Girl Walks Into a Bar (13 page)

In general, our relationship can best be summed up in the following exchange:

The time: eight
A.M.
My phone rings. “Hello?” I say in a groggy voice.

“Heeeyyyyy!”

“What’s going on?”

“I got the best blow job last night.”

“IT’S TOO EARLY FOR THIS!” I snap, and hang up on him.

Ryan was one of my many friends who had heard me lament my man situation over the years, and so he was rooting for me on the Dating Crusade. He wouldn’t let up about this guy from the theater.

For me, my natural anti-dating instincts started to kick in. I hate dating. I hate strangers. I hate going on dates with strangers. I waited about two weeks until I had managed to work up the will to e-mail him. I went to get his card out of my purse and it wasn’t there. I had put it right in the small pocket! I turned the bag over, dumped everything out, and still nothing. It was definitely gone.

I reported back to Ryan that I had lost the card, and he was very disappointed in me. He suggested that we look him up at
Gotham
. We tried, but he wasn’t listed. I thought he had mentioned he only freelanced there. Also, the difficulty in locating him was compounded by the fact that he had a pretty common name, so Googling him didn’t help. So that was it. I screwed up.

Almost a year later, on my birthday, I was walking down the street in my neighborhood and a guy was walking toward me on the sidewalk, grinning. I didn’t even remember him at
first; he had to tell me that he was the guy who had talked to me at that show.

“Oh my God! I lost your card!” I exclaimed to him. “I was gonna get in contact with you and I lost it!”

“Well, here’s another one,” he said and presented a new card. I waited about a week to e-mail him to say hi, due to my aforementioned reluctance and fear. But he immediately wrote me back suggesting we go out to drinks. He even offered four or five venue options. He was very thoughtful and concerned about planning the date at just the right place.

The night of the date, I met him at the bar area of a large Spanish restaurant. There was no instant attraction on my part, but I was trying like hell to be a “regular person” who could get to know somebody slowly. We chatted about this and that, and about ten minutes in, I asked him about his job. He told me about being a freelance writer. He then said, “And my partner and I have a dog-walking business.” His … business partner, you ask? Nope! His
gay husband partner.
The guy is wearing a ring. He is married to a man. And I was on a date with him.

Now this story goes off in two branches. One branch is, I was pissed. This guy seemed straight to me, and I think of myself as having pretty finely tuned gaydar. He even fooled Ryan. Also, he had approached me
right
after that host announced to the audience, “She’s siiiinngle!” and asked me out. I guess this was the drawback of being in the public eye. This guy just wanted to meet someone who was on TV so he could say, “Hey, I’m hanging out with that girl from
SNL
tonight.” What other explanation was there? And why would I
go out with a complete, gay stranger on a friend date? I have friends, not to mention my full posse of quality gay men friends whom I’ve met via legitimate means!

Here comes the other branch of the story, and this is why I said nothing to this guy on the “date” but hung in there for an hour before bolting from the area in defeat. Before I was in the public eye, which wasn’t until my early thirties, I had a great memory for people I met. I was never someone who forgot a name or a face. But an odd thing happens when you are on TV. People are used to seeing you night after night on their television. You are in their home. They’ve had a ton of practice at seeing your face. But the reverse isn’t true. Sometimes it happens that when I’ve met a stranger, they’ll see me again two years later and think I’m going to remember them from a ten-second introduction at a party, maybe because they’ve had years of seeing me on TV. After I saw this guy on the street and he gave me his card again, I was walking to the gym one morning a few days later, and a complete stranger passed me and said hello. In my head I was thinking, “Who the hell is this?” That’s another thing about being in the public eye; sometimes a person saying hi is just a stranger who recognizes you and is superfriendly. Other times, it’s a classmate of yours from high school. Usually, when a stranger says hi as if we are old buddies, my mind goes into superfast Rolodex mode and tries to sort out who the friendly person is. When this guy said hi, I came up blank.

“Hi,” I said, Rolodex spinning madly.

“This is my partner, Walt.”

“Hi,” I say to Walt, an extremely gay man.

“OK. Bye!”

Who was that? “It sort of looked like that guy who had asked me out,” went a fleeting thought in my mind that flitted immediately out again. I should have paid attention to that fleeting thought, because I discovered on the date that the gay man who had said hi a few days before on the street was indeed the same man with whom I was currently drinking sangria. So you see, by the time I went out with this guy, I
did
“know” my date was gay. I even met his partner! I had no recourse. I couldn’t say, “Why the hell did you ask me out, gay man!?” Because technically,
right
before this date, I had seen him on the street with his partner. I had some severe face blindness syndrome with this guy who, I still contend, looked like the quintessential New York Jewish dude.

This dating thing was doing nothing to improve my morale. I am no “star” in my own mind, yet allow me to use this word for the sake of argument. The only thing worse than going on a date with a starf****r is going on a date with a gay starf****r. With a gay starf****r, you can pretty much be sure there will be no f***ing.

My Pal, the Universe

Clearly, love was not happening
. My career still wasn’t happening either. I did not want to fall into a k-hole about my life. I was determined to remain positive. I had learned my lesson after I ended my four-year stint on the mainstage at Second City in Chicago and moved to LA, where
nothing
happened in my career for the longest time. I felt really defeated about it. But after a year in LA, I landed the job on
SNL
. I was going to be wiser now. I wasn’t going to waste my precious time bumming out, because you never know when your break is coming. However, it was getting harder and harder to stay optimistic. So, next, I did what people do in dark times—I turned to religion. Well, I turned to spirituality. Well, I turned to … The Secret.

As in
THE SECRET!
As in that DVD and book that came out several years ago that temporarily made me feel I was invincible and the only thing holding me back from my own success was my own negative attitude. The Secret says that if you envision the life you want and live as if you already have all the good things you desire, the UNIVERSE will magically send all
those good things to you. Have you ever tried The Secret? I know that believing in The Secret comes with some shame, but I am sure some of you ladies reading this have a vision board with pictures of engagement rings and babies, and a picture of Oprah so you can someday meet her, and it’s stuck behind your dresser in case a guy were ever to come over, see it, and run screaming in terror from your bedroom.

I can tell you from my experience with The Secret that there are two phases. The first is Secret Euphoria. You are the master of your own destiny and can bring whatever you want into your life. You place your order with the Universe, and the Universe delivers everything back that you’ve requested in a neat bow and in a timely fashion. You try it a bit and you know what? It kind of works. Well, at least it did for me. I had first encountered The Secret a few years prior, and to try it out, I decided I wanted a part in a movie and I wrote it down. The Secret says to aim as high as you possibly can, so I decided to up the ante—a role in a movie
in a cool foreign land
. Yes. I actually wrote it down.

No joke, six months later, I was headed off to Spain and Greece to shoot a comedy with Nia Vardalos. The amazing thing about me getting my wish was that it’s very rare for comedies to shoot in amazing foreign locales. Big dramas or war movies, yes, but comedies can usually be shot right at home. So I did think maybe there was something to this Secret thing.

But as anyone who has done The Secret knows, Secret Euphoria is followed by another phase, which I refer to as Secret Crashout. This is the phase when you look at your list
and you look at your life and you realize you still don’t have a boyfriend or a million dollars or an organized apartment. It’s the “Let me get this straight, Universe, you’re telling me I DON’T have magical powers?” phase. Hence the term
Secret Crashout
.

I needed a reboot. I needed to get back on track. I just needed to believe again. Well, the DVD says to start small by asking the Universe for something simple, to prove you’ve got your mojo. It suggests a cup of coffee. In Secretland, that means you envision yourself getting a cup of coffee, a free cup of coffee that just happens into your life merely because you focused on the positive vision in your mind and therefore start vibrating on the frequency that attracts this free cup of coffee. I didn’t want to ask for the cup of coffee. That felt too unoriginal, since it’s the example they use in the DVD. What could I ask for that could give me a sign? How about a flower? That’s simple. I asked for a flower.

Two short days later, I am performing the works of Spalding Gray,
Stories Left to Tell
, as a guest (they had a guest actor sit in every week). I didn’t have any friends coming until later in the week, but when I arrived in the dressing room, there on my table was not merely one single flower but three bouquets of gorgeous flowers arranged on the dressing table for me. I looked at my bounty of flowers and gave a sly singsongy wink to the heavens. “Universe! You sly devil!” I thought. Mind you, these flowers were from members of the cast I barely even knew. It was way above and beyond the call of thespian courtesy that there would be flowers from mere acquaintances raining down upon me.

I asked for
a
flower and I got a whole bunch of flowers in
return. Yup, everything was going my way. The Universe was back! Back to being my own magical genie.

When I got home, I started to arrange my new flowers. The bottoms of the stems were bound with rubber bands. This is standard NYC-deli flower practice. I got some scissors and cut the first rubber band.
SNAP!
The rubber band flung off the stem quicker than the blink of an eye. I can tell you with great certainty that it happened literally quicker than the blink of an eye because before I could blink my eye, that rubber band had smacked my eyeball like a slingshot.
OWW! Aghh! Owwww!

The irony occurred to me instantly. While still smarting and futilely rubbing my eye, I was thinking in my you-merry-prankster tone, “U-niverse! Why are you doing this to me? All I wanted was a flower and you gave me a whole bunch of flowers. Why you gotta go and wreck it, Universe?”

The next morning, I woke up and, to my surprise, my eye still really hurt. Now I had to go to the eye doctor. There goes my whole afternoon. Just because I asked for that damn flower. The eye doctor told me that it was a good thing I came in, because I had a severe irritation on my eye. He actually had to prescribe me some drops.

“You’d be surprised how often we see this injury in New York,” he told me.

The deli-flowers-rubber-band-eye-snap thing. Beware.

I was walking home from the subway, having spent my entire afternoon tending to my odd karmic injury. I’d better start over again, I thought to myself. Clean slate. I wondered what else I could ask for to get back on The Secret train.

I popped into the Starbucks on my corner and ordered a nonfat latte. As I went to the counter to retrieve my order, the Starbucks employee (no, I am not going to use the word
barista
) handed me my coffee.

“Hey!” he told me. “When I saw you come in, I made you an iced latte ’cause that’s what you usually get. So I already made you an iced latte too. Do you want it? We’re just gonna throw it away.”

Ta-da! The cup of coffee! THE CUP OF COFFEE! From the DVD! After all of my magical thinking, here it was, the thing right from the video that was somehow supposed to represent all of the abundance of life. I walked down the block with my prescription eyedrops in my purse and two coffees in hand and looked skyward.
“U-niveeeeerrrse!!”

I Left My Heart

(and Dignity) in Sacramento