by Erin Somers
“Wear closed-toed shoes,” Ana said to me. “It’s got a dirt floor.”
“What?” I said.
“Frogger’s,” said Ana. “For summer.”
“I think it’s supposed to be sand,” said Spencer.
I didn’t see how the proprietors of Frogger’s could aim for sand and miss. It either was sand or it wasn’t. But this seemed like a quibble and anyway there was a pie to eat. A pie that was, depending on whom you asked, too good for me, so characteristic it was below discussion, or the exact pie I deserved.
“This will be fun,” said Hugo.
I wanted very much to believe him.
* * *
Every summer, in advance of Memorial Day weekend, Tommy Frogger’s Bar and Grill became, with the help of thirty-six tons of local sand, Tommy Frogger’s Beach. The transformation lasted through Labor Day and they brought in another ten tons over the Fourth to replenish. We were lucky to be there while it was still fresh, the bartender told me. People tended to drop things—napkins, drinks, change, straw wrappers, forks, mozzarella sticks, wads of gum—and also to puke.
Ana was right. It looked like dirt.
The bartender smiled at me apologetically. What I had to understand was that the beaches of Long Island Sound were mainly formed by headland erosion, which meant you got a lot of silt. And the sand didn’t look like sand per se, not like the sand you’d see on the Cape or somewhere. Those were quartz beaches, those stunning yellow cliffs. Different thing entirely.
“Plus,” he said. I got the feeling he gave this explanation a lot. “How much do you know about glaciers?”
“They’re giant chunks of ice.”
“Well, yeah. The size of apartment buildings. And they move slowly, grinding, grinding, grinding. Grinding the shit out of everything. Picking stuff up and moving it elsewhere as they melt. The Wisconsin glaciation: That’s what formed Long Island. So it’s sediment in the Sound. And lots of small rocks.”
He looked proud of himself. He’d done some research, learned a term. He had a small diamond earring and a goatee. He set my margarita on a cardboard coaster. I licked its salty rim and turned to take in the room. The vibe was confused. An old arcade game sat in the corner, Frogger, the bar’s namesake. But even this was muddled by the assertion, right there in the name of the place, that Tommy Frogger was a person.
The rest of the furniture sat on top of the sand—I could tell that they’d taken everything out before putting the sand in, then set it back on top. The spool-shaped tables and varnished wooden chairs listed at random angles. It gave the bar a shipwrecked quality, like it had all washed up there and Tommy Frogger had deemed the arrangement good enough.
Most of the chairs were full. The crowd was in early middle age and largely sunburned. The women wore tank tops, the men cabana shirts. A crop of teens occupied one spool, mall goths drinking sodas out of tall red glasses. I wondered if they were friends of the pizza guy. They seemed around his age. They were trying to rearrange their chairs so they faced the stage in back. Finally one of them, a girl with streaky green hair, emptied her glass into the sand before getting down on her hands and knees and using it to dig around the chair legs.
With difficulty, Hugo picked his way back from the men’s room.
I handed him his whiskey. “Was there sand in the bathroom?”
“Yes, but not on purpose. Some had gotten in. In the sink, too, God knows how.”
“Should we try for a table?”
“Over here.”
He led the way, mounting brown dunes in Italian loafers. He’d staked out a table near the stage, laid his sport coat over the back of a chair.
We sat down and the lights dimmed. The MC was balding. He had a round little belly like a second head. His gray T-shirt held the sweaty imprint of it, a perfect circle. He was doing the one about his girlfriend’s tits. How they had gotten so huge since she’d had a baby. It confused him, the bit went. They were great now, but also off-limits. A food source for someone else. How fair was that?
The joke included an impression of the baby nursing. His kid, probably. He smacked his lips and made a high-pitched gurgling sound. People were laughing, even the women in the room. Sand crawled up my ankles and into my shoes. I waited for a twist, for a second level, but none came.
I had been to many terrible open mics. I’d performed at them myself, and watched my friends perform. This was not even the worst I had seen. At least this one had an audience. At least they knew a performance was going on.
Once, when we still lived in the East Village, Audrey dragged me to a comedy night at a coffee shop in the neighborhood. We would both try out new material, was the idea. Audrey went first and I recognized our error as soon as she stepped onstage. The lights were on and everyone was sober. People sat in front of laptops wearing headphones. Audrey had to shout over the squeal of the milk steamer, the construction outside, the chiming cash register. At one point, a middle-aged woman came in selling individually wrapped roses and porn DVDs out of a black Hefty bag.
When it was my turn, I couldn’t do it. I got up and walked outside, watched through the window as they determined that no one named June Bloom was coming up to perform. Audrey found me standing outside the entrance, blowing into my cupped hands. She was furious. She brooded the whole way home, up Second, down Twelfth, up the stairs, down the hall, but didn’t speak until we were back in our apartment.
“You don’t take risks,” she said finally.
“I don’t take pointless risks,” I corrected her.
I hung my coat on the rickety wooden rack left by the last tenant. It already held six coats, plus hats, scarves, two messenger bags, and a layer of stray mittens strewn across the top like mulch.
“It’s too full,” she said.
I added my wool beanie. The rack wobbled but held. I felt minorly victorious.
“You’re just mad that you went and I didn’t,” I said.
“We were both supposed to do it. That was the plan.”
“But it was so bad.” I laughed. “I don’t know if you could see, but there was a guy Skyping in the corner. There were no talent scouts there. No bookers. No one was going to sign me. No one was even paying attention. You’d have walked out, too.”
“No I wouldn’t have,” she said. “Not if you went first.”
“Don’t make this a loyalty thing. The porn lady came in while you were up there. A guy bought a rose from her and gave it to the woman he was with.”
“That’s exactly why you should have gone. Because that happened.”
She added her coat to the rack and we stood waiting for it to fall. It didn’t.
“All right,” I said. “I’m out for myself. What else?”
“Too easily embarrassed.”
The night had been legitimately embarrassing, I told her. Some things just were. Most things. So I had a low threshold for it. That I was willing to concede.
“Big of you,” she said.
She hung her bag on the one remaining spoke and backed away slowly toward her bedroom.
“We have to get a new one of those,” she said.
I doubted that we’d ever buy a new coat rack. It was so far down my list it was on a second sheet of paper.
“Maybe they have one at the dollar store,” I said. “I’ll look for one.”
“You won’t.” She said it with sadness, and finality, like that was what we’d been arguing about the whole time. Affordable coat racks and where to find them.
The pizza guy was up right after a Sacred Heart frat boy who talked mostly about parties he’d been to with his brothers. Everything he mentioned was a borderline crime. “I love to pee off porches,” he said. “If I had a choice I would pee off porches for the rest of my life. Or on cars. That time was good, too.” Outdoors beat indoors for peeing. He moved on to girls he’d hooked up with and I became worried that he was going to incriminate himself.
When the pizza guy walked onstage he was unmistakable. Hugo glanced a
t me to confirm it was him and I nodded. I don’t know what identified him as a delivery boy—he was not wearing his uniform—but it was somehow apparent. He started speaking and it became even more apparent.
“I have a job you might care to hear about,” he began. “I deliver pizzas for Paolo’s right across the street.”
The audience turned around to look.
“You can’t see it from here. Why would you guys need to confirm its existence anyway? Better fact check this one. See if he’s telling the truth. If I was going to make up a job for myself, I’d do better than delivery boy, believe me.”
The audience laughed. He wasn’t bad. I sipped my drink and felt my shoulders relax. Bombing was as awful for the audience as it was for the comedian. When the scorn ran out that left only empathy. Then you were in the unfortunate position of having to feel for the guy, cringe along with him, immerse yourself in his regrets like an oatmeal bath.
“So on paper it’s admittedly not the best job. But I’ll tell you what’s great about it. Other than free pizza, which is never a bad thing. What’s great about it is that you get to see the inside of people’s homes. People who order pizza from Paolo’s have nice shit. Also, weird shit. And there’s a third category: nice weird shit. I’ll give you an example: antique Ouija board. I’ll give you another example: snake tank with three rare snakes. Final example: chair specifically for fucking.”
Next to me, Hugo was laughing. He’d always been a generous laugh on the show. Leaning forward and back, slapping his desk in hilarity. Taking a sip of water from his mug and nearly spitting it out. I guess he had to be. He had to put his guests at ease. But there was no reason for him to be laughing now, no reason except genuine amusement. I thought it said something about him that he could still be entertained, that he had not been pickled by so many years in the business. Not fully anyway, not through and through.
“Another good thing about my job,” the pizza guy was saying, “is all the great friends I make. Well, not friends per se, but acquaintances. Pizza friends, I like to call them. Some of these people, these pizza friends, have a tendency to expedite the getting-to-know-you process. Do pizza friends respect social boundaries? No. Pizza friends do not. Do pizza friends spend years gradually growing more comfortable with you, slowly and reciprocally peeling back layers of the self, onionlike, until the two of you reach a certain level of intimacy? No. Pizza friends do not have time. Pizza friends need a bunch of old encyclopedias moved and expect you to pitch in. Pizza friends will ask you to help them with their fly because their arm is in a cast, even though you really, really don’t want to.”
He finished up and everyone applauded. Hugo hollered at him through cupped hands. The pizza guy smiled unguardedly and I remembered what I had told him yesterday about finding some worthier pursuit. I had probably seemed as creepy and overfamiliar as one of his customers.
The MC returned to the stage and I trekked back across the sand to get us another round.
The bartender poured my margarita from a silver shaker. “Are you enjoying the show?”
“Sure,” I said. “Parts of it. That last kid was good.”
“He’s all right. Gets to be a lot of pizza talk after a while. He’s in here every week doing his pizza stuff. He should branch out, you know?”
He slid me the glass, frosty and glacier green.
“What would you have him talk about?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “His family, a bad date, the news, whatever.”
I felt offended on behalf of the pizza guy. The bartender had to be there, but no one was making him listen. He was free to retreat to his thoughts at any moment, polish a glass, hum the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” He was free to remember lost loves, their faces and bodies, recount to himself what had gone wrong. Nothing tethered him to the here and now. His mind was his own no matter what.
“Oh shit,” said the bartender.
“What?”
He pointed at the stage. The crowd was applauding again. Really cheering. Some of them rose to their feet, then they all did. I understood what was happening immediately. I felt foolish not to have seen it coming. The basement comedy club should have prepared me, if not the years of observing him.
Hugo mounted the stage and accepted a hug from the MC. The audience sat down, though it took awhile. Whenever the applause began to dwindle, someone let out a shout and it started up all over again.
“Hi,” said Hugo at last. “Hello.”
I had never seen him do stand-up live before. By the time I made it to New York he had mostly stopped. His last big show had been New Years Eve 1999 at Carnegie Hall. Red Hot Chili Peppers had opened. At midnight, balloons fell from the ceiling and ushers passed out champagne in real glass flutes. Bony came out to play “Auld Lang Syne” in a shiny purple tux.
I remembered that night well. I was in seventh grade, at a party at Andrew O’Hagan’s house. It was dull even by middle school standards. Someone had secured a six-pack of Icehouse and we had shared it among ten of us. Warm, bitter, and not enough of it: my first drink. We watched the ball drop and waited for Y2K, whatever that might have entailed. Electronics fizzling off, weak sparks preceding darkness. That was how I began the century, holding my breath in a rec room for a disaster that didn’t arrive. And meanwhile Hugo was eight hundred miles uptown in a tuxedo, doing the one about the end of the world.
“I’m so happy to be here tonight at Frogger’s,” Hugo was saying. “You know, I’ve played a lot of rooms, but never one”—he paused, looked down at the floor, up at the disco ball unmoving in the center of the ceiling—“quite like this.”
I watched the Carnegie Hall performance years later, sitting in a cubicle in my college media center. He looked grainy in the video, greenish, and the audio peaked when people cheered. But it still amazed me, the nerve of it. Claiming a place among the maestros—Leonard Bernstein, Toscanini—to tell jokes. To speak out loud some thoughts he’d had. Notions, he’d called them.
“Hey, that last guy was good, wasn’t he?” Hugo addressed the pizza guy directly. “Maybe you can help me get a job over at Paolo’s now that I’m out of work.”
I could only see the kid’s back, but his delight was obvious. His head bobbed up and down on his skinny neck.
“We’re not hiring,” he said. “But I can take your information to keep on file.”
“Oh sure,” said Hugo. “I’ll just write down my personal email and phone number for you. Would that work? You already have my address.”
He didn’t have to do much up there. His outsized presence was enough. He could have done the Our Father and gotten laughs. He could have read from the phone book.
“I guess you’re wondering what I’m doing here,” said Hugo. “I’m here with a friend. That’s her at the bar. The mortified one. Wave to everybody, June.”
They all turned around and looked at me. I raised a tentative hand.
“June heard about this place,” he said. “She’s got her ear to the pavement, that June. She heard the open mic night was supposed to be good. Isn’t that right?”
I nodded. “Sort of.”
Someone was taking video. A few people, actually. I counted three with their phones in the air. It would be on the Internet tomorrow. Millions would hear my muffled “sort of.”
“June is visiting from New York City,” he said. “Great town. Have you guys ever been?”
Laughter, boos. It was a forty-minute train ride away.
“You haven’t, huh? Well, it’s one for the bucket list. Let me tell you. Have you guys heard about Brooklyn? Lots happening over there. I haven’t been personally, but from what I understand, it’s a whole borough devoted to eating breakfast late in the day. Everyone there is something called an influencer. June, am I getting that right?”
The crowd turned and looked at me again.
“More or less.”
I sipped my drink.
“Sorry, June. I’m not quite done with you. Tell them where you
live.”
“Bushwick,” I said.
More boos, this time from the table of kids.
He said to me, “You hear that? The kids are booing Bushwick. Must be time to move again.”
He took a couple of steps toward them. “You guys seem smart. While I’ve got you here, maybe you can help me understand my son. One of us is an asshole and I’m trying to figure out who.”
He went on like that for a while. The jokes were unremarkable, but the crowd’s enthusiasm made up for it. He grew red from the neck up, and half-moons of sweat formed in each armpit. I began to wonder if he would ever leave the stage. He was more animated than I’d seen him the entire last season of Stay Up. It made me wonder why he had spent twenty-five years shackled to a prop desk. He didn’t like it, I realized now. He hadn’t liked it for a long time.
Afterward, he bought a round of drinks for the whole bar. He made the bartender turn on the disco ball. He took over the music and played “The Weight” and everyone sang along. The windows fogged up. I found myself drinking my third margarita alone near the Frogger console. Hugo’d brought me there to make up with me and show me a good time and already he’d forgotten. I decided to step outside.
We were in a brick strip mall with green roofing. Walgreens, liquor store, nail salon. It was nice, as strip malls went. We had taken the MG again and it was parked next to a big black Hummer with chrome trim. I thought maybe I could drive home this time if I got my bearings.
I walked into the Walgreens and browsed the aisles. It was cold and dry and smelled like packaging. Any Walgreens in the world would have that smell. I looked around for something to buy. I wanted the tactile experience of handing over bills and getting back coins. I put some things in a basket. A bottle of water, two packs of waxed mint floss.
I watched a young woman shelve cough syrup for a while. She seemed calm, spaced out, like she was on the cough syrup herself. It was the same look I’d seen on the face of the shopgirl the day before. Boredom so total it delivered you to the astral plane. I knew the feeling from my agent’s assistant days, my audience page days, my receptionist days. You could function in that zone. Answer the phone or take an inventory of the supply closet. Chat pleasantly with tourists from Michigan. Meanwhile your brain made the connecting sound of the early Internet and played a video of a dog you’d never laid eyes on running through a field.
