My Year with Eleanor

by Noelle Hancock

  Roids looked at me in surprise. “What situation?”

  “You with your legs spread out like you’re home on the couch watching the game. And I’m over here riding sidesaddle in my own seat. I mean, what’s that all about?”

  He shrugged his beefy shoulders helplessly. “It’s because of my balls, lady! I gotta make room for my balls!”

  I arched an eyebrow. “Well, I gotta have room for mine, too, honey.”

  Roids laughed. “I like you. You got sass, lady.” He brought his knees in until they were facing straight ahead and I relaxed my legs again. What is it with men and their testicles? I thought. Guys act as if balls are celebrities and their thighs are bodyguards clearing everyone to the side. (“Out of the way, people! Give them some air!”) Testicles are like the Olsen twins of anatomy—but with cleaner hair. Suddenly, I had another bit.

  “So when do I get to hear your jokes?” Matt asked a few days later. We’d just had dinner at our favorite French bistro and were walking back to his apartment, holding hands and swinging our arms.

  “At the show.” I’d considered testing my material on Matt, but I kept thinking of an essay I’d written the year before. I’d planned to send it to a newspaper column that published reader submissions but had asked him to edit it first. When I’d handed it to him, it was eighteen hundred words; when he’d handed it back to me, all but six hundred words had been crossed out. He’d cut so much that I lost the narrative thread and had no idea how to fix it. I’d also lost my nerve to submit the earlier version.

  He dropped my hand and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “What? I don’t get to hear them first?” He looked so genuinely hurt that I relented.

  I launched into my routine: “So porn star Jenna Jameson had twins this year. Which reminds me of this article I read recently in In Touch magazine. They were interviewing celebrities about their tattoos and Jenna confessed she once almost got a Hello Kitty tattooed on her wrist. But she decided not to because she thought, ‘How would I explain that to my grandchildren?’ ” I paused. “Really, Jenna? That’s what you’re worried about explaining to your grandchildren?” I looked at him expectantly.

  He didn’t laugh and actually cringed a little.

  “Oh come on! That’s my best joke!”

  After a few seconds, he said, “Maybe if you said it slower?”

  “Okay, never mind! No more jokes for you.”

  Before bed that night I swallowed one sleeping pill and decided to throw in a half of another pill for good measure. As the contest approached, my sleeping pill intake had slowly started to rise. When I wasn’t getting enough sleep, my head was foggy and I couldn’t write my routine—or anything else. And I was also training to climb a mountain and couldn’t exercise if my body was fatigued. It was a catch-22. I couldn’t stop taking the pills because I had to train for Kilimanjaro, but I needed to stop the pills before I got to Kilimanjaro. I placed a pill on my kitchen counter and positioned a knife across the middle. When I pressed down, one of the halves went rocketing onto the floor. Damn. They’re going rogue now? I should’ve taken this as a sign. Even the pills didn’t want me taking them. Instead I got out a flashlight. Then I was on my knees, one side of my head pressed against the floor, sweeping the beam back and forth. The addict in me couldn’t let that precious rogue half pill go to waste. Finally I saw it, nestled amid the dirt and a ball of lint beneath my fridge. I blew on it, rinsed it off, and popped it into my mouth. When I tipped my head back and swallowed, I saw my parakeets staring down at me.

  “I know how this looks,” I said.

  Meanwhile, Matt’s reaction spooked me enough that I put off practicing the routine until the contest was a week away. I couldn’t even bring myself to say my lines out loud when I was alone in my apartment. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, I suppose. Procrastination is the lazy cousin of fear. “When we feel anxiety around an activity, we postpone it—whether it’s doing our taxes, working on a project we’re not sure we can handle, or having a painful conversation,” Dr. Bob once told me. “You’ll never feel ready. You have to do things now—even if you don’t feel ready.”

  Now that I knew the two were related, whenever I caught myself putting something off, I looked for ways to make the dreaded activity less intimidating. If I was suffering from writer’s block, I’d transcribe passages from my favorite books until inspiration struck. Sometimes it helps if you start with someone else’s words. So I turned to one of my favorite comedians, Jim Gaffigan. I popped in my headphones and cued up his comedy album on my iPod. I grabbed my hairbrush off my bedside table and stood in front of the mirror. Performing Gaffigan’s routine was less threatening because I wasn’t judging the material.

  “Am I the only one who finds it odd that heaven has gates? GATES?” I repeated along with Jim, mimicking his incredulous tone. “What kind of a neighborhood is heaven in? What, you die and go to a gated community? Are the gates really necessary? Are they like, ‘Yeah, we got a lot of kids sneaking in and using the pool. Getting those gates wasn’t easy. We had to go down to hell and get a contractor and everything.’ ”

  When I was sufficiently loosened up, I tried a few lines from my first bit. My voice sounded high pitched and uncertain. Eleanor had this problem when she started public speaking. Her voice, which was high to begin with, got higher as she became increasingly uneasy. Instead of making her points forcefully, she’d trail off with a nervous giggle. A vocal coach taught her to lower her pitch during speeches. High vocal tones suggest anxiety and shrillness while warmer, lower tones convey control and authority.

  I cleared my throat and repeated the bit again, using a deeper, casual tone. Better. I got out my digital tape recorder I used to interview celebrities and performed my entire six-minute act. Then I played it back and listened. I rushed through my lines, as if I was trying to get as far away from them as possible.

  I called Mark Anthony Ramirez, the comedy mentor assigned to me by the people who ran the contest. Each journalist was paired up with a professional comic who would field any questions we had about stand-up. Mark Anthony had performed at every major comedy club in New York so I trusted his judgment.

  “The most important component of stand-up is projecting confidence when you’re onstage,” Mark Anthony said.

  “But I’m not confident onstage!”

  “Then pretend you are. Fake it till you make it. As soon as the audience senses you’re not confident, you’ve lost them.”

  “Or maybe they’ll laugh more out of pity?” I asked hopefully.

  “If the performer is nervous, the audience is going to be nervous for that person. People laugh when they feel at ease, and people feel at ease with someone who projects an aura of self-control.”

  “So crapping my pants onstage is out of the question?”

  He chuckled. “You’ll do great. Oh, but make sure you know your routine backward and forward because when you get onstage, you’ll be so juiced up that you’ll probably blank out a bit.”

  Blank out? My public speaking specialty. Stand-up comedy was one of the hardest forms of public speaking because you couldn’t just go onstage with a general sense of your talking points and wing it. In stand-up you had to get to the jokes in as few sentences as possible before the audience lost patience. Your routine had to be razor sharp. Forgetting one line or having even one word out of place could ruin a joke. Six minutes was a lot of material to memorize. Mark Anthony had me read my routine over the phone.

  “I have to tell you,” he said when I finished, “of all the people I’ve seen perform in this contest over the last few years, you’re by far the most raunchy and in your face. It’s risky. I hope you can pull it off.”

  I knocked loudly, struggling to be heard over the TV blaring so loudly that I could hear it in the hallway. Matt opened his apartment door wearing boxers with tiny bulldogs printed on them and the wire-rimmed glasses he only w
ore while lounging around on weekends.

  “Hey! I thought you were at home rehearsing for the show!” His expression turned to concern. “Are you okay, honey? You look a little . . . overwrought.”

  I forced my mouth into a smile. “I’m fine!” I said, a little too brightly. “I just want to run an idea by you.”

  Matt was the most rational person I knew. If my conscience were to come to life in human form and be given a ridiculously good head of hair, it would look like Matt. If I could get Matt on board with my plan, then I could justify it to myself.

  “Everyone is so excited to watch you perform tomorrow night,” Matt said as I plopped down on his couch. “What time should we get there for good seats?”

  How about never? I thought. Does never work for you? Ignoring the question, I asked. “Did I ever tell you when I decided to be a writer?”

  He shook his head.

  “I was a freshman in high school English, and our lesson that day was on satire. My teacher divided us into pairs and told us to work together to draft our own satirical essay. My partner was the class clown, Jon. He was busy goofing off, so I ended up writing the whole thing myself. When it was time to read aloud, Jon read one half and I read the other. The students were falling out of their chairs laughing at Jon’s part, but my part fell completely flat. Shakespeare was right: all the world’s a stage. But some of us are meant to be performers and others are meant to be writers. That’s when I knew I was meant to be a writer.”

  Matt eyed me skeptically. “Where are you going with this?”

  “It’s just—” I avoided his gaze. “There’s a reason they never cast me in the school plays and stuffed me in the back of the chorus—and it’s not because I’m tall. There’s a reason I’m bad on TV. I already know I’m not a good performer. Why do I have to get up there and show everyone else, too? What will that accomplish? Maybe the point of this project is that I don’t conquer all of my fears, but I accept my shortcomings?”

  His expression softened. “Baby—”

  “There’s even an Eleanor quote about this.” I removed a piece of paper from my back pocket and read, “ ‘Perhaps one of the most difficult things any of us has to do is to be able to say clearly, “There is a limitation in me. Here is a case where, because of some lack of experience of some personal incapacity, I cannot meet a situation.” ’ So, you see, I think Eleanor would take my side here—Jesus, could that TV be any louder?” I said, turning toward the television set across from us. I snatched up the remote and stabbed at it with my fingers, looking for the power button. Instead, the screen turned to snow and the crackling sound of static roared from the TV. “Oh, just make it stop already!”

  Matt gently pulled the remote from my hand. With one press of a button the TV darkened and silence filled the room. Tears sprang to my eyes, and he became a kaleidoscope of Matts swirling before me. “I don’t want to do this!”

  “I know it’s scary.” He reached for me. I collapsed against him and let him hold me while I bawled. It was one of those shuddering cries that bordered on hyperventilation.

  “Haven’t I put myself out there enough this year?” I gasped between sobs. “Haven’t I embarrassed myself enough and taken enough risks? Can’t I keep this one last shred of dignity? I’m exhausted, Matt. I’m tired of being scared all the time.”

  “I know you are, but twisting Eleanor’s quotes can’t get you out of this. Only you can. But personally, I don’t think you should. Think of all the scary things you’ve done this year. Were any of them as bad as you thought they’d be?”

  I sniffled and wiped my face. “No.”

  “In fact, you enjoyed them, right? Weren’t you just telling me that, with the exception of shark diving, you’d do every one of them again?”

  “Yes,” I admitted grudgingly, resigned to my fate.

  He smiled down at me and stroked my back. “I believe in you, honey. You went skydiving, remember? This can’t be scarier than skydiving.”

  “Yes, it can,” I mumbled against his chest. “In skydiving you can only die once.”

  Comic Strip Live was crammed in the middle of a miscellaneous block of delis and bars on the Upper East Side. The walls of the foyer were covered in framed black-and-white headshots of comedians who’d performed here. Among the ones I saw when I walked in: Jerry Seinfeld, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, and George Carlin.

  The main room smelled vaguely of cigarettes, though smoking in New York bars was outlawed years ago. At the front, a circle of light formed a bull’s-eye over the stage. I was surprised by its smallness. It was a glorified step, maybe five feet wide. Except for the strip of faux brick wall behind the stage, the room was painted crimson. So you can’t see the blood on the walls, I thought.

  Earlier that day I’d asked Chris—who did improv comedy in college—if he had any last-minute advice. “If not that many people show up, when you get onstage ask the audience, ‘Hey, who brought in all these chairs?’ ” I definitely wouldn’t need Chris’s line. There were about two hundred people jammed around the various rectangular tables.

  There were to be ten performers that night, all of us in either print or TV journalism. We were corralled in a side alcove, separate from the audience. I introduced myself to the others and took a seat in a red leather banquette in a quiet corner where I could go over my routine in my head. I was having a love-hate relationship with the passage of time. Every minute that brought me closer to my biggest fear also brought me closer to the end of my biggest fear.

  In the club’s dim lighting I could see Matt had staked out a corner with about thirty of my friends—old work colleagues, college buddies, Matt’s college buddies, and of course Chris, Jessica, and Bill. The sight of them gathered here in support was so moving that I had to blink back tears. At the same time, my heart quivered, knowing that if I bombed, it wouldn’t be in front of a group of strangers I’d never see again.

  A heavyset Latino guy wearing a black leather jacket, a baseball cap, and small gold hoop earrings came over and held out his hand.

  “Noelle? Mark Anthony. Nice to finally meet you in person. You’re third in the lineup, by the way.”

  “Good, I’ll get it over with quickly,” I said, while simultaneously texting Matt the number so he’d know when to expect me. “I don’t know why I’m so nervous. It’s only six minutes of my life, right?”

  “Five, actually,” Mark Anthony said.

  I looked up abruptly from my BlackBerry. “What?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. Apparently I was wrong when I told you your routine should be six minutes. The emcee just told me you guys only get five minutes.”

  I was momentarily relieved. One less minute I’d have to be onstage. Then I realized what this meant.

  As if reading my thoughts, Mark Anthony said, “So you’ll need to cut two bits from your routine. Want anything from the bar?”

  I shook my head, dumbly, unable to speak. My mind raced. The whole routine had been carefully constructed with seamless transitions from one bit to the next. It had taken me a week to memorize it. Cutting two bits would throw everything else off. I reached into my purse and pulled out my routine, neatly typed up on three sheets of computer paper. I scanned it quickly, frantically flipping the pages. I could play it safe and cut the two most vulgar bits. At least I wouldn’t have to worry as much about offending people.

  “Does anyone have a pen?” I called out desperately.

  A passing waitress extracted a blue ballpoint from her apron and handed it to me. Noting my panicked expression, she said, “Keep it, honey.”

  I went to strike a line through the vulgar bits, but when I pressed the tip of the pen into the paper, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even though they were the most risky, they also had the potential for the biggest laughs. Before I lost my nerve, I turned the page and struck out my bit about baby terrorists and the one about guys sit
ting spread-eagle on the subway.

  The emcee, a cute dark-haired guy in his thirties with a faint Brooklyn accent, took the stage to warm up the crowd. All the while I was feverishly scrawling new transitions to fill the holes left by the deleted bits. A few minutes later he introduced the first comic, a political reporter for the New York Post. His opening line: “Okay, I’m a Catholic, West Indian black Republican. Anyone else here?” Silence. “Ah, I thought not.” The crowd guffawed.

  I tried to practice my routine, but I only got as far as the opening line and then stopped. Oh my God, I wasn’t even onstage and I was already blanking out! I was clutching my routine so hard between my hands that the pages were puckering. These sheets of paper were my safety net. If I took them up there and read from them, I’d be sure not to have any awkward blunders. I’d also basically disqualify myself. Everyone else had their routines memorized. There was no way I could win if I used my notes. A producer for CNN was up now. Her delivery was incredibly deadpan and she opened with, “Can I ask you guys a question? Is it wrong to gorge yourself on pizza and ice cream while watching The Biggest Loser?” Her routine was getting a lot of laughter from the audience, but I could barely hear over my breathing, which was steadily increasing in both frequency and pitch.

  Mark Anthony returned from the bar swigging a beer and gave me a friendly punch in the arm. “You’re up next, kid.”

  Dr. Bob had once told me that when animals and humans feel threatened, we experience an adrenaline rush. Adrenaline is a performance enhancer, there to give us the energy to either dive in and persevere or escape. How we react is known as the fight-or-flight response. I chose flight.

  “I can’t do this,” I whispered to Mark Anthony. “I’m not ready.”

  He looked at me for a moment while rubbing his goatee. “Okay, I think I can move you down in the lineup and buy you some time.”

  “Move me. Please.” He hurried off to alert the emcee.