Ten Dead Comedians

by Fred Van Lente

  Dustin broke character then and started talking in what they presumed to be his regular voice. “When you’re as rich and forgotten as I am and spend a lot of time sitting around waiting for a phone to ring that never does, you have a lot of time to think. And to…arrange things.”

  He blinked, and they could see a sort of glistening in the eyes beneath the thick glasses. “I’ve decided that because I created you, I am going to un-create you. I am striking the cosmic gong. I am wielding the vaudeville hook of destiny and pulling you off stage. There’s going to be a new dawn in Funnyland, thanks to me. I am delivering my closer. For your acts as well as mine.

  “Am I rambling? I feel like maybe I’m rambling.”

  He put the noose he had been holding around his neck.

  And pulled it tight.

  He said nothing for a second or two.

  He breathed in deeply. Exhaled:

  “Can you blame me for wanting to stay onstage a little longer?”

  “This has got to be a bit,” Zoe whispered.

  “I am sorry for bringing you here under false pretenses,” Walker said, “but I can’t be sorry that none of you are leaving this island alive.

  “Including me.”

  The camera angle shifted abruptly, moving off his reflection in the mirror so that they were no longer looking at him but through his eyes, to the right side of the writers’ room.

  Together Walker and his audience ran through the French doors, bursting them open.

  Meredith Ladipo started screaming.

  And onscreen the camera plunged over the railing of the balcony outside and for one endless moment, they were hurtling downward to the rocks and white surf below, and now everyone was screaming.

  But then the drop stopped with a blurry jolt and the camera cocked to one side, swaying with horrific gentleness.

  “Oh my God,” William Griffith said. “Oh my God oh my God oh my God.”

  “Look!” Meredith Ladipo yelled. “Outside!”

  Both Steve Gordon and Dante Dupree had gotten up and crept toward the French doors. At first they couldn’t see what she was pointing at.

  Through tears Meredith said, “The doors were open when I came in, and the wind had scattered the pens and pads everywhere. I didn’t see before but—look! Look!”

  “Holy shit,” Steve said, “she’s right.”

  When he pointed, Dante saw through the French doors, on the post of the banister near the base:

  A length of black rope was tied there, the same rope as in the video.

  Dante and Steve stepped forward, each looking at the other, each taking one door and opening it.

  The two men stepped onto the balcony and looked down over the railing:

  Sea winds batted the thinning white hair on top of a head attached to the other end of the rope.

  In unison Dante and Steve crouched down and dug their fingers into the loop around the banister but failed to loosen it.

  So Dante laid on his stomach and grabbed the dangling rope with one hand, then the other, and tried hauling the body up. Eventually there was enough slack that Steve could help as best he could, grabbing a different coil.

  They managed to pull the body high enough that they could see the vivid sunburn atop Dustin Walker’s bare, desiccated scalp, the GoPro still strapped to his forehead. The dull miasma of rot hung close now, making the two men instinctually avert their eyes and nostrils.

  The jostling must have been too much for the state of the neck because the head abruptly tumbled off the noose. Dustin Walker’s head and Dustin Walker’s body dropped separately into the foaming surf below, without a sound.

  “Shit!” Dante cried, releasing the rope. Steve did the same.

  When they looked over the railing, there was no sign of the body, just waves battering cliffs.

  They walked back inside the writers’ room, where everyone sat stunned. Meredith sniffled and desperately kept her tears at bay with a fraying Kleenex.

  Zoe said, “Is it—”

  Dante cut her off:

  “It’s not a bit.”

  IV

  TJ Martinez threw up his hands.

  “Of course it’s a bit!” he said. “It’s such a bit! That was the bittiest bit in the history of bits! If you could only see your faces…I guarantee you, Dusty’s got cameras all over this place and he is laughing his ass off at each and every one of you right now.”

  Zoe said, “If that was a bit, Walker owes me a new pair of panties. Jesus.”

  “Oh, please, like you ever wear underwear.”

  Zoe gave him the finger. “You will spend the rest of your life never finding out.”

  “How can you be sure it’s a bit?” Ollie said. He was even paler than when he arrived, which didn’t seem biologically possible.

  “Because, Cantaloupe Head, he would pull this crap all the time on set. The man was obsessed with pranks and pranking and keeping the act going on and on and never breaking. I mean, never breaking. One time he took the place of a lot janitor for a week to get back at this one director. Like, planting kiddie porn in the guy’s office, just the most vicious stuff. Dusty gets his rocks off messing with people.” Meredith Ladipo sat in a chair against the wall, shoulders heaving in desperate gasps. TJ went over and patted her back. “There, there, kid, we’re supposed to believe you’re not in on it, huh?”

  Meredith shook her head vigorously. “I’m not! I’m not in on it! I don’t even know what it is! And even if I did know it, I would most definitely not want to be either in or on it!”

  “Okay, okay, it’s all right. So the joke’s on you, too. But all of you, calm down, because there is absolutely, positively no doubt in my mind: this is a joke.”

  “TJ’s right—well, about this one thing,” Steve said. He had dropped down in a chair after coming back in from the balcony and was breathing heavily. “Dusty loved these elaborate put-ons. One week the writers really pissed him off, so he had Kinko’s print out, like, thousands of copies of this script he hated and paid PAs under the table to come in to the office over the weekend and ball up each page individually and throw them into the writers’ room. By Monday you couldn’t even open the door because the room was full of these balled-up scripts. I mean, he had that place filled to the ceiling. The producers threatened to fire his ass, and they did fire the PAs, but he thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.”

  TJ scowled. “How would you know, man? I didn’t see you there.”

  Steve rolled his eyes. “C’mon, TJ, it’s not funny. It wasn’t funny before, and it sure isn’t funny now.”

  “What?”

  “You know exactly who I am!”

  TJ tapped his chin. “But then how do you explain this feeling like I don’t?”

  “I don’t know. Because you’re a titanic asshole?”

  TJ shook his head. “That’s just a lucky guess.”

  Dante paced the room. “I don’t care what you say. And I don’t care what he says. That thing smelled like a dead body. That thing looked like a dead body. That was no goddamn bit.”

  TJ sighed at Dante’s naïveté and looked to Ruby. “There’s no way he could have uploaded that thing after he was dead, is there?”

  Ruby did a double take. “What, you think just because I’m under the age of thirty I’m your IT department?”

  “No. Because you’re Asian.”

  “Oh, that’s so much less offensive.”

  “What is it with you people being all sensitive all the time?”

  “You people? Asians?”

  “No, people under thirty.”

  She just looked at him. “I am going to stop talking to you now, because you make me sad.” She turned away to Meredith Ladipo and reached for the remote. “Mind?”

  Meredith, still glassy-eyed from shock, shook her head. Ruby took the remote off the table and pointed it at the screen, which still bobbed with the hanged man’s view of the surf lashing the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.

  She
exited out of playback and went to the desktop of whatever computer controlled the screen, which displayed a single icon.

  “I knew you could do it,” TJ said.

  “It’s still racist to assume I could,” Ruby said.

  She pointed at the icon.

  “Okay, so…” She sighed. “Looks like the whole hard drive has been wiped except for this GoPro file. If he saved it to the computer as a new document before he started, the camera would have kept filming to that file until its charge ran out. Then it would be the only file on here for Meredith to play back. So it is actually quite possible that an actual live person was not needed to upload the file—it was always here to begin with.”

  TJ barked a laugh. “See? Classic Dusty prank planning!”

  William Griffith said, “You just said it was proof it was a prank if it couldn’t be uploaded by a dead person.”

  “True,” TJ said, pointing at him, “but keep in mind I don’t have any idea what I’m talking about.”

  “Wait! Wait! Wait!” Ollie stood up, waving his arms.

  When everyone was looking at him he blurted out:

  “Are we not doing Dusty’s comedy special? Is he not coming? What were we all brought here for, then? We all have lives! Important lives! More important than regular people’s!”

  Everyone looked away from him without responding.

  On the screen, Ruby called up the statistics window for the GoPro file. “This thing says it was taped a week ago today.”

  “A week?” William Griffith said. He asked Meredith, “A week? When’s the last time you spoke to Mr. Walker? Directly?”

  “It’s…it’s been longer than a week,” Meredith said. “I told you, I’ve been spending most of my time in L.A.”

  “You came here without having spoken to anyone here for over a week? What’s wrong with you, woman?”

  “I’ve been talking to Dave every day.”

  “Fuck’s Dave?” Dante said.

  “Dave, the caretaker. He lives here year-round. But he’s not here now.”

  “Are you sure?” Janet asked.

  “I searched this place top to bottom,” Meredith said through clenched teeth. “We nine are the only people on the island.”

  “Are you sure?” Zoe said.

  “Dave’s not here, man!” Meredith yelled, hands balling into fists.

  There was silence, briefly, after her outburst.

  “Now that’s a bit,” TJ said.

  V

  Dante Dupree knew when he had reached the limits of his sobriety, which was as solid as the layer of sugar atop crème brûlée.

  “I need a drink,” he said.

  Janet said, “That’s the smartest thing anyone’s said all day.”

  They went across the hall to the Red Skelton Memorial Clown Lounge, which, while creepy, had the advantage of being fully stocked with booze.

  William Griffith filled a highball with Jameson and began talking with his arms:

  “This is nonsense, isn’t it? Complete utter nonsense! Some of us rearranged tour dates for this. Shooting schedules. You can’t just shift those things around like you’re parking cars.”

  He turned to Meredith, who was slumped in one of the leather-backed bar chairs like all the bones had been removed from her body, and stuck a finger in her face:

  “If I have lost a dime of income, and I mean a single dime, as a result of this idiot stunt, I am going to sue your employer, his production company, and probably you, too.”

  Meredith sat up. “Me? Why me?”

  “When you sue, you sue everybody. That’s the first rule of suing.”

  Dante said, “Jesus, leave her alone, Billy. She don’t know shit.”

  “According to who? According to her?” Griffith downed the highball, then grabbed the bottle for a second pour. “And you believe her? After all this? I don’t trust anyone responsible for this cockamamie operation.”

  He turned back to Meredith. “I want a boat back to the mainland. Or the main island, whatever you call it. I want you to call it in immediately.”

  “I can’t,” Meredith said wearily. “I have no way of calling if I can’t get on to the network, and as you all so graciously keep reminding me, the password I have doesn’t work. Captain Harry usually comes out with the day’s supplies every morning by ten. That’s the best I can offer you, I’m sorry.”

  “There’s no landline?” Zoe said.

  “Not that I’m aware of, no.”

  “Thank you very much, twenty-first century,” Janet said to no one in particular.

  “He said we all committed crimes against comedy.” Ollie shook his head in disbelief. “Us. Criminals! What kind of criminals? All I ever wanted to do was make people laugh.”

  Ruby said, “Yeah? When are you gonna get around to doing that?”

  Ollie stuck his tongue out at her.

  TJ Martinez said, “You guys all need to chill. Dusty’s gonna pop out of a palmetto bush or whatever as soon as he gets bored watching us.”

  “You…think he’s watching us?” Ollie paled.

  “Don’t you get it? This is it. This is the special he invited us here to work on. This is his big comeback.”

  “Another reason to sue!” William cried.

  “Nobody’s suing anybody, Billy the Contractor,” TJ said. “She made us sign those nondisclosure agreements, and they all had the usual indemnity clause.”

  “My God, you’re right!” William slammed down his glass. “I wonder if I can swim back?”

  “Oh, please, try,” Ruby deadpanned. “I beg of you.”

  “We should just stay put,” TJ said. “I’m sure he’s doing this to get back in my good graces.”

  Zoe laughed, hard and loud, making TJ look at her. “Why exactly would he want to do that, TJ? Maybe you forgot: you don’t have a TV show anymore. You’ve been sent out to sea on the show business equivalent of an ice floe.”

  TJ chuckled. “You keep thinking that all you want, sweetheart. My word has a lot of pull with the network.”

  Steve said, “Really? Is that why your ratings fell below that infomercial for Abs Blaster?”

  “And why they hustled your ass out the door faster than a Jehovah’s Witness with a serious case of gas?” Dante said.

  TJ barked out a laugh. “Room full of comics turns into a shark tank with one sniff of blood in the water. Sad. Sad and predictable. Believe me, I’d rather have one week of my career than all of yours combined.”

  “You can have your career, Tomás Javier,” William said, enunciating each syllable of Martinez’s name and listing in his bar chair. While no one had been paying him any mind he had poured his third and fourth highball. “Do you know that this man never had a live studio audience? Never, not one, in over a decade. Every single reaction you heard was from a laugh track. A laugh track! Can you imagine? Can you imagine how insecure you have to be to need finely adjusted canned laughter for every lame monologue joke, every piece of celebrity puffery, every—”

  “I’m not going to apologize to you or anyone else for being a perfectionist.” TJ jutted out his jaw.

  “Please, it was the worst kept secret in comedy,” Ruby said. “Since no one watching your show would know real comedy if it slithered out of their buttholes and bit their dicks off, I doubt it mattered all that much.”

  “Mr. Walker may be an unforgivable garbage person for trapping us here under false pretenses,” William slurred, “but he got one thing right: you are a disgrace to our profession, Tomás Javier.”

  “Fake-ass cracker, please!” Dante said.

  William blinked his watery eyes in Dante’s direction. “I am sorry, were you referring to me?”

  “You can’t talk shit about shit,” Dante said. “You’re all NASCAR, pork rinds, and homophobia onstage, but once the camera goes off you’re Downton fucking Abbey.”

  William blinked again, looking genuinely confused. “And?”

  “And if Dustin called us all fakers, you are, without a doub
t, the fakest faker in the room,” Zoe said.

  “That is categorically unfair,” William said. “For one thing, despite your use of the epithet ‘cracker,’ Mr. Dupree, and all your thuggish street affect, your diction is as good as Mr. Livian’s, whose class I took at Juilliard.”

  “Oh, so now I’m not black enough, is that it, Billy? C’mon, you’re gonna have to do better than that. I’ve been hearing that shit since I was eight years old.”

  “Billy the Contractor is no more or less a put-on than any of your acts. I adopted his persona as a larf for a reunion of the Purple Crayon of Yale; a video of my performance made the rounds among attendees on Facebook. It went viral, much to my very pleasant surprise, among the very”—he made air quotes—“folk I was mimicking. There’s nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong at all. Often the lines blur between satire and its subject—”

  “Man, you’re gonna make me throw up,” Dante said. “You’re making fun of those people, and making them pay you for it!”

  “No! No, that’s not true. I have learned to embrace them as they have embraced me. The more time I spend with them, the more I have learned to adopt—no, love—their ways.”

  Steve rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ, Griffith, they’re trailer park rednecks, not a lost tribe of the Amazon.”

  “True, but they have similar bathing habits,” William said.

  “Well, look what I have here,” Janet said with a grin, producing a Bud Light tallboy from the minifridge behind the bar. It was stamped with an image of Griffith in full Billy the Contractor drag, giving would-be binge drinkers a thumbs-up and a FIX ’ER UP. “I’m sure you wouldn’t mind setting aside that fancy brown to partake of a drink of the people, would you?”

  William beckoned her to him. “Please, I’d be honored. Give it here.” Janet popped open the tab with a fizz and a hiss and handed him the can.

  “To the great American white working class,” he said as he raised the tallboy high. “May their Percocet be plentiful and relatively uncut.”

  William drank it in a mostly single gulp, pausing halfway through to grimace. When he was done, he gave a satisfied gasp and threw the can into the nearby fireplace pit, which it bounced out of instantly.