Maeve in America Page 3

  I changed clothes in a bathroom cubicle at the hotel. The mercifully solid oak doors hid my shuffling from foot to foot as I stood on the sneakers I’d worn on the trip, trying not to touch the floor. Even in fancy places you don’t want to stand barefoot in the bathroom, because rich people have worms, too. I wiggled into the dress, packed my old clothes up, and slipped out of the cubicle to inspect my put-together self in the mirror. I tried not to think about the Vera Wang dress. It was never mine to begin with. Neither was this one, but it was what I had on and I forced my brain to focus solely on what stood before me. Compare and despair, I chanted to myself, compare and despair. I looked perfectly okay. The dress was basic, up to the job, if the job was to have a nice time and to blend in well. I worried that the peplum effect was a little too like a deflated jellyfish wrapped around my waist, but I was gloomily sure that nobody would look too closely. I was no mermaid come to live on land, and I was certainly no Cinderella. I wasn’t an Ugly Sister either, just a bystander, unnamed in scene, maybe the youngish aunt of one of the girls hoping to catch the Handsome Prince’s eye.

  I had assumed there would be a cloakroom, but as the old saying goes, to assume is to make an ass out of you and me. In this case not you, just me: the woman who just changed into a floor-length dress in the bathroom and was now standing balefully by the door to the ballroom with a backpack on her otherwise strapless shoulder. I ducked into the room where a drinks reception was well under way and flung my backpack under a tall table draped with a long white tablecloth. I took a glass of cava from a passing waiter’s tray and offered it to the Man upstairs, praying that nobody would spot the backpack. Not that there was anything valuable in there, but they might think it was some kind of explosive device. I stood, alone and worried for a moment, which is a great look for any party, but quickly realized that nobody would suspect a terrorist attack on a fund-raising ball for a nonprofit arts center, and that my bag would be fine. I spotted a woman from the arts center and went up and pulled her elbow just as she was about to take a drink. She didn’t think it was funny, but I put that down to her not knowing who I was for a moment. She was kind of startled, until she stepped back and realized it was actually me. She said I looked gorgeous and she didn’t recognize me at first. Is there any greater compliment than someone thinking you are too gorgeous to be yourself? Not to me! I was thrilled. It only took her a second to click that it was me, though, and I couldn’t help picturing her reaction had I been in that oyster-colored Wang number. She probably would have screamed. Or wept, the way children on reality TV shows weep when their mothers emerge from huge cosmetic surgery overhauls and look completely distorted.

  We were called for dinner and sat in a dated, glitzy hall at huge round tables. When I sat and arranged the slit in the skirt, my dress looked fine, but these little rolls of underarm fat kept popping out at either side of the bodice. That would never have happened in my real dress, the one that held me just right, the one that felt like a second skin, a skin more comfortable than my own. More than comfortable, I felt luxurious and effortless and gorgeous in it! That must be how rich people feel all the time, extra-comfortable. Now I was shifting position in my chair, trying to sit up straight. I held my shoulders back, but I couldn’t keep doing that and still reach for the butter to put on my little rolls while they were still warm. I mean on my actual bread rolls, not those underarm rolls.

  The pang of my missing dress echoed through me as I sat there, and I couldn’t help noticing the imperfections around me. The waiters in battered white blazers were so old that they snoozed as they stood and strained to hear our orders. My table was wonderful, giddy and friendly and full of young Irish immigrants. There were a couple of boxers’ wives whose husbands were training and couldn’t come out, and they were in bright, tight dresses and took regular cigarette breaks. There was a former child actor and a humanitarian aid worker, full of stories of their past lives that expanded as the drinks kept flowing. The speeches were tipsy and outrageous and the petits fours were tragically divine.

  It was an event I’d be delighted with at any other time, but I couldn’t enjoy it that evening because I kept wondering just how different it would all be if I’d shown up in the magical dress. Wouldn’t I be the one holding court at the table, regaling everyone with my just-the-right-side-of-gossipy anecdotes? The waiters would stand up straight and the little birds of paradise would surely not flit so easily away for a smoke. I was certain that the Javier Bardem look-alike at the next table would be drawn to this siren before him, and without any trouble I’d surely lure him into the deep blue sea with me. Not like this, though, no. Not when the tide was out.

  It was silly of me to pine for something so elusive as the fleeting feeling a slip of fabric had given me one afternoon in the Meatpacking District. Why couldn’t I ignore whatever nerve it had pinched? I simply couldn’t, and it flared up at the ball now and made it impossible to enjoy myself. I was as foolish as Bette Davis, storming off to her cabin instead of staying and making love to Paul Henreid all damn night. What did it matter that we were not rich and elegant, when there was still so much fun to be had? It was too late now; the ball was over. Javier Bardem’s twin and his friends left first, followed by the people being honored and the humanitarian. I said my goodbyes, wished one of the bright girls good luck for her husband’s upcoming fight, and crouched under the table to reclaim my backpack, in full view of a surprised busboy.

  I went back to the bathroom to change into my subway clothes. I tugged at the side of the dress, glad, as always, to unzip. I put my leggings and hoodie back on and tied my hair in a ponytail. I walked out through the hotel, and as I passed the reception desk and reached to push the brass-paneled door I heard my name being absolutely yelled by a number of voices coming from the front bar. I looked in, and there was my table, reassembled with a few missing pieces, fresh drinks in hand, smiling at and toasting me and each other. “We decided to have one more, come in and sit down.” “Even like this?” I mimed, gesturing to my outfit. “Even like that,” said the remaining bright girl, moving over to make room on the deep green sofa. So I did go in and I did sit down, and it felt like we were just getting started.

  Pen as Gun

  THE SLIVER OF SHARED SPACE between comedy and tragedy is one that fascinates me. “Haha before wah-wah” is my favorite thing to say to giddy children, because it used to drive me crazy when adults said it to me.

  Back then I couldn’t articulate why, but I know now that I was annoyed because I only wanted to be high on laughter. I did not want to think about the inevitable comedown.

  The sway and clack of karma’s pendulum bothered me then, and I still have questions. If too much laughing leads to sadness, is the opposite also true? Can you get so sad that you eventually have to laugh? When things get bad, really bad, where does comedy fit in?

  The giggle at a funeral, is it real or just a mechanism to release tension, the way a gassy baby appears to be smiling? Myself and my comedy comrades, is our work an indulgence or a necessary part of the natural order of things?

  These remained theoretical questions until February 2016, when I was asked to lead a comedy workshop in Iraq.

  My friend Mark asked me to do it, and I immediately said yes. When I met Mark he was in training for his second New York Golden Gloves tournament, and he reminded me of old pictures of the legendary boxer Jack Doyle I’d seen growing up in Cobh, where “the Gorgeous Gael” was born. I adored him at once, especially the rebel streak I spotted early on, which surely came from his Irish parents. I had a million questions for him when he began working for a media company called Yalla that was based in Erbil, about two hundred miles north of Baghdad and fifty miles from Mosul, where ISIS had declared the caliphate back in 2014 and, at that time, still held.

  I wanted to know everything about the comedy scene and content creators in Iraq. Yalla’s goal, like most platforms around the world, was to create a place online with con
tent that would be so relatable and so great it would spread by itself, it would go viral, and everyone would get the message. In Yalla’s case the message, couched in fun makeup tutorials and sports-gone-wrong videos, was that creativity was better than destruction, and ISIS was never the answer to what ails Iraq. Mark’s job was to help foster an independent creative sector in Iraq, and he thought that a workshop where a few U.S.-based comics came to meet and work with their Iraqi counterparts would do just that. With the shining example provided to us by the history of U.S. involvement in Iraqi affairs, I knew that nothing could go wrong.

  I told my parents I was going to Kurdistan, rightly figuring they would not ask which part. I don’t believe the word “Iraq” came up in our conversation. If it had, they might have pointed out that Iraq was a place still haunted by the U.S. invasion over a decade ago and the consequential havoc it wreaked, or perhaps they could have mentioned ISIS, at that time still rampant in various regions, ensuring that violence reigned across much of the country. Erbil was safe, Mark assured me, but I still felt it was better not to get into a whole detailed explanation of regional politics with my family. “But Mammy, you’re not listening to me, ISIS are miles away and I’ll keep my phone on the whole time!”

  I sent the word out—I needed a team! Wow—sounds awesome, came the reply. But short notice / too weird / my wife said no. Finally, just twelve days to go before the workshop, two people did sign up. The first was my friend Joe Randazzo, a TV writer and satirist, one of The Onion’s earliest editors. I’d done a few live shows with him, and the first day I met him I’d had a strange feeling his house had burned down once, and I asked him if that was true. He said it was true, his family home had burned down the week he graduated from college. He asked how I’d known that and I told him I didn’t know, but I’d just gotten off a plane and sometimes jet lag made me psychic. Since then, he’s thought of me as slightly magic, which is always helpful when I ask him for favors. At the time, Joe had two little kids and another on the way. Despite being due to give birth in a few months, his wife actively encouraged him to go. He found that deeply funny and a little unsettling.

  The final person to confirm, thereby completing our trio, was a comic by the name of Mo Amer, whom I did not know personally. I’d heard he was very funny, and a lovely guy too. Both turned out to be true. Mo is a seasoned road comic who arrived in Texas as a child with his Palestinian refugee family. He speaks Arabic and English and had done shows in Ramallah for refugees and in Baghdad for American troops. I’d put together a great team, but whatever about that—these guys’ names were Mo and Jo! Myself and my MoJo were headed to Iraq, and this pleased me no end.

  You know how busying yourself with details like luggage tags and gel manicures can distract you from the bigger questions? That’s what happened to me. I had ignored this one big question that snuck up through my security checks and winked at me from my pastel-pink fingernails. I focused on getting a team together and micromanaging their presentations while figuring out what I should wear. A blazer with the cuffs turned up, of course. That is what people who give talks wear. I got two of them, and that took a whole afternoon of trotting into various Banana Republic stores. The question, the one I avoided because it was too big, was something along the lines of this: What if comedy, and creativity, these nebulous things I’ve devoted all these years to, are, in the grand scheme of things, unhelpful? Or even pointless? I had vague ideas about how creativity was a life raft for me when the waters of my life got choppy, but I was acutely aware that I did not have any experience trying to stay afloat in a country wracked by war and pain.

  Being an Irish child in the 1980s, I have memories of news stories about sectarian violence in the terrible days of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but I grew up in the very south of the peaceful Republic of Ireland and was lucky enough to escape any trauma. Some specific events, like the Omagh bombing or the two policemen getting beaten to death by IRA men after a funeral, those would rock everyone in the country. A heaviness would descend for a few days as the adults talked to each other about what had happened, and went quiet when we asked why, and turned off the news before the images got too graphic. For the most part, though, the lives led on either end of our tiny island were extraordinarily different, something I only realized as an adult after I’d learned about the reality of segregation and patrols and justifiable fear experienced by people the same age as me growing up in Northern Ireland.

  I don’t know that there’s a definitive way to prove a community’s taste in comedy has been impacted by their daily experience, but Northern Irish people are certainly known for their dark sense of humor. A Belfast comedy club owner told me about lines stretching down the street in the days after a particularly bad atrocity during the Troubles. He’d talked about it in terms of catharsis and community. Before your time, he’d said, and given me two drink vouchers, because I was doing an open spot and that was the payment. That was true, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland was not a story I owned; by dint of luck and geography I’d escaped it all.

  In the week leading up to my departure, I set about preparing my presentations. I was worried I’d say the wrong thing, or be too serious or too flip, so I stayed up all night. Otherwise, I reasoned, I would just lie there fretting. I researched my topics. The French artist Louise Bourgeois said in an interview once, “To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.” That was a good place to start. I would open with a short discussion on comedy as memoir, and close with an even shorter discussion on the history and significance of creativity in times of conflict, and how to keep your creativity intact during those times. I hoped that the attendees would have a lot to say on the latter, but just in case, I scoured the Internet and the library for images and texts to back up my argument that creativity did, in fact, matter. I put together some slides and asked my friend Kinan to translate them into Arabic, then I asked my other friend Brian to put them in a cute format on Keynote so I’d seem like a total professional, like someone who was born in a blazer.

  On the subway to JFK, I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, about his experience in the Auschwitz camp during World War II. In it, he called humor “another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation.” I checked in, used my boarding pass to mark that page, Instagrammed myself trying to fit a whole cruller into my mouth at the airport Dunkin’ Donuts, and boarded the plane. Mo, Joe, and I were meeting at Ataturk Airport in Istanbul, where Mo had access to the first-class lounge and had promised to get us in too, because he’s that cool. Having each arrived on different flights, it took a while to find each other, but we managed it, and the three of us settled in to wait for our flight to Iraq. Blessings on blessings, there were millions of tiny cakes and pastries being passed around. The rich businessmen seated all around the banquettes ignored the treats while we scroungy comedians took full advantage.

  In between mouthfuls, Joe asked how I knew Mark, the man behind this whole Erbil trip. I told him Mark was a lovely guy, extremely good-looking, and was an amateur boxer and remains in great shape. I’m not sure why I opened with that, and it certainly didn’t go down well. “Wait,” Mo said, putting down his éclair, “we’re going to Iraq ’cos you’ve got a crush on some dude?” I backtracked, saying no, that’s not why we were going, we were going to help people use their creativity to fight ISIS. Besides, I insisted truthfully, “Mark is not even my type, and he’s married, and I really like his wife, not that that matters, ’cos I would never!” Joe shook his head. “Oh, you don’t like great-looking guys in great shape?” I told him no, I was actually drawn to chubby, slow-moving guys. I showed them some examples on my phone and that seemed to calm us all down.

  Later, when our flight was delayed on the runway because of security issues and a man started punching the seat in front of his when the woman in it reclined, Mo and Joe looked at me with something like u
nease. The man was moved to the back of the plane, and we eventually took off. Later still, at approximately five a.m., as we stood outside a locked hotel with the dreamy Mark banging on the door, explaining that the clerk was probably at prayer, they looked at me again, this time with regret dawning over incredulity.

  Once we were checked in, I slept for two hours and woke up before my alarm with the jittery feeling of excitement and slight dread I always have on my first day in a new place. I showered and attempted to blow-dry my hair, but, as with hotel blow-dryers around the world, this one was as faint as a sleeping child’s breath. Furious with my damp hair, I stomped down to breakfast, which was a buffet that included cookies, hard sheep’s cheese, honey, and nuts. Heaven. The workshop began at ten a.m. Except it didn’t because we didn’t have the right cable for the projector.

  Forty of my Iraqi peers nodded politely as I squinted in the light and apologized in English. We sat in a hotel basement, in a long room with tables in a circle, all facing me. The participants in the workshop were stand-ups, cartoonists, animators, and comedy actors. Some beginners, some comedy veterans, an equal mix of Kurdish and Arabic speakers. Everyone had been given notepads and pens and small bottles of water. I looked around at these faces as they waited to hear what I had to say about the importance of jokes. My translators, MJ and Ayer, waited too. “Hi, everyone, thanks so much for being here. We will start soon, we just have to find the right cable for the projector, thanks so much again, thanks a million.” I noticed Ayer darting between groups of people to relay the Kurdish translation, while MJ just stood beside me and translated loudly in Arabic. I asked them both if it would make more sense to divide the room between Arabs and Kurds, thereby getting my first big laugh. Thankfully, they thought I was joking, starting out strong with a controversial political reference, you know, something topical.