The Funny Man

by John Warner

  It doesn’t take nearly as long to say everything as he thought it would and when he finishes, his wife says, “I’m having a hard time believing this.”

  “Me too,” the funny man replies.

  20

  THERE WAS A time, at the brief peak of my fame and popularity, that I fantasized about being martyred, Lennon-style. I was thinking that I would attract the attention of some lunatic and then be cut down in my prime, a permanent beacon of untapped genius. Even at my most recognizable, I would walk the streets, head down, but not too far down, letting passersby grab a glimpse and I could sense their bodies seize with recognition, but even as they were saying, “hey, isn’t that … ?” I was past them. At some point I hoped an obsessed fan who smelled like the inside of a crayon box would emerge from the shadows and ask me to sign something before knifing me in the gut. I would look dramatically skyward as I sank to my knees, eyes on the heavens and as someone else recognized me and realized what had been done, they would wail in their surprise and grief.

  Or a plane crash, or a safe falling out of a window and crushing me, something that would snuff me out without me seeing it coming.

  Now, thanks to the unveiling of Barry’s strategy, the judge’s prediction has come true. I am widely viewed as the biggest shithead on the planet. Before, just a shithead, now the biggest. There are protestors outside my apartment almost twenty-four hours a day. I have been protested before, but this is bigger, angrier. They push petitions into the hands of pedestrians that urge a retroactive change to the law to make manslaughter punishable by death. They chant obscene slogans. Using a bedsheet and black spray paint they made a sign held up toward my view that just says, DO THE WORLD A FAVOR AND JUM! I’m assuming they ran out of room for the P. Most of the time I leave my blinds drawn now, but when I do make an appearance, or my silhouette shows up against the curtains I can hear the boos and jeers from my many floors up.

  When I look at the gruesome truths of my life coming out via the testimony during my defense—what I have done to my wife, the incident with my child—it’s hard not to be sympathetic to the protesters’ position. Today was the therapist’s fourth on the stand. Because of my “not guilty by reason of celebrity” defense I had to waive doctor-patient privilege over certain events, and every last morsel has poured forth. Barry says it’s all necessary, as part of our celebrity-as-sickness strategy. I don’t remember saying or doing lots of the stuff, but it’s all in the man’s notes, dated and timed, so it’s hard to dispute. I mostly watch the jury watching him. If they weren’t sequestered, I could imagine them joining the protestors in front of my apartment. The prosecutor just sits there, I’m sure wondering what the hell Barry is up to. I’m the only one tempted to stand up and say, “I object!”

  The sheriff’s deputy who will recount fully the incident with my son is scheduled soon, and his testimony, plus the associated video, will only further harden their hearts to me. It was and is inexcusable, inexplicable, unbelievable, and if I wasn’t rather cowardly, I would’ve killed myself right after it happened. Like I told the judge, I deserve every bit of what’s coming to me.

  But that doesn’t mean I want to go to jail because things have changed and I now have something to live for. Her messages continue to arrive disguised in more and more elaborate ways. Yesterday it was in a news story about her preparations for the upcoming major season. The first letter of each word in her quote, removed, arranged into thinking of you.

  I’m looking forward to the Grand Slam season, for I will be able to see her much more often, matches in their entirety instead of highlight snippets here and there. Her seed is low, but her game has been looking up, a newfound sense of purpose and resolve apparent in her groundstrokes, at least according to the experts that pretend to know these things.

  Barry will not admit to any miscalculation, that he may have overshot the target. On the contrary, he sees it as merely the ultimate fulfillment of his original strategy. “So now we know you’re the villain, which is great.”

  “How can that be great?”

  “Villains are compelling. We love villains. Tell me, who’s the greatest villain of all time?”

  “Hitler?”

  Barry shakes his head for the thousandth time. “No. Hitler was evil. Evil people aren’t villains, they’re just evil. Are you evil? No, you’re hateful, but not evil. I’m talking movies, television, that kind of thing, pretend villains.”

  “But I’m not pretend, I’m real.”

  “I thought you’d been paying attention,” he says. “The whole point is you’re not real, you’re a celebrity. Anyway, the greatest villain of all time is Darth Vader.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And at the end of Star Wars, George Lucas makes a very big show of making sure we know that Dart Vader is saved, that he will be back. Do you know why he did that?”

  “Because he knew there was a sequel?”

  “No, because he knew, deep down, we don’t want our villains vanquished. We need our villains. Why are we always worried about some half-assed dictator five thousand miles away armed with rockets that a seventh-grader could outdo in his backyard, getting his hands on nukes? I’ll tell you why, because then we don’t concentrate on the shit happening under our noses. Villains are there for us to pour all of our baggage into, all that fear and hate, making us believe that we’re nothing like them. Villains become indispensable. We can’t live without them. Think of it as your public service.”

  Following the incident with my son, I was at my lowest. I went caveman. I went feral, holed up in the apartment alone. My pits crusty, mushroom-scented. My skin moist, mossy. I pulled the drapes off the rods and wore them like a loincloth. At times I may have scrabbled on all fours. I itched, often. I scrounged old takeout from the fridge for food. I’d come to like Scotch by then. I’m sure there were pills, but I don’t remember any of the specifics. I may or may not have been trying to kill myself. If so, it was going to be slow, painful, because that’s what I deserved.

  I left the phones off the hook and shunned visitors and it didn’t take all that long for people to stop even trying to see me. I was being left alone just as I said I wished. This is when I became a tennis fan, because every other channel and show for some reason made me cry. For awhile I tried animal shows, but when a family of meerkats was wiped out by a fox and the lone remaining meerkat howled piteously under a glowing orange moon, I felt my legs collapse out from under me, so I went with the tennis. The matches were hypnotic, transporting, all that geometry on the screen. I liked to hold up my hands to cover the players in my sight so it looked like the ball was hopping back and forth on its own. Of course, some of the time I must have been watching Bonnie, she being the most popular player in the world, but I made no special note. I also made no special note of sleeping or waking or anything. All of it smeared together. It seemed both instantaneous and endless, permanently trapped in a single moment.

  Which is why I don’t remember how or why the card appeared. It wasn’t there and then it was.

  I was staring out the window wondering about the strength of the glass, rapped on it with my knuckles and felt the glass wave in its frame. Glass is actually a liquid in suspension, you know. Always flowing, just very, very slowly.

  The card was actually glowing. I saw it reflected in the glass, pulsing from my coffee table. I went and picked it up and saw that it was made out of the thinnest paper stock possible. It was like vellum, but somehow still rigid. When I held it to the light it glowed even brighter. On one side of the card was just an insignia, a phoenix rising out of the ashes and a phone number. On the other side it said In case of emergency. I thought it might be vibrating in my palm.

  The last thing to enter the apartment had been dim sum three or four days previous, judging by its state of decomposition resting on the table. I put the card next to the take-out container and foraged some pistachios out of the creases in the couch and rested back on my haunches, shelling the nuts as I stared at
the card. I shut my eyes and opened them and it was gone. I shut them again and reopened and it was back. I puffed out my cheeks and blew out the air and the card flipped once before settling back down. If I looked at it long enough, I thought I could see the phoenix wings flapping. I picked it up and tucked it into the folds of my loincloth and went back to my window.

  That evening I woke in my bed and realized I was clutching the card in my hand. It should have been wadded and wrinkled, but when I unfurled my fingers it sprang back into pristine shape. I thought I could maybe hear it humming. I found the phone and dialed, my fingers trembling over the keypad on the headset.

  A recording answered on the second ring. A computerized female voice said, “Are you ready?”

  I was silent, breathing heavy, and it repeated its question, “Are you ready?”

  “Ready for what?” I replied, or maybe that was in my head, I’m not sure. I felt like I could hear a hard drive whirring on the other end.

  “Are you ready?” the voice repeated itself, with a little edge this time like there was only one possible answer, so I gave it, and the line went dead.

  21

  WHILE THE FUNNY man’s marriage teetered, his career entered what he later came to think of as “the Midas period,” where he would turn many things into gold and they glittered briefly before they became useless shit. Because the house—sans wife, child, and Pilar—was empty and echoing and he was lonely, he hired an assistant, Langley, but when he quickly realized he had nothing he needed assistance with, the assistant soon became something closer to servant, which is actually how these things usually go. The funny man was now not just a funny man, but a movie star, the movie star of the moment. A possible franchise, even, the foundation upon which many other things rest. He now appeared on the covers of many magazines simultaneously and as he watched television, which he was doing a lot of again, sometimes—no, not sometimes, but often—there’d he be, large, highly defined, not so bad looking for a guy who doesn’t need his looks to make money. The funny man would lean forward or stand and walk toward the screen to look more closely. It was as though somehow his television had turned into a mirror and he was looking at, not himself exactly, but maybe a twin; a cooler, more accomplished model, Funny Man 2.0, if you will. He started to realize the truth about television, which is that the images on screen were far more real than reality, since these were the things that everyone could share: Our collective spirit. There was no objective truth outside what some critical mass of people believed. No one could really know the original funny man, not even himself, but Funny Man 2.0 was everywhere simultaneously. He should have seen this before, but it took becoming one of the people inside the television to recognize the truth of it.

  The funny man recognized this other funny man as himself, but deep down, he knew he was not him and that he would need to work hard to fulfill this image. Langley was his first effort on that front. He called his manager and said, “I should probably have an assistant, right?”

  “Do you want an assistant?” his manager asked.

  “I have no idea.”

  The funny man could hear the manager humming softly on the other end. The humming was new and the funny man recognized it as the manager’s verbal tic as his brain calculated the “proper” thing to say. Not the “right” thing, as in the thing that would be the best possible advice and counsel for the funny man’s wellbeing, but the proper thing, the thing that greased the wheels of his relationship with the funny man.

  “You know what I always say,” the manager said, “better to be safe than sorry.”

  The funny man had never heard his manager say this, but never mind, six assistant candidates were waiting on his doorstep the next morning. The funny man had never had occasion to hire anyone (his agent had chosen him and the manager simply seemed to appear one day), so he had no idea how to go about such things. In the end, he selected the candidate that most looked like Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, Langley.

  Langley was installed in one of the guest rooms and became a lingering, frankly creepy presence about the house. But Langley already had a month’s worth of pay in his account and there was that Funny Man 2.0 in the television that he was supposed to head toward, and so the funny man simply started having Langley do anything the funny man didn’t want to.

  Mornings, Langley was tasked with things like spraying deodorizing powder inside the funny man’s shoes just before the funny man slid them on to his feet. When the phone rang, Langley started bringing it to him. If the funny man could think of nothing to do, he would tell Langley to polish something and he would, the never-used fireplace tools, the convection oven, the mini-cotton candy—maker the funny man had once ordered midair from an in-flight catalog. The funny man told him to stop doing this one day when he saw that Langley had turned to a box of the child’s toys, removing the boy’s fingerprints from his little toy people and the plastic dragon and the tiny shopping cart that he liked to push around, and the wooden duck that had wheels and leatherette wings that flapped when you rolled it along the ground and the train engine that the child had given a name, “Trainy,” and the funny man snapped and told Langley to cut that shit out.

  The funny man apologized soon after, but from Langley’s demeanor he sensed that he didn’t have to, that this was not something that was expected of him. This was sort of fascinating, this casual, unchecked abuse and he began to experiment with it until one day, Langley was bent over, picking up the funny man’s clothes discarded carelessly the night before and the funny man decided to boot him in the ass.

  LANGLEY STRAIGHTENS, DROPPING the clothes, but otherwise registers nothing and merely stoops again to gather the clothes and places them in a hamper that he then picks up and carries toward the laundry area. The funny man follows and watches as Langley shifts a load from washer to dryer and again as Langley stoops, the funny man boots him in the ass. This time Langley topples halfway into the dryer, clanging his elbow against the metal drum, but still he says nothing.

  “This is so terribly wrong,” the funny man thinks as he stalks behind Langley toward the kitchen, booting him in the ass every few strides. As Langley pulls eggs from the refrigerator to start the funny man’s omelet, the funny man slaps them out of Langley’s hands and then retrieves the only one not broken and smashes it on Langley’s head. Each escalation is more thrilling than the last, the realization that no one should get away with this, and yet here he is, and as Langley turns to face him, the funny man can feel his own body surge with power.

  Langley looks at the funny man, his face unbothered. Strings of yolk stretch between his upper and lower lashes. It is a look of infinite patience, of waiting.

  “How do you do that?” the funny man asks.

  “Do what, sir?” The yolk runs down Langley’s handsome face and collects at his chin and drips to the floor.

  “Take it. Stand this. How come you’re not beating this shit out of me?”

  At last, Langley swipes his hand over his face, collecting the egg remnants and flinging them into the sink. “My last employer concussed me with a phone. This, as they say, is nothing.”

  The funny man realized he had to get rid of Langley, that he could not stand the shame of having him around, but he already felt too guilty to fire him. He thought about and then dismissed the idea of allowing Langley to boot him in the ass and smash eggs over the funny man’s head, but the funny man knew that he owed this man something, and the first of his sold-gold ideas sprung into his head.

  The funny man calls his manager again. “I’ve got an idea for a television show, a game show,” he says.

  “Great,” the manager replies, “we’ll start filming next week.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what it is?”

  “Can we put your name on it as in: (The Funny Man) Presents …?”

  “Sure.”

  “Then no, it doesn’t really matter what it is.”

  With that, (The Funny Man) Presents Kick in the A$$ featu
ring Langley was born. The concept was simple. Langley would travel about the country and walk up to random people and boot them in the ass. For each kick the person would receive $1000. Once Langley warmed to the task, he was a natural. During his employment with the funny man he had never seen it, but Langley had a gorgeous, disarming smile and when people would turn around, shocked that someone had just kicked them in the ass and saw Langley there, grinning with a fan of hundred-dollar bills in front of his face they too would smile and wave into the camera and on cue say the show’s catchphrase, “That’s asstastic!”

  Langley developed a knack for picking the juiciest targets for maximum physical comedy (cruelty), sneaking up behind a mom in the baking aisle at the grocery store and delivering the kick just as she bent to retrieve a bag of flour, sending her tumbling in a white cloud, or pausing at the top of an escalator and waiting for some unsuspecting business-type to bend to tie a shoe so Langley could boot him to the bottom. Once the show gained popularity, they planned sweeps-week stunts, like arranging for Langley to be let onto the field of a Major League Baseball game so he could kick an umpire in the ass.

  T-shirts with Kick Me and an arrow pointing down on the back and Langley’s face on the front sold by the millions. The funny man, simply by lending his name, was entitled to a slice from every ancillary pie, but more pleasing was seeing Langley thrive. He considered it an example of doing well by doing good.

  Langley began having to wear disguises to keep people from chasing him, offering their backsides up for a boot. He posed for pictures with heads of state, in those cases only pretending he was going to deliver a blow. At the show’s peak, Langley had endorsements for shoes and padded “Langley-proof” adult diapers. Whenever a traditional piece of televised entertainment failed, they filled the gap with another half hour of Kick in the A$$ until Langley had a portion of just about every night of the television week.