The Funny Man (17 page)
Well, things are pretty damn near unbearable, so the funny man crawls to the bathroom and yanks out drawers in the vanity until he finds them and swallows them dry, followed by three aspirin and one more of the pink, ovoid jobbies just for good measure.
L
ATER, HE WISHES
that his wife could’ve seen the effort it took to rise as the boy’s cries wash through the halls down to the funny man’s ears as he lays curled on the bathmat.
“Daddy?” Faint, questioning.
“Daddy?” Louder, more insistent, a tinge of urgency and worry.
“Daddy!” A demand. A tractor beam pulling the funny man upright, knuckles white on the bathroom counter, arms trembling, spine screaming, but now, thanks to those blue ones, feeling like the pain is coming from a distance. It is loud, undeniably powerful, but it is not all that near, a thunderstorm already passed. Each step toward the boy is easier than the last, floating on love, compelled by duty, lubricated by pills. In the apartment, he would’ve been with the boy long ago, no more than six or seven steps necessary to get from one room to another; so tidy, so perfect, a masterpiece of efficiency in design.
He should have moving walkways installed, like they have in the airports. He can afford that, you know.
“I need to go, Daddy.” Of course, the child has been “going” on his own for some time now. No assistance needed, other than the occasional reminder to wipe thoroughly, but the child is sick, scared, a reversion to something smaller, helpless.
“Sure, buddy, let’s go.”
He looks better, his skin dry, eyes clearer. As the boy sits on the toilet, the funny man touches his forehead and finds it cool. The worst has clearly passed, but back in the boy’s room, as he climbs under the covers, the elephants from the circus-themed wallpaper lift free and begin to dance on their thick hind legs. The boy seems unbothered by this development, so the funny man plays it casual, tucking the comforter under his son’s chin and giving his boy a reassuring smile.
But why are the elephants playing jazz out of their trunks? And are the stars shooting from their eyes dangerous to him or the boy? Have the clowns always had those fangs? Should walls really undulate like that?
W
HEN THE FUNNY
man’s wife arrives home, the boy is fine. The sickness has passed and as she breezes in, dropping her suitcase at the door, she finds her son in the kitchen trying to retrieve the gallon container of orange juice from the refrigerator, arms stretched overhead, grasping blindly for an upper shelf. She swoops in and rescues the boy before he dumps it over his own head. There is a bit of a musty smell in the air and no sign of her husband, the funny man. “Where’s Daddy?” she says.
The boy shrugs and she takes the juice from the boy’s hands and bends to kiss him on the forehead. “You need a bath, pal.” The boy nods in agreement, which is unusual.
The funny man’s wife installs the boy at the counter with his juice and some dry cereal and goes in search of her husband, calling his name. The carpet in the living room squishes under her feet, foam rising to the surface. She tries different tones with her calls—laughing, urgent, bemused, angry—all with no response. She searches everywhere on the first and second floors, yells into the multicar garage, scans the yard, and still, no husband.
She is pissed. She is terrified. Her husband had been erratic for a time, but that is done with, and even at his most erratic he would never jeopardize the boy.
Surely not the basement. The basement is unfinished, a concrete slab used exclusively for storage. There is talk of tricking it out once the boy is older, if they still live here, as a place for him and his pals to hang, play video games, shoot pool, karaoke if they don’t think that’s too dumb. The funny man and his wife have the resources to make it the coolest spot in the neighborhood.
But now, months pass without either of them having occasion to go into the basement. More often than not when they go down, whatever they thought was there wasn’t anyway, likely having been discarded as they moved from one house to the other.
All the reasons an erratic-acting person may go into a basement flash through the funny man’s wife’s head as she descends the stairs, plain pine boards, unsanded at the edges, purely utilitarian. She feels as though she should rush but cannot will herself to do more than tiptoe into the gloom. The single bulb with the dangling chain is on, 60 watts, and she knows he must be here somewhere, and she begins trembling and she gasps when she sees a body, huddled in the corner on its side, its back to her, curled in on itself. Perfectly still. She is about to run upstairs and dial 911 when the body raises its arm and she gasps and runs to the funny man and uncurls him and turns him over on to his back, which makes him tense and moan.
The funny man smiles up at his wife and reaches a hand toward her beautiful face. “I got sick,” he says. “I ran out of pills.”
T
HIS IS THE
first time I’ve seen any crack in the judge’s composure. Barry and me and the prosecutor are in her office, the two of them standing before her desk, me off of Barry’s shoulder a step and a half back, my usual subservient spot. She has Barry’s brief and the prosecutor’s response spread in front of her. There are Post-its tagged in half-a-dozen spots. Eight-inch thick law books bound in calfskin are open on the floor surrounding her chair. Looking down at the briefs she flicks her glasses to her face and then off again and looks up at Barry.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, counselor, but I think you’ve got a point here.”
Barry stays perfectly still, but the prosecutor slumps in his place and groans audibly. I can see that his collar is imperfectly rolled down over his tie. “Come on,” he mutters under his breath.
The judge shakes her head. “I hear you, Mr. State’s Attorney, but we’re in a real bind here.” I see Barry suppress a grin. “If I deny this, you’re looking at an appeal for sure. Hell, he’s going to appeal anyway, am I right?”
Barry refuses to give anything away, standing stock-still, his expression unchanged.
The judge continues. “But if I deny it and he appeals, you’re looking at pretty much a full retrial. The appeals court may even just send it back here and we start all over completely, new jury, everything. That’s what I’d do if I was them, anyway.”
The prosecutor apparently concedes the point, ducking his chin to his chest.
“So what I’m thinking,” the judge says, “is that we just bite the bullet and get it over with. Let’s lay all the cards on the table and see what the jury makes of it and we’ll let appeals come in and clean up the whole mess rather than sweeping some of it under the rug for later.” The prosecutor nods in a way that makes it look like someone is pulling a string on top of his head. Barry allows himself a grin.
I want to tell him that it’s never good to laugh at your own jokes, but as we leave and hustle back to the town car, I decide not to piss on his parade.
“The one regret I’ve always had,” he says, “is that I wasn’t born a woman so I could experience the miracle of birth.”
“I can think of a few million women who might trade with you,” I reply. “I’m totally serious. It’s why I don’t have children. Being the father is an inferior substitute. But here, with this, I feel like I’m actually birthing something, that what I’m doing here will be permanently woven into the tapestry of the American experience.”
“Your legacy,” I say.
Barry frowns. “Are you listening to me? I’m not talking about something as simple as that. We’re at the DNA level here, my friend. A legacy is the thing people remember about you. What I’m talking about is marrow-level permanence. This will forever be of the world, even if people don’t know it. It’s like, when we … when I do this act, where others are bound to a generally agreed-upon reality-based community, I am capable of creating my own reality, and others will come behind me to study what I do and comment, judiciously, if you will, but there I am creating newer realities that others will live by. I will be one of history’s actors.”
“Like Hitler?” I say.
“We’ll see,” Barry replies. “We shall see.”
P
ILAR RETURNS FROM
her vacation with presents for everyone, beaded necklace for the missus, a stuffed polar bear almost as large as a real one for the boy, and even something for the funny man, a hand-carved pipe shaped like a whale’s body. “Eskimo,” she says as she hands it to him, kissing him on the cheek. The funny man watches her back as she wheels her suitcase down the hallway to her room and he admits to himself that he is glad to see her small, sturdy carriage. When she returns to the kitchen and ties the apron behind her back and switches the television from the sports channel to the Spanish-language network, it appears as though their domestic universe has been restored.
To the funny man, the term
accidental overdose
is a complete crock of shit. First of all, it makes him look like an addict and while he knows that “a doctor prescribed them to me” is the oldest excuse in the book, in this case it happens to be true. Right, hindsight says the amount of the pink, ovoid one in his system was truly horrifying, but he blames that on the little round blue ones, which caused him to forget that he’d already had his allotment of the pink, ovoid ones. Sure, he could have refrained from working some of his shadier connections made on the road to score some additional little round blue ones, but they seemed to be the only thing kept the dancing, jazz-playing, stars-shooting-out-of-their-eyeballs elephants from attacking.
And the pain. The pain was so real, like it had become part of him, like he
was
pain. No one should doubt the pain. The MRI
proved
the pain was real and would probably follow him around for some time, maybe even forever. “Significant narrowing,” the doctor said. “Stricture.” “Impingement.”
He knows finding him in the basement like that scared his wife, but it was the only place the funny man could get any real relief because the elephants didn’t like to go downstairs and the concrete felt so cool and inviting. He couldn’t have been there more than ten or twelve hours, if that.
There is still some lingering pain, but his wife and Pilar control the blue circular ones so there is no danger of overdoing it there. Pilar is also a help with the doctor-prescribed stretching and strengthening, working the hamstrings by levering the funny man’s foot toward his head as he reclines on his back on the new living room carpet.
Some other things are lingering as well, like his wife’s resentment. He knows it is resentment born out of fear, born out of a worry that she’d lost him or could lose him, resentment from a loving place, but it makes it no less painful when he looks up and sees those brief flashes of hate in her eyes.
Though he has been deemed untrustworthy, probably permanently, he has not been completely neutered. It is his task daily to retrieve the boy from school and if he informs someone ahead of time they are allowed to go out for ice cream on the way home. On Pilar’s night off he makes dinner, something he is getting better at, progressing from carryout to food preparation (opening of cans, combining of no more than three ingredients, heating) to actual cooking (recipes, chopping, basting, dry rubs, etc.). He is not superfluous, but neither is he vital. The money continues to flow, even as he does nothing, refusing all bookings and projects presented by his agent and manager. Been there, done that, he thinks. When he signed the contract to do the horrible movie he said to himself that it was a lifetime’s worth of money and he was right. He has left a mark, a small one, but it is indelible. He may not get his hourlong biography, but when they get around to doing the “Remember that crazy shit back in that decade that just passed” shows, he will be in there, forty-five seconds’ worth, maybe even a whole minute of being made fun of by funny men who would kill for even a fraction of that kind of success. Now that’s irony!
He is chronologically very young, but he feels so old, so maybe it is time to retire. He has achieved his goal. He is a comedian, not a great one, maybe not even a good one, but he has made many people laugh. More than many, actually. If you stacked the number of people he has made laugh on top of each other he imagines they would reach the moon. The only question left is whether or not a press release is even necessary, if anyone would bother taking note.
But then his manager calls. The movie is done and they would like him to see it. The funny man thinks that he experienced it, why does he need to see it? But thanks to a little time and necessary perspective, and the pink, ovoid pills at a reasonable and safe dosage, the thought of watching this abomination fills him with more curiosity than dread.
The showing is scheduled for a private screening room in the city, and the funny man expects to be reunited with everyone from the movie: The easily swayed director, the cinematographer, his costars, the love interest, but when he arrives, while there is room for thirty or so attendees, the only people present are his agent, his manager, and two guys in suits expensive enough that they must be executives, one of whom looks a bit on the young side.
Handshakes and introductions all around confirm what the funny man has suspected about the men in the suits. They are from the studio, and one of them is really, really young. They offer him popcorn, which the funny man declines, and as the lights dim, the funny man tosses back one of the pink, ovoid pills and settles in.
“I think you’re going to be surprised,” the older-looking suit says. “And we hope you’re going to be pleased.”
As the movie plays the funny man is unsurprised about at least one thing, and that is that the movie is truly terrible. It is unoriginal, unfunny, poorly paced, wretchedly shot, and unbelievably (blessedly) short, with a sixty-six-minute running time. Much of the footage used is outtakes that the funny man assumed would be buried deep in the DVD extras (if there even was a DVD release), moments where someone broke character, or a boom mic bobbed into the frame, or when the getaway van burst into flames too early, or when the funny man had pulled his hand out of his mouth in order to yell at someone. (He doesn’t remember doing this and feels some shame over it.) Five minutes in the middle appear to be cell phone—filmed footage of two extras having sex behind one of the production trailers and the climax utilizes cardboard cutouts of the funny man’s and the love interest’s faces with human lips pushed through—
Clutch Cargo
—style—to deliver the dialogue.