America's Funny Man

You know how when you meet celebrities you take particular care to not wig out on them, but you concentrate so hard on not spilling your irrational and unfounded love for them all over their finely pressed sweater vests that you end up not saying anything at all?  And then you've lost the chance to say something so witty, so hysterical that the celebrity in question befriends you after taking you out for coffee, and pretty soon you're a celebrity yourself—nope, that ship has sailed.

Dennis, Chastity, and I went to a reading and book signing for David Sedaris's Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, and I was determined—no, destined to make that guy laugh so hard he'd offer for he and Hugh to take Dennis and me out for dinner.  He'd then carefully work with my on my writing, helping me to find a great agent and publisher, you know someone who "gets" my stuff.  He'd praise me, and I'd be in awe of him, and they'd let us go stay with them at their home in England.  Oh, how wonderful it was going to be.  But I froze up.

Dennis spoke to him before I did. "Hi, thank you for asking a question," Mr. Sedaris said, as Dennis had asked something about a movie that had been rumored to be in the making, something about the Sedaris family.  "Oh, no problem," he said.

"It was a very good one.  What's your name?"

As he asked this question, he began drawing a picture of a knife on the title page of Dennis's book.

"Well, Dennis, this is a picture of the knife you used to stab the guy who took my computer."

He'd told the story earlier, something about when he was in Hawaii a couple weeks ago the house he stayed in was broken into, and his computer bag was stolen.  Something about there being drugs in the computer bag?  At any rate, there were stories on the computer he'd not backed up because, these are his words, "I didn't know you had to drag the files onto the little stick, I thought you just put the stick in and it backed it up for you."  Oh, older generations.  During the talk, Dennis had leaned over and whispered to me, "What a lucky thief!"

As Dennis said to Mr. Sedaris what he'd told me of the thief's luck, I thought about making fun of Mr. Sedaris's technological illiteracy for my One Joke That Would Change My Life, but then there was the possibility of offending him.

"And how long have you two been together?" Mr. Sedaris asked.  It'll be two years at the end of February, so I said, "two years."

"No, no, it's not two years until the end of February," Dennis said.  Yes, he was right, but you can't get corrected in front of a celebrity when you're trying to get them to give their fame to you!   People with celebrity potential do not get corrected!

"Yes," I said, and shut up for a while.  Mr. Sedaris finished the knife he was drawing for Dennis and moved onto my book.

"Who's this for?" he asked.  I was confused by the question, because someone who worked at the book shop had gone down the line and asked each person specifically if they wanted a name in their copy or just a signature.  Since Mr. Sedaris had very openly expressed his annoyance with people who nitpick about inscriptions in autographs, I said that I'd just like a signature.

"It's for me, I guess," I said.  And I didn't mean it to come out this way, but if my voice weren't so deep, my intonation would have pegged me as a high school girl with a purse puppy.

"And your name is...?"  Shit.  He hated me.  He loved Dennis and he hated me.  He was gonna sweep my boyfriend away from me and convince him of what a terribly rude person I am, or at least write about me in such a light in one of his future stories.  The picture he began to draw in my book was a face.

I told him my name.

"And you're in school?"

Yes, Loyola, English, digital media, that whole speech.

The face in the drawing was now connected by some sort of hose to what looked like wheels?

"Oh."  And that's all he had to say.

No, no, not wheels.  Balls.  Testicles.  He definitely just added pubic hair to the sketch.

"This," he said, "is a picture of you after you've been in a terrible accident, and all you have left is your head, so to help you regrow the rest of your body they graft that to your boyfriend's balls."

I looked at the picture and said, "Well those can't be his, he's got three."