Unwifeable(18)

When it comes to editing, Steve fights hard for every joke I write that the copy desk flags or red-pens. If you ever want to know what to look for in an editor, it’s this: someone who is a writer first.

But Steve also has to fight for something else. During the painting process, I make a huge mistake. I never once ask to look at what the makeup artist is doing to my face. I am so self-conscious already, I don’t think I have a right to demand to see what is happening. Someone says, “Fierce,” at one point, so I think that’s a good thing?

But when I finally go to a mirror I see it: I am nightmarish. The Post (like any mainstream media) relies on hot photos of hot women being hot. And I didn’t look hot at all. I looked frightening—like a red-and-black Kabuki freak.

When Steve pulls up the photos in our system Merlin, I watch his eyes as he clicks through the hundreds of shots. Then I watch as he does what a good editor does.

He doesn’t make me feel bad, but he is honest—and he saves the story. (In the words of one of my Washington Post mentors David Von Drehle, “Don’t try to make an A+ story out of C-material.” And that’s what those photos were.) After he makes some calls, the publicist messengers over a CD filled with other art options of drop-dead-beautiful naked women covered in body paint that we can use for the cover—instead of me. Next to one of them on the features cover, I am inserted as a tiny little inset. “My Brush with Fame: The Naked Truth About Becoming a Body Paint Model.”

It is humiliating, but it is also instructive. Never trust a makeup artist. Never trust anyone when it comes to pictures. If you think something looks weird, say something. Throughout a photo shoot, check in. Go with your gut. Need to start all over? Fine. Do it.

After the piece comes out, I keep up my aggressive parlaying streak.

I text Nick Kroll. Does he want to go to the body-painting-model-filled after-party with me? He is in LA. I call up Andy Borowitz, and he agrees. We walk through the party in the Meatpacking District as naked gorgeous women pose provocatively this way and that in silver, bronze, and gold body paint.

Outside the party, we pass by a newspaper box on the street. I put in a quarter to get out the paper and show him my piece.

“I got a few funny lines in it,” I say, as I show it to him, proud of myself in a small way after listening to his impressive anecdotes.

I hold up the spread for him to see. He examines it momentarily.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s not a good picture of you.”

My heart sinks. I feel so stupid. Only I could be in the paper naked and look like shit. So much for the piece-of-ass trajectory.



* * *




PERFORMING STAND-UP IS never something I plan to do in New York, but that one drunken night out with Dr. Tom changes all that. When I am booked to do a show at a gay Thai restaurant in the Meatpacking District, I nervously prepare as best as I can, trying to build up the fake confidence that a real performer gains naturally by going up at clubs five nights a week.

Inside the venue a few minutes before showtime, I walk up to a young man whom I ask, “Hey, are you on the show tonight, too?”

He is.

“I work at the Post,” I say, chatting him up nervously.

“Okay,” he says.

Then, all of a sudden, he turns to me in the middle of my wandering spiel. His face pinches up. He asks, with disgust and disbelief, “Did you just fart?”

My face turns red, and then I laugh.

“Yeah, I totally did.”

He pauses, stone-faced at first, then cracks up, shaking his head in disbelief. Onstage, I do not kill—at all. Halfway through my set, I look like a deer in headlights, and it shows. The young man I have been talking to before tears it up, however.

His name is Hannibal Buress.

“What are you doing now?” he asks me after the show.

“Nothing,” I say. “Want to hang out?”

It feels like we are both just trying to figure the city out, and we spend the rest of the night together. We soon find out we have something in common: We both have Chicago roots. I went to Northwestern, and he went to Southern Illinois University, where he says that after the first time he got a few chuckles, he got that rush any new performer gets, where you feel like Chris Rock or something. Little does he know that he is just a few years from being in the same major leagues as Rock himself.

A few days later at the Post, I get a call from Hannibal.

“You going up anywhere tonight?” he asks.

I hadn’t planned on going up anywhere again. But I meet him at a Lower East Side bar, where I get to see Eric Andre do stand-up in his earliest days of performing. Eric is modest about his talents, immediately bringing up that maybe Zach Galifianakis already has the music-and-comedy thing covered. Not a chance.

Hannibal calls me when he is hosting shows, and I get to do my own shitty stand-up. This sets my new intermittent pattern.

“What are you doing tonight, Miss Mandy?”

“Nothing.”

“Going up anywhere?”

Well, now I am.

One night after a show, he says he has nowhere to stay so I invite him back to the lesbians’ apartment to crash. We lie platonically in bed together, and he says after an awkward silence, “You’re cool as shit.” We make out for a little while, then fall asleep.

We text stupid shit throughout the day that makes me genuinely happier than most things in my life at the time.