Jen Kirkman - I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

Being a comic is even harder than being in a band. A stand-up comedian wanders cities alone, saying dirty things into germ-ridden microphones to drunk people, whereas a musician sings things into a germ-ridden microphone to drunk people who at least want to give them free drugs and sleep with them after. So for the time being, I just told them that I was moving to New York City to get another job in some kind of box office and to start going on auditions as an actress—really put that BFA in theater arts to work.

In the front seat of the U-Haul Blake and I discussed our relationship. We wanted to remain a couple and try to do the long-distance thing. We agreed that we were only a four-hour train ride apart and it would be even more exciting when we saw each other. Right outside of the Bronx, I had to pee really badly, but the highway was basically a parking lot. The traffic wasn’t going to move for a while, so I took a Snapple bottle, pulled my pants down, and squatted. I missed and peed on the floor of the van and on Blake’s sneaker. Jewish people step on a glass after they take a vow, and in our fucked-up way, we sealed a long-distance relationship deal with my urine on Blake’s foot.

Blake helped me carry my suitcases up the narrow staircase to my new third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn. My roommates weren’t home but they’d left a key under the mat and a welcome note. When I saw my bedroom for the first time, it felt more like a giant fuck-you note. The room was so small that there was only space for a single bed and a small nighttable—which had to sit on the other side of the room if I ever wanted the door to open. I moved from living under my parents’ restrictions to a room that physically restricted me from having any space to invite a boy to sleep over unless I moved my bedside table into the living room.

Blake had to get back to Boston to return the U-Haul before we were charged for an extra day. Before he left, he sat on my bed with me. He held me and we cried. The mutual tears seemed romantic, but the truth was that I was mourning my jail-cell-size bedroom and Blake was probably coming to grips with the fact that he had a four-hour drive in a van that reeked of fresh urine.

That night, I went by myself to a comedy show at a swanky club called Fez. I already had an intellectual inkling of becoming a comedian, but watching it live onstage—I got what can only be called an urge. I couldn’t just sit there like a normal audience member. I wanted to get out of my seat and run up on the stage and just start talking. I wanted to wave to the audience members and say, “I’m one of them! Not you!” The pull was strong. I had to do this comedy thing and I wanted to do it at the expense of everything else and I wanted to start right away. This was my proverbial moment of ovulation and I wanted to lie down on the ground with a pillow under my butt and let comedy just come inside me, and one day it would blossom and grow into a career baby.

I was disturbed from my sleep later that night by the loud noise. Yes, I lived over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, but the screeching that roused me wasn’t the cars; it was my roommates having a fight. Did I mention that Amy and Ed were a couple? It was like living with my parents all over again. Amy had always been volatile in college, but I couldn’t understand what there was to yell about once you’d moved in with a guy. So far, in my limited life experience, the yelling happened because the guy wouldn’t move in with you. But now Amy was upset at Ed because she wanted marriage and kids and was wondering why their cohabitation hadn’t brought out that urge in him yet.

I understood her urge—not to get married and have kids but to have the life you envisioned for yourself. To fill up that pit in the gut that just says, “Gimme, gimme what I want. I promise I’ll be good if you just gimme what I want!” That’s how I felt about stand-up comedy. And if anyone had told me that I couldn’t have it, I would’ve been yelling too. Although I related to Amy’s feelings of longing, falling asleep to them was not soothing. I opened my window so that the sounds of the Mack trucks would drown out the sounds of the train wreck in their bedroom.

The next morning, I got on the Manhattan-bound F train after being laughed at by Amy for asking whether it was safe to carry a purse into New York City. I got off at Second Avenue and found my way to my mecca—the Luna Lounge. It was empty and I went up and confidently said to the bartender, “I want to perform at the alternative comedy show I read about in the Village Voice .”

He shrugged. “I don’t book it. You have to send a tape.”

I was confused. “A tape of what?”

“A tape of you doing stand-up.”

Now I was indignant. “But I have never done stand-up. I don’t have a tape yet. I’m trying to start so I want to start here.”

We went back and forth for a while—as I tried to convince him that I just knew I was funny and he tried to convince me that he had no power to get me on that stage. Imagine going to a job interview, refusing to bring a résumé or any references, and wanting to get hired on the promise that you’ll do a really, really good job if they’d just hire you. I sat down at the bar, defeated. But then I realized, Hey, I’m an adult. In New York City. I can have a drink in the daytime if I want and smoke a cigarette. I ordered a beer and bummed a Merit Ultra Light off the bartender. I posed for the imaginary camera that was taking my James Dean–esque photo. I’d gotten what I wanted out of New York City and after only four days, I knew it was time to go home.

BACK IN BOSTON, things felt weird with Blake. I couldn’t believe that four whole days spent in a long-distance relationship hadn’t made him change his mind about not wanting to live with me. He said I could stay with him until I found an apartment. I did find an apartment. His apartment. And like a lost puppy, I stayed for almost a year. I got my old job back at the Boston Ballet and my old position back on the “team” at Improv Boston. I was disheartened at the thought of starting a stand-up career because it seemed like you couldn’t start until you had already started and put it on tape. So I postponed that dream and focused on being Blake’s clingy girlfriend.

As the months passed, the only thing tangled up in Blake’s sheets was Blake. I was on the other side of the futon, shivering, struggling to get under the covers with him. Blake had made a new friend in his acting class, a female friend. She was starring in the college production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Blake lit up when he talked about her, and he talked about her a lot. He also talked to her a lot, on the phone, in his room, while I sat on his bed, watching. I got drunk one night at a party and confronted him in front of God and a kitchenful of his peers and screamed, “Are you fucking her?” He wasn’t fucking her—until his girlfriend got drunk and crazy and screamed, “Are you fucking her?” And then that night, I’m pretty sure he fucked her, because he didn’t come home. The next day we broke up.

I know it’s wrong, and if I end up going to hell and meeting Adolf Hitler, I promise that I will kill him with my bare hands, but to this day when someone brings up The Diary of Anne Frank, I can’t help but think to myself, That little whore.

My relationship with my parents had improved over that year. Somehow living with Blake wasn’t as abhorrent to my folks as spending the night with Blake and then coming home the next morning in the same clothes in which I’d left their house—to see my boyfriend, who was planning to take those clothes right off. My mom and I sat at the kitchen table, where she’d referred to me as a “trash bag” just a year before. We were having our first frank discussion about sex, without actually talking about sex. Actually, we’d talked about sex once—in 1985.