You Deserve a Drink: Boozy Misadventures and Tales of Debauchery (18 page)

I figured I’d hit up a restaurant, drink my face off till it closed at midnight, and then sleep on the floor the rest of the night. Because I, for one, have zero shame in sleeping on an airport floor, especially if it’s a morning flight. I distinctly remember sleeping on the floor of LaGuardia once and hearing a woman say, “Poor thing. She’s probably been stranded here for days because of the blizzard.” My flight had been delayed ten minutes. That is how quickly I will hit the deck. In fact, I make sure to pack my carry-on backpack specifically so that it will serve as a makeshift pillow. Ten hours was going to be a breeze.

When I landed in Kuala Lumpur at ten p.m., I knew my plan was kaput. The airport looked like a tomb. There wasn’t a soul in sight who hadn’t just exited my flight. Once the deplaning passengers had scattered, I realized that the airport was not only pretty
much empty, but I was the
only person left in the terminal
. Sure, this sounds like the premise for an amazing ’80s movie, but it caught me a little off guard. The place looked postapocalyptic except for the one old man vacuuming.

This was going to be creepy, but I was sticking to the plan. First order of business: Get drunk!

Visions of rum with pineapple and mango juice danced in my head as I strutted toward the dining area of the terminal. I couldn’t wait to get a drink with a tiny umbrella in it. I would hold that tiny umbrella over my head like it was raining and say, “What recession?” as the patrons of the bar would laugh and laugh. I was already working on my encore joke when I rounded the corner to see all the bars were closed. Undeterred, I went in search of food. I found a vending machine. Lemongrass Bugles-type chips for dinner it was!

I swiped my card. Nothing. Again. Nada. I looked around to make sure there was still no one near me, then licked the stripe on the back of the card and swiped again. Still nothing.
No worries
, I thought to myself,
I’ll just have to go to an ATM and take out some currency that I will never exchange back to dollars
.
*

But when I typed in my PIN at the ATM machine, my card was declined. It took me a minute to realize what was going on. I had warned my bank that I was going to be in Australia for a month, but I didn’t say shit about Malaysia. This was bad. Not only was I stranded in a deserted airport for the next ten hours, but now I didn’t have a dollar to my name. The next meal I was getting was the flaccid egg sandwich on the flight.

I sprawled out on the floor, stomach growling. The sooner I could sleep, the sooner that egg sandwich would be in my face. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t fall asleep. Normally after five
minutes of lying horizontal, I’d already be dry-humping the floor and drooling, but it just wasn’t happening for me. Every time I closed my eyes, I imagined waking up to the old vacuuming man spooning me with his hands up my shirt. And no one would be there to tell him otherwise! I’m sure he was a great guy who would never do that, but the thought kept me tossing and turning. I sat up and noticed a cluster of computers a few gates down. I made a beeline to the lit-up screens like a moth to a lightbulb.

Oh my Gilbert Gottfried, there was Internet! I threw my arms up in victory. I felt like Tom Hanks in
Cast Away
when he learns how to crack open coconuts. Sure, he’s still stuck on a desert island, but there’s hope. These crappy old desktops were my coconuts.

I logged on and immediately checked my e-mail. I saw that Maegan was on G-chat and figured with the time difference, she was at work. We started chatting. She bitched about work and I bitched about feeling stranded with no money or food in Kuala Lumpur. Just take a second to visualize an empty airport and a girl lying on the floor, popping up every few minutes to type something into the free computers, occasionally laughing to herself. I was slowly going mad.

MAEGAN

I’m gonna go take my lunch. . . .

ME

Oh my god, what are you going to eat? I want to imagine it. I am so hungry that this is like dirty talk to my taste buds.

MAEGAN

I’m thinking about going to get a big veggie dumpling soup from Republic but I might just grab a falafel sandwich from the cart. . . .

ME

BOIOIOIOIOIOIOIOING!

MAEGAN

Will you still be on in thirty?

ME

This is my life now. This is all I have.

MAEGAN

Hang in there. I’ll be back.

I looked up the menu to Republic and read it to myself like it was
Fifty Shades of Grey
. By the time I got to “A tamarind-infused broth,” I couldn’t take it anymore. I felt like Sting must feel after a tantric sex session—my whole body was buzzing just imagining the broth in my mouth. Why oh why couldn’t reality be like the movie
Hook
and all you had to do was imagine food and it would appear?
*

Stomach roaring, I peeled myself off that hard tile floor and strolled through the terminal in my pink cowboy boots. (Could I be more American?) The clicking of my boots was the only sound. I found a row of fast-food places and thought about trying to convince the poor bastard on the third shift to give me a snack for free, but then I got a weird, foreign feeling in my stomach. It was pride. I couldn’t be this American who was clearly flying around the world, wearing bubble-gum-colored cowboy boots, begging for yesterday’s fried rice.

As I made my final turn, I spotted a Western Union in the distance. Random. I didn’t even know they had Western Union in Asia. Shouldn’t it be called Eastern Union? And that’s when it struck me!

I took off like airport security was chasing me for stealing Corn Nuts. I got to the computers and slid to a halt à la
Risky Business
.
Please let her be back online. Please let her be online. Please let— oh thank Bejeezus, she’s still online.
I started typing. . . .

ME

MAEGAN!!!!! ARE YOU THERE? HOLY FUCKBALLS!*^&%#$! Can you do me a huge favor??

MAEGAN

As long as you never say “fuckballs” again. What’s wrong? Did you accidentally “The Secret” the vacuum guy to touch your boobs?

ME

LOLZ! No, seriously. I am desperate. Is there any chance you can sneak out of the office and Western Union me some $$$$? It would be to the Kuala Lumpur airport branch under my name. . . .

MAEGAN

That’s a sentence I never thought I’d read. Of course I will! Leaving now.

Sure enough, after an hour and a lot of broken English and sad rounds of charades trying to explain myself to the night-shift worker at Western Union, I had a crisp hundred dollars’ worth of Malaysian ringgits in my hand. There were only three hours left before my flight started boarding, but I was going to treat myself. This meant buying way more snacks than I could possibly consume and then going straight to the rent-by-the-hour hotel in the terminal. I was essentially paying sixty bucks to take a three-hour nap, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I was in a strange room in an airport terminal, covered in a confetti of snack crumbs, but I didn’t care. I felt like Eloise at the Plaza.

And that is the last time I ever booked a layover longer than two cocktails’ worth.

In the End

I still have some bad luck when it comes to flying. That’s out of my control. But I did decide to take matters into my own hands when it came to my fear of flying. I needed to face it head-on.
So
, I bought myself a flying lesson for my thirtieth birthday.

Turns out, flying is a lot less scary once you know how to land a plane. Although I’d still much rather be back in coach taking down tiny vodkas and watching Netflix on my laptop, so please don’t count on me.

A shit-ton of fresh blueberries, raspberries, and pitted cherries

Bottle red wine

1 cup simple syrup

Juice of 2 lemons and 1 orange

Throw everything into a punch bowl or novelty-size wineglass. Stir together, add ice, and sippity-sip. These fruits are known to help reduce anxiety. Grapes are good for it too, but I’d rather drink my grapes than eat them. If you don’t have or don’t like red wine, sub white or rosé or sparkling or whatever the fuck! Just don’t let it stress you out. That defeats the entire purpose, ya dumbs.

T
his chapter is about one of the banes of my existence: panic attacks. If you’ve never had a panic attack, it’s very hard to understand and almost impossible to explain. Kind of like when someone is visiting you and you want to watch
The Real Housewives of Atlanta
, but they don’t watch it, and you try to catch them up on the details. It doesn’t work. You end up getting so frustrated that you just change it to
Friends
. Everyone gets
Friends
. An imprisoned Taliban member could watch one episode and agree that Chandler is underrated.

All that said, in this chapter I’ll try to explain panic attacks to you from my personal experience. Allow me to set the scene. It was winter in New York City. I had been living there for a handful of
months and was pretty comfortable in my routine of working ten a.m. to six p.m. as a receptionist at a recording studio, living on a supertight budget, and going out for cheap drinks on the weekend. When I say cheap drinks, I mean the bar I frequented was actually named Cheap Shots. Our other haunt was a spot on St. Mark’s called the Continental. Their deal was ten shots (of total shit liquor) for ten dollars. I
lived
there my first year in NYC.
*

It was a Friday night and Maegan and I were strolling toward the East Village doing what any two fabulous twentysomething gals do on a night off from work: bitching about coworkers.

“I swear to God, if I hear Fred from accounting do his Borat impression one more time, I am going to eat staples,” Maegan complained. Normally I would do my impression of Fred doing his impression, but I was preoccupied. Something weird was happening.

Suddenly, I became very conscious of my legs. And not in that “Damn, my legs look goooood” way I am usually conscious of them. Specifically, I was aware of how I couldn’t feel them. I couldn’t feel them, but somehow they were still working. Left. Right. Left. Right. How did they know how to keep working? Maegan kept talking but it just sounded like the adults in Charlie Brown—totally nonsensical noise.

Maybe my legs were just cold. Winter in Manhattan is colder than a popular girl at a “Magic: The Gathering” party. We continued walking and I bent over and hit my legs with my hands a few times. Yep, still there. And somehow still working.

Not only are my legs being weird
, I thought to myself,
but why is my mouth so dry?
It felt like I had just slept all night with my mouth open in front of a fan in the Mojave Desert.
I hope I don’t have to
talk, and oh shit. My hands have stopped working. I need to shake my hands and slap them to make sure they still work. And Mame? Mame?

“Mame!” Maegan shouted, finally getting my attention as I stood there slapping my legs like I was being attacked by mosquitoes. “Are you okay?”

I could’ve played it off like my tights itched—it was no secret that I never did laundry. But I decided to be honest. “This is going to sound totally crazy”—I could speak! Sweet Jesus, I could speak—“but I feel really weird. Like, I’m very aware of my legs right now, and everything feels . . . just strange. Like I’m a little underwater.”

“You’re having a panic attack,” Maegan said matter-of-factly, as if she had just ordered lunch.
Yes, I’ll have the Caesar salad, extra croutons, and you are having a panic attack. Also, I’ll take a Diet Coke.
I stared at her, not knowing how to respond. “You’re totally having a panic attack. We need to get you inside ASAP.”

I continued to look at her in wonder. I’d always heard about panic attacks but didn’t know what they would feel like. She linked her arm through mine and talked me down as we walked to the closest bar. Somehow my legs were still moving and keeping up.

I was very aware of my speech pattern but was nervous that no sound would come out. Like, have you ever spent an entire day by yourself? You’re chilling at home, watching a
Catfish
marathon, judging these idiots who could fall in love without ever video-chatting. (Meanwhile, you haven’t put on pants all day and just ate a block of Gouda like an apple.) Then it happens. Just as you are about to watch Jimbo Jenkins find out his fiancée is actually a French bulldog who’s learned to type, you remember that you have to go to a coworker’s birthday party in an hour. Fuckity fuckity fuck! You have a brief moment when you think,
Do I still remember how to talk to people? When I open my mouth, will full-fledged thoughts and sentences form?
This is exactly how I felt during the panic attack.

We got to a bar and Maegan ordered me two white wines. I focused on my breathing, which felt like it wasn’t coming naturally,
as Maegan spoke to me calmly and stroked my back. After I
chugged
drank my pinot grigios, the weirdness started to lift. I felt normal enough to speak.

“So, that’s what a panic attack feels like, huh?”

“Yep. You feel like everything is crazy and you might die. Just a really fun time overall,” Maegan said sarcastically.

The next few weeks were stressful. I walked around nervous that at any time I was going to have a panic attack, but without Maegan there to lead me through it. After all, I didn’t know what had caused the first one. There hadn’t been any obvious trigger that set it off. I wasn’t feeling particularly anxious at the time. Would my panicking about having a panic attack send me into a panic attack?!

Later I would try to trace it back and would realize that the first time I had really experienced anxiety was, no lie, because of
Saved by the Bell
.

Be honest with yourself—you fucking loved
Saved by the Bell
as a kid. I, for one, watched it probably every single day from 1992 to 1995, and I wasn’t alone. I guarantee most American females ages twenty-eight to thirty-two could sing the
SBTB
theme song from start to finish.

Obviously I had a major lady boner for Zack Morris. He was handsome, suave, a delightful troublemaker, and a good boyfriend. Plus, as cool as he was, he wasn’t afraid to be in the glee club or star as the prince in Bayside’s production of
Snow White and the Seven Dorks
.
*

Sure,
SBTB
had its flaws. I was painfully aware of the inconsistent use of Zack’s ability to freeze time. I would watch it and just
be face-palming at why he wasn’t using that power constantly. But it was wholesome fun. I didn’t want to deal with eating disorders and coke problems like those skanks on
90210
; I wanted to have pep rallies in an oddly small burger joint and throw secret surprise parties in my principal’s office because for some reason there wasn’t anywhere else to throw them.

What I think I’ve adequately proven is that my love for
SBTB
was endless. Until one fateful day.

Riding on the success of the sitcom,
Saved by the Bell
decided to come out with a two-hour made-for-TV movie where the gang goes on a Hawaiian vacation. It was called
Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style
. (The execs at NBC really took a risk with that edgy name.) In it, Kelly brought her cutest bikinis. Screech, of course, accidentally became some Hawaiian deity, because that’s what always happens on trips. But the gang did forget one thing back at Bayside . . . the laugh track.

I remember being nine years old and watching my favorite fake high schoolers, the ones I would rush home from school to watch every day, and feeling extremely uncomfortable. Why wasn’t there laughter? And
woo
s when someone kissed? And groans when Screech did anything? My heart started to race. Without the cues from the live studio audience, I didn’t know when to laugh. To make matters worse, without the built-in guffaws, Screech seemed mentally handicapped. And judging by the self-made porn tape he released years later, that assessment is apt.

Everything seemed like a lie in my nine-year-old brain. Was
Saved by the Bell
not actually funny? This was worse than learning Santa Claus wasn’t real. I had to turn it off, and that’s saying a lot. This was a girl who thought
Ernest Scared Stupid
was a goddamn masterpiece.

And that, folks, is the first time I experienced anxiety. Luckily, it didn’t turn into a full-on panic attack. I was young and innocent enough to think,
I feel weird. Better do a floor routine on my trampoline and pretend I am Dominique Moceanu during the Atlanta
Olympic Games
. My trampoline was basically my home base to get my mind off anything.

Two things you’ll notice from this picture. That building behind us is my elementary school. That’s how close we lived. On days I didn’t have to go to school because of a dentist appointment, etc., I would jump on my trampoline and wave at my classmates. Also, I’m wearing a hat with my name embroidered on it. Clearly I’ve always been very modest.

Unfortunately for me, there weren’t a lot of jumbo trampolines lying around New York City to create a panic attack diversion. And once I had my first one with Maegan, they crept up about once a month. And without warning. It was worse than getting my period. In fact, I called it getting my exclamation point.

Occasionally they would happen on the subway. I’d be sitting there, reading
Us Weekly
and minding my own business, and
boom
! Suddenly, those familiar feelings would start to creep in and I’d start sweating. It was going to happen and it was inevitable and I had to get the fuck off the train. Trust me, when you are freaking out about your breathing, the inside of a New York City subway
train isn’t the ideal place to be. You already feel like you can’t get enough air into your lungs, and then you look down the car to see an old lady coughing, a discarded dozen chicken-wing bones on the floor, and a homeless man taking off his ten pairs of socks across from you. It’s game over.

I’d also have them at parties where I was meeting new people. This really threw me off because I am an extremely
un
-shy person. But for whatever reason, during those few years they would creep in.

Oh shit, here they come,
I would think.
Ain’t no stopping this emotion train. Just hope that it’s quick.

Those anxious feelings would start to cover me like molasses. There would still be full sentences coming out of my mouth, but I had a completely different inner monologue happening in my head, kinda like when you are reading a book and realize that you haven’t been processing the words for the past five minutes. There was this disconnect between my brain and mouth.

I learned the proper etiquette in that situation is to excuse yourself to the bathroom (while grabbing a cup of vodka on the way), splash some water on your face, and sip said vodka until you feel confident enough to Irish-good-bye the shit out of that party. And for the love of God, take a cab home. Never go back underground with those residual feelings of panic. As soon as you get through the turnstile, the underground music from
Super Mario Bros.
will start playing in your head and you’ll imagine all the rats at the station banding together to form one large Transformers-style super rat.

But more so than in social situations or on the subway, the worst panic attacks would happen before I had to perform live. Good thing I decided to become a comedian! Until the past year, every show—and I do mean every show—I would be beyond nervous to go onstage. As soon as I was actually onstage and heard the first laugh, all the nerves would settle. But until that moment, the anxiety was through the roof. And nothing made me more anxious than when I hosted my show
Celebrity Funeral
at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.