Chapter 26

WHEN JIMMY MET JEANNIE

Looking back on my young adulthood, I never thought my life would get so intertwined with someone else’s. We weren’t always an enmeshed couple with five kids trying to navigate through the same life with two different minds. It’s difficult to imagine that a chance meeting could change everything so dramatically, but I guess that’s how it always happens.

When I first met Jim, we both lived on Mott Street north of Chinatown, south of Houston Street in Manhattan. The area is now one of the city’s most sought-after stylish neighborhoods (yes I’m obsessed with NoLIta), but back then, pregentrification, it was sort of no-man’s-land. It wasn’t Little Italy and it wasn’t SoHo. I loved it. It was distressed in the way a shining stainless-steel sink becomes etched and scratched over time and develops a beautiful patina that tells the story of its years of use. The once charming prewar tenement buildings had fallen into disrepair, layers of paint peeling off elaborately patterned tin ceilings. Old marble tiles warped, cracked and filthy.

There were some people remaining from the Italian neighborhood that Martin Scorsese had grown up in, but it was mostly inhabited by immigrant Chinese and Dominican families. The playground on the corner had cement tables where old guys would sit all day playing dominoes. There was a bodega on the block that I don’t think sold anything, at least not legally. It had a wooden fruit stand, partially visible from the street, and I think the fruit had dust on it. There was a suspicious storefront where some wannabe goodfellas met up and “played cards” while two or three lookouts sat on the sidewalk smoking cigars in folding lawn chairs with a friendly word for all who passed. There were open windows with dripping air conditioners precariously placed on the sills high above the sidewalk, elevating the exhilarating feeling of impending danger. Loud salsa music was always blasting from somewhere. A Chinese great-grandma foraged for cans in the curbside recycle bags.

Central to the neighborhood was a Catholic church with a brick wall around it: St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. This church defined the block because within its walls was an old cemetery filled with grass and trees, a rare sight for a nonpark area in New York City. It gave the whole area a unique charm and made it unlike any other neighborhood. It became my church. Jim’s building was on Mott between Houston and Prince, and mine was between Prince and Spring. I had seen Jim for a few years as we passed each other on the street. When you pass the same person so often, eventually you should acknowledge they exist with a nod or a smile, or it’s just weird. Years later, Jim and I would recount passings-by and the number of times we had “met” before we actually met.

There was that one time in the late ’90s when my sister Maria, a junior at a Milwaukee high school at the time, was staying at my apartment while she toured colleges in the New York area. Jim, whom I then thought of as that blond guy who lived on my block (he stood out like a pale thumb), was jogging by with headphones on. I smiled at him and said “Hi,” to show my sister that even in New York City people are friendly with their neighbors. Jim reacted as if he were at the beginning of some “I never thought it would happen to me” story, stopped jogging, and said, “Hello, ladies!” We stood there awkwardly for a beat because I guess we didn’t expect him to stop. I must have babbled something about heading over to the NYU campus. He looked at us skeptically and said, “How old are you?” My sister quickly replied, “Sixteen!” and Jim said, “Bye!” and sprinted away.

A few years later I was directing a play with seventh and eighth graders in the St. Patrick’s Youth Center. It was tech week, and the next morning the kids were having their dress rehearsal. The backdrop and scenery had taken a beating from the day’s run-through and needed to be patched up. At about 10:30 p.m., I ran over to the Korean market on Prince Street to buy some duct tape. A Korean market sells everything under the sun. Amazon probably got its inspiration to move on from being only a bookseller after walking into a New York City Korean market. When I got to the duct tape section (yes, there was a duct tape section next to the gourmet crackers), I realized I had forgotten to grab a shopping basket and I needed about five rolls of tape. In my usual manic state, I slipped the multiple rolls over my wrist and up my arm like bracelets, checked out at the counter, and bolted out the door.

Jim, having finished a spot at one of the comedy clubs, was entering the Korean for a late-night snack. As I was exiting, I literally collided with Jim like we were in some bad romantic comedy. As we bumbled through our apologies, I smiled and said, “How are you?” He replied, “Sorry, do I know you from somewhere?”

I was wildly offended: “Are you kidding me? We live on the same block! We have passed on the street hundreds of times! We smile at each other! We nod! Are you really that arrogant that you would ask me if you know me?” I caught my breath. I’d had a rough day staging fifty rambunctious middle schoolers in Romeo and Juliet.

Jim looked at me. A wild-eyed, dirty, crazy woman with duct-tape bracelets up to the shoulder. “You know, we’re probably going to get married,” he said.

Two years later, we did.

That prophetic pickup line kicked off the beginning of my story of surviving a brain tumor. At the time, I was shocked by Jim’s unabashed confidence, yet intrigued. After I accused him of being arrogant, he said probably the most arrogant, obnoxious, entitled thing I have ever had directed at me that wasn’t catcalled from a passing car window. Married? I wouldn’t even go on a date with this guy. Not my style to be pushed around. Married? I was busy. Not interested in a relationship. My experiences with relationships up until that point were excruciatingly painful time drains. Then again, I was starting a not-for-profit theater company for local urban preteens, and I needed the support of the neighborhood, so I gave him my email address. I didn’t want to seem too available with a phone number. That night when I got home after midnight, I sat down in front of my gigantic computer and logged in to AOL, as we did in 2000. As soon as I began to check my email, a little instant messenger popped up. It was Jim.

jimgaffigan: Hi. Did you miss me?

Jlnoth: Wow you are really confident.

jimgaffigan: What are you doing?

Jlnoth: Logging into AOL.

jimgaffigan: Wanna go see a movie?

Jlnoth: When?

jimgaffigan: Now.

Jlnoth: It’s 12:16am!

jimgaffigan: There’s a 12:35 movie playing at the Angelika. Let’s go.

Jlnoth: What? No! i don’t even know you.

jimgaffigan: What do you want to know?

Jlnoth: Um… where you get your arrogance?

jimgaffigan: What are you doing tomorrow?

Jlnoth: Laundry.

jimgaffigan: Cool. I have laundry too. Let’s do laundry together.

Jlnoth: i’m not doing laundry with you. You’re not my boyfriend!

jimgaffigan: Not yet. Do you want to have dinner with me?

Jlnoth: What is your problem?

jimgaffigan: Ok, how about lunch?

Jlnoth: Ok, fine.

jimgaffigan: Great. Lunch tomorrow. I’ll meet you at Spring Street Natural at 12pm

Jlnoth: Tomorrow?

jimgaffigan: lol

Jlnoth: What’s lol?

jimgaffigan: laugh out loud.

Jlnoth: oh.

For some reason that I could not explain at the time, I met him for lunch the next day at Spring Street Natural. I brought brochures for my “Shakespeare on the Playground” initiative. We started talking. He was a stand-up comedian. Only. I was a teacher, an actor, a director, a caterer, and I had just started a not-for-profit theater company. In other words, he was successful; I wasn’t. Ironic that the more jobs you had, the less prestige. I offered to let him pay for lunch. I ordered some fancy thing with brown rice, avocado, and a poached egg on top. This was the nicest restaurant I had ever been to in New York. In fact, it was the first time I’d ever gone out to lunch in New York.

“Do you come here for lunch a lot?” I asked.

“No, I’ve never been here before.”

“Why did you pick it?”

“I’ve always wanted to come here since it opened. The neighborhood is really changing.”

We talked about all the changes we were witnessing. It was interesting to hear the perspective of another midwestern transplant who had such a similar experience of ending up in this neighborhood and then realizing they were the hillbilly that settled on top of an undiscovered oil well.

He talked about how he was going out of town for a while to do gigs at various improvs around the country.

“I don’t really follow stand-up comedy,” I admitted.

“Do you have a favorite comedian?”

“I guess the Monty Python guys.”

“Oh, you’re a nerd!” he replied.

“Wow, you’re really good at talking to girls!”

Navigating through a conversation that ranged in tone from jocular to downright hostile and would have made Beatrice and Benedict seem chummy, we discovered that we both grew up on Lake Michigan (him Indiana; me Wisconsin). I knew we were both from the Midwest, an area that a New Yorker would describe as anywhere between Pennsylvania and Utah, but the coincidence that we grew up on the same lake was wild. And both from unusually large Catholic families. He was the youngest of six, I the eldest of nine. “Nine? That’s just weird,” he said. Our cultural sameness was further highlighted when the food came. He took a forkful of mine without asking, so I took a forkful of his. He asked me about the play I was directing. I handed him a brochure across the table. “I really think you should get involved. The kids in this neighborhood have nothing to do.”

“Did you just agree to go out to lunch with me because you wanted me to volunteer in your theater company?” He seemed irritated.

“Did you just ask me to lunch so you could bed me?” I retorted.

“Touché,” said Jim, and he took another bite off my plate.

Just then, my flip phone rang. The guys I had buying an amp for the show were at the Guitar Center in Queens. Yes, there was only one Guitar Center at the time. And it was in Queens. They were at the register and didn’t have enough money for the purchase. “Excuse me,” I said to Jim. Then into the phone, “Let me talk to the cashier. (beat) Hi, can I just give you a credit card over the phone?”

“No. We don’t do that,” came the voice on the other end, obviously suspicious that I was trying to steal the amp. “We need to see the card and ID.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let me talk to the guys. (beat) Hey. Okay. Stay there. I’m coming.” I snapped my phone shut and said to Jim, “Thanks for lunch. I’ve got to go.” I grabbed my bag, and the brochure (they were expensive to make, and I’d decided that Jim was not brochure-worthy).

“Okay,” said Jim. “I’ll walk you to the train.”

He paid the check and walked briskly beside me as I made another phone call to the guys.

“Hey. What train do I take to get to where you are in Queens? No. I don’t want you to get a smaller amp…” While I was talking I paused and leaned against the brick wall of a building as I fumbled for the MetroCard in my bag. Jim put both hands against the wall on either side of me. Not touching me, but kind of trapping me, like the “London Bridge Is Falling Down” game. I ended the call, ready to knee him in the family jewels. “What are you doing?” I asked incredulously.

“A strong woman needs a strong man,” he said and gave me a firm kiss right on the lips. Then he walked away. “Bye.”

I stared after him. He was a strong man.

In the time between the collision of the duct tape diva and the arrogant pale guy in the Korean market and the day we walked down the aisle of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, the dying-on-the-vine neighborhood began to transform into the height of New York chic. It was like our own Disney movie. As our love blossomed, so did Mott Street. When we walked down the block hand in hand, it was like stardust shot out in front of us and an old abandoned storefront transformed into a romantic French bistro. It was a nonstop adventure as new boutiques and restaurants sprang up everywhere, as if just for us. We both worked long, hard days late into the night, but in the city that never sleeps, two night owls meeting for midnight indie movies and small plates and red wine, at new places that people from all over the city were crowding our neighborhood sidewalks to get into, was magical and thrilling.

We started working together right off the bat. It was sort of an accident. Yes, I did force Jim to volunteer for “Shakespeare on the Playground.” The neighborhood kids were part of this renaissance we were all experiencing, and they had to come along for the enchanted ride. There was a young man in my hip-hop production of Midsummer Night’s Dream who was naturally funny but shy and self-conscious. His role was Robin Starveling, the tailor, and it was a funny part. Every time Billy would say his lines, he would turn bright red and hide behind his script. Jim worked with him one-on-one, and Billy gained tremendous confidence. I couldn’t tell who benefited more, Jim or Billy. Jim’s willingness to take time out of his schedule and help this kid showed me that under the tough, irreverent, funny-guy exterior was a compassionate saint. It was buried deep, but I saw it with Billy.

I also started dragging Jim to Mass. His apartment building was directly across the street from St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, but he had never once entered the church. “Are you afraid you’re going to burn, like foil wrapped bacon in a microwave?” I asked incredulously. Jim had grown up Catholic but was more of a cultural Catholic; in other words, he rooted for Notre Dame. But when he saw it was important to me, he was game.

One day, Jim sprang it on me that he had written a TV pilot and it had been picked up by David Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants. I was like, “Wow, that is so amazing! Can I be in it?”

Jim seemed annoyed by my naïveté.

“I’m trying to make sure they keep me in it.” He explained that it was for CBS and it featured all well-known actors, except him, the unknown.

“But it’s your show!”

Jim was a little frantic. “I have to do a bunch of scenes with Christine Baranski, and she’s a real actress.”

If there was anything that years of theatrical training had taught me, it was how to break down a scene. Jim had the comic timing and the natural charm already. He had helped me by helping Billy, and now it was time for me to help him. “I’ll work on it with you!” Great. We made plans for later that night to work on the scenes. Jim gave me the key to his apartment so I could let myself in after my catering job in case he was not back from his set at the comedy club. It was my first time in his apartment. When I flipped on the lights after keying in, I was pretty sure I had just stepped into the apartment of a serial killer. Jim lived in a cramped, filthy, railroad-style one-bedroom with eleven-foot ceilings and a bathtub in the kitchen, the room I had just entered.

I looked around. Books and dirty dishes were piled high on the counters. There were three rooms visible from the center kitchen where I’d come in that led into one another (like railroad cars), and each was sponge-painted a contrasting hideous color. The paint was cracked and chipped and peeling off the tall steam pipes that heated the room with a hiss. There was a robin’s egg blue living room area to my right toward the front of the building. The windows with moss-colored curtains partially masked the best view in Manhattan, which was St. Patrick’s grassy courtyard surrounded by the redbrick walls. In that room was a desk with stacks of papers and CDs, the walls lined with shelves of hundreds of books. Standing in the yellow kitchen with the bathtub, I heard an imagined whisper: Run for your life! To my left was a room that looked like a cramped closet with a lofted bed, painted in a too-dark forest green and an open door to a tiny gross-looking bathroom with only a toilet and sponge-painted orange walls. The commode was six inches off the floor and there was a three-foot stack of magazines and mail in front of it. It was a pull-chain toilet circa the 1920s, and most likely had not been cleaned since then, the tank high above, and no sink.

I didn’t know what to think. Jim seemed so normal, and now I was standing in the den of a madman. As my heart stopped pounding and I started to think more rationally, I walked around as if on another planet. The environment told the story of a workaholic artist. This guy was reading, studying, eating, sleeping—and showering in the kitchen—rinse, repeat. Yes, it was a mess, but it was an aspirational mess. However, now I was working with him, and I couldn’t work in a mess. I pushed up my sleeves and started cleaning. For me, as the oldest of nine kids, cleaning is second nature. I was not intimidated by any mess; I’d seen them all. In fact, I was more uncomfortable being around a mess than cleaning a mess. Cleaning gave me the sense of some sort of control over my environment.

I don’t know if Jim was delayed, or if I worked really fast, but when he showed up for our scenework session, his apartment was totally clean.

“You cleaned my apartment?!” He didn’t seem embarrassed or freaked out. He seemed overjoyed. It was at this moment that I believed I’d created my own monster. I also suspect that I may have been tapped as potential wife material.

“I didn’t do it for you; I did it for me. Next time, we are working at my apartment.”

This began a series of work sessions where Jim and I really clicked into team mode. I lived with my sister Felicia, who soon got used to Jim coming over every night for our scene study. We nicknamed her “the Judge” because we often would call her in to settle our arguments (fights), which she did fairly, giving equal time to both sides. Our apartment down the block was a five-flight walk-up, which Jim didn’t mind, because at that point he was actually trying to stay in shape. He was “eating healthy,” so I always had a salad with Annie’s Shiitake Vinaigrette and veggie burgers ready to go along with our work. Jim made himself right at home. Not thirty seconds after he walked in, he would take off his pants, drop them on the floor, and spend the rest of the evening milling around in his boxers.

My sister just got used to it. She was slightly irritated the time when a brand-new, ultra-buttoned-up boyfriend came to pick her up for a date and Jim answered the door in his T-shirt and boxers. The guy was stunned. It was also Felicia’s last date with him, and we always joked that Jim ruined the relationship with his “butler in boxers act.”

But the work was where we really found each other. If the changing neighborhood had helped our romance bloom, the work revealed that we would be able to be compatible long after the magic of the late-night dates gave way to the practicality of the real world and there was no more time for red wine.

Welcome to New York was a baptism by fire into the world of network television, but Jim and I were a tight team. We went through the ups and downs of the show getting canceled, multiple pilot seasons of brutal auditions, stand-up shows that I was now producing, home-made CDs (compact discs, for those of you born after 1997), trips around the country and the world, and lots of work. Jim was a true romantic, and he booked gigs in exotic places like a cruise ship whose route was around Alaska’s Inside Passage. Jim performing on a cruise ship was the antithesis of his personality, being someone who would finish a gig, put a baseball cap on, and scurry out of the club so he didn’t have to interact with anyone. On a cruise ship you are trapped with the same audience who saw you the night before for a week: “My wife thought you were kinda funny. I didn’t get it. Pass the eggs.” Jim hated performing on the cruise ship, but he did it so he could take me on these amazing adventures.

Off and on for two years, Jim asked me to marry him. I couldn’t say yes. I felt like marriage would be the end of my life. I was having too much fun being the girlfriend. Every time I felt like Jim was gearing up to ask me to marry him, I would say something like, “I hope you are not taking me to Rome just so you can ask me to marry you.” Every time this happened, I would watch the disappointment wash over him, like I just blew a surprise party he had been planning. “Listen, when you’re ready, give me a two-month warning so I can plan something.”

“It’s a deal.”

Jim had been cast in a sitcom at one point and had to relocate to LA. He’d asked me to come with him, but I’d already let go of so much of my life to be part of his team, and I couldn’t move to follow him. I had a lot going on in New York.

“Move out here!” he would say when I would complain that the long-distance relationship was too much for me to deal with.

“I’m not following some guy across the country unless we’re married.”

“Then marry me.”

That’s not how I wanted it to happen. “I’ll give you a two-month warning when I’m ready.”

“Is this the two-month warning?”

“No.”

I went to a therapist to talk about why I couldn’t make a commitment to Jim. I already “had” a therapist, as most New Yorkers do, even starving artists like me. My favorite aunt had been diagnosed with cancer a few years before, and her health was deteriorating quickly. When she was very sick a bunch of family members had gone down to Florida to help out. One of my jobs was to drive her from her home on Marco Island to the hospital in Naples for radiation treatments to keep her cancer at bay. She refused chemotherapy. A doctor herself, she had seen the havoc chemo wreaks on the body, and she wanted to enjoy the little time she had left. The radiation therapy was to keep her brain tumor from taking over. As we drove along that long highway, I was overwhelmed with emotion. How could she be so resigned about facing death?

After her funeral, I returned to New York. My life was different. I was terrified of getting cancer. I felt like I had cancer. I would make appointments at the clinic every week and see the doctor with lists of imagined symptoms that I was sure were cancer. About the fifth time I saw the same doctor and was questioning the results of my normal blood test, she said to me, “I think you need a different kind of doctor.” So that’s how I came to “have” a therapist.

I didn’t see that therapist very often anymore since I had worked through the anxiety caused by the trauma of losing my beloved aunt so quickly, but this whole “Why can’t I marry Jim?” question brought me back to her. That, and my sister told me that at a recent Halloween party when Jim was in town, he confided in her that he thought I might be crazy because everything I did indicated that I wanted to marry him, but every time he broached the subject, I would run away.

My sister was concerned. “Jim is the most normal boyfriend you have ever had. He is an adult. You are going to blow it, Jeannie. You have to do something!” I was crazy. I knew it. And I was about to blow it. So I went back to my therapist.

“What are you afraid of, Jeannie?” she asked.

“Jim’s career is taking off. I feel like if I marry him, all I will do with my life is continue to help his career, and give up my own life. He’s going to steamroll me.”

She looked at me through her thick-lensed glasses. “Close your eyes. Picture yourself in five years. In ten. Is Jim there?” I closed my eyes. Jim was there. He was always there. If I lived in a mud pit, life would be fun with Jim. As our session ended, she handed me an illustrated cartoon of a woman sitting on a bench. She was covered in cobwebs and had the face of a skeleton. The caption below said, “Waiting for the perfect man.”

I walked home to my apartment in the brisk December air. I found myself talking to God. “God, why didn’t you tell me that I was supposed to marry Jim?” and God said, “Why did you ask a therapist instead of me?” Well, that’s probably what He said. I called Jim. In a week, he was flying to Milwaukee where I would meet him to spend Christmas with my family.

“Jim, I’m giving you the two-month warning.”

“Finally,” he said. “What made you change your mind?”

“A skeleton,” I said.

“I knew you were crazy.”

My family had the tradition of the “Secret Santa” out of necessity. There were just too many people to buy for, so someone had the job of assigning gifts for one other person. Of course, we all bought gifts for Danielle. No one had kids yet, and she was like an adult kid, so surprised and gleeful with every present she unwrapped. We all should experience life with such joy. After about an hour of exchanges and laughs, we were sitting surrounded by piles of ripped paper and bows. I was doing my usual act of cleaning up and looking for wrapping that was “still good.” I asked, “Is there anything else, did everyone give their gift?”

“There’s one more,” Jim said. I turned to face him and he got down on one knee while opening a box that had his mother’s engagement ring in it. “Jeannie, will you marry me?” For the first time I could remember, my eight siblings, their significant others, and my parents and cousins were completely stunned into silence.

“Oh my God!” I said with tears in my eyes. “I thought you said two months!”

My sister-in-law chimed in, “Well, what are you going to say?!”

“Yes!”

And that’s how Jim steamrolled my life. And I let him. The oldest of nine children, the ultimate caregiver, marries the youngest of six, the ultimate care-getter. A match made in codependent heaven.