Unwifeable(28)

“In your book about douchebags,” he says, “are you going to say some guy sniffed your neck?”

I laugh.

“No,” I say. “I don’t know.”

“You have beautiful hair,” he says. Then he smiles and says, “God took my hair.”

Pointing to the softness of his sky-blue cashmere sweater, Moby says he can warm me up and rubs my arms. I’m super nervous and try to think of something to say to fill the silence.

“You could never feel sad up here,” I say.

“No, not sad,” Moby agrees. “Maybe forlorn.”

On the cab ride to take me home, he directs the driver which streets to take (“At the right time of night, this one is like butter”), and tells me to buckle my seat belt. He says how strange it is no one does that in New York. The closest we get to being physical—outside of the sniffing—is a light kiss at the end of our night.

When I reach the lesbians’ brownstone in Park Slope, I race upstairs to Lola and Juanita, who are awaiting details. I tell them everything.

“Congratulations,” Juanita says. “You just had your first lesbian experience with Moby.”

Other hangouts with Moby are decidedly non-dates. He invites me to a fund-raiser he is doing with the Roots at Crobar, and I run into Michelle Collins, who invites me up into the VIP section with Julia Stiles and Drea de Matteo. When Moby finally comes upstairs, I say, by way of seduction, “I hear you hit on all young writers.”

“I like smart people,” he says.

When he emails me with pictures of screaming fans at his concerts, I tell him this is like the celebrity version of a dick pic. “What’s a dick pic?” he asks.

Another night, he joins me as a plus-one to an event at Dangerfield’s comedy club on the Upper East Side, where Jerry Seinfeld and friends are feting a new documentary about Rodney. We drink Manhattans at the bar, talking about the awesomeness of the old-school vibe of the club, but when I say I am going to get some quotes for Page Six, he takes off. Now on a singular dateless mission, I walk up to Joy Behar and explain who I am.

“I know who you are,” she says with a half smile, and I figure she must be referring to the Star Jones piece. Behar continues to eye me suspiciously, but Susie Essman jumps right in with an anecdote, telling me that Rodney Dangerfield was the only comic who told her to make her act even dirtier.

“Rodney called me up one day out of nowhere,” Susie says. “?‘You got to be the female Andrew Dice Clay, that’s the way to make you a big star.’?”

Susie turns to Joy and says, “He was supportive of women comics.”

“Yes, he was,” Joy says. “He also wanted to fuck all of us.”

When Moby says he wants to see me at the “reporter battle,” as he calls the New York’s Funniest Reporter contest I get asked to compete in, I give him the details, but the night of he doesn’t show.

But I don’t care, because I’m more focused on the stand-up itself. Thanks to Ryan the publicist’s girlfriend, Sharon Simon, who mentored me before the show, I now have a secret weapon: information about how to not completely suck at stand-up.

Simon, a very funny stand-up comic with years of experience, listened to me patiently as I complained. “It’s like, I do the same jokes, and sometimes I’m terrible and other times I do really well, but it’s the same material.”

“Okay,” she advised. “That’s actually pretty easy to fix. Tell me, when do you do well?”

“When I’m in the moment, when I’m just talking and being me.”

“There you go,” Sharon said. “All you have to do to put yourself in the moment is immediately comment on something that’s happening at the start of your set, and everything will come out more naturally after that.”

It was like the lesson on writing that Steve gave me. One moment, one thing determines how the rest flows. Find something that anchors you, that is naturally your voice, and the rest of what you say will follow.

The night of the show I follow the delightful Robert George, a wonderful op-ed writer whom I work with at the Post. He has just done his set, in which he talks a lot about being both an African American and a conservative.

When I am called up onstage, I remember Sharon’s words, and I say, without hesitation or overthinking, the first funny thing that comes to mind.

“I don’t mean to sound bitter,” I say, as I pull the mic off the stand, “but all these other reporters are stealing my ‘what it’s like to be black’ material.”

Huge laugh. And I am off, with the rest of my jokes flowing with the same ease of rhythm as the first. At the end of the night, the judges deliberate and then come back with their announcement: I won!

Mackenzie and Steve are both there to cheer me on, and it is such a high. But then . . . I get some whiskey in me. Afterward, walking through a drizzling rain, I go to a sleek new comedy club in the Meatpacking District called Comix and drink so much Jameson, I have trouble standing up. To my left is Eugene Mirman. To my right is Todd Barry. I have no idea what I say to them, but I’m sure it’s a disaster. Tig Notaro is extra nice and maybe even a little concerned. Around 2 a.m., some cheesy grandstanding guy comes up to me, swoops in, and kisses me—and I go along, then stagger out. Not too long after, I end up making out with a second guy, with a shitty knockoff Morrissey hairdo. When we stop kissing, I start to cry and tell him about my promise not to have sex because of God and the last terrible one-night-stand tampon-fucking incident.