I found myself nodding—a lot. It was the first real conversation I had had with a comic, someone who was doing what I wanted (and had failed) to do, and it was as if I’d been reunited with a long-lost relative.
“How long have you been doing your standup?”
“Almost a year. So I know the Natural Fudge, and every little dive within a fifty-mile radius that has an open-mike night.”
A man walking a basset hound passed us, his face as forlorn as his dog’s. Fountain was more residential and quieter than the big boulevards it ran between—Santa Monica to the south and Sunset to the north—and the pedestrian traffic was lighter and more neighborly.
“Where’d you go to school?” I asked.
“University of Nebraska, in Lincoln.”
“Did you study agriculture?”
“Nope. I was a music major.”
“Wow.”
“Wow, yourself,” said Mike, nudging me with his shoulder. “Now what about you: how’d you come to choose comedy over high fashion modeling?”
It was my turn to nudge him. “Yeah, the magazines are filled with 5’4” Asian Scandinavians.”
“If they’re not, they should be.”
I didn’t care that he was joking, and I resisted the urge to skip.
“And you really didn’t bomb,” he said, once we’d gotten back to his car.
“So what do you call it when no one laughs?”
“People laughed. I laughed.”
“But why,” I said with all sincerity, “why didn’t more people?”
“Should I tell you the truth?”
“Only if it’s deeply flattering.” When he didn’t answer, I gave a quick sigh. “Okay, tell me the truth.”
“It’s just that . . . I didn’t believe you. Whatever you say, you have to make the audience believe that you mean it.”
“You didn’t believe I went out with the Jolly Green Giant?”
“I would have, if you sold me on the idea.”
“How do I do that?”
“Like a poker player who wins the pot even with a lousy hand. Like you believe it yourself.”
I pondered this as we drove past a trio of barely dressed women plying their trade on the corner of Sunset and Gower.
“Candy, in a contest between a comic with killer material and no confidence in it and a comic with mediocre material who thinks it’s the funniest shit ever, guess whose gonna get more laughs?”
“Comic number two.”
“And we have a winner!”
He told me the story of his first time on stage, how a guy yelled at him to “shove that horn up your ass!” and how the drunk lady he thought he was cracking up was actually crying.
When he pulled up in front of Peyton Hall, I wanted to reward him for cheering me up and asked if he’d like to come in.
“I just made some banana bread.”
“Banana bread,” said Mike, tapping the steering wheel with his fingers. “I love banana bread. But I’ve got to get home. My girlfriend’s probably wondering where I am.”
“Oh.” I was embarrassed at how deflated I sounded.
“Yeah, Kirsten. We met in college. She works for Alliance/Crocker—the frozen food company? One of us has got to have a real job.”
“Oh,” I said again. “Well, thanks for everything, Mike. Really nice meeting you.” I pushed opened the car door. “Thanks for your advice, too.”
“Yeah, I—” he began, but I had already shut the door and was racing up the steps to my apartment.
21
9/27/68
Dear Cal,
Grandma and I went to the movies today—she said she wanted to take her funny girl to see Funny Girl! It was really good, although that song about a girl not being pretty was dumb—who wouldn’t pick being funny over being pretty?
I USUALLY WENT TO THE POOL after work, and more often than not Maeve and Ed had the same bright idea. We were sprawled out on chaise longues, but instead of regaling each other with what had happened during our workday, I was painfully replaying my night at the Natural Fudge. My feelings were raw; Mike Trowbridge’s reassurances had been a temporary cushion I fell against after the bad dream of my performance, but that pillow had quickly been yanked away. And my friends weren’t exactly slathering me with the balm of sympathy.
“I don’t understand why you didn’t ask us to go,” said Ed.
“Yeah, way to freeze us out,” said Maeve.
“I didn’t freeze you out. I just wanted to see how an unbiased audience would react.”
“Bullhooey,” said Maeve. “You just didn’t want to share the experience.”
“And now I’m glad I didn’t. Because I bombed.”
“Which is why you should have had friends with you,” said Ed, examining a patch of peeling skin on his shoulder.
“Yeah, who’d want to go through something like that alone? Ed, ick—don’t pick at that,” said Maeve, leaning over to swat his fingers. She waved her hand then, as if considering swatting me, too. “So here’s how it’s done, Candy: you tell your friends what’s going on in your life, so they can share it. Which is why—whether I bomb or not—you two better be cheering me on Saturday night.”
IT WAS A TONIC FOR me to be an audience member and watch a performance that had nothing—intentionally—to do with comedy.
A banner draped across the stage of the Toluca Lake Junior High School read, Welcome, Valley Vixens! and Ed and I were among a group of about fifty spectators on the folding chairs set up on the polished wood gym floor.
The man seated next to me broke a peanut shell with a quick twist of his fingers.
“You lift weights?” he asked, giving me the once-over.
“No.”
“Maybe you should think about it,” he said, popping the peanuts into his mouth.
Next to me, Ed snickered.
“Okay, I thought about it,” I said to my goober-loving neighbor as he thumbed open another shell.
“And?”
“And I think I’d rather stick to my black belt karate.”
“Whoa. No kidding?”
I chopped the air with my hands.
“These babies are insured for a hundred thousand each.”
The peanut eater whistled, or tried to.
In the audience, there were a couple of people who looked like they knew their way around a weight room, but the majority had muscles that looked unchallenged by sit-ups, curls, rows, and extensions.
The atmosphere was definitely more sports arena than opera house. Some, like the man next to me, had brought snacks. One woman nursed a baby hidden under a bunny-printed blanket. The older couple next to Ed explained that their daughter had been lifting weights since she saw Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C.
“We tried to tell her—Kath, weights aren’t going to help you get what she’s got,” said the man, holding his cupped hands in front of his chest.
“But Kathy’s always been strong willed,” said the woman. “And Sy and I realized it’s a lot easier to say, ‘Okay, honey,’ and just go along for the ride.”
A thin guitarist, whose droopy mustache matched the slope of his shoulders, plugged an electric blue Telecaster into a pig nose amp and without acknowledging the audience ripped into “Thank Heaven for Little Girls,” heavy on the tremolo.
“Maurice Chevalier as played by Jimi Hendrix,” Ed whispered.
Judges—a bodybuilder and two normal-sized ones—set themselves and their clipboards at a table across from the guitarist. The royal blue curtain parted and a deeply tanned man with a gray brush cut strode out on the stage.
“Welcome, people, welcome!” he said, clapping his hands. “This is so outta sight! The Valley Vixen Women’s Bodybuilders Competition! Who wouldn’t want to be a Valley Vixen, man?”
The audience responded with hoots and hollers.
“My name’s Ricardo Jones, yeah, that Ricardo Jones”—here he pushed up the sleeve of his Hawaiian shirt and flexed an arm to d
isplay a softball-sized bicep—“1968 Mr. Greater Orange County, and it is my beyond-groovatational honor to be hosting tonight’s competition because, really, man, isn’t it time for the ladies to show off what they’ve got?”
Cheers rose from the audience; even the peanut eater had reclaimed enough saliva to offer a wolf whistle.
“So let’s not waste time—let’s bring out the parade, man! Hit it, Kevin!”
The guitarist shrugged his droopy shoulders and as he launched into the Miss America theme song (heavy on the wah-wah pedal), the procession of bodybuilders began.
“Oh my God,” whispered Ed, which was my sentiment exactly.
The woman leading the procession had short red hair and a scowl on her face, not an expression commonly worn by a pageant contestant. She had on a bikini that matched her hair color, and before striking her first pose she adjusted, with a determined yank, the triangles of fabric covering her small breasts.
“Ladies and gentlemen, say hello to Susie the Strong from Reseda! Susie enjoys sunrises—especially Tequila ones, right, Suze?—James Bond movies, and riding Harleys with her husband, Lyle! Vroom, vroom, baby!”
“That’s my neighbor,” said the peanut eater. “Sweetest gal you’d ever want to meet, although she’s not the sharpest tack on the bulletin board.”
“Next,” said the emcee, “from Van Nuys, let’s meet Bonnie the Buff.”
“More like Bob the Bulky,” I whispered to Ed of the masculine-looking contestant. “Or Biff the Brawny.”
“Bonnie likes Chinese food,” the emcee was saying of the woman whose oiled muscles were the biggest I’d ever seen on a person sharing my gender, “board games like Risk and Stratego—but only if she wins—and the novels of Jacqueline Susann.”
“Check out her mustache,” Ed said.
“That’s from the steroids.”
Tears had welled up in Maeve’s eyes when I had confessed to her that when I first met her, I thought her build was due to drugs.
“This is all blood, sweat, and tears,” she had told me. “I fight fair and I body-build fair.”
That particular code of ethics didn’t seem embraced by Bonnie the Buff or several other entrants whose musculature was as threatening as their facial hair.
When Ricardo Jones introduced the fifth contestant as Mustang Maeve, Ed and I whistled like we were calling a pack of dogs scattered over three states. She was wearing a lime green bikini and enough oil to toss a banquet of salads.
“Maeve enjoys speaking German—hey, ve got a schmartie here!—the music of Tom and Jack Jones—sounds like she’s got a jones for Joneses!—and reading poetry. Roses are red, Maeve!”
While the crowd enjoyed the wit and wisdom of the emcee, Mustang Maeve seemed oblivious to it. She didn’t try to tamp down her stage fright with a sneer, like Susie the Strong, but instead wore a smile frozen at half-mast, and she walked as if she were afraid her very footsteps might cause damage to the stage floor.
After the dozen contestants were introduced in the pectoral parade, they posed as a group and then in individual routines. It was obvious that some had been lifting weights much longer than others; Kath the Convex from Ventura had stick straight legs and only a slight rise to her biceps. North Hollywood’s Winona the Wild was muscular, but she was also fat, which hid a lot of definition.
During the judges’ deliberation, Kevin played “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby,” and when Ricardo Jones was given the results envelope, the guitarist played the low E note up and down the fret board and gave full play to his whammy bar and wah-wah pedal.
“Ladies and gentleman, third place honors go to . . . Mustang Maeve from Hollywood! And second place goes to . . . Reseda’s Susie the Strong!”
It was exciting to watch people who didn’t win first prize act like they did. Both Maeve and Susie bounced up and down, clutching one another’s arms and when the anticlimatic announcement came, “Which means this year’s Valley Vixen is Bonnie the Buff from Van Nuys!” they didn’t just embrace the victor but hoisted her into the air.
“You don’t see that too often in a beauty pageant,” I said to Ed, and repeated the sentiment when we were all in Maeve’s car, on the way to her mother’s house in the Hollywood Hills.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” said Maeve. “It isn’t a beauty pageant. If it’s anything, it’s an art exhibit, celebrating the bodybuilder as an artist, a sculptor.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“And she is right,” said Ed from the backseat. “I mean, you don’t consider a male bodybuilder contest a beauty pageant, do you?”
Maeve brightened. “Yeah! You don’t consider a male bodybuilder contest a beauty pageant, do you, Candy?”
I decided not to let on that I considered any bodybuilder contest as sort of weird. Still, I didn’t want to let Maeve off the hook completely.
“But didn’t you think it was strange that the emcee guy only introduced you by those dumb titles? I mean, what was that about?”
“They have us come up with names like that to make it harder for the creeps—Bonnie said she had a fan who called her over fifty times a day—to track us down. But yeah, I did feel kind of stupid coming up with mine.”
“That was your idea?”
“Did you name it after your car?” asked Ed.
“Oh, I get it,” I said, tracing the little mustang logo on the glove compartment.
“I couldn’t think of anything else that began with an M!” said Maeve.
She turned left and into a short driveway.
“Well, here we are,” she said, jamming the gearshift into park. “Now remember, I’m not responsible for anything my mother may or may not do.”
22
TARYN POWELL’S FAMOUS VOICE rose from the hot tub as we passed through the high wooden gate and entered the candlelit patio.
“Hail the conquering heroine, everyone,” she said, “the new Valley Vixen!”
“I didn’t exactly win the title, Ma,” said Maeve, “but I did come in third!”
“Well, come on in and celebrate! The water’s fine.”
“We don’t have suits, Ma.”
“Well, neither do we,” said the TV star sweetly.
“Taryn, you’re terrible!” said a man whose silver goatee and mustache were the only hair on his head. He looked at Maeve. “We’ve all got suits on, hon. At least we did when we got in.”
Taryn lifted her hand out of the bubbling water and twirled a bikini top.
“That was then, Derek. This is now!”
“Yeah!” said an auburn-haired woman, tossing a tiny swimsuit bottom over the edge of the hot tub. “It’s about time we got this party started!”
Ed’s elbow dug into my side, a gesture I knew asked the question, Do you see who that is? My nudge back assured him that I did; the person joining Taryn in the underwater striptease was Sharla West, the actress who played her diabolical daughter-in-law on Summit Hill.
“Yee-haw!” said a man with a golden mane of shoulder-length waves, getting into the act and throwing his swim trunks out of the tub.
“Oh, great, so you’re throwing an orgy,” said Maeve.
Taryn reached for her champagne flute in one of the slight recesses that had been built specifically to hold drinks in the hot tub’s ledge.
“It’s not an orgy,” she said and took a sip. “Yet.”
The quartet in the pool snickered.
“We’ll be inside,” said Maeve, turning away.
As Taryn urged us to join them—“The water’s fine!”—Ed and I offered feeble waves and followed Maeve into the house.
“Dang,” whispered Ed, “I could have sat in a hot tub with Sharla West.”
“A nude Sharla West,” I said, sprinkling salt into the wound.
After we’d entered her mother’s huge white living room, Maeve turned around, hands on hips.
“Hey, you guys are welcome to join the free-for-all. Don’t let me hold you back.”
Her lips were
pinched and she wore her injured-party look.
“No, no, I’m fine,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Ed, but I could tell if he had his druthers, his would place him in that vat of churning bubbles, squarely between Taryn and Sharla.
“It’s just so humiliating!” said Maeve, as tears, the usual accompaniment to her breakdowns, glittered in her eyes.
Ed and I sat down on an immense U-shaped white leather couch in the sunken conversation pit as Maeve began pacing in front of the fireplace.
“She loves acting like she’s the racy daughter and I’m the uptight mother! Ewww! How would you guys like to jump in a hot tub with your naked mother and her friends?”
From the look on Ed’s face, I could tell her question conjured a picture he didn’t want to visualize. As for me, I would have jumped into anything with my mother, naked or not. Still, I understood her point.
“Should we go then?” asked Ed gently.
“No, stay,” said Taryn, knotting the tie of her terrycloth robe after she rolled open the sliding glass door and came into the living room. “Maeve, hon, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
Standing by the fireplace, Maeve considered her fingernails. “Maybe not, but I don’t think you tried very hard not to upset me.”
The actress opened a silver box on the marble coffee table and took out a cigarette.
Scrambling, Ed reached for the round crystal lighter.
“Do you think I’m a terrible mother?” asked Taryn, after she’d exhaled out her nose, like a dragon.
“Mom!” said Maeve, drawing out the word in two syllables.
“Well, we’re not blood-related,” said Sharla, entering the living room, “but I will say you absolutely stink as a mother-in-law.”
“Sharla,” said Maeve evenly. “We were discussing my real mother, not your fake TV husband’s one.”
“By the way, Taryn,” said Sharla, ignoring Maeve. “Derek and Jon are leaving.”
“Why? It’s still early! Why is everyone leaving?”
“Because some of us have a six a.m. call,” said Derek, a towel wrapped around his waist. He was followed by the wavy-haired guy, also half-dressed in terrycloth.
Best to Laugh: A Novel Page 13