Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  “It felt promising,” she said. “It had weight. Not just a chance encounter, but the beginning of something.”

  I was getting impatient, doing a lap around the room for anything I’d forgotten. “And then halfway through the flight he took his shoes off and watched a kids’ movie.”

  “And socks,” she said. “Shoes and socks. And not just a kids’ movie. An animated princess movie for little girls.”

  “Is this an allegory?”

  “It’s a real thing that happened,” said Audrey. “As well as an allegory.”

  “Can’t men watch cartoons without some judgment on their masculinity?”

  “It wasn’t just about his masculinity.”

  Later, the author fell asleep and his breathing sounded ragged and wet. Audrey could feel his body heat radiating three inches off his skin like a clammy dome. She’d come close to grabbing her bags and heading back to coach. It was lurid, his humanity. It was a neon sign switched on in the dark. It ruined his books for her forever.

  “Granted, I was drunk,” she added.

  “But that was that author,” I said. “And this is Hugo.”

  “Author, television host. There’s no difference.”

  “Sure there is.”

  I wasn’t going to get into it, but the problem with allegories was that they worked in general but failed in the specific. Anything could happen with Hugo. Anything at all. The outcome wasn’t limited to disgust. Plus, I could think of counterexamples. Our friend Priya from college had fucked Michael Jordan once and it was great. They watched Ray after on demand. He sent her home in a chauffeured limo.

  “I think that’s apocryphal,” said Audrey. “Anyway, you’re not going to Michael Jordan’s house, are you?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Say it did happen. Priya wasn’t invested in basketball at all. Michael Jordan wasn’t her idol. She wasn’t employed by Michael Jordan. She wasn’t in her twentieth year of a one-sided conversation with him in her head.” She paused. “Isn’t Hugo like seventy?”

  “Not seventy. Sixty-five.”

  “And what about his thing with that high school girl? What’s her name—Kitty Rosenthal? How old was she, sixteen?”

  The episode was bound to come up. Hugo was almost more famous for that one night with Kitty Rosenthal than he was for the rest of his career combined. It wasn’t that the story didn’t bother me. It was that I had grown accustomed to it, or learned to ignore it. Shelved it somewhere out of reach.

  “I’m twenty-nine,” I said.

  “So too old for him then.”

  “We can’t both be too old for each other,” I said. “How does that work?”

  “I just want you to think about it, is all. Really think about why you’re going.”

  I made a show of thinking, let several seconds elapse while I stared off into space. All I really thought about, though, was Hugo smiling at me in front of the club. How his smile had seemed full of possibility. How it had made me feel, briefly, special.

  That seemed like a weak justification, even to me.

  “I’m going for fun,” I said. “Remember fun?”

  I’d been clutching my bathing suit in one hand and stuffed it into the tote. I didn’t get many chances in the city to wear it. I went to the beach at the Rockaways twice a year, lay out on our roof maybe once. A pool out in the country was an enticement all its own, almost separate from Hugo. Almost. “Did I tell you he has a pool?”

  “Well,” said Audrey. “A pool.”

  We laughed again.

  * * *

  There was nothing to see on 95 between Manhattan and southeast Connecticut. Streetlights and potholes, the dour monoliths of Co-op City. We hit traffic in Westchester and Hugo had his driver—Cal, I had learned by now—put on a Richard Pryor album.

  The older white comics I knew all revered Pryor. Hugo himself always named him as his greatest influence, but it was hard to see what their comedy had in common. Stay Up found its jokes in misprinted headlines, man in the street silliness, the gentle mocking of starlets. In his late career, Hugo was bland and inoffensive and scandal-proof. He had become an affable idiot among affable idiots.

  Richard Pryor, with his drug jokes and race jokes and sex jokes, his raunch and barely controlled rage, was something else entirely. The album we were listening to, stop-and-go through Harrison and Rye and Port Chester, was called That Nigger’s Crazy.

  “Back then you could shock people,” Hugo was saying, “I mean really shock them. Pryor was raw. He talked about doing crack in a way that you could tell he had done crack. That was a big deal back then. People weren’t walking around casually joking about crack. Now everywhere you go, it’s crack this, crack that. You’ve got middle-aged white women talking about how their smartphone is a crack addiction or their Starbucks latte is like crack. Oh really? You’re crawling around on your hands and knees sucking on carpet fibers ’cause you think a drop of your latte might have gotten on the floor?”

  “Have you ever done crack?” I asked him.

  “That is not my point at all. Just not even close.” He leaned back to watch nothing scroll by for a while.

  On the stereo, Pryor was doing the bit about the wino dealing with Dracula. Winos weren’t afraid of anything, it went, except running out of wine. Wino bumps into Dracula on the street and he’s like, what’s that you’re wearing, a cape? He’s like, what’s wrong with your teeth? Why are they hanging out like that? Go to the dentist, motherfucker. It’s 1975. And so on.

  Finally Hugo asked, “What about you? Do you like Richard Pryor?”

  There were other comics I liked better, but Hugo seemed tired, not fully up to sparring, so I said, “Sure, he’s funny. Reminds me of you a bit. Your early stuff.”

  Hugo’s mouth twitched with a suppressed smile. “Flatterer.”

  “Was I not recruited for that express purpose?”

  “Recruited is too strong,” he said. “Enticed. Coaxed.”

  We listened to the Pryor a little longer, and then Hugo said, “What brought you to our show anyway? Besides fate I mean. It always interests me, the route our staffers take to find us.”

  “I was an audience page,” I told him. “You know what that entails.”

  “Ah, a child of the purple windbreaker. I hope you kept it.”

  “No. I think it got lost in one of my moves.”

  It was hanging in the far left of my closet in dry cleaners’ plastic. I saw it regularly, wondered all the time when I’d throw it out. I’d never wear it again, this water-resistant sack with the show’s name over the heart. Its only value was sentimental, and I didn’t think of those days fondly. The work was too boring, too physically demanding. I was twenty-five and everyone else was twenty-two, right out of college. The three-year difference didn’t sound like much, but it humiliated me.

  “What made you want to do it?” said Hugo.

  I shrugged. “I barely remember.”

  It was almost five years earlier. I’d been working as an assistant in the voiceover department of a talent agency. It was a big corporate office, gale-force AC, business casual. I managed the schedules of actors who voiced radio promos and TV commercials. I booked them auditions. It seemed to me the least consequential job available. I spent most of my time there—most of two years—writing jokes in text documents that I hastily minimized if anyone walked past. That and applying for other gigs. When I took the job it seemed like it could be an avenue to something else. Maybe I could move over to the comedy or TV department. It hadn’t worked out that way, though. Nothing that presented itself as a stepping-stone ever really was.

  My page application had been an impulse. I filled it out online and clicked send. When I got a call back I was surprised. So many of my applications disappeared into the blank churn of the Internet. The pay wasn’t better than what I was getting as an assistant, but it wasn’t worse. My last day at the agency they gave me a card signed by everyone in my department and we had grocery-store cupca
kes, stale and sticky, in the conference room. I felt sad in a remote way, even though I hated the place. Instead of saying good-bye to my boss, I snuck out an hour early and took the stairs all the way down. Eleven flights held more appeal than the bloodless well-wishes of people who didn’t really care what happened to me.

  The new class of pages started the last week of August. Summer was dead by then and the city flew at half-mast. It had been raining for two days while a tropical system made slow progress inland. When it stopped, the sky was still dingy gray and low as a ceiling. I was wet on arrival. Not just from sweat; puddles of unknown depth lingered at the curbs. I judged it right three times, four, but eventually I guessed wrong and drenched my shoes, my socks, the hem of my jeans. I had to do the whole day like that, squishing along.

  “I remember the first time I set foot in the theater,” I told Hugo. “The lobby floor was flooded and they had us sandbag it. That was my first day.”

  “It was a special place,” he said lightly.

  The Bob Hope Amphitheater. There’d been a war for him between networks in the early nineties and the promise of the theater had clinched it. It had been restored, keeping the best of its original features: crown moldings, stained glass windows, scrolled mahogany banisters. By the time I got there in 2013, it had faded again. The atrium needed paint and the tiled floor, below the rubber nonslip mats, was cracked. Poor lighting gave it a green, flickering cast. The only recent improvement was the addition of cardboard cutouts of Hugo, big smile, finger guns, available for photo-ops as the line inched past.

  Still, he wasn’t wrong. The building had a specialness, even flooded, even in the thick of summer. It was built in the late thirties as a music hall and cycled through decades of use and disuse, repair and disrepair. Everyone had played there—Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Nina Simone. Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman. Robin Williams, scaling the plush purple curtain like a gym-class rope.

  I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I did believe that the mind took what it knew about a place and projected a mood. Part of my job as an audience page was to give an introductory spiel about the building, and afterward I could always see the crowd looking around, newly awed. Here had walked the demigods of entertainment. Here the guitar. Here the brow. Here the halo of light. It made people reverent. It made them speak in hushed voices about the architectural features. It made them, anyway, less likely to stick their gum to the undersides of their seats.

  “Did you like being a page?” Hugo said, and we both laughed.

  The job was scanning tickets and putting on wristbands. Standing up through the whole performance and making sure the audience stayed put. Answering the same three to five questions over and over. Pointing out the bathroom. No one liked it. Or some did, the try-hards. Everyone else was stoic. Occasionally the pages all wallowed together at the TGI Fridays in Times Square. Fifteen dollars got you an extralarge daiquiri with floating components you had to chew. We could have chosen any bar in Manhattan, but we chose that Fridays, deep in the canyon of the neon signs, a place so lacking in character it could subsume you into its anonymity. It could dissolve your very identity.

  “I didn’t like it that much,” I said. “If you can believe it.”

  “Did I ever meet you on one of my page rounds? I always tried to make a point of meeting everybody.”

  “For a second early on. You shook each of our hands and thanked us. You seemed sincere.”

  “I was. We need the pages. We need the whole staff.”

  He talked about the show like it was still going on. I wondered how long it would take for the past tense to kick in.

  I said, “I remember you weren’t wearing your suit and it was weird to me. An out-of-context thing like seeing your teacher at the grocery store. And you had on a baseball cap. The baseball cap in particular was really jarring.”

  “My hair must have been bad. I only ever wear the hat when my hair is bad.”

  “It made you seem like a regular guy. I didn’t like that.”

  “Sorry for seeming regular,” he said.

  What I actually felt that day was excitement. Until then he’d been made of pixels. Then suddenly there he was, right there. I had touched him. I could smell him. He smelled like coffee—he was drinking one—and damp skin. He’d walked over from his office in the tiered skyscraper the network owned, two street blocks and half an avenue away.

  We took a break from sandbagging and he gave us a sardonic pep talk.

  “Welcome to the glamorous world of show business,” he said, toeing the frayed corner of a sandbag with his sneaker. “I wish I could tell you it gets better.”

  The effect was low-key psychedelic. Encounters with celebrities always produced in me a fizzy dissonance. I had once seen Art Garfunkel at my gym and I’d been mesmerized. I could remember staring at the ruched elastic waist of his shorts. He dropped his keys and I picked them up. He had a Rite Aid loyalty card just like mine, which made me laugh. Folk legend at the register swiping for his rewards. It was the same the first time I met Hugo. I could not accept it as anything other than surreal. My brain simply would not yield.

  “We must have met other times,” said Hugo.

  We had. After I was a page I worked as a show receptionist for three years. My face, along with the other receptionist’s, was the first he saw when he got off the elevator in the morning. I passed him in the hallway regularly. Once we’d shot hoops together at a staff party at Dave & Buster’s and I let him win. I mean really crush me. All told we had encountered each other hundreds of times, if not thousands.

  “We’ve met here and there,” I said.

  We pulled off 95 and drove the rest of the way on the Post Road. I had been to Greenwich before, but was surprised every time by the generic nature of its charm. Here was the Upscale Anywhere, green lawns and avenues of beautiful shops unfurling like flags.

  The driver stopped at a gourmet supermarket and both of us climbed out. Hugo grabbed a cart, navigated into the store. He steered awkwardly—who knew when he’d last done his own shopping? Inside, he looked back over his shoulder and grinned at me wildly, as if this was some great caper.

  “Anything you want,” he said, and spread his arms out expansively. There were lives out there that had strayed so far from the norm that a trip to the supermarket was high kitsch.

  “The grocery store,” I said to myself. “What a lark.”

  Hugo didn’t hear me. He had already disappeared into the glare of lights and crush of people. He was already lost amid the antipasto.

  * * *

  The house lay behind a solid gray gate on a long arm. A winding driveway carried us deeper onto the property. It sat in a clear field, a boxy structure of glass and pale concrete. Instantly I could imagine the way it would take on the color of the seasons. White in winter, green in summer. Tonight with the lights off it looked nearly invisible in places, a suggestion of angular geometry against the night. It was an esoteric design object you could live in. It belonged on a plinth.

  “The architect chose everything. The furnishings, the art,” Hugo was saying. “Unity being the idea. Blurring the line between indoors and outdoors. The dimensions of the recessed living room are the same as the pool. All of the materials are local. The granite. The wood. Every few years the state tries to make it a landmark.”

  We climbed out of the car. Hugo insisted on carrying my tote. The straps were filthy, I noticed, and his arm was touching a bottle of store-brand face wash I had crammed on top.

  “Why not let them?”

  “It’s a house,” he said. “Not a museum.”

  He led me through the downstairs, turning on lights as we went. Through the windows: acres of moonlit field in every direction. The kitchen was white and stainless, opening seamlessly into the living room. Beyond the sliding glass door the flat of the patio gave way to a dark, wobbly presence. The pool.

  I sat down at the marble slab of island to unpack our grocery bags. I took out high-concept crackers and pricey Cô
tes du Rhône, while Hugo busied himself retrieving silverware. He had a whole drawer of tiny, specific knives and he looked down into it thoughtfully for a long time before giving up.

  “So what’s your story?” he asked.

  I was struggling with a wine opener evidently from the future. “Me? Nothing. I’m just over here trying to figure out how much manchego is acceptable to eat in this scenario. We should all get together as a species and nail down some cheese protocols.”

  Hugo nodded. “A Geneva Convention for dairy. I like it. But what I meant was what’s your story more generally. Your upbringing, et cetera. Are you from New York?”

  “South Carolina,” I said. “Outside of Charleston.”

  “You don’t seem southern.”

  People always said this to me. I had lived in New York since college and didn’t have an accent. I was never sure how people expected southerners to act. The place I had grown up was a lot like this place. The Upscale Anywhere. Only the wealth was not as great and the worst of its ruthless villains were already dead.

  “The South isn’t all that different. Except for the trees.”

  “So why leave then?”

  “Hope. Ambition. Belief in myself. You know, kid stuff.”

  Hugo crossed his arms. He was tall and broad in an appealing way. His paunch seemed solid rather than flabby. What wrinkles he had appeared calculated, left intact so he’d look like a reasonable facsimile of a gently aged human being. Leaning against the sink in his shirtsleeves, he was just this side of too orange to be my thesis advisor, or my rumpled editor in chief, or—I didn’t want to think it but there it was—my father.

  “What fucked you up enough to want to become a stand-up?” he asked.

  “I’m a writer,” I said. “Not a stand-up, not really. No stage presence, you see.”

  “Then why do it?” he said.

  “It’s that or a Web series, right? Or improv.”

  “Improv. Ick.”