I Know What I'm Doing (26 page)

20

NO LUCK OF THE IRISH

It’s a big con job. We have sold the myth of Dublin as a sexy place incredibly well; because it’s a dreary little dump most of the time.

—RODDY DOYLE, IRISH AUTHOR

E
ven though I’m from Boston and was raised Catholic, I’m not Irish. I’m German/French Canadian/Polish/English. And according to my mother, “You can tell we aren’t Irish because we only have three kids in our family—unlike that Irish family down the street who has eight kids and a dog that runs around biting everyone in the neighborhood. God didn’t say anything about not using the Pill. As long as you are married anything goes.” That was her French Canadian/German take on things, I guess. Church was once a week. No need to go every day—unless you’re guilty of something.

Despite my non-Irishness, I got offered a gig to do a comedy festival in Dublin for three days in July of 2014. I’d already flung myself across the globe twice that year to London and Melbourne so what was one more time? It seems insane to go from Los Angeles to Dublin for just seventy-two hours, but if someone is going to pay for the trip and on top of that pay me to perform—why not? It would take me out of Los Angeles for another weekend that I could be getting down to finding another boyfriend to end my many months’ streak of utter celibacy, but on the other hand it seemed perfect to enter a Catholic country feeling sexually repressed.

It’s important to take in the culture of every audience. Every country reacts to comedy differently. British people don’t laugh very loudly. They don’t applaud much. But after the show, once the comedian is feeling like he or she should have just stayed home the English will line up to tell you that you were “brilliant.” Then they’ll proudly tell you that they know that they didn’t give you a goddamn sign that they thought you were brilliant but that’s just how they are.

I’d heard that the Irish don’t admit to much. If a comedian were to ask, “How many people here are in therapy?” it would be met with silence—either they wouldn’t ever admit it or they wouldn’t ever be therapized in the first place. I like to make direct connections with people in my audience. I’m like if the Statue of Liberty came to life. I seek out the downtrodden, the tired, the childfree, the single, and the divorced. I don’t make fun of them, I just ask about what their experience was and then work it into my act. I decided that I would proceed with caution and not bother asking the Dublin audience if any of them were also divorced. I would just get into the material and whoever relates, bonus. The material can stand on its own even if no one in the room is divorced. I wasn’t really worried. There haven’t been many audiences I haven’t been able to win over at least a little bit, even if they only seemed lukewarm to me at first. Or maybe I don’t win anyone over. Maybe the two-drink minimum has just finally kicked into their bloodstream.

Before my shows at what I’ll call “The Corporate Cell Phone–Sponsored Comedy Festival,” I had a day of sightseeing. Dublin reminds me a lot of Boston. It’s quaint, steeped in history, with an appreciation for its big thinkers and artists like James Joyce, Thomas Kinsella, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, and my favorite, Oscar Wilde. I immediately traipsed to the birthplace of Oscar Wilde just to stand on the front steps and stare at a plaque. I’d already visited his grave in Paris—I was paying my respects out of order.

I sauntered into a dress shop that mixed vintage with brand-new independent designers. I spent an hour trying on dresses, modeling them for the clerk as other women shopping did the same. I settled on a button-down gray dress with small red flowers that had a very 1990s feel—even more so if I were to pair it with Mary Janes or combat boots. Next I went to see a tarot card reader named David who had come highly recommended. He wasn’t expecting me. I just showed up at his little storefront. As I shuffled the deck he said, “Divorced?”

“Yeah, how did you know?”

“I’m a little intuitive as well. I can tell you’ve just put a big obstacle behind you.”

Now look, you skeptics. I know. I know that a woman my age, who clearly isn’t a local and comes wandering in looking for guidance from a deck of cards without a wedding ring—it’s pretty obvious that she’s divorced or (
gasp
) worse (
in hushed tone
)
never been married.
I get it. But I think it’s magical to believe that someone can see into me and know my past and my future. WHY NOT? It’s cheaper than therapy and less work. And, may I add, I wanted to know more about what my life would look like. I wasn’t aiming to find out about my love life from a guy resting his arms on a paisley tablecloth. But he seemed to be picking up some information from . . . somewhere, so I let him do his thing. David spread my cards out on the table. I was getting a lot of what he called “kick-ass” cards. I could see for myself that they were pretty kick-ass; lots of women holding big cups and wearing giant hats. In a more modern deck it would be the Hillary Clinton or Oprah card.

“You’re very kick-ass. Strong. Independent. There’s no man.”

He shuffled some more.

“Oh, there is a man. He’s over here,” he said, motioning under the table.

“He’s hiding?”

“He’s not ready to come to you yet and that’s because you’re not ready for a commitment. He’s kind of like Clint Eastwood but with the soul of a woman.”

The last major event I remember Clint Eastwood from was when he did a bizarre theatrical performance/speech at the Republican National Convention where he yelled at a chair. And he’s eighty-five. But the soul of a woman sounds nice. It would be great to be with someone who can beat someone up for me but also understands my fears of early menopause.

“He doesn’t mind that you travel. He travels too. But he’s not coming for six months.”

David the Tarot Card Reader also told me that there’s a baby card in my future. When I bristled and said, “I’m about to turn forty. I don’t think so,” he quickly recovered and said, “Something you do with children is going to make you a lot of money.” Either it’s that for-profit orphanage I plan to start or maybe my last book,
I Can Barely Take Care of Myself
, will retroactively hit number one, kicking a Bill O’Reilly book off of the top of the charts. I don’t think it’s going to be an actual baby—seeing as I don’t want one. I don’t even think I can get pregnant anymore. My current birth control is just to tell someone, “Pull out if you remember, I don’t think anything’s working.”

Overall, the reading was everything I hope my life turns out to be. He predicted that the next seven years will be filled with travel adventure, that I’ll live overseas for a short time, and again a badass man with a feminist streak will be joining me. And then the pièce de résistance: David topped off our time together with the ultimate cherry—“You know, Jen, you seem very sensitive and intuitive. I bet you have what it takes to be a psychic too.”

I don’t know why women feel so complimented by being called psychic but it really is something that lots of us cherish as a virtuous quality. I would rather be called psychic over generous, brave, warm, anything. It’s another way of saying, “You’re special. You’re different.
You’re better than most people.
”

Thank you, I am! One time I predicted I was going to stay in bed all day and I did!

With my future clearly laid out before me—and nothing awful to look forward to—later on that day as the sun set, I skipped over to the Iveagh Gardens where the shows were taking place.

I talked to some of the other comics who were hanging out backstage—or rather, outside, behind the makeshift tented theater. Some of the other comedians were Irish but most of them were Canadian or British—all of them with more experience performing in Ireland than me. One girl worked some tough love and gave me heart-to-heart fashion advice that was too late because I had to get onstage in four minutes. “They might not like the leather pants. It comes off as too confident for the audience.” Another comic chimed in, “Yeah, they don’t really like American performers.”

That seemed odd to me because I’d seen a James Dean mural spray-painted on the side of a building with the word “HERO.” And there are reruns of
Friends
on at all hours of the night.

“Oh, they like
those
Americans but it takes a while for them to warm up to a comedian. Especially a woman.”

I heard my name announced with the introduction, “This next comedian is from America”—that’s all it took for some people to start booing. I smiled and tried to get through my set but there were about fifty guys in the back of the room singing some kind of anthem. (I later found out that these guys bought tickets to the show but were having a college fraternity reunion, like they figured out a loophole, that a cheap way to “rent a room with entertainment” was to buy tickets to an already existing event and completely take over.)

After I joked about being divorced, one woman in the front row yelled, “Marriage is sacred. Shoulda made it work!” What, was my Sunday school teacher here heckling me? She yelled out again during a bit I have about sex, “Too much information!” I yelled back, “Honey, I haven’t even begun to give information yet. If this is too much you should leave.” She left. Another woman in the front shouted, “I can see why your marriage didn’t work.” I ignored her. I was no longer performing my work. I was just talking on autopilot, counting down til my fifteen minutes of shame was over.

I took a bow and enthusiastically said with a big smile, “Thanks, you’ve been awful.” It was only nine o’clock. I wandered through the otherwise lovely landscape and tried to ignore the sounds of plastic cups being crushed against dudes’ heads and burps that sounded like they were coming from the trees. This wasn’t an intellectual comedy crowd. Certainly not Dublin’s finest. Two guys ran up to me and each grabbed me by an arm, lifting me off of the ground. One said, “You’re too pretty to not get teamed.” I kicked him in the shin and released myself. “Hey, you rapists! I’ll tell a cop.” Luckily there was an officer behind me, witnessing the whole thing.

“Oh, they’re all right,” he said in his plucky accent.

“They’re all right?” I said in my Boston accent that I use when I’m trying to sound tough. “They said that they wanted to team me.”

The cop laughed it off. “Well, they’re not now.”

I kept walking, letting my prejudice build. Jesus Christ, Dublin was Paris by day—South Boston by night.

Where were the drunken intellectual poets? I know that James Joyce was often kicked out of bars in Dublin for fighting but at least it was what he did when not writing groundbreaking novels.

I ran into two old friends from America, comedians Neal Brennan and Anthony Jeselnik—both are fiercely hilarious, well respected, and do not put up with any shit. They told me that crowds notoriously suck at The Corporate Cell Phone–Sponsored Comedy Festival. We found a bar to hang out in that was safe from my haters and we started in on the Guinness. Normally I don’t have a taste for beer but normally I don’t have such distaste coming my way. Guinness was medicine. I told the bartender about the crowd I just performed to. I showed him the reviews on Twitter that were already coming in. Lots of carefully written assessments of my work such as, “You suck.” He said, “Oh, man, drunken Irish people are a bunch of cunts. Write that on Twitter.”

“I can’t say that.”

“Yes, you can, love. It will be funny. ‘Cunt’ is a term of endearment around here. They’ll get the joke.”

“They’ll get the joke” may as well have been said in slow motion, it was such foreshadowing. The expression “famous last words” was invented for this moment. And so I picked up my iPhone and tweeted just as he said, “Drunken Irish people are a bunch of cunts.”

At that moment, I saw Ren standing before me. Who is Ren? I didn’t know either. He introduced himself and said he was a drummer and his band is well known in Ireland. No, it’s not U2. I don’t know his band’s name so I’ll just call them “Not U2.” Ren said, “I think you’re funny and I loved your set about how you dated a twenty-year-old for one night. I’m twenty-four. Do you have room for one more?”

I see my comedy as a way to share my humiliations so that others can feel less alone. I never see it as a way to solicit men to sleep with. My stories about being single are not cries for help. Or cries for dick. But I was drunk. I was sad and feeling so unfunny I thought that the only cure would be to feel ashamed about something else as soon as possible. So I kissed this kid who was sixteen years my junior from the band Not U2. I felt odd kissing someone in front of people I knew. I hadn’t done that since my first kiss in my best friend’s basement—oh wait, no, and also at the altar on my wedding day.

We hightailed it downstairs to the bathrooms where just outside the men’s and ladies’ rooms was a proper chaise lounge/fainting couch perfect for making out with a stranger. We kissed for a while and anyone within a two-inch radius could feel that Ren wanted more. He wanted to go back to my hotel room because he didn’t live in Dublin but had to be in Dublin very early the next morning. He said that he didn’t want to have to drive back to his mom’s house.
His mom’s house? Oh, God. No. No. I can’t do this. I’m too old.
I said my good-byes to Ren and thanked him for being the only man in Ireland to find me funny.

Hours later, I hit the road and was utterly confused that the sun was rising. Wait. What? My friend Anthony gently explained that we just stayed up all night like a couple of drunken cunts. I had lost all track of time in the bar but I assumed that since I was still in the bar and still being served that it must be somewhere between eleven p.m. and two a.m. I didn’t know that bars stayed open until six a.m. in Dublin. Feeling safe because, well, it was morning and people were already out walking their dogs, I walked back to my hotel alone. I stopped in a store to get a doughnut and the shop owner shouted, “We’re closed!”

I argued, “But your door is open. So in a way you’re open.”