The Funny Man (7 page)

W
HEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER
arrives he surveys the setup and asks if this is the architect everyone is talking about who designs the tiny homes, or is this the cancer survivor that hopscotched across the state, or perhaps the young author who everyone thinks is so rude? Is this the man who started a multimillion-dollar charity by banding the homeless together to sell chocolate chip cookies shaped like American presidents?

“Where am I, anyway?” he asks. “Can a guy get a latte?”

He looks at the llama and waves it away. The llama doesn’t seem to care.

The production coordinator points at the tire. “Straddle it,” he tells the funny man. “One leg down each side of the tire with the wife and kid sitting in the middle. Zany, but also precious. Beloved and unpredictable.” This looks decidedly impossible to the funny man. The extent of his athletic prowess was a college intramural championship in Ultimate Frisbee. He is not flexible in any sense of the word. He suspects that his tendons are shorter and more rigid than average.

The funny man climbs to the top and gingerly stretches his legs around the tire. He feels a tug in his groin.

“Don’t move,” the production coordinator says to the funny man. “Tickle the baby,” the production coordinator says to the funny man’s wife. “Perfect.”

A line of sweat leaks down the funny man’s face. It seems possible that the muscle in his leg may detach from his knee. Did he not once see a show on one of the science channels that demonstrated how each muscle is a bundle of many fibers and that exercise is actually a form of destruction, where the muscle is damaged on purpose so that it may grow stronger in defense? But damage is different from destruction, which is what seems to be happening here. Damage is reparable, destruction permanent. For sure surgery, rehabilitation, a permanent limp or hobble. He breathes loudly through his mouth. His wife stage-whispers up at him through her smile: “Are you okay?”

“Ah, ah, ah,” the funny man replies.

Putting down his latte, the photographer approaches the scene, squinting through one eye as he moves toward the camera. He squats down to his haunches and cups his hands around his eyes. “We’ll fix that look on his face in post,” the photographer mutters to the production coordinator.

“Shoot them,” he tells the production coordinator. “Shoot them now.”

Triggered by remote, the camera fires over and over and over.

A
COUPLE OF
weeks later, standing in the supermarket aisle, the neighbor tears through the issue of the magazine and there, on page 37 is her tree with the neighbors hanging from it. She always knew the wife was pretty and the husband is better looking than she’d thought, though up to that point she’d only seen him in sweatpants as he went to retrieve the morning paper. She did not know their names before, but now she does and she will never forget them again. They probably will not speak to each other because she does not want to be a bother, but she will wave when appropriate. Years from now she will tell stories about how she used to be neighbors with the famous funny man and his wife and how wonderful it was.

The picture is amazing to her. Every day for the past seventeen years she has looked out her front window at that oak tree. She has driven past it up her driveway, thousands and thousands of times, yearly she has ordered her husband into the yard to rake up its leaves, but here, in this glossy magazine, for the first time, she feels like she really
sees
it, you know? She buys ten copies.

7

B
ARRY SAID IT:
“We’re all monsters;” but if so, we aren’t born this way. We become them. I figured the trial would tell that story, but the prosecution has presented surprisingly little of my sordid recent history, perhaps figuring the jury knew all that was necessary already (“untalented, successful, bad husband and father”) and that to rehash things would appear to be piling on, bending the whole mood back toward sympathy. The tabloids have spared no ink on me over the years. Not that the additional humiliations would make a difference at this point. Ever since I shot the armed robber six times in alleged self-defense, my life has been a series of (probably well-deserved) humiliations, arrest, mug shot, detention, the whole thing the difference between laughing
with
and laughing
at.

Like the location-monitoring device strapped to my ankle. Yes, I am in many ways fortunate to be out on bail and able to live and sleep in my high-rise apartment with the doorman and view of the park and access to take-out, but honestly, hasn’t technology progressed to the point where the transmitter-receiver can be smaller than the brick-sized thing that I have to haul around everywhere save the courtroom? Mornings, when I shower, I have to dangle the leg out of the spray, which is difficult since my shower has six nozzles to provide full and constant coverage. If the device gets wet, the anti-tamper alarm will sound and a team of federal marshals will kick down my door and plant their boots in my spine, and they will shout things like, “What’s doing here, smart guy?” And I want no part of that. Again.

When I raised this issue with Barry, he looked at me and said, “Please don’t tell me you want me to bring this up to the judge.” For a moment I returned Barry’s look, incredulous, because of course I wanted him to bring this up to the judge, that’s why I’d taken the time to mention it to him, but as Barry continued to stare at me and I saw the pity fill his eyes I realized that this was one of those incidents my therapist would point to in order to illustrate what he calls my “loss of perspective.”

The only places I am allowed to go are the courtroom, my apartment, and the therapist’s. I would like to quit the therapist because each session is more enervating than the last. This alleged “loss of perspective” is our only subject now. “Loss of perspective” is meant to suggest that I no longer have the capacity to see myself as others do, but I prefer to look at it different, that instead of losing perspective, I have gained one: My own.

“Loss of perspective” is only our latest subject following my struggles with “superfluousness,” “indifference,” and later, “free-floating rage.” Personally, if you ask me, the start of my problems, or at least the start of my
real
problems, can be traced to starting therapy, as I had no real idea about how screwed up I was before. I would like to quit, but if I abandon the sessions I would miss the contact, the friendly greeting of the receptionist, Jill, her smile no less warm than ever even though I am now an alleged manslaughterer, and her offer of coffee and her assurance that my therapist will be free any moment, the mug now warm between my hands, the feel of it so comforting that I don’t want to drink, and then her holding open the door to the therapist’s office, smiling always, inviting me past with her free arm and the smell of her perfume on the way by. So many things have been taken from me (or I have thrust them away from myself) that I feel desperate to hold onto whatever I have left. This I will keep.

The fifty-minute hours themselves are exercises in futility. I’m pretty sure, anyway. I know what ails me now and in so knowing can self-identify the cure, but as the trial has dragged on, I have planned my weeks around those moments in the outer office and the thought of giving them up is like letting go a life-preserver mid-ocean.

What ails me presently, I am positive, is good, old-fashioned lovesickness and finally, this is what I told my therapist.

“It’s not the trial, really, that has me so bent out of shape,” I said.

The therapist made a noncommittal and nonjudgmental gesture. This gesture is encouraging without being approving. I imagine that he’s practiced this gesture in the mirror for many, many hours. At conventions he gives seminars on the gesture, and after the seminars, at the hotel bar, other therapists ask him to do it, which he does, and he in turn critiques their gestures for them. “Go on,” he said.
Gesture.

“I’m in love.”

“Oh?” Here the gesture failed him, the eyebrow lifting into skepticism. “With whom are you in love?”

I didn’t want to get into it because I knew the pattern, we were on the route to “loss of perspective,” perhaps after a detour toward “living in a skewed reality.” “I can’t really say much more than that,” I said.

“And why not?”

“It’s secret.”

“You know I can’t tell anyone about it, right? That our conversations are bound by confidentiality?”

“Sure.”

“Then why won’t you tell me?”

Why indeed? Because even to speak it is to relinquish some of its power. I’d said too much already. Some things just are. I sat stone-faced.

“Can you tell me where you two met?”

I intended to wait him out, but my face must have betrayed the answer.

“Oh,” he said, “there.”

“You have a tone,” I replied.

The therapist threw his hands in the air, surrenderish. “No tone, no tone,” he said. “You know my feelings on that, we don’t need to discuss it anymore.”

I did know his feelings about the White Hot Center, where Bonnie and I met and fell in love.

His feelings were that the White Hot Center didn’t exist.

His feelings were that what I described about what went on there was impossible to the point that maybe I needed some additional prescriptions or some time with a car battery and cables attached to my temples, whereas my feelings were that he was full of shit because I’d been there, my heart knew what it had experienced, what was real and not.

“We’re not going to get anywhere, are we?” I said. My time at the White Hot Center where I was cured, at least briefly, demonstrated the almost three years of futility behind my conversations with this man.

A look that said “fuck if I know” flashed across his face before the mask returned. But the truth had been briefly revealed. I imagined that the therapist’s mentor has always told him that therapy was as much art as science, but the therapist no longer believed this. He knows what I know, that therapy is neither art nor science, but something far more random. To his own therapist the therapist describes it this way: “It’s like I’m holding some kind of machine gun while sitting on a spinning carousel and there’s a target that flashes past as I go round in circles. When the bullets hit the target they’re effective, for sure, but I’m spinning pretty fast and the gun really kicks around when I fire it, so while I
do
hit the target sometimes, I’m never quite sure where or why, and if you ever tell a soul that I said this, I’ll have you killed and disbarred, probably in that order.”

Or I could be making all that up. It passes the time anyway.

A
S PART OF
the bail agreement, the only places I’m allowed to call out to are 911, Barry, my agent and manager, and the downstairs concierge, who will then place my carryout orders for me. The only people allowed to call in are Barry, my agent and manager, the downstairs concierge (to announce the impending arrival of my carryout) and my ex-wife, but she never calls.

Because Bonnie is also famous I can at least keep tabs on her, worship her from afar, if you will, since I now understand love is a form of worship, a true act of faith, and that distance is no impediment to the practice of it. Love always has been this way, it’s just that I recognize it now.

Since the start of my trial, her game has gone into the toilet and there is tremendous speculation as to why—injury, illness, and (absurdly) aging—but I know the
real
reason. It is because she has been struck with the lovesickness also. We had plans and now those have been dashed. Do I take some pride in this, that my downfall ripples across the continents to her? I do, even as I mourn her misfortune. One of the great joys of being loved is having others feel your triumphs and pains, but at the same time, when they are feeling your pains, if you love them in return, you are then feeling their pain over feeling your pain and so on and so on and this is a difficult loop to pull out of.

I haven’t mentioned this theory to my therapist either because I’m certain that it too would be chalked up into the “loss of perspective” column. He may not be wrong. My life as a famous person has altered me down to my DNA, my previous self a whisper, a sound you can’t quite hear clearly. This is why I should not entirely trust myself on this front, but at this point, I’m too deeply invested.