Ten Dead Comedians

by Fred Van Lente

  Dog Person

  I know you may find this hard to believe just by looking at me, or obsessively reading about me on TMZ.com.

  Which all of you do, right?

  (Laughs)

  Okay, good. Just checking.

  So you know, from all your research you did before the show, right, I’m an iconoclast. I defy a lot of stereotypes in a lot of ways. For one thing, most people assume women like cats, and men like dogs. But I don’t. I like dogs. I’m a dog person.

  Whoo-whoo, right? Give it up for the dog people. I’ll drink to that.

  Or anything, really.

  That’s the kind of subtle, pervasive sexism in society that really annoys the hell out of me—assuming that, just because you’re a girl, you’re a cat person.

  Cat owners can get really uptight about it when you assume their cat’s a girl, too:

  “Oh, what a beautiful kitty! What’s her name?”

  “IT’S A BOY, GENDER FASCIST.”

  “Okay, okay, so it’s a guy, what’s his name?”

  “His name is Smooshy Lovey-Dovey Cotton-Face.”

  (Laughs)

  “I know. I know, his name suits him; he’s very butch. We almost called him Mr. Puffytail, but that was the name from the cat in those I Married a Cat movies, and you can take this cat-lover thing too far. I mean Dustin Walker should be tried at The Hague for that last one, you know what I mean?”

  I mean, I am a dog person, but that doesn’t mean I want to round up cat people and put them in camps or anything.

  Make them wear a felt Hello Kitty outline on the front of their jackets. No, no, that’s going too far.

  They did that to my nana in Poland and I know my history well enough not to repeat it. No, no.

  (Laughs)

  I’m not one of these people, you know, who only cares about her side, her team, and just goes, you know, it’s my way or the highway, buster. I’m not like that. I didn’t just leap into this whole dog-person thing with eyes wide shut. No, I took cats in one hand, and dogs in the other, and weighed them against each other, like this. And that’s how I made my decision. And I totally get, and respect, if you came to a different conclusion.

  On the one hand, you have an animal that doesn’t come when it’s called, likes being touched intermittently at best, and spends all its time eating, sleeping, and staring out the window. And has just terrible, terrible mood swings.

  I don’t need that in a pet. No.

  Because I already own a mirror.

  Hello! I just described me! Don’t call me, don’t touch me, eat, eat, eat, oh God why did I eat all that and why won’t anyone call me? Why don’t I have a boyfriend? I know, I’ll have a bottle of sauv blanc and two Ambien and we’ll see if anything has changed in the morning. Gulp. Glug. Snore…

  Individuals in relationships need to complement each other, you know? Provide what the other lacks. Don’t double personality traits! Otherwise you’re just another one of you. You might as well get one of those full-body pillows girls at Comic Con have that has a nude photo of you silk-screened on it and walk around with that.

  Then you never have to let you go.

  I just got a dog. You want to meet him? Yeah, of course you do.

  Come here! Come here, boy! Come out on stage! You see the treats? You know what that means, right?

  Yes, come on out here, Asshole! C’mere! That’s a good Asshole!

  Oh, sorry, yeah: I named my dog Asshole. I know, I know, some of you are judging me right now. “Oh, that bitch is so awful, how can she do that?” But just hear me out. When I brought him home from the shelter—

  Yes, he’s a rescue. I know, I’m so awesome and caring, right? But I hate that word, it’s so bourgie. Poor people get their dogs from a pound while hipsters rescue their dogs, like they were in a fire, or strapped beneath a laser by a supervillain.

  That’s a good Asshole. Who’s a good boy? You’re Mommy’s special little boy, aren’t you?

  Uh-oh. He’s peeing. He’s…peeing. Can we get someone out here? Whoo. Yeah, no, that’s definitely got an odor. Did you have asparagus for lunch? Can we get a mop or…? Thanks.

  Can you get of him out of here? Here, thanks. Bye, sweetie! See you back in Mommy’s dressing room after the show! Eat my Valium and I’ll kill you!

  See why he’s called Asshole? When I “rescued” him from the pound he was named Buster.

  But then I got to know him.

  And he ate my Louis Vuitton bag.

  And then he pooped in it.

  I realized then that you shouldn’t name dogs immediately. You should wait and observe their personalities for a while and then settle on a name, like Native Americans used to. Or like Kevin Costner has taught me: Dances with Wolves…Wind in His Hair…Stands with a Fist…

  Or if I was Native American:

  Struggles with Credit Card Debt.

  But to know Asshole is to love Asshole. No, really. He is thrilled every time he sees me; he runs up to me when I walk through the door or come home from a shoot or from being on tour. He looks like he’s going to die whenever I leave, like he can’t live without me. Anytime I talk, he looks like every word coming out of my mouth is the most brilliant thing he’s ever heard, dumb tail wagging, dumb mouth panting.

  He loves me so much.

  Or so I thought.

  I was getting my hair done at what must be the same place Neil deGrasse Tyson goes to, because they had some, I don’t know, some science-y magazine on the table. What do I know? And I was reading in it that people think that dogs are naturally more affectionate than cats but that’s not true. What’s really going on is that dogs have been with humans tens of thousands years longer. So dogs have actually evolved to react to our human cues. Asshole knows, hardwired into the DNA inherited from hundreds upon hundreds of ancestors dating back to the Stone Age, he knows that his survival, his meals, his shelter, his safety, his everything really, is entirely dependent on keeping on my good side.

  So that’s not love.

  That’s pure calculation.

  And I’m like, yes, thank you, God!

  That is actually what someone like me, with a bottomless roaring void where her self-esteem should be, needs in a relationship. Mindless, unquestioning loyalty. Not codependence, but uni-dependence. One person is totally obsessed with meeting the other person’s needs, with the other person ready to send him back to the pound if he messes up another four-digit handbag, I am not kidding around this time, Asshole, no I’m not, you hear me backstage, Asshole, do you?

  Sure, sometimes I still hate being single, and my mother texts me to remind me that I am at the same time every day when she sees her neighbors leave the house to take their kids to school. But not as much, since I got Asshole.

  In fact, there’s only one thing keeping me from going, “You know what? Asshole is all I need. He is fulfilling eight or nine out of the ten things I could get from a man.” And there’s only one thing preventing me from saying, “You know, what? I’m deleting the JDate app off my phone. I will be happy with Asshole and this Channing Tatum swimsuit spread from Us Weekly as my only life partners.”

  And it’s sad. Yeah, you know where I’m going with this. It’s sad.

  But it’s the whole lifespan issue, you know? There’s no way he’s going to live as long as I am. Asshole, at best—and I mean, like, at best—he’s going to live to be twenty years old. And if that happens he’ll have local news crews around him going, “We were wondering what you eat to keep you so, well, young is the wrong word, but you know…alive? Is it a special gourmet form of dog shit you eat? Like, do you only eat the dog shit of virgins? Of French dogs? Is there a specific kind of butt you sniff? What’s your secret? And can we get a doggie-diet best seller out of it?”

  (Laughs)

  Sometimes, I just get in these moods, where I look at Asshole and I can’t think about anything else but him dying. Really! It’s awful. I know one day I’m gonna come home, and he’s not going to be asleep; he�
�s going to be dead. Or, even worse, he’s going to get cancer or kidney failure or something and I’m going to have to bring him to the vet and put him to sleep, and the vet’s going to be like, “Do you want to be here for it?” and I know no, I don’t really want to, but then she’s going to judge me—that I’m cruel or a pussy or whatever—and so then I’m like okay and I’ll just stand there and watch as my dog dies right there, on the slab, in front of me, licking my fingers.

  And when I think that, it’s the only time I ever get really mad at Asshole. I’m all like:

  You selfish dick.

  Why can’t you ever think about how your decisions will affect me?!

  —Zoe Schwartz

  Paramount Theatre, Seattle, WA

  February 2, 2017

  (Filmed as Laughs Like a Girl for Netflix)

  I

  TJ flipped through the monitors in the panic room, familiarizing himself with every camera and every conceivable view:

  In all the guest bedrooms and Meredith’s room, but not the master bedroom.

  In the kitchen looking at the fridge and the pantry; outside in the wine cellar.

  There were two in the playroom, both aimed at the ball pit.

  One was aimed at the stage in the groundskeeper’s cabana.

  One was in the writers’ room, which encompassed the veranda outside.

  One in the clown lounge, but none in the library.

  A camera looked up at the bottom pool and another looked down on the top pool.

  He was surprised there weren’t more cameras directed at the grounds—none pointing at the bouncy castle, for example. He was not surprised there was no camera in the entry gallery, where their headshots once hung, since that definitely worked to the killer’s advantage.

  In addition to cycling through the news using the dials beside each monitor, TJ could rotate each camera with a small joystick in a one-hundred-degree parabola.

  He figured this out when he caught Dante Dupree creeping around the grounds. He watched as the comic meandered near the entrance to the dock elevator, waiting for him to do anything the least bit interesting. Finally TJ got bored and spoke into the microphone:

  “I see you with your guilty thoughts, tough guy. Don’t try anything you don’t want me to see.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, dude,” Dante said, looking around but seeing nothing.

  “Over here, jackass,” TJ said, and on-screen Dante turned, looked up, and walked toward the camera, which presumably was mounted on one of the lampposts lining the fountain walk.

  “Moves, huh?” he said.

  “Keep it all on the up-and-up and you don’t have anything to worry about,” TJ said.

  “I wouldn’t dream of being anything but up, I swear,” Dante said, and he backed out of the frame, keeping one eye on the camera the whole time.

  “That’s a lame bit, dude,” TJ said, munching on an MRE. He hadn’t eaten all day, and to him, its au gratin potatoes tasted like heaven.

  II

  The afternoon dragged on across TJ’s monitors.

  He saw Zoe Schwartz in her room, opening one of her dog’s vacuum-packed treat cups. Asshole ran over to her, tail wagging.

  She set the plastic cup under his nose and he scarfed down most of the food. As soon as he raised his snout to lick his chops, she picked up the cup.

  She looked around. Gordo was in the bathroom. She had no reason to think she wasn’t alone, since neither of them had discovered the camera in her room yet.

  Zoe put two fingers into the dog food, scooped it out. If TJ hadn’t just eaten a bag of Skittles from the MRE stash, dog food might have made his stomach grumble a bit, too.

  Asshole barked at her impatiently.

  Zoe shushed him, putting her other hand around his muzzle.

  She popped the dog food in her mouth with her fingers.

  She chewed briefly, swallowed, swished her tongue in her mouth.

  Then she stuck her fingers back in for another bite. Asshole flanked her on the left, then the right, staring at the food, his tail a worried blur.

  The toilet flushed and Gordo emerged unexpectedly from the bathroom. Zoe made a little cry and tossed the doggie cup across the room. Asshole pounced on it.

  “Jesus!” she said. “Didn’t you wash your hands?”

  “What, I—”

  “Don’t even think about touching me until you wash your hands!”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll wash my hands,” he said, returning to the bathroom. “Again,” he added, unconvincingly.

  TJ covered his mouth and laughed his ass off.

  III

  The monitors were black and white with light enhancement, so it was hard to gauge the day ending from eyeballing the screens alone. The digital clock on the panic-room tablet computer said it was half past six when TJ spied Meredith Ladipo frantically looking around her room.

  He pressed the intercom: “If it’s your conscience that’s missing, I’m pretty sure you left it behind on the mainland, hon.”

  Meredith jumped up, looked at the ceiling, started to say something, stopped, then stalked out of the room.

  IV

  At 7:25 pm Dante Dupree appeared in the wine cellar. He had a small key that he used to open one of the Plexiglas shelves.

  “Dude, where’d you get that?” TJ said into the intercom.

  Dante didn’t answer. He grabbed a bottle, put a second under his arm, and took a third in hand.

  “Dude, if you let me have one I will totally give you a spaghetti in meat sauce. I’ve got a half-dozen kinds of MREs in here. I got chili, tacos, ravioli, ready-to-eat breakfast with bacon and hash browns, man.”

  Dante turned toward the camera and gave it the finger.

  “C’mon, dude, don’t be like that. That ain’t right. C’mon.”

  Dante grabbed a fourth wine bottle and walked up the stairs toward the kitchen.

  V

  Night fell at last and as TJ flipped through the cameras, there was one person he didn’t see.

  “Hey, guys,” he said in an intercom broadcast throughout the island, “anybody see Ollie?”

  No answer.

  “I mean, I haven’t seen him for, like, a long time.”

  Zoe, still sitting at the foot of her bed playing with her dog, looked up at the camera.

  Then she looked down, ignoring him.

  “Can somebody maybe organize a search?”

  Gordo sat by Zoe’s open window and smoked, using an empty can of beets as an ashtray.

  “I mean, I would go, you know, but…uh. You know.”

  Dante drank glass after glass of wine in the kitchen.

  “I’m just worried about him, is all.”

  He didn’t know where Meredith was.

  The white-noise buzz of the fluorescent lights in the tiny room was really starting to drive him crazy.

  VI

  At 9:35 pm, Meredith Ladipo entered the kitchen and found Dante Dupree sitting at the center island, finishing off three or four bottles of wine. They were pretty obviously from Mr. Walker’s private stash, which begged the question how he got into the locked cabinets, but her expression indicated that she was beyond the point of caring about such things.

  “Where’ve you been?” he asked her.

  “On the docks, hoping to signal a boat. Or a plane. Or a mermaid.”

  “Oh,” Dante said, and he poured himself another glass.

  She leaned her shotgun against the fridge and got a glass out of the cabinet and filled it with ice water. She sat at the counter and drank it, trying to ignore her whining stomach.

  Suddenly, Dante looked up at her and said:

  “Do you think I’m an alcoholic?”

  Meredith blinked. “How should I know?”

  “I don’t know if I’m an alcoholic or not. You know why? I’ve never tried to quit. So who knows, maybe I could. But if I did, I’d have to go cold turkey. Give it up all at once. Because, you know, I’ve tried having only one drink. When you’re
sober, one drink seems totally doable. Takes the edge off. Lets you wind down the day. My grandmother had happy hour as one of her nightly rituals. She could only have one. A glass of Southern Comfort on the rocks, that was her favorite. Or a glass of white wine. But that was it. I always admired that about her. She could have just the one; you’d offer her more and she’d say, ‘No, I’m good.’ And she would never reach for that bottle herself.

  “I don’t understand why I never got that ability from her. For me, one drink always becomes two. And it is true, there are some nights I can just do two. Like if I’m at a restaurant and it’s late or I know I have to drive a long way home or back to the hotel.

  “Usually, though, if I’m going to stop, it’s after just three. That’s where the bladder gets unsealed, and then we start wearing out a path between the bar and the men’s room. But three is fine; three gets me just toasty enough to last me until I go to bed or whatever.

  “But if I’m honest I get only three a few times a week. Much more often I just keep going, you know? I’m on a roll. I’m just so full of excitement and energy and the drink is a way of channeling it, you know? You’re tired or you’re depressed or you’re bored and…and after you haven’t done it for a day, you forget. You just want to keep that buzz, that euphoria going, and then when you’ve gone too far it’s too late, or you’ve gone to bed after it’s already too late, and you wake up with a caved-in brain and cottonmouth.”

  He picked up the last unopened wine bottle, stood up, paced the room, looking for the bottle opener. “Hell I put that thing?”

  “You seem to have given this a lot of brat york,” Meredith said.

  “Huh?” he squinted at her blearily.

  “Thought,” Meredith said, her expression changing not one iota. “You seem to have given this a lot of thought.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I think that if I had kids, I wouldn’t drink so much. Not because I’m worried what I might do to them, but because I’d have less time on my hands. Less time to marinate in my own shit, you know? Running this way and that for things that don’t involve writing my act, practicing my act, driving to do my act, doing radio to promote my act, hustling to get the next act. If I had kids, I’d just be outside myself more, you know?”