The group took this news in stride with minimal grumbling. Zoe shouldered the cloth case she had kept with her since the airport. When William Griffith asked, “May I help you with that?” she hugged it close and said:
“No, that’s all right, I’ve got it.”
Most of the others took a carry-on or a purse with them and tromped in a winding queue up the stairs.
Midway along the side of the cliff, breathing heavily and brow slick with sweat, William Griffith turned to look back for his captain friend. He saw that the boat was already nearing the vanishing point where sea met sky and soon would disappear over the horizon.
V
Most of them were short of breath by the time they reached the top of the stairs. TJ Martinez had to lean a hand against the railing and catch his breath. “You make me do that again, screw Dusty, I’m going home.”
“How? Does Uber have a navy now, too?” Dante Dupree said.
Once William Griffith, bringing up the rear, staggered to the landing, Meredith said, “We all here? Everyone still alive? Splendid. This way.”
The great house was set back at the end of an allée of towering coconut palms. It was built during this century but in later French-colonial island style, the turquoise hurricane shutters open against bright ocher walls. The structure had two terra-cotta tile roofs, one over the gallery on the ground floor and another on the second-story belvedere. It sat on a slight hill at the edge of the cliff, with its gallery doors open at opposite ends to catch the prevailing trade winds. As the group approached, flanked by the tall trees, they could see all the way through the central hallway to the rear of the mansion, where a pool shimmered. A large fountain rose up before the entrance, shaped like a giant concrete lily pad. Concentric rings of robin’s-egg blue mosaic tiles radiated from its gurgling center.
Looking off to one side, Ollie cried, “Is that a bouncy castle? No way!”
A grand pink inflated castle stood between the main house and a more modest cabana guesthouse set into a steeper slope. Flapping atop a turret was one of those elongated inflatable men alerting motorists to car washes and auto lots. It wore a red track suit and glasses and had thinning hair with an obvious comb-over.
“Is that…is that supposed to be Dusty?” Steve said.
“Isn’t it swish?” Meredith said.
“Are you his assistant or his enabler?” Janet said.
Meredith Ladipo led the group into the partially enclosed front gallery, part living room, part reception area. It had large louvered windows and earth-tone tiles that matched the mahogany furniture.
“I could get used to this,” Zoe said. “I could absolutely get used to this.”
“Dustin? Mr. Walker? We’re here!” Meredith Ladipo called out as they entered. Her voice rang off the blindingly white plaster walls. “Dave? Dave, can you hear me?”
No answer.
“I feel so very wanted,” William Griffith said.
Meredith Ladipo did her best to conceal a nervous smile, and failed. “I guess I should go see where everyone is. While I’m doing that, please feel free to freshen up and settle into your rooms. Here, I took the liberty of printing a layout of the grounds for you all.” She handed out maps, each individualized with the location of the recipient’s bedroom. “It’s…three o’clock now? Let’s meet at five in the writers’ room—marked clearly on your maps. Dustin can explain exactly what this project is all about in his own inimitable way, over cocktails.”
“Where is Dusty?” TJ said.
“I am going to find out,” she said, and walked out of the gallery through an archway leading deeper into the house.
“Great,” TJ sighed, “we just got here and the show is already a total mess. Might as well be a network production.”
“Typical Dusty,” Steve said.
“How’d you know?” TJ shot back.
Steve opened his mouth to say something but Janet Kahn suddenly whipped off her sunglasses and cried out, “Oh my God, will you look at that?”
She stepped toward the gallery’s east wall, which was covered with letter-sized black-and-white photos framed in black. The images were arranged in three neat rows of three. Each of them was represented, in action onstage in a club or theater, mic in hand.
They all gathered around for a look.
“Looks just like the back wall at the Comedy Store,” Dante said.
He pointed at a photo of Meredith Ladipo on stage gripping a mic stand in front of a black backdrop:
“Hey, look, the African Queen of England is a stand-up, too.”
William Griffith smiled at the shot of him packing the Grand Ole Opry in full-on Billy the Contractor drag: Bud Light tallboy in hand, Farm King cap turned backward on his head, the sleeves of his plaid shirt ripped off so everyone could see the copious flame tattoos shooting out of his biceps. “That was a good night,” he murmured.
“Will you look at that,” Janet whispered.
She reached out and touched her photo. It showed her several decades and a few facelifts ago, sporting a beehive hairdo and striped lamé dress, standing on the floor of a taste-free Vegas lounge. Her joker-card smile inveighed humorous abuse on a tuxedo-clad and evening-gown-wearing audience. Every man and woman in the photograph had faces frozen in laughter.
“The Shotgun, mid-salvo,” Steve said.
“You were out there breaking barriers before any of us,” Ruby said.
“Not just the greatest, but the greatest of all time,” Dante said.
“Hell yeah,” Zoe said, and touched Janet’s back. “Though you do have shoulder blades like a man.”
“Thank you, dear. You can drop dead, too.”
Janet’s eyes shimmered. She yanked a half-used Kleenex out of her sleeve. “Sometimes you wish life was like this, you know? You could just stop some moments in time forever.”
“Not everybody,” Dante said. “Jesus, Ollie, look at you here.”
“What? I’m up there? Let me see?” Ollie was considerably shorter than the others and got stuck behind when the scrum rushed to the photo wall. He elbowed his way to the front and his cheeks flushed crimson at what he saw.
“Whoa, look at the size of that Jew-fro, Ollie,” Janet said with a cackle. “The Anti-Defamation League is calling, telling you to cut it out, you’re making the rest of us look bad.”
TJ said, “Aw, c’mon, give him a break. That’s cool, Ollie. I didn’t know you tried to do real comedy.”
“What?” Ollie blinked. “What do you mean?”
“You know,” TJ said, “as opposed to that horrible hacky prop crap you do for tourists.”
“Yeah, like, it basically belongs at five-year-olds’ birthday parties instead of onstage,” Zoe said.
“Or old folks homes,” Ruby deadpanned.
“Oh,” Ollie said. “That.”
VI
Ollie didn’t cry when he left the gallery.
He didn’t cry as he walked up the stairs winding through the center of the house.
He didn’t cry as he walked around the upstairs gallery to his room.
He didn’t cry at all, in fact.
But as soon as he shut his door, he grabbed a pillow and screamed into it all the curses he would never say out loud, way worse than eff your mother and ess on your dad.
It all came back to him downstairs. He had forgotten how much those words could hurt and how casually cruel other comics could be, backstage before and after he went on, no matter how well his set went—or, more often, how badly.
The photo on the wall had come from one of his earliest attempts at stand-up, at an open mic at Carolines, in Times Square, where he bombed worse than scientists had previously believed possible. His thick corrective lenses, his overbite, and the dark Chia Pet curls covering his head stirred the audience’s predatory instincts as soon as he stepped onstage. He had spent three long January nights freezing his ass off handing out fliers to tourists taking pictures with a giant Elmo wearing a fanny pack, chirping “Do you li
ke comedy?” over and over just to qualify for the privilege of being nearly assaulted by a roomful of mooks from Nassau County.
The whole experience brought back stress memories of the schoolyard before first bell, that horrible purgatory of kids milling about on the basketball court waiting to go in, how he was the target of any kid not born with curly hair, squat legs, bad eyesight, and Jewish roots. He wasn’t as quick as the others downstairs, the ones who were able to fight insults with even better comebacks.
Ollie never learned how to parry, dodge, and counterattack. Then as now, when mocked, his brain just buzzed with a white noise of panic. He was like a superhero who had the same origin, but got different powers.
It was Dustin Walker’s album Can’t Help Myself, the Thriller of comedy, that originally inspired him. He played the cassette over and over until the tape snapped, but fortunately by then he could do all the routines by heart in front of his bedroom mirror, using his mother’s hairbrush as a microphone. He could do all the characters, all the voices, on command—he just struggled to find his own.
After the Carolines fiasco, he decided to give up traditional stand-up altogether. He had worked the Orange Baby Man persona into his act for the first time on the night depicted in the gallery photo, inspired by a Can’t Help Myself track called “Born Yesterday.” Using his background in magic and clowning, he developed a persona so bright and innocent and vulnerable, no one in the audience would dare heckle him.
And from there, he’d built an empire.
When he looked up from smothering his screams in the pillow he saw a bright-orange square on the bedside table. He immediately recognized it and simultaneously doubted what it was. As he approached, however, he saw that he was right:
An Orange Baby Man regional-franchise handbook binder lay beside his bed. The trades had yet to receive the press release, but he was well under way to opening Orange Baby Man Theaters around the globe, from New York to Macao, London to Rio, each with its own local OBM performing Ollie’s routines. The binder contained rules and regulations and a mission statement, which he had dictated to his assistant during breaks between rehearsals. They were meant to inspire in all “a childlike sense of spectacle” while promoting the values of “peace and play.” It was his gift to the world.
And Dustin Walker had the binder in his house! Amazing. Did he want to be an investor? Did he want to open an OBM theater in Saint Martin? (That might conflict with the regional exclusivity deal he had cut at the Sandals resort in Saint Thomas, but, whatever. When a star of Walker’s magnitude got involved, all things became negotiable.)
The corners of his mouth turned upward. Those stuck-up jerks looked down on prop comedy, huh? Well, wait till they saw this. He’d show them.
He’d show them all.
VII
Ruby Ng sighed when she saw her room. White rug on brown hardwood floors. White cushions on beige wicker chairs. White sheets over a dark mahogany bed frame, tastefully bunched white mosquito netting garlanding the four posts. Nice colonialist decor, she thought.
Still, it was hard not to admire the view: when she opened the hurricane shutters she was greeted by a spectacular showing of the endless blue Caribbean beyond the coconut-lined cliffs. She snapped a few vacation-porn shots to text to Yvette as a “hey, I’ve arrived alive” notice. But a red exclamation point in her Messages app reminded her of the unbearably cute Meredith Ladipo’s warning about the cell reception, or lack thereof. She opened the Settings menu to join the island’s Wi-Fi network.
Meredith had included the network password on their maps. It was a meaningless jumble of letters and numbers. The first time Ruby typed the sequence into her phone it buzzed irritably. And the second time, and the third time.
“Well, shit,” Ruby said.
As she gave up, putting away her phone, she noticed a small, old-timey, gunmetal-gray flip phone on the end table. Presumably it had been left by the room’s previous guest.
Thinking she’d hand it off to Ladipo to dispose of later, she picked it up and popped it in her pocket as she headed out to explore the rest of the building.
VIII
A black square box of Winchester shotgun shells lay on the end table in Janet Kahn’s room. An exploding clay skeet discus was drawn on the front (“X-Tra Lite Target Load”).
The comic known as the Shotgun picked up the box and opened the lid: all but two of the shells appeared to be in place.
She put the box back on the table with a tight smile.
IX
On Dante’s end table he found a brown bottle of Lagavulin 12-year-old. You knew it was the good stuff because on the label they spelled it “Scotch Whisky.” Extra e’s were for filthy commoners, apparently. Yet the English loved sticking extra u’s into everything. British people just made this shit up as they went along, of this Dante was convinced. He didn’t understand half the crap out of Meredith Ladipo’s mouth, as nice as she was on the eyes. They just had to have a different word for everything.
Dante picked up the bottle to admire it and frowned. It wasn’t glass, but plastic. Not so fancy for him, apparently.
He thought about opening it and having a quick taste, though he had promised himself he would take it easy this weekend. The drinking got even worse when he wasn’t touring.
He thought about it some more. Maybe he should show some self-control.
An old saying of Grandma’s tickled the back of his mind:
“Watch out for white people bearing gifts. They’re always trying to buy your ass on the installment plan.”
He set the bottle back down, unopened.
X
Steve Gordon saw it as soon as he walked into the room: something square and cardboard on the bamboo end table. He picked it up.
And his breath caught in his throat.
It was Can’t Help Myself, Dusty’s first stand-up album, the one that catapulted him to Instant Legend status. “The Thriller of comedy” was how it was most commonly described—every home had a copy, and at one time it was as ubiquitous as the Rubik’s Cube and Big Mouth Billy Bass combined. On the dust jacket, an early twentysomething Dustin Walker looked cross-eyed at the camera wearing a straitjacket while having his mug shot taken.
Or he usually did. Someone had taped a photo of Steve’s face over Walker’s on this particular album cover.
I guess he’s still carrying a wee bit of a grudge, Steve thought.
The Radical Yes
To All Aspiring OBMs:
The most important thing to remember about Orange Baby Man®, and the main reason he is loved by audiences of all ages all over the world, is that he was LITERALLY BORN YESTERDAY.
• He does not have our baggage and hang-ups.
• He does not have our fear, hatred, and prejudice.
• He knows nothing of our world or any human society.
• He is too young to have learned how to talk. He speaks in a rudimentary but semantically rich form of prelanguage called BABY RAP® that all regional and touring OBMs will have to learn. Written and oral exams will be required.
• He is an alien, except he was born here on Earth and is completely human (like Superman).
• His is a journey of EXPLORATION and DISCOVERY that he invites the audience to accompany him on.
All sketches revolve around Orange Baby Man® encountering and interacting with unique aspects of his world, all of which are, at first, completely alien and baffling to him:
• A giant smartphone
• Brightly colored squirty paint tubes
• PVC-pipe musical instruments
• Watermelons
• Exercise equipment
And so on! Unlike us, Orange Baby Man® does not approach the unknown with trepidation or hesitancy. Instead, he embraces the unknown enthusiastically with what Mr. Rees likes to call THE RADICAL YES.
The RADICAL part of the Radical Yes is what activates the humor in our sketches. Orange Baby Man®’s enthusiastic and often rambunctious embrac
e of the props he finds onstage put him in amusing and outrageous situations. He acts before he thinks, and like so many of us he often finds himself in over his head.
When this happens, it triggers what we like to call the Pivot™, and the rest of the sketch becomes about him trying to escape an awkward situation. (Example: the sketch in which OBM gets on the treadmill without realizing he has a paint tube squirting out of the bottom of his diaper. Boy, he makes quite a mess, doesn’t he?)
And this is where the YES part of the Radical Yes comes in. Every sketch, no matter where it begins, or what happens during it, must—and we can’t stress this enough—resolve in a life-affirming place, a positive place making us understand that if we did have worries about how things were going to turn out, those worries were proven to be completely unfounded at sketch’s end.
Sometimes Orange Baby Man® causes damage (see “The Mallet,”) and sometimes his environment damages him, but it is always in a spirit of play and learning. It is never malicious or intentional.
Sometimes Orange Baby Man® finds himself in strange or uncomfortable situations, but never in ways that may be offensive to other ethnic groups or nationalities.
Orange Baby Man® is a presexual being with no knowledge of or experience with coitus. OBM sketches must never reference dating, romance, marriage, pregnancy, rape, fisting, etc.
Mr. Rees has often said that the main reason he dropped out of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College to create Orange Baby Man® was to empower his audiences to leave his theaters with a smile on their face and a little piece of OBM inside each of them.
Through the joy and laughter of comedy we want the audience to learn how to embrace the Radical Yes in their own lives.
Ten Dead Comedians Page 4