One Big Joke

by Laurence Shames

  PRAISE FOR LAURENCE SHAMES’ NOVELS

  “As enjoyable as a day at the beach.”

  – USA Today

  “Funny, suspenseful, romantic, and wise…Shames is a terrific writer with real heart”

  –-Detroit Free Press

  “Expertly blends fast-paced action with colorful dialogue…Smart and consistently entertaining”

  —The Chicago Tribune Book Review

  “A clever premise is explored with delicious dark humor and healthy cynicism”

  —The San Francisco Chronicle

  ONE BIG JOKE

  LAURENCE SHAMES

  Copyright © 2018 Laurence Shames

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1981614281

  ISBN-13: 978-1981614288

  DEDICATION

  For Marilyn, who keeps me laughing and, I hope, vice-versa

  Dying’s easy. Comedy is hard.

  Edmund Kean, English actor,

  on his deathbed in 1833

  PART ONE

  1

  “What is with you lately?” said Marsha Gluck on what might or might not have turned out to be the last evening of her nine-year marriage to the then-unemployed comedy writer Lenny Sullivan. “You’ve been acting like everything is one big joke.”

  “That is so not true,” he said, but he said it more by reflex than from conviction.

  Lenny was forty-two, of average height, average build, with darting hazel eyes and rather kinky and wild brown hair that was just beginning to recede from a tall and often crinkled brow. He had a habit, when conversing, of leaning forward from the waist, then again from the neck. This forward lean helped to quicken his responses and focus his attention. Even so, he didn’t really understand exactly how or when this conversation with his wife had begun to curdle into an argument.

  “It is true,” she insisted. “It is. The worse things get, the grimmer things look, with the politics, the craziness, the country going down the tubes, the more you make it sound like one big joke. To you that’s all it is.”

  “No. Not so. It isn’t one big joke. It’s a whole lot of little jokes all strung together. Some of them are funnier than others.”

  “You see? There you go again. Always with the sarcasm, the subversion. I’m getting a little worried about you, Lenny. All this undercutting, this dodging. I’m just not sure it’s healthy.”

  “Dodging what?” he asked, his neck craning forward another inch or two. “What am I dodging?”

  “That life is serious. That the world is a serious place.”

  “And this means it can’t also be funny? Marsha, what can I say? I write gags. I make up skits. That’s what I do. So call me a lightweight. We can’t all be short-listed for a MacArthur. We can’t all win the Nobel Prize. We can’t all write The Grapes of fucking Wrath. We can’t all be Jean-Paul fucking Sartre. We can’t all—”

  “Okay, okay, I get the point.”

  “Do you? All I’m saying, I’m saying that, like practically everybody else, all I’m trying to do is get through another day in your very serious world without a shit-fit or a major depression. So how do I do that? By making jokes. Maybe providing a few laughs for people. Maybe even getting paid for it.”

  “Except you’re not getting paid for it these days.”

  “Oh, thanks so much for reminding me.”

  By then he was pacing around the cluttered living room of their small New York apartment. The room’s carpet had some wine and coffee stains on it and some of its fringes were unraveling. It looked like crap but they hadn’t bothered to replace it because, back when Lenny’s career was going better, they’d figured they’d soon be moving to a bigger place, so why accumulate more stuff to shlep around? “Not getting paid,” he went on. “Not bringing home the bacon. And I’m sure that’s my fault, too.”

  “Who’s talking fault, Lenny? No one’s talking fault.”

  “Yup, definitely my fault that the supposedly ready-to-break-big star of the show I was writing flaked out and went into rehab just before we were supposed to shoot the pilot. Not sure what I did wrong, but it’s definitely my fault.”

  “Can we please stop talking fault? I’m just trying to figure out why you’ve been in such a bad mood lately. So negative all the time. So gloomy. I mean, you make a lot of jokes but I don’t hear you laughing.”

  This was happening at around ten o’clock on a January night. Marsha was already dressed for bed, wearing fuzzy slippers along with a blue wool bathrobe over mint green pajamas. Lenny, just slightly dizzy from the quick pivots of his pacing, eventually plopped down into an armchair and looked at her while pretending not to. He still loved to look at her, even when he was feeling lousy, even when they were quarreling. She had short cinnamon-colored hair and bright green eyes with yellow flecks. Her hair was so thick that it completely swallowed up the earpieces of her reading glasses; her eyes would twinkle or darken in sympathy or disagreement with whatever she was reading. The book she was holding was, as usual, a thick and heavy one and it made a dent in her lap, and for some reason Lenny found this small and intimate detail heartbreaking.

  How many times had he watched her read, seen the different ways she held a book, the way her lips squeezed together when she bent closer to scrawl notes in the margins? Noticing and savoring things like that: Wasn’t that a big part of what married love was all about? So just what the hell was happening to the two of them? Why couldn’t they seem to get through an evening without an argument? Were they just in a bad patch or were they falling apart, letting their bond be poisoned by some tough and toxic times? When had they stopped laughing together? She used to laugh at his jokes. Often she helped shape them, tune them up. Not lately. Was she losing her regard for what he did? Or maybe he was losing it himself. Was it him? Was it all him? Was he just being impossible?

  After a minute of dispiriting reflection, he couldn’t sit still anymore and he sprang out of his chair. “I’ve gotta go move the car,” he said.

  What happened next could, from a certain viewpoint, be blamed on alternate-side-of-the-street parking. Then again, if things had been going better in the comedy business and if Lenny had still been able to afford a garage, alternate-side-of-the-street parking would not have been an issue. Plus Lenny would have been a lot less touchy. So you could also blame what happened next on his being unemployed.

  In any case, he went to the bedroom, grabbed his car keys, phone, and wallet, and headed for the door of the apartment.

  Without admitting he was doing so, he hesitated there for just a moment, waiting to hear his wife remind him to put a coat on. Lenny often headed out to move the car in winter without first grabbing a coat. This was generally because he was preoccupied, thinking through a skit or polishing a punch line or wondering how to approach a former employer about giving him some work. Usually, just as he was reaching for the doorknob, Marsha would sing out, “Don’t forget your coat.”

  This time she didn’t. Maybe it was just a tiny oversight. Maybe she was at a particularly serious spot in her reading. Still, the omission tweaked Lenny’s already bruised and maudlin feelings. He thought the worst: Maybe his wife had stopped caring much if he went out without a coat and caught a cold or even pneumonia. Maybe she wanted him to catch pneumonia. All right, fuck it then. Bring on the antibiotics, the IV pole, the Filipino nurses. He headed out without a coat.

  The hallway of their building depressed him further. It smelled of cabbage and old ladies. The street in front of the building was strewn with dented garbage cans and windblown Chinese take-out menus. For years now, decades, the Upper West Side had been gentrifying. Why did the spiffing up always seem to stop right at their block? Their block was like the dry spot on a lawn that the sprinklers always fell just short of. He found
his car. It had been a new car once, a nice car. It wasn’t any more. That depressed him too. He unlocked it, got in, and started looking for a new space on the opposite side of the street.

  If he’d found one right away, his life would not have changed.

  He would have re-parked, gone back upstairs, flossed his teeth, and gotten into bed with a glass of Scotch and a yellow pad. His wife would have joined him at some point. Maybe she would have read in silence until the lights were switched off, or maybe they would have reconciled with a hug and a kiss, maybe even made love or found something to laugh about together.

  But he didn’t find a parking space.

  So he drove around the block. The car was cold, the upholstery chilled his back, and everything annoyed him: the asshole with Jersey plates who’d taken up a space and a half; the fire hydrants that wasted precious swaths of curb; the smug garages filled with the vehicles of people whose luck was running better, who were making even these lousy times work just fine for them.

  He went around another block, then another, still planning to lock up and go back to the apartment, but as he spiraled farther out from his building, pinwheeling like a slow and tiny nebula, the gravity that had held his life together seemed somehow to loosen its grip, almost to be casting him off. Traffic light by traffic light it became possible to imagine that maybe he would not go home. Why should he? He’d stopped being sure his wife loved him anymore; he couldn’t quite figure why she would. He had fresh and nagging doubts about whether the work he’d been doing for as long as he could remember was of any value whatsoever. Making people laugh. He’d told himself it mattered. But maybe it didn’t. Maybe Marsha was right. Maybe the world had gotten awfully serious, terminally serious, and he was out of step. But if his work was trivial and he couldn’t make a living from it anyway, and if his wife kept picking on him on top of that, and if they ended up arguing even when neither of them really wanted to, just where the hell did that leave him?

  He kept making turns at street corners. Halfheartedly, he kept scanning left and right for an available parking space, but he was no longer looking very hard or seeing very clearly because his eyes had misted over. This was from the cold, he told himself. Only that. From sitting in the cold car without a coat on.

  Finally he came to a corner where he didn’t make a turn. He was on West End Avenue, heading south, and although he couldn’t quite remember making a decision to continue straight ahead, south was where he kept on pointing. After all those blocks and blocks of crawling pinwheels, it felt as free and loose as punch-drunk laughter to be on a straight course, heading somewhere, anywhere.

  His spirits giddily if ambivalently rising, the crisis embraced if not fully understood, he pressed down on the accelerator until he was in perfect sync with the traffic lights, and every one of them turned green for him, as though urging him on, wishing him well, clear through to the entrance of the Lincoln Tunnel.

  2

  In Key West, at a small, uncrowded, and perennially close to bankrupt comedy club called Titters, another week-night open-mic session was slogging along toward its one a.m. conclusion. You never knew what you’d get on open-mic nights, and over the course of the long evening there’d been a handful of good belly laughs, a fair number of cringes, and plenty of those excruciating silences that fill the hopeful then wrist-slitting interval between when a joke leaves a comedian’s mouth and when it lands in the ears of an audience that either doesn’t get it or just doesn’t think it’s funny.

  The performers and the material had been all over the place. There’d been Trump jokes and dick jokes, parodies of TV shows and shticks about stoned-out Keys types blundering through life. There were a lot of riffs about sex but usually they were about not getting any. There was a routine about socks that got lost in the dryer then mysteriously reappeared on other people’s feet in a shadow universe. One woman did a rudely hilarious ten minutes about trying to avoid explaining to her gynecologist how a certain foreign object had ended up lodged where it was.

  Between acts, people ordered more drinks. Or at least the proprietor, Pat Coates, hoped they would, because she had rent to pay and licenses to buy and needed every dollar of revenue she could scrape together. Which is why she tended bar herself and also was the one who stacked the chairs and swept the floor when the night was over, and changed the spotlights when they needed changing, and made sure the microphones were fully charged, and did the dozen other little jobs a person never really thought about when hatching the fantasy of owning a small club somewhere.

  She’d run Titters for four years now. It never got easier, but she’d promised herself that by the end of her ten-year lease she would have managed, at least, to put the place on the sort of semi-semi-mainstream comedy circuit—make it at least an A-minus or B-plus kind of venue that people would have heard of. The club was in a converted houseboat tied up to a city-owned dock that flanked U.S. 1 at Garrison Bight. There was, of course, a funk and a romance to the whole floating concept, and the dockside tub had always seemed a promising location for something, yet every business that leased it had gone belly up. During the ten years Pat had lived in Key West, the place had failed as a Thai restaurant, failed as an art gallery, failed even as a T-shirt shop. Perversely, it was this whiff of failure that had made the spot irresistible to her. A comedy writer and former stand-up herself, she saw comedy and failure as going hand in hand, being natural partners. Jokes, after all, were a way of fighting back from helplessness. Laughing was how people told failure to go fuck itself.

  So she kept at it. She felt good about giving young comics a place to hone their craft. She enjoyed—sometimes—schmoozing with the customers, or at least with the small number who were regulars. Like the very old man she was chatting with now.

  He was a lean fellow with a good head of silver hair tinged at the ends with the brittle yellow of ancient newspaper. He had a banana nose and fleshy lips and he wore a red silk shirt printed with a bold pattern of classic-shaped cocktail glasses—martini, daiquiri, hi-ball—tipped at various angles. His name was Bert d’Ambrosia, and the rumor—though rumors of scandalous past lives surrounded a lot of people in Key West—was that he was some kind of retired Mafioso. The old man was friendly, sort of relentlessly friendly, and he always had a fidgety chihuahua named Nacho in his lap. He didn’t always laugh at the comedy—a lot of the pop culture memes passed him right by—but he never failed to feed the tip jar or to applaud at the end of a set. These people were trying, after all.

  “Comedy my day and comedy now,” he was saying during the break. “Know the difference?”

  Pat was drawing someone a beer. She was tall and angular yet there was also a softness in her looks that came mainly from the mildness of her wide gray eyes. Her hair was short and ash-blond, coarsely cut so that different layers of it overlapped like shingles. It was a way cool haircut, probably a haircut meant for someone younger than her nearly forty years, but she didn’t care; she liked it that way. Finally she turned back to Bert and said, “Yeah. Your day, comedy was a bunch of straight white guys in suits and ties standing still as trees and telling corny jokes.”

  “Corny says you. No. The difference was, my day, everyone agreed on what was funny. Take Jack Benny. Guy never even needed to tell a joke. All he’d do is fold his arms, turn his head a certain way, and say…Well…and the entire country was cracked up. Now it’s like, I dunno, little territories, ghettos. Ya got jokes for twenty year olds and jokes for sixty year olds, jokes for guys and jokes for women, jokes for straights and jokes for gays, and no one gets it what the other side is laughing at. Plus ya got this whole CP thing—”

  “PC.”

  “Whatever. So you got all this stuff that, deep down, everybody knows is funny but you’re not allowed to say it. Like if you don’t say it, it’ll go away. Which happens to be bullshit. Hypocrisy. S’okay, ya don’t wanna hurt no one’s feelings. I get it. Fair enough. But come on, ya can’t tell an Eyetie joke unless you’re an Eyetie? Can’t te
ll a Jew joke unless you’re a Jew? Tonto, forget about it. When’s the last time you heard a good Lone Ranger joke? All I’m sayin’ is—”

  Whatever he was saying, it would have to wait, because just then Pat’s phone rang. It wasn’t the club phone but rather her personal line, and it rang with one of the special tones reserved for close friends who, being in the comedy world, tended to have breakdowns and crises and overdoses in the middle of the night.

  This particular tone belonged to her buddy and sometime writing partner Lenny Sullivan. When they were on a project together, they’d call each other at all hours to test out a line, buff up a gag. But they weren’t on a project now and so his late-night call was a little bit concerning. She picked up, and through the hum of the club, said, “Lenny?”

  He said, “It’s Lenny.”

  “I know. I just said that.”

  “I’m in Delaware.”

  “Delaware? Fascinating. Have you done an Instagram post?”

  “I think I just walked out on Marsha.”

  “You what?”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was in a crappy mood. I went to move the car. Then I was on the Turnpike. I don’t know exactly how it happened.”

  Pat said nothing.

  “She’s been pretty tough on me lately,” Lenny rambled. “Or at least that’s how it feels. Probably I deserve it. Probably when I don’t have work I’m a pain to be around. Hold on, I’m coming to a toll.”

  Pat moved the phone to arm’s length and looked up at the stage. A comedian was talking about her secret desire to sneak up behind old guys who drive Harleys and snip off their silver ponytails. The notion got a few sparse laughs.