I Know What I'm Doing (32 page)

I held Joan’s story in my heart when I saw many of my peers and even men who started comedy after I did get their own TV shows or start selling out comedy shows on the road while I still struggled to get noticed. Joan was funny, wildly original, indefatigable, and she couldn’t get noticed for over a decade? Maybe, just maybe, Joan’s story was my story too. It gave me hope. And hope is what you live on when you’re young and broke. That and free ketchup packets.

On a particularly down day when I was working as a temp at DKNY I got reprimanded by my fabulous gay boss for what he called a “fashion sin”—I was wearing ankle socks with Capri pants and flats. “Honey, no socks. Ever. I don’t care if it’s negative ten degrees. Socks make people here sad.”

I worried about the people working at the DKNY corporate office if ankle socks were affecting their serotonin levels. Did they read the newspapers? (Page Six doesn’t count.)

I took my socked feet on a walk during my lunch hour. I had also been told that bringing my own lunch every day made everyone sad (someone please get some Zoloft over to DKNY headquarters in Midtown stat). So that I didn’t accidentally spark chain-reaction suicides in the office, I walked up and down Fifth Avenue eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Coming toward me—on what was normally a bustling sidewalk but at this moment seemed to be occupied only by us two—was Joan Rivers. I stared at her, letting her pass. She had no idea she had just brushed by a young comedian who idolized her and had a copy of
Enter Talking
in her purse—a purse that probably made everyone at DKNY utterly despondent. I wanted to stop Joan and ask her for advice. But I already knew—there is no advice. She can’t give me some fast-track option. That doesn’t exist. The advice? The advice is stop asking for advice and just keep fucking doing it, open mic after open mic, and then when you get better at it—Indian casino after Indian casino.

Fifteen years later I’m sitting with Joan Rivers and our mutual agent at lunch somewhere on Fifth Avenue. We’ve had two glasses of wine and she’s holding my hand as I tell her the story of walking by her—the lowly temp eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich—and now I’m eating chopped salad with her as she willingly gives me advice on how to continue in this business and in life as a divorced woman. We both got misty-eyed about how much our work means to us. She joked, “You were right not to stop me that day fifteen years ago, bitch. Those socks sound awful.”

We talked about men. I told Joan that I have a hard time “getting it up” for guys who don’t do something similar to what I do, but that a lot of men who do what I do would rather a wife who isn’t also coming home on a Sunday night from the road, too tired to rub his feet or cook. “If this is what you want,” Joan said, “you’ll do it no matter what and you might not have a man. You might not meet someone again who can handle what you do until you’re sixty. But what’s the alternative? Be in a relationship but be miserable in life?”

She knew that our lifestyle is a quiet sacrifice. This isn’t something to boast about or brag about or feel superior about. No one wants to
not
have everything they want in life but sometimes what you really want has to outweigh what would also “be nice to have.” I’m not in it for fame or fortune. It’s the other “F” word: Freedom. I don’t want a boss. I don’t want to work for a major corporation. I don’t want to sit at a desk.

Joan told me to keep my options open. That there may be men in my life who aren’t in my business who are still funny and will embrace my lifestyle. She warned against falling for comedians. “Expand your horizons. Most comedians I know want a woman who eats salad with her mouth open and just stares into their eyes.”

Joan and I met through a combination of good luck, good timing, and fifteen years of preparation in my mind of how I would behave if I were ever in her presence. After a guest dropped out at the last minute, I had the chance to appear on her YouTube series
In Bed With Joan.
When I arrived at the infamous bed Joan warned me that she only talked on camera and had some things to do before the shoot. But she overheard me joking around with the crew. I wish I could remember what I said but whatever it was, the crew laughed and Joan turned around and pointed at me, making eye contact. “You’re funny,” she said. That’s all I had ever wanted: validation from Joan.

The next thing I knew, she broke her rule of not talking before she was on camera and we sat and chatted. One of my favorite stories in Joan Rivers’s book is that when her peers had risen to fame and out of the small Greenwich Village scene and she was at her lowest point and agents weren’t able to book her on gigs, Lenny Bruce was around. He came to see one of her shows and afterward gave her a note that said, “You’re right. They’re wrong.”

When I asked her about that story she said to me, “Oh my God, years later I was talking to George Carlin and he said that he got that same note. Oh well.” And that’s the epitome of being a comic—sometimes a story is inspirational and sometimes it ends up being a great opportunity to say something self-deprecating. But both of us knew that note still meant something to her.

Back in 2005, a little under ten years into my stand-up “career,” my parents started to get very frustrated. They had lent me money to move to Los Angeles and they thought—naively, as I did—that my seven-minute spot on a TV show taped in Hollywood called
Late Friday
would bring me to the next level. There would be fame, fortune, and food not bought from 7-Eleven. But performing a quick stand-up set on NBC in their 1:30 a.m. slot isn’t really going to do much for anyone—not the person who performed it and not the people who watched it with one eye open on their way to sleep.

When I needed a sudden root canal but my credit wasn’t good enough to apply for a payment plan at the dentist’s office, I called my loan officers, Mr. and Mrs. Kirkman. They were frightened—would I keep asking for money? Did I not realize they weren’t rich? Today it’s a root canal but what will tomorrow bring? A toe amputation? We had a huge fight. Our relationship felt strained despite the fact that they lent me the money and I paid them back five dollars a week until it was paid off.

Years later I read a self-help book that suggested we have to parent ourselves—otherwise known as self-soothing. One exercise in the book was to picture in your mind two parents that completely understood things about you that your biological parents don’t and just talk to them in your head. I picked Joan Rivers and Howard Stern. For years I talked to Joan and Howard in my head when I had money problems due to having career problems and the problem was that I didn’t have a career. This relieved the stress of having to tell my real parents that I thought I made a huge mistake in following my dreams. Calling your parents for money is sometimes really calling them for validation, and you’re not going to get that in a conversation that’s wrapped up in trying to figure out how they can get eight hundred dollars across the country to your dentist before the novocaine wears off. Although your parents may believe in you and root for you, they still worry. They don’t always realize that you feel like a five-year-old when you talk to them about YOUR worries and that what you’re really saying when you say “Okay, we can work out a payment plan” is “OH MY GOD, I AM SO SCARED I AM OUT IN THE WORLD ALONE—CAN I JUST MOVE BACK HOME AND WATCH GAME SHOWS ON THE COUCH? I GIVE UP! I NEED SOME COMFORT!”

Just a year before her death, my parents went to see Joan perform and she took care of them. She arranged for them to have great seats and they had a private meeting after the show. Joan told them that she believed in me and she hoped that they realized my talent. (She knows the right thing to say to people’s parents because her parents tried to push her to be a doctor.) By that point my mom and dad were no longer worried about me since I was gainfully employed and my teeth weren’t falling out. I would have loved Joan and my parents to have had this discussion during the year of the root canal but I’m sure back then they would have been thinking,
Why is Joan Rivers telling us what to think?
I felt like my whole life had come together when my mom told me the story of her and my dad meeting Joan and how she made them feel special by announcing, “Everyone out of my dressing room, please, the Kirkmans are here!” The mom in my head had met my real mom and they all agreed—I’m just such a goddamn delight.

The last time I saw Joan we were performing together at a theater called Largo in Los Angeles in the summer of 2014. She was kind enough to agree to share a bill with me and let me keep all of the money. I bought brand-new wineglasses and a bottle of Cakebread chardonnay for us to toast with backstage and to thank her. She rehearsed her opening with the pianist. She made notes backstage up until she went out there to perform. When the lights dimmed and the crowd roared, ready to greet her fabulousness, she said to me, “Well, you know what Ethel Merman said, ‘If they could do what we do they’d be backstage ready to go on and we would be in the seats.’ ” I said, “That’s great. Is that your mantra now?” She said, “No, that’s Ethel’s mantra. I’m always nervous and insecure before I go on.” And she took her gum out of her mouth, stuck it to the wall, and walked toward the stage in her sequined jacket. She giggled to herself, shook her head a little, and said, “It’s time.”

At Joan’s funeral I watched Howard Stern make a speech that started with “Joan Rivers had the driest vagina” and ended with him choking back tears. I thought of my “parents in my head” and even though I don’t know Howard and the funeral would have gone on just fine if I weren’t there—I felt like my life had come full circle. I thought about how Joan never stopped, until life had to forcibly stop her. I thought of her coming up in the repressed 1960s with only Lenny Bruce and gay audiences on her side. She had it a lot harder than I do when the only thing that truly annoys me is people asking, “So what’s it like being a woman in comedy?” (My answer? “I don’t know, I’ve never been a man in comedy.”) Hey, at least people are asking questions, trying to understand why it’s so hard for some people to accept women as funny. But I don’t feel like teaching. I just want to make jokes. And I learned from Joan that making jokes is the best way to teach and to heal.

It would be acceptable for a dentist in 1965 to maybe question his female patient for not wanting a traditional life, but enough is enough. It’s 2014. Well, it’s 2014 when I’m writing this so hopefully the world is even more progressive by the time this book is in your hands. (Has Artificial Intelligence outsmarted humanity yet?) I don’t have to convince anyone that my decisions are okay—I only have to laugh it off and then secretly make fun of them behind their back.

I always think about what Joan said to me when I told her that my orthodontist had intimated that my life isn’t “real.” She said, “Your life is a gift and you know better than to waste it with your fingers inside of people’s mouths.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you once again to Sarah Knight at Simon & Schuster for giving me another opportunity to a write book and for pushing when I needed to go the extra mile for a better joke or a more honest sentiment. And for encouraging me to let myself be a very flawed non-advice-giving role model for other “Jen Kirkman types” out there.

Thanks to my manager, Kara Baker, at Avalon for being patient with me while I finished this book and not pushing me to do more “showbiz” things instead—like host a TV show where contestants see who can eat wood chips the loudest.

Thanks to my agent Simon Green, who lets me whine over e-mail how hard it is to write a book sometimes and never points out how easy it is for me to write a whiney e-mail. Thanks to all my agents at CAA for never ending their e-mails with #teamjen.

Thanks to my friend Sarah Colonna for reading an early rough draft and telling me this is why she loves me.

Thanks to Jake. Whenever I am feeling low and critical of myself, I think of what you told me. That I am not as I picture myself, destructive like Godzilla, stomping through cities, ruining lives. That I am “the Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree—big and bright and full of warmth.”

Thanks to the planet we live on. I hope to see more of you.

Read Jen Kirkman's hilarious first book

I Can Barely Take Care of Myself

1. Welcome Back, Kirkman

After graduating from Boston’s Emerson College in June 1996 with a bachelor of fine arts in “theater arts,” I moved back into my parents’ house. (There are few to no well-paying jobs available to a girl who minored in rolling around on the floor collecting dust bunnies on her sweatpants—otherwise known as “modern dance.”) I wish I’d had a really good reason for moving back home, like my friend Jayson from freshman year in college. It was rumored that Jayson took too much acid and also became possessed by the devil on the same night—this rumor started because he dropped two tabs while doing a séance around a pentagram that Mick, his practicing Satanist roommate, had burned into their dorm room rug. After the devil possessed him and/or the bad trip never wore off, folklore has it that Jayson was forever unable to speak but couldn’t stop laughing—like some kind of demonic hyena. Jayson left school during his first semester and moved into his mom’s basement, where he sat staring at the wall and listening to Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
most of the day, except for the time he spent at his part-time job at his hometown library. I know that story sounds implausible—what library would employ a loud laugher?

Anyway, I didn’t have an excuse for moving back home that I could pin on my mom and dad either, such as: it turned out that my
mom wasn’t just a hypochondriac and she actually did have a fatal heart murmur and it was her dying wish for me to move back into my childhood bedroom that was still covered with floral psychedelic wallpaper from the 1970s. That would have been a good one (except for the fatal heart murmur part).

It’s not like I hadn’t made plans for my postcollege life. I had. My plan was to become a famous television actress, the type who could play younger, because as a twenty-one-year-old, I still looked sixteen, just like everyone on
Beverly Hills 90210
(well, except for Andrea). Always a realist, I also had a backup plan and that was to become a famous actress on Broadway. I’d certainly put in some semiquality time training to be an actress. I spent every morning in acting class, putting my hand on my solar plexus to find my emotion and then breathing from my diaphragm. I usually found only a cough when I breathed deeply from my diaphragm because I’d developed a pack-a-day habit of smoking Camel Lights. I inhaled the acting class air like a young, hopeful girl, then hacked and wheezed out phlegm like a longshoreman whose emphysema gets exacerbated by his seasonal pneumonia.