The Funny Man

by John Warner

  “I think, I guess,” he says to the ball, but speaking to his wife, “that when it comes right down to it, I feel like you never really believed in me and I hold some resentment over that.”

  “Ha!” the wife says. “Haaaaaaa! Ha! Ha! Ha!” She fakes wiping a tear from the corner of her eye and grabs the foam ball from the funny man. She shakes the ball at him. “That’s the funniest fucking thing you’ve ever said, you fucking shitball.” She fakes throwing the ball at the funny man’s face and he flinches.

  The marriage counselor, the impartial arbiter of their marital disputes, looks at the funny man and frowns and says with an edge to her voice, “Look, it’s important that both parties want to work on the issues, otherwise we’re wasting everybody’s time.”

  His wife has launched into a list of supportive things that she has done that even the funny man must admit sound impressive and yet he somehow he still feels empty, a sponge of need that drains as quickly as it is filled.

  “Maybe I’m a terrible person,” the funny man says.

  The funny man’s wife deflates, slumps in her chair and speaks down to the ball, “Do you see? Do you see what I’m saying?”

  It is his wife who pulls the plug on the marriage and he is sort of grateful for it, though he is also devastated at the act. It is the objectively right thing to do, but he never would’ve had the courage to do it himself.

  She always was more than I deserved.

  When the divorce summons comes, the funny man goes to his lawyer’s and breezes past the receptionist without pausing and enters the lawyer’s office without knocking. He picks up a bronzecast model train engine off of the lawyer’s desk and tosses it from hand to hand as he paces.

  “How many zeros?” he asks the lawyer.

  The lawyer holds up a lot of fingers.

  “Can I afford that?”

  The lawyer nods.

  “How long?”

  The lawyer holds up five fingers.

  “Weeks?”

  The lawyer shakes his head.

  “Days?”

  The lawyer nods. The funny man wrenches the train engine in his hands and groans. If he cared about things like money anymore, he would be caring deeply at this moment, but he cares about nothing.

  The funny man sighs. “Make it happen,” he says.

  28

  “WITH MIND OVER matter, nothing matters,” Mitch Laver said to me after taking virtual Roger Clemens’s heat off his face. That’s what they preach and teach at the White Hot Center.

  Mr. Bob wasn’t lying about people not understanding the true boundaries of physics. When it comes to the physical world we have our known knowns and our known unknowns, but we also have our unknown unknowns. The White Hot Center traffics in the unknown unknowns.

  You’d understand if you’d been to the White Hot Center.

  It started with the sessions. Mornings, Chet would fetch me from my room at first light and escort me to the training center. The grass would still be wet with dew, and as we walked we’d pass foraging peacocks and peahens. Chet wore an all-black tracksuit. Mine was canary yellow. Only his had the phoenix insignia. Clearly there was some kind of code behind the colors, but I’d been unable to figure it out. Except for my trainers and Chet, I had been almost totally isolated from others. A slight, Asian-looking woman delivered the meals to my bungalow and someone (Chet, maybe) was cleaning up after me and restocking the canary yellow track-suits and fresh underwear in my wardrobe, but I never saw them. When I wasn’t in training, I would be eating, and then shortly thereafter, sleeping, jostled awake by Chet the next morning.

  Blacktopped walkways snaked around the grounds, little white chain fences reminding everyone to stay on them. Buildings of every imaginable architectural style were visible across the hilly grounds. I could see a Le Corbusier, a Gehry, Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Koolhaas. My own bungalow where I mostly slept off my treatments was clearly a Frank Lloyd Wright. It was like a child playing with models had planted them all over the grounds. Later, I asked Chet about it and he said that in some cases, certain guests would fulfill their remunerative responsibilities with commissions.

  But at the start, it was just the walk and then Chet rapping three times on the door to a low, domed hut-like structure. The door would yawn open and Chet would nudge me inside into the darkness. The hut was filled with a gelatinous goo that sucked me in through some kind of peristalsis, pulling me deeper until the only slice of light disappeared as Chet shut the door behind me. For what seemed like hours—but who knows how long it was?—I would sit, suspended in the goo, and then a voice that was more like a vibration that my body just understood asked me questions. It was a lot like therapy, only as conducted by gelatinous goo that spoke to you in vibrations.

  The questions might be something like, What is your first memory? And I would tell the goo all about when I was two, maybe three, and my mother and father and I were taking a train west to New Mexico for a family reunion and they had left me in the sleeper car, strapped down to the bed by some kind of netting so I wouldn’t fall off as the train swayed. I remembered, more than anything, wanting to turn over from stomach to back, but I couldn’t because the netting was pressing me down, keeping me safe, but also killing me because I so badly had to turn over.

  I said that I told the goo these things, but it was more like I thought them and somehow the goo understood those thoughts.

  And why do you remember this? the goo said/vibrated/communicated, after I shared my first memory.

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  Because you were trapped.

  I didn’t really see it that way, but who was I to argue with the goo?

  Another time it asked about my first kiss and I remembered Meredith Babcock, the lead in our fifth-grade musical. She had a solo, an Indian squaw singing about the white man’s march over her tribal lands as they laid the track for their iron horse, the railroad. She was simultaneously heartbroken at the loss of her ancestral home and resigned to the march of progress, but you can’t stop progress. Not with a song, anyway. At the end she’s adopted by a robber baron and goes to Harvard and becomes a lawyer and sues the federal government for reparations.

  We all wished her ill. We wanted to hear a crack in her perfect pitch. We wanted her to fuck up big-time. At lunch, we punched her sandwich flat inside the brown bag and told her she sucked. At recess, she’d climb to the top of the jungle gym equipment and read a book while we threw clods of mud at her. In the halls, we kicked her heels and threatened to push her down the stairs. Sometimes we’d chase her halfway home, shouting I don’t remember. She’d throw her head back and call us “cretins.” We had no idea what that meant.

  Deformed idiot, the goo chimed in.

  I thanked the goo for the information, and told him how I was going to be part of the tech crew, do the lights, but then one of the square dancers broke his arm at recess and I was all that was left to fill in. They said if I didn’t do the dancing they wouldn’t let me do the lights, so what the fuck was I supposed to do, that’s like blackmail. There wasn’t time to mimeograph new programs, but they said they would marker off my name on each and every single one, which even at the time seemed like bullshit, but I couldn’t be sure, so I caved. I didn’t even have time to learn the steps. I just wore some jackass checked shirt and blue kerchief around my neck and marched around. My partner had psoriasis, so instead of holding hands when we were supposed to hold hands she shoved her balled-up fist into my palm. In class she used to pick at the scabs underneath her desk and flick them to the carpet. At the end of the day you could see a whole collection down there. I don’t think she even noticed she was doing it. Once, on a field trip, her mother was one of the chaperones, and the girl was picking away, and I saw her mother slap her hands and grunt at her.

  “We must have been the fucking worst,” I told the goo.

  And is that who you kissed? The girl with the psoriasis?

  “No,” I told the goo. I told the goo th
at I had kissed Meredith Babcock, that it was after the play at a party at one of the parents’ houses and somehow we were playing spin the bottle. We made sure not to invite her in as part of the circle, but she was watching while pretending not to care, and when it was my turn the bottle stopped in between two people and pointed at Meredith Babcock and she said, “Let’s go.”

  We went to the backyard, behind a bush, the designated kissing spot. I told the goo that as I followed her I watched her long, straight black hair swish in perfect rhythm with her steps. We knelt behind the bushes and looked at each other. I was eleven and had no real interest in kissing anyone. Meredith Babcock looked at me and blinked several times and she said, “Do you think I was good?” and rather than saying anything, that’s when I leaned in and kissed her and I hoped that was an appropriate answer.

  And why do you remember that?

  I didn’t know.

  Because of the wanting, the goo said.

  We progressed like this through most of my life, dredging up things I wouldn’t have figured I remembered, along with other things I’d never forget, like the incident with my father when we thought he’d stabbed me with the ski pole, or, what I’d done to my own son. The last question of the day was always, What do you want?

  I replied with abstractions: “to be happy,” “to be loved,” and the goo must’ve been unhappy with these answers because it would quiver and surge and expel me out of the hut at Chet’s feet and he would gather me up and take me home.

  At the end of another unceremonious dumping, Chet and I started walking together back toward my quarters. It seemed as though my session had ended earlier than usual. Dusk had already fallen, but that day I could see some light still hanging across the horizon. Since the initial greeting ceremony I hadn’t seen any of the other “guests.”

  “Where is everybody?” I asked Chet.

  “We do a lot of testing while you’re unconscious during the journey here, which allows us to put everyone at the Center on a customized program specifically designed to their particular body chemistry and biorhythms. To paraphrase, you’re on your path, they’re on theirs, sir.”

  “How am I doing?”

  “Soon you will have a full review and reflection session, but for now, we all agree that you’re progressing appropriately.”

  “Can I ask you a question, Chet?

  “Anything, sir.”

  “Is this place real?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “Am I dead? Am I dreaming?”

  “What do you think, sir?”

  “It just doesn’t seem possible.”

  “Who’s to say what’s possible?” he replied. We’d arrived at my quarters. I could see my dinner waiting for me, steam coming off the plate. It looked like meat loaf.

  “I dunno,” I replied. “Not me.”

  “Why not you?” Chet said, clapping me on the back as he opened the door for me.

  I went in and tucked into the food immediately. I thought it would be the best food I ever tasted and it was. While I ate, in my head I said, Why not me? Why not me?

  29

  SETBACKS AT EVERY turn, but what his manager has come to tell him about is a magic word to celebrities, a onetime only get-out-of-jail (metaphorically speaking) free card available to each and every one of them. “It’s not all bad,” the funny man’s manager says to him. He is speaking softly. His movements are slow and precise, like a technician defusing a bomb, which for all practical purposes is what the funny man is. He would like to explode and he knows in doing so, he could do some real damage, could fuck up a few lives, take a lot of people down with him. Free-floating rage, indeed.

  “Comeback,” the manager says.

  “Comeback?”

  The manager nods. “People love a good comeback story, something they can root for, something they can get behind, something grounded in real American values.”

  The funny man likes the sound of the word comeback. He was gone, but now he is back; missing, then found. Come back, funny man! Come back! He is also crushingly bored in this apartment with nothing to do except wait or not wait for the time to take the next pill. He asks the manager what the plan is.

  “Small series of club dates, unannounced, but strategically leaked, handpicked reporter to follow you around and do a profile. We’ll give the proceeds to charity, something for orphans or amputees, or orphan amputees. We’re thinking a new haircut, something cleaner, low-maintenance. You’re both humbled and grateful. If phase one works out, you’ll go oversees and entertain the troops.”

  “Wait,” the funny mans says. “Why can’t I just do that first? That actually sounds kind of cool.”

  The manager looks at his shoes, knowing that his snippers are poised to cut the wrong wire.

  Recognition dawns on the funny man’s face. “Because they don’t want me.”

  The manager half nods and half bows. He could’ve also said because they don’t allow pill-popping addicts to fly on military transports, but he doesn’t.

  The funny man considers going back to the clubs. He enjoyed the clubs, he really did, the way they would be downright chilly when he’d arrive in the evening, but hot and sweaty with body heat by the time he left. He loved the proximity to the audience, seeing the jokes land and their faces open up with surprise. It begins to sound real good to the funny man, mostly.

  “I can’t do the thing anymore. I just can’t,” he says. There are not enough pills in the world to make it tolerable.

  The manager’s face brightens. “No, exactly, that’s fine. That’s not for the comeback. We save that for years down the road for the nostalgia tour; no, no, no, no, no, we’ve got to mothball that for now, make them miss it, exactly right. We’re totally on the same wavelength here. No, we need a new thing.”

  “A new thing?”

  “Yeah, something new, that they haven’t seen before but still can’t stop talking about.”

  “Fresh lightning,” the funny man says.

  “Exactly,” the manager replies.

  AND SO THE funny man sits around the apartment and tries to conjure a new thing. Because of the pills, the fully coherent hours of the day are limited, which is a problem to begin with, and during those times the funny man’s mind usually remains entirely blank. Later, when the pills have a firmer hold and his body feels like it is encased in cotton candy, he will experience what he is sure is an incredible burst of creativity, writing down dozens and dozens of ideas in his notebook that unfortunately make little sense in the light of the next day.

  For awhile, he thinks that perhaps something involving ears is promising. He has seen a special on the exotic travel channel where they visit a tribe of dark, naked people who dangle progressively heavier weights from their ears until their lobes are stretched practically to the ground. Apparently, in their culture, dangling earlobes are like large breasts in America.

  The funny man spends some time tugging on his ears and finds them to be agreeably stretchy. Pulling them down while looking in the mirror, he sees that he looks pretty funny and that people may laugh at that.

  But once out of the drug haze, he thinks through the ear thing rationally. To pursue it would mean courting a kind of permanent disfigurement, like people who tattoo their faces. There’s no coming back from that kind of thing. Post—face tattoo the first thing everybody thinks when they see you is, “oh yeah, that guy’s got a tattoo on his face,” and it blots out just about everything else. Everywhere in the world he would be stared at because of his physical freakishness. Everywhere except the tribe of dark, naked people, though even there, they would ask him why he is so pale and his ears hang like a chick’s.

  So that won’t work.

  Screaming has been done more than once. Mumbling too. As has accompanying one’s own jokes by playing a guitar that is smashed at the end of the set. (The same deal has even been pulled with an accordion.) He is too clumsy for magic and he can’t sing. Singing poorly has been done, anyway. A comedy ac
t involving constrictor snakes could be fresh, but the damn things are awfully unpredictable and having a python wrapped around your neck while you tell jokes seems like it might be a distraction.

  It becomes increasingly clear to the funny man that everything has already been done. There are no more “things” to be had. On the one hand, this increases his already outsized self-esteem because it reinforces how difficult it was for him to develop the first thing even though it was actually demonstrated to him by an eighteen-month-old baby. On the other, it means there will be no comeback.

  Finally, one day, to relieve stress and shake the cobwebs loose, he puts on some music and begins dancing around the apartment. He is not a good dancer, and knowing this, he emphasizes this fact, shaking his limbs arrhythmically, outside of the beat. He concentrates on one limb at a time, shaking it as crazily as he can before adding another limb and another until his whole body jitters in a million different directions. As he catches glimpses of himself in the apartment’s reflective surfaces he begins to laugh. “Hey, that’s pretty funny,” he thinks.

  He dances and dances. As evening turns to night, with the apartment lights on, he can see his reflection in the windows and he is now doing a move that involves mostly flopping a single leg around so it looks like the tendons and ligaments of his ankle have become unattached. The foot seems to be able to rotate the full 360 degrees, and even imperfectly captured in the windows, it cracks his shit up. When he tries to put pressure on the foot he realizes that the reason it looks like the ligaments and tendons have become detached is because they have. Rather than pointing straight as it should, his foot points at his other foot. There is pain, for sure. It is hilarious. It is grotesque. The funny man feels a flush of pride. I am suffering for my art.

  With practice and some manipulation, the funny man finds that he is, more or less, able to put everything back into place before detaching it again and what he has now is a replicable comedy phenomenon. After a week of practice, he makes an appointment to show it to his agent.