The Funny Man (21 page)
The funny man chuckled at the story. “That sucks,” he said.
“He got off easy,” his wife, who was not yet his wife, replied. “What do you mean?”
“I would do worse, ten times worse. A hundred times worse.” The funny man was sure she was kidding, that they were joshing around. “Like what?” he said, smiling.
She told him in enough specific detail that it seemed as though she’d spent some time thinking about it before, had maybe priced out some of the specs, done a couple of napkin sketches regarding the logistics. Rather than using a hypothetical, she kept saying, “you,” to funny man, as in, “If you were to get a blow job from a disgusting whore, I would …” The funny man was both horrified and deeply turned on. He did not know it at the time, but it was the crossroads moment when he decided that they would be getting married or at least that he would ask. She had such spirit that he was fairly sure she’d say no, and he was sure he’d love her for it.
But
he
has
not
been unfaithful! Flaky, unreliable, wayward— yes, guilty as charged—but not unfaithful. He has been filled with faith. He is bolstered by this truth. He also has the tremendous news about his impending megastardom to share with her. He is now a planet with increased gravitational pull. His agent and manager have made it clear, he is mighty. In fact, they bowed toward him as he left his manager’s office.
He dials his mother-in-law’s number and grovels his way past the bitch (she
never
warmed up to him, even after the thing succeeded and all those worries about his abilities as a provider were proven to be for naught) and gets his wife on the phone and pours out the whole sorry story, the encounter with the love interest, how she propositioned him (there was an audible intake of air on his wife’s part here), and her whole theory of celebrity arbitrage, but that he turned her down, flat! He slept in the bathtub! And how the bimbo took his flip little comment literally and that he was sure the movie was one big prank, and now how it not only wasn’t a prank, that he was the newest and hottest star in the celebrity universe and if he could successfully navigate eight to ten brutal months of spirit-crushing cashing-in/selling-out, at the end of it, they’ll have enough money to buy their own island, just as they’ve always wanted. No, he knows she’s never said that she wanted an actual island, it’s more of an understood thing because who doesn’t want an island with brown-skinned, loinclothed servants? No, that is not racist, because he is talking about naturally tanned people, not some sort of native tribe subjugated to the will of the white man thing. No one would possibly turn that down if it were offered, which it is. It is in the offering for him now, for them. For them!
It doesn’t take nearly as long to say everything as he thought it would and when he finishes, his wife says, “I’m having a hard time believing this.”
“Me too,” the funny man replies.
T
HERE WAS A
time, at the brief peak of my fame and popularity, that I fantasized about being martyred, Lennon-style. I was thinking that I would attract the attention of some lunatic and then be cut down in my prime, a permanent beacon of untapped genius. Even at my most recognizable, I would walk the streets, head down, but not too far down, letting passersby grab a glimpse and I could sense their bodies seize with recognition, but even as they were saying, “hey, isn’t that … ?” I was past them. At some point I hoped an obsessed fan who smelled like the inside of a crayon box would emerge from the shadows and ask me to sign something before knifing me in the gut. I would look dramatically skyward as I sank to my knees, eyes on the heavens and as someone else recognized me and realized what had been done, they would wail in their surprise and grief.
Or a plane crash, or a safe falling out of a window and crushing me, something that would snuff me out without me seeing it coming.
Now, thanks to the unveiling of Barry’s strategy, the judge’s prediction has come true. I am widely viewed as the biggest shithead on the planet. Before, just a shithead, now the biggest. There are protestors outside my apartment almost twenty-four hours a day. I have been protested before, but this is bigger, angrier. They push petitions into the hands of pedestrians that urge a retroactive change to the law to make manslaughter punishable by death. They chant obscene slogans. Using a bedsheet and black spray paint they made a sign held up toward my view that just says,
DO
THE WORLD A FAVOR AND JUM!
I’m assuming they ran out of room for the
P
. Most of the time I leave my blinds drawn now, but when I do make an appearance, or my silhouette shows up against the curtains I can hear the boos and jeers from my many floors up.
When I look at the gruesome truths of my life coming out via the testimony during my defense—what I have done to my wife, the incident with my child—it’s hard not to be sympathetic to the protesters’ position. Today was the therapist’s fourth on the stand. Because of my “not guilty by reason of celebrity” defense I had to waive doctor-patient privilege over certain events, and every last morsel has poured forth. Barry says it’s all necessary, as part of our celebrity-as-sickness strategy. I don’t remember saying or doing lots of the stuff, but it’s all in the man’s notes, dated and timed, so it’s hard to dispute. I mostly watch the jury watching him. If they weren’t sequestered, I could imagine them joining the protestors in front of my apartment. The prosecutor just sits there, I’m sure wondering what the hell Barry is up to. I’m the only one tempted to stand up and say, “I object!”
The sheriff’s deputy who will recount fully the incident with my son is scheduled soon, and his testimony, plus the associated video, will only further harden their hearts to me. It was and is inexcusable, inexplicable, unbelievable, and if I wasn’t rather cowardly, I would’ve killed
myself
right after it happened. Like I told the judge, I deserve every bit of what’s coming to me.
But that doesn’t mean I want to go to jail because things have changed and I now have something to live for. Her messages continue to arrive disguised in more and more elaborate ways. Yesterday it was in a news story about her preparations for the upcoming major season. The first letter of each word in her quote, removed, arranged into
thinking of you.
I’m looking forward to the Grand Slam season, for I will be able to see her much more often, matches in their entirety instead of highlight snippets here and there. Her seed is low, but her game has been looking up, a newfound sense of purpose and resolve apparent in her groundstrokes, at least according to the experts that pretend to know these things.
Barry will not admit to any miscalculation, that he may have overshot the target. On the contrary, he sees it as merely the ultimate fulfillment of his original strategy. “So now we know you’re the villain, which is great.”
“How can that be great?”
“Villains are compelling. We love villains. Tell me, who’s the greatest villain of all time?”
“Hitler?”
Barry shakes his head for the thousandth time. “No. Hitler was evil. Evil people aren’t villains, they’re just evil. Are you evil? No, you’re hateful, but not evil. I’m talking movies, television, that kind of thing, pretend villains.”
“But I’m not pretend, I’m real.”
“I thought you’d been paying attention,” he says. “The whole point is you’re not real, you’re a celebrity. Anyway, the greatest villain of all time is Darth Vader.”
“If you say so.”
“And at the end of
Star Wars
, George Lucas makes a very big show of making sure we know that Dart Vader is saved, that he will be back. Do you know why he did that?”
“Because he knew there was a sequel?”
“No, because he knew, deep down, we don’t want our villains vanquished. We need our villains. Why are we always worried about some half-assed dictator five thousand miles away armed with rockets that a seventh-grader could outdo in his backyard, getting his hands on nukes? I’ll tell you why, because then we don’t concentrate on the shit happening under our noses. Villains are there for us to pour all of our baggage into, all that fear and hate, making us believe that we’re nothing like them. Villains become indispensable. We can’t live without them. Think of it as your public service.”
Following the incident with my son, I was at my lowest. I went caveman. I went feral, holed up in the apartment alone. My pits crusty, mushroom-scented. My skin moist, mossy. I pulled the drapes off the rods and wore them like a loincloth. At times I may have scrabbled on all fours. I itched, often. I scrounged old takeout from the fridge for food. I’d come to like Scotch by then. I’m sure there were pills, but I don’t remember any of the specifics. I may or may not have been trying to kill myself. If so, it was going to be slow, painful, because that’s what I deserved.
I left the phones off the hook and shunned visitors and it didn’t take all that long for people to stop even trying to see me. I was being left alone just as I said I wished. This is when I became a tennis fan, because every other channel and show for some reason made me cry. For awhile I tried animal shows, but when a family of meerkats was wiped out by a fox and the lone remaining meerkat howled piteously under a glowing orange moon, I felt my legs collapse out from under me, so I went with the tennis. The matches were hypnotic, transporting, all that geometry on the screen. I liked to hold up my hands to cover the players in my sight so it looked like the ball was hopping back and forth on its own. Of course, some of the time I must have been watching Bonnie, she being the most popular player in the world, but I made no special note. I also made no special note of sleeping or waking or anything. All of it smeared together. It seemed both instantaneous and endless, permanently trapped in a single moment.
Which is why I don’t remember how or why the card appeared. It wasn’t there and then it was.
I was staring out the window wondering about the strength of the glass, rapped on it with my knuckles and felt the glass wave in its frame. Glass is actually a liquid in suspension, you know. Always flowing, just very, very slowly.
The card was actually glowing. I saw it reflected in the glass, pulsing from my coffee table. I went and picked it up and saw that it was made out of the thinnest paper stock possible. It was like vellum, but somehow still rigid. When I held it to the light it glowed even brighter. On one side of the card was just an insignia, a phoenix rising out of the ashes and a phone number. On the other side it said
In case of emergency.
I thought it might be vibrating in my palm.
The last thing to enter the apartment had been dim sum three or four days previous, judging by its state of decomposition resting on the table. I put the card next to the take-out container and foraged some pistachios out of the creases in the couch and rested back on my haunches, shelling the nuts as I stared at the card. I shut my eyes and opened them and it was gone. I shut them again and reopened and it was back. I puffed out my cheeks and blew out the air and the card flipped once before settling back down. If I looked at it long enough, I thought I could see the phoenix wings flapping. I picked it up and tucked it into the folds of my loincloth and went back to my window.
That evening I woke in my bed and realized I was clutching the card in my hand. It should have been wadded and wrinkled, but when I unfurled my fingers it sprang back into pristine shape. I thought I could maybe hear it humming. I found the phone and dialed, my fingers trembling over the keypad on the headset.
A recording answered on the second ring. A computerized female voice said, “Are you ready?”
I was silent, breathing heavy, and it repeated its question, “Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?” I replied, or maybe that was in my head, I’m not sure. I felt like I could hear a hard drive whirring on the other end.
“Are you ready?” the voice repeated itself, with a little edge this time like there was only one possible answer, so I gave it, and the line went dead.
W
HILE THE FUNNY
man’s marriage teetered, his career entered what he later came to think of as “the Midas period,” where he would turn many things into gold and they glittered briefly before they became useless shit. Because the house—sans wife, child, and Pilar—was empty and echoing and he was lonely, he hired an assistant, Langley, but when he quickly realized he had nothing he needed assistance with, the assistant soon became something closer to servant, which is actually how these things usually go. The funny man was now not just a funny man, but a movie star,
the
movie star of the moment. A possible franchise, even, the foundation upon which many other things rest. He now appeared on the covers of many magazines simultaneously and as he watched television, which he was doing a lot of again, sometimes—no, not sometimes, but often—there’d he be, large, highly defined, not so bad looking for a guy who doesn’t need his looks to make money. The funny man would lean forward or stand and walk toward the screen to look more closely. It was as though somehow his television had turned into a mirror and he was looking at, not himself exactly, but maybe a twin; a cooler, more accomplished model, Funny Man 2.0, if you will. He started to realize the truth about television, which is that the images on screen were far more real than reality, since these were the things that everyone could share: Our collective spirit. There was no objective truth outside what some critical mass of people believed. No one could
really
know the original funny man, not even himself, but Funny Man 2.0 was everywhere simultaneously. He should have seen this before, but it took becoming one of the people inside the television to recognize the truth of it.