The Funny Man

by John Warner

  The funny man was right and he was wrong. The brace came off, but only once his father was in hospice, a well-tended midrange hotel room for the imminently dying. They’d been moved there from intensive care after the oncologist showed them the three-dimensional image of his father’s torso on the computer monitor. The doctor used a track ball to scroll from head to bottom, each image a slice of his father, collectively producing something with space and volume. The tumors scattered through every organ started as specks, then swelled in size as the technician scrolled through the body, before receding again. The chemo had had no real shot. Liver, pancreas, one of the kidneys, spleen, both lungs, all “compromised.”

  His father was unconscious throughout his hospice stay. The funny man’s wife was in her eighth month with the boy, constantly uncomfortable, but still she was there, with the funny man and his mother in the hospice room, monitoring his father’s death. The caretakers at the hospice were lovely, like angels on Earth, knowing exactly when they should or should not do something, keeping them informed on the progression of things, having hot or cold beverages ready at just the right time, and still the funny man had the urge to punch each and every one of them in the face. His father’s head had been shaved bald for the chemo and blue veins traced across the skull. His skin was a sack for his bones. Dry, white crud collected in the corners of his lips. His breath smelled rich, earthy, elemental. All of the hospital monitoring machines were stripped out at hospice so the only sound was his father’s breathing: slow, shallow gasps.

  Until the girl with the harp knocked softly and introduced herself and explained her purpose, how she was both a harpist and a researcher investigating the effect of music on the terminally ill. She looked like a harpist to the funny man. Odd. Harpists are odd, because what kind of person chooses to play the harp? Impractical, flaky people. Harps are both gigantic and fragile. Only people with station wagons or cargo vans can play the harp. People who burn too much incense in their crummy apartments, annoying their neighbors who do not enjoy the smell of hippie, play the harp. And additionally, what kind of person chooses to play the harp for dying people? Absurd. The moment you make a fan they are meeting their maker. No percentage in that.

  She had long, impossibly thick hair that hung like black ropes and wore a dress that looked almost medieval, bunched and gathered velvet. She wore heavy wool stockings and flat, elaborately strapped sandals. She explained that she recorded the pulse and respiration of the dying person before and after she played and even though they were almost always unconscious and seemingly insensible, the vast majority of the time the music brought beneficial effects.

  “We find,” she said, “that it brings them ease.”

  The funny man was ready to send her on her way, to tell her to get the fuck out of there with her stupid instrument and her dumb clothes, when his wife gripped his wrist and said, “that sounds lovely.”

  And it was. Boy, was it. The woman started by introducing herself to the funny man’s father, using his name and explaining what she wanted to do for him. She touched him softly on the temple and then the slack skin at his arm before laying two fingers on his wrist to gauge his pulse.

  Who knows what she played? The funny man had not heard harp music before and has not since. The funny man and his wife sat together on a couch near the window, his mother next to the bed, opposite the harpist, holding her husband’s hand. The notes sounded so warm to the funny man, soft and tangible, and he laid his head back and shut his eyes and the tears streamed from beneath them. But this was not sobbing. The funny man’s breaths remained easy, regular, slowing even as the music continued. It’s just that his eyes would not stop unleashing the tears like they had been made for this very purpose. After awhile the harpist began singing along with her playing. No words, just sounds. The word contralto emerged in the funny man’s head and he knew it was right in describing her voice and that felt like a little miracle because no way did he know that word. His wife reached for his hand and held it and he had no idea how long the woman played and sang, but it felt endless and too short both, this overwhelming feeling of peace, and when the woman finished the music still seemed to linger in the room as she touched his father again at the temple and chest and wrist and finally wished him “farewell.”

  His father died a couple of hours later, peacefully, the blue veins on his head flushing red briefly before going pale. It was the worst thing that had ever happened to the funny man and his wife understood, letting it be what it was: terrible, earth-shattering, not minimizing or reducing, even though their child was due imminently and he was going to have to pull it together for that. She trusted he’d be there and he was.

  That was really something, the funny man thinks.

  On the eve of the movie’s worldwide release, the funny man looks at his beautiful wife in their beautiful kitchen, spreading peanut butter on stalks of celery, a snack for the boy. He can hear Pilar bustling upstairs, running the vacuum in the hallway. There is a window above the sink that overlooks the back yard, where there is a creek that gives up little toads for the boy to collect. They are no bigger than a man’s thumbnail and their colors blend with the mud, but the boy is patient and therefore good at catching them and placing them in shoeboxes with holes punched in the top. Come evening he always releases them back to the wild. The yard is so spacious it takes half a day for a team of three to tend it. Light comes through the window and strikes his wife’s hair, making it shine. They are surrounded by abundance. He is rich in every way imaginable. He should be the happiest motherfucker in the world.

  PART II

  The Fall (The Rise)

  19

  ONCE THE MOVIE opened, things progressed very quickly, very strangely, very, very badly for the funny man. He snuck into a showing of the movie opening night. He came in after the previews and saw a theater full to bursting with middle-school to college-age kids. The movie was even worse than the funny man remembered from the screening, but oh, did they howl at every last shitty joke. (It’s not even like there were jokes, at least in the traditional, setup-punch line sense.) In some cases, half the crowd inexplicably recited punch lines along with the actors, shouting over the audio as though they’d been there before, many times. Afterwards, as the theater emptied, the funny man stayed in the back, pressing his face to the wall and watched the seats refill with a carbon-copy audience of the last showing.

  His agent and manager had left thousands of messages at the house, some of them just the sound of them shrieking with excitement into the voicemail. They sounded like teenage girls listening to The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, shrill, fainting-prone. The funny man’s wife asked him how it was going and he had to force himself to hold back the tears as he said, “It’s a hit.” The gifts started arriving shortly thereafter. Constant deliveries of congratulations and well wishes from those who had been enriched by the film as well as those who wished to work with the funny man in the future because of his potential for someday enriching them: Flowers, candies, candies sculpted into the shapes of flowers, baskets stuffed with nuts and crisps and cheese and exotic spices that made the funny man sneeze when the packages were opened. Pilar practically ran out of room trying to find places for all of it. The coup de grâce was his-and-his sports cars sent by the studio, one for the funny man, and one for the boy (at one-fifth scale).

  “Holy shit,” his wife said.

  They had been thinking that the funny man’s rise to his previous prominence was something of a lightning strike, but in reality, it had taken years of quasi-toil in the crummy clubs, being indifferenced to death. This latest move was quantum, logarithmic, hyperspacial, like his first level of fame was akin to traveling to the moon by train and this one was like being faxed to Glaxo-23 in the Rglyplyx Nebula.

  MONDAY AFTER THE opening weekend the funny man is in his manager’s office with his agent also in attendance. Their greeting hugs are closer to tackles and they can’t seem to stop smiling. The funny man has come resolved to explain
everything, how it’s a misunderstanding. How he thought it was all a gag and that he never intended anything to get this far, that he is prepared to stand astride the madness and yell “stop.”

  “You,” his agent says, pointing at the funny man.

  “You,” his manager chimes in, also pointing. “You are a genius. That’s what they’re saying, you know that.”

  “Really?” No one has ever said this word in conjunction with the funny man, most likely because it isn’t true, but that doesn’t mean it can’t feel good.

  “Hell yeah!” his agent says, picking up a stack of newspapers and brandishing them like a weapon. “They’re calling you ‘the savior,’ the ‘box-office slump buster.’ Before this weekend industry gross was down eleven percent year-to-year. After this weekend, up three percent, and that’s all you, buddy.”

  The funny man knows that the movie is doing well, but he had no idea it was doing this well. He wonders if there is some utility in letting them continue with whatever it is they have to say, just to, you know, see what’s what. Once invoked, genius is not a word to be casually dismissed.

  “It’s a wave,” his manager says. “It’s a tsunami and you’re riding it … we are riding it, but we’ve got to strike immediately because once a wave breaks, it’s nothing but foam and seaweed and a bunch of dead shit left behind. Now, we’ve got the sequel locked in and that’s got to start soon. Brilliant move insisting that you direct this one, by the way.”

  “I’m directing?” The funny man has only the vaguest memory of the negotiations. He was just throwing out random thoughts to see what would stick. Why should he remember something that was all supposed to be pretend?

  “Uh, yeah,” his agent says. “Shooting starts in three months, remember? Remember how you approved the script and we hired the director of photography and everything? How the whole cast is returning? They’ve been scouting locations for weeks. If it was possible, we’d try to push it up, but since we can’t we’ve got something else planned.”

  “Oh?”

  The funny man’s manager takes the handoff. “Now, the window is tight, but we think we can do a full-court blitz stadium and arena tour up and going, forty shows, twenty-two cities, in forty-three days.”

  His agent hands him a sheet of paper with several columns titled Date, City, Venue, Capacity, Estimated Gross, Net Proceeds. The estimated gross for each spot is a truly grotesque number. The net proceeds is pretty obscene itself.

  “Just sign here, and here, and here,” his manager says, handing over additional papers.

  The funny man is aware that he is at a crossroads, perhaps for the first time in his life. No, this is not his first crossroads, just the first time he is aware of it at the time of the crossing. Knowing the condom had slipped off and continuing to have sex with his future wife in the library, that was a crossroads. Doing the thing for his agent for the first time, crossroads. Signing up for the movie, crossroads. Deciding not to jump from the top of the tornado slide at fifth grade recess, crossroads. But in each of those instances only hindsight has identified them as such. In those moments he existed in a state of blissful ignorance as to the likely consequences of his choice. Even with the tornado slide incident, he didn’t exactly think he’d shatter his ankle like Tommy Rodman did when he called the funny man a wussy and nudged him aside and made the jump himself. The funny man wasn’t hesitating at the apparent danger. He was just thinking how it didn’t look particularly fun. In this moment, he knows what’s what, that to sign where his manager is telling him to sign is an irreversible choice with significant and lasting implications, most of them probably bad.

  He is a genius. Everyone is saying so. They are offering him the GDP of a developing country to perform in basketball arenas and football stadiums across the country. He knows the schedule is backbreaking, particularly for someone with a balky back. He signs the papers without glancing at them, knowing that this is the wrong thing to do, but he does not care. The wave has crested the dam of his denial. He’s spent many hours of his life dreaming about this eventuality. He thought that perhaps the terrible movie would be the end of his quest, but it is more like the beginning. His life is a fairy tale (of sorts), a story not entirely in his own control, and who is he to say it should end, even if it ending right at this moment would mean living happily ever after?

  THE HOUSE IS empty; no wife, no Pilar, no child. It feels oddly similar to the day they moved in and each room was bare, someone else’s home that they were just visiting. The gifts of the weekend have been cleared away. Everything smells very clean.

  On the kitchen counter beside a supermarket tabloid is a note from his wife. The cover of the tabloid displays two photos: The funny man in the movie’s promotional poster, eyebrows arched, hand shoved all the way in his mouth; and his love interest stepping out of a limousine in a black suit and oversized sunglasses. Her head is ducked, but not so much that the camera doesn’t recognize her. It is all very Jackie O in mourning.

  I NAILED HIM! the headline shouts above the picture. Steamy on-set romance heats up summer blockbuster, it says in smaller type beneath them. The story inside quotes a lot of anonymous crew members saying they never suspected, nor saw anything. “Duh,” the funny man thinks.

  “I thought they hated each other,” one of them says. But the on-set chill gave way to a behind-the-scenes inferno, according to the lady love herself, the article continues.

  The funny man yells at the ceiling as she shreds the paper into confetti before reading the note from his wife. His hands tremble as he holds it, making it hard to read. Fortunately, it is short, handwritten, the same writing she uses for the grocery list or the Christmas cards. It is as familiar to him as his own.

  Shitbag—

  I can’t believe it, but then again, I can. You’ve been acting weird ever since you got home. I thought it was stress. Turns out it’s guilt. I need some space to think this through. We’ve gone to Mother’s.

  Love,

  (Signature)

  “Love.” She has signed it love. This, plus the fact that he really does have the truth on his side, means there is hope. He knows his wife is a woman of substance, of conviction, someone who cannot be purchased or paid off, and her views on infidelity are (rightly) inflexible, draconian even. She said as much before they were married, before they knew she was pregnant with the boy even, not long after they had de facto moved in together after only a couple of weeks of “dating.” They were in bed together, listening to the radio and the disc jockeys started talking about a story of a woman who affixed her unfaithful husband’s penis to his leg with Krazy Glue. The man needed surgery and skin grafts and even after all that, he sported a distinctly leftward tilt.

  The funny man chuckled at the story. “That sucks,” he said.

  “He got off easy,” his wife, who was not yet his wife, replied. “What do you mean?”

  “I would do worse, ten times worse. A hundred times worse.” The funny man was sure she was kidding, that they were joshing around. “Like what?” he said, smiling.

  She told him in enough specific detail that it seemed as though she’d spent some time thinking about it before, had maybe priced out some of the specs, done a couple of napkin sketches regarding the logistics. Rather than using a hypothetical, she kept saying, “you,” to funny man, as in, “If you were to get a blow job from a disgusting whore, I would …” The funny man was both horrified and deeply turned on. He did not know it at the time, but it was the crossroads moment when he decided that they would be getting married or at least that he would ask. She had such spirit that he was fairly sure she’d say no, and he was sure he’d love her for it.

  But he has not been unfaithful! Flaky, unreliable, wayward— yes, guilty as charged—but not unfaithful. He has been filled with faith. He is bolstered by this truth. He also has the tremendous news about his impending megastardom to share with her. He is now a planet with increased gravitational pull. His agent and manager have made it clear, he i
s mighty. In fact, they bowed toward him as he left his manager’s office.

  He dials his mother-in-law’s number and grovels his way past the bitch (she never warmed up to him, even after the thing succeeded and all those worries about his abilities as a provider were proven to be for naught) and gets his wife on the phone and pours out the whole sorry story, the encounter with the love interest, how she propositioned him (there was an audible intake of air on his wife’s part here), and her whole theory of celebrity arbitrage, but that he turned her down, flat! He slept in the bathtub! And how the bimbo took his flip little comment literally and that he was sure the movie was one big prank, and now how it not only wasn’t a prank, that he was the newest and hottest star in the celebrity universe and if he could successfully navigate eight to ten brutal months of spirit-crushing cashing-in/selling-out, at the end of it, they’ll have enough money to buy their own island, just as they’ve always wanted. No, he knows she’s never said that she wanted an actual island, it’s more of an understood thing because who doesn’t want an island with brown-skinned, loinclothed servants? No, that is not racist, because he is talking about naturally tanned people, not some sort of native tribe subjugated to the will of the white man thing. No one would possibly turn that down if it were offered, which it is. It is in the offering for him now, for them. For them!