Text copyright © 2020 by David Sedaris

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eISBN: 9781542023078

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One of the things that most delighted me when I moved to Chicago in 1984 was the main branch of the public library, which was like a palace and was stocked with story collections I’d have never found back home in Raleigh. Another pleasant surprise was my local bookstore, which was well within walking distance of my apartment and hosted author events. How thrilling it was to literally sit at the feet of writers I admired. I was too broke to afford hardcovers, so I would usually get in line with a paperback, wondering as I waited, What will I say? Everything I thought of sounded inane, and by the time I got up to the signing table, I was most often a stammering mess.

The kindest of these authors would notice my trembling hands and go out of their way to set me at ease. It wasn’t that hard on their part really—a quick question, a comment: “Do you live around here?” “Those shoes look like you made them yourself. Are you a cobbler?” Others would simply look up and nod as I blathered away. Then I’d thank them and flee, my face burning.

My worst experience still angers me all these years later. I waited in line, a nervous wreck, and when I got up there, the author was talking to someone, her publicist, maybe. “I don’t know,” she said, sounding bored. “There’s not really much to do in this town. Why don’t you call Jerry and see what he thinks.” My copy of her memoir was reached for, signed with nothing but her name, and then pushed back. She didn’t even look up.

In that case, I didn’t leave embarrassed. I left feeling betrayed. What I’d wanted, much more than the book—which I now would rather die than read—was to be seen by this person. If only for a few seconds. I left the store determined that when and if it was ever my turn and I was the author seated at that table, I was going to engage people until they grew old, or at least thirsty. “Well, all right, then,” they’d say, looking past me for the nearest exit, “let me let you go.”

I would see them until they wilted.

And that’s pretty much how it goes. I generally start the conversation immediately, that way the person wanting a book signed never has to say the things they’ve stood in line agonizing over, and that they will most likely regret later on. There are exceptions, though. I was in Baton Rouge in late May 2013, when a woman approached, saying, before I had a chance to throw her off balance, “You got me to put my bra back on.”

I set down my pen. “I beg your pardon?”

“I take it off the second I get home from work, and that usually means it’s off for the night,” she told me. “It means I’m not going anywhere for any reason. Then a friend called and told me you were here, so I put it back on and dashed over to see you!”

“Well . . . thank you,” I said.

I repeated the woman’s story the following evening in Atlanta, thinking it might get a nice response. It did, but the laughs were ones of recognition rather than surprise. “Do you take your bra off the moment you return from work?” I asked the first person in line. She was big breasted, with pewter-colored hair, cut short, and she laid her book upon the table, saying, “Baby, I take it off before I get home.”

“At the office?” I asked.

“No,” she told me. “In the car.”

“You take your blouse off?”

“Ain’t no need to do that,” she said. “What you do is unhook it in the back and then pull it out your sleeve.”

“And after it’s off, is it off for the night?”

“You know it is,” she confided. “A friend will call drunk and wanting a ride, and I’ll say, ‘Honey, I got my bra off. Get yourself a cab.’”

Next in line was a male college student. “I can always tell when my mom borrows my car because she leaves her bra in the glove compartment.”

I thought this was just an American phenomenon, but then I started my UK tour and learned that I was wrong. “Once this comes off, I’m in for the rest of the evening,” women told me in London and Manchester and Liverpool. I did sixteen events. The last was in Edinburgh. “Do you remove your bra on your way home from work?” I asked a young woman with orange hair.

She nodded.

“In your car?”

“Oh, no,” she told me, “I do it on the bus.”

All around me this has been going on—for centuries—and I had no idea, me, who had a mother and four sisters!

It’s not like the clues weren’t there. How many times have I knocked on a woman’s door after dark, and had her answer wearing a sweatshirt that doesn’t seem to go with the rest of her outfit, or had her answer with her arms crossed over her chest. I thought that was sign language for Couldn’t you have told me you were coming? Now I see that it actually meant, If you think I’m putting my bra back on for this bullshit, you are so sorely mistaken.

When I’m lucky, while I’m out on tour, a theme will develop. It can’t be anything I force. Rather, it needs to be organic. For one book it was bras, and for the next it was jokes. It started with one a driver named Bill Mooney told me.

A Jewish fellow named Saul Epstein owns a nail company, very successful, and when he retires, he hands it over to his son-in-law. Then he moves to Florida and is there one day, reading the New York Times, when he comes upon a full-page ad. It’s a picture of Jesus, hanging on the cross, and below him are the words, “They used Epstein Nails.”

Furious, the old man reaches for the phone. “Are you out of your mind? That’s no way to sell our product!”

The son-in-law promises to fix everything, and a week later, Epstein opens his Times to find another full-page ad. This one shows a cross standing empty on a hilltop. In front of it, lying with his face in the dust, is Jesus Christ, and on either side, looking down at him, are two Roman soldiers, along with the words, “They didn’t use Epstein Nails.”

I repeated the joke at a bookstore that night, and got the following:

What’s the worst thing you can hear while you’re blowing Willie Nelson?

“I’m not really Willie Nelson.”

And: It’s late at night, and a man is getting ready to go to bed, when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail. “Yes,” it says, “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.”

Beside himself with rage, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he can, and storms off to bed.

Two years later, there comes another knock. The man answers, and again he finds the snail, who looks up at him and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”

The following evening, at another bookstore, a man approached saying, “So, God tells Adam, ‘I’m going to make you a wife, a helpmate, the most beautiful woman who ever lived. She’ll be fantastic in bed, uncomplaining, and ready to carry out your every desire. The thing is, it’ll cost you.’

“‘How much?’ Adam asks.

“‘An eye, an elbow, a collarbone, and your left ball.’

“Adam thinks for a minute, then asks, ‘What can I get for a rib?’”

This was countered an hour later with: Three friends marry three women from different parts of the world. The first chooses a Spanish girl, and tells her on their wedding night that she is to do the dishes and the laundry, and to generally keep the house in order. It takes a while to break her in, but on the third day he comes home to find things as he wanted.

The second man marries a Thai girl. He gives his wife orders that she is to do all the cleaning, as well as the cooking and the ironing. The first day, he doesn’t see any results, but the following one is better. On the third day, he finds that his house is clean, the dishes are done, and there is dinner on the table.

The third man marries an American girl. He orders her to keep the house clean, the dishes washed, and the lawn mowed, and to put hot meals on the table every evening. The first day, he doesn’t see anything. The second day, he doesn’t see anything either. But by the third day, some of the swelling has gone down. He can make out basic shapes with his left eye, and his arm has healed well enough that he can throw together a sandwich and load the dishwasher. He still has some difficulty when he urinates.

Not everyone was skilled with their delivery. “OK,” someone might start, “a priest and a rabbi, or no . . . wait, a witch doctor and a priest and a rabbi go to a . . . oh gosh, just give me a second . . .” By the end of the month, I had close to two hundred jokes, some not worth repeating, and others gold. I put them in a file on my computer, and then categorized them, later noticing the significant overlap between “sex” and “misogynist.” Also, who knew there were so many pedophile jokes out there?

Everyone seems to have one up their sleeve.

On my next book tour, the theme was monkeys, and on the latest one, it was items men shove inside themselves and later have to go to the emergency room to have extracted. This started when an ER nurse told me about a patient she’d seen earlier in the week who had pushed a dildo too far up his ass. The door shut behind it, so he tried fishing it out with a coat hanger. When that proved the wrong tool for the job, he snipped it with wire cutters, then went after both the dildo and the cutoff hanger with a sturdier fresh hanger. You hear this from doctors and nurses all the time: their patients shove lightbulbs up inside themselves, shampoo bottles, pool balls . . . and they always concoct some incredible story to explain their predicament. “I tripped” is a big one.

And OK, I’m pretty clumsy. I trip all the time, but never have I gotten back on my feet with a pepper grinder up my ass, not even a little bit. I’m pretty sure I could tumble down all the stairs in the Empire State Building, naked, with a greased-up pepper grinder in each hand, and a box of candles around my neck, and still end up in the lobby with an empty rectum.

Another common excuse is, “I accidentally sat on it.” Implied is that you were naked at the time, and that this can of air freshener that just happened to be coated with Vaseline went all the way up inside you. “I must have left it on the sofa when I came home from work and took a shower. Then I sat down to watch the news the way I usually do, and, well, you know the rest.”

A week into my tour—again, because I’d mentioned it onstage—a nurse handed me an X-ray of a man’s pelvis with a set of hand weights in it. How on earth? I thought, imagining the work that must have taken. And to follow the first with a second? Who does that? Days later, I saw an X-ray of a Bose speaker inside someone. “And it was still connected to Bluetooth,” the woman who showed it to me whispered.

A parallel theme that June was money. On a book tour, you’re generally accompanied by a media escort. This is a person who picks you up at the airport and takes you to all your interviews and appointments. In Milwaukee, it was Mary. She was a handsome woman, maybe a few years older than me, and we were heading to my hotel when she mentioned an event she had attended earlier in the day that was sponsored by her church. “There was a speaker, and at the end of his talk, he gave everyone in the room a crisp new fifty-dollar bill, and told us to go out into the world and pass it on to someone who needed it.” She pushed her blond hair off her shoulder and checked her rearview mirror. “Oh, and it has to be done by 3:16 p.m. That corresponds to a Bible verse, though I don’t remember which one.”

Mary had a few hours between dropping me off at my hotel and returning at five o’clock to take me to the bookstore, but explained that she wouldn’t be around any poor people between now and then. “I was thinking,” she said, “that if it’s not too much trouble, maybe you could give the fifty away for me.”

I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend the afternoon. All I knew starting out was that I didn’t want to give the money to a beggar. Better, I decided, to hand it to someone who was working a terrible job. So, I went off in search of a McDonald’s, figuring I’d hand the fifty to the roughest-looking employee I could find. “Excuse me,” I’d say. “Are you poor? Are you in debt?”

I hadn’t brought my phone and didn’t know where to find a McDonald’s, so I just wandered. A half-dozen blocks from the hotel, I came across a Subway, but I can’t bear the smell of those places. “It’s like a loaf of bread farted,” Jon Stewart once observed. I still had an hour before 3:16 but wanted as much time as possible in my comfortable hotel room before leaving for the bookstore. OK, I thought, looking at my watch, I guess a beggar will do.

But suddenly, I didn’t see any, which, I mean, isn’t that always the way?

When you just want to be left alone, they’re everywhere and super aggressive. Portland, Oregon’s are the worst. They’re all tattooed there, and are stretched out on the sidewalk. Eighteen, twenty years old with pierced noses and ears with so many holes in them, you could likely tear off the outer rims the way you’d separate a stamp from a sheet. “Asshole,” they spit as you walk by with your eyes averted. “Go fuck yourself.”

I’d have welcomed a tough young Portland beggar in Milwaukee, but everyone I passed looked, if not well off, then at least middle class—all on cell phones, carrying shopping bags. I saw an exhausted-looking man with a pillowcase standing on a corner, but veered away when he raised a can of beer to his mouth.

No drinkers, I thought, sounding like a church lady.

By this point, it was 2:58, and I was starting to panic, thinking, I guess, that if I didn’t give the money away by 3:16, the God I claim not to believe in, the one whose only son was used to sell nails in one of my favorite jokes, was going to smite me.

It was then that I came upon the library—Bingo, I thought. That’s poor-person central, at least in the US, where such places double as homeless shelters. This was an old branch, and the building was grand. Inside, it was cool and tomblike. I saw two young women in their early twenties standing near the information desk, but everyone else was seated—slumped, for the most part—many with knapsacks and duffel bags on the floor beside them. None were convincingly reading. The books seemed more like props, something to stare into the way my father now stares at magazines, turned to the same page for hours on end.

I walked up to the counter. “How can I help you?” a librarian asked. She looked to me like a librarian is supposed to, slightly stern, with a longer-than-average neck.

“This might sound strange,” I told her, “but I have fifty dollars to give to a poor person by 3:16 p.m. I see some pretty good candidates here and was wondering if you might direct me to the neediest of them.”

The two young women standing nearby had apparently listened in.

“Give it to me,” one of them said. She wore a lot of foundation, and her eyebrows qualified as drawings. “I want fifty dollars.” The T-shirt she had on was white, and bedazzled with plastic gems. Because of the notebooks she and her friend were carrying, I guessed them to be community college students, possibly majoring in not giving a fuck.

Had a stranger approached me with a fifty-dollar bill when I was in college, I would have never forgotten it. In the mid-to-late 1980s, that was a lot of money, one-quarter of my rent, though I probably would have spent it on a luxury—pot, most likely, and some decent groceries, which meant at the time Marie’s salad dressing. It came already refrigerated in a jar and was sold beside the lettuce at a store called Treasure Island. Green goddess I’d have bought, and ranch. Then I’d get high and dip things into my precious, precious dressings. More than the pot and groceries, I’d have appreciated a short break from the constant stress I felt. Was there a single moment back then when I wasn’t worried about money? When I didn’t worry a check might bounce, or that a higher-than-average phone bill would reduce me to eating pancakes for a week? I don’t recall buying anything thoughtlessly. If chicken backs or boxes of spaghetti were ten cents cheaper five miles away, I would get on my bike in subzero weather and ride there. Meanwhile, I’d see people as broke or broker than I was at the expensive corner stores, buying milk and bread with their food stamps. They didn’t know how to shop, hadn’t been taught the way my sisters and I had, by a father who clipped coupons and bought all our produce from what amounted to a purgatory bin, the one things were emptied into just before they went to the dumpster. All our canned goods were dented, and off-brand. Some just had one word on the label: “Beans,” say, or “Corn.”

I could see how the girl at the counter might have needed the money. The problem was that she’d asked for it. “Asking doesn’t cost a thing,” people like to say, or, “If you don’t ask, you don’t get.” But I think it’s overrated—your reward for being pushy, though not for being interesting, or particularly deserving. Do I think this way because I’m unable to ask for things? I wondered. Have I spent the afternoon looking for the young, hapless version of myself, the person I was before my luck kicked in?

“Give it to me,” the young woman demanded, sounding more strident now.

“Let me put you in touch with our security guard,” the librarian said. “She’ll be able to help you much better than I can.”

It was eight minutes after three.

“I need fifty dollars,” the college student repeated. “I want it.”

Her friend chimed in then. “Me too. Give it to me.”

At what point does this become robbery? I wondered.

The security guard was in her seventies and brittle. Her uniform had short sleeves and exposed her arms, which were twig-thin, like a snowman’s. This is who you call in case of trouble? I thought. The woman had all the authority of a crumpled leaf.

“You’re looking for someone poor?” She squinted through her oversized glasses to the far side of the room. “We got a lot of them today. But, oh, how about him?”

She gestured with her chin to a sorrowful-looking man in his sixties I had noticed earlier. What I’d honed in on, besides his duffel bag and the unconvincing way he was reading, was how shitty his haircut was. It looked like he’d done it himself with a campfire.

I walked over to him. “Excuse me.”

He either couldn’t hear me or was ignoring me.

“Sorry to bother you,” I said a bit louder. “But would you please take this for me?”

I laid the fifty dollars on the table beside him.

“Sure,” he said, as if he were doing me a favor.

The young woman at the counter narrowed her eyes. “Shit.”

Her friend offered a slight variation. “Shithead.”

Done, I thought. And with six minutes to spare. Take that, God.

“It was actually really smart of that speaker to hand out fifty-dollar bills,” I said to Mary when she arrived to take me to the bookstore. The afternoon had left me high, almost, and words gushed from my mouth like water from a fire hose. “It made me think of all sorts of things: how good I have it, how I judge people, the arbitrary rules we set. Then, too, it makes for an interesting story. Give away fifty dollars of your own money, and the moment you tell someone about it, you’re an asshole. I mean, the one thing you’re really not allowed to bring up in this world is your generosity. Because the moment you do, it’s not generosity anymore—by bringing it to light, you’ve killed it. Plus it makes the people you tell feel ungenerous. And they wind up hating you.”

Mary nodded.

“And there’s no point in me doing anything if I can’t write about it,” I continued. “It would be like . . . walking ten miles without my Fitbit on—a complete waste. I mean, I do do things I don’t write about: I use the bathroom, I have sex, but I try to be quick about it.”

The following night in Duluth, I mentioned the speaker that was still connected to Bluetooth, and a nurse told me about a guy who’d put his glass dildo in the freezer. When he later forced it up his ass, the extreme temperature change caused it to shatter, which led to all sorts of damage. After cringing, I thought of how someone—possibly me—should introduce the Chilldo, which would perhaps be made of Pyrex, and thus guaranteed not to crack or fracture deep inside a user’s rectum. I then made a note to put it on my Million Dollar Idea list, just below a chain of airport barbershops called O’Hair. Is this why I’m not poor? I wondered. Because I’m always thinking?

I told the story about Mary that night as well, and at the end of the evening, a woman handed me a fifty-dollar bill and asked that I give it away to someone who needed it.

I figured I’d wait until I reached St. Louis, but near my gate in Minneapolis, where I had a short layover the following afternoon, there was a McDonald’s, and walking by it, I noticed a woman behind the counter. She was perhaps in her early fifties, and significantly overweight with dull gray hair that fell to her jawline. Her glasses were oval shaped, and crooked. It’s odd, giving away money. You don’t want someone thinking you pity them, though that’s often what it amounts to, and often for something so small—in this case, crooked glasses. Plus having to go through airport security every morning just so you can work at McDonald’s.

“Excuse me,” I said. “This is going to sound crazy, but every day I choose someone to give fifty dollars to. Would you mind?” I put the bill on the counter in front of her, and wondered for a moment if she had misunderstood and thought I’d said $50,000.

“Oh, my goodness!” She screamed like someone on a game show who’d just won an outsized prize, a boat stacked atop a BMW filled with diamonds, and the exorbitantly priced ink cartridges my printer demands at the end of every fifth page. I raced away but could hear her behind me. “Did you see that? Fifty dollars! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

I guess I chose the right person, I thought as I hurried on to my gate at the far end of the terminal. My flight wound up being delayed by half an hour, and I was hungry. Getting a snack meant walking by the McDonald’s, and I didn’t want the woman to see me again, so I just sat there, and ate three raisins I found stuck to my checkbook at the bottom of my tote bag. Oh, the price of saving people.

At an event that night, someone gave me a fifty-dollar bill I in turn handed to a guy in his thirties who was eating out of a garbage can. He was strangely handsome, and wore a headdress made from a pair of filthy trousers. It’s embarrassing that my first thought wasn’t, No one should have to live like that. Instead, I wondered why I couldn’t carry off a pants turban the way that this guy could. “It isn’t fair,” I said to myself, handing him the bill.

“God bless you,” he muttered.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said.

At a bookstore in Salt Lake City later that week, someone gave me two five-dollar bills to hand out, and I thought, Is that all? The next day, I was in Seattle, and passed a man who was picking crushed cigarette butts off the sidewalk and lighting them. His fingertips had been blackened from dirt and fire. There was a convenience store not far away, so I walked in and spent the ten dollars plus several of my own on a pack of Marlboros. “Here,” I said, returning to where he was sitting on the filthy pavement. “Take these.”

“Aaaahhh!” the man screamed, and shielded his face, the way you might if you knew for a fact that someone was going to punch you in the nose.

“I’m not . . . ,” I said. “I’m trying to give you . . .”

“Aaaaaaaahhh.” He let out another cry, and passersby looked my way, their expressions reading, What’s that monster in a skirt trying to do to that poor homeless guy?

But it wasn’t a skirt. It was a pair of culottes!

“Aaaaahhh!”

“Oh, go to hell,” I whispered. “I spent thirteen dollars on these cigarettes, and I don’t even smoke anymore.”

We must have been in front of a group home of some sort, for a moment later, a man who looked as troubled as the one now rocking back and forth, still protecting his face with his hands, walked over and said in a too-loud voice, “I’ll take them.”

This fellow had greasy hair and was missing both his front teeth. The asking part kind of bothered me, but he was clearly mentally ill, so got a pass.

“Thank you,” I said, and I handed him the cigarettes.

I continued to talk at my bookstore events about the fifty-dollar bills, hoping someone might be like the woman in Duluth, but no one stepped forward, and in time, the subject was completely eclipsed by the things that men shove up inside themselves. If women come home from work and take their bras off, their husbands return and look for things they can force up their asses. In every city, I was given a new example.

By the time a nurse told me about a patient who had inserted an electric toothbrush up inside himself, and another who’d managed a two-liter bottle of Diet Mountain Dew, I was so inured that I said only, “Wait a minute. Diet?”

It wasn’t my fault that the money theme faded. I put things out there, and the audience chooses what it prefers to focus on. I think it was the mood the country was in. Something in the early summer of 2019 had us all thinking about enormous gaping assholes.

My final stop was in Reno where, for the first time in nearly forty years, I hitchhiked. I wasn’t going far, just to the Ritz-Carlton I was staying at in Lake Tahoe. Then I went home to England, as if none of this had ever happened. The only thing that stuck was that man in Seattle, the one who preferred to pick crushed cigarette butts off the sidewalk than take the pack that I had bought for him, the one who cowered at my approach. I met so many people during that book tour. I shook hands, I asked questions. I connected. I’m not a bad man, honestly I’m not. So, why do I worry that he was the only person I encountered that month who truly saw me?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Illustration ©2020 Laurie Rosenwald

With sardonic wit and incisive social critiques, #1 New York Times bestselling author David Sedaris has become one of America’s preeminent humor writers. The great skill with which he slices through cultural euphemisms and political correctness proves that Sedaris is a master of satire and one of the most observant writers addressing the human condition today. David Sedaris is the author of Barrel Fever, Holidays on Ice, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, and Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977–2002, as well as the collections of personal essays Naked, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls, and Calypso. He lives in England and is a contributor to the New Yorker, the BBC, and CBS’s Sunday Morning. For more about the author, visit www.davidsedarisbooks.com.