Agorafabulous!

by Sara Benincasa

  I had to leave. It was never going to get better unless I left. But what if It didn’t get better? What if leaving made It worse? I wanted to stay there for a while, like forever, and maybe die on the floor, or pass out. Maybe I could pass out from the pain and someone would find me and I would wake up hours later in a lovely private hospital room or in my bedroom at home or in some beautiful safe rehab facility somewhere, a home for well-intentioned but slatternly young public school teachers.

  Giving up seemed like such a nice idea.

  Then came another stab ripping through my body. It was so jolting and so raw that I cried out. And that is when from the depths of my soul, like an irradiated plant-human hybrid emerging from a toxic swamp, came a voice I had locked away in a cage built out of literature courses and wry detachment and books recommended on NPR. It said, “Madonna mia, you did not move to Manhattan to sit and cry on a dirty friggin’ ladies’ room floor. Get the fuck up. Splash some water on that hair and scrunch it, it looks like bullshit. It’s like you got agita, just . . . in the front.” And somehow, for just a moment, I caught the faint scent of cannoli. (Look, we can’t all have madeleines.)

  I let the pain propel me from lying on the floor to sitting up and then, gingerly, to standing.

  I focused on each step. I talked myself through the motion, the way I’d done walking meditation back at my parents’ house in Jersey. Heel rolling to toe, heel rolling to toe, step, step, breathe. Every few steps, I had to stop and lean on something for support—first, the bathroom door, then the elevator wall, then a marble pillar in the hall, then a garbage can near the main entrance, then a utility pole outside in the icy rain. It was cold and I wore a long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans. I got soaked. But I kept going, from one buoy to another, until I reached the corner of West 120th and Amsterdam, where I hailed a cab.

  “Columbus and . . . and . . .” I groaned a little as another wave of pain churned through my innards.

  We just sat there, and the car didn’t move.

  “Are you . . . okay?” the driver asked, craning his neck around to look at me worriedly.

  “No sir,” I said, with effort. “Sick.”

  “You make . . . a vomit?” He mimed puking.

  “No, no, not that kind of sick.”

  “I pull over, you make vomit, we keep go.”

  “I promise I don’t have to vomit.”

  “Vomit so hard to get out of seats. Gets stuck in seat belts. I clean with toothbrush, last time.”

  “I have cramps!” I said loudly. “I have really bad cramps! And I need to go home now!”

  “Stomach?” he said. “No vomit in my cab.”

  “Woman’s problems!” I said with a sob. “I am having woman’s problems. Female troubles.” I pointed, for emphasis.

  “Ohhhh, baby,” he said, nodding sympathetically.

  Now New York is full of folks from all around the world, many of whom do not speak or understand English. But a language barrier was not our problem. I was stuck in a car with a man who was perfectly capable of understanding me. He simply wasn’t listening. And because I had been in similar situations with past boyfriends, I knew it was time to take the very direct approach.

  “NO BABY!” I screamed. “MY PERIOD! ONCE A MONTH! BLOOD! FROM MY VAGINA!”

  “Oh my God!” he said, horrified.

  Then he hit the gas pedal and we screeched into the night.

  We sped all the way home. We did not pay attention to traffic lights. We did not pay attention to pedestrians with the right of way. He mumbled to himself furiously in a language I didn’t understand. I preferred this to our torturous interactions in English. When he dropped me off, I attempted to hand him a twenty. He took it gingerly, as if I were offering him the tail of a wriggling rat. I’m pretty sure that after he left me off, he had to call a shaman from his homeland to do some sort of mystical cleansing ritual on his vehicle. A pigeon may have been sacrificed; I don’t know. He may have just set the cab on fire and run away screaming.

  I lived in a third-floor walk-up, and I knew I couldn’t make it upstairs on foot. I crawled, which gave me a close-up view of all the dog hair the super’s vacuum didn’t reach. I couldn’t see straight enough to put the key in the lock, so I knocked on the door as loud as I could, which wasn’t very loud.

  Eventually, my pretty roommate and surrogate older sister Aimee, whom I adored, heard me and came to the door.

  “What’s wrong, Sar?” she asked, looking shocked.

  “Sick,” I said in one shallow breath. I brushed past her without another word and stumbled to the bathroom medicine cabinet.

  I swallowed a small pile of Advil, and I took a few Xanax, and I lay down in my bed in the quiet dark. For the first time in years, I sang an old hymn from church. It had been my favorite when I was a child.

  Be not afraid

  I go before you always

  Come, follow me

  And I will give you rest.

  I clutched my stuffed yellow giraffe, a toy I’d had since I was two weeks old. It played music; I wound it up and listened to the familiar tune for perhaps the ten thousandth time. And I rocked myself back and forth, back and forth. I slept for twelve hours. When I awoke, it only hurt a little bit. And then I just had a period, or something like it. Just blood, in small trickles and drips, for a few days. Then it was all gone.

  Logic dictated that I see a professional ASAP, so I waited two weeks and then went to see a psychic named Aubergine, on Ninth Street and Second Avenue. She assured me that it had just been a really bad period. Phew! Then she asked me if I wanted a $500 chakra-clearing session. I passed.

  I still don’t know if I miscarried. Some of my friends say it was obviously a miscarriage. Others say it was just a crap period because the heavy dose of synthetic hormones had thrown my body off. It sounds absurd, but I’m honestly not sure which idea I want to be true.

  I know women who’ve miscarried. Some of them keep it a secret and mourn silently on the anniversary of the day each year. Some of them are glad it happened, relieved that they didn’t have to take on a burden they might have resented. Once in a great while, some of them joke about it among friends, because after all, comedy is tragedy plus time, right? They laugh because they can’t cry anymore.

  I read an article by one of my usual hippie-dippie self-help gurus who said that children choose to incarnate on this mortal plane, and that sometimes a miscarriage occurs when a child realizes that its timing isn’t quite right, that its mother isn’t ready for it yet. It’s probably utter bullshit. But part of me wants to believe. Because if I actually was pregnant, and if the hippie’s theory is true, then I had one smart little bundle of cells in the oven. It takes fully grown adults years to realize their partner is not a good long-term choice, and my teensy tiny accidental fellow-traveler got the message before it even got a brain.

  I hope the kid comes back one day, when I’m ready. When I meet her, the first thing I’m gonna do (after demanding a bottle of wine to complement the effects of my epidural) is give her a high-five. And then I’m going to hold her wrinkly little red face very close to my own, and I’m going to whisper so just she and I can hear, “Thank you for giving me another chance.”

  Chapter Ten

  Funny Business

  On the first day of class at Columbia University’s Teachers College, I broke into tears when it was my turn to introduce myself during a small seminar.

  “I’m sorry,” I blubbered into a tissue someone hastily produced. “I’m just not sure I’m supposed to be here. I don’t think I want to be a teacher.”

  My professors at Teachers College were almost uniformly encouraging and helpful. They believed in me, even though I didn’t believe in me. As I bonded with my classmates and grew more comfortable around the staff, I found that my favorite part of the day was recounting the most ridiculous thing that had occurred during my hours as a student teacher. Nothing pleased me more than to relay a story that sent my classmates and professors into fi
ts of laughter. Hearing them giggle and guffaw made all the pleasure centers in my brain light up. When I cracked them up, I felt warm and alive and energized. And I had plenty of tales to offer up for their amusement.

  Thanks to the efforts of the head of the program, I received my first-semester student teaching placement at an upscale public school in Manhattan. Unfortunately, my “cooperating” teacher was anything but cooperative. Instead, she was bitter, resentful, and all the other qualities one so often finds among teachers who would really rather be doing something else. I understood her dilemma, but not her meanness. Today, I’d tell her to fuck off, but I was younger and sweeter then. With my usual desperate need for approval from authority figures, I wanted her to like me. She responded to my polite overtures by rolling her eyes and shooting me disgusted stares from the back of the room when I taught my mini-lessons. To her credit, she was a good teacher. To my discredit, I showed up late a few times. But I’m still fairly certain her veins were filled with briny pickle juice rather than human blood.

  One day before class, she told me she was going to assign the seventh-graders an essay with the title “The Most Important Day of My Life.”

  “Well, that sounds fun!” I chirped.

  “Wait ’til you see the shit we get back,” she said, her voice tinged with disgust. “Most of them were in third grade at a downtown school on 9/11 and they saw the planes hit. They all had to evacuate. Do you know how many fucking 9/11 essays I’ve had to read this year? ‘The smoke cloud, Daddy cried, we had to move,’ and blah blah blah blah blah. They make everything about 9/11. It’s like, enough already. You’re in middle school now. I don’t want to read about this shit. Can we please move on, already?”

  “Yeah, what a bunch of fucking pussies,” is what I should’ve said.

  Instead, I said, “Well, they are still little kids. It’s kind of a huge trauma.”

  That was not the correct response. She made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat and pounded a coffee. Later that day, she announced that no one in the class was allowed to write about 9/11 for the rest of the school year.

  I knew I didn’t want to end up like her.

  I just didn’t know how I did want to end up.

  I was sure I wanted to be a writer. I’d always known that. Most writers are born, not made. Bawling, they emerge from the sticky, wet womb slick with some combination of material effluvia and literary ambition. The main trouble for born writers, as for born painters and sculptors and actors and musicians, is that art doesn’t generally pay the bills. I didn’t want to work in an advertising agency. I didn’t want to produce diet tips for some soul-killing women’s magazine. I didn’t want to churn out instructional manuals for tech companies. I wanted to write. And I wanted to do something else, something attached to writing but somehow different, though I had yet to identify exactly what that was.

  A graduate school classmate ended up providing me with the answer. Some of my fellow students found my class-clown tendencies offensive and irritating, but a few seemed to find me entertaining, even refreshing. A woman a few years older than me stopped me after class one evening.

  “Have you ever tried stand-up comedy?” she asked. On my tearful first day of our seminar, she’d told us she had just left her job at Comedy Central’s talent department in order to make a difference through public-school education.

  “No,” I said. This wasn’t strictly true. I had done stand-up comedy once at an Emerson College benefit for a food pantry. I think my chief joke involved a dolphin impression. I don’t remember who asked me to do it, nor do I remember why he or she thought I would be any good at it. I just remember blowing the light (ignoring the light that indicates a comedian’s time is up) because I didn’t know what it meant or why it kept flashing at me. I would later learn that blowing the light is one of the most irritating etiquette violations a comedian can commit. But I wasn’t a comic—I was just a girl who had been asked to tell jokes onstage for some reason. Finally, one of the actual comedians got in front of the stage and started waving his arms at me. It wasn’t exactly the most fabulous debut in the history of the jester’s craft, and I had regarded it as a strange little one-off, almost entirely forgettable.

  But now this former comedy-industry professional seemed to think I was funny.

  “You shouldn’t be teaching,” she said. “You should be doing stand-up.”

  “Can you make any money doing that?” I asked.

  “Not usually,” she said. “But I bet you’d be happier.”

  We became friends, and she introduced me to her former coworkers at Comedy Central. These were the women who decided what went on air at a channel I’d been watching since I was a kid.

  “Sara’s thinking of trying stand-up,” she told them.

  “Cool,” they said, and then we drank wine and ate burritos.

  I still didn’t try stand-up. I’d been doing pretty well in New York with the mental health stuff, and I didn’t want to upset my wobbly brain-canoe. Stand-up comedy seemed like a ton of pressure. It was just you and a microphone up on that stage, emotionally naked in the blinding spotlight in front of a crowd of strangers. What if I had a panic attack in front of everybody?

  When the next semester rolled around, I moved on to a much happier student-teaching placement at the super-competitive Bronx High School of Science. I still didn’t know if I wanted to try stand-up, but I enrolled in a sketch-writing course at the People’s Improv Theater downtown. The instructor, Kevin Allison, was a member of the legendary sketch comedy group The State, which had spawned the films Wet Hot American Summer and The Baxter as well as the television shows The State, Stella, Reno! 911 and Viva Variety. I loved the class, and made friends with Avi, a handsome and hilarious recent college grad who worked at one of those hip boutique ad agencies that exist in loft spaces around Manhattan; Callie, a tiny blond bombshell, who also toiled in advertising; Geoff, a nude art model (he put on clothes for class) and reality TV cameraman; and Andrea, one of those casually beautiful girls who walk around New York City as if it were normal to have perfect bone structure. (She was also a black lesbian real estate agent. Obviously.) They were my first friends in New York besides my roommate and my Teachers College classmates. They were the first New Yorkers I met who also had a strange compulsion to make other humans laugh. It can be really comforting to meet someone who shares your mental illness. I met four someones (plus Kevin).

  We sat around my graduate-school seminar one night talking about what we did to blow off steam after long days of work and class. Drinking was a popular option, as was knitting. I mentioned my class at the PIT. Out of nowhere, a girl asked me if I might be interested in doing stand-up at her dormitory as part of a women’s comedy night.

  “I volunteered to help book the show,” she said. “We already spent our budget on the real comedians and I need somebody cheap to open the show. Do you want to do it?”

  Without thinking, I nodded yes.

  “Great!” she said. It wasn’t until she’d walked away that I realized what I’d done.

  Before I could come up with a creative way to back out, she e-mailed me with all the details. It turned out that the “women’s comedy night” was part of her dormitory’s celebration of the United Nations’ International Women’s Week, during which various heads of state and Madeleine Albright were scheduled to speak. Her dorm was International House, a big fancy residential building for international students attending any one of New York’s kajillion graduate schools. It was comprised of seven hundred students from more than one hundred countries. Its board of trustees was headed by a Rockefeller. Past chairmen of the board included Henry Kissinger, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Gerald Ford.

  In other words, this was not a casual evening of laughs in the study lounge beside the soda machine.

  I e-mailed her back and asked what she thought the crowd would be like.

  “Mostly Pakistani and Indian med students,” she wrote in response. “Well, some of them ar
e scientists.”

  I groaned and told my PIT class about it the next day. Avi, Callie, Geoff, and Andrea immediately said they were coming and bringing a camera.

  “I’m pretty sure it’s going to suck,” I said.

  “How many minutes do you get?” Avi asked. Avi knew more about comedy than anyone else I’d ever met. He idolized Jack Benny, and his bedroom wall was decorated with a black-and-white photo of someone named Bill Hicks. He wanted to be a writer-director-editor-producer-actor (and also a stand-up).

  “Fifteen minutes,” I said. Avi started laughing.

  “Is that not a lot?” I asked.

  “For your first time? Fifteen minutes is forever. Do you have fifteen minutes?”

  “What, like, right now? I’m not busy.”

  “No, do you have fifteen minutes of jokes?”

  “No. I don’t have any minutes of jokes.”

  “And when is this event?”

  “In a month.”

  “Well, you’d better get writing,” Avi said. He told me to carry a notebook around and be prepared to write down anything funny that I saw or thought about. He also told me to watch my favorite comedians online, or to buy their DVDs and watch them.

  I went out and got Denis Leary’s one-man show, No Cure for Cancer, even though Avi claimed Leary stole half the show from Hicks. I didn’t know if that was true, but I knew I dug Leary. I also picked up Margaret Cho’s concert films, I’m the One That I Want and Notorious C.H.O. I got an old favorite, John Leguizamo’s Freak, even though Avi said Leguizamo was a monologuist, not a stand-up comic. I picked up some Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, and Eddie Murphy, because Avi said this was required viewing. Finally, I bought some of George Carlin’s HBO specials. I’d always liked Carlin.

  We’d gotten into the habit of going to a club on the Lower East Side, called Rififi. There was a room behind the bar that could fit about fifty people, seventy if most people stood. It was the hippest comedy club on the face of the Earth. Avi pointed out the different comedians who shuffled through to perform at $5 shows like “Invite Them Up” and “Oh, Hello.” “That’s Patton Oswalt,” he’d say. “That’s Brian Posehn. That’s Michael Showalter. That’s Christian Finnegan. That’s Aziz Ansari. That’s David Cross. That’s Nick Kroll. That’s John Mulaney. That’s Greg Giraldo. That’s Reggie Watts. That’s Zach Galifianakis.”