Everything Is Awful: And Other Observations - Hardcover

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Matt Bellassai is a writer, stand-up comedian, and winner of the 2016 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Social Media Star, which remains his only real accomplishment, besides graduating fourth in his class in high school and losing an election for student body president in college. After the success of his BuzzFeed web series, “Whine About It,” Matt embarked on a solo stand-up career, performing to sold-out audiences around the United States and at least one disastrous not-sold-out audience at a casino in Palm Springs, California. He is the host of the podcast “Unhappy Hour.” Born and coddled in the suburbs of Chicago, he currently lives the poor gay man’s version of Sex and the City, with none of the sex, fashion, or friends. He will almost definitely die alone.

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Everything Is Awful

EVERYTHING IS AWFUL, AND OTHER EMBARRASSMENTS

I was six years old when I last peed my pants.

I say this not to brag—although making it over twenty years without pissing my pants is actually quite an accomplishment, to be perfectly honest—but to bare my shame.

I was at my best friend Kenny’s house after school, drinking juice boxes and waging war with toy soldiers. You know, six-year-old stuff. As our battle wore on, my body slowly devolved into the cross-legged dance of the six-year-old in distress, writhing to console the mounting pressure of my bladder. As my soldiers fell in the heat of battle, I crept painfully closer to my limit.

I was dressed in my finest outfit for a school assembly earlier that day, some hideous combination of red, black, and white my mother thought was stylish in 1996. In retrospect, that outfit probably deserved to be pissed on. You can’t put a budding homosexual in an ill-conceived pattern and expect him not to urinate all over it. Regardless, there I was, standing in front of the toilet (I’d managed, at least, to make it to the bathroom), furiously struggling with the buttons of my fancy six-year-old pants. And yes, my mother chose not only a hideous pattern, but dress pants with buttons instead of a zipper, yet another choice that begged for this very outcome. I’d held my composure for as long as I could.

My hands helplessly fumbling at the buttons, I finally succumbed to sweet relief, soaking the plush rug beneath my feet, along with my socks, underwear, and those wretched pants, still buckled around my waist. Some days, when I'm standing in front of a toilet, I can still feel that rug beneath my feet, a moist phantom of my earliest humiliation.

I spent the next twenty minutes silently brooding in that bathroom. They were black pants, after all. Maybe I could get away with acting like this hadn’t happened. All I needed to do was spend the next two to three hours in damp agony, and as long as nobody looked too closely or inhaled too deeply, I could escape undetected.

But I spent too long plotting this out, and Kenny’s mom knocked on the door.

“Is everything all right in there?” (A question that someone only asks when everything is not all right in there.)

I confessed to the accident, and opened the door in surrender. I thought for a moment maybe she’d stick my nose in it, the way my own mother used to stick our dog’s nose in his pee when he pissed where he wasn’t supposed to. But she took the carpet from beneath me and handed me a pair of Kenny’s old shorts to wear for the rest of our playdate, my very own scarlet letter so that all could bear witness to my shame.

That evening, I left Kenny’s house in those shame shorts, carrying my own clothes in a plastic bag, with my head held high, just as Hester walked with her letter before me.

•  •  •

I couldn’t help but think that I somehow deserved what happened.

Earlier that day, my schoolmates and I were eating lunch in our classroom. The gymnasium we’d normally eat in was closed for the assembly, so we were eating at our desks instead, which felt intoxicating, like we were doing something forbidden. Everybody was already hopped up on assembly energy, but now we were especially animated, fidgeting in our seats, screaming across the room, tossing bits of food when the teacher turned her back.

Austin was the boy who sat behind me, a huge lug of a kid, nearly twice as tall as the rest of us and almost twice as thick. If this were a fairy tale, Austin would be the ogre child we’d all run from when he emerged from his swamp. And I’d feel bad about that comparison, but Austin was kind of an asshole, one of those boys who was friendly only until someone better came along, so I treated him with similar respect.

We were drinking from our cartons of milk, those tiny paper boxes that are nearly impossible to open, made of that kind of thin cardboard that gets immediately soggy after the first few sips. Austin was halfway through a long sip when I turned around and made a funny face—my repertoire of humor in first grade was limited to gurgling noises, knock-knock jokes, and funny faces—and he choked back a mouthful of spittle and milk with a furious scowl.

“Don’t!” he screamed with genuine anger. “These are my nice pants! I can’t ruin them!”

This made me laugh even harder.

Each time he’d pick up his carton, I’d turn around with my fingers halfway up my nose, my cheeks puffed out, and my eyes crossed, and Austin would cry back, “Stop! If I get milk on my pants, my mom’s gonna kill me!”

It went on like this for ten minutes, back and forth, attracting a small audience around us eagerly waiting to see if Austin would ever finish his milk. Until finally, I waited for him to take the largest possible gulp. I turned around at just the right moment with just the right combination of fingers stuffed into the right combination of face holes. Austin lurched forward for a moment to try to stop himself from reacting. And then, all at once, a violent stream of milk exploded from his nose, all down his sweater, and pooled momentarily in his pants before seeping into the fabric.

The audience around us erupted in screams of laughter, and Austin’s own outburst turned from a milky chortle to anguish as he stomped away from us, wailing in protest.

There are a few lessons to draw here, the first of which, of course, is that children are terrible human beings, and I was certainly no exception. (Though, in my defense, Austin grew up to be an even bigger dick, and once said, “I’m fat, but at least I’m not fat and gay like Matt Bellassai,” so I don’t regret ruining his dumb pants, and if I could, I’d go back, do it all again, and then smash his stupid face into that puddle of snotty lap milk before it seeped onto his tiny ogre dick.)

Most significantly, though, this was the first time I realized that comedy could be weaponized. I might not have been the fastest or strongest, but I could spin a joke or pull a face, and bring an oafish menace like Austin to his knees. And yes, perhaps I’d have to make myself look like a fool for the sake of a laugh, but at least it was my laugh in the end, even if I ended the day in a pair of someone else’s shorts, carrying my own soiled pants and underwear in a plastic Baggie.

•  •  •

I’m not one of those cool New Yorkers who lunched with Nora Ephron, but I like to pretend that I am. I imagine we would have sat for hours at a café drinking coffees, ordering extra croissants when we’d finished the two we’d each already eaten, and smearing them with extra high-fat butter. We’d have been wearing matching turtlenecks and scarves, discussing which wrinkle-reducing eye creams we’d discovered most recently, or which new dessert shop we would try next, or perhaps, after the sixth croissant, whether Angelina Jolie would ever find love again.

I moved to the Upper West Side in part because I idolized Nora’s rendition of it. My studio was only a closet compared to the apartments in the Apthorp, the famous complex down the street where Nora lived for some time. But still, I felt peppy and witty and sophisticated whenever I walked those streets, like a character in one...