You're Not Doing It Right

by Michael Ian Black

  meredith wants to give you a blowjob

  Sex and work have always been intertwined for me. The first time I have any idea of the person I want to be when I grow up is when I am seven or eight years old, and my family is on a day trip from New Jersey to Washington Square Park in New York City. We’re there to check out the faded site of all that jazzy sixties bohemia but the closest we get to anything resembling counterculture is watching a guy on a unicycle juggling flaming torches. When he is finished, a girl in short shorts and a T-shirt passes around a porkpie hat into which people stuff crinkly dollar bills. After she is done and the crowd has dispersed, I see him tongue kiss her as he counts his money.

  This is the coolest job I have ever seen. Here is a guy who, first of all, gets to ride his unicycle to work. Second, he determines his own hours. Third, the guy is obviously making a fortune. Fourth, part of his job involves lighting things on fire. And finally, while I did not have the language to describe the highly specific envy I was feeling, I now know that what I was thinking was this: That guy must get so much pussy.

  I want to be him when I grow up.

  Eventually, I come to realize that any occupation that involves trying to get people to throw dollar bills at you is not a good job. If it were, all men would be juggling unicyclists and all women would be strippers. Maybe this is how we create these identities for ourselves, attaching tiny bits a little bit at a time, the same way plaque accumulates in our arteries and eventually kills us. Because from the moment I see that juggler, I want to move to New York and be a performer.

  The second event that informed the way I thought about my future self occurred a couple of years later during my first summer at sleepaway camp. The camp was called Nah Jee Wah, a Jewish camp with an Indian name. Most Jewish camps are named for Indians. I don’t know why this is, perhaps because Camp Nah Jee Wah sounds more woodsy than Camp Lipschitz.

  For reasons I cannot remember, but are probably due to a lack of desire to play more kickball, I enlist in the camp play. There is a group of about fifteen of us, of varying ages and abilities. I am one of the younger kids and I am given very little to do. But I don’t care. What little I have to do I love right from the get-go. We practice every day in a dim barn, and I learn what it is to be part of something grand. All these people learning to work together, it’s like the army, but with dance shoes. Rehearsing that play is the best part of my summer, made even better by the presence of a girl named Meredith.

  Small, freckled, and strawberry blonde, Meredith looks like a Jewish Pippi Longstocking. We bond over the fact that we are the only ten-year-olds doing the play, and because we have so little to do during rehearsal, we spend a lot of time talking. She is from Long Island. She likes horses and rainbows. She is the most fascinating creature I have ever encountered.

  Soon we are spending time together outside of rehearsal, and then one day we begin holding hands, and just like that, she is my girlfriend. One hot afternoon during rehearsal, Meredith’s best friend, Debbie, corners me backstage.

  “Guess what?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Meredith wants to give you a blowjob.”

  “Cool.”

  “Do you know what that is?”

  “Yeah,” I say defensively. I have no idea what that is.

  “What is it then?” she asks in a challenging tone.

  “It’s when a girl blows in a guy’s ear,” I say with confidence. This seems to make sense and Debbie does not contradict me. They probably don’t know what a blowjob is, either. Needless to say, nothing like a blowjob happens that summer (or for many summers after that), but over time it becomes obvious to me that Meredith wants to progress our relationship into the land of kissing.

  I like her very much, but kissing seems like such a dramatic step. My kissing at that point is limited to my mother and the television screen when Molly Ringwald is on it. I do not know if I am ready to take such a dramatic step with an actual living girl. So I consult my counselor, Larry, who seems worldly because he is from England. I figure anybody with an accent that suave must know a thing or two about the ladies. I lay out the situation for him. He listens without interruption or condescension. When I am done speaking, Larry tells me to follow my heart. “And don’t get her pregnant.”

  One night as we return from evening activity at the dining hall, I lead Meredith on a moonlit excursion around the mosquito-infested swamp we call “Lake Nah Jee Wah” to a secluded and romantic moonlit clearing beside the Dumpster. We are alone. I am nervous, both because I am going to kiss her and because bears sometimes show up there to eat the garbage. I tilt my head up toward her since she is a foot taller. I close my eyes. We kiss. On the lips, close-mouthed. She tastes wonderful, like Dr Pepper lip balm. It is just one kiss, but it is enough. When I return to my bunk, Larry asks me what happened.

  “I kissed her.”

  “How was it?”

  “Pretty good.” But it was more than pretty good, and I think he can tell.

  “You did okay,” he says.

  The play opens a few nights later. There is a moment when I am supposed to enter from backstage and make my way to the front. It is my one big moment in the musical and as I push my way downstage I trip, completely losing my balance. I feel my feet going out from under me, my body cartwheeling through the air, deep shame already building in midflight. But somehow I land upright, on my knees, and I continue on as if I meant to do it. Nobody even seems to notice. Not the audience and not my love Meredith. From my peripheral vision I see her singing and dancing beside me. She glances over at me and smiles, and I feel strong and capable, and that is the moment I know what I will be doing for the rest of my life.

  We write sporadic letters to each other in the fall and winter. I cannot wait to return to Camp Nah Jee Wah to resume our romance. When summer finally comes, though, Meredith dumps me for a boy nicknamed Taco. I am heartbroken but console myself with the fact that Taco is legitimately much cooler than me. His nickname, after all, is Taco.

  Even though my heart is broken, my career path is set.

  Nobody at home takes me seriously when I announce my intention to become an actor. This is probably wise, since the year before I was going to play professional baseball, and the year before that I was going to be a long-haul trucker. (There was a brief, possibly drug-induced, period in the 1970s when long-haul trucking constituted the coolest career to which a man could aspire due to the song “Convoy,” and various Burt Reynolds movies.) So I know that children’s occupational goals can fluctuate. As I write this, for example, my nine-year-old son wants to be a roller-coaster designer. Maybe that’s what he’ll end up doing—the world needs roller-coaster designers—but I’m not betting on it.

  I sign up for acting classes, and the following spring my mother gives me a stark choice: I can either play Little League or join the local children’s theater production of the musical Paint Your Wagon. I cannot do both. In baseball, I am named to the all-star team two years in a row; in the play, I will be stuck in the chorus. I choose the play.

  The show’s lead actor is an older boy named Kurt. I am awestruck at his talent. He can sing, he can dance. He’s handsome and funny, and he signifies his devotion to craft by wearing a flowy white scarf around his neck all year round. His costar is a pretty blonde named Sue who he, of course, also dates. He is my idol. After the show opens, Kurt and Sue host a big cast party at the house of one of their parents. Everybody sings along to Creedence Clearwater Revival and eats pizza. Some of the cast members make out with each other. Nobody on our Little League team ever made out with each other. Clearly I made the right choice.

  Throughout high school, Kurt is always the lead in the school plays, theatrical royalty in a town that does not recognize his greatness. But I do. If anybody is going to make it, he will. He’s got everything going for him: he’s good-looking, he can act, he can sing, he can dance. After graduation he forgoes college in favor of New York City, Broadway bound.

 
; He is never heard from again.

  But I persist. When I am fourteen I go to theater camp, where I perform in two plays and touch my first vagina. The following winter I take classes with the camp’s artistic director in New York, bundling myself onto a train for an hour and a half each way every Saturday. When the subject of college arises, I tell Mom I am going to New York University to study theater.

  “What about getting a degree in education?” she asks. “That way, if acting doesn’t work out you can teach.”

  “No,” I tell her.

  I am not going to be like Mr. Reilly, the lemon-faced history teacher who directs our school plays. I’m either going to succeed or I’m going to fail, but I’m not going into it with a backup plan because backup plans are for pussies.

  My brother is at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, where he is studying to be an actuary, a career he chose after reading a survey in USA Today ranking it the best profession due to its high income and stability. Reading a chart in a newspaper seems like a random way to pick your career, but no more so than choosing one because a girl said she wanted to blow you when you were nine. (Or, for that matter, by taking an online personality test.)

  I apply to NYU early decision, and the day I am accepted is the happiest I have ever had. I am going to New York. And college doesn’t disappoint. I study acting and try to have sex with girls in my theater class. When we pick partners for scene study, I pair myself with an attractive classmate. Then we meet at her dorm room or mine to practice the scene. Then, hopefully, we make out. Sometimes we make out without having rehearsed the scene, which is fine, too. If I’m honest, most of the time we do not make out at all, but I choose to forget those times.

  The summer after my freshman year I apprentice at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a prestigious regional theater in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Apprentices are the festival’s worker ants, moving scenery, sewing costumes, hanging lights. We work for free in exchange for the chance to be part of a professional theater company for a season. They also offer classes and small opportunities to perform. I am a spear carrier in Henry IV, and a pirate (with lines!) in Tom Jones. When I am not working, I am attempting to seduce my fellow apprentices. Several times I miss the curtain call at the end of Henry IV because I am flirting with a girl backstage.

  I’m not the only one for whom sex and theater are commingled. Actors are notoriously promiscuous. Perhaps this is because, as a breed, we tend to be attention starved. Perhaps it’s because of the intense emotions our work stirs up, the long hours, the special camaraderie that develops among underpaid young people striving to create meaningful work. Or maybe, as I suspect, we just like to screw.

  Whatever the reason, I find myself wondering if other professions are as horny. I ask my brother if actuaries have a lot of sex with each other.

  “No,” he says.

  “What about at the Christmas party?”

  “No.”

  “Not even sometimes?”

  “It’s mostly just middle-aged dudes. So, no.”

  Before I got married, I could not imagine spending my life going to a job where there wasn’t at least a small chance of having sex with one of my coworkers. Seriously, what would be the point?

  CHAPTER 3

  you need to go

  I should give up on Martha but I do not. This is typical of me. In all other areas of my life, I abandon whatever activity I am engaged in when it becomes difficult: guitar lessons, French class, chess, going to the gym. All of it left behind once the effort required exceeds “minimal.” With girls, though, I am indefatigable. I have spent innumerable hours, weeks, and months chasing women who, despite my best efforts, remain as distant from me as the sun.

  After terminating my relationship with Mrs. Levine, I spend a fruitless spring pursuing the Lovely Miss Claire Walters, a young handbag designer and first-generation Irish-American, who once made me one of the worst meals I have ever eaten—an authentic Irish plate of stringy boiled beef accompanied by tasteless boiled potatoes. It is the sort of meal Irish people sing about when they are drunk and crying. I didn’t care. I told her it was delicious. I would have eaten a hundred plates of the glop just to be with her. She is a lithe little brunette thing with pale skin and moony eyes. We go out several times, although physically our relationship never progresses beyond the touching of boobs (me touching hers, not so much the other way around).

  Within the first couple of weeks, it is obvious she has no real interest in me. When I suggest we get together, she tells me she has work to do at home. When I offer to hang out with her while she works, she says she does not feel well. When I offer to care for her, she tells me she is unlikely to recover. But I do not let that deter me. After all, if I gave up on every girl who had no interest in me, I would never be with any girls at all. If I just persist, I know I can get her to come around. Persistence in this case means calling at inappropriate hours, showing up at her apartment uninvited, and repeatedly asking why she does not like me more.

  Eventually, the Lovely Miss Claire Walters refuses to see me or take my calls, just as I had done to Mrs. Levine. (Karma, you are indeed a bitch.) I am heartbroken, and when I take a moment to examine my stalkerish behavior in the mirror, I find humiliation and shame waving hello. Hello again, old friends, hello.

  With Martha, I am determined not to allow myself to become obsessive or weird. Since she is not a legitimate possibility d’amour, there is no point spending all my time thinking about her, passing by her desk for no reason at all, or attempting to discern hidden messages of devotion from our every interaction. No, I will put her out of my mind. Which I do. Sort of. Not at all.

  I can’t help it. In addition to being a stunning-looking girl, Martha is also fun to talk to. Her initial iciness, which I first interpreted as an attractive bitchiness, was actually a brittle insecurity about being the New Girl in an incestuous work environment. Our little MTV staff has been together for three years and is populated almost exclusively by single twenty-somethings. Needless to say, a lot of discreet and not-so-discreet intramural screwing is going on. It’s like Mad Men without the style. Any girl would feel intimidated walking into that environment. So for her first few months, Martha just glared into her computer monitor and did her best to ignore the hormonal whirlpool swirling around her. Over time, as her fear of molestation eased, she relaxed. Now she is one of the team. As such, I am hoping to molest her.

  Thanksgiving is coming, and although I could go to Florida to visit my mom, I don’t because Florida sucks. Instead, I plan to spend the day with my brother, Eric, who lives across the river in Hoboken. I ask Martha what she’s doing for the holiday weekend. Is she going home to Minnesota? No, she can’t afford it. Is she spending the day with Christopher? No, he’s going to Massachusetts to be with his family. Why isn’t she joining them? Because she used to sleep with his brother and it would be too awkward. Not the answer I was expecting, but okay.

  She thinks she might cook dinner at Christopher’s apartment for herself and some friends. Do my brother and I want to join them? We do. Don’t I want to ask him first? No, he definitely wants to come.

  I’d imagined that Christopher’s place would be really nice. And it is. It’s the sort of well-appointed Upper West Side apartment Woody Allen would put in a movie about a guy who runs a film festival. God damn you, Christopher, and your prewar crown moldings. I cannot compete with this man. I do not have, as Christopher does, a Ralph Lauren tufted leather sofa. Or hand-knotted Persian area rugs. Or forks.

  Martha greets us at the door. The first word that comes to mind when I see her is sparkly. Has she sprinkled herself with fairy dust? I do not know, but she is almost intolerably attractive. She welcomes us into the apartment and instructs us to relax with the other guests while she finishes the turkey.

  Several hours later, Thanksgiving dinner is still not ready. Martha is flustered. Apparently she has miscalculated the ratios between cooking time, oven temperature, and bird weight. I, of
course, find her haplessness charming. Watching her struggle to assemble the meal is like watching a puppy fighting its way through deep snow. I offer to help, but the kitchen is small and our friend Deanna is already assisting her, which is good because I have even less idea of what to do than Martha does. Finally, around eleven, we sit down to work our way through a late meal of undercooked stuffing, cold mashed potatoes, and dried-out bird. It is one of the worst meals I have ever eaten. Worse even than the Lovely Miss Claire Walters’s boiled beef and potatoes. I love it.

  Martha laughs at my jokes and leans into me when she talks. Under any other circumstances, I would be convinced that there is something between us. But I do not trust my interpretation of the mysterious transmissions that pass between men and women, and I trust them even less now, especially considering the fact that I am choking down burnt turkey off her (dipshit weeny) boyfriend’s Calvin Klein dishware.

  After the meal, I help Martha carry plates into the kitchen. As offhandedly as I can, I ask her what she’s doing the next day.

  “Nothing,” she says. “What about you?”

  I have no plans but I sense an opening. What do girls like to do? “I’m going shopping.”

  “What are you shopping for?”

  I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I say the first thing that comes to mind: “Candlestick holders.”

  What? Where did that come from? I don’t need any candlestick holders. I have never lit a candle in my life that was not attached to a birthday cake. But girls like candles, so maybe they like candlestick holders. One of the things I learned about Martha during our talks at the office is that she was a comparative literature major. As such, perhaps she will interpret the purchase of candlestick holders as a symbolic attempt on my part to harness the inferno I sense raging between her and my girded loins. Maybe she will view me as a man who is playing with fire, as I am certainly doing in pursuing a woman who lives with her boyfriend. Yes, I think, I am a man with burning passions. Oh yes indeed, Michael, candlestick holders were a masterful choice on your part.