Of course, being a pit bull myself and also having had very little impulse control training, I ran right at Billy a thousand miles an hour. I didn’t want him to live in fear for another minute, I wanted him to have the love he deserved. In doing so, I forgot a crucial thing: The kind of love I wanted to give him was not the kind of love he actually needed at that stage in our relationship. He wanted hugs and kisses and constant affection that would never end, but what he needed was a careful kind of love, a methodical love that would make him feel safe by providing safety and structure, not one that would implode from impossibly high expectations and enmeshment. As I write this, I’m realizing that I’m not even sure what the definition of love is or should be. Unlike Forrest Gump, I may not know what love is, but I certainly know what it isn’t: It isn’t urgent, it isn’t stressful, it isn’t about pity. I don’t think that to love someone else you should have to abandon yourself. I should probably write things like “Love is about loving yourself first” or “You have to be in a relationship with yourself before you can be with someone else,” but I’m not a motivational speaker or an expert on love and I don’t want this book to read like an annoying Pinterest feed.
I learned a lot the day I had my ear bitten off. I learned that cartilage doesn’t heal the same way bones do. I learned that we should all memorize at least three people’s phone numbers and I learned to never underestimate a cute blond nurse even though porn has conditioned us to. I learned that blood hardens like nail polish, and that my blood tastes like sweet-and-sour soup. One of the most important things I learned is that sometimes we file very unhealthy behaviors under the term love. I feel really lucky to have learned this in a dramatic enough way for me to pay attention, but not so bad that I couldn’t live to tell about it. If it hadn’t been for Billy, who woke me up and inspired me to rethink my behavior in relationships, I’d probably be married to some sicko and trying to raise a kid my baby daddy named after himself.
When I think back on that surreal moment, I really do feel lucky. Given all the other ways it could have gone, I have to admit that the way it all turned out is something of a miracle. And for those of you who still think pit bulls are inherently bad or that he did indeed attack me, I promise you that if he truly wanted to kill me, he could have done so in an instant. If you take a look at the alligator jaw that dog was born with, it’s hard to imagine how he did as little damage as he did. If he had nibbled anywhere else on my face, I’d look like spaghetti Bolognese.
As you may know, a dog’s mouth is his “hands,” so perhaps he was grabbing me by the ear the way a strict mother would to teach me what I needed to learn. I’m not looking at the event as a near miss to put in the rearview mirror. I want to hold on to what happened as an important reminder to slow down in relationships instead of diving in headfirst, without knowing if there’s any water in the pool. The goal for me now is to slow down and play things by ear. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.
The scar on my ear is still prominent, and it didn’t totally attach symmetrically at the top, but I like it this way. I mean, ears are incredibly weird, so now mine is just weird in a different way. Even if I look like half a Hobbit, it’s a lesson that’ll always be right there when I need it. Today all I have to do is look in the mirror and be reminded how quickly I can end up sabotaging myself if I get into an addictive relationship.
My wonky ear reminds me on a daily basis not to confuse love with sympathy or rescuing someone with intimacy. I no longer let myself get emotionally attached to people who confuse me, deplete me, or pose a danger to me. Although danger is the ultimate aphrodisiac for me, such behavior is a negative contribution to my future. As Vera says, “If you’re attracted to someone, that’s a red flag.” So if I’m too magnetically attracted to a person, that probably means something else is going on, like I’m getting adrenaline from their craziness, which means I may not get to date them, the same way I don’t get to eat pizza for every meal or buy every pair of vintage cowboy boots I see online at two A.M.
My Van Gogh ear is a gift from Billy. Every day it’ll remind me to meet others the way they are, not how I want them to be. It’ll remind me to practice a patient love, a love where boundaries, self-respect, and self-love come first. Most of all, it will remind me to be humble. Especially on bad hair days when my hair is up in a bun.
See? My ear is totally fine.
THE MIDDLE EAST CHAPTER
According to The Guardian newspaper, I’m the first woman comedian to do stand-up in the Middle East. I have no idea if that’s true. I’d Google it, but I’m too afraid I’ll be put on a watch list or something. Plus, if The Guardian says it’s true, that’s between them and their fact checkers.
That said, there’s no way it’s true. I’ve met tons of Persian women in Beverly Hills, and they’re hilarious. Plus, the Sphinx was a female, and she told the world’s best riddle 4,500 years ago, which I think caused people to die if they didn’t answer it correctly. So like all great comedians, she killed.
If I’m the first woman to perform stand-up in the Middle East, that would be very cool, but a dubious honor because I would have liked for a Middle Eastern woman to have been the first woman to do stand-up in the Middle East. Maybe that just wasn’t in the cards. Although I’m flattered, it pisses me off that Middle Eastern women wouldn’t have had that opportunity. Look, there’s a lot of heavy, third-rail emotion swirling around everything Middle Eastern and I’m not going to pretend to be any kind of authority on it, but what I do know is that all my life I’ve been drawn to things that make me uncomfortable—and not just karaoke, eye contact, and Spanx.
Like any uncomfortable topic, the Middle East is a very important and flammable one. There have been many comprehensive books about the layers of complexities of female identity in the Arab world. I haven’t read them and this isn’t one of them, but I do have a friend named Ahmed Ahmed, a comedian who organizes comedy tours all over the Middle East, and he asked if I wanted to go to Dubai and Lebanon with them. He warned me that female stand-ups weren’t really a thing in the Middle East, although from what I knew, females were treated exactly like they were, well, things. He couldn’t guarantee my act would be well received, but I jumped at the chance because at the time I wasn’t being received particularly well in a lot of places in America either. I probably should have been scared, but I was doing shows in parking lots in downtown L.A. at the time, so nothing really scared me anymore.
Like any American, I had heard plenty of stories in the news about sexism and misogyny in the Arab world—reports about girls being deprived of their basic freedoms and education, and of grown women in Saudi Arabia being banned from driving. Everybody I knew was obsessed with that particular injustice, the not-being-allowed-to-drive thing—that was like the final straw for people in L.A. In America the idea of women not being allowed to drive is, of course, outrageous. Instead of being unable to drive, we just get constantly made fun of and meme’d for being bad at it.