by Michael Ryan
But despite myself, my head started going. I had been working on a whole different routine. I had guessed Bucket might do something for me after Doris and I were married, and I was thinking of trying to do something more ambitious and cerebral, maybe a small theater piece like Spalding Gray but not neurotic-psychotherapy-autobiographical. I had been working on it on my computer. Which was at Doris’s. And I had given her back my key to her townhouse for her mother to use while she was out here for the wedding.
I heard the back door of Renate’s house open and her yell, “Sparky, get down. Krista, what is Sparky doing here?” It was obviously time to go over and get him. I got up to open my door and saw an enormous dark shadow behind the blinds. Then a hard knock. First thing I thought was: SWAT team. But I opened the door. It was a black man with his back to me, in a black T-shirt, with “Comic Relief” written in cursive across it—a size extra large T-shirt that on him was extra small. When he turned around he was my friend Charles Coleman.
“Hey, Robert,” he said. “Thought I’d come over to the white folks’ neighborhood and scare everybody.”
“You scared me,” I said.
“I always scare you. You’re easy.”
I invited him in. His head almost scraped the ceiling. Charles was my best friend in the business. He had been on that New Comics at the Improv video when I did the midget at the urinal. The man was funny. Much funnier than me that night. He had come out and stood silent at the mic for a full minute doing his bad black glare at the all-white audience as if he were about to beat the bejesus out of every one them for all their racist crimes. When everyone was crawling out of their seats, he said in his best homeboy accent:
“Don’t be scared, white people.
“Y’all don’t need to be scared of us big black men.
“We just like you.
“We want the same thing you want:
“White women.”
That joke made me his fan forever. It’s like Eddie Murphy’s Mr. Rogers parody, singing to the white audience, “Will you be my neighbor?”—only better, because of all the racist sexual myths. Charles got nailed for it, of course. Anybody who takes real risks in this business gets nailed. That’s why I was right on the edge of quitting myself: either I take more risks or I get out. Except they amounted to the same thing. If I took more risks I’d be getting myself out.
Charles checked out my place disapprovingly. “Why is it so dark in here, man? You hiding from somebody?”
“I’ll pull up the blinds.”
“No, no. Let’s go to that Starbucks Nicole Simpson used to hang out at.”
That’s at Seventh and Montana. Before we got in the car I checked with Renate about leaving Sparky. She answered the door and told me it would be fine. When I slid into Charles’s car, he asked, “Who’s that staring at us from the upstairs window?”
I didn’t have to look. I told him who it was.
“She goofy?” Charles asked.
I told him she was schizophrenic.
He said, “Maybe that’s why she’s not wearing a shirt. You white folks sure let it all hang out when we’re not around to watch you. Maybe you’re not all as stiff-assed as you seem.”
As we went into the Starbucks, I quoted to Charles my favorite opening sentences in American literature, from a book about OJ and Nicole by her best friend Faye Resnick: “ ‘Nicole and I had a dream. To become financially independent and open a Starbucks together.’ ”
“So this is the Starbucks,” Charles said. “Kind of like visiting the Vatican or something. What’s the most wastefully expensive thing they got? I’m gonna have that.”
“That’s the double mocha latte. If you want to be in the spirit of the place, you make it a double decaf mocha latte with nonfat milk.”
“No way,” Charles said. “I need all the fat and drugs I can get.”
We ordered two of them and sat down at a table outside. Late Sunday morning in Santa Monica, more people congregate at the coffee shops than at the churches, mostly singles in workout outfits, but a few couples with kids and dogs. There’s a lot of neon-glow spandex uplifting surgically enhanced body parts. Nobody older than twelve is overweight unless they’re married. If I gained five pounds in the wrong places a neighborhood intervention committee would show up at my door to confront me about my Food Issues. A line of Porsches (for the boys) and BMWs (for the girls) were double parked at the corner while their owners popped in and got their cappuccinos to go.
“It’s nice here,” Charles said, smiling. “My, feel that ocean breeze. Maybe I’ll buy myself a place over here. All I need to do is start a Mexican drug cartel. I’m going to give OJ a call for some real estate advice.”
“Is that why you came over, Charles, to look at real estate?”
“I came over to look at you,” he said, seriously.
“Hmm,” I said, unintentionally reminding myself of Sabine. I never said “Hmm.”
“ ‘Hmm,’ the man says,” Charles repeated. “I came over to look at you today because I didn’t see you on Friday night.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry you drove to Palos Verdes in all that rain for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing. We got a free dinner and two primo bottles of champagne to take home.” Charles had gone with his wife, Marla, whom he had been married to since college. They had four kids, the oldest of whom was about to start college herself. He was a family man straight through, but didn’t let you know that until he trusted you.
“How was the dinner?”
“Dinner was good. You must have heard about it already.”
“I have. From Don.”
“Yeah, that guy’s a brick. He was sitting next to me. I didn’t know anybody else and I hardly knew him. When it comes around to his turn when they’re roasting you, he gets up and says, ‘Robert is my best friend. I love him. I won’t say I’m ashamed of him because I don’t know why he’s not here.’ Then he sits down. Blew everybody away. Kind of took the wind out of the Robert Roast. Until I got my turn.”
“What did you say?”
“I said one sentence, ‘I happen to know for a fact that Robert was the real assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King.’ Then I sat down. Nobody makes a sound. They thought I was serious. And nuts. But I can see they’re doing the math in their heads.”
“I was nine.”
“Sure. Marla’s laughing her butt off into her napkin. Then everybody gets it. Pretty slow though. Slow and lazy. But I hear y’all got big dicks.”
“I step on mine all the time,” I said.
“Well, you stepped on it this time, I’ll tell you. I wouldn’t want to have that Doris woman mad at me. No, I wouldn’t.”
He took a swig of his latte and left a white mustache on his lip, which he licked off in a swipe. “Amazing they get four bucks for this drink,” he said. “It must be like the tulip mania in Holland. When was that? Sixteen hundred something.”
“I don’t remember,” I said abstractly. “I had a lot of bookings that year.”
“So what are you going to do now?” Charles asked. It wasn’t curiosity either. It was concern, like Madge. I was pulling a lot of sympathy over this career crisis. I should have thought of it earlier.
“I’ve got some business coming up this week. Bucket just called. He dropped me already. And he got me an HBO special.”
“I heard,” Charles said.
“How’s that possible?” I asked. “I just heard myself ten minutes ago.”
“You been in LA long enough to know you can’t take a piss in this town without everybody hearing about it before you shake off your wanky. So, you going to do it?”
“What else? Should I not do it?”
“That’s a possibility.”
“Why’s that? You know something I don’t?”
He put his cup down on the table. “Could be a set-up.”
“How? What do you mean?”
“It may be nothing. I may be paranoid. But I’d want control of choosing th
e audience. He gets you the wrong audience, you bomb, you’re done.”
“I’m done anyway,” I said. “Without Bucket. Plus I think I’ve had it. I’m burnt out. I mean, where do I go? You’re doing your own thing, you love it, it’s working for you. HBO might be my chance to do something good, which is not to say it will be a hit.”
“See, that’s your problem,” Charles said. “You want to do something good. What does that mean? It means you want to do something you think is good. You want to please yourself. But that’s not what comedy is. Comedy is for the audience, not for you.”
I thought about that. “So I should do more bathroom jokes? Got some real edgy ones for me?”
“No, you’re still missing the point. What the audience laughs at is funny. That’s what you leave in. What they don’t laugh at you take out. Trick is you got to find the right audience.”
“What planet do I find it on?”
“Maybe not this one. I didn’t say you could make a living from it. You’ve been jumping over square one is your problem. That’s why you’re dying, Robert. You’re isolated. You’re cut off from other people. You’re cut off at the root. I’ve seen that for a long time.”
It was an odd moment, sitting there with all the beautiful people and shiny cars, the breeze coming up Montana Street off the ocean. For all the things that had happened in the last two days, including breaking somebody’s heart, I hadn’t felt like crying. But what Charles said made me see I was lost. I guess he saw the effect it had.
“So I got a proposition for you,” he said. “That’s what I came over to talk to you about.”
“What’s that?” I asked quietly.
“An all-black comedy special from the Apollo. Six comics. I’d like you to be one of them.”
I looked at him. He wasn’t kidding.
“Charles,” I said. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you about myself.”
“What’s that, bro?”
“I’m not black.”
“You’re shittin’ me. You’re not black?”
“I’m really not, Charles. I’m kind of surprised you haven’t noticed. I thought you were a perceptive guy.”
“That’s the beauty of it,” he said loudly, slapping the table and making everybody around us jump. (They had been hyperaware of him as it was.) “That’s the joke. An all-black comedy special, the m.c. is black, the audience is black, there’s not a white face in sight anywhere, we open with two or three black comics, then you come out. No warning. You just step out there. There ain’t anybody whiter than you, Robert. You dig it?”
“Sounds terrifying,” I said.
“Yeah, well, now you know how I felt at just about every gig I used to do. And I was just a baby. But the thing is, it will be funny. You start off way up, way higher than normal. You’re in a groove before you begin. Everybody’s laughing already before you open your mouth. So you stand there for a while, acting confused. Then you open with something like, ‘This isn’t the Yale Club?’ Like you got the wrong driving directions. Then you do a race bit. How often does a white comic do race at all, much less from this angle, in front of this audience? Has it ever happened? I don’t think so. You can break some ground here. You can get into some whole new material. We’ll get somebody to video it too. What do you say?”
“It doesn’t sound like a career path to me, Charles. I don’t see how it fits into what you were just saying about audience. I mean, I’m not going to be the black person’s white comedian.”
“Absolutely right. But you don’t know what it’s going to do for you, right? Question is, is it a good thing in itself? And the answer to that is yes.”
I smiled at him and he gave me a whatthefuckdoesthatmean look and leaned back in his chair. By this time we had everybody’s attention. There was a handsome young couple at the next table with a baby and an Afghan hound. I said to them, “What do you think I ought to do?”
The man said, “Excuse me?”
I said, “Do you think I should accept my friend’s offer or not?”
He picked up on it. “How much is he paying you?” he asked.
“That’s a good question. How much are you paying me?” I asked Charles.
“Not that much,” Charles said.
“Not that much,” I said to the man.
“Then the answer is no,” the man said.
“Thank you,” I said to him. “You ready to go, Charles?”
“Why isn’t he paying you better?” the man said.
“Excuse me?” I was the one surprised this time. Didn’t the guy see the joke was over?
“Why isn’t he paying you better?” the man repeated. “Is he too poor? Or doesn’t he like you?”
“He doesn’t like me,” I answered. “And I don’t blame him. You ready to go, Charles?”
Charles didn’t answer. As we were crossing the street to his car, Don pulled up in his white Volvo station wagon. Charles tapped on Don’s hood and Don waved, then Charles went ahead and unlocked his own car. I stuck my head into Don’s window as it glided down. Jeb and Emma were strapped into the backseat, both with four-pound banana splits on their laps. Their T-shirts already looked like action paintings.
“Somebody’s getting a bribe from dad,” I said into the car.
“No fighting for one hour. Their hourly rate is more than your lawyer’s,” he said, handing me a sealed envelope. “On second thought, it’s not. Nobody’s hourly rate is more than your lawyer’s. That’s his office address. Your appointment’s at eight thirty tomorrow morning. Give me a call when he’s through with you.”
“The one call I’m legally entitled to make?” I asked.
“Not going to happen. If the cops were going to bust you, you’d already be in jail.”
I noticed Charles was sitting in his car with his elbow on the steering wheel and his chin on his fist. Jeb had been whispering to Emma in the backseat and now she leaned out of her window and said to Charles, “Are you really Shaquille O’Neal?”
Charles didn’t move. He just shifted his eyes when she spoke to him. “No, honey,” he said.
Jeb laughed uproariously. “You’re such a liar,” Emma screamed at him.
“Back to the war zone,” Don said. “Stay cool,” he added, addressing himself as well as me, then drove off.
I forgot to ask him if Francine had a key to Doris’s townhouse so I could get my computer. My brain was on overload. I was lucky I didn’t walk off a pier, except I wasn’t on a pier. I walked over to Charles’s car and got in.
“That bit with the guy at the next table wasn’t funny,” he said through his teeth when I slid in and closed the door.
“I’m sorry, Charles. I’m a little strung out right now.”
He didn’t say anything but his jaw got even tighter.
“The Apollo gig’s a great idea,” I said hurriedly. “I appreciate your thinking of me, and I’m probably going to do it just because I could work with you, but I need a few days to think it over.”
“That’s fine,” he said. “But let’s get it clear. Number one, I don’t care why you do it. Number two, I’m asking you instead of any other white comic in the universe because I think you would do it better than any other white comic in the universe. So it’s totally selfish. Number three, that bit with the guy at the next table was disrespectful to me and almost got ugly. Shows an ugly part of you, Robert, that I don’t like. The part that just doesn’t get that other people are people. Not functions. Not joke-functions, career-functions, fiancée-functions, or your one-black-friend-in-the-business functions. So whatever happens please don’t do anything like that with me again. Ever.”
I apologized again, then apologized probably five more times in the five minutes to my house. I didn’t mention Sabine or my potential problem with the LAPD. I said nothing about Krista or the bottle of Demerol or the Korean girl hauled out in a Hefty bag. Plus I hadn’t slept since I woke up in Baja to find Sabine gone. There were plenty of reasons I was strung out. I wanted
to say, “Charles, if you had a weekend like I just had, you’d be strung out, too.” But I didn’t. He was much too sane to ever have a weekend like I just had.
8.
The HBO contract in a cardboard envelope was stuck inside my screen door. Krista had signed for it while I was off with Charles, printing her name in wobbly block letters about two inches high. It was about noon. Forty-eight hours ago I had hopped in the car to cash a check for my honeymoon. My future had been clear, or at least only moderately murky. I had never heard of anyone named Sabine. Now all I wanted was sleep. I had left Sparky with Krista, but I thought I’d just take a little nap before I went over to Renate’s to get him.
When I woke up from my little (seventeen-hour) nap, it was five a.m. Monday. I jumped awake. I was having a dream in which I needed to do something extremely urgent but nobody would tell me what it was. I went to my car to go buy some Weight Watchers lemon chicken and when I backed out of my driveway I was on the 405 going backward down the steep hill coming from the valley into LA and I realized I was also in the backseat (my Z doesn’t have a backseat) and I couldn’t reach the wheel and was going faster and faster about to crash. Then I woke up. My heart was slamming as if it were trying to pop through my chest. I lay there a minute, trying to calm down, to become conscious of my breathing and the silence, the physical sensations of the bed and pillow—to enter the moment as it is and turn off the noise in my head. It’s your basic meditation technique. This sounds like a joke, but I go to a Vietnamese holy man sometimes for advice. Don’s wife, Francine, actually put me onto him. He’s got an office in a chic art deco building on Second and Wilshire, where she has her office. His name is Tran Hanh. He has the shaved head, the orange robes, the funny high voice, the whole bit, and is very witty about being a Western entrepreneur of Eastern wisdom. Somehow he can walk that tightrope. Anyway, on one of his videos, when asked what he would do if he had only one minute to live, he said, “I would enjoy my breathing.” I guess you can believe that or not, but when I’m panicked, I try to enjoy my breathing.
