Ten Dead Comedians

by Fred Van Lente

  “Was that a choice, not to have kids, or…?”

  “Yeah, you know, it was never really something that entered my head. I think that’s partly from being raised by an old lady, my own parents long gone. In my head, that was just something people did in their retirement, like raising roses or something, you know? Raising roses, raising people. I know that don’t make no damn sense, but that was just my upbringing.

  “In a way it’s for the best, I guess. I can get, you know, overly exuberant when toasted. Sometimes it’s hard for me to control my temper. Hasn’t caused me too much trouble.

  “Except, you know, when it has.”

  He started opening random drawers with a deafening rattle. “I mean, the goddamn wine opener was right here. You take it?”

  Meredith shook her head.

  Dante said, “You know, the thing that worries me the most, though, is that nervous energy, though, that darkness; the drinking keeps it, you know, from overwhelming me. All the comics struggle with it. Lenny. Pryor. Robin. They fucked their own shit up but good. I’m not saying I’m anywhere near their category, but it’s hard not to notice that to do this job, you’ve got to be a little off.

  “Like, I mean, look at Dustin Walker—talk about off. You know what I mean? Talk about being full of darkness.”

  “I guess,” Meredith Ladipo said.

  “Did he have kids? Walker?”

  Meredith shook her head.

  “Huh. Then I wonder…remember that trophy Ruby found, when we were looking for weapons? ‘Dorothy Walker Clear-Mind Clinic.’ Who was that named after? Sister? Wife?”

  “Mother,” Meredith said.

  “And that was what, for rehab, right? A place to stash rich junkies while they get clean?”

  “No,” Meredith said sharply. “It was…” Realizing she had reacted a bit more emotionally than she had meant to, she took a breath. “Mrs. Walker had Alzheimer’s, and her son founded the clinic to study that and other neurological diseases and disorders. To look for a cure.”

  “Oh.” Dante sounded disappointed. “I mean, good on him, I guess, but I guess I’m in the market for a rehab. Though, I ain’t gonna lie to you, I am worried—if I go full teetotaler, that’d be a little like getting my balls cut off, you know? Domesticate me a little too much, like I’d been spayed. Would I still be able to tap into that darkness, or would it get, like, I don’t know, sealed off, behind glass, where I couldn’t get to it anymore? Like natural Xanax or some shit?”

  He stopped and stood in the middle of the room and flailed his arms helplessly:

  “Goddamnit, Dupree, where the fuck did you put that motherfucking cock-sucking bottle opener?”

  Meredith slid off the stool and reached for Dante. “Here.”

  She took the wine bottle from him, screwed off the cap, and handed it back.

  Dante looked at the open bottle.

  He looked at Meredith.

  He looked at the bottle again.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  VII

  TJ watched Meredith and Dante’s exchange in the kitchen until he got bored. He thought maybe they would fuck, which might be cool to see, or might be gross, hard to tell. But when it became obvious they weren’t going to do anything, he switched to the feed in Zoe Schwartz’s room.

  Asshole stood quivering before the doorway, every strand of fur vibrating in anticipation of the adventures to be discovered in the hallway.

  The dog ignored the two humans rolling around and kissing on the bed.

  “Is it weird we’re fooling around so much?” Steve said. “I feel like maybe it’s weird.”

  “That’s survivor’s guilt,” Zoe said.

  “I haven’t technically survived anything yet.”

  “Then it’s Canadian’s guilt. You feel bad we’re having a good time while everyone else is miserable.”

  “Actually, I’m pretty miserable, too.”

  “Makes two of us. So let’s stop talking about it. Or about anything. Fuck me until I forget where I am, please.”

  As she was pulling his shirt out of his jeans and up over his arms, they both heard, very loud and very close:

  “Do you guys do requests, or is this going to be ten minutes of boring missionary-position white-people sex?”

  The voice came out of nowhere and both Steve and Zoe simultaneously but independently jackknifed off the bed to look for its source. Asshole ran in tiny circles and barked in a way he presumably thought was helpful.

  “Hey, if you get the dog in, like, a threesome, there could be some money in it for you.”

  TJ’s cackle was unmistakable, and it appeared to be coming from the light fixture in the fan rotating overhead.

  “You are such a piece of shit, TJ,” Zoe said. She turned to Steve: “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “You can’t get away from me in this place, girl. I got eyes everywhere.”

  “Why do you have to be such a hateful douche, TJ?” Steve said as he shoved his shirt back in his pants.

  “Why do you have to be a joke thief, Gordo?” the ceiling fan said.

  Steve’s jaw dropped as if he had been struck across the face.

  “What nonsense are you yammering on about?” Zoe said. “You expect me to believe that?”

  TJ said, “No more secrets. I hear that’s your new policy, right, Zoe? Well, I’ll go first. You think I’m a piece of shit? What about your new fuck-buddy? You know why I said I didn’t know him when I first got here? Because he’s dead to me. Dead to everybody. Dusty made sure of that.”

  “You’re a lying sack of shit,” Zoe said. She turned to Steve: “Isn’t he?”

  TJ laughed. “He knows. He knows it’s true. He knows he deserves this.”

  Steve turned toward Zoe. “Listen. What happened was—”

  “What happened, Zoe, was that Dusty used to warm up the studio audiences before tapings of What Just Happened? He didn’t really have a lot of time to go out on tour, or do the Store or anything, so that was his outlet for stand-up. Most of the time the producers hired a comic to warm up the crowd, but a couple times a week Dusty would do it himself—all-new material, original stuff he came up with on his own.”

  “Sometimes,” Steve said to her, “there’s parallel thinking. There’s only so many premises for jokes somebody can come up with—” Zoe’s face fell. “Oh, Jesus, Steve, really?”

  “And sometimes motherfuckers just rip you off,” TJ said. “Steve heard those jokes, and he remembered them, and he started going out and doing them as his own. It wasn’t until he went on his SNL audition that Dusty really came down on him.”

  Zoe looked like she might throw up. “My God.”

  “This was right after What Just Happened? went off the air. Dusty threatened to sue NBC and HBO, and they killed the special they were going to do with him before it got too far down the pipeline. Then Dusty went to every single club owner who was anybody, every agent, every manager, every booker for every late-night show, and made it very clear that if they ever wanted to have anything to do with world-famous funnyman Dustin Walker ever again, the last thing they should do is book joke thief Steve ‘Gordo’ Gordon.”

  Zoe didn’t need to ask Steve if it was true. She could see on his gray, wan face that it was.

  “That’s not on your Wikipedia page,” Zoe whispered accusingly. Without looking at her Steve said, “It kinda fell in that gray area in the early aughts, before every single thing that happened to every single celebrity, no matter how minor, was captured online. And then, you know, I never did anything afterward worth writing about. I basically had to break into the industry again. And I didn’t. There’s one thing you can never be more than once, Zoe. And that’s new.”

  “You got what you deserved, pendejo,” the light fixture said.

  “Oh, like you would know what getting what you deserve looks like,” Zoe barked up at it. “Shoe Jizzer.”

  Steve started to say, “I wanted
to tell you before—I mean, after the photo thing, but I—”

  Zoe held up a hand and took a breath.

  “Look, Steve, even though the source is a loathsome, shit-caked human sphincter…”

  “You’re welcome,” the ceiling fan said.

  “I mean, you get that this is some heavy stuff here, right? I’m a comedian. It’s what I’ve wanted to be since I was nine. I’ve based my whole life on it. This…I gotta process this. It’s like a rabbi going out with a Holocaust denier. If this is your rep…I mean, that’s a problem on a whole bunch of levels. Sorry. But it just is, you know?”

  “No, I know. I know.” Shoulders slumped, Steve made his way to the door and opened it. Before walking out, he turned and said, “For what it’s worth, Zoe, I really do admire and respect your comedy—”

  “Asshole!” she cried.

  His head drooped. “I get it, I’ll go.”

  “No, dumbass, you’re letting the dog out!”

  The anemic mutt bolted between Steve’s legs and into the belvedere gallery before he could react.

  Zoe pushed past and ran after him. “Asshole, come back here!”

  TJ’s cackle bounced off the walls. “That went even better than I could have possibly hoped.”

  Steve sighed. “Do you have to be such a hateful piece of shit 24/7?”

  “It’s not personal, Gordo. Well, maybe it is, just a little.”

  “Why do you care so much? I mean, they weren’t even your jokes.”

  “You may find this hard to believe, Gordo, but every man’s gotta have a code. And I strongly believe in the comics’ code. Never, ever steal another guy’s material. Never, ever. Makes you—what do they call them in India?—untouchable. You been dead to me since that day, man.”

  “Yeah, you’re right, TJ,” Steve said to the fan, “I do find that hard to believe. You being Mr. Integrity, with that laugh track on 2nite and all.”

  “I keep telling you, that was different.”

  “Yeah. It’s always different when you do it. Choke on a bag of dicks, TJ.”

  Steve turned to leave, but before he did, he saw on the end table a small vacuum-sealed cup of foie gras treats for dogs. He grabbed it and put it in his pocket, hoping this minor chivalrous gesture would go some way toward getting him back in his lady friend’s good graces.

  VIII

  Zoe bolted onto the landing just as Asshole hit the stairs. His legs were short and his claws were long, so he skittered down the steps, allowing her to close within a few yards of him.

  Asshole skidded across the hallway floor at the bottom of the stairs. She was almost on top of him, but he gained traction just as she reached for him. He accelerated away from her, tongue lolling, into the front gallery, where he stopped and cocked his ear.

  She called out his name and he started to turn her way—but then he heard something else, something she couldn’t hear.

  He ran in that direction, his legs moving so fast that at first the rest of him didn’t move at all, like a cartoon character revving up before taking off.

  The front gallery really slowed her down. The floor was still covered in glass from the photo frames smashed there and she was barefoot.

  She stepped across the minefield of shards as carefully as she could, stopping only to remove a triangular bit from the side of her heel with a curse.

  Asshole sat on the grass near the fountain, looking into the gallery, watching her, head cocked, as she approached.

  She sort of saw that a third set of headshots was back on the wall to her right, materializing as mysteriously as the second set that had appeared after Dante Dupree cast the first set into the sea. She, Gordo, Dante, TJ, and Meredith were all still there.

  Ollie wasn’t anymore, but she didn’t notice. She had other things on her mind.

  As soon as she made it to the other side of the room, Asshole turned and dashed away, darting diagonally past the fountain and into the wall of swaying bamboo to his right.

  She followed the dog through the bamboo, along the brick walkway between of the leafy curtain.

  Her first thought was that if she wanted this level of aggravation, she would have gotten a cat.

  Her second thought was the dim realization that, up on the hill by the cabana, someone was holding what appeared to be a whistle to their face. She thought, I know them—but wait, I’ve got to have that wrong because—

  The thought was neither completed nor retained, because it was replaced with the sensation of being unable to breathe, as the inability of breath tends to do to all thoughts that do not directly relate to regaining the ability to breathe.

  She dropped onto her back on the stone path and felt a sharp pain in her throat, which, she began to realize, came from something she had run into while cutting through the bamboo. Placed exactly at the level of her Adam’s apple, it dug into the flesh of her neck, practically cutting it in half, and then detached from the metal poles she could now sort of see in the green bamboo on both sides of her. It was a taut garrote that, once she ran into it, had detached from its moorings and spooled around her neck like a tentacle.

  Asshole stood over her, barking and barking like the whole damn thing was her fault in the first place.

  IX

  TJ Martinez watched in silent horror as Zoe dropped into the mud as though her strings had been cut. He squinted at her gritty image until he realized that the glint around her neck must be a wire, strung along the bamboo curtain just at neck level. When they collided, it didn’t just nearly crush her larynx, it was released from brackets that he could now see shining on mounts attached to poles in the bamboo. Her fingernails clawed at the garrote so hard, she was tearing the skin of her throat to ribbons. Her feet kicked out beneath her like they hadn’t yet gotten the message they were no longer running on the ground.

  The idea then seized him fully formed:

  He would save her.

  He would save her, and even if that didn’t cause her to give up her vendetta against him, it might weaken her resolve, maybe give a counternarrative to the one she planned to deploy against him. Did he get carried away with his specific kink? Sure. Did he regret it? You bet. But did he deserve to have his life ruined over it? No, sir. He wasn’t a bad guy. Look, it sounds cliché, but Hollywood was the real victimizer here. He hadn’t been refused a thing for so long, he had forgotten what that was like. The bottom line was, being rich was awesome, but fame sucked. Not being able to go out and just be a person in the world, it was a lot to give up. The kink, as he called it, that was his release, being able to use that power for his own ends for once. Sure, it might have freaked out some girls, but who knows, maybe it benefited some of them in the long run. Toughened them up. Or loosened them up. One of the two.

  He would save Zoe Schwartz’s life, right at her lowest ebb, and that would prove, to himself at least, what he knew to be true: he was one of the good guys.

  TJ threw himself at the wheel to retract the bar across the panic-room door.

  It would not move.

  He tried a few more times, then wrenched the wheel again, but succeeded only in wrenching his shoulder.

  He banged on the door and called out futilely; he could see on the monitor that no one was in the wine cellar beyond.

  On the other monitor, Zoe’s struggles with the wire around her neck began to weaken.

  X

  Asshole’s barks were becoming more and more distant in Zoe’s hearing. She began to lose the strength to reach up and pull the wire out of her throat.

  As the world contracted into darkness around her, she became aware of a light in the center of it, warm and inviting.

  It was so obvious to her now. All the striving and worrying, all the career maneuvering. All the fretting about her weight, about her hair, about her makeup, about her clothes, her general attractiveness. Did men like how she looked? Did women dislike it? She would have laughed, if she had the breath to spare and the airway to expel it out of, at how absurd it all was.
/>   So that was life’s great truth: You’re holding on too much. Let go. Let it all go.

  For the first time in her adult life, Zoe Schwartz felt calm. At peace.

  Her mouth turned upward in a smile.

  My Important Charity Work

  So, I don’t know if you heard or not, but:

  I’ve become kind of a big deal.

  Yeah, right? Thank you, thank you kindly. Bless your redneck hearts. That’s kind of you.

  As a result, it would seem that the financial recompense that has eluded me all my misspent life has finally arrived, with bells on.

  But I’m still the good ol’ boy you know and love. Or if not love, then mildly tolerate. I’m not gonna be one of these celebrities who forgets where he comes from, or gets too big for his britches.

  For one thing, I get my britches at Sons-O-Britches. That’s the tall-and-wide britches store in the britches outlet mall just outside Jacksonville, Alabama.

  In the britches district, yeah, that’s the place. You got it. Still gonna shop there.

  I’m gonna be more like them rappers, you know, who bring all the homies with ’em from the hood even after their records go platinum. I’m gonna be just like that. I still got my entourage from down in ’Bama, when I used to do construction down there. Cooter, Rebel, Pondscum, Li’l Big George, Big Li’l George, General Lee, Leavenworth Jim, Stutterin’ Sam the Flimflam Man, Liver-Eatin’ Jones—yeah, they’re my boys. They always will be.

  Gotta hose ’em down every night or they really start to stink up the place, but they’re still with me.

  But I’m not gonna live like no monk or nothin’, ’cause I already got myself a pool.

  Hitched its trailer up to the back of the one my house is on and everything.