Happy-Go-Lucky

by David Sedaris

One company makes boxer briefs with a holster in the back, which they call “Compression Concealment Shorts” but which I would call gunderpants.

Where I live now, in the UK, it’s hard to get a rifle and next to impossible to secure a handgun. Yet somehow, against all odds, British people feel free. Is it that they don’t know what they’re missing? Or is the freedom they feel the freedom of not being shot to death in a classroom or shopping mall or movie theater?

In Karla’s absence, she pointed to two pigeons parading across her beautifully landscaped lawn. “All those two do,” she said, lifting her glass with her blue-veined hand, the fingers as thin and brittle as twigs, “I mean all they do, is fuck.”

At twenty-two, you are built for poverty and rejection. And you know why? Because you’re good-looking. You might not realize it this morning, but thirty years from now, you will pull out pictures of yourself taken on this day and think, Why did nobody tell me I was so fucking attractive? You maybe can’t see it now because you’re comparing yourself to the person next to you, or two rows up. But you are stunning.

Stand up for what you believe in, as long as I believe in the same thing. Those of you who’d like to ban assault rifles, I am behind you 100 percent. Take to the front lines, give it your all, and don’t back down until you win. Do not, however, petition to have a Balthus painting removed from the Met because you can see the subject’s underpants. The goal is to have less in common with the Taliban, not more.

It’s night, and a cop stops a car a couple of priests are riding in. “I’m looking for two child molesters,” he tells them. The priests think for a moment. “We’ll do it!” they say.

“It doesn’t matter,” I explained. “The point was to make him feel less embarrassed.” “Too bad,” Hugh said. “I can’t hide who I am.” “Well, it’s really important to try,” I told him. “I mean, like, really, really important.”

If a cat had caused that much damage, OK, but I don’t see the emotional payoff with a rabbit. The only reason they’re not classified as rodents is that they have four incisors in the upper jaw rather than two—a technicality if ever there was one.

“What’s your idea of perfect happiness?” Amy asked me as the taxi passed a horse-drawn carriage on Central Park South. “Mine is sitting in first class with an ice cream sundae while watching a documentary about Jim Jones. That’s just the best.”

Seek approval from the one person you desperately want it from, and you’re guaranteed not to get it. As for my dad, I couldn’t tell if he meant “You won” as in “You won the game of life,” or “You won over me, your father, who told you—assured you when you were small and then kept reassuring you—that you were worthless.” Whichever way he intended those two faint words, I will take them and, in doing so, throw down this lance I’ve been hoisting for the past sixty years. For I am old myself now, and it is so very, very heavy.

“Do you take your bra off the moment you return from work?” I asked the first person in line. She was big-breasted, with short, pewter-colored hair, and she laid her book upon the table, saying, “Baby, I take it off before I get home.” “At the office?” I asked. “No,” she told me. “In the car.” “You take your blouse off?” “Ain’t no need to do that,” she said. “What you do is unhook it in the back and then pull it out your sleeve.” “And after it’s off, is it off for the night?” “You know it is,” she confided. “A friend will call drunk, wanting a ride, and I’ll say, ‘Honey, I got my bra off. Get yourself a cab.’”

It’s late at night and a man is getting ready to go to bed when he hears a knock on his door. He opens it and looks down to see a snail. “Yes,” it says, “I’d like to talk to you about buying some magazine subscriptions.” Beside himself with rage, the man rears back, kicks the snail as hard as he can, and storms off to bed. Two years later there comes another knock. The man answers and again he finds the snail, who looks up at him and says, “What the fuck was that all about?”

A week into my tour—again because I’d mentioned the story onstage—a nurse handed me an X-ray of a man’s pelvis with a set of hand weights in it. How on earth? I thought, imagining the work that must have taken. And to follow the first with a second? Who does that? Days later I saw an X-ray of a Bose speaker inside someone. “And it was still connected to Bluetooth,” the woman who showed it to me whispered.

It wasn’t my fault that the money theme faded. I put things out there, and the audience chooses what it prefers to focus on. I think it was the mood the country was in. Something in the early summer of 2019 had us all thinking about enormous gaping assholes.

I long ago stopped feeling bad about my interests. History? Give me a break! Culture? Yawn. Take me to the nearest supermarket!

In America, the talk now is all about white privilege, but regardless of your race, there’s American privilege as well, or at least Western privilege. It means that when you’re in Dakar or Minsk your embassy is open and staffed, and you don’t need to hand out bribes in order to get what you need. That spark you feel when an idea comes to you—This could work. I can actually make this happen!—is Western privilege as well. It may not be certainty, but it’s hope, and if you think that’s worthless, try living in a place where nobody has it. Worse still, try getting a decent hotel room there.

There was a rumor that liquor stores might close, and that caused a run on vodka. Not the kind that came in slender frosted bottles and looked like awards for modern dance but the kind that came in jugs and might as well have a skull and crossbones on the label.

“Oh, how nice that you can just ‘wake up and wash your face,’” someone would write in the comment section or tweet. “And in New York, no less! I, meanwhile, don’t even have a face anymore. I had to sell it so I could feed my family during the worldwide pandemic you obviously never heard about. Now, when I try to eat, the food falls onto my lap because I don’t have any cheeks to keep it in my mouth with. Think of that when you’re holding your washcloth, you fucking privileged prick!”

The terrible shame about the pandemic in the United States is that more than nine hundred thousand people have died to date, and I didn’t get to choose a one of them. How unfair that we lost Terrence McNally but not the guy on the electric scooter who almost hit me while he was going the wrong way on Seventh Avenue one sweltering afternoon in the summer of 2021.

Andrew wants no church service but wouldn’t object if a few people got together for drinks or a nice meal in his memory. My father, by contrast, insisted on what amounted to a three-part multistate death tour. As I said to Gretchen, “It’s a lot of running around for someone who couldn’t be bothered to pick us up from the airport.”

Saul Bellow wrote, “Losing a parent is something like driving through a plate-glass window. You didn’t know it was there until it shattered, and then for years to come you’re picking up the pieces.”

The group of three in front of me in the Dayton Starbucks all ordered drinks that involved the blender and great mountains of whipped cream. Then the tallest of them wondered if Donna wanted anything. She was out in the car, perhaps bound and gagged in its trunk.

Then there was the psychologist whose father’s last words to her, croaked out on his deathbed, were “You are a communist cunt.”