“How come you joined the cavalcade of stars?” asked Boonie.
Bruce rubbed his chin. The guy was older than I was, but I have no idea how much older. He had the sort of rugged but understated good looks that lets a man ignore birthdays between his early thirties and late fifties. “I wanted a crack at the Gotham City Laughs of Tomorrow competition,” he said.
“You mean the big jerk-off?” said Boonie.
“Joke-off,” I said. “We call it the joke-off.”
Bruce nodded, eyes roving back to the closed-circuit TV. I had the idea that nothing made this man laugh; the idea of him making others laugh seemed . . . well . . . laughable.
“Don’t you worry about getting killed?” asked Boonie. There was no banter in his voice now and very little southern accent.
Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you mean that Joker fellow . . .”
“Yeah, that Joker fellow,” mimicked Boonie. “He sorta caught some of our attention.”
Bruce nodded as if mulling this over. “Sure, it worries me. But I figure it’s a chance I have to take to get a shot at the bigtime for the Gotham Comedy . . . ah . . . the joke-off. The odds seem decent.”
Boonie started to make some smart-ass reply, but I surprised him and myself by elbowing him to shut up and saying, “Right, man. That’s the way most of us feel. Say, Boonie and I are going out for coffee after the last show. Want to come?”
Bruce seemed to weigh the invitation with the same seriousness as he did everything else. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”
For the next week or so, Boonie and I spent a lot of time with Bruce after the show—in those thin, cold hours between the closing of the nightclubs and the rising of the sun through Gotham’s smog banks. Usually we hit an all-night café, mainlined strong coffee, and talked about comedy. Boonie and I talked about comedy. Bruce listened a lot. To tell the truth, he was a nice-enough guy. Just way too serious to be funny. He was even serious about comedy. Actually, he seemed to want to talk about the Joker most of the time: What did we think made the Joker do what he did? Why would the Joker be killing stand-up comics? What did we think of the Joker’s sense of humor?
“That ain’t a sense of humor, man,” Boonie answered more than once. “This Joker pissant is nuts. His idea of a punchline is pain.” And then Boonie would say, “Y’all want to analyze everything, Bruce. Petey and me, we just want to get laughs.”
“But just what, precisely, makes people laugh?” Bruce asked late one night, early one morning. Outside the diner, cold rain was turning to snow in front of the street-sweeping machines.
Boonie snorted. “Shit-fire, boy. If we knew that, old Pete and me’d be livin’ in Bel Aire an’ sittin’ on Johnny Carson’s couch twice a week.”
“But there must be some formula,” persisted Bruce. “Some secret.”
Boonie shook his head. “If there is, nobody knows it. Good comedy’s like . . . like good sex . . .”
“Good sex?” repeated Bruce. Any other comic would have snapped back, “Is there such a thing as bad sex, lint brain?” but Bruce was listening again. Seriously.
“Uh-uh,” I interrupted. “Not sex. Surfing.”
Both of them looked at me.
“I mean it,” I said. I’d had a good night. The laughs had been strong and constant and sincere. “When I was out in California last summer, watching them surf at Malibu, I realized that a good stand-up routine’s like that. You gotta catch the wave just right . . . it’s like judging the audience . . . then get a good start, stay right on the break or curl or pipeline or whatever they call that sweet point just under the crest . . . and then ride it for all its worth, but still know when to end it.” I stopped, embarrassed, and slurped cold coffee.
Boonie stared at me. Bruce said, “And what’s the secret of riding the wave?”
For once my gaze was just as serious as Bruce’s. “The secret is using material that means something,” I said, surprised to hear me talking this way. “To go at the thing that’s most serious to you, most . . . well, most sacred . . . and to make it funny.”
Bruce pondered his own coffee cup.
I pushed ahead. “I mean, look at your material, man. It’s stuff you bought from a street-corner gag writer. Am I right?”
He nodded. I think he nodded.
“It’s not you, man,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s not what scares you, what hurts you, what bugs you . . . you got to go for the stuff that’s hiding in the deepest closets, then get it out. Share it with others who’re hiding the same thing. Make it funny. Take some of the sting out of it.”
I had Bruce’s attention. “Do you do that, Pete?”
“Yeah,” I said and sipped coffee. I was lying. I never dealt with the core of me—the guilt and fear and pride and terror I’d felt since I was four years old and realized that I was black: middle-class, reasonably well-educated, not street smart, not cool, but black. I realized why and who I’d really been lecturing there: I’d never had the guts to do a routine about my childhood in Charity Hills, or what it means to be the only kid on your block who didn’t belong to a gang. “Yeah,” I lied again, looking at my watch. “Hell, it’s almost four-thirty. I don’t have to be at Burger Biggie until ten, but it’s a little late.” I threw some change on the table. “See you losers tomorrow.”
Boonie gave me his hillbilly grin. “Yeah, y’all can see me hang out my dirty linen then. I ain’t got no hangups about talkin’ about my miserable upbringin’ and poor but honest family.”
“Yeah,” I said, pausing at the door. “Tell us again about how you slept on bare mattresses with burlap for a cover . . . too poor to buy sheets or blankets.”
Boonie grinned more broadly. “Shee-it. We had sheets. But they was cut full a holes ’cause of all the Klan meetin’s we had to go to.”
I shook my head. “See you tomorrow, Bruce. I’ll watch you bomb, my cracker friend.”
Instead, I watched Boonie die.
We were uptown, at the ritzy Chez Harpo, and the place was crawling with cops. We were only a day away from the selection deadline for the joke-off, and there must have been forty comics competing for mike time that night. Bruce didn’t survive the auditions for Chez, but he was there that night. So were about fifty cops: on the roof, backstage, in the audience, in uniform out front, and monitoring things from a trailer command center out back.
The mayor and the commissioner of police . . . what’s-his-name . . . Gordon, had decided that the Joker comedy killings were making Gotham look bad. Whatever the reason for the security, I didn’t see any way the Joker could get through it.
He did.
Boonie had them laughing. He was riding the wave real well, letting the laughter build and then punching it up higher, pausing at just the right spots, using the silences, when suddenly one of the silences stretched too far. The audience paused to breathe, waiting for the next funny bit.
Boonie started smiling as if he had just thought of something funnier than the story he’d planned to tell. The audience tittered in anticipation. Boonie’s smile grew wider. His lips stretched back over his rear teeth. Some of the audience’s laughter fell away, turned to gasps.
Boonie’s color drained until his sunburned Georgia look gave way to a deathly pallor, grew paler still—by the time people started screaming, Boonie’s complexion was the kind of white a corpse might show after a week in the water. His lips were stretched from ear to ear as if someone had pulled his cheeks back with meat hooks.
Boonie dropped the mike, gurgled something, and collapsed.
The cops went nuts. Bruce was the first one to Boonie, but I was there a second later. My friend was dead, already cooling to the touch.
Bruce pounded his fist on his knee. “Damn, damn, damn . . .”
“What?” I said. “How?”
Bruce touched Boonie’s neck where the tiniest dart was visible, barely larger than a mosquito. “Joker Venom. He’s used it for years. Keeps altering the formula so no antidote works.
Hardly elegant, but very effective. A message.”
The cops were sealing all exits, searching the premises, frisking patrons, shouting orders.
Bruce shook his head. “The Joker’s gone by now. Probably disguised as a police officer.”
I was crying. I couldn’t help it. “But why Boonie? Why him?” I spread my jacket over my friend’s face to hide the terrible rictus. “I mean, he wasn’t the best comic tonight. Certainly not the worst. Why’d that bastard choose him?”
Bruce seemed elsewhere—not in shock like the rest of us, merely—elsewhere. “I thought the Joker might be eliminating competitors,” he said, almost speaking to himself, “but now I know it’s something else.”
I wiped away tears with the back of my hand. “What, dammit? Is he trying to sabotage the joke-off?”
“No. Definitely not.”
Paramedics and cops had shoved through and pushed Bruce and me away from Boonie. They worked fast, tossing IVs, syringe cases, and technical terms around . . . but Boonie stayed dead.
I stood up and looked out over the heads of the crowd. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m going to enter that damn contest and win. Win for Boonie and for me. No way that this homicidal asshole is going to scare us away.”
“You’re right,” said Bruce. “We do have to be in it. Both of us. And we will.”
The word came just like a summons from the Almighty. Uncle Louis would have loved it. He always wanted me to be someone genuinely significant—like an African Methodist preacher-man. Becoming a fast-track management clone at Burger Biggie was sort of okay—but a no-account stand-up comic didn’t cut it.
Anyhow, the message from God arrived via Gotham Bonded Messenger. No bicycle delivery here—nosirree. I was just heading out of my apartment to cover the night shift for an asshole buddy whose plane had gotten stranded in Cleveland when he’d gone home to see his father. Dad had started that long day’s journey into kidney cancer . . . Anyhow, I saw the sparkling silver BMW pull up to the curb. I figured it had to be a crack dealer, so I ignored it.
Naturally I was surprised when a hunched-over guy in a blue uniform got out and said directly to me. “You would be Mr. Tulley?”
I resisted the impulse to say something like, “Why yes, Mr. Stanley?” and just nodded my head.
The old guy crabbed up to me and handed over an envelope. Then he produced a smoky-gray Lucite clipboard and said, “Sign here.” No “please.”
What the heck. I signed. Could be there was an inheritance, though far as I knew, nobody in the family had died. Maybe it was a desperate creditor. I checked the return address. Just a box number in Clovertide, up on the north side.
I shrugged and ran my right index fingernail under the flap. The folded letter felt like vellum. I straightened it, smoothed the creases, and read the calligraphy. Classy stuff. At first I didn’t register what it was I was seeing on that page. Then I let out a whoop that probably triggered all the car alarms on the block and raised at least a half-dozen of my more gris-gris—conscious dead kinfolk.
I was in. Damn. How about that. But I was supposed to report to some address up on the north side for an orientation. Tonight.
Faulkner said that when it came to sacrifice for writers, a good novel was worth any number of little old ladies. I figured I could extend that to artists of all kinds, so I kept it in mind when I called my understaffed B.B. and told the woman who answered that I was going to be a no-show tonight.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “You sick?”
“Nope,” I said. “I just got a formal notice saying I’m going to be competing in the big joke-off, the Gotham City Laughs of Tomorrow contest, the golden path to the Johnny Carson Show. There’s a heavy-duty meeting tonight.”
“Right,” she said, clearly sounding as if she didn’t believe the tone of my voice, much less a word I was saying. “Get in when you can, Pete. We really need you. Listen, take something, get better fast.” She clicked off the line.
Yeah, right. I’d better get better fast. The joke-off was only three days away. And me, I was going to be there. Son of a bitch. I started humming along with the tune on the oldies station I’d left on as a burglar deterrent: “Laugh, laugh, I thought I’d die . . .”
I took the train north and got off at a station just a little different than my usual stop. This one had spotless tile—and no graffiti—with tasteful turquoise accent stripes. Maybe the stations downtown did, too, but you would never notice for the krylon street art. When I got on the T-local at the Sprang Street station, I’d seen a jagged scream painted on the wall in Day-Glo purple: JOKER LIVES. Someone else had sprayed an X over the second word and added LAUGHS in bright scarlet.
The address on the invite was two blocks west. This was a business neighborhood, lots of low office blocks in brick and glass. It was getting dark now. I hardly saw anybody who looked like me—hell, there was hardly anybody at all on the street. They’d probably all headed home at five to the ’burbs.
My destination was a nondescript office tower that disappeared somewhere up there in the darkness. There weren’t any lit windows. When I walked past the alley that bordered one side, I caught a glimpse of a familiar vehicle—A European stretch limo parked in the back.
Bruce was here, too? I realized I was phrasing it in my head as a question. I hadn’t seen him perform since Boonie bought the farm, but I couldn’t imagine his improving sufficiently to make any kind of final cut for anything. I mean, he was a nice guy and he had heart, but Jesus what a stiff.
“I think I owe this to you, Pete.” The deep baritone came from the darkness behind my left shoulder. I jumped. A reassuring hand came down, the steel fingers wrapping around my scapula. I wasn’t reassured. “You taught me some first-rate lessons.”
“Holy shit!” I said. I knew who was there. “You scared the crap out of me.”
“I don’t recall you being so scatological in your delivery,” said Bruce. I could hear the trace of a smile in his voice. I turned and looked at him. He was dressed somberly in dark wool trousers and a black turtleneck. More like his namesake, it suddenly occurred to me. Good for him. Anything beat that Bozo zoot-suit he’d boasted the first time I’d seen him bomb. “Congratulations on jumping the final hurdle to the joke-off.”
“You, too,” I said. He put out his hand and I took it. Again, I felt like I was sticking my fingers in a walnut crusher. “Do you know what we’re getting tonight?”
Bruce shook his head and motioned toward the dark building with the folded letter in his left hand. “I know only as much as you do.”
Both of us started walking toward the front door. I realized there was a light inside, the dim glow from a gang of security monitors behind a lobby desk. The glass door opened as we approached. There were two big guys in rent-a-cop uniforms waiting for us. Both had mean eyes, though they each smiled. “Mr. Tulley? Mr., ah, Bruce?” said the bigger of the pair. At our nods, the other guy checked his clipboard and made marks. Obviously they’d been well-briefed. “Please take the elevator on the left and go up to the thirtieth floor. You both want room one-oh-one.”
Bruce cocked his head. “Why is room one-oh-one on the thirtieth floor?”
The first guard shrugged. “I didn’t set up the numbering system. I just know which place you’re supposed to go.
“I was just wondering.”
“You two are the last,” said the second guard. “You better hurry. Mr. Carson’s waiting.”
We got in the elevator and punched thirty. As the doors slid shut, I said to Bruce, “Something significant about room one-oh-one?”
“Aside from the fact one wouldn’t expect it to be on the thirtieth floor, it’s also the designation of the room in 1984 where prisoners encounter the thing they fear most.”
“Swell,” I said. The elevator car suddenly seemed smaller, more claustrophobic.
Actually, room 101 turned out to be a respectably sized suite that didn’t seem sinister at all. Nearly a dozen and a half comics w
ere there, all ones I knew and a few I was friends with. Then there was Johnny. It was kind of weird seeing him without Ed or Doc. He was surrounded with four or five harried-looking aides. He was taller than I expected, but what can you expect when you’ve only seen someone on a nineteen-inch tube? I guess maybe I was expecting him to be nattily dressed in an Armani. Nope. He was wearing a perfectly tailored suit that I was pretty sure was from his own line. I couldn’t be positive because I wasn’t in that shopping bracket, but I figured Johnny wouldn’t be disloyal to his own label.
One of his assistants raised his voice and said, “If you’ll all find a seat, Mr. Carson would like to have a few words with you.”
I sat on a leather-upholstered couch with Bruce on one side of me, Diana Mulhollen on the other. She’s such a sweet kid. I was glad she’d made the final cut. As long as I still won.
Johnny got up in front of us and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’ll keep this short. You’re all here because you’ve been selected from among all of Gotham City’s considerable ranks of the comically gifted.” He grinned. “You’re all among that select group of folks who end up going to parties that have been primed by some friend who told everybody else there, ‘Hey, you’ve got to talk to so-and-so, he’s the funniest guy you’ll ever meet.’ So what happens? You get there and everyone’s looking at you expectantly, waiting for you to knock ’em dead.” We smiled. Some of us snickered. Johnny smiled back and continued, “It’s a tough life, being funny. It’s our hope that the Gotham City Laughs of Tomorrow competition will make that life easier for some of you.”
He went on to talk about the charities that would benefit, and about the live national TV hookup that would carry the proceedings across all America. Then he got to what I suspected most of us really wanted to hear about.
“The winner will be on the show the following week. We’ll fly you out to Burbank and put you up like a king—or queen. And if that works out . . .” Johnny grinned and spread his hands beneficently. “There’s no telling where you’ll go. This will be the break of a lifetime.”
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 18
