The Funny Man

by John Warner

The neighbor peeks through her curtains at the whole scene and wonders if it’s safe to go outside.

  THE SHOW WAS the first time he would ever do the thing for such a large audience, the first time he’d do anything for such a large audience and the funny man was hella nervous. Trying to bond with the headliner, the funny man asked for any useful tips. The headliner was known as a “comic’s comic,” a bit cerebral, a practitioner of perfectly crafted jokes larded with arcana sometimes so subtle the audience laughed several seconds behind the beat. The headliner had hosted his own series of shows (cable, not network), all of which were critically praised but mostly ignored by viewers, but still, this guy was in television and even a handful of movies here and there in parts tailored to his persona. It was widely said by other comics that the headliner should be more famous than he was, but the other comics did not really believe this because most of them didn’t get the jokes either. The headliner looked up and down at the funny man. “Don’t fuck up,” he said.

  The funny man laughed. The headliner didn’t.

  The crowd was almost totally silent through the funny man’s opening material. He’d never been on a stage elevated so far above the audience and it was disorienting, and between bits his brain searched for each segue. Full-on amateur hour. “I’m fucking up,” he thought. “I’m really fucking up.” He imagined that it might be possible to jump from the stage and plunge to his death, it was so high. He would at least break a leg, which might engender some sympathy. At least they wouldn’t be silent anymore, he thought. At least he was able to cram all those consumer goods from the gift basket in his suitcase. His wife would enjoy the Swiss chocolates.

  But then he turned to the steamer trunk filled with the hook and his costumes for the thing, and dragging it to the front of the stage, it made a hideous squeak that got a few laughs. Working with the moment, the funny man pretended to struggle to get the trunk open, making a show of his inability to raise the lid. He kicked and cursed at the trunk, the sounds of the laughter swelling in his ears, until fully inspired, he invited someone from the front row to come up and help, a frat-boy-looking guy who looked unsure as he mounted the steps to the stage, but gave the full-on dude double-fist thrust salute into the air as the spotlight hit him. Frat-boy-looking guy strolled over to the trunk and braced himself for the effort of raising the lid that the funny man had found so impossible to move, and flinging it open, fell flat on his ass to massive applause.

  When frat-boy-looking guy got home he told his parents that the show was “the coolest thing ever.”

  THE MAKEUP ARTIST circles the funny man and mutters something about pores. After giving up on the funny man, he turns to the funny man’s wife, and shouts “perfection!” causing the funny man’s wife to blush, which adds just the right amount of additional rouge to her cheeks. Oldest trick in the book.

  THE FUNNY MAN could not contain his grin as he left the stage after performing the thing. It was clear that they’d never seen anything like that before and would be going home to tell their friends and neighbors about it. The headliner stood in the wings, arms crossed and frowning. “Nice job, fuckwad. A pox on you and your shitty act.”

  The funny man laughed. The headliner didn’t.

  Back at the hotel, talking on the phone, his agent said not to worry about it. “You’re never opening for anyone ever again.”

  The next week the funny man was booked on the late, late-night show, the one that’s watched by fewer people, and not so much watched, but something that’s on in the background during sleep, or sex, or drinking oneself to death, but still, television! The funny man did a truncated version of the thing. At the end of his act the host came over to shake his hand before throwing it to commercial. “Great great stuff,” he said. “Back after a break!” As the camera light clicked off, while still gripping the funny man’s hand, the host, a former comic himself, leaned in and said, “Everyone else is going to hate you for this. You know that, right?” The host released his grip and patted the funny man on the back, the final pat feeling something like a shove off the stage. Once could be a fluke, twice begins to be suspicious, but a third time is, for sure, a pattern. The funny man was not going to be loved by the other funny men. His rise to comedy fame is to be a solo, rather than a team sport. This is how it always is, though. Even in ensemble situations, all for one and one for all means more for some. For every Rachel, there is a Phoebe. For every Chevy, a Larraine. He is comfortable with this because he has no choice.

  WHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER arrives he surveys the setup and asks if this is the architect everyone is talking about who designs the tiny homes, or is this the cancer survivor that hopscotched across the state, or perhaps the young author who everyone thinks is so rude? Is this the man who started a multimillion-dollar charity by banding the homeless together to sell chocolate chip cookies shaped like American presidents?

  “Where am I, anyway?” he asks. “Can a guy get a latte?”

  He looks at the llama and waves it away. The llama doesn’t seem to care.

  The production coordinator points at the tire. “Straddle it,” he tells the funny man. “One leg down each side of the tire with the wife and kid sitting in the middle. Zany, but also precious. Beloved and unpredictable.” This looks decidedly impossible to the funny man. The extent of his athletic prowess was a college intramural championship in Ultimate Frisbee. He is not flexible in any sense of the word. He suspects that his tendons are shorter and more rigid than average.

  The funny man climbs to the top and gingerly stretches his legs around the tire. He feels a tug in his groin.

  “Don’t move,” the production coordinator says to the funny man. “Tickle the baby,” the production coordinator says to the funny man’s wife. “Perfect.”

  A line of sweat leaks down the funny man’s face. It seems possible that the muscle in his leg may detach from his knee. Did he not once see a show on one of the science channels that demonstrated how each muscle is a bundle of many fibers and that exercise is actually a form of destruction, where the muscle is damaged on purpose so that it may grow stronger in defense? But damage is different from destruction, which is what seems to be happening here. Damage is reparable, destruction permanent. For sure surgery, rehabilitation, a permanent limp or hobble. He breathes loudly through his mouth. His wife stage-whispers up at him through her smile: “Are you okay?”

  “Ah, ah, ah,” the funny man replies.

  Putting down his latte, the photographer approaches the scene, squinting through one eye as he moves toward the camera. He squats down to his haunches and cups his hands around his eyes. “We’ll fix that look on his face in post,” the photographer mutters to the production coordinator.

  “Shoot them,” he tells the production coordinator. “Shoot them now.”

  Triggered by remote, the camera fires over and over and over.

  A COUPLE OF weeks later, standing in the supermarket aisle, the neighbor tears through the issue of the magazine and there, on page 37 is her tree with the neighbors hanging from it. She always knew the wife was pretty and the husband is better looking than she’d thought, though up to that point she’d only seen him in sweatpants as he went to retrieve the morning paper. She did not know their names before, but now she does and she will never forget them again. They probably will not speak to each other because she does not want to be a bother, but she will wave when appropriate. Years from now she will tell stories about how she used to be neighbors with the famous funny man and his wife and how wonderful it was.

  The picture is amazing to her. Every day for the past seventeen years she has looked out her front window at that oak tree. She has driven past it up her driveway, thousands and thousands of times, yearly she has ordered her husband into the yard to rake up its leaves, but here, in this glossy magazine, for the first time, she feels like she really sees it, you know? She buys ten copies.

  7

  BARRY SAID IT: “We’re all monsters;” but if so, we aren’t born this way
. We become them. I figured the trial would tell that story, but the prosecution has presented surprisingly little of my sordid recent history, perhaps figuring the jury knew all that was necessary already (“untalented, successful, bad husband and father”) and that to rehash things would appear to be piling on, bending the whole mood back toward sympathy. The tabloids have spared no ink on me over the years. Not that the additional humiliations would make a difference at this point. Ever since I shot the armed robber six times in alleged self-defense, my life has been a series of (probably well-deserved) humiliations, arrest, mug shot, detention, the whole thing the difference between laughing with and laughing at.

  Like the location-monitoring device strapped to my ankle. Yes, I am in many ways fortunate to be out on bail and able to live and sleep in my high-rise apartment with the doorman and view of the park and access to take-out, but honestly, hasn’t technology progressed to the point where the transmitter-receiver can be smaller than the brick-sized thing that I have to haul around everywhere save the courtroom? Mornings, when I shower, I have to dangle the leg out of the spray, which is difficult since my shower has six nozzles to provide full and constant coverage. If the device gets wet, the anti-tamper alarm will sound and a team of federal marshals will kick down my door and plant their boots in my spine, and they will shout things like, “What’s doing here, smart guy?” And I want no part of that. Again.

  When I raised this issue with Barry, he looked at me and said, “Please don’t tell me you want me to bring this up to the judge.” For a moment I returned Barry’s look, incredulous, because of course I wanted him to bring this up to the judge, that’s why I’d taken the time to mention it to him, but as Barry continued to stare at me and I saw the pity fill his eyes I realized that this was one of those incidents my therapist would point to in order to illustrate what he calls my “loss of perspective.”

  The only places I am allowed to go are the courtroom, my apartment, and the therapist’s. I would like to quit the therapist because each session is more enervating than the last. This alleged “loss of perspective” is our only subject now. “Loss of perspective” is meant to suggest that I no longer have the capacity to see myself as others do, but I prefer to look at it different, that instead of losing perspective, I have gained one: My own.

  “Loss of perspective” is only our latest subject following my struggles with “superfluousness,” “indifference,” and later, “free-floating rage.” Personally, if you ask me, the start of my problems, or at least the start of my real problems, can be traced to starting therapy, as I had no real idea about how screwed up I was before. I would like to quit, but if I abandon the sessions I would miss the contact, the friendly greeting of the receptionist, Jill, her smile no less warm than ever even though I am now an alleged manslaughterer, and her offer of coffee and her assurance that my therapist will be free any moment, the mug now warm between my hands, the feel of it so comforting that I don’t want to drink, and then her holding open the door to the therapist’s office, smiling always, inviting me past with her free arm and the smell of her perfume on the way by. So many things have been taken from me (or I have thrust them away from myself) that I feel desperate to hold onto whatever I have left. This I will keep.

  The fifty-minute hours themselves are exercises in futility. I’m pretty sure, anyway. I know what ails me now and in so knowing can self-identify the cure, but as the trial has dragged on, I have planned my weeks around those moments in the outer office and the thought of giving them up is like letting go a life-preserver mid-ocean.

  What ails me presently, I am positive, is good, old-fashioned lovesickness and finally, this is what I told my therapist.

  “It’s not the trial, really, that has me so bent out of shape,” I said.

  The therapist made a noncommittal and nonjudgmental gesture. This gesture is encouraging without being approving. I imagine that he’s practiced this gesture in the mirror for many, many hours. At conventions he gives seminars on the gesture, and after the seminars, at the hotel bar, other therapists ask him to do it, which he does, and he in turn critiques their gestures for them. “Go on,” he said. Gesture.

  “I’m in love.”

  “Oh?” Here the gesture failed him, the eyebrow lifting into skepticism. “With whom are you in love?”

  I didn’t want to get into it because I knew the pattern, we were on the route to “loss of perspective,” perhaps after a detour toward “living in a skewed reality.” “I can’t really say much more than that,” I said.

  “And why not?”

  “It’s secret.”

  “You know I can’t tell anyone about it, right? That our conversations are bound by confidentiality?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then why won’t you tell me?”

  Why indeed? Because even to speak it is to relinquish some of its power. I’d said too much already. Some things just are. I sat stone-faced.

  “Can you tell me where you two met?”

  I intended to wait him out, but my face must have betrayed the answer.

  “Oh,” he said, “there.”

  “You have a tone,” I replied.

  The therapist threw his hands in the air, surrenderish. “No tone, no tone,” he said. “You know my feelings on that, we don’t need to discuss it anymore.”

  I did know his feelings about the White Hot Center, where Bonnie and I met and fell in love.

  His feelings were that the White Hot Center didn’t exist.

  His feelings were that what I described about what went on there was impossible to the point that maybe I needed some additional prescriptions or some time with a car battery and cables attached to my temples, whereas my feelings were that he was full of shit because I’d been there, my heart knew what it had experienced, what was real and not.

  “We’re not going to get anywhere, are we?” I said. My time at the White Hot Center where I was cured, at least briefly, demonstrated the almost three years of futility behind my conversations with this man.

  A look that said “fuck if I know” flashed across his face before the mask returned. But the truth had been briefly revealed. I imagined that the therapist’s mentor has always told him that therapy was as much art as science, but the therapist no longer believed this. He knows what I know, that therapy is neither art nor science, but something far more random. To his own therapist the therapist describes it this way: “It’s like I’m holding some kind of machine gun while sitting on a spinning carousel and there’s a target that flashes past as I go round in circles. When the bullets hit the target they’re effective, for sure, but I’m spinning pretty fast and the gun really kicks around when I fire it, so while I do hit the target sometimes, I’m never quite sure where or why, and if you ever tell a soul that I said this, I’ll have you killed and disbarred, probably in that order.”

  Or I could be making all that up. It passes the time anyway.

  AS PART OF the bail agreement, the only places I’m allowed to call out to are 911, Barry, my agent and manager, and the downstairs concierge, who will then place my carryout orders for me. The only people allowed to call in are Barry, my agent and manager, the downstairs concierge (to announce the impending arrival of my carryout) and my ex-wife, but she never calls.

  Because Bonnie is also famous I can at least keep tabs on her, worship her from afar, if you will, since I now understand love is a form of worship, a true act of faith, and that distance is no impediment to the practice of it. Love always has been this way, it’s just that I recognize it now.

  Since the start of my trial, her game has gone into the toilet and there is tremendous speculation as to why—injury, illness, and (absurdly) aging—but I know the real reason. It is because she has been struck with the lovesickness also. We had plans and now those have been dashed. Do I take some pride in this, that my downfall ripples across the continents to her? I do, even as I mourn her misfortune. One of the great joys of being loved is having others feel your triumphs a
nd pains, but at the same time, when they are feeling your pains, if you love them in return, you are then feeling their pain over feeling your pain and so on and so on and this is a difficult loop to pull out of.

  I haven’t mentioned this theory to my therapist either because I’m certain that it too would be chalked up into the “loss of perspective” column. He may not be wrong. My life as a famous person has altered me down to my DNA, my previous self a whisper, a sound you can’t quite hear clearly. This is why I should not entirely trust myself on this front, but at this point, I’m too deeply invested.

  So every time Bonnie double-faults or sprays a forehand return wide of the sideline, I believe I know why, I know that she feels it too. And we haven’t even slept together yet! Or rather, we’ve slept together very briefly—the best night of my (second) life—we just didn’t have sex. Imagine! As the camera bores in on her sitting on the sidelines between games, a towel over her head and a far-off look in her eyes where before there had been perfect focus, I’m not ashamed to say, my heart thrums. I am on life support and it is this that sustains me even it is just a few memories and a fantasy of an impossible future.

  I have plenty of time alone in my apartment to contemplate these things. It is a nice cell, but still a cell. I leave the television on in the background as I wait for her next appearance and go to my big window, the first thing the real estate agent wanted to point out to me at the showing, even though at the time it mostly seemed like something I wanted to throw myself out of.

  Now it, along with her, is my saving grace, a window to the world. I prefer the view at night when everything is reduced to shadows and lights, when the people can’t really be seen and the cityscape is dominated by the neon in the store windows, the white domes on the top of the taxis that stack up along the park that snap off one by one as they are claimed. The slow-moving flashers on the horse-drawn carriages as they amble down the path. Brake lights sparking in sequence as cars roll up to the intersections. I open some cold beans and eat directly from the can as I stand at the window. I never wanted this view, meaning it wasn’t a goal of mine, but all things considered, I’m glad to have had it, at least for a time. I have watched the scenes so often it’s like I know what is going to happen next, the pattern and progress, and sometimes it comes in my head that these people below are at my command. It is both beautiful and peaceful and when we were last together I told her that I couldn’t wait for her to see it.