Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

And she said, “If you live under this roof, you live under my rules, and we do not allow sleeping over at a boyfriend’s. If you want to be a trash bag, then you get your own house and behave like a trash bag there.”

I’d never heard of being called a “trash bag” before, as opposed to just “trash.” My mom was really throwing down. If we were the Real Housewives of Massachusetts, she would have ripped a crucifix off her neck and stabbed a hole in my Red Sox T-shirt. When I think about it, it’s actually kind of a compliment, because my mom was implying that I’m strong, durable, and can be relied upon for clean up after a house party. I decided to respond like an adult, and since I didn’t know how to be an adult, I got hysterical and stamped my feet. I slammed my fists on the creaky kitchen table and took a stand against living for free with my parents and driving their car. I screamed a few things about being in love and how they couldn’t keep us apart. I grabbed the suitcase that I’d just unpacked the day before and started repacking. Had they not assumed I’d shared my bed with boys in college? Maybe they hadn’t. When your daughter is in a sketch comedy troupe, maybe all you assume is that she isn’t getting any.

At the last minute, I realized the Oldsmobile wasn’t really my car and I’d have to walk with my stuffed suitcase to the commuter rail train that came once every three hours. Fuck it, I thought, and like a grown-up, I dragged my suitcase sans wheels down the street and a few flights of platform stairs, where I pouted and waited for a train heading to the city limits.

Blake lived in a part of Boston called Brookline Village, with three other guys. I figured what’s one more person? When I arrived with my suitcase, his roommates were happy to see me and I went into Blake’s room and immediately unpacked my things and hung them in his closet. While he was at class, I got all domestic, cleaned up his incense ashes, rinsed out his bong, and put his dirty clothes in the hamper. Later that night as we lay entwined on his futon, Blake asked, “So, have you thought about where you want to get an apartment?”

“Oh,” I said, trying to conceal my disappointment, but it was hard to play it cool with a quivering lip and a bridal magazine in my hand.

Blake said, “I’m sorry, baby, but I can’t have a live-in girlfriend my senior year in college.” I ignored the fact that him calling me “baby” made me cringe. Sometimes Blake really thought he was a member of Earth, Wind & Fire. I told him that he needed to grow up. He came back at me with, “I’m not supposed to be grown up yet. You’re twenty-one years old and a college graduate. You’re the one who needs to grow up.”

The next day, after Blake let me know that our committed relationship couldn’t handle the extra commitment of permanently sharing his bed and his stolen cans of tuna, I went by myself to a party. My friend Zoey had just come back from New York City and was carrying around a copy of their free weekly newspaper the Village Voice. There was an article about a new alternative comedy show on the Lower East Side called Eating It at a bar called the Luna Lounge. Although it wasn’t a normal “comedy club,” it was highly respected and a place where all of the coolest comedians went to try out new material. Getting up in front of people and just sort of talking had been something I’d wanted to explore ever since I was fifteen and I saw that episode of Beverly Hills 90210 where Brenda Walsh started hanging out at a spoken-word open mic night at a coffee shop. She called herself a “hippie witch,” moved out of her parents’ house for a short stint, and sat on a stool, telling stories about high school.

I never went apartment hunting in Boston. After that party, I decided that becoming a stand-up comedian and getting my start in Manhattan was my destiny. If Blake thought that I should grow up and my parents thought that I wasn’t adult enough to sleep at my boyfriend’s house, I’d show everyone. I’d move to the toughest city in the world. I’d wanted to live in New York City ever since I saw my first black-and-white photo of James Dean smoking in a Manhattan diner. Sadly, I can’t say that I’ve grown out of my urges to do things because I think that technically, if I were photographed doing them, it would make a really cool and iconic picture.

Even though the “plan” was to be a serious actress, I had always secretly wanted to be a stand-up comedian. It’s safe to say I had about as much ambition and understanding of how to actually become a stand-up comedian as my mom had of how to become a high-priced call girl. But that article in the Village Voice seemed like it was written specifically for me to see. The closest I had come to doing comedy since This Is Pathetic was becoming a member of a local Boston improv group. (Improvisation—that fine art where a group of people stand onstage with nothing prepared and one of them asks the audience for a suggestion like an occupation or a location and someone inevitably shouts out, “Rectal exam!”) I enjoyed messing around onstage and making people laugh, but I wasn’t great at playing with others. It’s not that I don’t enjoy sharing the spotlight—I just don’t like having to be responsible for other people. Improv is all about supporting your teammates. (By the way, I hate when anything other than a professional sports team refers to itself as a “team.” It has this air of forced camaraderie that has always made me uncomfortable, along with people who talk in baby voices to babies and to adults during sex.) Improv is similar to war in that you’re expected to do anything to save the life of your partner. And as with war, people don’t really understand what improv is “good for.”

Improv requires one thing I lack that I think all mothers need—that basic instinct to put someone else first. I can barely forgive myself for the time when I negged Billy from my improv troupe onstage. He said, “I have a gift for you,” and my first instinct was to say, “No you don’t.” The scene died right then and there. See what happens when I try to nurture something? I know it seems dramatic to relate destroying an improv scene to possibly destroying a child’s life, but improv and child rearing are not so different. Both are jobs that people volunteer for and complain about endlessly, and they bore everyone around them as they talk about the process.

I broke the news to Blake that I was moving. He was surprised, since only twenty-four hours earlier I’d wanted to settle down and play house. I explained to him that if I wanted to do something as drastic as become a stand-up comedian, I had to really make a bold move and change cities. I couldn’t become a new person in my old hometown. Blake agreed. He always agreed with me when I spoke excitedly and loudly about something—even if I was talking out of my ass.

My parents had changed the locks on me after I decided to leave them and attempt to move in with Blake. I never understood their reasoning for that move. Wouldn’t that only ensure that I’d spend even more nights having patchouli-scented sex with my boyfriend at his off-campus apartment? I had to arrange a time so they could let me into my own bedroom to get the rest of my things. Blake was in the driveway, hiding from my folks and manning the small U-Haul truck that I’d rented to get me to Brooklyn, where I was going to live with my old college friends Amy and Ed. I didn’t even have any furniture, just a couple of lamps and a wicker nightstand. The inside of our U-Haul looked like a Pier 1 had been renovated by a crackhead.

As ballsy as it may have been to move to Brooklyn without knowing anything about it—except what I’d seen in the opening credits of Welcome Back, Kotter as a kid—I was still a wimp in a lot of ways. I knew I had my parents’ love but I wanted their approval. I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mom and dad that my reason for moving to New York City was that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. They never said point-blank, “Don’t become a stand-up comedian,” but I think that’s an implied desire that parents have for their child from the moment he or she is born. That and “Don’t become a stripper or a junkie, or a musician.”