Everything's Trash, But It's Okay Read online

  MORE BY PHOEBE ROBINSON

  You Can’t Touch My Hair

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Phoebe Robinson

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  PLUME and the P colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All photos courtesy of the author.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Robinson, Phoebe, author.

  Title: Everything’s trash, but it’s okay / Phoebe Robinson; foreword by Ilana Glazer.

  Other titles: Everything is trash, but it is okay

  Description: New York, New York: Plume, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018025958 (print) | LCCN 2018028615 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525534150 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525534143 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: HUMOR / Form / Essays. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Essays. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs.

  Classification: LCC PS3618.O33363 (ebook) | LCC PS3618.O33363 A6 2018 (print) | DDC 814/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018025958

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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  To Oprah. Like lit’rally every book should be dedicated to her. A’doy.

  CONTENTS

  More by Phoebe Robinson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Foreword by Ilana Glazer

  Introduction

  I Was a Size 12 Once for Like Twenty-Seven Minutes

  Feminism, I Was Rooting for You; We Were All Rooting for You

  LOL. Wut?: An Incomplete List of All the Ways Being a Woman Is Ridic

  Some Thoughts on Interracial Dating from Someone Who Is a Motherflippin’ Pro at It

  The Top Ten Non-Trash Moments of My Life

  Meeting Bono Twice Was My Reparations

  Money Is a Trifling Heaux and Also Your BFF

  You’re Not Curing Cancer (Unless You Are—Then Carry On, My Workaholic Son)

  How to Be Alone and Only Mildly Hate and Lukewarm Love It

  Addendum: I Have a Boyfriend Now . . . Well, I Had a BF at the Time I Turned This Book in to My Editor—J/K, We’re Still Together

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  FOREWORD

  I met Phoebe in the smoky basement of a hookah bar doing stand-up on the Lower East Side in 2010. It was one of those shows with, like, twelve comics, and each gets lit at six minutes, letting them know they have sixty seconds to wrap up. We were the only women on the show, and Phoebe was joking about getting catcalled, and how New York catcallers get creative. They’d guess her birthplace, “Jamaica! Jamaica!” or “Tanzania” or some African nation . . . but it was also probably because she walks around with a boom box blasting The Lion King music. I was in. After we finished our sets, we introduced ourselves.

  Phoebe is one of those people you meet and think you’ve met before, like you went to high school with her, or made it through some shitty job only because she was your desk mate. She’s got that Midwestern openheartedness yet the no-bullshit focus of a New Yorker. I felt so invited by Phoebe’s unabashed nerddom—we were not smoking hookah in the basement, we had headaches, lol. And we were both one-drink sorta gals—drink tickets were our only pay, and it gave us a thing to hold. I loved how she wasn’t trying to pretend like she didn’t care about comedy, which a lot of comics—and, obviously, specifically male comics—do. No, she cared. A lot. And she was prepared to work her ass off for years and years, which I’ve had the awe-inspiring pleasure of witnessing to this day.

  Phoebe is a woman who gets. Shit. Done. As a Jew with anxiety issues, I’m most in awe of her ability to shrug off hesitance or doubt, set the bar high for herself, and jump for it. And yet she’s still like, “It’s not brain surgery, we’re not saving lives—it’s comedy.” And then will literally say “tee-hee.” Like the thing she cares about most is still . . . what it is. It’s empowering to be around, and it feels the same way reading her book.

  In her essays, Phoebe gives herself over to her reader. I can tell you: It’s like having Phoebe-the-friend in a book. When I was reading her first book, literal New York Times bestseller You Can’t Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain, I would truly lol on the subway because it was like having a mini Phoebe sitting on my shoulder, telling me realer, deeper layers I didn’t know about her before, but the way she says it is hilarious. Phoebe’s relationship with language is the absurdity of her comedy. Just in real life, I get texts with “abbrevs”—abbreviations—that have apologies attached to them, so the phrase ends up being ten times longer than if she had just written out the original word. Like “eems aka email—#Lol #NotWorthIt” instead of “email.” But she’ll play like that even when—or especially when—it comes to talking about race and gender and money and all the stuff that makes most people’s butts clench. She invites us all to get straight to it, gets to her most intimate and vulnerable places, but you don’t even realize you’re going there because of how she dances with language, and she invites her readers to do the same. You’ll find yourself adopting Phoebe’s phrases because they truly make life more fun to live but also because they make it easier to hold, at the same time, the insane complexities of this world while also just giving a little eye-roll, a shoulder-shrug, and laughing that shit off.

  —Ilana Glazer

  Introduction

  In summary: The world is currently one big “Previously on Homeland” recap that plays on repeat. Nothing but a bunch of dumpster fires and Claire Danes ugly-cries.

  Despite a few glorious things—Beyoncé’s historic Coachella performance and Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Pamplemousse LaCroix, sitting in the window seat on a flight with an empty middle seat next to you—the world is en fuego, boo-boos (and has been for a while, to be honest), and I have the receipts to prove it. I mean, Brexit happened. And some of the people who voted for it were like, “Oops, J/K,” and the Legal System responded, “Lol. Wut? This is literally how voting works. The thing with the most votes wins. I don’t have time for your #JokesNotJokesButForRealWeHighKeyJokesLife, so please pack your bags.” Then there was the De-Peening of 2017 aka very powerful men such as award-winning actor Kevin Spacey, legendary journalist Charlie Rose, comedian/auteur Louis C.K. watching their lives and careers implode following the uncovering of their sometimes decades-long sexual-deviant behavior, which ranged from harassment to sexual assault. And let’s not forget the murder of Harambe, the gorilla, at the Cincinnati Zoo; Apple removing the headphone jack from their iPhones because this com
pany is hell-bent on being the Nurse Ratched of our time; or the first black bachelorette, Rachel Lindsay, incorrectly choosing Bryan over Peter, thus denying the world some cocoa, gap-teefed babies. Oh! And remember a few years ago when a dude in the US legit had Ebola and went bowling and ate chicken wings with friends instead of quarantining himself because #WhiteNonsense? Say it with me: Dumpster. Fire. But far and away, the most telling sign that the world is in dire straits is the fact that in the past few years, the universe started killing off everyone who mattered in my childhood.

  There was Carrie Fisher (White Jesus, why?), Prince (Black Jesus, why?), George Michael (Levi Jeans Jesus, I can’t), and David Bowie (Alien Jesus aka the feathers from Björk’s swan dress at the 2001 Oscar ceremony, —because y’all know Björk and anything in Björk’s universe only communicates through sound). Oof. I don’t know about you, but I was overcome with emotion at seeing so many pop culture icons pass. Utterly devastated. Heartbroken and beside myself. So I mourned like we all did. Appropriately. Okay, I didn’t, but I tried. Well, I tried the way I do when the heater in my apartment is too high and instead of getting up to adjust the thermostat, I say to no one, “It’s too hot,” and then unzip my onesie down to my hips so that I end up looking like a caterpillar taking a cigarette break mid-metamorph-morph aka metamorphosis. #IgnorantAbbrev #SorryForWastingYourTime. Anyhoo, I did not try very hard not to be utterly inappropriate mere days after Bowie’s death.

  When he passed, I fell down the usual internet rabbit hole many of us are wont to do when someone famous dies. I read think pieces, bought any albums I didn’t already own, watched old performances on YouTube. After about forty-eight hours of this, I became an unofficial truther of Bowie’s personal life, hoping that in my quest to unearth all the last unknown details about him, this busywork would distract me from the reality that we’re all going to die. And since this mission was rooted in earnest and profound love for the dead, I felt like Doogie Howser at the end of Doogie Howser, M.D., just writing smart bon mots about what I’d learned. But I wasn’t. My good intentions were quickly replaced by my just-below-the-surface hot-mess tendencies.

  About three days after Bowie died and amid a particularly wide-eyed-and-awake-at-four-in-the-morning internet hunt, I typed this into Google:

  Did David Bowie have a big penis?

  I know, I know, I know! And it’s not like I pulled up Googs’s “incognito window,” which wouldn’t have recorded this question in my browser’s history. I typed this question in the broad-as-the-Alaskan-daylight-during-midnight-sun season aka Google’s regular search window, where anyone could track what I’d done. To which, Google basically responded à la Danny Glover from the Lethal Weapon franchise, “I’m too old for this shit,” and then set about unsuccessfully trying to save me from my trifling ways. I started with “Did David Bowie,” and before I could continue, Google countered with this autocomplete:

  Did David Bowie wrote “My Way”

  What in the hell kind of poor-grammar-of-a-troubled-youth-from-Dangerous-Minds voodoo is this? Can’t lie, I admire the tactic, but this search engine knew not who they were messing with. In my twenties, I once had a girls’ sleepover and made us watch Showgirls. Then we went to bed, and when we woke up, I convinced them to watch Showgirls again. Clearly, my ignorance is only matched by my determination. Googs sounding like the “Cash Me Outside, How ‘Bout Dat” girl was cute, but no way was that stopping me.

  So next Google tried to attract me with honey:

  Did David Bowie Have Pets

  Suggesting there might be pictures of pets at the end of this search is the visual equivalent of a coworker telling you there are cookies in the break room. I’m intrigued, but I’m a grown-ass woman and can literally get cookies any time I want. Plus, I have an “in case of emergency” photo album on my phone called “Chocolate Puggle Puppies.” I’m good, Google.

  Starting to feel defeated and tired, Googs began throwing haymakers, but it didn’t have the strength, and as soon as I typed “a,” I was met with this:

  Did David Bowie Have Any Siblings

  Lmao.com/WhenSearchEnginesGiveUpAndStartSoundingLikeAOneNightStandStrugglingToMakeConversationOverBreakfast.

  And then when I hit the space bar after the letter “a” and typed “big,” Google knew it couldn’t save me from myself, probably did the sign of the cross, and mumbled under its breath, “Maya Angelou, I know you didn’t work this hard so Phoebe could do this bullshit, yet here we are.” I typed “penis.” And pressed enter.

  Yes. This. Is. Trash. And. I. Am. Not. Proud. But like I stated earlier, I’m a truther, and somewhere along the way of reading copious amounts of articles and learning the basic deets—why his eyes were two different colors (they weren’t; they were both blue—it’s just that one had a permanently dilated pupil after he got in a fight with a good friend whose fingernail sliced into his eye), the name of his first band (the Konrads), and checking out his and Freddie Mercury’s isolated vocals on “Under Pressure” (if you haven’t, please listen ASAP)—I stumbled across an old interview with one of his exes, who “casually” mentioned that Bowie was packing down below.

  Three things:

  LOL for the rest of my life over his ex “happening” to provide a State of the Naysh about his peen. It is wack to kiss and tell about someone, especially if the person in question has moved on (Bowie married the love of his life, Iman), but more importantly, peen size never casually comes up in conversation. It’s not like some dude is chilling at a house party, shooting the breeze about the latest home renovation he’s working on, and goes, “Speaking of wood, the other day, I chubbed twice and measured once and whaddya know? I have a big dick.” Real talk, discussing peen size in the press is an IHOP (Intentional Hijack Of convo vis-à-vis Peen) triple stack. She knew this was going to get her attention, so she did it.

  I’m not even a size queen! Just like a nation hosting a hundred-plus countries at the Summer Olympics, after the countries proved your athleticism, if you qualify as sauseege, I’m giving you a thumbs-up, a team windbreaker, and a Target-sponsored sports bottle. I welcome all even if you have no chance of making the podium. ANYWAY. What I’m getting at here is that I didn’t truly care what the answer was going to be re: Bowie’s peen.

  If a dude had Googled about Zsa Zsa Gabor’s tatas after she passed away (RIP, boo-boo), I would have hollered to the heavens in the key of “Hell to the naw, to the naw, naw, naw,” which is one key below Mary J. Blige’s “I’m on my period, at Walgreens, and they’re out of Toblerones, so I can’t get my chocolate fix” key. In short, I would have been livid and grossed out.

  Yet there I was, trying to Lester Holt my way to the truth. Why? Because I am a trash person living in a trash world.

  To be clear, I’m not calling myself “trash” because I’m fishing for a compliment. I’m saying this because I love myself. And you know what they say: Only with the people and things you love can you be truly, and sometimes brutally, honest. As funny, smart, kind, thoughtful, pretty, warm, and talented as I can be, I am also a ludicrous trash fire like the kind you see on Naked and Afraid when people sign up to be in the wilderness when they’re barely capable of troubleshooting Mozilla Firefox, let alone making an actual fire from scratch, so they end up with fire that’s the length, width, and height of just the hair part of a troll doll. Real talk though, if my allergic-to-manual-labor-with-the-upper-body-strength-of-an-eight-year-old self could find a dude who could make a fire as big as an entire troll doll (if not bigger), I would say adios to “spray and pray” life and yes to “leave it in and let our new lineage begin” life. (Mom and Dad, I literally do not engage in spray and pray; this is just jokes.) MOVING ON! What I’m getting at is that I can be a nightmare, but in case you don’t believe me, here’s a sampling of my trash from the past couple of months:

 
I’ve walked into several stores mere minutes before closing and took my sweet-ass time shopping.

  I ordered and ate a small Papa John’s personal pan pizza because I didn’t feel like washing a Granny Smith apple that was straight chilling in my crisper.

  I misspelled my own name.

  I attempted to cancel my own going-away party one hour before it was supposed to start because it was raining. Not like disaster-movie rain, but what Seattle would call “Every day.”

  Instead of telling my masseuse that I needed a moment, I eked out a fart in segments like it was a seven-course tasting menu at Spago. Oy. A fart is still a fart no matter how you try and dole it out over time to lessen its effects. I think the Dalai Lams said that.

  I rented The Counselor on iTunes even though it only has a 35 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes just so I could look at Michael Fassbender’s hotness. The movie—dis is where they fuq’d up—put his sex scene as the film’s opening scene, so then I just watched that and turned the film off. Rude? Yes. A waste of my money? Of course. But also, everyone knows when you make a lame-ass movie, you put the sex scene like forty-three minutes in so the viewer will be too invested to peace out. So really, it was the filmmakers’ fault for putting the sex scene up top, giving me time to abort mish and still catch the monologue on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

  I made my ringtone the “Somebody!” part from Smash Mouth’s “All Star.”

  I skipped going to Equinox because I didn’t feel like walking the flight and a half of stairs to get inside the gym. Like I don’t want to have to work out before working out. That’s too much working out.