Kenny would ess when he heard this. Dustin Effing Walker’s mounting a comeback? An HBO special? A streaming web series? Whatever it is, he wants my help?
After all these years, after all the sold-out tours, the Emmy-winning specials, his Grammy, the IMAX documentary, packing the same theater in the Bellagio for months straight, tickets going for four figures on StubHub, none of it mattered to Oliver’s peers. They still wouldn’t let him play their reindeer games. They made fun of him at roasts that weren’t even about him.
Yeah, I get it, you hate prop comedy. How original. Have you seen my house on Painted Feather Way? Would you like to count the bathrooms?
No, seriously, would you please count them, I forgot how many there are, that’s how many there are.
Boom! Kenny dropped his closer, and the two thousand strong in the former Cirque du Soleil theater erupted with laughter.
The stage manager and Ollie exchanged thumbs-up. He reached out with his free hand and another PA put another rubber mallet in it. He made sure his shoulders were straight and his spine was relaxed and his chi was flowing properly down through his legs and out his toes.
Ollie was one of the most successful performers of his generation, but Dustin Walker could bring him the only thing he lacked:
Dignity.
Kenny yelled:
“Give it up, fellow seekers of the Radical Yes! It’s time for a playdate with…Orange Baby Man!”
Ollie somersaulted onto the stage with wide staring eyes and a manic grin. He was the exact color of a traffic cone. He even had a bright white stripe in the form of a diaper around his nether regions.
Giant multicolored whoopee cushions rose from the floor to meet Orange Baby Man. He beat out “My Heart Will Go On” on them in fart noises with his mallets.
The crowd rose to its feet as one.
V
He would like to extend to you an invitation to join him, me, and a select group of collaborators of equal stature for a long weekend of creation
When she read that, Janet Kahn screamed:
“Elena! Elena, goddamn it! Elena, get in here!”
“Ms. Kahn, please…,” murmured her plastic surgeon, Dr. Shamdasani, and not for the first time. For the past twenty minutes he had been trying to get her to set down her phone so that his anesthesiologist could step in, but the insult comic still known as the Shotgun remained a raging dynamo of invective even while lying in an operating room at Cedars-Sinai.
“Look at your creepy serial-killer smile, Dr. S. It never wavers. You dipping into your own stash? Sticking your lips with the Botox? You auditioning for the villain in the next Batman movie? Elena!”
“Right here, Ms. Kahn,” her personal assistant said. She had been standing just inside the door the whole time.
“Jesus Christ! Don’t do that! You already made it across the border, you can stop sneaking around. Wear high heels once in a while so I can hear you coming. I’ll hold off Immigration long enough so you can stomp away.”
Elena had been born to second-generation Brazilian Americans in Framingham, Massachusetts, twenty-two years ago. She was the fourth personal assistant to work for the Real Queen of Mean that year. The placement agency swore to Elena that the real Real Queen of Mean was nothing like her insult comedy act.
It took two hours on the job for Elena to realize that was quite true.
The real Janet Kahn was much worse.
“How did whoever this is get my private number? Did you give it to her? If it was you, I’m gonna strangle you with your own fallopian tubes.”
“Who…?”
Lady Put-Down shoved the phone in Elena’s face. She took it and scrolled through the text messages thus far.
Elena frowned:
“Who’s Dustin Walker?”
“Christ on a crutch, are you serious? What are they teaching in public schools these days? Your generation can rank every member of One Direction by penis size but you don’t know Dustin Walker? He’s one of the few legends in this business who hasn’t been carried out in a double-ply Hefty bag. Yet. That’s why I’m in this chair, right, Dr. S? You’re gonna make sure I live forever?”
“I shall do my very best, Ms. Kahn.”
“Look at you, grinning and nodding, grinning and nodding. They should give you out on bobblehead day at Dodger Stadium.”
Elena turned to leave. “I will find out whoever’s calling and make sure they do not contact you again—”
“What? No! That’s not what I said. The short bus just drop you off? Listen! Find out who gave them my number. Then I’ll know if the offer is on the up and up. Which I hope it is. Because the idea of it doesn’t entirely, you know, suck.”
Elena left the room trembling in awe at the nicest thing she had ever heard Janet Kahn say about anybody. She instantly looked up Dustin Walker on IMDb as soon as she got to the waiting area.
“Besides, Dusty’s spread will be a grand place to recuperate from you using my face as a hibachi grill, ain’t that right, Doc?”
“Perhaps, Ms. Kahn, if you ever give me your kind permission to perform the rhytidectomy…?”
“Oh, you can get pissed, Doc. I can hear it in your voice. Real human emotion. I like this side of you. Yeah, okay, do your worst. I don’t expect you to make me a 10, but I am tired of throwing up on my bathroom mirror every morning.”
VI
for a long weekend of creation at the house he’s got on a small island off Saint Martin. Yes, that’s the Caribbean. Sand, sun, and jokes. What’s not to love?
TJ Martinez put down his big-ass Desert Eagle handgun and picked up his phone to make sure he had read that right.
Saint Martin? That was one of those island countries with no extradition treaties, right? Where the brothers had a revolution and kicked out the white man and made sure he’d never come back except by paying through the nose at high-end luxury hotels? That sounded nice. Particularly now. Things were getting way too heavy on the home front for his liking. He could hear punks stumbling about in the bushes outside his big-ass mansion right now.
TJ had been playing Call of Duty in his silk bathrobe and Michael Kors boxer shorts with the sound jacked all the way up on his headphones. The walls of his man-pit were reinforced by framed platinum records and photos of the guests he had on during his twenty years hosting 2nite. There were five presidents, forty-two Grammys, thirty-eight Oscars, and eight Nobel Prizes among them.
He threw off his headset when shadows passed across the shutters on the big bay window. There were definitely creepers creeping around in his shit. Somebody jiggled the bulletproof panels from the outside.
He hadn’t always bunkered down like a wounded animal. But after he retired from 2nite, after two decades of the daily grind of a nightly variety show, after all the articles on his significance, after Miley Cyrus jumped out of his farewell cake in pasties on the last show, he woke up the next morning feeling like Rip Goddamn Winkle.
What was this new world, with everyone at DEFCON 5 24/7, losing their minds at every little thing. He used That Word in a tweet once—once!—and that’s all it took for planet Earth to start screaming for his blood. All his awards, all those how-will-we-live-without-him think pieces, all forgotten in an instant.
Does TJ Martinez need that nonsense? Hell no. I got nothing left to prove. Not since I was seventeen years old, back when they stopped kicking my ass for my mouth and started giving me cash money for it instead.
TJ turned off the TV and padded over to the front door with the Desert Eagle. He could hear voices arguing in whispers on the other side. He quietly undid each of the six dead bolts so he could catch the mofos with their drawers around their ankles. He didn’t have any security cameras in his big-ass mansion, because Anonymous or WikiLeaks could hack into those and he didn’t want anyone posting videos of him jerking off onto MySpace or whatever. That ain’t right. He didn’t have an alarm system, either. That just begged la policia to show up unannounced claiming that the system gave them a fals
e signal and do you mind if we have a look around your property since we’re here anyway oh look at all this heroin we found for some reason. No, thank you.
Before 2nite TJ had starred with that crazy white boy Dusty Walker on What Just Happened? They had been thick as thieves back in the day, scoring coke together and destroying any pussy that had the bad sense to blunder into the orbit of their insanity.
He hadn’t talked to Dusty for years and years, since they did that movie together, the one about the guy who married a cat. It was a piece of garbage but it paid for Dusty’s sweet crib in the islands. Might be good to see him.
Might be even better to lie low for a while.
Because he was about to straight-up murder some fools.
He grabbed the knob and threw open the door.
VII
The only potential sticky wicket is that the dates are kind of already locked in—Aug. 8–11—so hopefully that’ll work with your schedule.
Once Ruby Ng read this, she stifled a cry. By this point she had spent a solid twenty minutes creeping around TJ Martinez’s bushes trying to find a window to look through that wasn’t covered with bulletproof shutters.
Ever since the ex-2nite host had tweeted That Word, then deleted it eighteen thousand retweets too late, then set a land-speed record for deleting every single one of his online accounts, Ruby burned with the desire to get him on her podcast, Comedy Ambush, ranked #44 overall on iTunes, #2 in interview/humor (watch your ass, Marc Maron). But it looked like Martinez had gone full-on Colonel Kurtz. His mansion was locked down to survive a zombie attack, bunker-buster bomb, and/or the Rapture.
Lucky for her, he had left his front gate open.
Normally, Ruby would have turned off her phone notifications to avoid interfering with its microphone attachment and Bluetooth connection to the small video camera mounted on her Kaiser Wilhelm bicycle helmet. But any remaining thoughts of leaping out of the bushes and strafing TJ Martinez with an impromptu interview about his privilege flew out her ears as soon as she looked at her phone and the text hit her between the eyes.
ZOMG Dustin Walker THE Dustin Walker wants to work with me.
Ruby popped out of Martinez’s bushes and walked across his front lawn, dialing rapidly. Where did he see my stand-up? YouTube? Must have been YouTube, since none of the phallocentric gatekeepers of Hollywood had the cojones to put her on the air.
When her fiancée, Yvette, answered, Ruby blurted out, “I’ve got great news,” and read the Walker message back verbatim.
Yvette screamed:
“Oh my God, honey! That’s wonderful! That’s amazing! I’m so happy for you. Except…you know. For that last part.”
“What? Why?”
“You…you do have plans that weekend.”
“Not anymore I don’t!”
She could feel the bubbling hot magma of Yvette’s unleashed fury surging through the phone. “What—what are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Dammit Ruby, our wedding is that weekend!”
Ruby blinked.
“Oh.”
She blinked again.
“Oh yeah.”
She blinked a third time.
“Well.”
After an awkward pause:
“Guess we’ll have to reschedule, then.”
“No—no, we are not rescheduling our wedding! We’ll lose our deposit at the aquarium!”
“I’ll make it up to you, baby.”
“Make it up to me? How can you make it up to me? How can you pay me back? You haven’t had a positive net income since we started dating!” An estate tax lawyer, Yvette was definitively the sugar mommy in the relationship. “When will Yogi Gomes find another time to leave his ashram? That’s the best ten-date window for a wedding between Tauruses! Do you have any idea how hard it is to rent doves, for Christ’s sake?”
“I swear, I’ll figure out a way. ’Vette! This job is a slam-dunk game-changer!”
Yvette burst into tears.
“The most special day of our lives together is a slam-dunk game-changer! What about that?”
The veins in Ruby’s neck started popping out. “I don’t think you understand what an opportunity this is, not just for my career personally, but to increase the non-accommodationist queer presence in mainstream American comedy! I thought you believed in the revolution of representation! What about the revolution, Yvette?”
At that moment, TJ Martinez burst out of his front door, waving a handgun at Ruby as big as her head, screaming, “I’LL SHOW YOU A REVOLUTION!”
“Gottagotalklaterloveyahon!” Ruby Ng sprinted through the gate and toward her recumbent bike chained to a lamppost down the block as fast as her unshaved legs could carry her.
VIII
Anyway, drop me a ring or a text back if you’re interested—Dustin would absolutely loooooove to work with you.
Fascinating, William Griffith thought when he read the series of texts. He had never met Dustin Walker, or heard anything but a track or two of his most famous album (Can’t Help Himself), but that was not unusual. William was not familiar with most of his fellow practitioners in the art of observational monologuing.
“Mr. Griffith, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to show you this piece. M. Vallier suspected you might find it right, as they say, up your alley.”
“Yes, of course, Dominique. Lead on.”
Dominique led William across the high-rise gallery offering spectacular floor-to-ceiling vistas of the Arc de Triomphe and Champs-Élysées. Normally the gallery was closed on Monday, at least to all collectors not named William Griffith. He had to red-eye back to JFK to tape Fallon on Tuesday, so arrangements had been made.
William looked at the mixed-media work for some time, then asked:
“Whose vagina is that?”
Dominique said:
“The artist’s mother’s.”
William nodded:
“Ah, yes. Of course. They make the most exquisite sound when they brush against one another.”
“The colored-glass vaginas are hand blown, ironically enough, by the artist’s mother. This is why M. Vallier has called it The Birth Call. Instead of—”
“The Birth Caul, of course. Droll. A pun. Very daring in the art world.”
Dominique shot him a hungry, expectant look:
“So, do you think you might be interested—”
Just then William’s phone tinkled again, the sound of a fork tapping a champagne flute. When he read the text, he felt a pang of disappointment. It was from his manager, Jessica, and not another flattering message from the Dustin Walker people:
Hey Billy sorry but the Phoenix guys are really on my ass about the promos can you just call in that number and give them 1 or 2 takes real quick thx xoxoxoxoxoxox
“Pardon me, darling, I need to make a call. May I…?”
“Please, use my office. Over there.”
William entered the small side room and closed the door. He dialed the number in Jessica’s text, and when the recorder beeped on the other end, he let out a rebel yell:
“Hey there, this is Billy the Contractor and you’re listening to KTEA, Kay-Tee, Phoenix’s real place for real talk for real Americans! Remember to hold your fire till you see the whites of their panties! Fix ’er uuuuuuuup!”
He waited a beat.
Then he said:
“You know what criminals call gun-free zones? Target practice! You know that, KTEA knows that, and Billy the Contractor knows it, too! You can’t see I’m open-carrying on the radio, but you straight-up know I am! Fix ’er uuuuuuuup!”
Beat.
“How many liberals does it take to screw in a light bulb? Who knows, none of ’em have worked a day in their lives! This is Billy the Contractor tellin’ Real America to set their dial to KTEA, Phoenix’s radio home of Hannity and Limbaugh! Fix ’er uuuuuuuup!”
Dominique’s face was blank with shock when he stepped back out of the office. She must
have heard every word.
And she must have been more familiar with his bank account than with his act.
That was true of most of his fellow travelers. He decided he was going to take the Dustin Walker people up on their offer. He had been paddling around by himself in his own little pond for far too long.
William handed the stunned Dominique his black Amex and said:
“M. Vallier knows me far too well. This piece would look exquisite next to the pool at my guesthouse. I’ll take it.”
IX
Hope to see you there!
Best,
Meredith Ladipo
Assistant to Dustin Walker & Funny-Person-in-Training
“You’re fired, Steve!”
Teddy’s words were drowned out by the metal stage door crashing shut in the alley behind Improv Underground, where illegal immigrants in white aprons pitched giant garbage bags of rotting produce from Aldi into blue plastic Dumpsters. Steve Gordon had dashed out as soon as he read the last part of the message, leaving his accountant students slack-jawed in amazement.
As soon as Dusty’s name appeared on his lock screen, he had to grab the stage-right curtain to keep from falling over. He hadn’t heard from Dusty in years. Years. He assumed Dusty still hated his guts because of…well, you know. But now, after all his pitch meetings to stone-faced producers, after all the pilots not picked up, after the sink into the dreary sameness of improv classes and infomercial hosting…Dusty wanted to see him again? This was destiny calling, wasn’t it?
This was salvation.
Steve wasn’t halfway to the alley before he pulled up Meredith Ladipo’s contact details from her message and dialed her number: 310 area code. Los Angeles.
By the fifth ring his panic mounted, but then a woman answered:
“Hey there, Funny Person.” A young voice with a British accent, brimming with the confidence of the extremely good-looking.
“Yeah, hi, this is Steve Gordon—”
“I know.”
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