I was sitting alone in the empty cafeteria doing homework when Adam and his two minions, J.R. and Gade, approached. Gade was a curly, towheaded sheep, while J.R. was a short musclehead with a mullet who bragged about how his biceps were getting so big that he couldn't comfortably put his bulging arms down at his sides. (It was an impressive handicap, although not quite as impressive as his worldview--expressed to me like a father giving advice to his son--that all women were whores and all men whoremasters.)
When I looked up, J.R. and Gade were standing over me, giddiness etched on their faces. I had noticed this expression on boys at least once before when I was at soccer practice--just before they came toward me, threw me down, and rubbed my forearm hair really hard as if they were trying to make glass out of sand, although in fact they were making tiny knots that my mom had to cut off with tiny sewing scissors. I didn't cry during that attack; more than anything, I was amazed that my arms could do that.
So when I spotted that familiar glint in the eyes of Adam and his sidekicks, I thought, What is this gonna be? It was this: While Adam stood by, clutching a heaping stack of cold cuts from the cafeteria, Gade and J.R. held me down on the cafeteria table, arms pinned and outstretched like another Jew you may or may not know, and J.R. clamped my nose shut with his free hand. Then they waited patiently, giggling, for my body's breathing instinct to force my mouth open. At which point, Adam, not missing a beat, stuffed the cold cuts inside. I gagged at the taste and smell, simultaneously gasping for air through the blockade of highly processed dead-animal flesh. By now it had been seven full years since I'd last tasted meat. To call this event unpleasant would be something of an understatement.
There was no point in telling on him; it would only cause trouble for me. And since no rape kits had been designed to prove oral penetration by cold cuts--suddenly the phrase "hide the salami" had a whole new meaning--I wasn't sure that anyone would believe me anyway.
I wonder if that experience was as satisfying for Adam as it was traumatizing for me. What had he hoped to accomplish? If he wanted to teach a dumb vegetarian a lesson, it failed. I did not, after that encounter, say to myself, Well, message received: Meat is appetizing, and it's time to put this childish vegetarian thing behind me. If anything, my negative attitude toward eating meat deepened. If he really wanted to teach me a lesson, he should have found a child suffering from severe malnutrition, specifically from protein and iron deficiencies, and forced me to expound upon my bourgeois dietary politics to the starving child's face. Now, that could have been life changing. I guess what I'm saying is, if you need to be a bully because you tremble with all that pent-up hostility and aggression, try being clever about it.
* * *
"Hanging Out" with Sandy
* * *
I went to visit my sister Laura in Berkeley, where she was attending summer school. I was then thirteen and so tiny that I looked like a nine-year-old. And in those days our food supply wasn't being pumped with hormones or whatever it is that seems to produce the enormous breasts, densely vegetated mons pubis, and full-tilt ovulation that even some ten-year-old girls enjoy today.
The Berkeley trip offered many new experiences. I'd never flown by myself, and this was my first time seeing California. But most exhilarating was the complete freedom that came with zero adult supervision. My sister was in class all day, so I wandered around Berkeley on my own. I'd stumble onto pick-up soccer games and jump right in. I took myself to lunch at this place called Blondie's--it sold the biggest slice of pizza I'd ever seen--and stared at girls who had hot pink hair, or rats living on their shoulders.
Laura's dorm was co-ed, and her next-door neighbor was a boy named Sandy. He had blond, shoulder-length hair and what seemed to be zero classes to go to, so he was available to hang out with me all day. Even though Sandy was eighteen, he took a surprising amount of interest in teeny, tiny, thirteen-year-old me. Another thing Sandy took a great interest in was drugs, though I didn't quite put it together at the time. I would wake up well after Laura had left for class, put on shorts and a T-shirt, and knock on Sandy's door. He would always be chilled out, and always welcomed me in. To a degree, I can now relate; little kids are funny when you're stoned.
One day, though, the chilled-out Sandy had been replaced by a manic, crazy-eyed look-alike who opened the door and shooed me inside, with an energy that made me sense something was off. I plopped down on the floor as he closed the door behind me, and just as I felt the wind coming through the open window, he picked me up, carried me to its edge, and hoisted me out by the ankles--dangling my body headfirst twelve stories above the ground. I still have no idea what instigated this. We weren't in the midst of an argument, I didn't owe him a large sum of money, and as far as I know neither of us had been thinking, I wonder what it's like to be suddenly faced with one's own mortality? It just happened so fast. I'd been sitting on the floor, and the next thing I knew I was staring at cars and people who looked like tiny dots far below me, and feeling a totally unfamiliar anxiety about the condition of the ligaments that connected my ankles to my tibias. I was startled by a loud, bloodcurdling noise, before I realized it was coming from me. I was screaming like, well, like a child dangling upside down from the twelfth floor of a seventeen-story building.
It is, to say the least, weird to be held in such a position from such a height, because your potential murderer also happens to be the only person who can save your life. You might say the same thing of someone who's holding a gun to your head, but there's an important difference: That person must make a conscious effort to blow your brains out and a conscious effort to pull the trigger, while the person dangling you out the window only needs to stop making an effort. It's a very passive kind of killing. Human nature being what it is, I'm far more worried about the likelihood of murder being triggered by laziness, inertia, or any other expression of giving up.
Sandy instructed me to continue screaming, not that I needed prompting--especially once he'd explained that until I had "screamed enough" he couldn't bring me inside. "Enough" is a little subjective, but naturally I did my best. Trying to guess at just how much was enough would have been challenging even without my head close to bursting with blood.
At some point Sandy got whatever his definition of what "enough" was and pulled me back in. I'd like to think it was because of some sort of negotiating skill on my part, something that could serve as a template for future situations in later life, but it wasn't. Screaming "AAAAGGHH!!!!" has never since gotten me anywhere.
The kind of horseshit he had pulled probably happens to kids all the time, and it's a bummer. Whatever mistakes my parents made, they always tried not to damage me. They never hit me; they encouraged me, and gave me love in the best way they knew how, and when I suffered, they worried, tried to help, and took me to doctors. And still, just by leaving the house, I could get gang-assaulted on a cafeteria tabletop and dangled out a fucking twelfth-story window by some drugged-out psychopath. I'm just saying, it's a kick in the pants, you know?
On the day I returned home to New Hampshire, Sandy gave me a going-away present (one, that is, in addition to a brush-with-death sore throat). He handed me a brown paper bag and said, "Don't open this until you get on the plane." So on that plane, in the middle seat sandwiched between two businessmen, I opened my gift: one Playgirl magazine, two Penthouse Forums, and a Cheri. I can say with some confidence that this gift turned out to have a fair amount of influence on my life. At least it fed my fascination with sex, which in turn informed some of my earlier work, as seen below, in a self-penned Penthouse Forum letter.
SARAH SILVERMAN: THE COLLEGE YEAR
* * *
I Wait Until Third Grade to Make Major Life Decisions
* * *
In third grade, the teacher gave us questionnaires that asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. I wrote, "A comedian, an actor, or a masseuse." Like Mozart, my destiny was evident at a very young age, and it would be only a brief twenty-five years later that I
would get my own television show. Another way in which Mozart was like me: I'm pretty sure he thought farts were hilarious. If I could travel back in time and have lunch with him, I bet he and I would have loads to talk about. Can you imagine the scene? When I reach the Steve Martin-y phase of my career, I'll write a play about such an encounter. The question is, Will I go see it? In all likelihood I will sincerely intend to but will wind up at home instead, watching some future version of Lost, should one exist.
* * *
I Develop My Act and Breasts, in That Order
* * *
Between junior and senior years of high school, I went to Boston University summer school, and one night I decided to check out Stitches Comedy Club on Commonwealth Avenue. I'd never been inside a comedy club before, and I was underage, but somehow I weaseled my way in. As I entered, I heard a woman's voice on the mike. It was Wendy Liebman, who at the time was an emerging talent but would go on to become a major comic. Through her signature strained smile, she said, "Somebody told me I looked like Ruth Buzzi today. I don't know who she is--is she pretty?" Each joke that followed was funnier than the one before it. I was blown away. I found out when the next open mike was and signed myself up.
Although it would be my first real open mike, I was not especially nervous. It might be that I'm one of those people who are naturally comfortable on a stage. Besides, I'd had some practice telling jokes in front of an audience. My high school had assemblies on Mondays and Fridays, and, hippie school that it was, there was always extra time for kids to get up and make an announcement or, in my case, tell a couple jokes. But maybe my lack of stage fright was the upside of years of nightly bedwetting. Maybe that daily shame had ground away at my psyche, like glaciers against the coastline, so that somewhere in my consciousness, I understood that bombing on stage could never be as humiliating. My early trauma was a gift, it turned out, in a vocation where your best headspace is feeling that you have nothing to lose.
My set was pretty successful. I told some jokes about high school and ended the gig with a song about being flat-chested, which at the time I was. Soon, though, I did develop breasts. Fairly substantial ones. But I was slow to realize I needed to adjust my act. It wasn't until I moved to New York and started doing stand-up that Kevin Brennan told me so eloquently, "That song isn't funny because you have tits." This moment marked the end of a three-year high school epoch characterized by wisecracks such as, "Hey, Sarah! I just heard a joke that will blow your tits off! Oh, you already heard it."
I was so excited after my first open mike that I couldn't wait to do it again. But I still had to finish high school, and there wasn't much of a comedy scene in Manchester, New Hampshire. But there was a place called La Cantina where bands performed, and when I asked if I could open for one of them with my stand-up, the owner said yes. That night there was a table packed with drunk people in the back, and whenever I would deliver a punch line, they would all shout supersarcastically, "Ha ha ha ha ha," and then mega-straight-faced, "Hilarious." I bombed.
After graduating I happened to get a summer job at La Cantina--as a cocktail waitress. No one recognized me at first; it took Sheryl, the other waitress, about a week before she blurted, "Oh my god, you're that girl who tried to do comedy here that time." I stood helplessly as the rest of the staff gathered around, looking me over, making the connection. "Don't quit your day job," they laughed. Which was not only unoriginal but nonsensical, since I worked at night. With them. There. If memory serves me, Mozart had a nearly identical experience while working his summer job at a Salzburg alehouse.
* * *
I Finally Move to the City Where Practically Everyone Already Thought I Was From
* * *
Throughout my life, people have often assumed I'm from New York City. I imagine this is mostly due to my complete lack of a New Hampshire accent and my Jewiness. Even as a little girl, grown-ups would ask me, "Are you from New York?" This puzzled me--I'd never even been there.
"What's New York? I'm from here."
Maybe they knew something I didn't.
Manchester, New Hampshire, had a big theater called The Palace. It staged summer stock shows, where professional actors from New York came for the season, and put up three plays. As a teenager, I apprenticed at The Palace for two summers, painting the stage and performing whatever other menial tasks they handed me. But I also got to be part of the chorus, if the play of the moment had one, and to live in the cast-house dorm with the actors. I became good friends with many of them. In the winter, I went to New York to visit these friends whenever I could. Any time I had a gift coming to me--Hanukkah or my birthday--I would ask for a shuttle ticket from Boston to New York City (fifty bucks round-trip at the time). To this day, my mother looks back on that wondering what she was thinking, letting a fifteen-year-old girl go to New York City for the weekend, but I love that she did. These trips sparked an intense desire in me--to get out of New Hampshire and live in New York City on my own. The kid who was always afraid to sleep over at friends' houses traveled alone to New York feeling confident and adventurous. I flew and took the subway by myself. On my own in this incomprehensibly massive metropolis, I managed to navigate and stay alive. Even more than home, it felt like home.
To the lifelong aspiring performer part of me, New York was like a playground stocked with my favorite toys. I got to see Les Miserables on New Year's Eve 1986, because one of my friends from the summer worked the concession booth selling T-shirts. I desperately loved the soundtrack and dreamed of playing Eponine. Well before the curtain went up, my friend let me walk on the stage and I cried.
Seeing the play that night for the first time--until then I'd only listened to the soundtrack--I understood it in a whole new way. After the show I boarded the subway, looked down at my red Swatch, and watched it turn to midnight. I looked up at this train car full of strangers, and my heart soared. In New Hampshire, I'd always felt like a goat living among sheep; until I got to New York it had never occurred to me that there could be a place filled with other goats. It was the best New Year's I'd had yet. It probably still is.
At seventeen I took a train from New Hampshire to New York City to go to an open call for Gypsy.
In the fall of 1989 my mom came with me to New York City to help move me into my freshman dorm at NYU. We arrived in the city the night before and stayed at the Washington Square Hotel, putting the bulk of my luggage in their storage room. The next morning, we were given the storage key and went to gather my things. We opened the door, and there, lying on top of a mountain of luggage--including my trunk--was a maintenance man with his pants down around his ankles. His eyes locked with ours; he was in what I now understand to be the final unstoppable bucking stages of jerking off. A few very long seconds later he scrambled to get his pants up enough to scurry past us and out the door. At which point we piled my belongings into a big rolling cart and headed off to the dorm. To some, this might have seemed an ominous beginning to a new phase of life, but I found it oddly affirming. I guess at some level I viewed it as just one more sign of New York's immense diversity. I had spent my life feeling like the weird one in my community, I had been the masturbating maintenance man, if you will, of southern New Hampshire--but if there were people like this in New York, surely I could find a place for myself well inside the fringe.
Mom and I arrived at my room in Rubin Hall, at 5th Avenue and 10th Street, to find a boy in boxer shorts and a T-shirt sitting Indian-style with his back against my dorm room door, organizing a tray of cassette tapes. He introduced himself as Jason Steinberg, a sophomore, and gestured across the hall to his room. I could see through the open door that his walls were covered in Billy Joel posters. He was Jewish but looked Italian to me, straight out of Saturday Night Fever. I had never seen a Star of David worn like a cross around someone's neck.
He seemed to be a real mover and shaker. When he heard Mom and me discussing my need for a stereo of some kind, he took us to Crazy Eddie's and negotiated the lowest price fo
r a tape player-radio. Lots of nights I would see him come home with full-grown women--the kind who wore fur coats. When I told him I was going to be a comedian, he mentioned that he worked the door at a place on West 3rd Street called Boston Comedy Club, got me a job passing out flyers there, and encouraged me to do their open mikes. I was sad the day he got kicked out of the dorm for calling my roommate a cunt.
* * *
The Corner
* * *
I passed out flyers for Boston Comedy Club on most days from 4:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. It was great money--ten bucks an hour. I was stationed at the corner of West 3rd and MacDougal, immersed in a culture of all ages, races, socioeconomic classes, and states of mental stability and sobriety.
I quickly became friends with all the corner drug dealers. Two in particular, named "English" and "Shady." Shady had big bulging eyes and wore a red bandana; English was black and British, and sported a full beard and mustache. He was tickled to be sharing his corner with this white, Jewish, wide-eyed girl, and took me under his wing, showing me where he'd buried knives--just in case I needed one. He hid them in various patches of garden and other public places where attempts had been made to bring nature into the city. I couldn't imagine a situation in which I would need a knife, let alone have time to dig one up, which in hindsight shows a lack of imagination, the kind that would have prevented me from enjoying a successful career in retail narcotics.