Yes Please (30 page)

Fun fact: Seth Meyers was in the audience that night. He was living in Amsterdam and performing with a group called Boom Chicago. It would be four more years before we would officially meet and instantly become friends for life. Do you think it’s a coincidence that Seth was in the audience again during another seminal night for me? I don’t. People help you time-travel. People work around you and next to you and the universe waits for the perfect time to whisper in your ear, “Look this way.” There is someone in your life right now who may end up being your enemy, your wife, or your boss. Lift up your head and you may notice.

As I watched Patti perform I took a mental picture of the moment. I looked around and thought about my life. I felt grateful. I noticed every detail. That is the key to time travel. You can only move if you are actually in the moment. You have to be where you are to get where you need to go.

Cut to 2013. I am at a restaurant in Los Angeles and Patti Smith comes out of the bathroom. I freeze and then I say, “Ms. Smith, my name is Amy Poehler and my group opened for you in Amsterdam in the late nineties.” She was very nice and polite and pretended to remember. Maybe she did. It didn’t matter. She said, “Right, Ann Demeulemeester was there.” I nodded my head as if I understood what she was talking about and then I went home and Wikipedia’d Ann Demeulemeester. She is a beautiful fashion designer who lives in Antwerp and is currently doing design inspired by Jackson Pollock. Of course she and Patti are friends.

Patti Smith knew who I was. I shook her hand. Suddenly I was transported back to Amsterdam. Time stretched and bent and I went for a ride. I dare anyone to prove that I didn’t.

Places also help you time-travel. My grandfather Steve Milmore was a wonderful man. We called him Gunka and he was a Watertown, Massachusetts, firefighter and served as a machine gunner in World War II. He married my grandmother Helen and went overseas for five years until he came back and put his uniform in the attic and never spoke of his service again. He had three wonderful children, including my wonderful mother. He died of a heart attack on my front porch on July 4, 1982, when he was only sixty-five. I was ten. He was the first important person in my life to die, and when he did, it was the first time I realized that life is not fair or safe or even ours to own. I miss him.

Gunka had a Wurlitzer organ, and he loved to play. His grandchildren would sit on his lap and he would play Bing Crosby or Nat King Cole. Lots of Christmas tunes. He wrote songs for us when we had the chicken pox. He went through his songbook and put numbers over the notes and then made a corresponding chart on cardboard that he laid over the keys so we could play songs ourselves. For a while I thought I was a genius and could totally play the organ. The reality was that I was the luckiest girl in the world because I had a grandfather who was a magic maker.

Sitting on the organ bench was important. Now that I think of it, benches are cool. Sacred by design. Benches are often a place where something special happens and important talks take place. Look at
Forrest Gump
. Or
Hoosiers.
Or outside a brunch place. Brunch benches are where it all goes down. After my nana passed away in 2003, my family took Gunka’s organ and put it in the basement of the house they shared. And it sat there for ten years, waiting for its chance to travel.

And now it lives in my apartment in New York City. My boys play it all the time. They sit on the same bench I sat on and feel the same good feelings of family and home. One night I was feeling lonely and stressed, and the organ started buzzing. I think Gunka was trying to talk to me. I sat on the bench and felt better. Inside the organ bench is old sheet music with my grandparents’ handwriting. I also found a song that I wrote when I was seven. It is a poem that has numbers written above it, so it can be played the special way on my special organ. I wrote it in the past and put it in the sacred bench so I could pull it out at just the right time. Time is just time. Time travel, y’all.

Finally, things can help us time-travel. A few summers ago I was feeling sad. I was in Atlanta and went shopping in a vintage store. I don’t love shopping for clothes. I just wish I could wear a daily uniform. As previously noted, I had to look up Ann Demeulemeester on Wikipedia. In the shop, I found an old-timey bathing suit.

I brought the bathing suit home and looked at it. I thought about who might have owned it before. The bathing suit didn’t fit into my life at that moment. I was too busy to go swimming. I felt disconnected from my body after having kids. And I was sad. I sat in the moment, looking at that bathing suit. I thought about how long my winter had felt. My brain fooled me into thinking the winter would never end. I closed my eyes and thought of what my life would look like when it did finally end—what six months from now might feel like. I put this bathing suit in a drawer and it waited for me to take it traveling. And then six months later I went to Palm Springs with a bunch of wonderful women. They were my beautiful friends who had helped me through a difficult year. We were going swimming and I reached into my bag to find a bathing suit. I had put this old-timey bathing suit in with the rest. I tried it on again and I felt beautiful. I thanked the bathing suit for waiting for me. I got into the pool with Rashida and Kathryn and Aubrey and thanked the women for holding me up when I couldn’t hold myself. I thought about the woman who had worn that bathing suit before and realized she was another woman who had helped me. I thanked her too. I realized I had traveled again, this time into a happier future. I stood in the sun. I thanked the sun.

The more I time-travel the more I learn I am always just where I need to be.

obligatory drug stories,

or lessons i learned on mushrooms

G
ROWING UP, MY HOMETOWN WAS A DRINKING TOWN
.
We all sneaked into our parents’ liquor cabinets at an early age and spiked our hot chocolate for our high school football games. Alcohol was accessible and drinking was slightly encouraged. Every family had a funny Polaroid of their five-year-old kid holding a beer. My parents weren’t heavy drinkers, but they imbibed. I have fond memories of being ten and handing my dad Budweisers as he played slow-pitch softball. Summer sunsets were spent on a dusty field, as these men swung hard and spit in the dust and put us on their shoulders. It was a parade of mustaches and farmer tans. It was later that I realized those men were only in their early thirties and already married with children—a collection of young dads in their prime. My mother had her wine, which she didn’t drink much of when we were young but now that she is sixty-seven and retired she allows herself a glass or three. I loved playing bartender behind the big bar we had in our finished basement. It was next to our giant record-player console and our faux-leather couch and shiny floral wallpaper. The wall-to-wall carpeting went all the way up the two concrete poles that supported the house. I spent hours down there pretending I was Michael Jackson or dancing as the Weather Girls told me it was “raining men.” That basement was like my personal Copacabana, and when it was filled with my parents’ friends I would sit on the stairs and listen to the clink of their glasses and their bursts of laughter. I would make an excuse to pad down in my Kristy McNichol nightgown and pretend I’d had a bad dream, all in an attempt to peep at the women with their shiny brown lipstick and the men packing their cigarettes against their hips.

Then there were the bad parts. Too many kids in our town died from drinking and driving. At least once a year there was a horribly sad funeral. Flowers would appear, tied up against some pole. Paper cups would spell out
WE MISS YOU, KATIE
in a chain-link fence at the entrance to our high school. I shudder to think of all the times I got into a car with someone who was wasted. Once I was with my best friend, Keri, and we were in the backseat of some ridiculous car, like an I-RAK or a Z-40 or a MIATI22 (I don’t care about cars). Keri had a crush on the driver and he had brought his friend along. We were headed to Revere Beach to drive around and do nothing. The boy was a little drunk and driving really fast, and I was screaming at him to slow down. I was so angry. I kept thinking, “I can’t believe I am going to die in this cheesy car with these two assholes with spray tans and names I don’t even know.”

I am ashamed of the few times I drove drunk. Drinking and driving is the absolute worst, because unlike doing coke in your basement while you teach yourself guitar, you could kill someone else. I think about the few times I drove drunk and I picture all of the beautiful families I passed in my car whose lives I could have taken. Please don’t drive drunk, okay? Seriously. It’s so fucked up. But by all means, walk drunk. That looks hilarious. Everyone loves to watch someone act like they are trying to make it to safety during a hurricane.

My town was good at supporting future drinking problems. Our parties consisted of kegs in the woods. The boys wore “drinking gloves” and we played quarters with cups of beer. Wine coolers made their debut just around this time, and the sugary concoctions made it easier for teenage girls to get drunk. Being young means you have no sense of your own limits, so we would all drink like it was our last night on earth. But even back then I fantasized about what it would be like to drink socially, like Sue Ellen on
Dallas
. I would pour grape juice into wineglasses and sit in our “fancy” dining room arguing with myself. This was the beginning of a long life of attempting to be much older than I was. I was on a search for the perfect amount of ennui. I would babysit while I watched
Thirtysomething,
clucking out loud when the characters were failing to communicate. I was sixteen. Why did I care if Hope and Michael had another baby?

I’ve tried most drugs but avoided the BIG BAD ONES. Meth never squirmed its way into my life, thank god. It is so evil and horrifying, but I am not going to pretend that I am not fascinated by the idea of staying up for days on end painting my basement. When I was twenty-five and living in Chicago, the building supers were two very polite and meticulous meth heads. Matt and I lived above them and listened to them constantly washing their floors. They also loved to vacuum. They often spent the night rearranging furniture and wiping down surfaces. More than once I woke to the sound of them sweeping the porch steps, moving the same pile of dirt around and around. They were tough to talk to, almost impossible to understand and make eye contact with, but I had a strange affection for their ability to channel their meth-taking into real apartment improvements. The problems began once they started knocking on our door claiming our sink was leaking. Then they would spend the whole day taking the sink apart. Then they would ask for twenty bucks to go find a special sink part and disappear for a week. Then one of them died. So all in all, meth seemed too risky.

Heroin was another drug that didn’t catch my tail. I lived in New York’s East Village in 1998, when heroin was making its forty-fifth comeback. The streets were filled with suburban junkies shooting up next to their pit bull puppies. My building was across from Tompkins Square Park, which had been suffering and/or improving due to gentrification, and the apartments were filled with a lot of musicians and models living alone in New York City for the first time. Most of the models took a real liking to me. Tall women are attracted to my littleness. I have a lot of tall female friends. They like how I am always looking up to them and I like having the option to jump into their pocket if I want to hide. One model, a Midwestern beauty I will call Hannah, met me at the mailboxes and told me she liked my sneakers. Not long after she confessed she was having an affair with a very famous professional basketball player and asked if I would like to go to a game with her. She wouldn’t tell me his name, but she mentioned he was “the one you know.” We sat courtside as the team warmed up, and this player made eye contact with us and nodded approvingly. “He likes when I bring girls to the game,” she said. I didn’t know exactly what that meant, but I did know that if that gentleman had put his penis inside me I surely would have died. I couldn’t stop thinking about his giant penis, and every time I looked at tall Hannah I pictured the two of them having sex. A giant pale oak tree getting penetrated by a dark taller oak tree, their size-fifty feet rubbing up against each other on some special bed built to hold their enormous bodies. The player would come visit her at night while his driver waited outside, black SUV idling. Hannah lived above me, and I would picture them fucking and eventually breaking through the floor and crashing through my ceiling, killing us all with one giant official NBA penis. The fear of this encouraged me to move to a new apartment. That and the one freezing morning I had to step over a passed-out model who had nodded off while filling out a W-2 form, only to open the outside door to find a giant pile of human shit. I said good-bye to the East Village and moved over to the West Village, where we don’t have those kinds of problems. In the West Village we just have tweaked-out gay hustlers who hit us over the heads with rocks, thank you very much.