The audience roared. The mike exploded in some sort of shaped charge, taking off most of George’s head and smearing the maroon curtains behind him with hair, blood, and brain matter.
Laughter is like an avalanche—slow to get started, but once its moving it has an inertia of its own. Even with the gasps and screams of shock, it took ten or fifteen seconds for the last waves of laughter to die out. Then, for a moment, there was silence except for a few sobs from a woman near the front.
George’s pear-shaped body had stood there for a second or two, headless, his fingers still curved around the mike he was in the process of dropping. Then the corpse fell forward and hit the boards with a sound I will never forget, arterial blood sprayed the closest tables, and the room was filled with chaos as everyone—myself included—stood, shouted, cried for help, or merely screamed. I remember that Diane Mulholland rushed from backstage and knelt next to George—the knees of her pantyhose wicked red from the blood. She looked offstage as if seeking help. Al Jacobs rushed onstage, froze as if he were physically incapable of coming closer to the corpse, and stood there, wringing his hands and grimacing.
I set down my drink and stood on the lowest rung of the barstool, just trying to see over the heads of the mindlessly surging crowd.
And then, a moment after the laughter ended and the shouts and sobs and cries of confusion began to ebb toward a more sinister silence, then the laughter began.
It was not quite laughter. It was more like the frenzied barking of a jackal or the amplified cough of a hyena than any sound of mirth I’d ever heard come from a human throat. And then the face appeared.
Ten feet tall, white-skinned and green-haired, teeth yellowed within the terrible rictus that passed for a grin, the giant head materialized and floated in midair above George’s body. If George’s corpse had remained standing, this bloated visage would have replaced his missing head like someone poking his face through a cardboard cutout at a boardwalk photo booth.
It took me a second to realize that I was looking at the Joker. Living in Gotham City most of my life, I’d seen news photographs and the rare snippets of videotape, but they had seemed unreal, cartoonlike, and this nightmare face floating above George’s corpse was all too real.
Diane screamed and flinched away from the apparition. Al Jacobs backed to the edge of the stage, teetered, and crouched, holding one arm above his bald head as if ready to ward off a blow.
The Joker laughed. The image seemed solid. I saw the pores in the white flesh, noticed the pink gums above yellow teeth, and watched as the wide eyes blinked in merriment and pure insanity. The laughter echoed off walls and curtains as patrons fled, shoving over tables in their haste to reach the fire exits. Diane Mulholland slumped unconscious in a pool of George’s blood.
The image of the Joker glanced down at her as if the projection could actually see, smiled, and lifted its long chin. It . . . he . . . was looking across the heads of the crowd directly at me.
“TUT, TUT, TUT,” came the amplified voice. I remember seeing Charles Manson interviewed once on Sixty Minutes. Manson’s voice sounded like Dan Rather’s compared to the black-ice tones I heard now. “I GUESS THIS FELLOW HAS NO HEAD FOR COMEDY!”
The crazy laughter rose in volume. Behind me I heard shouts at the front entrance, knew the cops had arrived, but I wasn’t able to turn away from that wild-eyed gaze.
“WELL, HE WON’T BE THE LAST TO GIVE HIS ALL TO LADY COMEDY,” echoed the mad voice. The image giggled, and then a strange transformation came over the face. It was as if rats were scurrying under the white cheesecloth of the Joker’s flesh. At first, I thought it might be a malfunction of the projector or whatever it was, but then I realized that it was the Joker’s actual features that were shifting, sliding into different patterns, jerking like the expression of a doll in a clumsily made claymation cartoon.
The Joker was no longer smiling. His green hair seemed to wave like seaweed in a strong current as he glared down at the last fleeing patrons, flicked a glance at the corpse, and then returned his gaze to me. “THERE IS ONLY ONE JOKER IN GOTHAM CITY.”
He was gone. The cops burst in, ran around, swung their revolvers in that self-conscious two-armed pose we see on TV every night, and shouted at each other over the din. Some stood around George’s corpse and looked as helpless as Al Jacobs had, while others rushed back stage, guns still drawn.
I knew they wouldn’t find the Joker. I lifted my glass and finished my drink. My hands were shaking so hard that I had to use both of them to get the glass to my mouth without spilling the last of my vodka.
They kept us until almost four in the morning. I’d never been interrogated before and it wasn’t much like the movies. They didn’t grill me, they didn’t use the good cop, bad-cop routine, and nobody shone a bright light in my face. In fact, they interviewed us one at a time in the long, narrow storeroom in the back of Al’s club, and there was hardly enough light to see the two homicide detectives asking the questions. They sounded more tired than I was. One of them had a serious smoker’s cough and sucked on lozenges between cigarettes.
Mostly, it was boring. They went over everything twice, then a third time. Then they started again.
“Are you sure Mr. Marlin said nothing to you in the green room?” the cop with the cough asked.
I sighed and began to give the same answer I’d given them thrice before. Then a shadow in the corner behind them moved, detached itself from the darkness there, and glided toward us.
“Holy shit,” I whispered.
It was the Batman. I heard his cape rustle, caught a glimpse of the peaked points on the dark cowl, but mostly he blended into the darkness in that little room. Only his face and that weird emblem on his chest seemed to reflect light.
He glided forward until he loomed over me, wrinkles in that cape glinting like black silk where they glinted at all. The cops made room for him but said nothing. I couldn’t say anything at that moment.
I know, you live in Gotham City most of your life, you’re supposed to see the Batman all the time. Well, you don’t, any more than you chat with Dustin Hoffman a lot if you live in L.A. or lunch with Donald Trump if you hang around New York. Oh, you see photos in the paper every once in a while and I almost saw Batman at a dedication of a new community center in Charity Hills once when I was twelve . . . but my dad and I got stuck in traffic and when we got there he was gone. You live in Gotham, you take a sort of pride in being identified with the Bat Guy . . . sort of like San Francisco residents are proud of the Golden Gate Bridge . . . but you don’t see him. To tell the truth, it’d been so long since I’d even read about him, that I’d sort of forgotten he was real.
He was real enough now.
I sat back, tried to look cool, tried not to gulp visibly as this cowled face leaned forward, neck muscles all corded under black silk, tried to listen coolly rather than scream when that gloved hand touched my shoulder. I’m thin, average height, but no wimp. Still, I had the definite impression that his hand could pulverize my collarbone and shoulder just by giving a squeeze.
He didn’t squeeze.
“Mr. Tulley,” he said. His voice sounded soft, almost preoccupied. But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get the owner of that voice angry. “Mr. Tulley, do you know any reason why someone . . . even the Joker . . . would want to kill George Marlin?”
“Uh-uh,” I said, always a snappy one with repartee.
I could see his eyes through slits in that midnight cowl. I’m pretty observant—stand-up comics have to be—but I have no idea what color they were.
“Mr. Tulley, is there anything that you haven’t mentioned which you think might help us with this investigation?”
“Uh-uh.” This time I managed to punctuate it by shaking my head.
The Batman nodded—more toward the two cops than at me—and then he took a step back and seemed to blend back into the shadows like black ink spilled on a dark velvet cloth.
The cop with the smoker’s cough led me to
the door while I strained to keep from peering over my shoulder at the corner.
“Thanks, Mr. Tulley,” said the detective. I could smell the lozenge he was chewing on. “Go home and get some rest. We’ll call you if we need you, but I think this’ll be all.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, grateful to be leaving, grateful to be getting out of that little room.
But it wasn’t all. Not by a long shot.
Bruce appeared one day after the second murder.
It was three nights later, some of us were working the old Aladdin Dinner Theater, figuring that whoever was taking notes on comics for the joke-off would probably hit Aladdin’s traditional Tuesday Night Laugh Riot.
Somebody hit it all right.
The Aladdin is one of the great old movie palaces built during the early days of the Depression. It’s part Taj Mahal, part Pharaoh’s tomb, a bit of Baghdad, and a whole lot of old-movie fantasy. The place is gigantic, with two levels of balconies, box seats, red carpets, murals, and corridors like caverns out of an Indiana Jones movie: rococo ornamentation everywhere, bronze hands holding torches for lighting fixtures, dusty chandeliers—the whole bit. Aladdin’s had decayed to the point of being a downtown porno theater in the sixties, was converted to a disco during the seventies, was abandoned for a while, and then became a dinner theater cum nightclub during the mid-eighties.
The place was too big for comedy: the night Tiffany was murdered, there were almost as many of us waiting to go onstage as there were people in the audience. The rows of theater seats behind the tables were empty, the balconies were dark, and the private boxes were sealed off. The small lamps on the dozen tables near the stage shed little light. The place smelled of mildewed carpets, old cigars, and rot.
And flop sweat.
There was a plainclothes detective in the audience. Max Weber, Aladdin’s manager, had pointed him out. He didn’t need to. Anybody could have spotted the shiny black suit, paunch, clip-on holster, and white socks and made the old guy as a cop.
People weren’t laughing when Tiffany died. She was having a bad night; the Roseanne Barr material wasn’t working, there was a heckler down front whom she couldn’t out-nasty, and she was sweating heavily . . . obviously just trying to get through to the end of the routine. I was on last, still at least forty-five minutes to go after Fast Eddie and a couple of others, so I was having a drink at an empty table and feeling sorry for Tiffany.
Suddenly, in midpunchline, a glass box came sliding down on wires from the dark catwalks above and slammed onto the stage, enclosing Tiffany as surely as an entymologist’s plastic jar would trap a bug.
There was a click, the mike cord was severed, and Tiffany stumbled as some sort of bottom slid under her, sealing the glass box. It couldn’t be glass of course—I realized even then that it had to be some sort of plastic or Plexiglas—but it looked like a glass phone booth.
Tiffany screamed, but her shouts were made almost inaudible by the cage. The plainclothes cop stared a moment and then jumped to his feet, groping for the gun on his belt.
The Joker walked onstage, aimed his cane, and shot the cop. Actually, the head of the cane flew through the air, trailing a thin wire, and slammed into the cop’s chest. The fat detective spasmed and collapsed. We learned later that the cane had fired something called a taser . . . a sort of high-voltage stun weapon. It wasn’t designed to kill. The Joker couldn’t have known that the detective had been fitted for a pacemaker . . . or maybe he did.
Anyway, the cop spasmed and died, Tiffany’s mouth moved as she pounded the Plexiglas, and the Joker bowed. He was wearing an old-style tuxedo, the formal effect spoiled only slightly by a bright green cravat he wore in lieu of a bow tie, purple spats, and purple gloves. He completed his bow and looked at Tiffany in her box as if he had just noticed her. “God, how sad!” He pouted almost effeminately. “Poor girl . . . trying so hard, and your only reward is flop sweat!”
The Joker snapped his fingers. Water began pouring from invisible ducts in the box, pooling around Tiffany’s ankles. She screamed more loudly; it was just audible through the plastic. Fast Eddie Teck charged onstage, a switchblade knife in his hand. The Joker tasered him unconscious with a flick of his cane.
“For those of you who don’t know theater talk,” lisped the Joker, showing us flashes of his yellow teeth all the way back to the molars, “flop sweat is the ultimate pan notice . . . the sheen of ultimate failure, the glow of abject panic . . . the perspiration of expiration!”
The liquid rose to Tiffany’s shoulders, then to her chins. Her orange silk caftan floated around her. She jumped, pounded at the walls, clawed at plastic. The fluid rose until only her mouth and nose were clear of it as she strained against the roof of the box.
I rushed toward the stage and stopped as the Joker tasered two would-be rescuers in front of me. He snapped his fingers and a second cane appeared in his other hand.
“Tut, tut.” The Joker grinned. “Never interrupt an artist at work.” He glanced over his shoulder at Tiffany. The box had filled with clear liquid; she was no longer struggling. A few final bubbles of air rose from her nose and open mouth and tangled in her swaying hair.
The Joker walked over to the box and patted the side of it almost affectionately. “You don’t sweat much,” he said to Tiffany’s corpse. “For a fat lady.”
A dozen of us had come out of the shock and horror sufficiently to prepare to rush the Joker en masse. He twirled his cane. “Oh, I wouldn’t recommend giving fatso mouth-to-mouth,” he said, showing an expression of revulsion. “You see, this flop sweat isn’t water, it’s hydrochloric acid!” He grinned at us, waggled gloved fingers, and said, “Ta ta! See you all—or at least the survivors—at the joke-off!”
He laughed insanely. A bunch of us climbed onstage, rushed him. The Joker calmly bowed, caught one of the wires above the box, and rose out of sight into the darkness.
It took us almost five minutes to find a fire ax to crack the plastic box.
It was acid.
The guy named Bruce appeared and performed the next night at the Carob Club. He was awful. He did a routine that wouldn’t have gotten a laugh in 1952, much less during the beginning of the hip, raunchy nineties. The jokes were flat, his timing was nonexistent, he didn’t seem to care whether the audience was there or not, and his body language was bad. I mean, I saw the guy move before and after the show, and although he dressed like a cartoon of a pimp—zoot-suit-shouldered polyester gold jacket, baggy green pants, a matching monkey-puke-green open-collar shirt with layers of gold chains showing, even a greasy little Wayne Newton moustache that looked like an anemic caterpillar had crawled onto his upper lip to die—despite all that, this guy moved like an athlete. No, better than that, he was as unselfconsciously graceful as a big cat on the veldt.
But on stage . . . klutzville. He moved like Pee Wee Herman doing an imitation of Richard Nixon.
The audience didn’t boo him, they just sat and stared as if a traffic accident was occurring on stage. There was even a splattering of applause when he got off—probably from pure relief. I mean, the man was bad.
That’s why it was all the more confusing that night when I was hiking the six blocks to catch the subway up to Gotham Center where I’d catch the el out to Finger Park station, and who do I see down an alley but Bruce, I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this guy heading down an alley in search of a flophouse . . . he wore one weird suit and had that handsome but driven look, sort of like some out-of-work actors I’ve known . . . but there he is, 2:00 A.M. in an alley, in the rain, and he’s getting into a limousine. The chauffeur is some old guy, and it’s some stretched European übermenschen limousine! It’s hard for most of us to take the tension and abuse and we’re all hoping for a break, the big time, money we can’t make any other way . . . or at least any other legal way. So why the hell would this poor schmuck take all the abuse and embarrassment if he didn’t have to? A guy who could afford a European limousine like that could buy an audience.
The next night at the Pit Stop, a strip joint that does comedy every Wednesday, Bruce was there again. Same routine. Same floppo, although this crowd was boozed up enough to start booing early. They were on the verge of throwing things when Bruce wrapped it up, bowed into that wall of boos, and walked calmly offstage.
Fast Eddie was ready to go on after him. Eddie leaned over to me and whispered, “Anybody’d look good after this jerk.”
Later, Boonie Sandhill and I went up to this Bruce guy in the green room.
“Howdy, y’all,” said Boonie, showing off the prognathous underbite that passed for a grin with him. “Caught your monologue, man. It’s . . . uh . . . original. Real different. Makes the rest of us look the same as stripes on a coon’s tail.”
Bruce raised an eyebrow and nodded, obviously not sure if Boonie was pulling his chain or not. I wasn’t either. We made introductions, shook hands. The guy’s handshake was easygoing enough, but I had the idea he could crush my fingers like breadsticks if he wanted to.
“Bruce,” said Boonie. “Is that your first name or last?”
The guy twitched a smile. “It’s my stage name. My . . . stand-up-comic pseudonym.”
Boonie rolled his eyes at the vocabulary. I said, “Any reason you chose the name Bruce?”
Bruce hesitated. “Homage to Lenny Bruce, I guess. He was sort of my hero.”
Boonie and I glanced at each other. This guy’s style and content bore about as much resemblance to Lenny Bruce’s stuff as did Mr. Rogers.
“Hero, huh?” said Boonie. “Too bad Lenny O.D.’d on speed.”
“Yes,” said Bruce. He was watching the closed-circuit monitor the Pit Stop had to let the green-room folks watch the action on stage. It was a crude picture—stationary camera, black-and-white fuzzy picture with poor sound—but Bruce seemed rapt. “It is too bad,” he said. “Lenny Bruce would have had a great future.”
Boonie and I looked at each other again. This guy was as miserable a liar as he was a comic; anybody who knew anything about Lenny Bruce knew that he died of an overdose of heroin.
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 17