Mothers

by Chris Power

  There was only one thing other comics liked about the act: when you go on after someone strange, you get another angle to work. The audience will reward you just for not confusing them. It’s all part of the show. The MC would walk on as Andy walked off, and right after the handshake would throw the crowd a bamboozled look and point a thumb at Andy’s disappearing back as if to say, ‘What’s with that guy?’ The laugh that got, Andy felt, really belonged to him. The only one in the whole set that did.

  Andy didn’t have any illusions about other comics’ opinions of what he was doing – he was ashamed of it himself – but he made himself stay and hang out after shows rather than sloping off like he wanted to. Face to face they often didn’t know how to take him, and when they found out he was English too, well, what the fuck was that about? He explained this was a temporary thing; that he was working on his own material; that none of this was planned. Sometimes there was aggression, and he could understand that. Sometimes he was asked, with genuine puzzlement, why he was doing someone else’s bits – a crime in comedy, but complicated in his case by the fact that he wasn’t trying to pass someone else’s line off as his own, he was openly performing someone’s entire act. Of course Kingdom had bought in jokes by the yard, lots of comics used writers, and why couldn’t you cover jokes like you can cover a song? But he never made the argument because he basically agreed with the objections. He was as uncomfortable with what he was doing as anyone else was.

  Despite that, Andy couldn’t always stand there and take it if someone told him what he was doing was bullshit – which he knew every single one of them was thinking, whether they broadcast it or not. He tried to ignore it, but one night in Philadelphia he couldn’t hold back. He had opened for Marvin Butler, a skinny mock-hipster with bubble perm and outsized glasses whose set he watched and enjoyed. But backstage after the show, Butler called Andy a necrophiliac. ‘Yeah? Well you’d better watch out then, Marvin,’ Andy said in Kingdom’s voice, grabbing two hips of air and thrusting his groin furiously towards them, ‘because when I look at you I see a fucking dead man.’

  As the act gathered momentum, Andy’s agent – when he still had an agent – urged him to prepare a plan B in case Kingdom’s estate took any notice and tried to shut him down. Or if people simply lost interest, as sooner or later they would, because sooner or later they always did. Andy assured him he had routines of his own ready to go, but that wasn’t true. Nothing would come. All he had were scraps. But as it turned out, scraps were all it took: he started trying to smuggle his lines in between Kingdom’s, and everything went wrong. The shifts in tone were bewildering; the change threw his delivery off; his own material just wasn’t funny enough. He lost count of the times he died, losing one room after another. He could only fight the silences with Kingdom’s help, the last person’s help he wanted. And even then, there was only so much Johnny could do.

  *

  On weekday mornings they eat breakfast very early, as a family, so Sylvia can see Tim and Marcus before her commute to the city. It is barely light outside and the spotlights above the table are on. Sylvia feeds Marcus while Tim quietly spoons cereal into his mouth. Tim is habitually withdrawn – Asperger’s was suspected at one point, but they had him tested and he isn’t on the spectrum. Apparently this is just the way he is. ‘I’m not surprised,’ Andy said at the time. ‘I was a lot like him when I was a kid.’

  ‘That’s not reassuring,’ Sylvia had said. ‘At all.’

  ‘So I have some news,’ Andy says, tapping a knife against his glass of orange juice. Sylvia looks at him expectantly. Marcus stares at the yoghurt in the spoon she’s holding. Tim’s rhythm of spoon to bowl to mouth continues unchanged. ‘This next bachelor party? The one in Florida? That is it. No more after that.’

  Sylvia smiles. ‘Really?’ she says. ‘But why? I mean, don’t those things keep you on your toes?’

  He’s told her that before, and it’s true, working those drunk, boisterous crowds does keep certain muscles strong, but he wants to do something for her. He feels like he hasn’t in so long. At the same time, he’s worried about her reaction if he tells her that, so he has planned what to say. ‘I’ve had a breakthrough, with my writing. I mean this could be really good, so I need more time to work on it.’

  ‘You’re writing again, Andy,’ is all she says, and for a moment he shares the simple joy of her statement before remembering there has been no breakthrough; that there is no writing.

  He forces himself to shrug and smile. ‘We’ll see where it goes,’ he says.

  ‘It’s going to be great,’ Sylvia says, guiding a spoonful of yoghurt into Marcus’s mouth. ‘And you, little man,’ she says, the boy’s eyes widening as she addresses him, ‘should be doing this yourself. Right, Dad?’

  Marcus squirms in his seat and looks at Andy.

  ‘You want to know what I think, Marcus?’ Andy says.

  Marcus nods.

  Andy mashes his spoon into his forehead and lumps of yoghurt and muesli fall down his face. Even Tim smiles.

  ‘My husband the comic genius,’ says Sylvia.

  *

  Andy has two gigs in Florida: the bachelor party that only he is calling his farewell show, and, the night before, one of his regular retirement village bookings. Suzzy, social co-ordinator at Sawgrass Meadow, is there to meet him at Tampa. ‘Suzzy like fuzzy!’ she told him when they first met, a few years ago. Suzzy is skinny, spry and tanned to the colour and texture of one of Andy’s longest-serving towels. He has never known anyone as enthusiastic as Suzzy. When she grins, which is often, she throws her entire upper body into it. As he comes through the gate, in a foul mood he sank into as his plane laboured into the dirty New Jersey sky, he sees her hopping on the spot and waving, holding aloft a handwritten sign like she always does and that he wishes she would not. It says JOHNNY K.

  ‘How’s Sylvia?’ Suzzy asks once they’re on the freeway. Her little Toyota is so pungent with pine freshener Andy thinks he can feel his skin burning.

  ‘She’s good,’ Andy says. ‘Working too hard, but she’s good.’

  ‘And the little ones? Getting not-so-little now, I’ll bet.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Andy says. ‘Tim’s got gigantism, so we can’t even have him in the house any more. He sleeps in the woodshed.’

  ‘Is that a joke?’ Suzzy says, her smile faltering.

  ‘I never joke,’ Andy says, staring at the road with the sullenness of a teenager.

  Suzzy is silent for a moment, then carries on with the catch-up as if nothing has happened. ‘Your youngest is Marcus, right? Is he four now?’

  ‘Marcus is four. You have an incredible memory, Suzzy,’ Andy says, impressed despite himself. He sees her just twice a year, but she seems to remember everything he has ever told her about his family.

  ‘Four!’ Suzzy says. ‘That’s a magical age.’

  ‘It is,’ Andy says, although he doesn’t agree. What Marcus mostly does is run at things until either he falls over or they do. Fun, but hardly magical. Although at least dealing with him is straightforward, unlike solemn Tim. Sometimes when Andy rehearses the act Tim stares at him like he’s reciting a list of war dead. Andy breaks off and asks him, ‘Any good?’

  ‘Very good,’ Tim says, like a put-upon butler. Andy has watched him play with his action figures, his soldiers and superheroes, which don’t yell at each other and fight, but sigh and walk away. He finds them in random corners of the house, manipulated into poses of lonely contemplation. Arriving at classmates’ birthday parties, Andy has seen him methodically shake everyone’s hand, like a funeral director offering condolences.

  ‘Speaking of four, Mr Kingdom,’ Suzzy says with mischief, ‘did you know it’s four years since you first came to Sawgrass?’

  ‘Is that right?’ says Andy. He knows it is. A gloomy anniversary mocked by an immaculate Tampa sky. He wants to punch the glove compartment. Suzzy is talking but he doesn’t listen to her. He remembers how difficult things were between him
and Sylvia the first time he came down here. She had been enormous, two weeks from her due date, and when the booking came in he said he wasn’t taking it. He expected her to be happy, but she said they couldn’t afford to turn down the money. When he said screw the money she told him the truth was she could do with the time alone. She went into labour when he was flying back – he picked up a voicemail when he landed – and by the time he got to the hospital Marcus was there, tiny and all-powerful. Sylvia’s sister had been her birth partner instead of him, and ever since he had pretended he was OK with that.

  ‘… and we always sell a mountain of tickets as soon as your poster goes up,’ Suzzy is saying. ‘You’re a bona fide Sawgrass favourite.’

  Andy’s gigs down here are almost always sold out, and while he tells himself this is because of the audience’s lack of alternatives at places like this – ‘twilight facilities,’ Sylvia calls them, and my god does he love her mind – he has to allow that, on this sclerotic circuit at least, he really is a hit.

  Suzzy drops Andy off at the same guest bungalow he is always given. He thinks it is, anyway: everything looks the same here. The bungalow’s slat boards are brilliantly white, its compact interior pristine. All down the silent street the identical white houses glow like phosphor in the sun.

  ‘Pick you up at six,’ Suzzy calls from the open window, pulling away from a verge so vividly green it looks like it’s moving. Later on she will drive him to the administrators’ cafeteria for dinner and take him to his dressing room, which is her office. He will admire photographs of her grandchildren, whose names he never even tries to remember: ‘This one looks well’; ‘What a lovely smile she has’; ‘That one really gets around!’ He will perform in the function room of the Sawgrass Country Club, a venue whose name evokes dark wood and polished brass, but the reality of which is beige walls and stain-obscuring patterned carpets.

  After the show Suzzy will drive him back to his bungalow, where he’ll watch TV until he falls asleep. His first time here, his post-show adrenaline blended with anger at and concern for Sylvia, he tried walking back in an effort to tire himself out. Eventually, though, hopelessly lost, he had to call Suzzy to rescue him from the labyrinth of marshmallow houses that ran on and on in every direction. Even the shrubs in their soil borders were uniform. She arrived in a lemon-yellow dressing gown and Birkenstocks, her face covered in a thick, green cream. She was radiating energy. Andy wondered if she really slept, or just wore different clothes at night to reassure people.

  As soon as he starts his set, he knows it will be one of those rare ones where everything glides frictionlessly into place. His timing is as good as it has ever been, his intonation flawless. He resists the temptation he feels, when a show is going well, to slip in some of his own bits. And if he ignores the fact that this material is the last thing he wants to be doing, if he views the gig as a purely technical exercise, as opposed to a creative one, then it really is close to perfect. ‘Boy, what a hotel that was,’ he says, mopping his face with his handkerchief, ‘that bedsheet could’ve been exhibit A in a homicide and two paternity suits.’ He waits, and just as the laughter begins to recede says, ‘But Christ, I was an ugly kid’ – and already there is laughter, anticipatory, because they trust him now. ‘So ugly,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘Anytime I got lost my parents just followed the screams.’

  It sweeps up and rushes over him again, all the barks and croaks and smokers’ rasps. A wave of joy. Most of these people have probably seen him before, he thinks. How many times have they heard these jokes? Here, on TV, on records. And how many times has he told them? He feels powerful and miserable, and like laughing himself.

  ‘What a crowd, what a crowd,’ he mumbles. He steps forwards, backwards. He waggles his tie like a key in a stiff lock. ‘And pimples? Oh boy. When a blind guy touched my face he said, “Braille!” You know what he told me it said? “Don’t look!”’

  The laughter has taken on its own momentum. It has grown so strong and then helpless that all he needs to do for the next few moments is prod it with a look or a shrug, or a double take at some imagined offstage misbehaviour. ‘Yeah,’ he says absently, staring into the space above the audience as he straightens his tie and stretches his neck. He jerks onto tiptoes and looks behind him, as if goosed by an invisible hand. He does all this without thinking about it, kneading the laughter like dough. He can hear people hiccoughing, crying, sucking in air like they’re suffocating. Women hand each other Kleenexes. Men blow their noses into handkerchiefs big as sails pulled from blazer pockets. Nothing’s sadder than a roomful of laughing people. Andy can’t remember whose that is. Maybe it’s his.

  After that kind of show, even at a place like Sawgrass Meadow, the adrenaline kick is hefty, and Andy knows he won’t be sleeping for a few hours. Declining Suzzy’s offer of a lift but armed with directions, he leaves the venue and is enfolded by the humid Tampa night. Suzzy’s spidery handwriting tells him he needs to turn left onto Vivien Leigh, then look for Larry Hagman a couple of blocks up on the right. The naming convention has changed since he was here last because, Suzzy explained, it wasn’t just Andy ‘that one time you slipped my leash’ who had trouble finding the way home. Streets that had formerly been vanilla forgettable – Mimosa Drive, Magnolia Way – now bore the names of era-appropriate actors, ‘because even when someone doesn’t recognise their own husband, they still remember Cary Grant. Oh, and before you ask,’ she added, powering up that devastating grin, ‘there’s no Johnny Kingdom. Yet.’

  He walks past the identical bungalows. Already, precise memories of tonight’s show are fading, his sense of achievement dwindling. His triumph degrades into an edgy energy. Walking along Richard Chamberlain, his thoughts skitter between bits of his routine, concern for Tim – always there somewhere, like a radio playing in another room – and anger with himself for that stupid lie he told Sylvia about writing again. He cycles through the projects he has abandoned over the last few years, something he has done with decreasing regularity since the last time he actually began something new. Turning onto James Stewart he decides none of them are salvageable. It’s time to trash them all and start fresh. Or maybe just do the first part, and find some other way to fill his time. He sees a dim shape – a possum? – shambling across a lawn. He yawns. Barbra Streisand, Burt Reynolds, Jason Robards, home.

  Inside his bungalow he puts on water for coffee, and as it heats he fetches a notebook and pencil from his suitcase. He could try and sleep, but he has an idea that he can make the disgust he feels about lying to Sylvia work for him: he’s going to write. But it won’t really be writing, he thinks, cautious as a hunter stalking deer. I’ll just bullet-point some ideas. It has been so long since he has written anything that the simple act of opening the notebook – old but unmarked, always to hand in case this moment should arrive – is exciting.

  Seated at the small kitchen table, steam curling from his coffee, the white page before him feels not like a barren waste, as he feared, but a field of possibility. What starts here as pencil marks, he thinks, has the potential to become rooms of laughter like the one he left a couple of hours ago. All he needs to do is begin. Just begin.

  He cannot do it. As if pencil and page are magnets with the same polarity, they refuse to meet. In desperation, Andy thinks of the advice an older comic once gave him, that when he had trouble coming up with new bits he would write out his old stuff first until, sooner or later, new material started to flow. But amnesia has taken hold. He can’t remember a single bit. He tries visualising old shows, when he was a real comic with his own material; he can see a room from his vantage on the stage: a dented microphone head, mildewed brickwork, a neon sign above the bar at the back of the room – he always looked for something like that to centre himself on as he turned his gaze to different parts of what was, beyond a few rows of upturned faces, virtual blackness. From out of this blackness he tries to force something. Anything.

  He cannot do it.

  There is a tapping.
Andy stands up, walks through to the living room and hits the porch light switch beside the front door – big as an iPad, for old and shaking hands. He cracks the door and sees a thin old man in a dressing gown. The light catches a few filaments of hair that arc from his bald scalp. He is statue-still, squinting in the sudden light. His mouth begins moving but Andy cannot hear words, only strained breath. The old man’s hands shake at his sides.

  ‘Hello,’ says Andy, opening the door wider. The old man is alone. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I’m back, Joe,’ the man says. His eyes are rheumy and searching. He takes a step backwards, then forwards.

  Andy sighs. Now this interruption has come he feels certain that he was on the verge of a major breakthrough.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he says. ‘I’m actually in the middle of something, so …’

  The man waves his hand as if to say, ‘Go right ahead,’ but stays standing on the threshold. Andy suspects if he closed the door in his face he would find him there, still muttering, when he opened it again in the morning.

  Andy sighs more loudly, with resignation this time. ‘You want to sit down? You want a drink or something? Cup of tea?’

  ‘It’s all bullshit,’ the man says conversationally, then turns and sits in one of the wicker porch chairs that face each other beside the front door. He crosses his legs, letting a long, towelling-slippered foot dangle.

  Andy looks up and down the street. The bungalows stand silver in the moonlight. The humidity feels like a large hand being held just in front of his face. The old man hums to himself. Something stirring. Maybe Beethoven.