The Girl Least Likely

by Katy Loutzenhiser

  At last, I slip on the red-framed glasses. “Yep,” I say to my reflection. “Utterly transformed.”

  Tonight’s door guy waits inside this time. Actually, it’s the bartender Carmen made out with. “Hey, I remember you,” he says as I shiver away the last traces of the cold outdoors. “I’m Ted, by the way. Your cousin never called me.”

  “Oh. Sorry,” I say, a little weirdly. But he just laughs and waves me along.

  Onstage, a new set is starting—a scrawny guy playing hipstery musical chords on a ukulele. He tells the crowd his name is Lennon, as in John, but we can call him Lenny.

  I drape my jacket on a barstool, searching the room for Jeremy. Lenny’s first few jokes all seem to revolve around the perils of capitalism, kept light with all that happy strumming. Now he’s talking about his girlfriend’s eco-conscious menstrual cup. There’s a quirk to him that definitely works.

  I sigh, already starting to relax. I like the feel of everyone packed together in this dark space, with that tangy beer smell permeating everything.

  “Sabrina!” I hear from behind me. It’s Dolores, whispering so loudly she may as well just talk. “You came back! Thank God. My next guy wandered off and I can’t find him. What a friggin’ banana-head. Remind me your last name so I can introduce you?”

  “Uh . . . Martin,” I stammer.

  “Sandy!” she hisses to the hostess. “Prep her? I’m gonna go.”

  I’m not entirely sure what’s happening right now, but as Lenny says good night to the audience, Dolores hops up to do her in-between bit. Sandy guides me toward the stage, explaining . . . something or other. I suddenly can’t remember what it was I planned to say up here tonight. Was I planning on saying anything?

  Wait a minute. What am I doing?

  Shit.

  Abort, abort!

  “. . . Sabrina Martin!” Dolores announces as the crowd claps. She waves, emphatic, until I walk up the steps to take her place.

  I hear the room quiet as I stare out past the lights.

  The inside of my brain is a big black nothing.

  “Hey, sweetheart!” a voice calls after I-don’t-know-how-long. “You gonna say something any time soon? I’m missing the Bruins for this!” I squint to see a man up front getting swatted by his wife.

  “Is she okay?” a girl says to her friend in back. Across the room, I glimpse Jeremy for the first time. He looks alarmed, if not slightly amused by my predicament. It’s a smaller crowd tonight than last week, and I think that might be making this worse. It’s as if I’m failing each individual audience member personally.

  “Wow,” I say finally, as I continue to take in all the stony faces.

  Make a joke, the little voice screams. Any joke!

  “You guys, uh . . .” I clear my throat. “You all look like I just told you I’m here to administer your next prostate exam.”

  Silence.

  “Okay . . .” I say. “No prostate jokes. I could see how that might bring down some of the guys in the room. This is meant to be a place of fun.”

  I can hear Bruins Guy’s wife talking now. “I don’t want to leave. They won’t all be this bad.”

  Somehow, this makes me chuckle. I take the mic from the stand to crouch down. “Excuse me. Ma’am? You know I can hear you, right?” That gets a solid laugh, and even if it’s mostly at my expense, I will totally take that right now.

  “Okay,” I say, straightening up. “I will admit, this is not going well. Apparently you can’t just barge onto a stage and expect astute, hilarious observations about life to flow effortlessly from your mouth.”

  The crowd murmurs, perhaps warming to me.

  “Anyway . . .” I think a minute. Crowd work. That’s a thing, right? “Do we have any visiting tourists here in the audience?”

  A couple young guys off to the side raise their hands. “Nice,” I say. “Although, why? Didn’t anyone tell you it’s cold here?” I touch my two little buns and adjust my glasses, feeling a slight thrill all of a sudden. Because honestly? Who cares how tonight goes? This is Sabrina’s problem.

  “What’s that?” I say, remembering to listen as the tourist guy talks.

  “We’re here for a snowboarding trip,” he repeats, louder.

  “Gotcha,” I say, chin up, back straight. “See, for me, most winter sports could be more accurately described as . . . recreational falling down?”

  A slight murmur from the room has me encouraged. People are smiling now as I pace the stage. “The last time I went skiing, I wound up in one of those only-big-person-on-the-bunny-slope situations. It’s so degrading when a child is better at something than you. This one little kid, Enzo, kept showing me up in our lesson. On the outside I was all, ‘Awww! Good job, buddy!’ But inside I was like, Fuck off, Enzo!”

  That gets a laugh, which is a relief. The story is even true, though I’ve embellished some. Enzo and I actually forged a nice friendship on that bunny hill.

  I’m trying to think of something more to say when I glimpse Dolores on the far side of the stage, waving her clipboard to catch my attention. She gives me a pointed look and I realize the blinking light I’ve been seeing for a while was probably the wrap it up signal I now vaguely remember the hostess mentioning before I went on.

  I must have wasted quite a lot of time staring out into the middle distance.

  Oops.

  “All right, well,” I say, remembering to stick the landing as I return the mic to its place. “I’m Sabrina Martin. Thank you, Portland!” I start to walk off, then double back. “Oh, and sorry for mentioning prostate exams in your safe space, guys. Won’t happen again.”

  Seven

  The Roguish Bad Boy | All speech somehow feels like innuendo. Very good at raising one eyebrow. Probably not a good life decision.

  A few people clap weakly as I speed down the steps, toward Jeremy at the bar. I can tell he’s enjoying this, smiling at me like a guy in a gum commercial—the ding! practically sparkling off his canine.

  “I know,” I say, rolling my eyes when I reach him. He’s with some other comics—Tinder Guy and Preschool Lady from last week. To them, I say, “Hi. You’re both really funny and I’m embarrassed. I should have prepared something.”

  Tinder Guy smiles. “It’s okay. I’ve been there.”

  “We all have,” says Preschool Lady. “But hey, you sort of got yourself out of it. . . .”

  Jeremy shakes his head. “For the record, I would have helped you. All you had to do was text me back.”

  “I know,” I say through a sigh. “I really didn’t think I’d be coming here again. Hence the verbal diarrhea. Anyway, lesson learned. That audience was scary.”

  “Yep,” says Tinder Guy. “Sometimes they’re dicks even when you’re good.”

  Jeremy reaches over the bar to pour a couple waters from the soda gun. He hands me one and I start to sip, blinking quizzically around at them. “To be honest, I still don’t fully understand why I went up there and did that. Either time.”

  “Same reason all of us do,” says Preschool Lady. “You’re probably deeply fucked up inside.”

  I laugh. “Maybe.”

  “Sabrina, right? I’m Paula.”

  “Isaiah,” says Tinder Guy with a little nod.

  “Nice to meet you,” I say to them before turning to Jeremy. “This is your fault, you know. You said I was funny.”

  “I said you were promising,” he corrects. “But I do think you’re funny.”

  I pretend to swoon. “Really?”

  “I mean, not tonight,” he says. “Tonight you were mostly terrible.”

  “She was not,” says Paula, teetering a bit as she meets my eyes. “Okay, it wasn’t great. But you’ll get there. Then again . . .” She smacks her lips. “The odds of an audience voting two female comics into the final three are pretty low. So I guess we’re mortal enemies now.”

  “Damn, that’s too bad,” I say. “You seemed cool.” She smiles and drains her beer, just as Dolores calls out, “Pau
la Meiselman!” With that, Isaiah excuses himself to join some friends who came out to support him—an eclectic bunch of twentysomethings who look ready for a nice brunch, or maybe a poetry slam.

  When it’s just us, Jeremy and I each take a stool to watch, and I can’t tell if we’re sitting together-together, or if this just happened by default.

  I can still feel him smirking beside me, so I shoot him a look, like, What?! But then I don’t really care, because I’m being pulled into Paula’s orbit, the same way everyone else is—from the moment she takes out the mic, rests an elbow on the empty stand, and says, “So I’m a preschool teacher. . . .”

  “Wait,” I whisper, turning to Jeremy. “Is she just repeating the same thing from last week?”

  “Probably not word for word,” he says, leaning in. “It evolves. My guess is she’ll use some of her tried-and-true bits first, then test out some new stuff. The people in the audience don’t usually return week to week, so it’s fine.”

  The room is fairly quiet, laughter trickling in and out, but you can feel her casting a spell on everyone. Even Bruins Guy seems happy with the concept of preschoolers humping stuff.

  “That makes sense about evolving,” I say after a while, keeping my voice low. Paula’s doing a great bit from last week, reenacting awkward sit-downs with what she calls U-POPs: Unsuspecting Parents of Pervs. “It feels more manageable, approaching it that way.”

  “Yeah,” says Jeremy. “Then again, if you recycle too much and don’t use this time to test out new material, you could end up screwing yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that if you somehow win this thing, the person who opens for Marnie James will need to fill fifteen minutes. So we’d all be smart to use these opportunities to work out a few different chunks.”

  “Jeez,” I say. “I’m still trying to wrap my brain around writing one chunk. But fifteen minutes?”

  “I’ve done it before,” he says over the roar of the crowd. “At coffee shops, places like that. It’s not as bad as it sounds.”

  Everyone is going bananas for Paula now. It’s heartening to see. As she waves good night, I turn to Jeremy. “So when are you going on?”

  “I went up before you got here,” he says, cracking his knuckles with outstretched arms. “Too bad. Could have been educational for you.”

  “Does this . . .” I draw a circle around him in the air. “. . . ever stop?”

  “I would probably just accept it if I were you.”

  Up next is Isaiah, his material all seemingly new, with the exception of the Mystery Tinder Poop Story, which is somehow even funnier this time around. His friends in the audience are laughing hysterically, and once in a while he smiles over at their table. I’m not sure I could ever pull that off—being so bold and unencumbered in front of friends and strangers alike. Or in any context, honestly. What am I doing here again?

  “He’s probably the one to beat,” says Jeremy. I wouldn’t discount Paula so quickly, but he could be right. Isaiah has this crowd whipped into a frenzy, some people cracking up at what he’s saying now, while others are still catching their breath from jokes he told two minutes ago. When he finally trades places with Dolores, there’s a collective joyfulness thrumming through the room.

  “He’s really good,” I say, mildly in awe as he descends the steps from the stage. “Paula, too. They both just have that . . . thing that makes a person funny.”

  Jeremy turns to me. “Do you think you have it? That thing?”

  “Oh, um . . .” The question feels too blunt, and personal. But I shrug. “Maybe I’m here to find out.”

  When Isaiah’s friends take off early, Jeremy and I claim their empty seats, waving at Paula to come too. “You both were so amazing,” I whisper across the rickety table. They practically beam, obviously happy with how the night went.

  Onstage now, a medical student named Lakshmi is describing the strange juxtaposition of starting a family with her new husband while also facing death at the hospital every day. It’s grim but honest, funny, and sweet. Next, an extremely deadpan sushi chef manages to make a whole set about fish surprisingly compelling. And then it’s someone I’ve seen before—the man I watched last week from the hall with Jeremy and Dolores.

  “Not this guy again,” mutters Isaiah, the room growing tense as he starts in.

  Paula shakes her head. “If he does that mail-order-bride impression again I’m going to lose my fucking mind.”

  As I look the man over, I decide he’s like a thinner, balder Kevin James—if you took away all the qualities that made Kevin James likeable. So far, the set is just him saying tits a lot.

  “Titties, tits tits, titties . . .” (Okay, not a direct quote, but it might as well be.) I feel like I’m going in and out of a Charlie Brown cartoon: blah blah stupid slut, blah blah blah blow job. Now he’s complaining about his marriage, and the voice he does for his wife is so tired—if he has a wife, I should say.

  “How much you want to bet he’s not even married?” asks Jeremy, apparently reading my thoughts.

  “I wish someone would tell these guys that nagging wives aren’t funny,” says Isaiah. “Like . . . cavemen comics were doing this bit.”

  Two women in the front row stand up abruptly, their chairs scraping loudly against the floor as they turn to go. “Oh, come on!” Bad Kevin James calls after them as they head for the exit, before muttering into the mic, “Whatever. Probably hormonal.”

  Just then, Bruins Guy from earlier cups his hands around his mouth to shout from the audience. I brace myself for something truly awful. I open one eye. . . .

  “Hey, buddy!” he yells. “You can’t fuckin’ say that! We don’t talk about women that way!”

  I look around the table, my heart oddly warmed, and all four of us burst out laughing. At least he’s an equal-opportunity heckler.

  When Dolores finally says good night, people clap and trickle out, the energy having rebounded from one last act—a retired contractor with a thick Maine accent who divulged his love for The Great British Baking Show. It was the exact wholesome opposite of what had preceded it, and you could tell the audience was grateful.

  In the emptied-out room, now disorientingly bright, Paula, Isaiah, and I have hung back, our table the only one with its chairs not yet flipped upside down by Jeremy or Ted.

  We’ve been going over all the acts, analyzing key moments like sports fans after a game. The med student said a quick hi-and-goodbye to us before she slipped out—right back to the hospital, I think. British Baking Guy, Ukulele Lenny, and Deadpan Sushi Chef all gave friendly waves of acknowledgment as they talked to friends in the crowd. Meanwhile Bad Kevin James just charged past our table without a word. I guess there was one other comic, too, but she left before I got a chance to meet her.

  “You missed a spot!” I call out playfully to Jeremy as he walks by with a broom.

  Isaiah drains his glass of water and turns to Paula. “Need a ride?”

  “Yes, please,” she says, and they both get up, waving their goodbyes. I can’t help but smile as I watch them go. It’s sort of unbelievable that we just met. As the door closes behind them, Ted pulls out the drawer from the cash register and walks off, leaving Jeremy and me alone at opposite ends of the empty room.

  “So.” Jeremy comes over, and I stand to let him flip our remaining chairs. “Are you going to accept my help this time?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” I say, following as he starts flipping stools at the bar. I notice the muscles of his arms flickering under his T-shirt and instinctively look away. “Then again, I’ve never even seen your act,” I go on, composing myself. “For all I know, you could be terrible.”

  “Oh no, I’m very good,” he says, and I’m annoyed that I’m charmed by his confidence. Why does that work on me?

  “I’ll admit the stuff I’ve been doing lately hasn’t been my best. But I’m starting on some new material that might be interesting. For now, I’m doing research.”
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  “Out in the universe?” He smirks, holding my stare with knitted brows. “Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask finally. He’s making me uneasy.

  “Sorry,” he says, though the look of curiosity doesn’t quite leave him. “I think I’m . . . trying to figure you out.”

  “Yeah, well, stop being weird,” I say, eyeing him skeptically. “Anyway, fine. Impart your wisdom. What do I do now?”

  “Well, now comes the part where you write jokes. Setups? Punch lines?”

  “Thank you,” I say flatly. “For the explanation. My little lady brain almost couldn’t handle that.”

  “Funny,” he says. “See? Do that.” I narrow my eyes and he gestures to the two stools still standing upright. “Look,” he continues as we sit. “People riff and experiment up there all the time. But first, you have to write some stuff. You can’t riff off of nothing.”

  I nod my head, sighing out. “I don’t know where I’d even begin.”

  “The advice I first got was to work from simple facts about myself. I made a list. Likes, dislikes. Things I wished I could change about myself.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “You have things you’d change about yourself?”

  “Not really, no. You’re right.”

  “Okay, land the plane, Jeremy,” I say, waving him along.

  “Just don’t overthink it,” he says with a grin. “Start with specifics about yourself, then try to make them broad enough for an audience to relate to. Also . . .” He hesitates. “This might just be my philosophy. But if you need inspiration, it never hurts to find a nice, meaty situation once in a while. Walk toward the awkward moments, not away. Just to . . . see what will happen.”

  “Huh,” I say. “I kind of like that. Carpe awkward!”

  “I mean, why not, right? If you treat life like an experiment, you can almost make the material come to you.”

  “Hmm,” I say. “I’m not sure I totally get what you mean.”

  “It’s like this . . .” he says, leaning in. He smells good. Why does he have to smell good? I realize I’m tuning him out.