I can’t watch stand-up now—the thought of it floods me with a heavy, panicked dread. There’s only so much hostility you can absorb before you internalize the rejection, the message that you are not wanted. My point about rape jokes may have gotten through, but my identity as a funny person—the most important thing in my life—didn’t survive. Among a certain subset of comedians and their fans, “Lindy West” is still shorthand for “humorless bitch.” I sometimes envy (and, on my bad days, resent) the funny female writers of my generation who never get explicitly political in their work. They’re allowed to keep their funny cards; by engaging with comedy, by trying to make it better, I lost mine.
The anti-feminist drumbeat is always the same in these conversations: They’re trying to take comedy away from us. Well, Tosh got a second TV show, while the art that used to be my catharsis and my unqualified joy makes me sick now.
The most frustrating thing is that my silly little Autobiography report dreams are finally coming true: I’ve been offered TV writing gigs, been asked to write pilots, had my work optioned, watched jokes I wrote for other comics get laughs on the air while wannabe open-micers were still calling me “the anti-comedy” on Twitter. Andy Richter and Sarah Thyre are friends of mine now. (Coincidentally, he’s one of the few big-name comedians who’s been tirelessly supportive.) I finally clawed my way to the plateau where my seemingly impossible goals were within reach, and I don’t even know if I want them anymore.
Video-game critic Leigh Alexander, who is perpetually besieged by male gamers for daring to critique a pastime that is hers as much as theirs, wrote a beautiful meditation on her weariness—on the toll of rocking the boat in an industry you love—for Boing Boing: “My partner is in games, and his friends, and my guy friends, and they run like founts of tireless enthusiasm and dry humor. I know sometimes my ready temper and my cynicism and the stupid social media rants I can’t always manage to stuff down are tiring for them. I want to tell them: It will never be for me like it is for you. This will only ever be joy, for you.”
Men, you will never understand. Women, I hope I helped. Comedy, you broke my heart.
The Tree
The tree fell on the house when I was sleeping, alone, in the bed that used to be ours, two weeks before my father died, four weeks after Aham told me he was leaving, eight weeks after we moved in together in a new state with grand plans. We shouldn’t have gone.
Because even that—“grand plans”—that’s just some nothing I tell myself, still, even now, four years later, when I shouldn’t need it anymore. It was wrong before we left. It was wrong in the moving truck, it was wrong in my parents’ driveway, waving good-bye, my dad wrapped in a plaid blanket and leaning on my mom, probably one of the last times he was out of bed (and I left; I left), it was wrong in Portland, Eugene, Grants Pass, Ashland, Yreka, Weed, Redding, Willows, Stockton, Buttonwillow/McKittrick, and Castaic, and east on the 210 and south on the 2, and off on Colorado, left, right, right, and right.
It was right two months before we moved, at the end of a day with his kids, when we swam in Lake Washington and played his favorite game, “see who can throw everyone else on the ground first,” which he always wins, which is the point, because he is a giant toddler, and we stopped by a garage sale because the sign read “RARE JAZZ VINYL” and the woman there thought I was the girls’ mom—me!—and complimented us on our beautiful children. “Your mom,” she called me, to them. They looked up at me and I panicked, and said, too loud, “Oh no, I’m not their mom, I’m just SOME LADY!” because I wanted so badly not to fuck this up, not to let him think I was getting any ideas. Don’t worry, I’m just some lady. We’ve only been dating for four months. You just got divorced. I’m not trying to be your family. That would be weird. I know. I’m normal. But.
Then we picked blackberries and made a pie and we swung by my parents’ house—it was still my parents’ house then, not my mom’s house, not truncated and half-empty—and after the kids went inside with the pie he held me back.
“I loved hanging out with you and the girls today,” he said, staring at me with that face.
“I know!” I said.
“I like your parents’ house,” he said, looking up at their white Cape Cod blushing in the sunset.
“Me too!” I said.
“What do you think our house is going to be like?” he said.
Meaningful pause.
“In L.A.”
“Really? Are you sure?” I jumped up and down, squeezing him.
We weren’t moving to L.A. together, we both insisted. We were each independently, coincidentally, moving to L.A. at the same time. He was going to live with some female friend I didn’t know; I was going to live with our mutual friend Solomon Georgio. It had to be that way. People didn’t move in together after four months. But on that perfect day, heat-drunk and berry-stained and bruised from roughhousing, from playing family, the ruse didn’t make sense anymore.
We should live together, obviously. We were best friends, and we were in love, even if we didn’t say it, and that had to be enough, even though he’d been telling me he was broken since the first night we spent together—broken from abandonment, poverty, kids at nineteen, two divorces by twenty-seven (“that’s as bad as being thirteen and a half and divorced once… times two,” his bit goes), single fatherhood, depression, a hundred lifetimes of real-ass shit while I was rounding the corner toward thirty still on my mommy and daddy’s phone plan. We were friends for eight years before we even kissed. “Didn’t you ever have a crush on me? I’m so handsome,” he asked me later, teasing. “No. It literally never occurred to me,” I replied, honestly. He was a man. I was still a stupid little girl. Kids? Divorce? That was above my pay grade.
In the summer of 2011, Aham and Solomon were both in the semifinals of NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity contest, an annual comedy competition that awards development deals to underrepresented minorities, particularly people of color. (Every year, some straight white shithead would insist on entering, nobly, in protest, because “Irish is a minority.”) I’m not sure if the deals ever went anywhere, particularly, but it was a good way to “get seen” by L.A. industry folks, and it made NBC look progressive.
All three of us were feeling like big fish in those days; we were ready to flop into the L.A. River and see if it’d take us all the way to the sea. (If you know anything about the L.A. River, you know we were screwed from the start.*)
Not to mention the fact that Aham couldn’t really move to L.A. anyway. You can’t just move when you’re an adult man with two kids—he was only going for a few months, six tops, to see if this NBC thing panned out, because you never know, and maybe he’d “get seen” and become the next David Schwimmer and be able to move out of his three-hundred-square-foot place and he and the girls could have a big new life and no one would have to sleep in the laundry room anymore. If not, no foul. Nothing to lose. Meanwhile, I was signing a year-long lease in Los Angeles. My love story had a six-month shelf life, at most, in all but the most unlikely circumstances. But I forged ahead. Fuck reality. This was going to be my person. I knew it.
Then, in the driveway, Aham said it out loud—we’d live together, be a real couple—and all of those warnings, overt and covert, that he’d been sending me for the past four months, that he wasn’t ready for this, he couldn’t do this, his divorce was too recent, their fights were too loud and too mean, his life had too many moving parts, were going to fall away. I had been right to ignore him all along. I knew it. I would make him okay through sheer force of will. He said it. Binding oral contract. Breaking it now wouldn’t be fair. That’s how a little girl thinks. Love was perseverance.
Later, I’d ask him, heaving, “Why the FUCK would you say that? Why did you trick me? Why did you come here?”