How I Finally Became an Adult

On being held back by the pursuit of what I found 'funny'.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint the moment when, after extra decades of extended adolescence, I began finally embracing adulthood. I may have treded water all the way until menopause, which I briefly saw as sad (until it dawned on me how fantastic it was going to be get rid of having my period.)

The onset of my delayed adulthood may have been triggered by certain simultaneous biological changes that took some of the fun out of drinking too much by changing the way my body reacted to alcohol. I no longer could rely on the robust lunacy of inebriation to provoke the rowdier, twenty-something version of me into saying yes to ideas like jumping off the dock and into the San Francisco Bay outside a fancy restaurant after dinner, just because someone dared me.

Equally important was the accumulation of smart counsel from a brilliant therapist I talked to for most of my forties, morphing me into someone who could no longer claim to be clueless. But the biggest difference between the two versions of me came when I called a halt to the mission I was on to to prove that I was not a hostage to a domestic rut like my rage filled, disappointed mother. I was busy making sure that I was having more intense and atypical life experiences than she did.

Or to put it more simply, I was always looking for trouble. And then I stopped.

The twenty/thirty-something version of me was still being influenced by the Bohemians who drove the action in the books I admired by Jack Kerouac, and Ken Kesey. Never mind that the women in those books were insignificant and peripheral, if they existed at all. I ignored them, just like the authors did. I also admired the silliest of the heavy drinking members of the Algonquin Roundtable. And the combination of these mentors lead me to a variety of questionable situations in the name of authenticity that I would absolutely never pursue now.

The most consistent part of my search for topics, which I still use today, was about seeking an angle of approach I thought would be ‘funny’. But my vision of this ‘It could be funny’ impulse during those decades frequently placed me squarely in the middle of the kind of weird circumstances at which the current version of me just shakes her head and rolls her eyes.

For example, back when I used to write monthly columns in magazines (in this case, a great but short lived publication called ‘New York Woman’,) I liked to follow up on weird classified ads running in the back of tabloid weeklies. Sometimes they were eccentric ideas for making easy money. Sometimes they were puzzling offers of spiritual enlightenment or questionable lifestyle advice. The weirder the solutions they offered, the more they struck me as ‘funny’.

One column, written on the eve of a pending Writer’s Guild strike in 1988, found me contacting each of several bids to help me ‘make fast cash daily in the ever-expanding field of stun-gun sales. ”

I ended up with a piece I called “My New Career in Stun Guns.” Here is an excerpt.

“The ad said “Make big money selling the revolutionary stun gun. Promote Peace! Prevent Violence! Get Quick Cash Daily!” No wonder I got excited! Here was an employment opportunity that featured international diplomacy and high-stakes capitalism neatly rolled into one irresistible package! After all, what little girl doesn’t grow up hoping to one day hear herself speak the words “Any stun guns for you today, sir or madame?” 
    Naturally my heart was racing with anticipation as I dialed the number in the back of the tabloid that I had found in a scattered pile on the floor of a frozen yogurt parlor. My elation was such that I didn’t realize how unnerved the whole thing was making me until I heard myself tell the man who answered the phone that my name was Monica. 
    “You have a nice voice, Monica.” he said, “I’ll bet you could really sell some stun guns.” And with that,the room began spinning and I felt my skin growing clammy. The combination of a goofy alias and a violent weapon being mentioned in the same sentence was suddenly making me swoon.  Next thing I knew,he had invited me to come meet with him down at‘headquarters’.
“Reassuring!” I said to myself,“At least they have a headquarters!” 
   And so it came to pass that later that day, I found myself walking up to the door of a small white stuccoed house just a few feet away from a twenty foot sign that said “Complete Bridal Service, Everything for the Wedding.” A prime location,I thought to myself,given the potential for shared referrals.

To re-cap briefly: When I read this piece now, what I see is a nicely dressed young woman, carrying only a small cassette tape recorder, walking blithely into the house of a complete stranger in a run-down industrial part of town. Because she lives alone and is working for a magazine whose staff is entirely based in New York City, it never occurred to her to tell anyone (as in zero people) where she was heading when she left the house that day. Therefore, in the event that something weird should happen to her in pursuit of this thing she finds ‘funny’, no one (as in zero people) would think to wonder about her where-abouts, at least for a couple of weeks.

In a best case scenario, her neighbors might react to the increasingly relentless howls coming from a house full of unfed dogs. And eventually, a missed deadline at the magazine would cause an editor or two to wonder why she wasn’t returning their calls. But it would take days, if not weeks, until someone noticed the absence of the young woman. And even after they did, they’d have no way of figuring out where she might be.

But back to the piece: There I was, alone in a dicey location with a man I’d never met and his giant stash of weapons; a situation that could very easily have gone south on me. And, once again, the only reason I’d put myself in this kind of jeopardy in the first place was that the idea of exchanging my generally pleasant career in comedy writing for a career in weapons sales struck me as being funny.

Here is how the story continued:

  A man of about forty-five, dressed in a long black trench coat and sporting the always fashionable Larry Fine hairstyle, opened the door and invited me in to a small dark living room. It was dominated by a large pyramid-shaped display of various hair-care products: shampoo, creme rinse, styling gel, mousse, extra body conditioner. “Very interesting living room decor!” I said to my host,unable to think of anything else to say. 
   “Are you at all familiar with stun guns?” he asked me right away,instructing me to sit down on a sad old sofa with broken springs as he disappeared around a corner and into a back room. “No,” I confessed, feeling uneasy about the whole thing,“I barely know what a creme rinse is." 
 When he returned, he sat down uncomfortably close to me on the sofa, balancing a large box of stun guns on his lap. Removing one that was about the size of a cassette player,he held it up in the space between us.“THIS is a stun gun,” he said,“It’s the only legal self-defense weapon that you can carry concealed. When you push this trigger,it shoots out 42,000 volts of electricity.” 
 Then he held the stun gun right in front of my face and squeezed the trigger,causing a bright blue miniature lightening bolt to jump from one point on the head of the gun to another. Coincidentally, it also caused me to jump from one point to another at the same time. 

Another re-cap: there were many people taking many different approaches to comedy in the 1980’s. But I had decided that mine would include actually putting myself in physical jeopardy. The piece ended like this:

“The way it works is we sell the stun-guns to you by the dozen for $30.a piece.And then you re-sell them for $79.95.” he explained.“But to tell you the truth, I’m watching your personality and thinking that you seem nervous. If you’re uncomfortable with the stun-guns,then you're not going to have a whole lot of luck selling them.” he advised.
 He definitely wasn’t wrong.
So I knocked him down and grabbed the stun gun out of his hand.Then before he could get up,I zapped him. And while he was still down for the count,I creme rinsed and moussed his hair.  

Okay, I made that last part up. But that was because I left there still thinking like a writer.  I knew I hadn’t found the right new career for me just yet.”

Part Two.

That was not the only insane thing I did in pursuit of a topic I found ‘funny’ that year. Certainly not. There were plenty of others.

Just a few months later, it occurred to me that spending the night at a grim looking ‘ADULT motel’ which I drove by multiple times every day on my way to run errands, might be a ‘funny’ way to spend New Year’s Eve. Why? Well, I was amused by their use of the word “adult.” Obviously, the big sign out front that boasted ADULT FILMS ON CLOSED CIRCUIT TV was not referring to “The Marriage of Maria Braun.”or ‘The Seventh Seal.” or “The Sorrow and the Pity.” Or was it? What if it was? Given the many jokes I felt I could make about the definition of the word ‘adult’, I sensed a funny piece lurking. What kind of ‘adults’ might I meet in this place?

So I made an ironic reservation for New Year’s Eve at this drab, two-story cluster of rooms, located in the middle of a run down commercial strip of Ventura Boulevard, surrounded by used car lots, abandoned bail bonds storefronts, and grimy fast food franchises. I felt sure my date and I would probably back out of it, because of course we would. The ‘funny part’ was really just us saying we were going to go.

However, come New Year’s Eve, when we found ourselves sitting around with no plans, we got into the car and drove by the place, just to see how things were looking. Surprisingly there were plenty of rooms still available. I don’t know why I was surprised. It didn’t look even a little bit like the kind of place you’d want to spend New Year’s Eve. But in keeping with my ‘life on the edge’ directive, the unwelcoming qualities of the place made it seem like an amusing place for an annual celebration. And it only took a couple of glasses of alcohol for me to make the argument that ‘it would be funny” if we checked in.

One thing and another and before you know it, we had driven over there and parked on the street out front. For the first few minutes, we just sat in the car, staring at this dismal tableau, wondering if either one of us were ever going to call my bluff. “Go see if they even have a room reserved for us” said my consort, conveniently assigning the hard part of the action to me. And rightfully so. I was the one who thought it would be “funny.”

 So I went over to the little rectangular ticket booth style office that sat by itself in the corner of the parking lot. A grim middle-aged woman with a heavy Eastern European accent appeared at the window. “Do you have a room for Mr. and Mrs. Martha Hessel?” I asked, struggling to remember the name I had used when I made the reservation. She looked down into her book and then nodded, her unsmiling face frozen into a grimace. Apparently blink-free staring was the only facial tool-kit required for the person who would be welcoming the guests.

 She took my credit card, then returned it. And as I sprinted back to the car, I heard her calling to me. “Mrs. Hessel?” she shouted, “MRS. HESSEL!!” I turned and walked back toward her, equal parts worried about what had gone wrong and unnerved by being called Mrs. Hessel.

“Yes?” I said warily.

“Missus, you forgot your complimentary champagne” she said, handing me a very small bottle and two plastic champagne glasses.“Oh. Okay. Thanks.” I said, relieved I wasn’t under arrest.

 Our room was small and dilapidated, free from any of the usual dubious motel art. In fact, it was mostly filled up by a large water bed in a four-poster frame. We each had a sip of our complimentary champagne, fermented to perfection at the exclusive Adult-Films-Close-Circuit-TV-and-Waterbed Vineyards. Then we turned on the 40 inch television set that sat on the small bureau opposite the bed to enjoy a few foreign films.

The rest of my memory of this event is just of a black and white 16 mm. movie we viewed on a too-small monitor. All I remember is that a pizza delivery man winds up having blurry sex with someone. And I also recall the feeling of great relief that came over me when I looked up into a large mirror hanging over the bed and relized I didn’t look too bad.

And that’s where the entire memory would have ended if the room had not suddenly begun to violently shake. An earthquake!  Of course! It was going to be our luck to be buried alive at this gloomy, disreputable adult motel, then eventually pulled from the rubble, live, on local TV while a chipper local anchor-person in a sport coat and makeup described the enormous fallen ‘ADULT FILMS AND CLOSE CIRCUT TV’ sign that had nearly decapitated us.

Assuming we had just seconds until this was going to become a reality, we quickly got dressed, and beat a hasty retreat. Then later on, from the safety of home, we searched the news for bulletins that would tell us how big an earthquake it had actually been. And finding none, we were forced to conclude that what we had experienced was not the movement of tectonic plates but rather, the result of the Richter scale-level-adult-human sexual activity being exerted by one or more very large ‘adults’ occupying the room directly above us.

And with that, I happily left this version of my pursuit of ‘funny things’ behind, having realized that the difference between being an adult and being a kid was simply realizing that I didn’t need to actively seek out questionable situations in order to write about them. I could just try to live sensibly and plenty of questionable situations were going find me all on their own. Turns out they don’t require an invitation.