Unwifeable(15)

Now, standing face-to-face with Dr. Tom once again, I am bombastic as I assure him that my stick-thin body is totally healthy as I do shot after shot of Maker’s.

“Well, thanks for saying I look great,” I say. “But don’t worry. I’m fine.”

Dr. Tom is handsome, but we have the chemistry of brother and sister. I love him in a way that you love the guardian angel who slips into your life at a time when you need one most.

I sit down at the bar to meet his friends.

One of them, Adam Strauss, has recently started doing stand-up comedy, so we agree to watch him do his set. He’s fairly new to performing, and as we sit at the table, it is clear he is warming up on us.

“So how soon did Tom drop the D-bomb on you after you two met?” Adam asks. “First ten minutes?”

I laugh. Not only does Tom have the D-bomb, for doctor; he also has the H-bomb, for Harvard.

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” I say. “Unfortunately, he had a penchant for jam bands.”

“You’re killing me,” Dr. Tom says.

Because I am eating very little during the day now, the shots I am downing go straight to my head, which always makes me want to drink even more. By the time Adam goes onstage, I feel nothing but pure liquid confidence.

“I wasn’t going to do stand-up in New York, because I just wanted to concentrate on the Post,” I whisper to Dr. Tom. “But fuck it, I think I’m going to do it tonight.”

Placing my name in line to do a set, I try to sober up a little bit with a water.

I have been performing at open mics in Chicago for the past year since starting my blog, and I think about all my past shows. The very first mic I did in Chicago was run by a then unknown T. J. Miller, who introduced me and, after I did my set, told the audience and me, “My only advice for you is to try to be less attractive.”

Yes, that I could definitely do.

I had also developed a pen-pal relationship with a young Kyle Kinane after joining a Yahoo! group dedicated to Chicago comedians. Kyle and I would email back and forth nearly every day for months (subject lines: “glad to hear you’re not reproducing,” “thursday morning coming down,” and “am I retarded?”), and he gave me something I wasn’t receiving from my ex-husband. Encouragement.

His lowercase stream-of-consciousness notes about the jokes I posted online and the status of his own life were like manna from heaven: “your blog is getting quite heelarious lately. well done. i’ve made a pact with myself that i’m not shaving until i’m not ashamed of myself anymore. last monday i got a citation for trying to sneak onto the train without having a ticket. this will be an amazing beard.”

I try to summon up every tiny encouragement in my mind right now and cling to it like a life raft. But I haven’t performed-performed in weeks since joining the Post.

“Up next . . . Mandy!”

Electricity shoots through my body.

I strut to the front of the tiny bar and survey the room. I feel a sense of nonchalance and attitude. I am just the right amount of drunk. Whenever I’ve performed before, I always overthought everything. I talked and delivered lines as if I was doing material. This time I delivered the whole set without thinking.

“I opened a fortune cookie the other day. It said, ‘Give up.’?”

Laughter.

“I was going to wash my hair with L’Oréal . . . but I realized I wasn’t worth it.”

More laughter.

“I’m writing a point-by-point response to He’s Just Not That into You. So far all I have is, ‘That’s not what he said last night . . . when he was inside me.’?”

The bar goes wild.

“Holy shit, that was great,” Dr. Tom says, giving me a high five.

The booker comes up and gets my email. Maybe I’m not done performing quite yet.

I kiss Dr. Tom on the cheek, grab a cab home, and, before passing out, realize I need to work out all the nervous energy wracking my body. I do something I haven’t thought about in years. Pulling out my cell, I dial a number I still know by heart. A phone sex party line that is free for women in Chicago. I discovered it the summer I interned at the Village Voice in New York in 1996, when I needed someplace to engage with those demons that have plagued me since I was fifteen.

Using a fake identity to self-flagellate sexually was my way to wrestle with the darkness. All those feelings of badness.

I record my intro message as I play with myself on my awful air mattress, sliding off it and falling onto the floor. “Hi . . . this is . . . Crystal . . . and I’m feeling kind of drunk . . . and wondering if anyone wants to chat . . .”

Bing! Bing! Bing! Seven new requests to chat one-on-one.

“Hey, this is Bob, a fifty-six-year-old married man in Arkansas, have you been a bad girl?”

The pain inside me has found its flogger for the night.

“Yes,” I say. “I am bad.”



* * *




ON THE SUBWAY the next morning, severely hungover from not just the alcohol but also the steep cliff-drop from stand-up to degrading phone sex, I check my email and see one new message from the guy who ran the open mic. He is putting together a show and wants to know if I’ll be on the bill.

“Definitely,” I write back.

I can’t believe it. Just like that, in the span of one second, I have something to cling to: Hope. Excitement. A dream, even.