I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (23 page)

I’ve always been somewhat of a believer that the world will end in my lifetime. Maybe it was from watching that fucked-up
Day After
movie or maybe it’s because the polar ice caps are
melting and the world is
actually
ending. There was a tornado in Brooklyn in 2010! I don’t go so far as to jar my own urine and keep it in my basement (I don’t have a basement), because unlike these professional “doomsday preppers,” I don’t like to plan. I don’t even plan for a future that I plan on living in—let alone plan for a future that takes place after the apocalypse. After a nuclear bomb
drops and our glowing brains are on the outside of our foreheads, or the aliens land and make us their bitches, do I really want enough bottled water to keep me alive? What’s there to live for? Eventually the ice cream is going to run out.

I cashed out three 401(k)s in my twenties because I needed the money right away. I had the same phone conversation with every Fidelity representative.

“Hi.
I’d like to cash out my 401(k). I’d love to not have to work as a temp in New York City for about a month. The other day at one of my assignments, the office manager placed a coffee and bagel order for everyone and excluded me. I don’t even have my own desk. I have to sit in a chair at a file cabinet. I have nowhere to put my legs.”

“Ms. Kirkman, if you are under the age of fifty-nine, you will
lose thirty to forty-five percent of that withdrawal in taxes and penalties.”

“I am twenty-five years old and have no concept of living until age fifty-nine. At that point I figure I won’t have to worry about money because I’ll be dead or married to a rich guy, preferably a rich dead guy.”

“Okay, Ms. Kirkman, I need to advise you that cashing out your 401(k) can be more expensive than using
credit cards to get by.”

“My credit cards are maxed out so I won’t be using them to get by. How soon can you send me the money? There are a ton of designer knockoff purses for sale on Canal Street but I don’t think the guy is going to be at his table for long. The police have really been cracking down on fake Kate Spades.”

“Ms. Kirkman, if you cash out your 401(k), you are restarting the clock
on your retirement date.”

“I hate the thought of my money sitting there while I’m young and having fun. It’s not cool. These are the best years of my money’s life—I want it to be free with me. It’s not fair to keep those bills all cooped up only to let them out when I’m elderly. I won’t be able to keep up with it. That’s not fair to my money. Money needs a young mother who can walk up and down
Canal Street with it, looking for purses without using a cane.”

WHEN I GRADUATED from college, I began planning for my future by securing the following credit cards: Victoria’s Secret (everyone needs underwear!); Bath and Body Works (everyone needs chemically induced pumpkin-scented shower gel!); Limited Express (everyone needs tight polyester shirts that don’t breathe!); Macy’s (everyone needs
somewhere to go to buy their mom a Christmas gift!); and Sears (because it sounds grown-up; it’s where adults go to buy their barbecue grills and those picks that hold corn on the cob that nobody uses). At age thirty-four, when I finally finished paying off the last of my debt incurred by interest on never-paid-off charges for lacy thong underwear and stretch pants, I vowed to never use credit
cards again. I now have one that I use only for travel and emergencies. And my emergencies never involve needing a last-minute lawn chair or raspberry foot spray.

I finally have a great work ethic. I write full-time on a TV show. In my spare time I write and perform stand-up all over the country. I’m writing this book in between moments of procrastination when I’m reorganizing my closet and cleaning
each individual key on my computer keyboard with its very own Q-tip that’s been dipped in Windex. Back when I had my first job as a box office representative at the Boston Ballet, I got bored after a week of doing the same thing every day—and that same thing was . . . working. I called in sick, claiming that I had mono. Mono lasts six to eight
weeks and is highly contagious. Mono makes the sufferer
so tired that she can’t get out of bed. Coincidentally, that is also a symptom of lethargy and depression.

I lay in bed for two days with “mono” until I walked into my kitchen to light a cigarette from the pilot light on the stove and a mouse ran over my foot. I steadied myself by putting my hand on the counter. Crunch. I broke the back of a cockroach with my bare hand. The cockroach ran under
the microwave (with a fucking broken back!). Both critters got away because they are faster and have stronger constitutions than human beings. Here they were showing up for work every day and I was avoiding my job, pretending to have mono because I wanted to sleep for fifteen hours a day. Terrified of my own apartment, I got the fuck out of there, returning to work that afternoon, having made a
miraculous “recovery.”

(By the way, this is another reason that I don’t understand people who want to stockpile bottled water so they can survive the apocalypse. Cockroaches are said to be the only things that would make it through a nuclear holocaust unscathed. So if you’re one of the lone humans who make it, you’ll be sharing a microwave with a cockroach—just like I did when I lived in a crappy
apartment in South Boston in 1998. And no matter how many kids you have to ensure that you’re taken care of in the future, your stockpile of canned soup and babies can’t stop doomsday. You might want to adopt some cockroaches instead.)

EVEN WHEN I was married I was well aware of the fact that having a husband was no guarantee that I’d have someone to take care of me when I grew old, because men
die first. Seriously. I’m not a sociologist but look at the math. I grew up with two grandmothers and no grandfathers. I know my personal experience doesn’t make my hypothesis universally true, but my favorite kinds of “facts” are the ones that I get to decide are “true.” Most people my age have grandfathers who died around age sixtysomething and their wives went
on to live another twenty or thirty
years. I picture God dictating a memo one day to his archangels:

Dear American Housewives from the 1940s:

I royally fucked up! You had absolutely no rights and no choices in life. It was a total man’s world! Oy vey, you gals must hate your husbands, who pinch their secretaries’ asses at work all day and then come home and expect you to have dinner on the table. At night they lie on top of you, grunting for a few minutes until they’re done, never letting you experience a real orgasm. Okay. Here’s what I’ll do. I’ll come get your husband this year. I’ll send an aneurysm his way at age sixty-two. It’ll be quick and painless. And then, here, honey, here’s the channel changer. You can sit right here in this recliner for the next thirty years or so in peace. You don’t have to cook for anybody anymore and I promise I will never let
The Price Is Right
be canceled—I’ll just keep having different people host every decade or so. Again, I’m so fucking sorry. Huge oversight. My bad.

GOD

(I know that sometimes women die first, but it has very little impact on the man’s future. When a man’s wife dies, he just gets remarried three days later because he doesn’t know how to use a dishwasher.)

Knowing my theory, some of my friends asked me how I felt about the fact that without kids, I’d likely die a lonely widow. Um, I don’t have to live alone just because I’m widowed. I knew when I was walking down the aisle that after my husband died of an aneurysm at age sixty-two I’d just move in with a woman. I don’t mean that in a lesbian way. I will just move in with a lady and we’ll water plants
together. I mean, if she wants to go down on me, that’s fine, but I’m not going to do anything to her. I have no interest in going exploring inside another woman’s vagina. I have one and I’m freaked out by the weird things that can come out of one—unexplained moisture,
once-a-month bloodbath, and the weirdest of all, another human being.

Unlike Best Buy Bren, I grew up on a solid diet of
The Golden Girls.
It wasn’t just a sitcom to me—it was a blueprint for my future. I pictured living in my old age with my childhood best friends, Tracy and Shannon. I wasn’t sure which of our moms would fill the Estelle Getty role but I always secretly fantasized it would be Tracy’s mom because she was the most liberal. She put Tracy on birth control when she was a teenager and accepted the fact that
teenagers were sexually active. I felt Mrs. Bowen would be the least likely to judge elderly Shannon, Tracy, and me if we took home any Viagra-popping octogenarian men to our wicker-furnished, pastel-wall-papered home. Tracy and Shannon are both now happily married with children but we can probably still shack up
Golden Girls
style in 2042—because no matter what kind of developments happen with
stem-cell research, men will always die first. That’s a fact.

DURING THE “Stand-there-and-we’ll-form-a-line-and-hug-you-because-you-just-got-married-and-we’re-exiting-the-chapel” part of my post-wedding ceremony, one of my dearest friends, Morgan, whispered in my ear, “I’m so happy for you and I just realized I’m gonna die alone.”

Morgan is hilarious and if she hadn’t mentioned something morose
and inappropriate in the moments between my wedding and the reception, I’d have felt let down. I’d much rather consider Morgan’s lonely death than suffer through a friend of the family hugging me tight and singsonging into my ear, “Be careful on that honeymoon! Those babies will start arriving sooner than you think!” I wanted to whisper back to that woman, “Oh, don’t worry. I don’t want kids.
We’ll be relying on my birth control pill
and
pulling out. But just in case, not only have I researched great luaus on the island of Kauai, I know every Planned Parenthood–type establishment within a five-mile radius of our hotel. And if I can’t get an appointment, think of how lush and tropical the flowers are that grow
between the cracks of the cement in the back alley where I’d get that Hawaiian
honeymoon abortion.”

But those words “I’m gonna die alone” stuck with me through the reception as I Vogued with my mom on the makeshift dance floor at a colonial inn in rural Massachusetts. Dying bothers me—a lot. But aren’t we all going to die alone? Death is like getting a ride to the airport. Sure, someone can escort you to the curb, but it’s against the law/laws of nature for your ride to
see you all the way through to the departure gate/pearly gates. The scariest part of death for me is not the moment when I might feel pain, gasp for my last breath, and shut my eyes forever (or leave them permanently popped open, staring, like all of the bodies that are found in the woods on
Law & Order
).

The scariest part of death for me is the afterlife. Part of me hopes that there is an afterlife
because I mostly enjoy being conscious, and if the afterlife is one big feel-good session where there is light 24/7—just like what happens in Alaska for a few months out of the year—count me in. But part of me is nervous that if absolutely nothing happens when we die—if it’s just lights out and you’re not even aware you’re gone—I would still somehow be
aware
that there is no afterlife. I’d be
in the dark thinking,
Well. Here I am. In the nonafterlife. In the pitch darkness. Doing nothing. All by myself. What time is it? How long is this going to go on?

This might be because when my mom would tuck me in at night I’d ask her, “What happens after we die?” and she’d tell me that we go to heaven to be with God. She said it was just pure happiness. There was no stress in heaven and angels
sang and we felt peaceful all the time. I asked her how long we stay in heaven. And she got very close to my face, rubbed my head, and said, “Oh, you never, ever leave heaven. You are there for all of eternity and eternity never ends. It goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on . . .”

On and on and on?
Wait a minute! What if I started to get bored during
all of this holy bliss?
I could
never
leave? I’d really be happy all of the time? What if I wasn’t and everyone in heaven started to annoy me? I’d be in eternity with a bunch of annoying optimists and it
would. Never. End?!?!
Hold on, are there any pamphlets I can read about hell? I’d like to hear all of my options before I commit to any one afterlife real estate.

As you can see, there is not much, including a husband
or a baby, that can soothe my irrational fear that the afterlife is a never-ending office party where people seem happy and I stand back watching, wondering,
Is everyone really this well adjusted? What’s wrong with me?

And with regard to dying alone, I’m not even sure if I
want
to die with a ton of people around me. What would I want with a bunch of happy, healthy, younger people surrounding
my deathbed, all looking on anxiously, waiting for my death rattle? I think dying surrounded by my children would be annoying. It would remind me too much of being a kid and having to go to bed on Saturday nights knowing that my parents and sisters were going to stay up until one to watch
Saturday Night Live.
There were no VCRs, DVRs, or Hulu yet, so I wouldn’t have been able to catch up with
it the next morning. Dying with my children surrounding me, I’d think,
This is what motherhood is all about. I birthed these kids. I raised these kids. I sat home at night worried about them while they were out having fun and breaking curfew. Now that I’m old enough to party with my kids, God is being the biggest buzzkill parent of all, calling me home for my curfew, and I’m missing out on all of the fun. My kids are sitting here so that I am not alone when I die but really they’re just rubbing it in my face that they get to stay and I have to leave.

I’ve told my friends who fear dying alone that if they never have a child who will take care of them in their old age, they can come to my place, provided that they bring their own cot on which to take their last breath and some kind of
attendant who can take care of the body. I will sit with them until almost the very end and at the moment when their soul is about to pass I will quickly pull out a cardboard cutout of myself, place it in front of their fading eyes, and run out my back door to avoid hearing the death rattle of a good friend.