Zombie Spaceship Wasteland Read online

  Reed leans closer in. His breath smells like he’s been eating Doritos and olives and drinking very little water.

  “You have to stay and drink tonight.”

  I say, “Here? After the show?”

  “You just walked offstage last night, and then walked right out of here without hanging out.”

  “Well, for one thing, the audience hated me.” I close my notebook. “And also, I really don’t drink.”

  “You had ice beer on Wednesday!” Reed says, pointing an accusing finger—Hercule Poirot facing down the guilty passengers of the Calais Coach. “You had ice beer, so that means you do drink!”

  “No, Reed. I tried ice beer. Tried it. I really don’t drink.”

  Reed’s mouth hangs open. “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “It does. I’d never had ice beer before. I wanted to at least know what it tastes like.”

  And then—and I remember this so clearly—I stop myself from saying this exact phrase:

  I want to experience as many different tastes, sights, emotions, conflicts, and cultures as possible, so that I can expand the canvas of my memory and enrich my comedy.

  I almost said this to a cokehead in a Poverty Sucks T-shirt and acid-washed jeans in a comedy club called the Smile Hole. As if he would answer in kind. As if he wouldn’t immediately file that away and share it with his surly, equally coked-out staff. As if I wouldn’t spend the next two days hearing variations of “How’s your canvas expanding there, Leonardo Van Gogh?” This is the kind of pretentious, oh-so-punchable smacked-ass I still am, with five years of stand-up under my belt.

  But I bite down on this and say, “So, uh, yeah. I, uh, wanted to know what it tastes like, but I really don’t drink. So . . . so . . .”

  Reed said, “Friday night is Party Night number one.”*

  “Okay . . .”

  “So I need you, after the show, to stay in here and have a drink. We can make you a soda water or a ginger ale or something, and make it look like a drink. People see you drinking, then they’re going to want to stay and keep the party going. We’re not selling . . . you’re not selling enough drinks,” says Reed, reciting the preamble to his mission statement.*

  The eleven audience members from the first show are trudging out of the showroom. I’m stationed at a central table, facing the door, a highball glass of soda water with a strategically placed lime wedge in front of me.

  At least this audience stayed for the entirety of my forty-five minutes of jokes. They had the fortitude of a homicide detective combing endless perp photos in search of a lurid neck tattoo.

  They each pause midstep as they notice me at the table on their way out. Each of them looks at me, glances at the bar, and then doubles their pace out of the club. We would rather drink quietly somewhere, anywhere, else than imbibe a drop of alcohol anywhere near you and your horrible jokes.

  The last audience member strides out into the bleak Surrey night. Reed slides into a chair next to me and says, “We’re thinking of hiring a different headliner for tomorrow night. Saturday night is Party Night number two. We’ve got to have good shows here.”

  I suck on the lime wedge and try to imagine what, in Reed’s logic, would constitute a “party night” headliner. He’s already imagined that a room full of people burning with hatred (or cold with indifference) for me as a comedian would, upon exiting the show, suddenly think, “Hey, that unfunny asshole is having a drink in the bar! We should have drinks with and/or close to that unfunny asshole!”

  I walk back to my hotel on the dim side road, muttering, “Somebody fucking kill me,” in time with my steps.

  SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1994

  More news updates when I rise for lunch. The “escaped” mental patient is “not a danger to himself and, more importantly, the public.” But his family is making an appeal for him to at least contact them, as he’s prone to confusion and could himself be in danger.

  I meet my replacement that evening when I arrive for the first show. “Oh hey, c’mere!” says Reed, hopping off his bar stool. He had been sitting next to a huge guy who looks like a beverage distribution agent.

  I shake hands with the guy. “This is Gary. We’ve been . . . how long we know each other, Bo?”

  Gary says, “Since this dude couldn’t get laid in high school.”

  “Suck a bone!” says Reed, and they both crack up. Is this guy even a comedian?

  “So, where do you get your jokes? Reed says he sees you writing them down in a notebook.”

  I don’t know how to answer this. Gary, like a dispiritingly large chunk of the population, seems to think comedians get their jokes out of books. Does he think I transcribe them to help my memory?

  “I write ’em down, too.” Gary takes a spiral notebook out of his backpack. Then he produces four or five paperback joke books and a few issues of Playboy. He opens the Playboy to where he’s got a few Playboy party jokes marked with yellow highlighter.

  “Oh, uh, I write my own stuff.”

  Gary says, “From where?”

  I don’t answer. I get a ginger ale and watch Gary transcribe jokes out of the paperbacks onto a separate sheet of paper. At one point, he asks me if a dirty knock-knock joke should come before or after a dirty riddle.

  “I’m going to make the riddle sound more conversational, like I’m just saying it,” says Gary sagely. “Usually, in a riddle, you ask the question, and then you answer it and the answer’s the joke. But see? Here’s how I’m going to say it . . .”

  I look down at the paper he’s slid across the bar to me. He’s written:

  Did you here [sic] about the midget porno movie? It’s called Itty Bitty Gang Bang!

  Gary says, “That way, it feels more like I’m talking to them. Like Richard Pryor.”

  Gary kills. Kills. A star is born in front of twenty-one people in Surrey that night.

  He could not have more of an advantage. For one, the audience is so relieved when I finally finish my half hour, they greet Gary like a redemptive angel come to wash away the acidic taint of my comedy with jokes they already know the punch lines to. Sometimes they recite them along with Gary, and then cheer.

  “So, this hooker said, ‘I’ll do anything you want for fifty bucks’ And I said—”

  And then the audience swoops in with Gary: “Paint my house!”

  Ten minutes into Gary’s act I head for the door. I want to step outside and get some clean air. The cigarette ban hasn’t made its way up to Canada (did it ever?) and the stress of watching me eat it makes the Smile Hole audiences light up with a vengeance. Scalp-to-ceiling-level in the showroom is a solid soup of gray death.

  “Where’re you going?” Reed lurches between me and the door.

  “I’m getting a little fresh air. I’ll be right back.”

  Reed shakes his head sadly. “You should go back in and watch Gary. I think it’d really help you.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I say, and shove my way outside.

  This is a disturbing, recurring motif in my career. The club owner insisting I stay and watch someone. And Reed resurrecting it brings up a blazing column of anger and disgust.

  The club owners never want me to stay and watch anyone good. And back when I was an emcee, and had even less courage, they insisted and threatened and seemed to take a weird pleasure in saying, “You’re going to sit in this room and find out what real comedy is about.”

  There were the club owners in Williamsburg, Virginia, who made me watch this god-awful hack headliner who sounded like a low-rent televangelist and hadn’t changed a word of his act in two decades. Then there was the oily, sneering Philadelphia club owner who, knowing I had a long drive back to Virginia after a late Saturday show, wouldn’t pay me unless I watched a black headliner who performed like a retarded Klansman’s idea of what a black comedian was. Then, one night in Walnut Creek, California, when the Bay Bridge was closing at eleven p.m., and I politely asked the aggressively forgettable headliner if I could leave after bring
ing her on, to save me a one-hour drive around the peninsula:

  “No, you stay. You’ve been up there chatting with your other comedian friends in the greenroom, and none of you ever once watched my act. So now you stay.”

  Well that makes sense, I thought. You’re right to be angry. I’ve been talking with my lively, creative peers about music we like, and movies, and bouncing jokes off one another, and trying to make our acts better, when I could have been down in the showroom, listening to your grating, monotone pig-voice recite early-eighties bullshit about periods, men leaving the toilet seat up, and the difference between cats and dogs.

  Out loud to her, I said, “Okay.”

  No one ever made me stay and watch Bill Hicks, or Brian Regan, or Todd Glass or Louis C.K. or Dave Attell or Warren Thomas or Maria Bamford. Oh wait—no one had to. Comedians naturally went out of their way to watch and learn from those people.

  In the parking lot I witness a fight. Wait, did I say “fight”? Because it’s not a fight when there’s one dude talking on a pay phone—a moonfaced, long-limbed-but-still-soft dude who’s not so much talking as nodding and then, a second later, saying, “Oh, I mean, yes,” as the person on the other end is probably saying, “Did you understand me? Don’t just nod . . .”

  And it’s really not a fight when the other dude is less a human and more locomotive incarnate, who barrels forward out of the parking lot and fractures Moon Face’s jaw with a Frye boot. That’s how the “fight”—which is a beating—starts and ends. Moon Face drops and pukes blood. Locomotive stands over him, fists balled, as if Moon Face is going to spring up and give as good as he got. Moon Face is instantly drained of any “give” once Locomotive is done with the “got.”

  “Scratch my truck bed, motherfucker!” locomotive threatens and explains with one sentence.

  I’m pretty sure a scuffed truck bed doesn’t equal a powdered jawbone, but I don’t say anything. I picture Locomotive slicing me in two with his neck muscles alone if I so much as make a peep. I also picture the audience hearing the carnage from the showroom and, mid-Knock-Knock joke, piling out into the parking lot. They’re met with the sight of me being mulched under Locomotive’s boots and another cheer goes up; another star is born. Having witnessed injustice triumph, and someone with the ability to harm choose to do so, I go back inside.

  “After this show, I want you guys to shake hands with the audience as they leave,” says Reed, stanching a nosebleed with a bar napkin.

  Oh Jesus, no, I thought.

  Oh Jesus, yes, I have to do it.

  If an audience member wants to come up to a comedian after a show, tell him or her they enjoyed it, that they laughed and wish the comedian well, fine. But I am being forced—and it won’t be the last time—to position myself at the exit door and shake everyone’s hand as they leave. Whether they want it or not.

  I repelled these audiences sitting in a comfortable lounge with a refreshing drink in front of me, like a living, welcoming liquor ad. Now I have to literally get between them and freedom, and make their last impression of the Smile Hole awkward and hateful.

  “I was thinking of doing that anyway!” says Gary.

  “That’s ’cause Bo wants to keep the party going,” says Reed, showing me his idea of a withering glance.*

  By this time, my opener, now an emcee who only had to do seven minutes, had adjusted his act. He goes onstage, says, “Who’s here to fuckin’ party?” The crowd cheers; he shotguns a beer and then belches the word “pussy.” Then he brings me up.

  I go up in front of a half-full room. The Locomotive sits in the front row. He doesn’t look at me as I say hello, since he’s too busy plunking a shot glass of bourbon into a mug of beer.

  As I plow deeper into my set, and he’s got time to sit in the unbroken silence and watch me, I see it—see it on his face—that he realizes I’m the asshole out in the parking lot who saw him sucker-boot Moon Face. My mouth goes dry and I speak faster and faster, not even pausing to acknowledge the silence. I do my half-hour feature set in eighteen minutes and get offstage. The emcee brings up Gary, and I head out to the lounge.

  “So, Reed, can I get my check?”

  Reed says, “Let’s wait till after the show. I need you to stay and shake hands.”

  “You know, I’ll bet they only want to shake hands with G—” I say before he cuts me off.

  “After the show,” says Reed, pushing past me, behind the bar. He taps his nose at the mulleted bartender and they head out back.

  I sit at the bar and scribble in my notebook. I suddenly, very badly, want a drink. Maybe a layer of scotch or two, to act as a numbing shield in case a boot attack should come my way later.

  The Locomotive looms into view, past my right shoulder. He’s also heading toward the back, where the rest-rooms are. He doesn’t look at me. I bend my head farther down over my notebook.

  I jot down two joke premises: “Guy recovering from saying something stupid at a party” and “Horrible things that have popped into my head while masturbating that didn’t stop me from masturbating.” Underneath them, nothing.

  Then a hand as solid as a trailer hitch falls on my shoulder. I look behind me and the Locomotive is staring down from the faraway perch of his own head on his steely neck.

  “Your jokes were good. I liked them.” He says these words and I realize what he means. I’m giving you a compliment I don’t believe, and you’re going to keep your mouth shut.

  “Thank you I’m glad you liked the show thank you,” I say. He walks back into the showroom. As he swings the door open I hear Gary’s voice say, out of any context, “. . . Chinese! . . .” The door shuts but I hear the crowd roar.

  An old man pumps Gary’s hand and wheezes with laughter.

  “I’m telling you, that joke with the ant floating downstream with a boner, and he’s saying for ’em to put up the bridge. That’s been a favorite of mine for so long I can’t even tell you!”

  Gary, and me, and the emcee are in an awkward receiving line at the exit door. The crowd files past. There’s a bottleneck in front of Gary. A few people are offering the emcee beers. I get terse nods.

  At the bar, Reed cuts me a check. “Don’t cash this until Monday. And be back here Wednesday morning. I got a different opener for you on those road gigs.” Part of headlining the Smile Hole was staying an extra week and performing at four one-nighters outside of Surrey. Four nights in the chilly countryside, playing bars, restaurants, and God knows what other establishments that Reed has persuaded to plug in a microphone and aim a desk lamp at a stage.

  “How’s the hotel? It’s reasonable?”

  “It’s nice,” I say.

  “Got a big sofa down the basement of my place. It doesn’t fold out, but it’s plenty wide. Bathroom’s right upstairs. I’ll take you to the supermarket, put any food you want in the fridge.”

  “I’m good.”

  Reed says, “Suit yourself.” He is inhaling a coke booger as he says it, so I hear “Shoot yourself.”

  The hotel seems to recede from me every step I take toward it.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1994

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”

  I’m sitting in a Subway sandwich shop at one in the afternoon on a Sunday, having a turkey sub and a Diet Coke for breakfast.

  While I ordered, one of the waitresses from the Smile Hole came in. She greeted me and actually seemed pleasant, as if we were the survivors of some horrible ordeal in a foreign land and were now back in polite civilization. I could not have looked savory in the harsh sunlight, which made her gesture seem even sweeter.

  Now we’re sitting at one of the little tables. She’s got one of those cold-cut subs that remind me of school lunches. We’re eating, and she’s telling me about her life in Surrey and how she wants to move to Toronto and maybe be a travel agent.

  “I mean, it’s cool if I ask you something? Kind of personal?”

  “Sure, go ahead,” I say.

  She asks, “Are you g
ay?”

  “Am I gay? No.” What the hell?

  She washes down a bite of sandwich with her root beer.

  “Well, why didn’t you hit on any of us?”

  “What?”

  “Me and the other waitresses, we were wondering why you weren’t trying to sleep with any of us.”

  For a second, I’m really flattered. Were they all angling to fuck me, a hellhole comedy club full of young Canadian waitresses? Did I exert some dark gravity up north, the way Superman suddenly had powers when bathed in Earth’s yellow sun?

  A moment later she shatters my reverie. “I mean, we figured, this guy’s the headliner, one of us is gonna have to fuck him.”

  That’s right. Not only were these waitresses not attracted to me. Not only didn’t they want to fuck me.

  They were resigned to having to fuck me.

  “Uh, I have a fiancée.” The waitress buys the lie. It won’t be the last one, I figure.

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1994

  This is my first of two days off. No show in the evening. Nowhere to be. I’m waking up in a hotel in a still-strange town, not knowing anyone. Theoretically, I could wake, live my day, and fall back asleep without ever once uttering a word. I feel like an aspirant monk with the diet and sleeping habits of a truck song narrator.

  I decide to walk nowhere near the Smile Hole. I want to pretend like I’m truly a silent drifter, and not a comedian who’s depending on a paycheck and future one-nighters to pay for the greasy hotel lunches.

  So I head east (I think) through the suburbs. It’s twelve thirty in the afternoon, and there’s a pudgy stranger in an overcoat walking the sidewalks of your neighborhood, Surrey. Head down, brooding, pasty from starches, and blinking in the sunshine. The Dave Clark Five’s “Because” begins playing in my head. It’s a song I often think of in the middle of the day in an empty suburban street. There’s something accidentally sinister under the gliding organ and falling vocal harmonies of that song. Whenever I hear it, I think of the words “daytime menace.” For instance, what if someone were peering at me right now, through their curtains, the inside of their house dark and still— maybe they’re manic-depressive. And they look outside and see me, the personification of a defeated sigh wrapped in an overcoat, trudging along the uneven sidewalk.