Stay Up with Hugo Best

by Erin Somers

  There were days as a receptionist that I felt sure I’d fall asleep. I worked far from any windows and the artificial light drained me. I used the bowl of Werther’s Originals we kept next to the visitor sign-in sheet to devise a reward system. Answer three phone calls, get a Werther’s. Make it to eleven o’clock, get a Werther’s. One hour left in the day, Werther’s. The people who came and went from the office, who stood pressing the down button and checking the time, who were headed out to rehearsal or to lunch or to tape segments, could not have suspected that someone in their midst was so bored or eating so much hard candy. After I was promoted I came to doubt it a little myself.

  Hugo found me in the greeting card aisle with a fistful of condolences. All of them skirted the issue. Wishing you deep reserves of courage for the trials ahead. Hold tight to memories for comfort. Lean on your friends and family for strength. Don’t forget to care for yourself in times of sadness.

  “Who died?” he said. “Your fourth grandparent?”

  “I was . . .” I looked down into my basket. I had added a purple desk fan. “Trying to sober up.”

  “Do you actually want any of that stuff?”

  I shook my head. He took the basket from me and set it down at the end of the aisle.

  “We’ll just leave that here. Are you ready to go or do you want to get a flu shot? Have some photos developed? I think they have a blood pressure machine over here.”

  His shirt had mostly dried, though it was now very wrinkled. He smelled like whiskey and fried food.

  “Did you eat something?” I said.

  “I might have had some wings. They were there. It’s not like I ordered them. Who are you . . . Laura?”

  I followed him back out through the store. The woman who’d been stocking cough syrup had moved on to nail polish. We passed her on our way out and I could hear her humming to herself atonally. I had to stop myself from saying good-bye to her.

  Outside, Hugo said, “A bunch of people from the bar are coming back to the house to hang out for a while. Maybe go for a swim. They’ll follow us over.”

  I looked around. The crowd from Frogger’s had spilled out into the parking lot. People leaned against the building smoking. The door opened and closed, letting out gasps of music and laughter.

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Yeah, just the MC, the frat guy, and a handful of teens.”

  He held the door of the MG open for me.

  “I don’t think . . .”

  “I’m kidding. No one’s coming back. I’ve got limits, believe it or not.”

  He opened the compartment that held the convertible top and accordioned it into place. Then he got in the front seat to adjust the mirrors. He seemed refreshed, almost manic. With a flourish, he put a piece of gum into his mouth. He snapped on a pair of driving gloves and I started to worry.

  “Are you okay to drive?” I said.

  “They really liked me in there.” He looked away from the road to smile at me. “Maybe I’ll get back into doing stand-up. It feels good, doesn’t it?”

  He was forgetting about all the ways it didn’t. The bad lifestyle, uncertain income, self-doubt, hecklers, flat beer, empty clubs, hangers-on. The depressing people you encountered. The puking, fear, dry mouth, limp French fries. The cocaine cut with baby laxatives. The comedown. The deflation that hit ten, twenty, sixty minutes afterward, a day afterward, four days, even if you did well. The way your voice could sound so thin the first time it rang out in a quiet room. The way it made you seem vulnerable, young, old, sad, tired, wounded beyond repair. The way it gave away everything about you.

  Or maybe those things never bothered him.

  I said, “It can, yeah.”

  He gunned it through a yellow light. It was 10 p.m. and the road was mostly empty. He took a left turn that swung us wide into the other lane.

  “What if you opened for me? We could go on the road. I haven’t been on the road for years. Have you ever been on the road?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got to do it then. It’ll be great. I’ll get back to my roots. You’ll work on your act. We’ll live in hotels and see all the kooky shit they have out in America. Corn palace. Big blue cow. World’s largest frying pan. Do you like that kind of thing?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That stuff’s all right.”

  I allowed myself to imagine a road movie starring the two of us. Room service omelets, whiskey late at night. My act would get good. Then it’d get great. By then we’d be close. We’d take a day off and knock around a little town. In a used bookstore I’d find a first edition I wanted, Thurber or something, and he’d surprise me with it later. We’d stop only because I was getting too many offers. Movies, TV shows, a stand-up special. We’d fuck—why not? I pictured myself in a terry cloth bathrobe looking out a window, then I moved on to something else, our farewell show at Madison Square Garden. Hometown crowd, standing ovation, I’m so happy to be back here in New York, city of my heart and my one true home.

  “Laura warned me not to expect anything from you.”

  “Fuck Laura. Laura’s out of the picture. Laura doesn’t get a say anymore.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since today at twelve o’clock. We officially severed our professional relationship.”

  “The bad news lunch,” I said.

  “Are you laughing?”

  “I’m sorry. It was just that you guys elected to play tennis after that. You chose to keep torturing each other when it would have been easy not to.”

  “That’s me and Laura,” he said grimly.

  “So she’s not your manager anymore?”

  “She wants to”—he let go of the wheel to make air quotes—“move on to other projects.”

  We were in backcountry now, on an unlit road, and I noticed for the first time that the round little headlights of the car didn’t do much. They gave off maybe four feet of wobbly blue light.

  “She thinks we’ve reached”—he made air quotes for a second time—“a natural conclusion.”

  The car swerved slightly, the lights panning onto the wooded shoulder.

  “Can you maybe not do that? I can understand from your tone when you’re quoting her.”

  “Talk shows are over anyway. Done for. Any joke you make on the show, any sexy little monologue joke, by the time it airs, someone has already done it on Twitter but better. Twelve somebodies have already done it better. You think you’re fast, clever, sexy. These people on the Internet are faster, cleverer, sexier. And they’re not even using their real names. They’re using some nonsense word and a blurry picture of a duck.”

  It unnerved me how much he was saying the word sexy.

  He slammed the brakes: There was something in the road.

  I shouted, “Opossum!”

  It was the size of a dog. I saw its beady eyes flashing white in the headlights. I saw its flesh-colored snout and grotesque, curling tail. Then I was lurching forward. The MG had a few flaws. The lap belt that had so charmed me earlier pinned my hips to the seat. My head hit the dash. Next to me, a similar thing was happening to Hugo. Only he wasn’t wearing the belt at all. His chest was driven into the steering wheel, his head into the windshield. A crack webbed out from where he’d hit. Somehow he managed to slide it into park.

  We stopped a foot short of the opossum. I couldn’t believe it hadn’t fled. Why hadn’t it fled? Was it rabid or just stupid? Was it trying to die? It looked at us for a second longer before slinking away. I watched its tail slide across the ground and out of the range of the headlights. Then I sat up.

  I could already feel a bump forming on my forehead and my right hip hurt where the seat belt wrenched me back. Otherwise, I was fine.

  “Are you okay?” I said to Hugo.

  He didn’t respond right away. The steering wheel had knocked the wind out of him. He had a cut somewhere on his head and I couldn’t tell how bad it was. Blood dripped over one eye and splattered his shirtfront.

  “I swallowed
my gum,” he said.

  He sat up, touched his face with two fingers, looked down at his hand in wonder. He must have forgotten he was wearing gloves.

  “My moneymaker,” he said. He was joking.

  I said, “It’s bleeding a lot.”

  “Faces are really vascular. I remember that from when Spencer was little. He used to run face-first into furniture. It probably looks worse than it is.”

  “Do you have anything in here? A napkin or something?”

  I opened the glove compartment. Pristine. No spill of documents, no owner’s manual, no first aid kit. It was for his gloves and nothing more.

  “This isn’t the type of car you eat a burger in,” he said.

  I felt around under the seat.

  He craned to catch a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. Blood ran from the tip of his nose and landed on the upholstery. “There’s nothing under there. Let’s go home. We’re a couple miles away.”

  “I think you need stitches. Or anyway, a professional to tell you that you don’t. Let me take you to the hospital. Look at you. You’re fucking up my car.”

  He started to smile, then grimaced in pain. “Your car.”

  I unbuckled my seat belt. “Yeah.”

  “You’re driving?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You were afraid yesterday.”

  “I’m not anymore. Come on. I’m serious.”

  He held his hands up in surrender. “Okay, okay.”

  We switched seats. I was still afraid, but it didn’t matter. Nothing did. I felt good. I’d imagined a similar emergency in Roman’s driveway, but I hadn’t anticipated I’d like it. It must have been chemicals, the same chemicals that made scared moms able to lift semis off toddlers. Who were all these toddlers getting trapped under semis? I stomped on the clutch and the car made a horrible sound.

  * * *

  The hospital was easy to find. The soothing British voice of my cell phone GPS directed us to a brick building with windows of greenish glass.

  “I’d marry her,” Hugo said of the voice. “I’d lose everything for her.”

  The waiting room was full of potted flowers. A woman holding a toddler slept in one of the chairs. Across the room, an older couple hunched close together, whispering over a brochure. Hugo blinked through the blood. The spots on his shirt had dried brown.

  “This is nice,” he said. “I’ve never been here before.”

  We approached the front desk.

  I said, “My friend hurt his moneymaker.”

  “We’ll also be needing a new transmission,” said Hugo.

  We were enjoying ourselves. The ride had been fraught. I stalled out, ground the gears, soaked the gearshift in palm sweat, soaked my clothes. The engine whinnied like a young horse. By the end I was blowing through red lights just so I wouldn’t have to downshift. Now it was over and we had made it. The adrenaline was wild. My pulse throbbed in the bump on my head.

  The intake nurse cocked a drawn-on eyebrow. “Did either of you lose consciousness or vomit?”

  Hugo winked at me with his good eye. “Not since Friday.”

  She took us to a back room and gave us paperwork to fill out while we waited. Hugo sat on the examination table and I took the low, spinning stool.

  “You’re remarkably bad at driving,” he said. “It’s impressive.”

  “Thanks.”

  He tapped his own head where my bump was. “Your horns are coming in.”

  I touched the bump at its tender center. The skin felt tight and hot. My hip throbbed where the seat belt had wrenched me back. Still, I had fared better than Hugo, who looked, with his bloody face and crazed smile, like a serial killer who’d just finished up for the night.

  I said, “Don’t you have a doctor of your own you want to do this? A plastic surgeon?”

  “I don’t give a fuck anymore. They can use a shoelace if they want.”

  Neither of us made any move to fill out papers. The doctor showed up and we continued our joking. She seemed neither amused nor unamused. She seemed tired and professional. She wore purple scrubs and a clean white coat. I held an ice pack to my head while she checked my eyes with a flashlight. She cleaned Hugo’s face, found the cut up near his hairline, shot anesthetic into it, cinched it up with three staples.

  She said, “My father’s a fan.” She held up her phone. “Do you mind?”

  “You want me to call him?” said Hugo.

  “Just a picture.”

  Hugo said, “No, let’s call him.”

  She glanced at me to see if he was kidding. I shrugged.

  “I’m serious,” he said, and motioned for the phone.

  The doctor called her father. It was late now, after eleven. I could hear his startled hello on the other end.

  She said, “Dad, I’m here with Hugo Best. He just came into the ER. Laceration. Nothing serious. He wants to talk to you.”

  She handed over the phone.

  Hugo said, by way of greeting, “Your girl just stapled me up like a pile of documents.”

  A nurse came in and asked for insurance cards. Hugo handed me his wallet so he wouldn’t have to get off the phone. I fished through until I found it, and his driver’s license, too. He was sixty-eight, three years older than he publicly claimed. At some point, a lifetime ago, those three years had made a difference. Now they didn’t.

  “Are we almost done here?” I said.

  Hugo mouthed sorry, but made no move to hang up. He was talking about Philadelphia for some reason. I guess the doctor’s father lived there.

  I put the ice pack back on my forehead. The lump underneath it was a wooden knob. This was what it was like to be with him. His attention was impossible to hold. I could take my top off and he wouldn’t look over. Not until he’d charmed the random dad he had on the phone. Not until he’d made the doctor smile.

  Hugo hung up and asked her for a lollipop.

  “Come on, I’ve been good, haven’t I? You weren’t exactly gentle with that stapler.”

  He wouldn’t change. That much I knew. I knew it from how he acted at Frogger’s. But what about me? I was malleable. I could get used to it. People did it all the time. Just look at Gypsy, a study in adaptability. She’d had her victories. The house, the doula. And the rest she was willing to brush off. I could be like Gypsy, and in time it wouldn’t bother me either. I could succeed where Allison and countless others had failed.

  The doctor shook her head affectionately. “You guys drive safe.”

  * * *

  The diner was silver plated with a rotating neon sign. Just what you’d want, Hugo said, pulling into the parking lot. In the bathroom I looked at the bruise on my head. It was reddish purple and not as tall as it felt. I knew it would turn yellow and green over the next day, bloom into something worse. I splashed water on my face and dried it with coarse paper towels from the dispenser.

  Back at the table, Hugo had ordered us coffee and a slice of pie to share.

  “More pie,” I said.

  “Diner pie,” said Hugo. “Different thing entirely. That pie earlier was for impressing other people. All looks, no pesticides. This pie is for oneself.”

  I touched it with my fork. It had a pale crust of meringue on top, a trembling layer of lemon below. I didn’t want it at all. Between the two, I’d take the pie with airs. But I was having coffee late at night with a famous comedian. This is what I had longed for. This is what I had, in my obscurity, been missing.

  I took a bite. “It’s too sweet.”

  “We need the sugar. We lost a lot of blood.”

  I sipped my coffee. We sat at a booth by the window. Every so often a pair of headlights swooped by. The place was empty except for a couple of guys in the corner. The waitress swiveled on a stool at the counter with one shoe off.

  “Were you serious before about touring together?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  I tried not to let his answer hurt me. “That’s n
ot true. There’s lots you could do.”

  “Like what?”

  “You talked about traveling. So travel. Go ride camels in Morocco. Climb Kilimanjaro. Get some expensive outerwear. A shell. Some of those boots with a lot of different hooks.”

  “I’ve been already.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere. Everywhere I’m interested in.”

  “Change directions, then. Do something totally different. Build houses in Haiti. Open a wine store in town. Run for public office. Write crime fiction. You like art—learn to paint. Go back to college. Be one of those late-in-life degree seekers, in it for all of the right reasons and none of the wrong ones.”

  He stirred more sugar into his coffee. “I’m not going to do any of that stuff.”

  “A sitcom, then. A movie. Cruise Ship III: Even More Cruise Ship.”

  Hugo had starred in Cruise Ship in the nineties. He played a con man on the lam posing as a cruise ship director. He wore crisp maritime whites and a big fake mustache. The detectives who were after him also ended up on the cruise ship. It was somehow enough of a success to make a sequel. Kirstie Alley was in it. I could never remember how, in Cruise Ship II, they justified being on a cruise ship again.

  “What else you got?” said Hugo.

  The waitress came over and refilled our cups. Hugo seemed on the verge of getting her to weigh in. It was his favorite kind of thing to do. Especially because she looked twenty-five and wore a tight peach-colored uniform.

  I took a breath. “How about this: Take your huge platform and use it to do some good. Promote some voices that don’t get heard as much in comedy. Produce shows. Use your influence to get projects funded. Projects by people of color, I mean. And women.”

  “You mean you,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Well, yeah. But not just me. People who deserve it and otherwise wouldn’t break through.”