When the McCarthys were set to move from Kingston, Aida took Madeleine aside, lit a fresh Gitane, inhaled and rasped, “Madeleine, you have a great gift, darling. But you’re funny. In the words of the immortal Dietrich, ‘you can’t help it.’ Don’t ever let anyone disparage you for it. Laughter bubbles from the well of tears, my cherub, and at the bottom of your well there is blood.”
Aida was the second person in Madeleine’s experience to invoke the top-hatted Deutsche Diva. Her inner eyes remained wide as saucers in awe-filled contemplation of the oracle. By the time she was a teenager, however, irony had loped in, lithe spike-collared beast, to ridicule the Aidas of this world. But when the mists of adolescence retreated, she recovered her memory and, though she still did not fully comprehend Aida’s prophecy, she recalled what she had always wanted to be when she grew up, and pursued it through her twenties. Funny. It runs on a harsh diet and requires a strong stomach. Popeye eats spinach to get his strength. A comedian eats the can.
“You coming for a drink, hon?”
Shelly stands in the doorway. She is reassuringly forty.
Madeleine pokes her head around the plastic curtain. “I thought we were doing notes.”
“We’ll do them at the bar.”
Shelly wrangles comedians. Makes them focus until something gets written, then shot on set. Like many producers, she seems not to have an iota of patience, but she could get a Chihuahua to double-ride a cat on a bicycle. She is trying to get Madeleine to write a one-woman show.
“Hurry up, McCarthy.”
“Order me some of those deep-fried—those fried—something fried, okay?”
It’s Friday. Dress rehearsal, then shoot in front of a live audience, then drink, debrief and start hatching next week’s show. Friday is fun, the peak of the week. It follows marathon Thursday, which is about rewriting, rehearsing, starting over, envying the misery and terror of the set and costume people, who are envying the misery and terror of the performers, and being grateful for a private dressing room with a bathroom of one’s own. Monday is full of laughter at new sketch ideas, Tuesday you work on the new ideas and no one laughs at them any more, on Wednesday only Shelly can tell if anything’s still funny. Saturday and Sunday are the days off, and the only ones free of gastrointestinal disturbances. Madeleine has the same mixed feelings about it all as the others do: she loves it.
Shelly leaves and Madeleine puts on an iridescent blue polyester bowling shirt with “Ted” stitched on the pocket, a low-slung pair of vintage pinstripes, a pair of battered orthopedic Oxfords so square they’re hip, and an Indian Motorcycle jacket of expensively distressed leather—she pictures a supermodel, clad only in the jacket, being dragged behind a Harley over gravel to achieve the fashionable patina. She feels what she often feels after a show: that she has removed one costume in order to don another. She spikes her hair, despikes it then gives up. Switches off the lights around her mirror, turns off the overhead and closes the door. It locks behind her.
The pieces of Maurice remain in her dressing room, ready to be reassembled and restored to life next time. But the flesh-tone bathing cap with the stuck-on grey hair that she fashioned herself—not with great craft, but with conviction; the black-rimmed glasses, perched now on the bridge of the rudimentary Styrofoam nose, smudged lenses obscuring blank eyes; the wide grey suit hanging limp from the rack next to the foam-core carapace of guts; and the big empty brogues, yawning caverns just right for hiding Easter eggs; these pieces of Maurice seem never to deanimate completely, no matter how far apart they are kept.
On some nights, when Madeleine pulls the door of her dressing room closed, she enacts a small ritual that she has never tried to explain to herself or anyone, because it is so trivial: she makes certain not to turn her back on the room until she has closed the door. She looks from the slack grey suit to the Styrofoam head, making certain to exhale through her nose as she does so, and to refrain from blinking as she pulls the door to. Then she tries the lock three times, click click click, turns, breathes and leaves. A harmless tic.
She performs similar rites when leaving her house: touch the doorknob three times, this assures her that she did indeed turn off the stove—an indispensable prerequisite to road trips, which are otherwise interrupted by a U-turn halfway to Buffalo, and it’s back to Toronto to find, “Of course I turned it off.” Her footfalls between the cracks of sidewalks are at times subject to baroque calculations, and when drinking a glass of anything she is careful never to exhale onto the liquid before sipping, and is often compelled to inhale first. If you say these things out loud, you sound nuts.
She looks more like a tired twenty-year-old than a thirty-two-year-old, which goes to show that low-grade obsessive compulsive disorder is good for the skin.
The television studio is located way up in the ’burbs of Toronto. She is the last one out, as usual. She says good night to the security guard and exits into the street-light sharpness of the April night, the hard gloss of manicured grounds, newly green. She jaywalks to an island in the middle of the six-lane suburban “street,” makes it to the other side and sets out across the parking lot of an immense mall which, like a mountain, seems to get no closer with her approach, as though she were moonwalking in place, until suddenly it’s on top of her and she can no longer see the entrance. She looks right, then left down the massive exterior, which might as well be featureless, its endless illuminated signs an optical cacophony. Light bleeds into the black sky and she closes her eyes, squeezing the yellow orb that appears on her inner lids like a lemon. Then she opens them again and sees it: the giant pickle.
Madeleine started stand-up by accident, when she was twelve. It was Jack’s idea. She was in a public-speaking contest. He had helped her write her speech, on the topic of “Humour: Its History and Uses.” She forgot her lines halfway through at the intramurals and had to improvise. He said, “Let’s build it in.”
As she advanced toward the provincial finals, he would identify some point at random within the speech and, depending on what was in the news that day, or what they saw from the car windows on their way to the hall, she would pitch a topical reference and see how far out into left field she could go before bringing it all back home. “Just get up there and do it your way, sweetie,” he said. She was eventually disqualified for “extemporizing,” but they went out for ice cream afterwards and he did a cost-benefit analysis of her public-speaking career on a napkin. She came out ahead because experience was worth its weight in gold. “If you want to be an entertainer,” he said, “you have to take every opportunity to hone your craft.” He always said “entertainer” and, even after she came to know it as a hopelessly outdated term, she never corrected him.
She majored in Classics at McGill University in Montreal, and moonlighted in a Québec-separatist guerrilla-theatre troupe. This involved terrorizing law-abiding citizens in public places from a leftist perspective, and “exploring her sexuality” with a mandolin player named Lise who was into iridology. Her French improved, along with her tolerance for dépanneur plonk, and though she was welcomed by the Québécoises as a quaint and feisty Acadienne, Madeleine felt like an imposter. Something had to give. She moved to Toronto, where she could comfortably resume her long-time disguise as an Anglo.
She quit university with her father’s blessing. “Anyone with a decent brain and self-discipline can make a living as a doctor or lawyer or glorified bean-counter like me,” he said. “It takes a gift to make people laugh.”
Comedy. The brain surgery of the performing arts.
They went out, just the two of them, for dinner at a Swiss Chalet. He spread out a paper napkin. “What business are you in?”
“The funny business.”
“What are you selling?”
“Laughs.”
“No. You’re selling stories. Every joke tells a story. Every laugh is the result of a combination of surprise and recognition—” he wrote the two words down on the napkin, then enclosed them in boxes each with
an arrow pointing to the blank middle of the napkin. “The unexpected and the inevitable”—two more boxes—“that’s what stories are made of, whether they’re happy or sad—” two circles, one smiling, one frowning, separated by a slash, connected to the blank centre by a wavy line. “It’s no good just making fun of things, even though it’s important to have all that mimetic talent and wit”—two more circles—“you have to have a point of view”—overarching heading—“and that’s what you’ve got.” He tossed the pen to the table. “A little different way of seeing the world. And the ability to let other people see it that way too. You take the familiar and tilt it. The ability to see things from multiple simultaneous points of view is a sign of genius.”
He had left the centre of the napkin blank, so she filled it in—STORY—and drew a circle around it.
He grinned. “That’s right. There’s your feedback loop.”
She looked at the mini-solar system. “It’s like a consolation,” she said.
He nodded. They had both heard her say “constellation.”
In those days, Toronto was a hair shirt, despite the best efforts of Yorkville with its coffee houses, its folk singers, and radicals; still Toronto the Good, WASP bastion. This was before pad thai, before spritzers and “Beemers,” when “pasta” was still spaghetti, before anyone “did” lunch, and when career women wore chiffon scarves with their pantsuits. But she found an apartment on Queen West, over a textile store run by an unsmiling Hungarian couple, and stumbled upon a rich vein of counterculture. A bar called the Cameron was a hothouse of art, music and theatre, a multimedia mecca where hipsters of all races drank side by side with honest-to-goodness Sally Ann hobos. She had a brief but pivotal affair with an intense alcoholic feminist, the publisher of an underground Marxist-Leninist newspaper, whose phone was tapped by the RCMP—it would have reflected badly on her if it hadn’t been.
She performed wherever she could, developing the gourd-like rind that every comic needs, and that a woman couldn’t live without if she was crazy enough to do stand-up. Phyllis Diller stood at the edge of the known world; beyond her were sea monsters. The new generation of brilliant funny women worked mainly in ensembles or in story-based one-woman-show contexts. Gilda Radner, Lily Tomlin, Andrea Martin, Jane Curtin…. There was safety in numbers, whereas stand-up was strictly kill or be killed.
How’d it go tonight?
I killed/I died.
In the clubs, comics were like indentured servants, clawing their way onto the stage in exchange for a kidney, their first-born child, their left testicle, but the women comics—wait a second, women comics? At Yuk Yuk’s, the hook was used liberally and literally. The safest stuff was “blue,” mean and macho, but Madeleine couldn’t have pulled that off if she’d tried.
What business are you in?
The funny business.
What are you selling?
Stories.
She died at Yuk Yuk’s, then auditioned at the Old Fire Hall for the Second City touring company. She hit the road, and often the Fire Hall stage itself, when the main company took a night off. It was almost as rare to cross over from stand-up to improv as it was to be a female stand-up in the first place. But she loved having a gang, she gloried in high-speed improvisation, doing sketches that were “about something”—politics, pop culture, the hostile grocery clerk this morning, processing whatever had happened in her day, working it all out at night on stage. In between sketches, ransacking the flea-bitten costume pile backstage; the exultation that accompanied the appearance of a new character courtesy of that red shirt, that hat, those boots, without which you would never be able to do that character again—“where the fuck is that red shirt?!” The bizarre and strangely ritualized behaviour that preceded every performance, jokes among themselves so gross they’d have had to import earth-moving equipment to go any lower. Big huge Tony prancing nearly nude through the dressing rooms like a Las Vegas showgirl, seizing and humping the company dry-cleaning with great graphic gusto when it arrived, then hitting the stage with a wholesome smile, ready to entertain the Rotary Club. They toured relentlessly, Welcome to Kingston, Gananoque, Chatham, Hamilton, Windsor, Sudbury, North Bay, Timmins. They played roller rinks where punchlines took ten seconds to hit the back of the arena. They did benefits—once for a Holocaust museum where the emcee brought out a child’s shoe from Auschwitz before introducing them, “Now here to entertain us …”
She bought a vintage VW bug and retraced the tour on her own, doing stand-up in every burg with a university or bar. Alone, alone, all, all alone. Alone on a wide wide sea. She did the club-sandwich circuit and graduated from seedy motels to Holiday Inns. She honed her craft before rooms where half the tables were empty and the other half full of lonely guys waiting for the stripper to come on. She survived a stag party of drunken engineers who tossed a blow-up doll around the room throughout her act—“isn’t it a shame when cousins marry?” She performed for musty nickel miners and their dates, who had turned out in the misprinted expectation of singing along with Stompin’ Tom Connors. She learned to love the beehived silhouettes that came to pack her return gigs in the taverns and “cabana rooms” of borscht-belt north. Make the women laugh, put the guys at ease, then turn up the heat until, by the end, she had come out as a burly nickel miner trapped in the body of a muff-diving lezzie. It helped that she was cute.
It was after Stonewall but before “gay pride.” If she wasn’t murdered in the parking lot, she would be taken into countless gnarly normal hearts. It helped that she met Christine—a Women’s Studies major whose father was a cop in Timmins. Madeleine didn’t have to explain contradiction to her. Christine wore batik dresses with police boots, kept her hair long and drove standard. She regularly rescued Madeleine, turning up in Sarnia with a cooler full of pesto and wine, a pillow from home, and a willingness to have sex that involved nothing but sleep afterwards.
She quit the touring company before she could be fired or promoted, and focused on in-town. Christine told her what to read and Madeleine sharpened her mental knives late-nights in Toronto at a boozecan-cum-salon called Rear Window. She started out as The Astonishing Elastowoman. She branched out with The Astonishing Elastowoman’s Introduction to Classics of Western Civilization. She branched and branched and branched. She became known for her bendy body and bizarre male characters, including Anita Bryant. There was Lou, a powder-blue-polyester-leisure-suited lounge lizard who accompanied himself on accordion and sang with an outrageous French accent. There was Roger of Roger’s Room, a fifteen-year-old boy obsessed with Soldier of Fortune magazine, prone to tears and fond of his pet turtle. At the end of every sketch, he would look down the sights of an AK-47 and name all the people he saw there the way the chick on Romper Room used to do with her magic mirror. And there was Maurice.
She began to headline in places with air conditioning, and graduated to concert halls across the country and to venues in Chicago and New York, where people bought tickets with her name printed on them. She crossed over into TV, into film, she crossed over and over and over. She merged feminism with humour, she merged being out of the closet with being in the mainstream, she merged and merged.
It helped that she was used to moving.
Jack and Mimi saw many of her shows. Jack saw most of them. She wished her brother could have seen one.
Propelled by the feeling of juggling, of entering a time-space continuum where she could see thoughts coming and pluck them from the air the way Superman plucks speeding bullets; by the revelation that everything is connected—start anywhere, go go go, you will inevitably wind up back at this spot, because space is curved and so are thoughts, a thousand boomerangs—she couldn’t focus on one thing, so she focused on everything.
She did it where it was safe: on stage, in front of many strangers who had paid good money and expected a good time. In person she remained shy well into her twenties.
If Madeleine stopped: all the balls would drop. The atoms would disperse. She would look do
wn, see the void beneath her feet, the precipice just out of reach; hear the tin-can sound effect of feet racing for purchase on thin air—Mother!—and zoom straight down to the Wile E. Coyote bottom with a powdery pok!
She arrives at the faux-rustic double doors of the Pickle Barrel Family Restaurant and pushes them open. The reassuring aroma of ketchup and fried food greets her, along with a blast of “Crocodile Rock”—all oldies, all the time. She spots the others at a big round table loaded with beer, nachos, burgers and wings. This is After-Three TV. She, one other woman and four men, all thirty-something, have been together for seven years. A combination of Second City alumni and renegades. When they first got together, they realized that each, at one time, had been the “bad” kid at school, the one required to remain “after three.”
They are crowded around the table with Shelly and two of their regular directors, who look as though they haven’t slept in a week, along with an even more haggard-looking script editor and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Pretty Department—hair and makeup Überfrau—who just broke up with her boyfriend and doesn’t want to drink alone. Hands criss-cross the table, helping themselves to every plate but the one directly in front of them. At a distance of a table or two, the group looks perfectly at home up here in the land o’ malls. They don’t appear bohemian—even if Madeleine’s personal style tends toward urban-lesbian-warehouse chic. On the whole, they resemble nice generic white people; a Judeo-Christian cross-section of North Americana, somewhere between university student and middle management, and there, but for a small yet crucial quirk, went they all.
When you look closely, however, you can see that they all have the thing in their eye. The result of an accident or a gift. Perhaps God dropped each of them on the head before they were born. Light seems to reflect at an odd angle from their irises—the visible effect, possibly, of information that, having entered the brain obliquely, exits the eye at a corresponding tilt. Something, at some point, smote or stroked them. Each lives in genial terror of being found out and exposed as a fraud. Each is fuelled by a combustible blend of exuberance and self-loathing, informed by a mix of savvy and gullibility. None was cool in high school. Denizens of the great in-between of belonging and not belonging; dwellers in the cracks of sidewalks; stateless citizens of the world; strangers among us, familiar to all. Comedians. These are Madeleine’s people.
The Way the Crow Flies Page 67