The Funny Man

by John Warner

  The funny man stands in front of the easel, chewing on the end of the marker as he looks at condom failure. He writes a question mark in red next to it. After a time, beneath it he adds wife’s sexiness. It was the wife’s sexiness that led to the initial encounter. Perhaps this ingredient was necessary to understand the true nature of the condom failure.

  Come to think of it, he remembers the moment the condom failed, or not failed so much as slipped off, because they were standing and he’d had to crouch down to lift her on to one of the library’s shelves for a superior angle of attack, and in the moment, if he really thinks about it, he felt the condom pull free and if he asked his wife—she probably felt it as well—but neither of them did anything to put the brakes on the moment. He had wanted her from the instant she’d stamped his books, and apparently she felt the same way, and if anything, things got a bit hotter, and even afterward when the condom was removed and clearly not filled, there weren’t any recriminations, just shrugs and, believe it or not, a sequel.

  The funny man draws a circle around both condom breaking and wife’s sexiness and in blue writes prob. not luck.

  For some reason that time he and his friend Binder were on spring break in Vegas and decided to take peyote and drink wine and go to the desert and watch the stars pops into his head. They’d pulled to the side of the road and walked into the scrub brush and scraped a little clearing with their shoes and laid down and tweaked out for hours until the wine had overwhelmed them. They did not wake up until a state trooper nudged his boot into the funny man’s ribs, which was somewhere around noon the next day, but not before he and Binder had gotten enough sun to cause second-degree burns, which swelled their faces to purple masks. The state trooper said it himself at the time: “You goofy assholes could’ve died if not for me. What do you think of that?” The funny man and Binder couldn’t reply because their lips were too swollen and blistered, but as the funny man writes not dying in desert next to Binder on the easel, he thinks that he might’ve escaped thanks to a little luck that time.

  Though aren’t we all entitled to a little luck here and there, enough to balance the scales at least? Surely there were times where misfortune befell the funny man with equal weight. And just how fortunate was he to be discovered by a state trooper on a routine patrol who had probably found college kids sleeping one off in a desert gully while their flesh was fried and the buzzards circled overhead millions of times?

  The clapping man telling the funny man’s future agent about him before he died. Was that luck? What about the clapping man not dying before he even had a chance to see the funny man?

  At some point, does the sheer weight of these probably non-luck-based coincidences have to add up to some luck, the way that change in a jar can turn into real money, given enough time?

  The funny man turns the easel to a blank page and retreats to his chair. He has opened up a can of worms. He has thought of these things in passing before, the barest of glances before turning away with disinterest, but now he can’t stop thinking about it, the endless chain of events that led him to this particularly charmed time and place, how any of the links in that chain could have been broken in any number of ways.

  He sets the massage feature to “shiatsu.” He has given names to the settings. Shiatsu is Tomoko. Swedish is Inga. Shantala is Joan, because he cannot not think of a female Indian name. He gives himself over to Tomoko and tries to forget that time when he was seven and fell off the skateboard, his head bouncing off the concrete like a basketball, the lump just off his temple bigger than a golf ball and his mother cried all the way to the hospital yelling at him, “Don’t you sleep! Don’t you go to sleep!” slapping him on the shoulder with one hand while the other twisted the wheel. “Don’t you dare fucking go to sleep!” she yelled. It was the first and maybe only time he’d heard her say “fuck.”

  Or at eleven, when he was having his tonsils removed and they gave him a shot of something meant for the kid the next bed over and his heart accelerated and his vision went static and then he woke up what seemed like (and actually was) three days later.

  Tomoko lays into his neck, digging right into the vertebrae. Digging in between the vertebrae, digging into his marrow like she may come out the other side. Sometimes the funny man thinks that Tomoko and maybe Inga are the only people who understand his needs. ( Joan is too rough.) The funny man grunts a little under her touch and refuses to think about swim class, the near drowning that put him off water forever, or that time just the past winter, on the way to the airport from his wife’s parents when he knows he fell asleep at the wheel, knows it because his eyes were closed and then opened and he’d sweated through his clothes in an instant.

  He dozes lightly as Tomoko eases back to level 3, and the funny man fights off the thought that his wife just might be right about this luck business, because at this point, luck isn’t going to take him anywhere.

  When his wife arrives home he decides that he doesn’t actually want to talk about it, which is lucky because she doesn’t want to hear it.

  THERE IS SURPRISINGLY little to do in the funny man’s day-today life. There is now significant demand for the funny man, but the demand is not daily, or anything like that, certainly not even always weekly. It is somewhere between occasional and frequent. Recurrent? Persistent? He couldn’t even tell you what he does on the days he is not needed. Work? Can he really call it work?

  There are demands from the funny man’s wife (she would call them requests) since he is around the house most of the day while the funny man’s wife is at her charity work, which she enjoys and has embraced since it is fulfilling in ways that are hard to articulate. These requests from the funny man’s wife seem very simple to complete when they are written on the dry erase board that hangs on the pantry door, but they are surprisingly difficult to start. He will look at the dry erase board and see an item half-smudged at the top, something like sort clothes for Goodwill and standing there, he will tell himself, Let’s get going to that closet and find the clothes that we never wear and give them to people who will wear them. When we decide on the discards, let’s write our name on the labels with a black marker so maybe the new owner will get a kick out of owning a shirt that was once owned by this famous person.

  Still standing in front of the dry erase board, the funny man will scratch himself roughly underneath his boxers and continue to think. These are both excellent ideas, the giving away of the no-longer-used clothes and the writing of our name on the label. We should do this right away, without delay, because there is absolutely nothing in front of us until the week after next and the casino gig.

  After this thinking and scratching, the funny man will move from the dry erase board to the refrigerator and open it and survey the contents and then close it and then he will go to the pantry, glancing sidelong at the dry erase board as he swings that door open, poking boxes and cans to the side to see what lays behind.

  (Beans. Always cans of beans, different varieties, garbanzo, great northern, light red kidney. The funny man doesn’t even know how one would prepare beans.) Then the refrigerator, open-close. Pantry, open-close. To the drawer underneath the phone with the carryout menus that he will leaf through until finally he will shut the menus back in the drawer and take something like a banana from a bowl on top of the refrigerator and he will shuffle through the house and flop into the special massaging reclining chair, one leg hung over the arm and he will peel the banana with his teeth as he flips on the television and decides he should watch one of the movies that is presently showing because he is in the entertainment industry and it is a smart move to know who is doing and has done what.

  On these days, the funny man’s wife comes home and asks what the funny man did that day. She stands in front of him, hands on hips, occasionally, but not unreasonably often, with a shopping bag looped over an arm, and he replies, “work on my material,” which is a joke he used to use when he had to use the bathroom, i.e., “I’ll be right back, I’ve got to go
work on my material.” In truth, though, most of the time, when he is asked this question by his wife, the funny man blinks up at her with eyes saucered from staring at the television and realizes that he has no idea what he’s done that day. He does not even realize the day has gone, never to be back again.

  THERE IS A nanny now for the child. She’s been in their lives for awhile actually, but it is only at the new new house (as awesome as the first one was, it was bought under a different, lesser set of circumstances and needed replacing) that she has a room (more like a wing) of her own, but still the funny man has time with his son every day without fail, like clockwork, except for those days when there is no time or when he’s on the road, of course. Each new thing the child does is a genuine and delightful surprise all the way from pretty much sleeping through the night to not shitting his diaper a dozen times a day.

  All that is in the past. The child walks and talks now, which is for sure fun. Entertaining, even. He has diapers that are underwear, or perhaps underwear that double as diapers. On the days the funny man spends in his special chair he envies his son’s diaper/underwear.

  There are phases, one of which was the boy pretending (or maybe not pretending) to run into the doorjamb and falling into a giggling heap over and over.

  “Not bad,” the funny man thought, writing the idea in his notebook.

  His son now cries instead of laughs when he sees the funny man shove his entire hand inside his mouth. He runs from the room, arms outstretched, legs stiff and stamping towards Pilar, who scoops him into her arms and rubs his hair and whispers “mijo.” This is usually the signal that father-son time is done for the day.

  Shoving his entire hand in his mouth is now very easy for the funny man to do, physically, but growing increasingly difficult to do psyche-wise.

  For example, there was that show at a theater that sat many times more people than had seen him be funny up until he developed his thing. On stage, after thirty minutes or so of material, the funny man says, “good night, you’ve been great” and walks into the wings without having done his thing, only to be met by the theater owner-promoter who places a large hand in the middle of the funny man’s chest and says, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  “Show’s over, that’s it,” says the funny man, trying to brush past, which is not possible because this man is large and the passageway small.

  “It doesn’t sound like it’s over,” the owner-promoter says. The audience stomps the floor and hoots through cupped hands, demanding … more.

  The funny man feels suddenly angry, and flushed with anger slaps the man’s hand off his chest. “I’m not a fucking trained chimp. I’m not Shamu. I don’t own cymbals that I clap together. I don’t eat fucking halibut at the sound of a whistle and when I say the show is over, it’s over.”

  The owner-promoter raises his hands in a we’re-just-talking-here gesture and smiles and then squeezes the funny man’s shoulder in a friendly/intimidating way. “Look, let me tell you what’s going to happen if this continues like you say it’s going to continue. I’m not going to punch your lights out, no. No, I’m not going to twist your thumbs off of your hands, no. I’m not going to clap my palms simultaneously over your ears and rupture your eardrums. No. First, I’m just going to send that limousine waiting for you behind the theater home. That’s my cousin’s boy behind the wheel, so for all practical purposes, he works for me. Next, I’m going to take that check with the five figures and turn it into four, but I’m still going to go on that stage and tell those fine people who are hooting and hollering out there that you’ve earned more than most of them make in a year for thirty minutes of ‘work.’ Then, I’m going to shove you out into the alley where your limousine should have been and I’m going to go on my public address system and I’m going to tell those people where to find you. You will have maybe a forty-five second head start. You’ve got some nice shoes there, leather, expensive I’m sure, but they don’t look like running shoes to me, so my recommendation is that you take a shot barefoot.” The owner-promoter pauses for a moment as the funny man looks down at his shoes. The funny man raises his eyes a hair and sees the blue-ink tattoo of an anchor on the owner-promoter’s arm.

  “Now, I got no problem with making them wait a little bit. In fact, making them wait is probably a smart thing, since they’re sitting there wondering if indeed it’s going to happen, if this funny guy with his thing is going to do his thing, and in that waiting there’s a tension. Do you feel the tension?”

  The funny man cocks an ear to the crowd. Their stomping and clapping is rhythmic now, timed together, like inmates before a riot in a prison movie clanking their cups against the bars, organized, angry.

  “Tension is a good thing, a necessary thing. It’s where doubt lives. Even when we’re pretty sure something is going to happen, we wonder if that thing is really going to happen. We know that the guy in the hockey goalie mask is going to drive a pitchfork through the virgins. We know it. We’re sure of it, and yet when it does happen, it surprises, delights even, because of doubt. Where would we be without doubt? Without doubt we would, no doubt, do some very stupid things, and what I’m saying here is that I’m trying to keep you from doing what is for many reasons, a very stupid thing. Do you doubt what I’m trying to say?”

  The funny man looks into the owner-promoter’s eyes and sees that there is a small chunk out of the gray-green iris in the right one and that come to think of it, that eye drifts just a bit to the side as well. The funny man realizes that without a doubt he does not doubt this man. He turns and walks back to the stage from the wings, a single arm raised with a fist at the end clinched so tightly the knuckles blanch.

  He’s never heard such a roar in his life.

  FOLLOWING THAT GIG, when he pours from the limousine in front of his house, he looks at it for a fleeing moment of rare self-awareness and wonders if it is a palace or a prison. As he approaches the front door a motion-sensitive light snaps on, causing him to blink and shade his eyes, and once inside he must deactivate and then reactivate the alarm. He doesn’t think about these things at the time because he doesn’t want to.

  11

  HER PACKAGE ARRIVED amid all the other junk, three feet deep in the mail cart, a small padded mailer, hand-addressed to the PO box. I don’t know why I gravitated to it among everything else. Now that I believe in fate, I’m going to call it that.

  Inside was a picture of me and a letter like every other letter, telling me to be strong, wishing me well, asking for the privilege of my signature. Her name was not on it, of course, because she could not risk it being seen, but what caught my eye was her insignia in the top corner of the paper, a small pink rabbit (her nickname is “the bunny” for her ability to cover the whole court). I brought my nose to the paper and it smelled salty but clean, just as she did that last night we spent together at the Center. Turning it over, I held the paper up to the light and I could see that certain letters stood out in greater relief that others. I quickly transcribed them onto a sheet of paper and found the message contained within them.

  I have been thinking of you and of how we can be together regardless of the outcome of your trial. I am out of room, but I’ll write more soon. B.

  I wished for more, but perhaps this is all she had time for, particularly because she had to also encode the letters. I imagine she is being watched fairly closely by her handlers. She had, after all, disappeared not just from the tour, but the face of the planet for better than two months, returning without a single answer to any of the questions about her whereabouts at her first press conference. This was before my walk in the rain and the attempted robbery. I watched live on the sports news channel. I had not seen her since I’d left the Center and she looked great, rested, tan (as always). She smiled for the cameras as she made her brief opening statement: I’m back and I intend to win a couple of major tournaments and then I will leave tennis and live happily ever after.

  The press crowd chuckled lightly an
d there was an awkward pause when they realized she had nothing else to say. Flashes popped as she looked left and right, grinning. Finally a hand went up:

  Q: Where have you been?

  A: I’m not talking about that.

  Q: Why not?

  A: I’m not talking about why I’m not talking about where I’ve been.

  Q: Why not?

  A: Because I can’t talk about it.

  This went on for a couple additional minutes until they tried a slightly different tack.

  Q: Can you tell us anything you’ve been up to lately?

  A: I’ve been getting into music.

  Q: What kind?

  A: Old stuff. Classic rock.

  Q: Like who?

  A: Oh, you know, the usual suspects, Beatles, the Doors, Hendrix, Joplin, that kind of thing.

  Q: What turned you on to that music?

  Here, as I watched the television I could see a brief, faraway look come to her eye before she refocused and answered.

  A: I heard some of it performed live and it just really spoke to me.

  Q: What do you mean live, like a cover band or something?

  A: Sure, or something.

  I hoped, I trusted that the “happily” ever-after part of the equation was a reference to me. To us. But then, I shot an armed robber six times in (alleged) self-defense and blew it.

  But now the messages are coming and the hope is rekindling. I search each new arrival of signing items frantically for her latest missive and there isn’t one every time, but often enough to make each search worthwhile.

  This arrived today, on a postcard, symbols hidden in a panorama of the Eiffel Tower, invisible to others, bold as neon to me:

  We’re going back, somehow. Some way. The day after our country’s independence. That’s the day. B

  So she has given me the when, but we still need to figure out the how, a not inconsiderable task considering that by her deadline, my trial won’t yet be finished and my ankle bracelet keeps me tethered to very few spots, one of which is not where she and I met.