Is You Okay? (13 page)

When I think back to that day, it reminds me a lot of the moments immediately after I broke my ankle at the Streamys. There is this brief period of eerie silence when you stare at each other in stunned disbelief, followed by total scrambling
chaos. Drivers behind us laid on their horns and swerved, trying not to hit the wheelchair, and then each other. Dad stopped when he finally realized what was happening . . . but he stopped in the very middle of the freeway.

“What are we going to do, Dad?” I said.

He looked at me.

“Go get it.”

And I'm, like, “You go get it!”

“I have no legs!” he said. Sure he wasn't “lying,” technically, but it was all very convenient for a guy with his prosthetic leg currently holding down the brake pedal.

So I opened the door, prayed to God (which was common while riding with my dad) and stepped out onto the freeway, crying hysterically. It's not like he pulled off to the side of the road when this happened. The man stopped literally in the middle of the freeway. One false step from me as I hopped out and I would be swept away like a duck in a river.

It took a couple minutes, but I finally reached the wheelchair. I quickly picked it up (it had fallen on its side), rolled it over to the van, tossed it in the back as fast as I could, and hopped in the front seat. And do you know what he said?

“You better not have scratched it.” He turned away from me for a couple infuriating seconds and let his comment sink in. When he turned back, he saw the look on my face, and couldn't hold it together any longer. He cracked up, and we both cried with laughter.

I never had a chance to talk to my dad about that crazy incident—actually, I was never able to talk to him about a bunch of that medical stuff—but I think he knew all his issues had an ongoing impact on my college experience. I think that's why he made jokes about his situation—to make it not seem so bad, and to give us something to bond over. I think he wanted it to be our “thing.”

When he got his prosthetics, for instance, the doctors tried to give him a set where the plastic matched his skin tone. But my dad being my dad, he took the white ones instead and said, “At least now my bottom half will get treated better than my top half!”

Dad's favorite joke was to take me with him whenever he had to go shoe shopping. Bad shoes had gotten him into this mess, and he was not about to let shoes be a problem with his prosthetics, so we would get new shoes anytime the soles
on the old ones would get too worn down. If he ever got a salesperson who didn't know who he was, he would try to scare them by unfastening his prosthetic so that when they lifted his leg to try the shoe on, the whole thing would come off in their hands. You'll never see someone question their career choice faster than a person who woke up one morning not knowing that their day would involve holding another man's leg in their hands.

But there were also days when he didn't feel like getting out of the car, so he'd just send me in to get a new pair of shoes.

“But I don't know what size you are,” I'd protest.

“Here, use this,” Dad would say, as he pulled off one of his prosthetic legs.

That wasn't all. Dad would deliberately park as far away as possible, while still being able to see the front door of the shoe store, so he could watch me take his leg inside. He watched every second of the performance—down the block, at the stoplight, across the street, then into the store and up to the counter—like it was theater. You could have stolen the groceries right out of the backseat and I don't think he would have noticed. I can still hear him laughing.

If you're wondering where I got the courage to get up onstage at a comedy club, or persevere through getting booed at
Showtime at the Apollo, or eat a bunch of hot sauce and wasabi, or jump down a fireman's pole and snap my leg in half, or make fun of myself, or share with the world my fertility challenges . . . you can find it at the bottom of an old black man's fake white leg.

Now that I think about it, my parents were my first Abby, before Abby was my Abby.

Were they my Abby the whole time, even when I thought I didn't have an Abby? I don't know, but I will always be thankful for the blessed support of my parents. They mean the world to me.

Yet here's the thing—your parents can never really be that one special person, no matter how hard they try, or how much you want them to be. They know your spirit better than anyone—of course they do—but they only really know the person that
they
created and raised. They don't know the version of you that you have created for yourself.

Think about it like this: In school did you ever get into a fight with a mean girl who wouldn't stop picking on you? The fight gets broken up, you get hauled into the principal's office, they call everyone's parents, and then the mean girl's mom says
something like, “My Janay is a sweet innocent girl. I raised her to know right from wrong; I don't believe for a second she would ever do something like that!” Janay's mom isn't lying; she believes everything she's saying. The Janay
she
knows—the one
she raised
—is a sweet innocent little thing who was taught right from wrong.

The problem is, that Janay doesn't exist anymore. She's dead. R.I.P. Li'l Janay!

Instead, Janay is now a fourteen-year-old psychological terrorist who makes her friends call her “Juicy,” who cusses at teachers, and then picks on girls smaller or shyer than her to feel better about herself, all because she has trouble reading and developed before all the other girls.

Her mother doesn't know this version of Janay. To her, “Juicy” is a total stranger, because she was created by Janay out of her sight. But I bet you there is someone who
does
know Juicy really well, and it's probably her best friend. Now, Juicy's best friend should smack some sense into Juicy and help guide her back to the path she has clearly strayed from . . . but that's another story.

The point is, as great as your parents are, the older you get, the less well they know the person you are trying to become. They will try their hardest to get to know that person, but it will never really happen. And it will never be as easy—for you
or for them—as it will be for the person (or people) you have
chosen
to let in while you figure out who your true self is and what you want your life to be. It's
that person
you need to find.

For almost twenty years now, the person who knows my true self has been my best friend, Jacqui.

Jacqui showed up in my life after college, in 1999 or 2000, while I was still in Florida. At first, I didn't like Jacqui at all. I was cast in a play called
Carousel,
in Orlando, and one day at rehearsal this stunningly beautiful white girl with long wavy hair and perfect skin walked in like she was floating on a cloud of dreams. The best way I can describe her before I got to know her is that she was the kind of girl you don't let your boyfriend talk to.

Jacqui introduced herself to the cast and crew, then very demurely started telling us what to do.
Oh, heck no!
Wannabe Miss Florida 1999 might be polite and get all the attention and the best parts, but she doesn't get to boss us around too! Well, technically she did get to, because she
was
the boss, or the co-boss—turns out she was one of the codirectors of the play.

Jacqui and I got along fine, though, in the beginning. She wasn't an instant-Abby, but we got to be friends as a group of us from
Carousel
started hanging out. We all wanted to be actresses or entertainers of some kind or another.

The ringleader of our group was a woman named Becca. (Remember the cute blond girl from
Pitch Perfect
who was the leader of the Bellas? She was kind of like that, but without all the nervous barfing.) Becca decided we all needed to be SAG members before we made the move to California, so when we weren't performing together, we bonded and schemed around trying to get our SAG cards.

SAG—the Screen Actors Guild—is the labor organization that represents working actors in film and television. When you join, it's called “getting your SAG card.” You can't just sign up, though—you have to work on certain kinds of commercials, TV shows, or movies and then apply. You don't need a SAG card to be an actor or a performer who gets paid—YouTube taught me that!—but there's a psychological boost to having one. It's something you can show to people to “prove” that you're an honest-to-goodness professional actor. (It's also good for convincing your family that you're “making progress” and not just foolishly chasing a dream.)

What they don't tell you is that the
real
benefit to having a SAG card is the health insurance that comes with it. The
card is worth its weight in gold for that alone. When you get walking pneumonia or you break your ankle (as I would find out), it's that insurance card you really want, not your mom.

All of us working on
Carousel
called ourselves “Du-Plex,” and our plan for joining SAG involved developing some kind of Saturday morning variety show that we could maybe get on one of the local cable channels or perform live, and then take the show with us to California and pitch it to the big TV networks. In reality, we were just a bunch of people who knew one another and liked to perform. And what Becca didn't know was that I already had my SAG card, so I was more about making friends than getting the mythical clearance to be an actor.