The Funny Man (12 page)

Q: What kind?

A: Old stuff. Classic rock.

Q: Like who?

A: Oh, you know, the usual suspects, Beatles, the Doors, Hendrix, Joplin, that kind of thing.

Q: What turned you on to that music?

Here, as I watched the television I could see a brief, faraway look come to her eye before she refocused and answered.

A: I heard some of it performed live and it just really spoke to me.

Q: What do you mean live, like a cover band or something?

A: Sure, or something.

I hoped, I trusted that the “happily” ever-after part of the equation was a reference to me. To us. But then, I shot an armed robber six times in (alleged) self-defense and blew it.

But now the messages are coming and the hope is rekindling. I search each new arrival of signing items frantically for her latest missive and there isn’t one every time, but often enough to make each search worthwhile.

This arrived today, on a postcard, symbols hidden in a panorama of the Eiffel Tower, invisible to others, bold as neon to me:

We’re going back, somehow. Some way. The day after our country’s
independence. That’s the day.
B

So she has given me the when, but we still need to figure out the how, a not inconsiderable task considering that by her deadline, my trial won’t yet be finished and my ankle bracelet keeps me tethered to very few spots, one of which is not where she and I met.

The hurdles are high, but for the first time since my arrest and the start of my trial I have something I have lacked for quite some time, a sense of purpose.

12

T
HE FUNNY MAN
sits in the manager’s office, splayed along a couch across from his manager and his agent, who share a different couch. His agent and manager are both dressed in suits, but the funny man no longer bothers shaving or dressing for these occasions. His pants could even be mistaken for very elaborate pajamas, though they are not because they cost better than two thousand dollars and were fashioned from the beards of billy goats. The funny man is still not entirely sure why he needs both an agent and a manager or what their respective duties are, though he is most assuredly aware that certain percentages leak off of his total into their pockets. The total is large enough that these sums do not particularly matter to the funny man, they are not missed, but he also knows that the sums are large enough that he matters very much to his agent and manager. For that reason he knows that he can wear these pants that look like pajamas and not sit up straight and absently scratch at the three days’ growth that sprouts in patches across his face.

His career has become stagnant, recursive, endlessly looping back on itself and what was once fun now looks and feels suspiciously like work. Fewer people come to see him than in the past and recently, prior to a gig, he walked the streets of the city and asked a hundred people, “Do you know who I am?” and only fifteen of them said yes. Of those fifteen, the funny man then asked, “Who am I?” and only twelve of them were correct. The funny man wants to get to the next level before he slips from his present one. He has come to recognize that celebrity has its privileges, that he can do things like drink for free or pay cash for expensive luxury items. The funny man has insisted that they install a commercial-grade deep fat fryer in the new new home and he recently spent most of a day making and eating doughnuts. His wife (mostly jokingly) accused him of having a second childhood and the funny man scowled and said, “What’s wrong with that?” Still, even as he has grown more and more famous, he senses himself devolving. Tasks that previously seemed inconsequential, easy, like say, swishing the cleaner around the toilet and scrubbing the ring of mung, now look Herculean and he wonders how this nanny-housekeeper can bear to do it. He has come to see his agent and manager because it is time to shake things up.

“We have some offers,” the agent says.

“Offers with an
s
?” the funny man replies.

“A commercial, for one,” the manager says.

“Voice-over?” The funny man arches a hopeful brow. Voice-over is cherry. Voice-over is big-time. Stars do voice-over. Voice-over is an afternoon’s worth of work for a lifetime of checks.

“Acting,” the agent says. The funny man’s brow deflates.

“Doing what?”

“You play a guy trying to rent a car. You’re at the airport trying to rent a car and you go from counter to counter but they can’t understand what you’re saying, can’t fulfill your car rental needs until you get to the client’s counter and they know just what you want and you’re off on your way, happy as anything. Totally fulfilled. Job well done,” the manager says.

“Why can’t they understand what I’m saying?” the funny man asks.

The manager and agent look at each other, each nodding for the other to spill the beans in more and more exaggerated ways until finally the agent is forced to speak up, because, after all, he earns 2 percent more of the funny man’s money than the manager.

“You’ve got your hand shoved inside your mouth,” he says.

The funny man slips deeper into the couch, burying his head under one of the throw pillows. He screams into it, feeling the mist of his breath bound back into his face. He would like to scream at these two that they’re a couple of fucking assholes with this shit, but the funny man is not the sort (not yet, anyway) who calls his people fucking assholes, even when they are clearly behaving like fucking assholes.

It’s not that he’s tired of the thing, not at all. The thing is great, and every time he performs it, it kills. No matter which celebrity he does with his hand in his mouth (and he’s now done them all, trying new ones all the time), the people laugh and laugh and laugh. The thing is the nuclear fission of comedy, self-renewing, inexhaustible.

Except that it exhausts
him
. It really does. He hasn’t tried to get away with not doing it again because the first owner-promoter has apparently spread the word about his bout of recalcitrance and the funny man is routinely pre-threatened before he even hits the stage. Recently, at a show in Pittsburgh or Portland, he’s not sure which, while doing the thing the funny man contemplated shoving his hand down into his windpipe, even knowing as he contemplated it what the likely outcome would be. Would he be dead before the audience realized it wasn’t part of the joke? Like all creative people, the funny man’s politics are liberal so he doesn’t throw these words around lightly, but he feels it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he is “enslaved” by the thing. It has gone from blessing, to blessing and curse, to just curse.

After awhile, from underneath the pillow because he thinks that if he looks these two in the face he might leap and try to poke their eyes out, the funny man says, “What’s the other one?”

“Movie,” the manager says.

The funny man removes the pillow from his face. “Movie?” he says. “Or film?”

“Movie. Road comedy, a bunch of high school friends accidentally rob a bank and go on the lam. Hijinks ensue,” the agent says. “You know the drill. The kid with the music videos is attached to direct.”

“Role?”

“Buddy number three out of five.”

“My own subplot?”

“Mostly comedic, with a pinch of romance,” the agent says.

This is an interesting proposition for the funny man. It is the next logical step for a person with his career profile. Actually, television is the next logical step, which means he is actually skipping a step. It will mean three months or more on a movie set, grueling days of sitting around and doing nothing while being away from his wife and child whom he loves dearly, of course, but who will be increasingly well-provided for, thanks to his sacrifice.

“What’s the catch?” the funny man asks, putting the pillow aside and sitting upright, elbows on thighs.

“Catch?” the manager says, moving a piece of paper across the table toward the funny man.

The funny man leans a bit more forward and looks at the paper, which has a number with lots of zeros on it. He’s never been good at math, so he counts them, with his finger, just to make sure.

T
HE DIRECTOR YELLS,
“Cut, take five!” and the funny man removes his entire hand from his own mouth and walks over to the chair with his name stenciled on the back. He assumed such chairs were a myth, but no, just like grade school, chairs on a movie set are indeed assigned. He figured that other things about making movies were a myth as well, for example, the director saying “take five,” but no, he really says it, says it rather often, though “five” (minutes) is usually closer to forty-five minutes and once extended to three days.

They are somewhere in the Midwest, not Midwest like Chicago or even St. Louis, Midwest like Kansas or Nebraska, the parts where no one goes and hardly anyone lives. They are driving through flyover country, but are presently parked in front of an abandoned drive-in restaurant whose exterior has been made up to look brand new, while on the inside a massive colony of rats basically runs the place. The cinematographer has noted that occasionally, when they are shooting toward the restaurant, rats perch in the window, visible in frame and may have to be removed digitally.

The funny man will spend 85 percent of his screen time in the film with his hand in his mouth, something his agent and manager (the fucking assholes) neglected to tell him before he signed the contract. But that number. The funny man knows that as long as he lives like a semi-reasonable human being he will never have to work again, that the number represents a figure more than he had earned up to that point and his earnings up to that point were nothing to sneeze at in the grand scheme of things.

The funny man’s movie love interest sits next to him doing word searches to pass the time. She is ungodly beautiful and yet only the third most beautiful woman on the set. In between takes she drops to the ground and pumps out twenty Marine-precise push-ups. When the funny man asked her about this she raised her arms, Christ-style, palms up, and waved them forward and back. “When they start to flap,” she said, gesturing to her triceps, “you’re playing someone’s grandmother.”

She is also crushingly stupid and dull and the funny man long ago gave up trying to talk to her beyond the barest pleasantries. She is so dull he can’t even muster any sexual interest in her, not that he would cheat because he promised that he wouldn’t, not only on his wedding day, but before he left for his shoot when his wife dropped him at the airport, kissed him on the cheek and said, “Don’t stick your dick in anyone else,” which she meant as a joke, but in a serious way.

Once, when the funny man’s movie love interest got up to do a scene, the funny man looked at her word search and noticed that most of the circled strings were not even words, or at least not the kind of words that utilized vowels.

The love interest looks up from the word search and the funny man realizes he’s been staring.

“What?” she says.

The funny man turns away and looks back at the director, who is being talked to by the cinematographer. The director is nodding his head, which the funny man has come to know is a bad sign, a sign that they’re going to try something different, something not found in the script.

When the funny man first met the director, the director described his style as “freewheeling,” which the funny man has come to understand means “making shit up as you go along because you don’t know what you’re doing.” The director is as malleable as one of the funny man’s college buddies whose nickname was “Dummy,” as in “Dummy, go up and tell that girl that you love her,” or “Dummy, fill this cup with your urine so I can pass this drug test,” or “Dummy, spank that cop and see what happens.”

Some things have surprised the funny man about making a movie. The first thing was that the movie is not shot in order. In fact, it’s not shot in anything close to the right order. In one of the funny man’s very first scenes, just about his first moment of acting in front of a camera, he was told to face his love interest, look into her eyes with a passionate fervor and kiss her as ardently as he could muster. He had been led from his trailer by a walkie-talkie-wielding assistant who said they were “on route” into the mouthpiece as the funny man closed the trailer door behind him. Thirty-five seconds later they were there, the set, a small clearing that overlooked the Grand Canyon, the backdrop for the big scene. The funny man had visited it as a child, bumping down to the bottom on the back of a burro, wondering why vacation always had to be so boring.

In the movie the characters are traveling east to west, but the production is doing pretty much the opposite, leaving from their Los Angeles headquarters as a money-saving measure. His love interest stood next to a bit of tumbleweed, brought in by the prop master to give the foreground some perspective. A rubber snake sat off to the side of the tumbleweed, coiled as if to strike.

The funny man had met his love interest once before, briefly, at a read-through of the script where they sat around a table and recited their parts in turn. The director brayed like a llama at every alleged punch line, but the funny man got the biggest laughs of everyone because of course his hand was always in his mouth and that shit’s just funny.