. What I didn’t know was that the road that we would have to take to get to Jericho was so steep it wouldn’t actually be legal in the United States and that we would be traveling on this road in a tour bus. The road had so many hairpin turns and so few guardrails that I spent the entire time praying and cursing and praying and cursing.
But I kept this all to myself, having my own private little panic attack. When we finally arrived in Jericho, I quietly celebrated that I had “done it self,” but I also knew that I had no reserves left, and I knew I was going to spend the entire time in Jericho freaked out about the fact that we would have to take the same road back up, but this time in the dark.
There’s this cool thing I was excited about experiencing in Jericho—riding a ski-lift-gondola thing up a big cliff to go to a beautiful monastery that’s carved out of the side of a mountain. (I’m not afraid of heights at all, unless I’m in a car on a road, so I was fine with that.)
So while my whole group of Super-Nice Lutherans from Wisconsin is in line to wait for the ski-lift-gondola things, I systematically go to each person in my group asking if anyone might have some anxiety meds I could “borrow.” For most of them, this would be the first time I’ve talked to them in five days.
Trying to be seen as super strong and not-needy is hard when you’re asking people if they have any Valium.
But I went to each one, and they all gave me the same midwestern, tilted-headed, “Oh, I’m so sorry I can’t help you,” crestfallen thing, and it was totally legit.
I got to the last person, and I said, “Hey, Sharon.” (And I couldn’t believe I got her name right.) I was like, “Sharon, do you have any Valium?”
She said, “No.”
And I thought, Okay, I’m going to have to be able to just do this. I can do it.
I get into a gondola, and as it lifts up into the dry air, I can see Jericho. It’s so beautiful there. And I thought about the Bible story about Jericho. There’s this situation where the Hebrew people have fought this incredible battle there, and the walls come tumbling down. And the only reason they were able to win the battle was that the two spies that were sent ahead of everyone else had help from this character named Rahab. But she was sort of the least likely person to give them help. Rahab was a prostitute.
I kept wondering if it was humiliating for them, receiving help from a prostitute. Would they have even spoken to her if they met her on the street otherwise?
My gondola arrives at the top of the mountain, and my whole tour group goes and does some sort of pious group activity.
But I kept to myself, except for chatting with complete strangers. I didn’t talk to the people I was spending two weeks with, but I was friendly enough to people on this trip who I knew I’d only see for like five minutes. (I have a similar policy on airplanes, where I disappear into magazines and headphones until the final descent, at which time I decide to be friendly, turning to my seatmate and asking if they are coming home or leaving home. That way, if they’re stupid, or boring, or needy, it’s like a ten-minute commitment, tops.)
And so I chatted with a couple of strangers. But mostly, when we were up at the monastery, I was formulating a plan for how I was going to get back up the road without any borrowed Valium.
I thought, I’ll just not look out the window. And as painful as it is, I’ll engage in small talk with someone and maybe just distract myself so much that I won’t freak out.
An hour later, as I get into a gondola to come back down, I realize it’s filled, not with people from my tour group, but with five Kenyans, all in these bright turquoise matching church shirts.
As soon as the gondola starts moving, this big, beautiful black woman next to me, grabs my knee and starts rocking back and forth.
I look at her friends like, What the hell’s going on?
And they say, “She’s afraid of heights.”
So I put my hand on her hand that had grabbed my knee, and with the other hand I rub her back, and I say, “You’re okay. I’m right here. You’re okay. I’m right here.”
And suddenly I’m praying. And her friends are singing hymns.
I say, “If God can bring down the walls of Jericho, God’s gonna get this gondola down the hill, I promise you. You’re okay.”
And I wondered in that moment, did she ever think that her need would met by a heavily tattooed tall white lady from America? Am I someone she would’ve voluntarily spoken to on the street or not? I didn’t know. But in that moment, I was helping her in her need.
When we finally arrive at the bottom, my whole tour group is waiting for me, and they see this unexplainable sight of me and five Kenyans pouring out of a gondola, all hugging each other, and the woman who was afraid of heights falling to her knees and saying, “Praise Jesus.”
And now these Kenyans are like my best friends, but I haven’t talked to any of the twenty people in my group in five days.
So we get onto the bus again, and I think, I can do this. I’m going to distract myself.
I totally succeed for ten minutes. I am engaging in small talk, feeling super proud, and definitely not looking out the window. When all of a sudden the bus stops very violently, and we all jerk forward, and there’s this really loud sound underneath the bus.
What the hell?
I swing around and look out the window, realizing we have failed to make a hairpin turn. And now the left side of the bus is facing a cliff, and the right side of the tour bus is blocking traffic in both directions on the hairpin turn, on this one-lane road with two-way traffic.
And as soon as the driver tries to reengage the clutch and go forward, we lurch back about ten feet, and he swings open the door and says, “Leave your stuff and get out!”
My vision blurs all around the edges, and I start not being able to breathe. I run out of the bus, and all I can see is this patch of concrete along the side of the road, and I make a beeline for it. I crawl up onto this patch of concrete, and I start rocking back and forth.
My knees are soaked in my tears, and I’m shaking. I can’t get oxygen in my lungs. My lungs keep rejecting the oxygen over and over and over. It won’t go in. I have a full-blown panic attack in front of twenty Super-Nice Lutherans from Wisconsin, which is basically the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
And I don’t even know when she came up to me, but all of a sudden I realize that Sharon’s hands are on my shoulders, and she says, “You’re okay. I’m right here. You’re okay.”
Her strong hands were somehow keeping the lid on for me so something didn’t escape that I needed, like m
y sanity or the ability for my body and mind to be in the same place at the same time. She was so strong and calm and amazing, and everything I want people to think I am, and everything that I wasn’t in that moment. She was exactly what I needed. And like an asshole, an hour earlier I’d had a hard time remembering her name.
Soon the bus was righted and in a position on the road where it could keep going, and everyone else was getting back on the bus.
I saw that, and I kept rocking back and forth, going, “I’m not getting on that bus. I’m not getting on that bus.”
Sharon turned to our tour guide, saying, “Under no circumstance is Nadia allowed to get on the bus” (for which I loved her).
So we stopped the first car we saw, which was this Audi, and these two Palestinian men rolled down the window, and they flicked out their cigarettes, and they said, “Can we help you?”
They agreed to take the shaking, crazy, needy, heavily tattooed tall white American woman back up the road to Bethlehem, to safety.
The next morning I was the first person at breakfast. There was this light streaming in the window, and I felt cleansed, like you do after a good cry or a hard rain. And I realized that whatever I was trying to protect on that road was taken from me.
Then I saw Sharon and her husband come in for breakfast, and I motioned for them to join me. I realized that they had seen me in my most unguarded, raw, needy state, a state in which I couldn’t do it myself, and they hadn’t made a big deal about it. They just wanted to make sure I was okay.
But I knew I had experienced what felt like a spiritual exfoliation by way of humiliation. It may have taken five days, but my heart was finally open to these people.
I mean, maybe not enough to laugh at corny puns. But when they sat down, I looked at them and I said, “So do you guys have any pictures of your grandchildren?”
NADIA BOLZ-WEBER is the author of two New York Times bestselling memoirs, Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint (2013) and Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (2015). She is an ordained Lutheran pastor (ELCA) and still works as the founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, Colorado. Nadia travels domestically and internationally as a speaker and has been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, Fresh Air, and On Being with Krista Tippett, on CNN, and in the Washington Post, Bitch magazine, the Daily Beast, More magazine, and the Atlantic. International media coverage includes BBC World Service, the Guardian, and magazine features in Germany, Poland, and Switzerland. Nadia lives in Denver with her family and her Great Dane, Zacchaeus.
The Moth Presents All These Wonders Page 10
