The Funny Man

by John Warner

  26

  I AM ENJOYING my new sense of purpose. I sleep very little, but mornings I wake completely alert. I’ve been concentrating on my core with the exercises, abdominals, obliques, that plus the back and shoulders, lats/delts. Those are going to be key if I’m to make it. In the mirror, I see my shape changing, firming up, a jawline forming. The waistband of my boxers no longer bites into my belly flab. I’ve felt better only once in my life.

  After exercising and before getting ready for court I make my lists and one of the items is to write a letter of apology to Barry. Earlier on in the trial he said how what people are looking for with me is closure, some way to shut the book on me and my sorry story forever. I’ve been holding them hostage, he said. Now, when I do what I am going to do, I will be denying that experience. There will be no closure. I will leave only mystery behind. (But maybe they will enjoy the mystery, who knows?) He also will not have his chance to take his “not guilty by reason of celebrity” defense to the Supreme Court. I imagine without a client that there is no actual case.

  WHEN YOU CROSS into the White Hot Center, it is through an entryway that serves as a kind of hall of fame, a nearly endless series of head shots framed and encased under Lucite. They reach floor-to-ceiling and the ceiling is more than twenty feet high. Each is illuminated by its own individual light and collectively, it makes it look like the room is being lit by the celebrities themselves.

  Chet and Darrell walked on either side of me, relaxed, nodding greetings to others that we passed. I considered the possibility that I was dead. I tried to recall the final events before the arrival of Chet and Darrell at my apartment, but things were vague.

  I remembered nothing from the trip, but as I was awakened, I could tell that we were at sea on a small craft, and as we approached the dock, it was apparent that we had arrived at some sort of island. The weather was warm, dry. The breeze on the boat felt good on my face. It was dusk, suggesting we’d been traveling almost a full day, but for all I knew it could have been multiple days. In the dying light I could see white sand beaches with palm trees behind them.

  Chet sat across from me on the boat as we bobbed toward the dock.

  “Why do I feel so good?” I said. I really did. For the first time since I could remember my brain felt like it was the right size and situated where it belonged. The purple scrim that fogged the edges of my vision for so long had lifted. Everything was crisp and clear. When I breathed deeply my lungs didn’t hurt. I could barely even tell I was breathing. Everything felt effortless. I smelled myself and came away with lilacs. “What did you do?” I said.

  “We cured your addiction, to those pills anyway.”

  “Just like that?” I replied.

  Chet nodded. “That’s a fairly easy thing, just a matter of readjusting the old brain chemistry, tuning it to the right frequencies. We’re very good at that, but then, we’re very good at everything.” The boat bumped against the dock and Chet leapt easily ashore and secured it to the pier with a pristine white rope. He offered me his hand and hauled me behind him. Darrel was waiting for us.

  A SHORT WALK up the dock escorted by Chet and Darrell and a ten-minute ride in a golf cart with a perfectly silent motor and we’d arrived at the main building. It looked like a cross between Jefferson’s Monticello and a beach resort country club, all pillars and white paint with a large looming dome, a bronze phoenix sculpture affixed at the peak.

  I of course recognized every picture in the hall, but I paused in front of one of them. “That’s Mitch Laver,” I said.

  “Indeed, sir,” Chet replied. “Cohost of Hello U.S.A., the number-one morning show in America.”

  “He was here?”

  “Indeed again. One of our greatest successes. When he arrived he was on the weekend shift talking up charity curling matches to cure cleft palate and screwing chicks with cellulite. Now, well, I think you know all about him.”

  An almost imperceptible pressure at my elbow and Chet had me moving along as he filled me in on the initial details. “There will be a greeting and welcome from Mr. Bob after which I’ll show you to your room where dinner will be waiting. After that, you’ll want to catch some sleep because the sessions start first thing in the morning. There will be others there, but we recommend not interacting or conversing in any way at this time. It upsets Mr. Bob, and besides, there will be plenty of opportunity for socializing later when you are ready and it is productive.”

  Clearing the hallway, Chet deposited me in a neoclassical rotunda, every square inch of which seemed to be fashioned from marble. Up close I could see the small fissures mapping the walls. This shit was old. A small platform raised four feet or so off the ground stood in the middle surrounded by people just like me, Q-ratings off the charts, no introductions necessary. Chet took a glass goblet of sparkling golden liquid from a tray offered by a blue tracksuited waiter with the phoenix insignia I’d seen on the card on his breast and handed it to me. “Welcome,” Chet said. His face was simultaneously beautiful and handsome. “I’ll see you after Mr. Bob’s remarks.”

  None of the assembled spoke to each other, apparently having been similarly admonished by their handlers. We took shy sips from our goblets and maybe shared the barest of nods. Protocol among the famous is always a little bizarre anyway, since introductions are redundant when the mere existence of your face announces your identity. In general, we cover by acting like old friends—two-handed handshakes, cheek kissing, backslapping, you old so-and-so-ing regardless of whether or not we’ve ever met. But waiting for Mr. Bob, we acted like seventh-graders at a social.

  We did not have long to wait. A man in a tracksuit identical to the waiters, only in the brightest white imaginable and with the phoenix insignia in full stitched relief on the back like something from a motorcycle gang, made his way forward and I must have blinked or looked away because I could’ve sworn he floated to the top of the platform and hovered for a moment before settling down. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, trim, medium build, with a long, hawkish nose, balding save for an orbit of hair reaching around the back of his head extending ear to ear. His voice was strong, commanding, but also calming.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to the White Hot Center. I am your host, Mr. Bob.” He took a moment to rotate sixty degrees, making brief eye contact with everyone in his field of vision.

  “It is popular to call this sort of enterprise a ‘retreat.’” He made air quotes around the word and wrinkled his long nose. “But this is not a helpful word, retreat. Under every circumstance to retreat is to give in. We hear it all the time that it is important to retreat and recharge, but this is a mistaken notion propagated by losers. While you are at the White Hot Center you are not at a retreat, you are at an ‘advance.’ If you retreat, to get back to where you were, you must cover previously traversed ground. What is the point of this? You have worked hard to march over that ground and there will be no re-marching. We are here to help you march forward to what is next, not to go backwards to what was and what has been.” He turned another ninety degrees and made eye contact with a different portion of the attendees.

  “We do this,” he said, “by teaching you a very simple, very ancient, very elemental concept that we call‘the Law of Desire.’” More air quotes. “Human beings want things. It is really just this simple. We are human and because we are human we want things. A certain musical artist, whose picture you may have seen in our entryway, famously said, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ but we showed him differently, didn’t we? Before visiting us, one would have thought it wasn’t possible for a sixty-seven-year-old man to have a physique as lean as a teenager and also continue to rock people’s faces off with songs that are more than forty years old, but guess what? It can happen. It happens by focusing on what is important, and what is important is the wanting. Only when the wanting becomes strong enough, shall we get what we want. When people do not succeed, it is a failure of desire, and nothing else. The only limits on the Law of Desire are phy
sics, but even so, physics are not completely understood, which is to say, there are many things you want that people will say are impossible, meaning truly impossible, not merely difficult, and yet, if you put into practice what we teach you, you will achieve them.”

  I thought of Mitch Laver taking a 95-mph fastball to his pretty face and walking away none the worse for wear.

  “I am here to help you in this pursuit. To put it most simply, to help you is my desire and I want it very badly, which is why we have a hundred-percent success rate.”

  A pleased murmur rolled through the crowd.

  “Ah ah ah ah,” Mr. Bob said, waving his finger. “Do not think that because our success rate is perfect that it will be easy. On the contrary, it is very hard, but because we want it so badly we do not quit, ever, even if it nearly kills you. Our logo is the phoenix because the phoenix is forged in fire. While being a phoenix is very awesome, fire is extremely unpleasant, even for future phoenixes. Until the moment you become a phoenix, fire burns. You should know that you will spend some time in fire here at the White Hot Center.

  “Now,” Mr. Bob continued, “before we share a toast, let me tell you of just a few of our ground rules. Number one, I have a personal, twenty-four-hour-a-day open-door policy. If you need me, I will be there for you, no questions asked for as long as you need.

  “Number two, anyone who tries to avail themselves of my open-door policy without first addressing your needs with your Center liaison is subject to immediate expulsion. You liaison is there for you, make use of them.

  “Number three, everyone’s program is customized to their specific issues, which means you will be welcome at the White Hot Center for just as long as necessary, but not a moment longer. We will know when it’s time for you to go and when it is that time, you will go.

  “Lastly, anyone caught within a hundred yards of the southwest compound may be killed without warning. Very serious about this one, folks. Very, very serious. Okay, let’s toast! To desire!” Mr. Bob raised a goblet that had magically appeared in his hand and we did the same before clinking glasses with the people in closest proximity. “To desire,” I said to a young girl next to me who I instantly recognized from the front of my cereal box. She wore a warm-up suit similar to Mr. Bob’s, though hers had a small bunny patch on it.

  “To desire,” she said.

  We drained the liquid. Chet appeared at my elbow just as a female version of him touched the young girl’s shoulder.

  “This way, sir,” Chet said, steering me away, as the girl was led off in the opposite direction.

  27

  THE ALMOST UNIVERSAL consensus is that the sequel must be a joke.

  “This is a joke, right?” they say. The nearly four-hour-long nonsensical rambling heap of garbage is the funny man pulling a fast one on the entire nation. “Very Kaufmanesque,” they say. “If it’s true, that would be like, awesome,” they say. The public is ready to go with it, and that is what the funny man’s manager and agent are encouraging him to do now that they have seen it as well, the only two people in the theater at their particular showing to stick it out through the entire run time.

  “Let’s just put a release out,” the manager says.

  “Yeah,” the agent says, “something like, ‘ha ha ha, you fell for it, suckers.’”

  But the funny man is pissed. He is being tragically misunderstood. On the Web site that tabulates all of the reviews and labels a movie either “tasty” or “putrid,” the funny man’s film is only 1 percent tasty. He finds the positive review and reads it out loud to the manager and agent.

  “’This film is meant to provoke and challenge, to disturb and upend. It is rare that we are given something that can be safely labeled genius, but that’s no doubt the case here.’

  “See,” the funny man says, “this guy gets it. Smithy Carruthers, knows what the fuck is what. What’s wrong with the rest of you?”

  The agent and manager exchange looks.

  “Uhh …” the agent says.

  “Umm …” the manager says.

  “Out with it, assholes,” the funny man says. He no longer hesitates to call his manager and agent what they self-evidently are.

  “Smithy Carruthers is a fake identity owned by the studio. He says every movie they put out is a work of genius.” The funny man searches for Smithy Carruthers’s reviews on the Web site and sees this is true. “Borderline genius.” “Approaches genius.” “Gets near genius and brushes up against it and comes away smelling like genius.”

  The funny man throws the manager and agent out of his apartment and goes to war to defend his film. Because his testicles remain ridiculously swollen he cannot take to the airwaves, so he hits the blogs. He posts messages anywhere and everywhere defending the movie, explaining the movie, explicating the movie for the slack-jawed yokels of America. He expects to be welcomed as a visiting dignitary, to be celebrated for his virtual presence among the anonymous people who usually have to content themselves with shouting into the void, but no, he is beset by savages who can type more quickly than him. Even on the message boards at the Web site dedicated to him and his greatness he seems to be suddenly and universally loathed. It is like they have been laying in wait for him and now have pounced. They are a Venus flytrap and he is their fly, their chunk of ground meat. This is blood sport and he is armed with a peashooter.

  The funny man is outnumbered millions to one. No one will jump in on his side. It is the world’s largest pile-on. Sites go down, servers crash. The global temperature ticks up one-tenth of one degree because of the extra energy expended delivering the virtual blows. They hit him from every angle, wearing him down pixel by pixel. His fingers blister on the keyboard. His spelling degrades to their level and his balls will not stop throbbing. Finding it impossible to compete on the message boards, he goes to instant messenger in order to take on his foes, one by one, like a martial arts master surrounded by bad guys:

  MOVIEGUY45: If you have to explain it, it’s not a good joke.

  FUNNYMAN: UR right it’s not a joke. That’s some serious shit up there. If you weren’t so stupid you might get it.

  MOVIEGUY45: That’s what she said. Lol!

  FUNNYMAN: That doesn’t even make any sense.

  MOVIEGUY45: Like ur movie. ROTFLMAO!

  FUNNYMAN: eat shit n die!

  MOVIEGUY45: that’s what she said. Lol, ROTFLMAO! LAWSMAHOIYF!

  Funnyman: what the f does LAWSMAHOIYF mean?

  MOVIEGUY45: Laughing While Sticking My AssHOle In Your Face.

  FUNNYMAN: Seek help, you sick fuck

  MOVIEGUY45: That’s what she said. Lol!

  Finally, by the end of the day, the funny man gives permission for his agent and manager to release a statement saying it’s all a big gag, but at that point, no one believes him.

  He is ruined. He is misunderstood.

  TO THE EXTENT possible, the mess of the sequel is cleaned up. The film had been pulled from theaters by the end of the opening weekend and all of the cast and crew were given bonuses by the studio in order to buy their silence and prevent the slow trickle of tell-alls from showing up in the media. A company run by two fourteen-year-old South Koreans was hired to scrub any evidence of the funny man’s typing tear across the Internet.

  The only one who wasn’t willing to shut up about it was the funny man. The studio had used its leverage to keep him out of any of the mainstream outlets, but when a woman named Dagmar Neuborgen, host of Duluth cable access’s Sewing Time with Dagmar, managed to get an interview request through, the funny man flew himself to her studio (the Neuborgen homestead basement) and because no one was paying any attention to him, did his best to do something to grab some attention.

  But nothing worked.

  As he sat down the funny man complimented the Neuborgens on their paneling, saying he’d never seen anything like it, which was the truth, and declined the offer of tea, accepting plain water in a mug with a picture of a cat wearing a sombrero. Looking at himself in the
monitor he tried out some different smiles before settling on one he called “pleasantly bemused,” which he wore as the red camera light snapped on.

  He tried everything. He compared his comedic influence to the holy trinity: Bruce, Pryor, Carlin. He laughed, he raged, he stalked the Neuborgen basement, clawing at the paneling like a cornered animal. He considered, then abandoned, then reconsidered some choice racial slurs. He looked at Dagmar Neuborgen’s crucifix nailed to the wall, at the handsome Christ figure’s feet, nailed, one over the top of the other, and said how he identified with the man, how he now knew what it was like to die for someone else’s sins. The funny man stared into Dagmar Neuborgen’s cornflower blue eyes and thought that those eyes must be why Mr. Neuborgen had fallen in love with her, and she shook her head sadly and said, “None of this is very original, is it?”

  AFTERWARDS, THE FUNNY man spends his time gazing out the apartment windows, searching for protestors, but the world has taken no special notice. The video pops up on the Web site designed for the purpose of sharing videos like a famous comedianactor having a meltdown on a cable-access show and sees it only has seventy-eight views. He looks one hour later and sees seventy-nine views. Three days later it is eighty views and he realizes he is the only viewer.

  There is now nothing left for the funny man save his once weekly overnights with the boy and a last stab at marital counseling.

  At what will turn out to be the final session, the funny man holds a foam ball that the couples therapist has encouraged him to squeeze any time he feels anxious or angry. The therapist has been talking like the funny man and his wife are making great progress, but this is true only if the progress is toward a final dissolution of their marriage.

  The ball is stamped all over with the name of an antianxiety drug. The funny man knows that some people would call this ironic, but he knows also that that would be wrong. His wife and the marriage counselor look at him. It is his turn to talk. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he is so completely wounded by everything.