Daddymoon

When Jen is five months pregnant I go on a solo vacation. Not on purpose. That’s just how it goes down.

I had planned a “babymoon” up the coast of California. If you’re not familiar with the term “babymoon,” it’s a trip where you take your pregnant wife on a vacation to celebrate that you’ll never be alone together ever again.

Jen and I had gone to the beach on our second date twelve years ago so I could establish that I was a “beach person,” and then we never went to the beach again.

That said, I plan this trip up the coast of California and figure out how to pay for it with gigs along the way. So every three days on our “vacation” I have to do a show. That way we don’t go broke before spending our savings on diapers, therapy, and college.

Unfortunately, Jen is still bleeding when the babymoon date arrives, so her doctor suggests she not fly because she classifies Jen’s pregnancy as “high risk.” Obviously, this is an excellent excuse but it’s a tough pill to swallow when someone cancels on “the last time you’re ever going to be alone together for the rest of your lives.” Somehow I make my wife’s high-risk pregnancy of our unborn child about me. That said, I booked all these gigs so I have to make the trip alone.

Now it’s a daddymoon.

Every night I’m alone in the honeymoon suite of a different beachside resort, and after the shows I sit alone in a heart-shaped tub eating chocolates and drinking champagne.

That’s how I find myself sitting on a recliner overlooking a beach in Santa Barbara. I’m sitting there without my shirt. I look over at a tube of Banana Boat SPF 50. Somehow I can’t muster the energy to put it on. It’s always hard to justify applying sunblock because I know that I cannot reach every square inch of my skin, so putting on sunblock becomes amateur body painting. A day after I get heavy sun, my body always looks like a red-and-white abstract painting. People look at my back and say, “Is that a cloud? Is that a bunny?”

I say, “That's a finger and that’s an area where my arms don’t reach.”

I look across the pool at another couple rubbing sunblock on each other. I think about asking to join their team.

Room for three at this sunblock party?

Probably not the best idea.

Even if Jen were here I’m not sure I’d ask her to apply my sunblock. It’s an involved process. My body has all kinds of dips and grooves. It’s like asking someone to butter a walrus.

I’m sitting on the recliner, and a seagull sits on the chair next to me. He’s huge. I’m not gonna say he’s the size of a person but it feels like he's the size of a person. It’s possible that the Klonopin has not worn off at this point in the morning. A seagull who seems like he's the size of a person is sitting on a chair next to me eating home fries. Someone has left their half-eaten plate of food from earlier. I’m starting to get worried that the seagull might abruptly leave his breakfast and flap his enormous wings in my face. Or maybe accidentally whack me with one of his enormous talons. Do seagulls have talons? As I mentioned, I don’t know anything. I get up to shoo the seagull from his chair.

I shout, “Come on! Get out of here!”

I’m shouting at a seagull. Even worse, I’m shouting at a seagull as though the seagull speaks and understands perfect English. There might be a lesson in that. We all ask for things in ways we understand and expect other people to understand, instead of entering their perspective. Maybe I’m doing that with Jen right now.

I get up off the recliner and walk towards the cliff overlooking the beach. I have a pain in my psoas muscle—that’s the one that extends from the lower back to the femur. My brain immediately converts this thought into the worst-case scenario. Maybe the psoas will get worse and, in combination with my aging and tightening ligaments, make me a debilitated old man. I didn’t even plan to be old in the first place. Fuck. I wake up tired every day. My moods pivot from manic to sad and in so many ways depend on how much caffeine I’m drinking. Now I’m having a kid. Fuck.

I walk to the edge of the cliff and there’s no obvious way to get down to the beach so I climb backwards down these enormous rocks. The smell of the beach and the precariousness of the rocks transport me to my childhood when my parents would take me to Cape Cod and I’d climb down sand dunes at the national seashore.

I think about how my ten-year-old self didn’t even imagine a forty-year-old self.

Perhaps the most baffling thing that occurred in my thirties is that I started living in the oblivion I had not imagined as a child. As a young kid I wanted to be a comedian and a rapper and then, in my twenties, I realized I could actually do one of those things.

In my thirties I realized I hadn’t planned to live until my thirties.

That’s a strange space to live in.

The great beyond.

It’s not outer space but it’s close enough. It’s outer time—which is even scarier because you can’t draw a picture of it.

Did people plan to have children when they were children? I guess I knew kids who would play with dolls and pretend that the dolls were their babies but, Jesus, we weren’t serious about that, were we? 

The end has always felt near. My friend Mitch was dead at thirty-seven. My friend Greg was dead in his forties. Neither of these were from natural causes. I always thought there was a decent chance I would go too. When I started to make a living in my late twenties, Joe encouraged me to start a 401(k) and I thought, Okay, but who is it for? I’m not going to be old. Maybe he’s trying to trick me into saving money for him when he’s old. He seems like someone who could be old.

Aging is like climbing to the top of a mountain and then you either jump off and die or inch your way down until you fall to your death. I never imagined the inching part, just the climbing. Not to mention, if God wanted me to die, sending me through a double-paned window in my sleep might not be the least obvious sign.

He must have been watching me jump through that window in Walla Walla and thinking, This motherfucker can’t do anything right. I look around at people my age and I think, Now what do we do? We’ve peaked. We are like soft avocados. We should have stickers on us that say “ripe ready to eat.”

I arrive at the bottom of the rocks, and my feet hit the sand. The physical act of standing in sand has always shocked me into the present. I walk down the beach, staring out at the waves and the cliffs in the distance. 

The beach has always appealed to me. The simple act of walking into the ocean reminds me that I’m alive. When we used to drive out to the national seashore as kids, the waves were so extreme that it felt like anything could happen. The same way a wave could smack you onto the sand and rocks it could also choose to propel you into the shore at what felt like two hundred miles per hour. 

It’s possible that’s what drew me to stand-up comedy.

I started out just wanting to write jokes, but once I performed them I couldn’t stop. Not because it went well but because it didn’t always go well. That’s the thrill. You can do extraordinarily well with an audience and two hours later you’re playing in front of a group of people that hate you.

The beach has always been exciting because it's a force larger than myself. I never really believed in God but I believe in the earth. I believe it is bigger than me. In case you didn’t look at the author photo, it is.

I'm standing on the sand and my phone vibrates.

It’s Jen.

I pick it up and immediately enter a world of dropped syllables and static. It’s amazing how your phone signal can be so clear when it’s ringing and then, the moment the connection is made, it drops out like a messenger who travels the world on foot just to say, “There’s a message for you.”

And then dies.

Jen explains through patches of static that the bleeding has continued and that, to make matters worse, the doctor noticed that Jen has hypermobile hips. The doctor expressed concern that Jen might break or dislocate her hip during labor, which is obviously not great timing.

I say, “Clo, I’m so sorry.”

Jen says, “Thanks. How are you doing?”

I say, “Things are fine.”

Things aren't fine. I'm away from the person I love most, who is bleeding and anxious about giving birth, and I didn’t even want to have a child in the first place.

I say, “I love you. It’ll be okay. “

We hang up.