Warnings from the Future

by Ethan Chatagnier

  He goes to the chain-restaurant bars to talk with the bartenders and maybe some crusty regulars. Every bartender is an undercover comedian. In that way, it will disappoint him the night the beautiful young girl—she says her name is Jenna—approaches him. Jenna won’t be able to tell him anything about the Mets. Jenna will have nothing interesting to say about the state of Nebraska. He could try to talk to her like a normal person, like the guy serving his cocktails, but shows are exhausting—an hour straight just talking under the lights, plus a fifteen-minute encore—and it’s so much work with young people discerning what parts of them are bland, what parts are posturing, what parts are genuine philosophies derived from their life experiences and what parts are just platitudes recycled from rock stars he’s too old to know anymore.

  So when he does the easy thing and switches back into comedian mode, he’ll know he’s going to take her to bed. That too is the easy thing, the decision not hard to explain to his friends or the guy behind the bar or even himself. My id had my superego in a headlock, he’ll tell people. She was young, hot. This will be just a moment after she’s told him directly: “I want you to fuck me.” That one bald sentence will be powerful enough to conjure an image of them in the act, an image with her in the center and him closer to the edge of the frame, out of the central focus, a blur of lumpy, pale negative space.

  When he turns into a performer his posture will straighten. His shoulders will uncoil, and he’ll seem a little taller.

  “How do you know I don’t have AIDS?” he’ll ask.

  “You don’t have AIDS.”

  “How would you know?”

  “It would have been in your set.”

  You’re absolutely right, he’ll think—such a horrible thing he could only deal with it by joking, and a wealth of jokes would stem from it. Even simple understatement would do it: AIDS, hand on his hip, wagging his head at the crowd, just my luck. So she has some insight, he’ll think, and he’ll want to tell her simply that it makes him sad how right she is, and at the same time to guard that truth from her. Hands off my suffering. Get your own: a first draft of a response he’ll immediately discard as too revealing.

  His hesitation will flush her with pride. Keeping him against the ropes will suddenly be more important than fucking him or learning a life lesson or acquiring a story to record in the online journal she updates in sporadic bursts. She’ll ask him to tell her a secret. He’ll fire back with “So what’s your angle, anyway? Child support? Paparazzi? Some kind of starfucker blog?” He’ll smile when he says it, but she’ll sense the hostility behind the question.

  “Naïveté,” she’ll say. “Plain and simple.”

  “Naïveté indeed. Were I to do the thing you said you want me to do, which is wrong on so many levels, you would see things you can’t unsee and feel things you can’t unfeel.”

  “Like being humped by a loaf of sourdough?”

  “Uncooked sourdough. Can you imagine that and want anything to do with it?”

  She will imagine it—something in all her planning she’s never done—him on top of her, grunting and sweating, his baggy midsection audibly slapping against hers, and find she’s not repulsed. Perhaps she should be repulsed, she’ll think, but she finds it endearing. In the scene she pictures, he’ll be shy and apologetic during sex, and she’ll comfort him and move against him and take the reins and touch his cheek. In that moment she’ll think she could be attracted to any body type, that under the right conditions or in the right mood she could be turned on by someone fat or scrawny, hopelessly short or dented with a weird concave chest. She’ll feel she understands suddenly how women with fat husbands can stand to go to bed with them, something that’s always mystified her before.

  “Yes,” she’ll say, simply, honestly.

  “Naïveté indeed,” he’ll say, touched by the sentiment, wanting more than anything to run away.

  He talks about fear during his set as well. “I’m scared of everything,” he says. “Spiders. Clowns. Dentists. Everyone’s scared of those things. Clown dentists—don’t ask. My dad had a dark sense of humor. Spider-clown dentists. I just thought of that, but it’s pretty fucking scary, right?”

  “Imagine a spider with a clown face, crawling toward you with a drill and that hook thing.”

  “Tell that to your kids and they’ll shit their pants.”

  “Other people’s babies are the scariest thing. Friends always want me to hold their babies, and I don’t want to do it. I just don’t want to. They’re too fragile. It’s because I have this weird fantasy—maybe fantasy is the wrong word—this idea that I’ll be holding the baby and it will just crack in half like an egg. And then they’ll look at me like, ‘Holy shit, what did you do?’ and I’ll be like ‘I don’t know, it just cracked in half.’ And they’ll be like ‘Babies don’t just crack in half.’ And I’ll just shrug like, ‘What can I say?’”

  “I’m scared of my life changing, because it feels like every decision I’ve made in my professional and personal life has been a huge mistake.” This part relies on a big shit-eating grin. The audience has to buy that this really is a source of amusement for him. Some jokes run on empathy. He suspects that many people, perhaps even most people, feel this way: that their life is a series of errors in judgment. He sees some of the heads in the front row nodding. The bad comedians, the jock comics, the shock comics, the goofsters, never do this—bond with their audience over a shared negative experience—but it’s this moment, he feels, that they’ll remember. It’s in the hush that settles in after the laughter. “If there’s a change coming down the pike,” he says, “it’s not going to be positive.” It’s the closest thing to a gift he can give them, the promise that all this can be laughed about.

  He’ll be too scared to undress Jenna in the hotel that night, scared that he’ll get the sudden urge to be physically rough with her, or that she’ll instinctively recoil when he touches his palm to her ribcage. So he’ll sit on the edge of the bed, untying his shoes like a husband getting home from work. She’ll stand there, tall in her leather boots, waiting for his next step. When he goes to his belt, still not looking at her, she’ll pull the blouse over her head, and he’ll take a small comfort in the way her tights reach so high up on her waist they cover her belly button and something about it looks silly. She’ll take off her boots to take off her tights, and standing in front of him in just her panties, she’ll ask him if he wants the boots back on. He’ll shake his head, still looking at the floor.

  His reluctance to take off his white underwear will be sad to her in a way that’s not endearing, but she’ll slide them off him anyway. He’ll tell her, “I don’t want to be on top.” He won’t go into detail, but he hates the idea of his gut hanging onto her flat belly. It’s fair enough with women over thirty-five, women ranging from poochy to just plain round, but it will seem like too awful a memory to brand onto a twenty-year-old girl who still believes in good in the world.

  Riding him will be an underwhelming experience for her. She will think that word exactly: underwhelming. He’s not repulsive, as he makes himself out to be, no look or smell of bread dough, just a normal guy in his forties with some extra weight on him. But she will want some intensity of emotion or a moment of humor—she loves to laugh during sex, but no boys can make it happen, and in fact none of them try. Instead she’ll find him constantly retreating. She’ll look for the mischievous glint that, during their exchanges at the bar, lit up his eyes, but he’ll have them squeezed shut as if anticipating a vaccine shot.

  After they finish, she’ll pull the condom off him, tie a knot in it, and throw it on the carpet near the waste bin. They’ll lie in tandem, facing the ceiling, their limbs not touching, two snow-angels too bored to keep going. Her mind will harken back to his routine from the show about sex between people over thirty, how deeply unsatisfying it is. She’ll think, He made it seem like it was funny. He’ll observe her disappointment and regret already that, if this was always going to turn out poorly,
he might at least have relished the experience. He’ll wish for another go, a chance to redeem himself. He’ll imagine her staying the night and him waking her up with kisses and caresses in the morning for round two. That’s not where this is going, he’ll know.

  “Now you know,” he’ll say.

  “Naïveté indeed,” she’ll say.

  “Maybe this is the first in your series of errors in judgment.”

  She’ll look into his eyes and smile gently. “How did you learn to laugh about it?”

  “I didn’t,” he’ll say. “I learned to fake it.”

  She’ll turn her face back up toward the ceiling, thinking hard about something, a connection her mind is trying to make. She’ll tell him, “When I played youth basketball, my coach always said, ‘When you compete, you either win or you learn.’” She’ll be flattered when this gets a belly laugh out of him, though she didn’t mean it as a joke.

  “That’s a good philosophy,” he’ll say. “But it’s a terrible thing to tell someone after sex.”

  She’ll laugh too. It will be the kind of laugh that makes her close her eyes, that rocks her in the ribs and curls her toes. This will be the first laugh they’ve shared that one hasn’t extorted from the other. He’ll laugh at her laughter, at the absurdity of her naked body lying there, rippling with it. A naked body, even one like hers, doesn’t look good laughing. It doesn’t have to.

  When he thanks the crowd and tells them how great they were and says good night, it’s a formality. There’s always an encore these days, and though sometimes he just wants to go back to his room or drop a few bucks on a cocktail, he’s not immune to the compliment. He sits backstage in a chair with armrests, letting his head roll back and bringing a bottle of water intermittently to his lips. He can hear it clearly: first amorphous cheering, then the chant—“Dov! Dov! Dov! Dov!”—then an accompaniment of stomps and claps in rhythm. He rides it like a high for ten minutes. The promoter comes by and tells him it was great, fantastic.

  He has a new energy when he returns to the stage. He always does, and he’s built the bit off that. He walks out with a big grin and some spring in the step.

  “You guys are the only people in my life who want me back when I go.”

  “When I was still married, I listened at the front door one time when I left. My wife said, ‘Love you,’ when I was headed out. Then after the door closed, she said, ‘I hope you get hit by a bus, you son of a bitch.’”

  “Well, I showed her.”

  “We had some good years, though. Ever try to hold onto something good? It’s like trying to hold onto a cat. A cat who hates you. Who has a moral objection. Now, cats are not easy to catch. But if you try and hold onto one, you are courting death. They’ll claw here: the carotid—here: the femoral. You’ll look like the end of a Scorsese film.”

  “Bad things, though, they cling to you. Anybody have a bad job?”

  He holds out the mike: some cheers, a lot of shouted yeahs, one louder and higher pitched than the others, screaming: “Tell it, brother.”

  “I will. I will tell it,” he says. “You been in that job a long time?”

  Laughter.

  “I know it,” he says. “My job is terrible.”

  “Bad jobs, they’re like those face-huggers from Alien. They jump on your face and hold on and shove something in your throat that you really don’t want in there. Bad jobs, bad girlfriends, bad boyfriends. That’s why, if you look back on your life, the only relationships you remember fondly are the short ones. You meet this amazing person, right? Then after a few weeks they get a sense of your personality and they’re like, ‘Fuck it, man. I’m outta here.’”

  “Bad things hold onto you longer. A bad marriage can transcend time and space.”

  “But good things last longer. Not while they’re going on, but the way they live in the rest of your life. You have a bad job, the day you quit, as soon as you walk out of that store or office or whatever, you get relief. When I go to my spider-clown dentist, I feel relieved as soon as I get up out of the chair. You stand up, and the fear evaporates.”

  “Good things, you can hold onto those forever. Some of you out there, I know, remember the first person you were in love with. It’s probably not the person you’re here with tonight.”

  “You have to look at your date now and deny it,” he says, grinning. “Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute.”

  “That’s a different kind of love, and you’re happy to have it. But sometimes, when he’s asleep and you aren’t, you think back on it, you remember that guy smiling at you. You remember holding hands running through a cornfield or some other Nicholas Sparks bullshit. And maybe there’s a sense of loss with it, but you’ve got it. Isn’t that amazing? You’ve still got it swimming around up there, along with that squeaker of a basketball game you won, or the first time you got high, or that time you went skinny dipping. Or that time you had sex with a sheep.”

  “No? Just me?”

  “It’s like a diamond you get to carry around. A mental photo album that doesn’t just have pictures but little slices of the feelings you felt in those moments. That’s what comedy is to me. Not necessarily the TV show and the big crowds, but the moments that planted the seed. The way my friends laughed at jokes I made in high school. No one else in my family could make my dad laugh. Just me. And it was this big, meaty laugh like you’d hear out of a drunk Viking. And I could summon it at will.”

  “He’s dead now, you know.”

  “Shit happens.”

  “But because I’ve got the memory—I mean, forty years later and I can remember just how it sounded—he isn’t.”

  This wrap-up isn’t funny, but it isn’t for them. He’s been giving to them for an hour and a half now. He needs one point where he takes something back, something for himself. Free counseling, he’ll say if anybody asks. One true good thing.

  An interviewer once asked Dov if he’d ever considered suicide, given how focused his act was on his own his own unhappiness. “Murder, yes. Suicide, no,” he’d answered. Another deflection. The words weren’t false, but the flippant way they came out was. That was the performer, casting no shadow. The times he was starting out and couldn’t get a paying gig; his dad’s long convalescence in a home; the months leading up to his divorce, with those hours of awful, dismissive paperwork: he’d been angry and overwhelmed and so, so unhappy, but he’d never wanted to do himself in. Not only had he not planned anything but he hadn’t thought or fantasized about it the way some people do. He’s estimated that he was more unhappy during those times than many people who actually made attempts.

  He’s thought about it since—you couldn’t say frequently, but often enough—not suicide, but why it’s so easy for him to say no to it, why for him it fails to exist in the realm of possibilities. It’s what he thinks about as he grabs his coat from the rack backstage, and what he’s often thought about after his encores this tour. The closing note forms a natural trench that his thoughts can’t avoid following.

  It’s cold enough that he turns up his collar before the door has slammed behind him. The cab he’s requested idles near the curb, chuffing exhaust in idyllic puffs that make him think of Christmas. A girl with a cigarette seems to be watching him from under the streetlight on the corner, her eyes following him without interest. A hot young thing from a different world than his. There’s the future and there’s the past, he thinks. He wants to arrive at some insight about the two, but after a minute the best he can come up with is Fuck ’em both. He gets in the cab, and they creep out onto the avenue, and maybe he’s being an old man about it, but the cars out on the road seem reckless tonight, some of their drivers drunk, some only tired, all of them collisions just waiting to happen. He gives the driver cross streets, and the man nods without saying anything. Dov hears a chattering, and for a moment thinks the man has a little radio in his ear before he recognizes it as a Bluetooth headset. Whoever is on the other end must be saying something funny, because the cab driver giv
es off a long, slow chuckle, so low and so dark it’s like he’s laughing in a different language.

  EVERY FACE IN THE CROWD

  Deckinger had a painting by Evan Durant in his foyer, one of the larger canvases, maybe four feet by six feet. How much it had cost him I didn’t know, but I knew other Durants, smaller Durants, had sold for more than thirty thousand. None of my friends could boast a foyer, let alone thirty large to decorate it. Rounding the corner into his living room I was confronted with a kind of optical mystery: the condo, which from its little brick façade should have been cozy if not cramped, was as spacious as the house I grew up in. That’s the type of magic money can make. A part of me hated coming to Beacon Hill, because I started to see price tags on everything: on the Durant, on Deckinger’s artisan dinner table and matching leather couches and the beveled lowball glass out of which he drank an amber liquid I didn’t want to know the price of. He had poured a glass for me as well. It tasted like a winter cake with candied fruit.

  “I don’t know my spirits very well.”

  “Cognac,” he said. “Paul Giraud.”

  He surprised me by having the tact not to talk up the drink or say how much he’d paid for the Durant. I’d brought a portfolio for him to look at, and I set it on the table. He flipped through it quickly, then said he’d thought I would bring some of the actual pieces.

  “Pumpkins?” I said. “You wanted me to haul pumpkins here on the T?”

  “How do you deliver the finished product?”

  “That’s just one at a time.”

  “Well, that’s thinking a bit small, isn’t it?”

  He wanted to play with me, to pique my artistic humors.

  “You looked me up, Mr. Deckinger. Saw one of my carvings in your neighborhood, right? Consider that a sample.”

  “Victor Newburn, and I really had to wring it out of him.”

  Newburn was Chair of Humanities at Harvard, and lived the next street over. He had commissioned me for a jack-o’-lantern mock-up of the famous statue of the Laocoön priest and his sons being strangled by Poseidon’s serpents, one of the more interesting assignments I’d taken. I’d ended up needing two pumpkins to encompass the horizontal spread of the tableau.