Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come

by Jessica Pan

  Imagining this makes me begin to laugh so hard that I start to cry. The ’shrooms begin to take effect. Until Janet starts a monologue about the meaning behind the mysterious text her neighbor sent her (to reiterate, the text in question was, “Enjoy the sun”), I give up and dig around in my pocket for my headphones. I put on the folk singer Laura Marling’s song “Wild Once.”

  I pull up my coat collar to block Janet from my peripheral vision as Laura’s voice drowns her out. I close my eyes. I’d read that bad trips tend to happen when you’re afraid, when you’re upset, when you don’t trust the substances, when you don’t feel safe.

  The mushrooms really are in my brain now—fantastical colors and images sweep across the canvas in my mind. I have to trust that whatever happens next, I can handle it.

  Right now I am inside of the music. I am swimming through the melodies, through Laura’s voice and the strumming of the guitar, and I am floating through the black space between the notes. The most astonishing part of the entire experience is that I’m not scared.

  More than any other time in my entire life, I am not in control. By choice. And I’m OK.

  I am sinking slowly into the ground.

  I open my eyes and look up again at the giant black sky. The stars are blinking and swaying to the melody. I . . . I am melting. I am the stars. I am the sky. I am the forest. I am a deer. I am a tick. I am everything. I am Laura Marling. I am Janet.

  I stay there for a long time, with no concept of how much time is passing. My eyes grow heavy.

  “The ’shrooms are telling you that you need to sleep,” Willow calls out to me. “Go to sleep. The mushrooms come from this forest, and they know what you need.” The woodland creature has spoken.

  I nod, plod over to my sleeping bag in the tent, and pull a beanie over my head. I feel myself being pulled into slumber and fall fast asleep, dreaming in Technicolor.

  At 5 a.m., my bladder wakes me up. The sun has barely risen, and after lots of zipper confusion and fumbling for my glasses, I finally stumble out of the tent. It’s gloriously silent and beautiful with everyone else still asleep. Only trees and ground foliage and the light blue and orange sky. I walk toward a clearing. There’s no one else around.

  My shoes move softly through the leaves when I hear the rustle a few feet away. Was this the communing with wolves that I had always feared?

  I look up.

  And then I see him.

  A deer. A stag. He’s beautiful: red, with big antlers and brown eyes. Imposing. Staring straight at me.

  We look at each other. He takes me in for a few seconds. I remain as still as possible, not wanting to scare him off. He pauses, for one more golden second, then he gallops off into the mist. Gone.

  In the Harry Potter books, a “patronus” is an advanced magic charm that wizards conjure to scare away evil dementors. Harry Potter’s patronus is a stag.

  And I have just seen a stag in the forest at dawn.

  Please don’t misunderstand me. What I’m saying is this: I took magic mushrooms, Janet is my dementor, a lone stag appeared, we locked eyes, and now I am Harry Potter.

  Sofa Jess had longed for adventures, though I’m not sure this is the kind she had ever imagined.

  But encountering that lone stag in the forest was thrilling. Spine-tinglingly wonderful. So many things had to happen to lead both of us to the same spot at dawn, staring at each other in the woods, the trees silent around us.

  Introverts crave closeness but often dislike putting themselves in situations that are likely to initiate new relationships. But just by showing up and taking part, even if on this trip I hadn’t, say, bonded with Janet, there was something enlivening about expanding my self-definition. Willow had said, “I’m amazed that you came.” I was, too.

  Janet had said, “We are purging what no longer serves us.” Staying closed off and saying no to things, merely because I was scared, was no longer useful to me. Staring at the sky, for those brief moments of silence, looking up at the stars, I’d felt like introvert and extrovert were labels that might not serve me anymore.

  I had already done so many things this year that I’d previously struck off as impossibilities. But I was still me. I still liked solace, I still needed to go home after lots of socializing, I still craved one-on-one coffee dates over loud parties in a crowded pub. I don’t anticipate taking magic mushrooms in the forest again, but I’d taken a risk, and it had led me to one of the most magical moments the next morning.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  On the way home later that day, we stop in a restaurant for lunch, and a bad night’s sleep appears to have stunned the chatter out of Janet. Then, Janet does something unexpected. She asks me a question.

  “Jess, you’re so far from home. Do you miss your family?”

  “I . . . yeah, I do,” I say.

  We talk for twenty minutes about both of us living far from our families.

  Back in the car, Janet falls asleep. It’s peaceful, and I begin to think that I was wrong about Janet. She looks serene. Barely demented at all. She’s not so bad. I could handle her; maybe I could even like her. Fleetwood Mac plays softly in the background.

  Janet opens her eyes and raises her head, as if on cue.

  “I have to poop!” she shouts in my ear.

  I turn my body away from her and lean my head against the window, gazing out into the forest around us.

  Expecto patronum.

  fourteen

  Redemption

  or

  Stand-up Comedy, Round III

  “That’s so bad. It’s inside of you. It’s a stain on your soul. Oh yeah, you’re fucked for a while now.”

  I’ve just relayed the story of my Scottish humiliation to this woman. She is gratifyingly horrified, which I appreciate, especially since she’s one of my favorite performers.

  Sara Barron is a relatively new comedian, but this year she was nominated for the Edinburgh Fringe Best Newcomer Award. She’s charismatic with impeccable timing.

  I seek her out because I couldn’t end my year with such a huge, embarrassing failure as in that pub in Edinburgh. I didn’t want my last memory of my being onstage to be a Scottish girl flipping me off.

  I didn’t want that to be the end. I wanted to rewrite my ending.

  After surviving in the woods with Janet and staring up at the enormous black sky, I felt small, in a good way. Like I could take more risks and no matter what, the sky wasn’t going to fall down, so why not try again? But I needed to talk to one more person.

  When I hear Sara on a radio interview saying that she used to suffer from nearly debilitating stage fright when she first tried stand-up comedy ten years ago in New York, I know I have to meet her. Had she really suffered from stage fright? She was one of the best performers I’d ever seen live. What had changed? I had to know.

  Sara says that when she started to pursue comedy in London, she found out that if she gigged three times a week, her brain didn’t have room to dread every single gig—that’s what finally broke the back of her performance anxiety. That, and having a baby, which put everything in perspective (babies, fake deathbeds, whatever you need to get you through the day).

  “I was showing up doing these disgusting open mic things all the time. And maybe the audience just thought I was a weird, older woman, but I felt like such a badass. I’d think: none of you idiots can begin to know what I’ve been through. I felt like such a hero—I’ve given birth!” Sara says.

  Giving birth is not an immediate option for me. Besides, I’m putting that off for a year as per my bribe with my dad.

  I tell Sara about how scared I am onstage.

  “It’s the weird intelligence of even the dumbest crowd. If they can smell your fear, you’re not in charge,” Sara says.

  “I’m not in charge ever,” I say.

  “But you could be,”
she says.

  Sara tells me what she says someone else told her when she started out: that you’re only as good as your last gig.

  “And you’re really in the shits right now. You have no perspective. That feeling will stay with you until you have another gig that goes OK,” Sara says.

  Here we go again.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The Cavendish Arms is a comedy institution in Stockwell, south London. It’s home to an infamous open mic night called Comedy Virgins. Twenty comedians, five minutes each, all competing for one trophy at the end. Enough desperation to power Kylie Jenner’s phone for eternity.

  If your set goes over six minutes, they play “Move Bitch” by Ludacris to usher you off the stage. Whatever else happens, I cannot bear that sort of public shaming. Some people never recover from that kind of distress.

  I bring Sam with me. I wouldn’t normally, but another rule of the night is that if you want to perform, you have to bring a friend. And they have to stay the entire evening, watching the other new comedians. I could not inflict that on one of my fragile new friendships, so better to risk my marriage.

  I’m here because Sara’s right. The Edinburgh gig is a stain upon my soul. And this is my chance at redemption.

  I want to puke.

  On the night, the MC pulls names out of a hat to determine who goes next, so no one knows the running order (and so people can’t tell their friends just to come for the second half).

  After each set, if the audience likes the comedian, they yell, “Buy them a drink!” This simple act makes the comedian eligible for the much-coveted trophy at the end of each show.

  As the room fills up with comedians and their hostages, I take deep breaths. I’ve ditched the smart oxford shirts and am in a T-shirt and jeans, because this is who I really am.

  Onstage, the MC waves the trophy in front of the audience. It’s small, fitting in the palm of his hand. I want that tiny trophy. I see it as my personal redemption after winning the tragic Midnight Oil Award that triggered this yearlong saga. I want it in my grubby little paws. I want to put it on my mantelpiece, should I ever be able to afford an apartment with a mantelpiece, and when people stop by, should I ever have people stop by, I’d say, “Oh, this? This is just a small memento of the time a group of strangers made me their queen.”

  The MC pulls the first name out of the hat.

  “Please clap your hands for . . .”

  Hot white fear runs through my body.

  “DANIEL GILBERT!”

  Right before the MC announces each name, I feel sick. As the night progresses, the odds of it being my name increase exponentially, but it never is me. This is torture. I’ve been hyperventilating for forty-five minutes already. How can they do this to us?

  Ten comedians down, and the night is halfway through. I’m a wreck, my hair is tangled from the number of times I’ve run my hands through it, my eyeliner smeared, my lipstick long gone from chugging water to combat a dry mouth. I’m trying to remember my act. I’m sweating. I have to be next, I think as the MC calls the next name.

  But I’m not. The MC draws the twelfth comedian out. And then the thirteenth.

  Who is the Queen of England, and can she kill me now, please?

  “Please clap your hands for . . .”

  I’m so desensitized that I don’t even recognize my own name. Sam claps me on the leg, hard. OH!

  I bolt toward the stage. On the way up there, I try to do that thing where I wave my arms in the air like I’m really excited and cool and confident in myself and just a fun person but can only muster one limp arm.

  I climb onto the stage and take the mic from the MC.

  Here we go. Stain-scrubbing of the soul commences now.

  Have you ever seen anything sadder than a woman weakly singing, “(Is This the Way to) Amarillo” by herself, to herself, onstage, to an audience full of apathetic millennials in expensive Nikes?

  You have not.

  Once on vacation, I accidentally drove down a pedestrian-only street in Italy. Old Italian ladies started hitting the car with their handbags as Italian men slapped the windshield in anger and disappointment. I kept cry-yelling at them, “OK BUT WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO DO NOW? I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO KEEP GOING.”

  This feels very similar, but this time round, in an exciting twist, I am warbling at a stony-faced crowd of twenty-somethings who are begging me to stop with their eyes. One woman in the front row actually covers her face with her hair to protect herself from my jokes.

  I am drowning. I can’t remember whether I’ve told particular jokes. Everything has gone black.

  I’m careening through my set at full speed when I finally, finally hear some laughter. The slightest titter from the audience as I’m describing the intense feelings I developed for Hugh Grant after watching Four Weddings and a Funeral as a child.

  Eventually, I put the mic back into the stand and run back into the crowd to take my seat. Sam puts a reassuring arm around me. The reassuring arm of shame. But then—

  “Buy her a drink!” a man behind me yells.

  I have been saved! If you are only as good as your last show, this man is proof that this show wasn’t a total failure. I’m stunned.

  The night takes a weird turn. Each of the following comedians bomb harder than the one before. A woman comes on, and the audience, myself included, can’t tell whether what she’s saying are supposed to be jokes. She’s followed by a man who tries to explain the deeper meaning behind rap lyrics but forgets all of the lines. He holds his head in his hands, trying to remember, and dies, right there onstage. A woman comes on and pretends to be a sexy baby. Enough.

  This room is a graveyard of crumpled-up bucket lists.

  Finally, it’s time for the trophy ceremony. Tradition has it that at the end of the show, the performers who the audience chose to “buy a drink” all gather onstage and go through a humiliating “clap-off” where the audience applauds for their favorite performer, until the one who generates the most noise is declared the winner of the trophy.

  There was a similar voting process at my high school for cheerleaders, except they had to cartwheel down the length of the gym in front of the entire school. I had vowed never to participate in something so humiliating, but I had not reckoned with the catastrophic stupidity that would come with age.

  I’m so close to the trophy. It’s me and four men competing, so now I also have to win to take down the patriarchy. I ball my fists. The MC gestures toward me like I’m a valuable vase he’s trying to sell, encouraging the audience to clap.

  But, what is this? The audience is clapping. For me. Had I really managed to do this? Had I managed to clinch the win on the most lackluster comedy night in history and pocket that sweet, sweet golden trophy?

  Well, no.

  In real life, what happens is that even though you wear a ton of Nars lipstick and mascara, you are the first one to be clapped off and are ultimately bested by a sixteen-year-old Jamaican teenager who made few jokes but who delivered a very convincing David Attenborough impression. He is crowned our champion.

  You walk off the stage morosely and go home and take a long shower and eat spaghetti carbonara, realize the mouse in the kitchen cupboard is back, and then fall asleep dreaming of Scotland.

  Paul once told me, “The fear of rejection feels worse than the reality.”

  I respectfully beg to differ.

  But we can survive the rejection. It’s like food poisoning. You feel fragile and like utter shit, and you don’t want anyone to touch or look at you for about three days, but then you wake up, open the curtains, see the sun, and realize you want to eat ramen and see how much water weight you lost while you were languishing.

  To make myself feel better after the Cavendish Arms, I go see Crazy Rich Asians and quietly eat chocolate malt balls. I was just one crazy sad Asian, crying in the cinem
a.

  In the film, at a fancy party thrown by a wealthy family, two women start making a big deal about some cactus.

  “It only blooms at midnight once a year!” they shout, beckoning others to marvel at it.

  I sit up in my seat.

  That plant is my spirit animal.

  For one night, in Piccadilly Circus, I was really, really good. I still have the video evidence. It shocks me whenever I watch it.

  After the movie, I email my brother Aaron, who is a paleobotanist (not the funny brother), and ask him to tell me more about this mystical plant from the film.

  He writes back:

  The Tan Hua ‘orchid’ (also known as the Night Blooming Cereus or the Queen of the Night) has white flowers that bloom once for a few days a year at night. The flowers die, but the cactus remains alive and blooms again next year.

  I was never going to be the kind of performer who hits it out of the park every time. I don’t want to spend my evenings watching hours of bad comedy for five minutes of bombing onstage. I’m not a natural performer.

  But on certain nights, I can blossom. Admittedly, it was less of an ethereal transformation and more a rigorous process of aggressive grooming, mirror pep talks, hours of practice, mornings shouting into pillows, and fighting the desire to drop-kick my husband. But it was still blossoming, for me.

  Recently, I watched a documentary about the first Norwegian woman to climb actual Everest. She tells the host, “I have that feeling, and I can still use it. I can go and get that feeling if I need it.”

  Even though comedy had twice stung me, when I think back to that first night onstage, I can see that poised version of myself; I can call upon her confidence when I need it the most. And if I start to feel too good about myself, I can revisit the Scotland gig and knock myself back down to earth.