The Funny Man (10 page)

Even when there is not a tournament currently going on, I can turn on my television at any random time of day and within forty-five minutes she will be there on-screen urging people to buy something, something that she dearly loves and believes in. My favorite is the commercial for the hamburgers where she is on the court, smacking balls over the net with all of her power and grace on display, when suddenly, in midair, one of the balls turns into a half-pound “chunk burger” and she drops her racket and grabs it out of the air, gripping it so the condiments (ketchup, mustard, grilled onions, jalapeño-jack cheese, roast beef bits, Parma ham, sautéed mushrooms, avocado, and a single pineapple ring) are clearly visible, bursting from beneath the bun. The soundtrack kicks in, seventies soul, seduction music, organ and wah-wah guitar, and as she opens her mouth and takes a bite, the condiments spill down the front of her pristine white top, leaving a trail between her modest, pert breasts, but she does not care, no sir, she is under the spell of this hamburger. For the moment, her life revolves around this hamburger; she is the chunk burger’s captive and she loves it. She simply can’t get enough of this chunk burger. If an asteroid from space impacted the Earth, threatening the extinction of the human race, she still would not be distracted from this burger. If piranhas were working their way up from her toes, she would not pay heed because of this burger. If fire were threatening to consume her, no sweat, got the burger. You can tell by the way she licks the lingering grease off her lips.

The commercial ends with the tagline, “can’t live without it,” and her performance is convincing. The commercial is so good that millions of people seek it out and pass it on to their friends, telling them that this is something to see.

Even though I could do this too, it’s more fun, more meaningful when it happens organically, without design, so as morning comes, I turn on the television and idly scratch at the monitoring device as I wait to see what I can’t live without.

10

T
HE FUNNY MAN
and his wife are embarrassed by the ritual, would never tell anyone else about it, but first they’d come to love it and then they’d come to need it. In the beginning it was just weekly. One of them would look at the other across the breakfast table and say, “Do you want to call?”

“Should we?” the other would say.

“Why not?”

“Didn’t we just do it the other day?”

“A week ago two days from now, actually.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Okay.”

And the funny man would stand and get the cordless phone and bring it back to the table and invite his wife from her seat onto his lap. He would cradle her across his legs as she steadied herself with a hand draped across his shoulders. They both had the number memorized, but it was also on autodial, and the funny man would hit the button and listen to the ten-note tune and once he heard the ring and entered the account number and pass key (their wedding anniversary) at the appropriate prompt, he would place the phone between him and his wife, holding the speaker up near their pressed-together ears.

What they had discovered is that at a certain point, money makes money and then it makes more money and after that, still more money. At that point there was only one account and the money flowed in automatically and grew as if by magic, and the phone number was a special automated system where one could call and get the account balance for that day recited to them by a pleasant sounding computerized woman. Even though they continued to pay their bills: mortgage, utilities, diaper service, cleaning help, meal delivery, etc… . the amount was larger each and every time.

After hearing the number, the funny man and his wife would look at each other wide-eyed, astonished. How does one have more money despite still spending money on things like nonstick pans and a pool table and a convection oven and that one weekend in the mountains where they rented the cabin and each cabin had its own outdoor tub fed by the natural springs and the cabins were strategically placed in relation to each other and the natural foliage and no two people since Adam and Eve had spent more time naked.

Usually after the ritual one of them said how “lucky” they were and the other nodded, offering their lips to seal the agreement with a kiss.

At some point, it became daily, something they both needed to get started, and sometimes it was done in the bathroom as they brushed their teeth, or over the kitchen sink as the breakfast dishes were rinsed, or as they worked together to stuff the child into that day’s clothes.

On one day, a fair bit down the road after they’d moved into the second house, where even the closets were like rooms, it was the wife’s turn to declare themselves lucky.

She is in the bathroom and because the funny man is in the bedroom, sitting up in the bed flipping through channels on the television, she says it loudly into the mirror as she clamps a device on her eyelashes.

“We sure are lucky,” the funny man’s wife says.

“What?”

“I said, we’re lucky.”

“What?” This house is large enough that a person in the bathroom cannot be heard in the bedroom without shouting.

“Lucky!”

“I can’t hear you,” the funny man says, muting the television. His wife appears in the bathroom doorway. “I said, we sure are lucky.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“What do you mean, what do I mean?”

“I mean, do you really think we’re lucky or are you just saying that?”

“We say it every day.”

“But do you believe it?”

“We’re pretty fortunate, I think, considering,” she says, turning back into the bathroom.

The funny man jumps from the bed and follows his wife into the bathroom, fishing his penis from his fly and relieving himself as he speaks. “Considering what?”

“Considering everything,” she says, still looking in the mirror. “Can’t you wait until I’m done?”

The funny man extends the show of peeing, swirling the stream around the bowl, grunting out the last few squirts before giving the works a vigorous shake and tucking it back through his fly. “Not really,” he says. “Are you interested in my prostate exploding like the
Hindenburg
?”

“That’s not funny,” his wife says.

The funny man follows his wife back into the bedroom where she searches through the closet for the right pair of shoes. “What if I told you that I don’t think we’re lucky?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“What if I told you that luck has nothing to do with what we are?”

The funny man’s wife bends over to place her shoes on her feet and he steals a glance down the front of her blouse, which makes him want to forget the argument he is for sure trying to have. “What do you mean?” she says.

“I mean, I think our circumstances are not so much due to luck, but to hard work and vision.”

The funny man’s wife steps toward him and runs the front of her hand gently down the right side of his face and then the back of her hand across the left side of his face. “I’ve got to go. Let’s talk about it when I get home.”

T
HE FUNNY MAN
spends the day preparing to talk about it when his wife gets home.

First he looks up
luck
in the dictionary and sees that it has to do with
chance
. He looks up
fortune
and sees that it means pretty much the same thing as
luck
and that essentially they both mean things happening “without design,” things that are “fated.” Things that were meant to happen
no matter what
.

The funny man decides to break down the issue. He goes to the office supply store and purchases an easel, a large pad of white paper, and three different colored markers.

At the top of the first page in black he writes
money
. He asks himself, Is the steadily growing account growing because of luck? No, it is growing by design as a function of sound fiscal planning rooted in the deep traditions of capitalism. Is contemporary American capitalism a matter of luck? Definitely not. It is a matter of having proved itself a superior basis for commerce. Just ask the
former
Soviet Union. Below the word
money
he writes
not luck
in blue.

He turns the page and writes
the thing
at the top. What about the thing, which is what has produced the seed money that is now growing on its own and continues to provide ongoing employment in front of sizable crowds for which the funny man is paid handsomely? Is this lucky? The funny man thinks on this for awhile, remembering back to the moment it came to him, and no, this was not luck, inspiration perhaps, but inspiration is 90 percent perspiration and perspiration implies work, which is not luck.

Because he sees that he could easily run out of paper, rather than turning the page, beneath
the thing
he writes
the boy
. His son had inspired the thing—he’s said that in the interviews. Is that lucky? Not really. Perhaps if the boy had been adopted it would be a sign of luck, pure chance handing them just the right little baby boy, but no, this is
his
son, product of his loins and his wife’s loins, or his loins and some other part of his wife, the female equivalent of loins. This is not luck so much as good planning, or maybe chemistry, which is in the realm of science, and is, therefore, not luck.

What about the boy’s general good health and well-being, that he had been born with a hand that he could try to shove in his mouth? This is not luck, the funny man figures. Sure, people with retarded children with flippers instead of hands might be unlucky, but the rest who don’t, like him and his wife, aren’t lucky, they are simply some word that means what has happened is what should happen under normal circumstances. Call it “the odds.”

Now, he was wearing a condom when the boy was conceived. That’s true. Generally, society would hold that condom failure as unlucky, a bad break (ha ha ha), but the child is undeniably a good thing. Wouldn’t that then be a stroke of luck?

The funny man stands in front of the easel, chewing on the end of the marker as he looks at
condom failure
. He writes a question mark in red next to it. After a time, beneath it he adds
wife’s
sexiness
. It was the wife’s sexiness that led to the initial encounter. Perhaps this ingredient was necessary to understand the true nature of the condom failure.

Come to think of it, he remembers the moment the condom failed, or not failed so much as slipped off, because they were standing and he’d had to crouch down to lift her on to one of the library’s shelves for a superior angle of attack, and in the moment, if he really thinks about it, he felt the condom pull free and if he asked his wife—she probably felt it as well—but neither of them did anything to put the brakes on the moment. He had wanted her from the instant she’d stamped his books, and apparently she felt the same way, and if anything, things got a bit hotter, and even afterward when the condom was removed and clearly not filled, there weren’t any recriminations, just shrugs and, believe it or not, a sequel.

The funny man draws a circle around both
condom breaking
and
wife’s sexiness
and in blue writes
prob. not luck
.

For some reason that time he and his friend Binder were on spring break in Vegas and decided to take peyote and drink wine and go to the desert and watch the stars pops into his head. They’d pulled to the side of the road and walked into the scrub brush and scraped a little clearing with their shoes and laid down and tweaked out for hours until the wine had overwhelmed them. They did not wake up until a state trooper nudged his boot into the funny man’s ribs, which was somewhere around noon the next day, but not before he and Binder had gotten enough sun to cause second-degree burns, which swelled their faces to purple masks. The state trooper said it himself at the time: “You goofy assholes could’ve died if not for me. What do you think of that?” The funny man and Binder couldn’t reply because their lips were too swollen and blistered, but as the funny man writes
not dying in desert next to Binder
on the easel, he thinks that he might’ve escaped thanks to a little luck that time.

Though aren’t we all entitled to a little luck here and there, enough to balance the scales at least? Surely there were times where misfortune befell the funny man with equal weight. And just how fortunate was he to be discovered by a state trooper on a routine patrol who had probably found college kids sleeping one off in a desert gully while their flesh was fried and the buzzards circled overhead millions of times?

The clapping man telling the funny man’s future agent about him before he died. Was that luck? What about the clapping man not dying before he even had a chance to see the funny man?

At some point, does the sheer weight of these probably non-luck-based coincidences have to add up to some luck, the way that change in a jar can turn into real money, given enough time?

The funny man turns the easel to a blank page and retreats to his chair. He has opened up a can of worms. He has thought of these things in passing before, the barest of glances before turning away with disinterest, but now he can’t stop thinking about it, the endless chain of events that led him to this particularly charmed time and place, how any of the links in that chain could have been broken in any number of ways.

He sets the massage feature to “shiatsu.” He has given names to the settings. Shiatsu is Tomoko. Swedish is Inga. Shantala is Joan, because he cannot not think of a female Indian name. He gives himself over to Tomoko and tries to forget that time when he was seven and fell off the skateboard, his head bouncing off the concrete like a basketball, the lump just off his temple bigger than a golf ball and his mother cried all the way to the hospital yelling at him, “Don’t you sleep! Don’t you go to sleep!” slapping him on the shoulder with one hand while the other twisted the wheel. “Don’t you dare fucking go to sleep!” she yelled. It was the first and maybe only time he’d heard her say “fuck.”

Or at eleven, when he was having his tonsils removed and they gave him a shot of something meant for the kid the next bed over and his heart accelerated and his vision went static and then he woke up what seemed like (and actually was) three days later.