I, of course, didn’t have shit, except for the bricks I was shitting every day contemplating my future. Comedy clubs were always asking me to perform because they knew a familiar face from TV packed in the plebes. I had about five minutes’ worth of material, something like that, but that was it.
And Dusty, who, goddamn him, for all his many, many personal failings as a human being, was still the funniest person I ever met. He would warm up our audiences before our tapings. Normally, the studio would just hire two or three regular midlist comedians who weren’t me to do that, but Dusty just started doing it for fun, and he made sure the stand-ups got paid. And he would just—I mean, he would just kill! But he said he hated stand-up, he was never going to do it again, the audiences were morons who didn’t get him anymore, he was going to just concentrate on movies. And so he had no reason not to cast out these pearls to our two hundred-seat soundstage theater.
(05:35.32)
And he kept saying he was never going to use them again!
I’m not justifying what I’m about to tell you. I’m just telling you what happened, okay? Save your judging looks and catcalls for the end, nonexistent audience.
So I was terrified that this show was my only shot, and I couldn’t handle going back to being a nobody again. I really couldn’t. I was already the fifth wheel on a show that had a cast of three people. So I was not getting such great offers. And I had some stand-up material, but not enough after the grind of doing What Just Happened? for four years.
So, I took four or five of Dusty’s best jokes.
(Pause: two seconds)
I can’t even remember them very well.
One of them was about grunge, that’s how incredibly relevant they are to today, you know?
Honestly, I didn’t even think he’d care if he found out. He didn’t want them, and I needed them. I needed them bad! Or so I thought.
Besides, how would he find out? I mean, who has spies at the Comedy Store for the midnight set?
Heh.
The joke, as they say, was on me.
And did he care?
Ooh boy, did he care.
(06:41.52)
I mean, I don’t really know what I was thinking, ripping him off, just from the way he terrorized the interns alone, but he fixed me good. He made sure no studio or producer would take a chance on me. No talent agency or management company would take me as a client. No tour or club would book me.
I mean, he fucked me so good I thought about changing my own name, but I couldn’t afford the court fees.
My savings ran out so I fled back to Chicago, which is Hollywood for people who are afraid of success.
Oh, I’m sorry, Chicago, I’m sorry. I know you want to get drunk and kick my ass now.
But I thought that’s what your kids were for?
I’m kidding. I kid you, Chicago, because I love you.
They are very pro-loser in Chicago, yes they are. I bet the Cubs are gonna be the only team in history to be less popular after winning the World Series. This is why they are my people.
No, I truly do love Chicago. Between the winters and the economy, it’s the Stockholm syndrome of cities. So I don’t really have a choice.
I’ll tell people I fell down the stairs, Chicago, no really. Please don’t leave me. It’s not you, it’s me. I can change, I promise.
You see, I learned the dirty little secret of success, which isn’t much of a secret because every celebrity talks about it but nobody listens to them. Fame doesn’t fill this emptiness you got inside of you, you know?
(08:00.90)
I really, truly, deeply wish that everybody could be famous, even for just a year or two, so they could really understand how little it changes you. You still got to get up every morning and look in that mirror and deal with that dopey-eyed sap staring back at you. Every single day.
That emptiness never gets filled up because, the public? They’re never going to love you the way you want to be loved. Not because they don’t really understand you or any shit like that, but because you’ll never see you through their eyes, eyes that worship you. You still got your own to look through. And they knew what you were then, which is what you’ll always be.
And so I found my peace with it. I convinced myself I was happy in my teaching jobs, as bad as they paid, as infrequent as they were, because even if I didn’t get to stay on the mountaintop with Dusty and TJ, at least I had been there. At least I had seen the view, you know?
But now here’s the funny part. My “closer,” as we say in the biz.
Even after achieving that level of, I don’t know, let’s call it inner peace—sure, why not—even after I achieved it, and even after knowing what a vindictive son of a bitch Dusty Walker is, and to what lengths he will go to revenge himself on whoever he sees as having crossed him in the slightest, most innocuous way…Knowing all that, and having been on the receiving end of it in such a…such a profound and dramatic way that literally shaped the majority of my adult life…
…Knowing all that, I agreed to come on this fakakta trip in the first place.
(09:20.40)
Oh, come on. I know that if there was anyone here, the walls would be ringing with laughter. I would be absolutely deafened! I mean, it’s almost unbelievable that I would be the saddest of all sad clowns, that my life would be so pathetic that quite possibly being the only person who knew for a fact that Dustin Walker was capable of this craziness on this island, that I would still think this would be my best option to spend a weekend.
Because he knew, that son of a bitch, I was chasing the laugh. I wanted to get it back. And he knew I knew he could help me, if he wanted to. Because that laugh, it’s stronger than smack to an addict, stronger than a flame to a moth. And I flew right into that flame, like the dumb, desperate schmuck moth that I am.
Heh.
So that’s my whole sad story. You have to admit, that is some comedy gold. Really and truly.
Oh, wait! Wait!
I remembered. I remembered one of the Dusty Walker jokes I stole.
Yeah, it went something like…
“I recently bought a big house in the canyon. I had always heard that fame really changes you, gives you a bunker mentality. I didn’t believe it until I bought this monstrosity.
“It’s like Alcatraz, but without the lovely sea view.”
There.
See?
That totally seems like something worth dying for, right?
(10:27.22)
— Steve “Gordo” Gordon
Recording studio on Walker Island, somewhere in the Caribbean Sea Just now
I
When Steve Gordon finished the set, he tried to put the mic back on the stand. It wasn’t easy because his hands were trembling—not from fear, but from the adrenaline surging through them. Though the circumstances were outré, he had not faced an audience, even a fake one—no students, no sketches, just him and his mouth and the mic—in twenty years. The blood pounded through his body and he could feel it pulsing in his forehead and he felt alive, truly alive, for the first time in two marriages, eight apartments, sixty-two fruitless meetings with agents, managers, producers, directors, and the like.
He looked out over the faux club to the sound booth.
“So what do you think? That was ten and change, right?”
No answer.
“And it was pretty good, right? Obviously, I need to tighten it up a lot more with, you know, an actual crowd, but that was some solid shit, man. That was solid. And most of it, I made it up right on the spot.”
Silence and darkness from beyond the crowd.
Steve sighed.
“You’re not even up there, are you? There’s no one there. You’re a recording—a ‘party favor,’ like Dante said. I might as well have done that whole routine in front of my mirror in my parents’ house, like when I was a kid. Doing Carlin’s Class Clown or Live on the Sunset Strip. Except what you just heard? That was all me, you cocksucker. All of it, every
last word.”
Nothing.
Steve swallowed. “The worst part? Is knowing I didn’t need to do it. I didn’t need to steal. I was good enough all by myself. Except I got scared. And so here I am.”
He looked down at the seam delineating the pressure plate from the rest of the stage.
He thought about raising his foot and stepping off. Even if it was the end, so what? At least he’d be going out on a high note. He did a set. He did a good set. Sure, it sucked that no one else knew it but him.
But he knew. And he didn’t before.
“Mr. Gordon? Steven?”
The voice didn’t come from the ceiling, and it had no electronic distortion.
His throat tightened with fear, but after a second he was able to call out, “Yeah, in here!”
The front door to the club yawed open and Meredith Ladipo shuffled inside, dazed.
Steve held up his hands. “Meredith, don’t come up here. I’ve been rigged—there’s a mine—look, you know, it’s too crazy to explain. Just don’t come up onstage.”
She kept walking as if she hadn’t heard a word he said. When she entered the aureole of light from the ceiling, he could see she had been crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“Clepe,” Meredith said. “Clepe endlong.”
“Uh…what?”
She swallowed and struggled to say very slowly: “He’s dead.”
“Who’s dead?”
“I killed him.”
“Who?”
“Dante,” she said. She burst into tears and wiped her eyes. “I killed him.”
Steve didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything. After tamping down her sobs she said:
“He tried to grab the shotgun from me. I told him it was loaded, I told him, but he didn’t believe me. Why don’t any of you ever believe me?”
“I believe you, Meredith, I believe you. It sounds like an accident—you didn’t mean it, right? It was an accident?”
“He’s dead, Steve, it’s my fault…The shot knocked him back, down the elevator shaft, and he’s gone…he’s gone!”
“Hey. Hey! No offense, kid, but I am still here and very much want to stay that way. Can you do me a favor?”
“What are you saying?”
“Meredith! Focus, man! Can you…look behind you, see the stairs beyond the bar?”
She sniffled. “You mean to the sound booth?”
“Yes! I forgot you work here. Yeah, could you go up there and see, uh, if there’s anyone there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I thought I saw someone there, but now I’m not so sure.”
“You mean like Zoe?”
“Sure, like her. Just—poke your head in and see. Pretty please?”
Meredith wiped her nose and her eyes and walked over.
She trotted up the stairs.
She could hear someone inside. Some sort of movement.
At first, she didn’t know what to do. It was a scratching sound.
She stepped away from the door, gripped the knob, and threw it open.
She shrieked as something bolted out of the booth and past her feet, knocking over the water dish and food bowl from which it had just been partaking.
Asshole ran down the steps and right up to the stage. He stood there, looking up at Steve and wagging his tail.
“Meredith!” Steve shouted.
She stepped toward Asshole. The scruffy little dog stood, every fiber of its being aquiver, transfixed by the dog treats it could see sticking out of Steve’s pocket, the dog treats neither Steve nor Meredith had noticed.
“Call him over, Meredith,” Steve said, his voice cracking. “Please, Jesus God, call him over to you!”
Meredith opened her mouth, but it had been a long time since she had taken her pills.
“Trolley,” she said.
“Yo-yo!
“Jam chaser!
“Forby yede!”
“What is wrong with you?” Steve said.
She held up a hand for him to wait a second.
“Are you fucking serious?!”
Meredith removed her pills from her pocket and popped two in her mouth and took the nozzle from the bar and shot seltzer water into her mouth.
But all this was taking far too long for Asshole. The little dog was perplexed. By this point in Mommy’s act she would take out the treats, and then he would run onto the stage, and she would give him the treats. So maybe, he decided, he was the one at fault here.
Asshole was a good boy. He was a very good boy. Mommy always told him so.
And so the little dog launched himself up onto the stage.
All twelve pounds of him.
II
Meredith Ladipo did not experience the explosion as an event happening in space and time. Instead, in one instant she was rushing toward the stage, opening her mouth to yell, as Steve Gordon backed away from the little gray drowned-looking dog launching itself at him.
And then in the next instant she was lying on her back over a scattering of tables and chairs with a roaring ring in her ears, like the endless peal of an infinite bell. A bright light filled her vision, then slowly retracted into the hovering singularity of the disco ball hanging from the ceiling, swinging back and forth, back and forth, in violent parabolas.
She became aware of shooting pains in her arms and back from where the metal legs of tables and chairs had slammed into her flesh when she abruptly transitioned from a vertical to a horizontal position. Nevertheless she was able to stretch out her legs—also with considerable pain—and reached to grip the fallen furniture to steady herself as she rose.
When she saw her hands, she started to cry. There was so much blood. That she had any more than a few minutes left to live seemed inconceivable, given the amount of crimson gore speckled across her hands, her arms, her clothes, her feet, splattered across the club floor and walls.
On one of her knuckles she saw a fluff of downy salt-and-pepper fur stuck to a darker red gelatinous bit of something that, until very recently, had been part of something living. She looked to the stage, over which a cloudy haze still lingered, with no sign of Gordo or Asshole anywhere.
She knew then—it was not her blood she was bathed in, but that of a man and a dog who were no longer there.
Her stomach tied itself into searing knots. She wanted to throw up but only tasted blood when she moved her tongue—her mouth must have been open when the blast came.
More overpowering than her nausea was the desire to get out of this charnel house. She slipped and staggered to her feet, pain lancing her left knee. She looked down and saw her own blood for the first time, oozing from a purple-edged gash extending diagonally across her kneecap.
Leave, her mind still burned, get out of here, and she turned toward the doorway, where Janet Kahn was standing in her sunglasses and plastic brace and mummy wrappings. Her mouth was moving but she couldn’t make herself heard over the still-endless ringing.
Meredith stopped breathing, and her heart stopped beating, and she stepped backward, ankle catching on crisscrossed metal stems lying behind her. She fell over on her side across a fallen metal chair. It caught her badly in the ribs and right arm. And now, officially, every single part of her was in pain.
She had kept on crying since seeing her own Carrie impersonation, but now she started moaning as well, from the bruising she just received in the fall and the old pain from the explosion and the past weekend and her whole life up till this point. She cried the way an infant cries, in protest against an entire world constructed in defiance of your own wishes.
Finally, however, she tired of it, once she realized that she was able to hear her own wails, which meant that she could hear anything at all. She stopped, and swallowed, and tried to calm her breathing, wiping the tears and caked blood from her eyes.
Janet Kahn still stood over her.
“Good news, kiddo,” she said. “This will all be over soon.”
III
“I thought you were dead,” Meredith said weakly.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Janet said. “Do you know I hold the world record for being declared dead by Twitter? Seven times. The last time I started the rumors myself, just to watch the tweeple scurry around like ants.”
She reached out her hand so Meredith could take it. “C’mon dear, upsy-daisy.”
Meredith slapped Janet’s hand away and managed to stand up on her own. The wound on her knee reopened and hobbled her, so she could back away only shufflingly.
“You’ve had a shock, I get it, but there’s no reason we should stick around this abattoir. This plastic brace I’m wearing does not do wonders for my gag reflex, believe you me. Let’s get some fresh air. C’mon, step outside.”
“You—it was you who killed all those people!”
Janet shrugged. “Ehh, a little from column A, a little from column B. I think it’s more a matter of semantics, princess. I mean, sure, I set the traps. But in most of the cases I just gave those people opportunities to kill themselves. No one made TJ Martinez go into that panic room. No one made Ollie attempt the gags in his binder. No one made Gordo get up on that stage. No one made Zoe psychologically incapable of being separated from her dog. No one made Dante drink a wine cellar’s worth of booze or Billy the Contractor a tallboy. In the end, they did themselves in.”
“Is that a dog whistle around your neck?”
Janet picked up the metal cylinder by its chain and glanced at it. “Yeah, okay, in Zoe’s case I helped her along a bit by guiding her annoying little rat mutt, sure…”
Meredith suddenly wagged a finger at her. “Wait! You gave Griffith his tallboy—you did poison him! Right in front of us!”
“Oh, yeah. That was totally me.” She held up her hand, which had several rings on it, one of which was a radiant smiling sun. She popped it open and showed a hollow center. “Isn’t that neat? Afghan poison ring. I got it from a market in Kabul when I did a USO show, like, ten years ago. Yeah, I popped open the beer and when my back was turned I was able to drop the arsenic in there from the ring, right under your noses.”
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