One of the few things about which I feel I’ve gained any wisdom as I’ve grown older is the insight that nearly everybody believes himself to be a good person. We all feel as though we’re doing our best. When others find us obnoxious or insolent or cruel, it is only, we think, because we were misunderstood or because they deserved it, or because they are the bad people. Not us. Nobody thinks of himself as a villain. Not even villains.
Elaine was doing her best, Mom hers. Grandma, I’m sure, was doing her best, too. In my daily life, I’ve made a conscious effort to try to meet people where they are, to see them as I see myself, imperfect but trying. Sometimes it’s easier than others. Sometimes it’s hardest with the people I love. My patience with strangers is often greater than it is with my wife and children. Why is that? Maybe because we are unafraid to show our worst selves to the people who share our homes. That seems backward to me, because those who have chosen to love us deserve the best we have to offer, and also because the people we live with know where we keep the knives.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Well, that’s my story”
My list of dead family members keeps growing, as these lists have a tendency to do over time. Grandpa Sam and cousin Shawn. Then, when I was five, my paternal grandmother, Bernice. I remember the morning after her death, seeing Dad’s long face, haggard as he took the stairs one at a time down to breakfast. Mom told us to behave extra well that day, and we did. Then Dad died. Aunt Ilene. Grandma CeCe. Grandpa Leon, the cop I never knew. An ancient aunt who kept a windup canary in a cage. A long-lost uncle who died without a will.
Yesterday I caught myself plucking a white hair from my temple. I lassoed it around my pointer finger and tugged, holding it up to the light for inspection. White from stem to stern. I don’t think I had white hair like that when I started writing this book two years ago. My body is different now. The wedding photos on my bedroom wall show a different body still. None of these bodies resembles Bruce Whitehall.
Often before showering, I stare at my whole self in the mirror. There it is, the whole lousy sum of me: legs and paunch and ribs and shoulders laced with red slashes from sleep scratching, flaccid penis hanging down like an aardvark snout. I don’t know why I do this. It’s a compulsion, I guess, like if I look hard enough, I’ll discover the real me, the secret me I’ve been hiding from myself all these years. Like, “Ta da! There you are!” But the mirror disappoints again and again. What am I hoping I will find if I look long enough? Whose face do I think will emerge?
Here’s a story I’ve never told anybody. When I was about ten or eleven years old, Elaine mentioned that a friend’s sister had taken ill. Gravely ill. Heart problems, maybe. Kidney? I don’t recall, but I remember Elaine saying the doctors weren’t sure if she would make it through the night. It was a woman I barely knew, but it scared me to think that somebody I had a passing acquaintance with could be dead by morning.
After dinner I went up to my room and locked myself in the bathroom. I began praying, although the prayer I issued seemed unlike any I’d heard before. Instead of communicating with God, I was trying to reach out directly through space to the woman in the hospital. I tried picturing her lying in a hospital bed, stretching my thoughts out to her as I repeated, “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.” Over and over. “A hundred percent better,” I whispered. I stared into the mirror, deep into the black of my pupils, repeating these chants dozens, maybe hundreds, of times. “You’re going to be okay. A hundred percent better.” I don’t know how long I stayed in there. Maybe half an hour. Maybe longer. When I felt I had done all I could do, I left the bathroom and went to bed.
The next night at dinner, I asked about the woman. Elaine brightened. “Can you believe it? She’s out of the hospital. She says she feels a hundred percent better.” When I heard that phrase—“a hundred percent better”—I knew. My message had been received.
What do you make of a story like that? It bothered me for a long, long time because I could not discount the experience, nor did I wish to make more of it than it was. Maybe it was nothing. But maybe it was, and if it was, it scared me. The praytheist mind can only find so many coincidences in this life before turning on itself. I’m not ready to accept God, not yet, probably not ever, but I like that He keeps reminding me to not give up looking for Him.
Sometimes after I turn on the shower and I’m waiting for the water to heat up, I stare deep into the black of my own eyes and try to connect with whatever force I thought I felt when I was a ten-year-old compelled to reach out to a woman I barely knew. It was as intense a feeling as I’ve ever felt, an almost electrical connection I believed myself to be putting out into the world. The kind of thing only a kid could believe.
There’s something wrong with Martha’s lungs. Over the last couple of years, she keeps getting recurrent bouts of pneumonia. Two or three times a year. She takes antibiotics, which knock it out after a few days, but it keeps returning. Finally, a pulmonologist diagnosed bronchiectasis, a condition that damages the airways to the lungs. As a result, mucus builds up and collects in the lungs, and thus: pneumonia. The doctor put her on a mucus thinner and told her to drink a lot of water. Beyond that there’s not much they can do other than continue to give her antibiotics when it flares up. There’s no cure for bronchiectasis, but as long as we keep our eyes on it she should be okay. She worries about the progressive inflammation in her lungs one day causing cancer. But it won’t. It can’t, because her life insurance policy is considerably smaller than mine. And also because it just can’t.
Sometimes she says to me, “Can you believe we’ve known each other twenty years?”
Sometimes as we kiss when I’m leaving the house she tells me to wear my seat belt even though she knows I always wear my seat belt.
Sometimes I remember Elijah, age two or three, naked but for a diaper, waddling across the grass. We’d just moved to a new house and we had a big side lawn, a vast expanse of green leading to the woods. I stood quite a ways back from him watching him go, fat little legs propelling him toward some distant destination he alone held in his head. I remember thinking he would always be walking away from us like that, and that I had to learn to be okay with that. Now he’s fourteen and I’m still not okay with it.
I’ve got a scrap of yellow notebook paper in my desk drawer that has the address of the cemetery where Dad is buried. I’ve only been there once. I keep meaning to go back. Eric and I have talked about going together, but we haven’t done it yet. Maybe this spring when the weather turns. It’s not too far. We could get sandwiches, make a day of it.
Yesterday I reminded Mom about the second time she heard the Voice, the one she first heard before tumor surgery. Did she remember yet what it said when she heard it again?
“No,” she said. “Sandy and I have discussed it a few times. I cannot remember.”
I’m exasperated. Does she remember anything about it?
“I have a feeling that I was in the mountains. . . . We were driving through the Pisgah National Forest, beautiful sunny day. We had a tape of beautiful Jewish music we loved to hear . . . and, like, this peace or something came over me. . . .” She pauses, then continues. “My God was right there.”
I think she means somebody or some force reached out to be with her, just the way I tried to reach out to that woman I barely knew lying in a hospital bed all those years ago. Maybe that’s all God is, energy reaching out to itself at the places where it needs a little help. Mom and I sit with that for a second; then I say, “All right, I have nothing else to say to you today.”
She laughs. We chitchat for a couple minutes more about the grandchildren. She forgot to call Elijah on his birthday and feels terrible. I assure her it’s okay. He knows she loves him. She tells him all the time. After a few minutes more, I know she’s ready to end the conversation, because she always says the same thing when she’s ready to get off the phone: “Well, that’s my story.”
“Enjoy your Sunday,” I tell
her.
“Love you, Mikey.”
“Love you, too, Mom.”
I hang up. It’s March here in the wilds of Connecticut. We’ve had a lot of snow the past few weeks. It’s piled in high drifts, and from my office window, I can see deep into the trees. I look for animal tracks in the snow but see none. I stand and stretch and straighten out my scoliosis shoulder. I roll my head around my neck, my joints cracking like popping corn. I do a quick inventory of my family. Everybody is where they should be: here, safe and warm. Elijah is on the computer playing Minecraft. Ruthie is in her room gabbing to one of her friends on the iPad I told her I would not buy her but did anyway. Martha reads the Sunday Times in the living room, a blanket Santa brought tucked around her waist. I head upstairs and throw on some sweats and a long-sleeve technical shirt and my puffy black vest. I come back downstairs, call the dog.
“Ole Ole Ole!” I yodel. He lifts himself from the floor and trots over to me. I grab his leash, loop it over his neck.
“Where are you going?” Martha asks. I have to ask her to repeat it because I honestly cannot hear. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?”
“I’m going to head over to the park with Ole.”
“It’s snowy out there. Be careful.”
I tell her I will be. I struggle into my boots and open the front door and step outside into the cold, clean air. It’s a good day to run.
Addendum
On April 8, 2015, I scheduled a colonoscopy.
On April 9, 2015, I joined a gym.
Author’s Note
All the events in this book are true to the best of my recollection. Undoubtedly, I got some things wrong, but I don’t know which things and you don’t either, so let’s both pretend everything happened exactly the way I said it did. Also, my memory is not good enough to remember actual conversations I have had in the past. That should be obvious to anybody with a memory. Most of the dialogue in this book is fabricated but represents actual conversations I have had, with words I would have used. I have done this to the best of my ability, with all the usual caveats, including the caveat of my having a less-than-optimal Neanderthal brain.
On the other hand, all present-day dialogue with my mother is genuine and verbatim. Over the course of writing this book, I conducted several interviews with her, and all of our dialogue is transcribed from those discussions. Some of it has been condensed or slightly edited for clarification, but that’s it. An example of condensing is when she had to interrupt our conversation to yell at her stupid dog, Jake. This happened many times because the dog is very stupid.
Finally, I changed several names to protect the identities of people. This is a smart thing to do when identifying somebody as a “rage addict,” or when discussing somebody’s involvement with a certain criminal enterprise known for murdering people who reveal too much about its business or members.
Acknowledgments
For advice and help and general encouragement, thank you to: Abby Zidle, Tricia Boczkowski, Polly Watson, everybody at Gallery Books, Barry Goldblatt, Jane Goldberg, Mary Kobayashi, and Paget Brewster.
Thank you, of course, to my wife, Martha, and children, Elijah and Ruthie, who do not mind when I tease them but like it best when I tease myself.
And special thanks to my mother, Jill Schwartz, who shared with me intimate details of her life without asking for anything in return other than a substantial share of book profits. I neglected to tell her that my books don’t have profits. She is going to be very disappointed.
MICHAEL IAN BLACK is a writer, comedian, and actor who has starred in many television series, among them The Jim Gaffigan Show, Another Period, Wet Hot American Summer, and The State. Michael regularly tours the country as a stand-up comedian and is the bestselling author of many books, including You're Not Doing It Right and My Custom Van (and 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face). Michael lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.
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You’re Not Doing It Right
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-1-4767-4882-5
ISBN 978-1-4767-4884-9 (ebook)
Navel Gazing Page 17
