“Who are you? What worm?”
But Azure was already slamming open Mr. Allen’s door. That’s when I realized it wasn’t just Azure who had changed over vacation. If not for the number on the door, I never would have believed this was my homeroom.
Just two weeks ago, it had been full of musical instruments—a piano, a drum set, even an accordion. All that was gone now. Instead, there was a terrarium that took up an entire wall, and a fish tank covering another. Giant tropical plants towered over everything, so thick you could barely see the ceiling, and it was super moist and hot, like somebody was breathing right in your face.
In the middle of the room was a microphone on a stand. Mr. Allen stood before it, wearing a safari jacket and a pith helmet.
“Testing,” he said. “Four-five, four-five.”
“Thank goodness,” I said to Azure. “After our six-day trek through the rain forest, we finally found that comedy club everyone’s been talking about.”
Mr. Allen laughed into the mic. The mic responded with a jolt of earsplitting feedback. He stepped away from it and walked over to us. “Good one,” he said. “Welcome back. I did some redecorating. What do you think?”
“Could use monkeys,” Azure said thoughtfully. “Capuchins, maybe.”
Mr. Allen looked crestfallen. “I know,” he said, shaking his head. “I tried. The school’s insurance wouldn’t cover it. “I got a snake, though. Check it out.”
He led us over to the terrarium, and sure enough, a giant brown and green and yellow snake lay piled on top of itself beneath the bright lights. It was slithering very slowly, the folded coils of its body seeming to move in different directions as they slid past each other.
It was kind of hypnotic, and we all watched in silence for a few seconds. Then Azure whispered, “Guys, she’s shedding!” I looked closer, and as the snake moved, she left behind a translucent snake-shaped skin, like an impossibly thin wrapper.
“Wow,” I said. It was the most graceful thing I’d ever seen, and I am so not a snake person.
“That’s what we’re all doing,” Mr. Allen murmured. “Shedding our old skins and growing new ones. Which reminds me—Jake, I have something for you.” He straightened up and strode across the room.
I tore myself away from the terrarium. “Yeah, Pierre said he ran into you at a yard sale…,” I began, expecting him to take some cassettes out of his desk. If he still had a desk, anyway. I couldn’t see one through all the mist in the air. Which I assumed was a combination of spray bottle water, because there were spray bottles everywhere, and the fact that the heat was cranked up to like ninety-five degrees.
But I was wrong. Mr. Allen came back with a slip of paper. He handed it to me with a big smile on his face and waited.
I opened it and read:
Mr. Allen was beaming at me like I’d just read the winning Powerball numbers. “Do you know who that is?” he asked.
“Some old guy?”
“Do you know which old guy?”
Mr. Allen’s eyes shone with excitement, and sweat was beading on his upper lip. Though that was probably from the insane temperature of the room.
“There are so many of them,” I said.
“Maury Kovalski is a comedy legend,” Mr. Allen informed me. “One of the last real, old-school, dyed-in-the-wool Catskills stand-ups.”
That meant absolutely nothing to me, but I nodded like it was totally awesome.
“Totally awesome,” I said.
“He’s an old buddy of mine,” Mr. Allen explained. “I told him I had an aspiring comedian in my class who could use some advice from a professional, maybe some help really discovering his voice, and he…” Mr. Allen trailed off.
“He what?”
“You should go see him,” Mr. Allen said. “Just knock on his door. He’s always home.”
“He what?” I asked again. “You didn’t finish your sentence.”
“He’s really nice once you get to know him,” Mr. Allen said, and turned away to water his jungle.
The next day after school, I went home and got my bike and rode it out to Willow Greens Retirement Home, which was only a few miles from my house. I don’t know what I was expecting, maybe a big sprawling mansion like Professor Charles Xavier’s pad in the X-Men movies. Or something on a golf course, like my grandpa Dan’s place in North Carolina, where kids aren’t allowed to spend more than two nights, which is a) bogus and insulting, but b) convenient, since two days there is about all I can take.
Willow Greens was more like a motel, with two floors and long outdoor hallways. A run-down motel, in the kind of neighborhood where you have to do your grocery shopping at the 7-Eleven. It definitely didn’t seem like the kind of place a famous retired comedy genius would live, unless he had managed his money very, very badly.
I locked my bike up and took the front wheel with me just to be on the safe side.
Maury Kovalski’s apartment was on the first floor. My heart was pounding in my chest as I knocked. It was kind of weird, just showing up like this. Then again, Mr. Allen hadn’t steered me wrong so far.
After a moment, an old guy with a full head of white hair and bushy white eyebrows and three or four days’ worth of white stubble on his cheeks answered the door. He was wearing a bathrobe and eating yogurt out of an enormous tub with an enormous spoon.
He looked me up and down and said, “Wheel salesman, eh? No thanks, I just discovered fire yesterday. Come back in fifty to sixty thousand years.”
He started to close the door, but I stuck my foot out and caught it.
“Wait, Mr. Kovalski. My name is Jake. Mr. Allen sent me.”
“Oh, so you’re his muscle, huh? Well, go ahead then, you goon, do your worst. I don’t have the money.”
Mr. Kovalski’s expression was so deadpan, I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Then I remembered that a) he was a comedian, b) there was no such thing as a door-to-door wheel salesman, c) nobody hires a sixth grader as muscle, and d) Mr. Allen wouldn’t send goons to his friend’s house anyway.
Therefore, I concluded that e) this guy was freaking hilarious.
“Okay,” I said, deciding to play along. “You asked for it, Kovalski. I’m gonna break both your legs. But don’t worry, I brought a wheelchair. Compliments of Mr. Allen. Next time maybe you’ll think twice before borrowing money for calf implants and not paying it back.”
Mr. Kovalski eyed me for a few seconds, then shoved his gigantic tub o’ yogurt at my chest.
“Have some yogurt, kid.”
“Uh, no thanks,” I said.
“Well, don’t just stand there. Come in. Or leave. Or just stand there. On second thought, that’s fine, too.”
I followed him inside. The room was messy, a combo kitchen/living room with an old TV in one corner and stacks of books and records covering half the couch. Over the stove was a microwave oven with the door open. It was filled with books.
“So,” I said as Mr. Kovalski sank down onto the couch, “you do a lot of cooking?”
“A wiseacre, eh?” was his reply.
I shrugged and put my hands in my pockets. “Better than a dumb-acre.”
“Mmphh,” Mr. Kovalski grumbled. “So you wanna be a comedian, huh?” He spread his arms. “Live in splendor, like me? What makes you think you’re so darn funny, huh? What’d you do, make a fart joke, get a little laugh, decide this is the life for you?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so instead, I said, “Mr. Allen thought I could use some advice from a professional.”
“You and me both, kid.”
“He said you were a legend.” I couldn’t remember if he’d actually said that, but I figured a little flattery couldn’t hurt.
“I hate that word. Sasquatch. The Abominable Snowman. The Loch Ness Monster. Those are legends. Me, I’m just an old forgotten stand-up eating yogurt o
ut of a giant tub.”
“It smells a little bit like Bigfoot in here, if that makes you feel better.”
Mr. Kovalski snorted and sat up straighter. “First lesson of stand-up, kid. You ready? I don’t see a pen in your hand.”
“Should I look in the refrigerator for one?”
Normally I would never have been so rude to an adult, much less one I’d just met, but somehow it seemed like the rules were different with Mr. Kovalski. We were speaking a different language. The language of comedy. Or of being a jerk. Maybe those were the same language, actually.
“Very funny. You listening, you schlemiel? This part is serious.”
“What’s a schlemiel?”
“It’s a Yiddish word. The schlemiel is the guy who spills the soup. The schlimazel is the guy it lands on.”
Mr. Kovalski shook his head. “This is comedy gold right here. You should be writing this down!”
“I have a good memory. What was the other thing?”
“What other thing?”
“The first lesson of stand-up. The thing you were going to tell me before you called me a schlemiel.”
“Oh. Right. Here it is: always punch up, never punch down.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You will. Or you won’t. What do I care? I got my yogurt.”
“How about teaching me a joke or something?”
Mr. Kovalski shook his head. “No, no, no. You can’t teach a joke. A comic has to make the joke. Like…a pot. Or…a cheese. As a matter of fact, lemme tell you a joke about that. There’s this fella, right? Goes to prison.”
“What for?”
“Doesn’t matter what for. Tax evasion. Shut your piehole and let me tell the joke. So on the first day, he’s sitting in the cafeteria, and all of a sudden this big burly guy stands up and yells, ‘Fifty-seven!’ And everybody in the room starts bellowing with laughter. I mean, they’re laughing for a solid minute. And when it finally dies down, the guy says, ‘Fourteen!’ and again, everybody is rolling in the aisles.
“So the new guy, he nudges the fella next to him and says, ‘What gives? What’s so funny?’
“The guy next to him says, ‘Eh, we’ve all been here so long, we know all the jokes. So we just assigned them numbers, and now that’s how we tell ’em.’
“Well, the new guy is very intrigued. And for the next three months, he studies all the jokes. Learns ’em backward and forward. And finally, he’s ready. He stands up in the cafeteria, and he says, ‘Hey, everybody! Twenty-nine!’
“Silence. Total silence. He can’t understand it. He sits down, and he says to the guy next to him, ‘What’d I do wrong?’
“The guy next to him shrugs and says, ‘Some people just can’t tell a joke.’ ”
Maury Kovalski leaned back on the couch, looking very satisfied with himself.
It was at that moment that I knew I was in the presence of a comedy genius. Either that, or a lunatic.
* * *
•••
When I got back home, Evan and Lisa and Pierre and six or seven kids I knew and semi-knew and didn’t know were waiting for me in the kitchen. All of them were angry. Some of them were eating guacamole. My dad makes excellent guacamole.
“What the heck, man?” Lisa said the second I walked in, my mind still reeling from the visit with famous comedy non-legend Maury Kovalski. “Did you forget?”
“Forget what?” I asked, which was basically a long way of saying yes. Then I noticed that Evan was wearing a giant and very realistic foam-and-rubber walking-egg costume. Maybe “realistic” is the wrong word, since there’s no such thing as a walking egg. But if there was, it would have looked like Evan.
“The video, influential 1960s underground comic book artist Vaughn Bro-de,” said Pierre while juggling three avocado pits.
“Now go put on your walking-egg costume,” my sister added. “Chop-chop. We only have the trampoline rented until six.”
Five minutes later, Evan and I were bouncing up and down in our costumes—which were not easy to move in, although they were extremely easy to sweat in—while Pierre and Lisa lip-synched along to their own vocals and the rest of the cast executed a surprisingly complicated series of dance moves.
“The Ballad of the Duck-Billed Platypus” went like this:
Not quite a reptile, not quite a mammal
He’s like Alan Trammel, but crossed with a camel
Not quite mammalian, but not quite reptilian
Partway a hero and partway a villain
He’s stuck in between the one thing and the other
Not quite in uniform, not undercover
He lays eggs, he has fur, he’s hard to describe
He’s all of us, none of us—look in his eyes!
The duck…billed…platypus!
Don’t…be…mad at us!
We must praise the D-Plat
In the key of B-flat
All niiiiiiight!
We did take after take, until my stomach and legs hurt from jumping. I frankly couldn’t understand the song or the video concept, which, in addition to the walking eggs on the trampoline, involved a lot of dancing animals, vegetables, and I think minerals.
Between “The Ballad of the Duck-Billed Platypus” (which was not a ballad at all, incidentally, since a ballad is supposed to be slow and quiet, not fast and loud) and trying to make sense of my meeting with Maury Kovalski, I basically ended up overloading my brain, the result being that I passed out at seven-thirty p.m. like some type of five-year-old.
Also, in case you were wondering, Alan Trammel played shortstop for the Detroit Tigers in the 1980s. Pierre found that out when he was Googling “rhymes with mammal.”
On Tuesday, from deep inside his humid jungle lair, Mr. Allen gave us an assignment—the first one of the new semester. For a second, I was terrified: if our classroom was suddenly a rain forest and Azure was suddenly preppy, maybe Mr. Allen’s assignments were suddenly going to make sense.
But my fear was unfounded. Mr. Allen wanted us to write a review of an “observed human activity” as if it was a piece of performance art.
Nobody knew what that meant. Klaus, the German exchange student who does not play drums for our no-instruments band Crazy American People Who Do Not Make Any Zense (which he also named), was the first to admit it.
“Zees assignment,” he said. “Eez joke? Eef zo, Klaus doss not get.”
Mr. Allen smiled without showing any teeth.
“I get it,” said my friend Forrest, who was homeschooled until this year and has some very strange ideas about the importance of squirrels in education, and also a slight fear of walls, ceilings, and floors. “We’re supposed to learn about how nature is art. So we appreciate that no painting can ever match a sunset, and no sculpture can ever be as beautiful as a squirrel climbing an oak tree. Right?”
Mr. Allen shook his head. “No nature,” he said. “Human activities only.”
“Rats,” muttered Forrest.
“Do you not lizzen?” Klaus asked him. “No rats. Rats are nature.”
“It’s an expression, Klaus,” said Azure.
“ ‘Rats’ eez expression? Zees ees making no zense.”
“You never think anything makes any zense,” my friend Zenobia said. Then she thought about it for a second and added, “Maybe you’re right.”
“Okay then, so everybody gets it,” Mr. Allen said. “Great.”
About six kids raised their hands to indicate that they did not. I was one of them.
“Great,” Mr. Allen said again. “Now. Let’s check in with Hotch, shall we?”
Hotch is the snake. We all looked at each other and sighed sighs of I guess we have to figure it out on our own. We sigh those sighs a
lot.
When I got home, I wandered from room to room, looking for a human activity to observe and write about. But nothing interesting was going on.
I was hoping my parents and Lisa might be “discussing” college, meaning arguing about it, which is a frequent human activity in my house these days, but no such luck. My mother was doing her homework, which is what she calls it when she brings paperwork back from the office. Lisa and Pierre were huddled around the computer, editing video footage and eating a giant bowl of popcorn with brewer’s yeast on it, which I’m convinced they put on there just to keep me away, the same way people put coyote pee on their plants to repel deer.
The list of jobs I do not want, by the way, looks something like this:
Coyote pee collector
Guy who puts coyote pee in bottles
Coyote pee bottle inspector
Vice president of marketing for coyote pee company
Truck driver responsible for transportation of coyote pee
Farm employee in charge of spreading coyote pee on crops
Politician
Anything else involving coyote pee
Jake the Fake Goes for Laughs Page 2