The Funny Man (23 page)
“With your thumbprint you are signaling your agreement as well as pledging to keep your experiences at the White Hot Center in the strictest of confidences under the harshest penalties,” Chet said.
I pressed my thumb to the palmtop’s surface and after a couple of beats, Darrell nodded again.
“Now, why don’t you change into something comfortable? We’ve got a long journey ahead of us.”
I stood unsteadily and peeled the loincloth from my body. It kept its shape as I dropped it on the floor.
“I could use a shower,” I said.
“We’ll take care of that,” Chet replied. “Now get dressed.”
I did as I was told, throwing on some sweats and a T-shirt with a windbreaker. I jammed my sockless feet into a pair of tennis shoes.
“Good enough,” Chet said. “Let’s roll.”
Together we walked out, down the elevator and into the lobby, Chet and Darrell flanking me on either side, holding me fully upright. It had been awhile since I’d stood like a man. Under their leather trenches, they wore black suits with crisp white shirts, no ties. Their masks bulged in their pockets. I didn’t get the feeling I was captive, necessarily, but neither was I thinking I could get away. I felt more curious than afraid. This was the kind of thing that doesn’t happen, but it was happening. As we passed the concierge desk, I could see the doorman slumped over and sleeping, his head cradled in his arms. A black SUV with dark windows idled at the curb with the back door open. I crooked my head over my shoulder at the doorman.
“Don’t worry,” Chet said, “he’ll be fine in a few hours. We gave him the same thing I’m about to give you.”
A whoosh of air, a stinging at my neck, followed by dreamless sleep.
T
HE FUNNY MAN
realizes too late that he has been operating under a mistaken notion of the nature and purpose of marital counseling. At first, he figured it a kind of straightforward penance. His wife was angry, justifiably so, just not about the right things. If he could prove his remorse for causing this anger, eventually he would be forgiven. As the clock ticked down toward the start of his tour he dedicated himself to his twice-weekly sessions, one individual and one in tandem with his wife.
The marriage counselor had been recommended by his therapist. She was an older woman with gray hair kept in a long braid that looked like a llama’s tail, and she seemed nice and friendly enough. Her couch, with its big, overstuffed pillows, was far more comfortable than the angular art-deco model favored by his therapist. The first joint session she laid out her three secrets to successful marriage repair:
1. Always tell the truth, even if it hurts.
2. Anger is the most human of emotions.
3. First thought, best thought. If it comes to mind, blurt it out.
Her theory, as she explained it, was that most marriages, particularly after the first several years, suffer from over-calculation, each partner being
too
conscious of the other. A desire to keep order overrules and suppresses honest and open communication, which will naturally sometimes involve conflict. Patterns of sublimation and subterfuge have been established for seemingly noble reasons—a desire to prevent hurt, or avoid strife, to keep harmony—but in reality these are a slow-growing cancer ready to devour the marriage from within. Everything seems fine, up until the moment the cancer is exposed and by that time, there’s no healthy tissue left.
“I should know what I’m talking about,” the marriage counselor said with a rueful smile. “It’s happened to me three times.”
In both the individual and joint sessions the funny man initially stuck with dictum one and insisted at every turn that he had not slept with his movie love interest. While admitting to her obvious beauty and general desirability, he listed dozens of reasons why he could not imagine sleeping with her. He detailed her stupidity and vapidity and expressed his indifference, nay, his loathing for her stupid, vapid self. His story about the night of the proposition was consistent each and every time and each and every time when he was finished telling it, the marriage counselor was frowning at him.
“What’s rule one?” she said.
“Always tell the truth, even if it hurts,” he replied.
“So why aren’t you?”
“Why aren’t I what?”
“Why aren’t you telling the truth?”
“But I am.”
The marriage counselor looked at him, the skepticism etched in her forehead and at the corners of her mouth. “I know you’re lying for two reasons. Number one, when you list all of those reasons why you wouldn’t have slept with her, not one of them starts with ‘because I’m in love with my wife and would never do that to her.’”
“I thought that was a given,” the funny man protested.
“And number two,” the therapist continued. “Look at that girl. She’s incredibly hot. I’m the furthest thing from gay and
I
would do her. You’re not secretly gay, are you? Because if you are, we’ve got a whole different approach for that.”
“No.”
“Then don’t expect me to believe you didn’t sleep with her, and don’t expect your wife to believe it either because I’m not going to let her.”
It’s not that the funny man thought it was a conspiracy, exactly. It was not a setup. Everyone was acting out of good intentions, it’s just that he had been cast in a role in which he did not belong. Yes, he was lost and distant, uncommunicative, and above all, flaky, but he was not a cheat.
Still, to move things along, particularly because the start of the tour was pending, at the next joint session he decides to confess. “Okay,” he says, “I admit it, I slept with her.”
“I knew it!” his wife shouts.
“Me too!” the marriage counselor chimes in.
He and his wife sit next to each other on the couch. She crosses her arms over each other and begins to cry.
“What are you thinking?” the marriage counselor says to her. “I don’t want to get into it,” she replies.
“First thought, best thought.”
“I don’t want to say something I’ll regret later.”
“Anger is the most human of emotions.”
His wife rubs the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand. “I love him. I want to cut his balls off.”
“Good, excellent,” the marriage counselor says.
“Good?” this from the funny man.
“Yes, good,” she replies with an edge to her voice. “Honesty is the only path to healing.”
For the remainder of the session they explore far more of the cutting off the balls feeling than the love feeling, and the funny man spends many of his words on sincere apologies for the myriad ways he has failed in the past. He comes to understand that it is indeed good that his wife wants to cut his balls off, that this is actually an expression of her desire to possess him, to have him always, and he is glad to have made this small metaphoric sacrifice, especially considering he gets to keep the real ones. At the end, there are hugs all around and as the marriage counselor grips him close she whispers in his ear, “I’m proud of you, you filthy pig.”
I
MMEDIATELY FOLLOWING THE
session it seems as though his false confession has stirred some progress. On the way home his wife holds his hand across the center divider of the car and that night they make love. It is better than average lovemaking, like his wife wants to prove that it is something the funny man would miss, but this is totally unnecessary because for the duration of their relationship he has missed it the moment the lovemaking is over. Afterwards his wife snuggles close and things feel so right, the funny man feels that he must tell the truth.
“Actually,” he says, stroking his wife’s hair. “I never did sleep with her.”
She sighs into his bare chest. “Let’s put it behind us, okay.”
“But it’s true. I really didn’t sleep with her. I just said so because it seemed like it would help move things along.”
“Honestly, don’t do this.”
The funny man sits up, back against the headboard. “Do what? I’m just trying to set the record straight.”
“You can’t have it both ways. You don’t get to be the good guy here. I’m forgiving you, which I think you know is very hard for me, so let’s just drop it.”
This is one of those crossroads the funny man does not recognize at the moment, which perhaps explains why he takes the wrong path in deciding now that
he
is the victim. He feels heat rush to his extremities and it feels kind of good, actually. He feels alive. Where for most of the previous months he has felt powerless, battered by forces beyond his control, suddenly he feels powerful. Anger is the most human of emotions and he is feeling it bigtime, feeling it toward everyone: his agent, his manager, the love interest, Pilar, his therapist, the marriage counselor, the airline industry, all the people who he would like to unleash his fury on, but because they are not there, he will do what is natural and easy and common. He will turn on his wife.
“Maybe
I
don’t want to drop it.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I never slept with her and I want some credit for it.”
“Credit?”
“Yes, credit. I
could
have slept with her. I bet I could’ve slept with a lot of people, but you know what? I didn’t and I don’t.” He is not even sure where the words are coming from. He retains some part of his brain that recognizes them as ridiculous, but they feel so good, even if they are hitting the wrong target. Shooting a gun up in the air is pretty cool too. “I’m pretty goddamn important in this world, mind you. People know who I am. They love me. I bring them great pleasure. There’s a lot of fortunes tied up in me, and for once I’d like just a little recognition that overall, I’m not such a bad guy.
I could be a lot worse.
”
His wife’s eyes change from furious to devastatingly sad as her face caves in for a moment, but before she speaks, the fury is back, a low rumble.
“You, get the fuck out of here.”
And he does, not because she said so, no way, because
he
wanted to.
H
IS ANGER IS
so liberating he is not sure why it took him so long to embrace it. He unleashes it on everybody, his agent, his manager, even his therapist, and for the first time things start getting done
his
way, and it’s effing great. Following a session-long rant the day before the tour started, at the funny man’s insistence the therapist added a prescription for cylindrical white ones to the mix to help the funny man sleep because he’s so charged up all day it’s hard to power down at night.
The tour has been renamed “No Apologies for A-Holes” and the concert T-shirt features a close-up of the funny man’s multimillion-dollar hand not in his mouth, but delivering a big middle-finger fuck you.
The shows themselves are amazing. It is theater-in-the-round in places more accustomed to tractor pulls and motocross, fifteen thousand capacity minimum, and the funny man stalks the stage like an animal on a chain. It is crazy to do comedy in such an atmosphere, nonsensical; the connection between performer and audience nonexistent. And yet it works. Because of the lighting he cannot make out a single person, but he knows they’re there because of the cheering.
During the show, before doing the thing, which absolutely must close the show each and every night, the funny man has installed an eight-minute bit on why it’s dumb to apologize, which, in hindsight, will seem hackish in a Dane Cookian way, but at the time feels like it belongs on the comedy shelf right next to Carlin’s “seven dirty words.” It is nothing like his earlier material, which is mostly gentle and observational with a light absurdity. He’s sure it’s the best thing he’s ever done now that he’s tapped into his true, primal self.
I’ve got one message for all of you, and it’s this: No matter what,
DON’T APOLOGIZE! I don’t care what you’ve done, I don’t want to
see any apologies … ever. I don’t care if you unleash a deadly plague of
monkey herpes that wipes out three-quarters of Earth’s population. DO
NOT APOLOGIZE! I don’t care if you’ve like kidnapped a third-grader
and chopped her up and put in the freezer for snacks later, when the cops
come for you and you’re tried and convicted and you’re about to be fried in
the chair, you should not apologize. DO NOT APOLOGIZE! Seriously,
no apologies, man. What good does it do to apologize? The second
you apologize, you’ve given them the upper hand. You’re the loser, you’ve
LOST, man. It’s like here, I’m a bitch, slap me, I apologize … shit.
What if you were right? Once you’ve apologized, no one’s ever going to
apologize back. I’m sorry, I made you say you’re sorry? Yeah, right. It’s total surrender. It’s bend over and grab the ankles and let’s play hide-the-kielbasa-
in-my-asshole time.
And even if you apologize it’s not like you get any credit for it. When’s
the last time someone just said “thank you,” when you apologized. DOES
NOT HAPPEN, PEOPLE! Like, you know what I hate, when you
say, “I’m sorry,” and then they come back with, “I should hope so!” What
the fuck is that? “I should hope so?” You should hope I don’t jam my foot
up your ass I should hope so!
Look at the word, even. Break it down to its roots. First part is “apo,”
which means “from” or “away,” as in “go the fuck away, I’m not apologizing.”
Middle part, “logo,” which means “the study of”—yeah, that’s
right, “the study of.” Last part is “ize,” which actually means, get this,
“pussy.” Put it together, and “apologize” means the study of being a pussy.
Well, fuck that!
J
UST A WEEK
into the tour he realizes that a significant portion of the crowd is delivering some of the no-apologies material with him, shouting out the punch lines. He starts holding the microphone out toward them rather than speaking the lines himself and the noise of fifteen thousand people (forty-five thousand when he’s playing a football stadium), yelling, “Well, fuck that!” threatens to lift him off the stage.
The separation papers arrive mid-tour. His wife asks for a truly absurd amount in monthly support for her and the child (and Pilar), and the funny man’s first instinct is to say, “well, fuck that,” but instead he instructs his manager to instruct his lawyer to instruct his accountant to provide whatever she asks for. She has primary custody, but he will have visitation rights, not that it matters while he’s on tour, but when this is done, he’s right there with both his money and his love. He will not be the kind of father who denies his child’s needs, one of which is a father who is brave enough to tell him the way the world works.