The Moth Presents Occasional Magic

by The Moth Presents Occasional Magic (retail) (epub)

  She said, “No, it’s a Tibetan priest.”

  I said, “All right,” though when she said the word “priest,” I immediately thought of, you know, a scary Catholic priest….

  I went to the room, and I don’t know about anyone else, but as a kid if I was in church kneeling and my knees didn’t hurt, I was in trouble. Your knees had to hurt in order to be really praying right. There was none of this “comfort” shit, you know what I mean?

  So I walk in there to meet this guy. He’s a little man, and he’s just sitting there, bent over, and he’s mumbling a chant, and I’m like, What’s he doing?

  She says, “He just prays and meditates. He’s been doing that since he escaped Tibet with his family. He does this for twenty-some-odd hours a day, and then he eats and goes to sleep for an hour.”

  Who the fuck’s paying for this? I wanna know. Is this guy getting federal assistance? Are my tax dollars paying for this guy? This is what went through my head.

  The woman says, “Well, come sit near him.”

  So I actually got on my knees, like a good Catholic, and she goes, “No, relax, relax,” and he looks at me.

  He couldn’t speak any English, but he said, “Oh, West Palm Beach. Thank you. Thank you.”

  I said, “What is he saying?”

  “Well, he’s just letting you know that you’re in West Palm Beach, and he’s saying thank you for being here. It’s a simple thing.”

  I’m like, I’m not going to hell or nothing if I don’t sit right?

  And then he puts his hands out.

  She said, “Oh, put your hands out!”

  She was excited that he put his hands out to me.

  I put my hands out, and he took my hands. And when he touched me, I felt so relaxed. I was just there in the moment. I wasn’t scared. All the pain went away.

  And then he put his forehead out, and she said, “Put your forehead out.”

  So I did, and he put his forehead against mine, and he said some Tibetan stuff, I don’t know what. All I know is I just felt really good and happy. It gave me a great feeling. I went there every day for a few weeks, meditating and praying.

  But now I’m in the hospital, waiting for my friend to call me back with more news about my wife’s accident. But I’ve got these Tibetan beads, and I’m thinking of this man, and I’m okay. He blessed these beads for me, by the way, so every time I touched those beads, I thought of him. Whenever I saw orange or yellow, I thought of him, too, because that’s the colors of the robe he had on. To this day when I see orange, I think, Wow, I love that color, because of him, you know?

  And then the phone rings again. But it’s not my friend, it’s my mother, and she says, “Daddy has a brain tumor.”

  Yeah, this was a bad day.

  And I sat back, and I had the beads, and I was so overwhelmed that I wasn’t feeling anything per se. This news just froze me. There was no feeling.

  I took the beads, and I threw them.

  I was like, Fuck this.

  You know what? I’ve been a Christian, Catholic, angry person for twenty-seven years and eleven and a half months, and now I’m a Buddhist for like three weeks? Fuck Buddhism. I don’t want that little bit of peace, man. It just makes the rest of life seem so much shittier. So screw this. I don’t want nothing to do with this.

  The phone rings again, so now I’m like, Okay, they are going to tell me my wife’s dead.

  And it was Jimmy, but he said, “Mike, I’m outside. I’m coming up. Frannie’s okay. Relax.”

  I said, “Oh, my God. That’s amazing.”

  I got up out of the bed, because she had actually been taken to the same hospital I was in, so I had to go visit her down in the emergency room. And I had this robe on and my morphine pole and another machine that’s giving me oxygen, and I took my robe off and turned it on backwards so that my balls were hanging out.

  I think it was just me saying, Fuck you, everyone. You know what I mean? Will you give me a break here? My dad has a brain tumor, and I’m going to visit my dying wife down in the ER. She didn’t die from flipping over the car, but she’s gonna die soon anyway. I’m gonna go visit her now, and I’ve got pneumonia. Who knows what the hell’s going on here?

  I go down, and she’s sleeping sitting up in the hospital bed. She’s got a little cut on her lip from the accident—a tiny cut. Car flipped five times on I-95.

  I woke her up, and I said, “Honey, honey.”

  She goes, “Hey…what are you doing?”

  She was wasted on morphine.

  She said, “I wanted to surprise you.”

  I said, “Well, you did!”

  A couple of weeks went by, and she ended up in hospice. She was in hospice two or three times.

  Young people don’t like to die, you know? Not that old people do, but some old people can say, I had a good life. She didn’t feel that way. She was pissed. She didn’t wanna die.

  She was thrown out of hospice for not dying.

  They put her in, but she didn’t die, and they said, “Look, you can’t stay here. You’ve been here for four months. Hospice is supposed to be for a week, two weeks. You’ve gotta go home.” But then she got worse, and she came back again.

  This happened three times.

  But finally, this time, she died. They told me she was gone. I was at home. I never stayed home, I stayed with her every night. But her mother was in town, so I took a night and stayed home, and she died that night.

  When they called me, the emptiness was there again. There was no feeling about it, you know? I froze. I held in all that death that I had because I knew my father was now going to die, too, and I loved my father. We were so close.

  So I was like, You’ve gotta save this angst up, man. You’ve gotta hold on. You can’t fall apart.

  Nine months after my wife died, I was out at a movie. I came home, and there was a voice mail from my brother, “Mike, pick up the phone. Mike, pick up the phone.”

  Every time I heard him say “Pick up the phone,” I felt a little more fear of what he was going to say.

  Finally he said, “Mike, I’m sorry to tell you this on the phone, but Daddy’s gone.”

  I’ll never forget where I was. I was standing in front of my laundry machines, listening. And I felt my heart get ripped outta me. Like I actually reached for my heart. It was the weirdest feeling.

  And that was it. The flame that I had as a kid—all of it—was gone, because now everyone had died.

  I made arrangements to fly home the next day, and when I got on the plane, I decided that I was going to end my life. I was done. I wasn’t telling anyone. It wasn’t a threat, it was a decision that I’d had enough of this. There was nothing else to live for.

  I got on the plane. I was so excited because, I’m really gonna fuckin’ die. This is so great. I was at peace. I couldn’t wait until the funeral was over, because that was when I was going to do it.

  I wasn’t going to jump off a building or jump in front of a car.

  People haven’t heard of overdosing on drugs?

  So I’m on the plane, and I’ve made this decision to end my life, and I’m at peace and I am happy.

  But all my life God or the universe, or whoever the fuck’s running this thing, would always go, Yeah, it’s really awful now. You’re almost out of hope. But here’s a little something nice to keep you going.

  I got up.

  I went to the back of the plane to go to the bathroom.

  And the lama, the monk that I had met, is sitting in the back row.

  He sees me, and he says, “West Palm Beach!!”

  And I said, “You little motherfucker.”

  He put his hands out like he did before, and he put his head out.

  What he was doing is called tonglen. You have to have amazing karma, they say, to have a lama actually want to do tonglen with you, which is giving an
d taking. When they put their head to yours, what they are doing is saying, Give me all your pain, and I’m gonna give you all my joy.

  The reason he sat for thirty years in meditation was to open his heart so much that it gets as big as the ocean, so that if you pour some of your pain into it, it absorbs it. That’s what his whole life was about.

  And it worked for me, that particular tonglen.

  I got home and I quit my job. I said, I want to be a standup comedian.

  So that’s what I did.

  * * *

  MIKE DESTEFANO was a stand-up comic who overcame personal torment and drug addiction to become a regular at all the top clubs in New York City. He could be heard on Sirius Satellite Radio and appeared on numerous television networks, including Comedy Central, Showtime, and NBC. He was a featured comic at both HBO’s U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen and the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. Time Out New York called him a “must-see…gruff, candid and unflinching.” His one-man show, A Cherry Tree in the Bronx, opened to critical acclaim. Mike died of a heart attack on May 6, 2011, at the age of forty-four. A documentary celebrating his life is in the works—about how Mike found the ability to rise from addiction, look himself in the mirror, laugh at his pain in front of the whole world, and show those who are still suffering that they can always recover, and when they do, they can do great things. Learn more at mikedestefanodoc.com.

  This story was told on January 23, 2009, at the Players Club in New York City. The theme of the evening was In Harm’s Way. Director: Catherine Burns.

  It was my thirty-third birthday. I don’t celebrate my birthday, because I’m one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I know it’s my birthday.

  Hitting your thirties as a single woman can be tough, but hitting your thirties as a single woman who’s a Jehovah’s Witness is brutal.

  A couple of weeks earlier, I’d heard a statistic that confirmed something every single Witness girl already knows:

  The ratio of single women to single men in our organization is nine to one.

  Yeah.

  So that’s tough.

  When you factor in the rule that we cannot date or marry outside our faith, it gets even tougher. So this was weighing on me as I was sitting with my gorgeous, funny, smart, single girlfriends.

  I had dreams. I had things I wanted to do. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to put myself out there. I wanted to find love.

  But the idea of finding a mate had become such an unattainable goal, such a pipe dream, that by extension all my dreams seemed unattainable. I felt, at thirty-three years old, as though my entire life had already passed me by and I’d missed it.

  I’d lost my joy, and joy is a fundamental requirement of being a Jehovah’s Witness. Only joy can get you out of your bed on a freezing-cold Michigan Saturday morning to go knock on people’s doors and try to talk about God. You have to have joy, and I’d lost mine.

  I talked to the brothers in my congregation about it. They told me to read the Scriptures, to meditate on them, and I did. I prayed. I read the Bible. Wasn’t really working.

  During this time there was one Scripture that I meditated on specifically, and that was Philippians 4:8: “Whatever things are chaste, whatever things are lovable, whatsoever things are pure, think on these things.”

  And I did. I kept myself busy, so that I wouldn’t think about what I felt was missing in my life.

  But I thought about other things, too. Like what it would feel like to have a life partner and what it would feel like to wake up in the arms of a man who loved me.

  So on my thirty-third birthday, surrounded by all my gorgeous, funny, smart, sexy, single girlfriends, I made a decision:

  I decided I needed more than Scripture.

  I needed more than prayer.

  I needed Tinder.

  Tinder, for the uninitiated, is neither chaste nor lovable nor pure. It’s also a visually based dating app, and that presented a problem for me because I couldn’t have my face out there.

  Can you imagine going to someone’s door, knocking, saying, “Hi, I want to talk to you about God’s—”

  “Aren’t you that girl I saw on Tinder?”

  “No, no, no, no, no.”

  It’s a sure way to get caught.

  Remember, Witnesses can only date other Witnesses, and that’s not a suggestion, that’s a rule. And if you break that rule, there are consequences.

  So I’m a planner. I launched a plan.

  I put on my best wrap dress, I took a really flattering picture, and then I cropped my head out and prayed for the best.

  There were some creepy responses to a headless torso on Tinder—there were. But there were some, the gentlemen of Tinder, who were nice, and one of these nice gentlemen was a guy named Josh.

  Josh and I hit it off immediately. We’re both obsessed with Parliament-Funkadelic. He had great taste in music, he was funny, he was smart, he was witty, he was not a creep. Best of all he was a grad student—he was doing his capstone—so he was perpetually busy and four hours away. That was perfect for me, because we became texting buddies.

  Most guys on Tinder, they want to text one day, maybe two, before you meet and get the show on the road. Josh was always busy and far away, so we texted, and the texting was delicious. All that flirting. I was sizzling, I was vivacious. Here was a man who saw me as a woman, not as a spiritual sister. It was awesome. I had a pep in my step, and it spilled into the other parts of my life. I found the joy in my ministry, I was friendlier at work, I wasn’t the wet blanket at parties anymore.

  People noticed, but I kept the reason to myself. I had to keep it a secret, because Josh wasn’t a Witness.

  So one day I get a message from Josh, and he writes, I’M IN YOUR NECK OF THE WOODS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  I happened to be home by myself that day, and I had this rush of boldness.

  I texted back, I’M HOME ALONE. DO YOU WANT TO COME OVER AND MAKE OUT FOR 15 MINUTES?

  To which he said, YEAH.

  And I immediately started to question every life choice I’d ever made, because I am not this girl, this is not me.

  This is the start of every Lifetime movie ever made. My roommate’s going to come home and find my dead body splayed on the living-room floor, and what are my parents going to think?

  I’m spiraling. But before I can cancel, Josh is at the door.

  I open the door.

  Wow.

  Tall, dark, and handsome.

  I let him in, we sit down on the couch, I set my timer. He makes small talk because he’s a polite Midwestern boy. And then he leans in for the kiss.

  That kiss was magic, it was electric. I felt it in my toes. I’m telling you this story years later, and I feel it in my toes right now. My whole body was buzzing.

  And then the timer was buzzing, our time was up.

  I thought, Oh, no, I want more.

  But I stood up dutifully and said, “Okay, thank you.”

  He said, “Really? Okay.”

  And then he said, “Can I see you again?”

  I told him I’d have to think about it, and I did. I had to think about it, because the texting, the flirting, that was good and fine, but we’d crossed a line. I knew where this could go, and I knew what the consequences could be.

  But I also knew I wanted more. It felt good. So I started carving out time to be with Josh.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses, we have a big culture of accountability. If you miss your meetings, people will text you or call you and ask where you were.

  If you have a roommate and you’re out late, that roommate might call you and say, “Where are you, what are you doing?”

  So I had to start lying. I started “going to the gym” a lot, I started “working late” a lot, to carve out time for me and Josh. We’d meet and we’d go to a movie or we’d cook a meal together.

  I remember one ti
me we ordered takeout and watched Sherlock at his apartment, and I was so deliriously happy. I wanted to call my parents and my friends and tell them how happy I was. But I couldn’t do that because not only was Josh not a Witness, he was a lapsed Catholic altar boy who questioned the existence of God. And if you Googled Josh (like I did), the first thing you would see is an article he wrote while he was attending MIT about leaving religion behind altogether.

  Yeah, this is not a guy I could take home to my family.

  I realized I was falling in love with Josh when my youngest brother got engaged and my first thought was, I can’t wait to dance with Josh at the wedding, and my second thought was, Have you lost your mind? You can’t take Josh to this wedding!

  So I launched a four-part plan.

  Phase one, introduce Josh into conversation: “There’s this really nice Midwestern guy. He keeps asking me out. I’m dutifully rebuffing him because of my faith.”

  Phase two, and this one was tricky: convince my family to convince me to take Josh to the wedding as my date.

  And I did it. Here’s how: I called up a couple of escort services and priced how much it would cost to rent a date, then called my family and said, “Listen, guys, it’s about three hundred fifty dollars an hour—can you pitch in?”

  When my mother picked her heart up off the floor, she said, “Why don’t you just ask that nice Midwestern boy to come with you?”

  Mission accomplished.

  Phase three was simple: take Josh to the wedding, keep it platonic, have him charm the pants off everybody.

  That’s easy, he’s a really lovable, affable guy.

  My grandmother fell in love with Josh. She’s not a Witness—she’s a little old Cuban lady—but the Grandma Seal of Approval? Super important.

  Phase four, I will admit, maybe I didn’t plan it out as carefully as I should have, but here was the general idea:

  We would get back, I would wait two weeks, and then I would announce that I had decided to start dating Josh. He wasn’t the big bad wolf anymore—people knew him, they liked him. I knew I’d take my lumps and maybe lose some friends, but I didn’t think it would be the end of the world.