Manhattan Loverboy

by Arthur Nersesian

  “Well, I can certainly use the help.” The tunafish tasted like chicken salad.

  “All right, kiddo, tell me if I’m wrong. You’re looking for a profession that is wide open. Good money. Shot at the top. And a shot at your name being carved into stone. Yes or no?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay, kiddo, I’ve got the answer right here, but I got to tell you something. Nothing comes without its price, without its trade-off.” It was chicken salad.

  “What do you want?” I asked him.

  “Not a thing. The trade-off will be the job I’m going to tell you that fits that area.”

  “If you’re going to tell me a high-labor, risky job…”

  “This job allows you to sit on your caboose most of the time: unlimited booze, TV, housekeeper, free wardrobe. And although you need to attend another, different kind of graduate program, you can virtually start this job tomorrow.”

  “I’m interested.”

  “The priesthood.”

  “You’re joking, right?” When I had finished the sandwich, Whitlock took two cans of soda from the fridge, one for him and one for me.

  “A little, but not in the main, no. Let me weigh some of the pros and cons for you. First of all, there’s an employee shortage. Second, you can work anywhere in the world. Third, you have high respect within the community. With a little politicking you can rise up the ranks to Bishop, Cardinal, maybe even to the top-dog seat. They’re now hiring non-natives. Also, you cheat taxes and maybe death.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Just give it some thought.”

  “I don’t believe in God,” I nullified.

  “De Minimus. I don’t believe in the law. This isn’t a theological discussion—it’s employment counseling.”

  “Look, I appreciate the suggestion, don’t misunderstand me. I’d just feel like I was pulling a big con job.” I finished my soda, and he started walking me somewhere. Again, I followed faithfully.

  “I’m a lawyer. People come to me asking for confidence in matters that no one can give them confidence in. But I let them get things off their chest. I give them the best counsel I can. If I had to be honest, it would be a very, very bleak world indeed. You shouldn’t be insincere, but find a pragmatic angle to help others.” We were now at the front door, and his man Wylie was waiting there with my coat.

  “Take care, my boy,” he said.

  “What now?” I asked, feeling like an umbrella asking where its owner was taking him.

  “Even though you don’t know this, you are presently going through a complete thought scrub.”

  “What’s a thought scrub?”

  “I have a tank of people working on your problem. And when the problem is worked out, you’ll be notified. Go home now. Digest your macaroni and cheese. Sleep.”

  “What about my vital papers?”

  “Oh, glad you mentioned them.” He vanished a moment and returned with a large, plain, brown paper bag. Inside were my transcripts and a variety of vital statistics about me.

  I went home, to sleep. Sleep inverts time. Sleep a few seconds, they seem like hours. Sleep hours and they seem like seconds. I awakened what seemed like moments later to a knock at my door. I wondered if I hadn’t somehow caught a dose of muscular dystrophy or cerebral palsy. Some of me just wasn’t responding to the messages from central command. My fingertips and toes were wiggling but the longer muscles wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t get the door, but apparently it was unlocked. A bike messenger entered and saw me lying on my bed wiggling and blinking.

  “You okay, man?”

  “I…don’t know, don’t know…sick…me sick…”

  I remembered the last thing I ate was that cellophaned sandwich at Whitlock’s place. “I ate chicken or tuna.”

  “It’s probably your cavities, man.”

  “Huh?”

  “They’ve discovered a bunch of problems stemming from metalloid cavities. Do you have metalloid or ceramic cavities?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Let me look.” The nut looked in my mouth.

  “Metalloid! I don’t want to be an alarmist, but you might consider getting them replaced with ceramic.”

  “Okay.”

  “You want to sign for this? I got other stuff to deliver.”

  “Okay.”

  He put a pen in my hand; I wiggled it against a clipboard. He put down a parcel and left.

  I slept for an untold conspiracy of hours. By the afternoon, I had reached the shores of semi-consciousness. In an effort to arise, I fell to the floor. I stumbled to the bathroom, stepped on a cockroach, and peed in a series of short and confusing lines. I opened the parcel I had signed for in my dream state. It was a copy of a book, My Saber Is Bent by Jack Paar. There was a note inside: “It’s solved! Call me—Whitlock.”

  Without any interest in speculating what it could be, I called him. His secretary informed me that he had been waiting for me to call all day and she put me right through.

  “Is that you, Joey?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Joey.”

  “We’ve got it. Ready for this? Are you ready for it?” He was speaking too fast for a response: “How would you like a job that you can work whenever you like. It’ll make you oodles of money. You’ll enjoy it. You’ll be in control and you don’t have to say any mass or anything.”

  “Well, I…”

  “A stand-up comedian.”

  “A stand-up comedian?!”

  “I have a friend; he owns a very popular night club. He books comics. I can get him to give you a break.”

  “I don’t know the first thing about comedy.”

  “You’re a natural.”

  “I haven’t the foggiest notion of…”

  “Public speaking,” he cut me off, “specifically the art of amusing an audience, is essential to a winning personality.”

  “I depress people…”

  “Look, I’ll get you a ten-minute spot on one of his amateur nights. Read up on the topic. Nobody’ll expect a thing from you.”

  “I really don’t think so.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” he muttered. “I’ll give you recommendations and tell you exactly how to get a job that pays three times the wage you’re making now at the bookstore. You won’t have to see me again, and there’s a lot of down time.”

  “Down time? As what, a scuba diver?”

  “It’s a proofreading job.”

  “What’s down time?” I asked.

  “Time when you’re not working, but getting paid for it.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  “Did you get the book?” He ignored my question.

  “The Jack Paar book?”

  “Yeah, he’s my fave. Just learn some jokes and be yourself. You’ll knock ‘em dead, son. And remember, there are agents in the audience.”

  His secretary got on to fill me in on some background details. I was to meet Mr. Whitlock in seven days for an amateur night at what he referred to as a classy uptown nightclub called YUK!

  CHAPTER THREE

  HE WHO LAUGHS LAST

  THINKS SLOWEST

  I wrote a couple of jokes and tried practicing them in front of a mirror. I called Veronica and told her that Whitlock and I had bonded, and he was helping me with the under-developed parts of my life.

  “Did he reinstate your grant?”

  “No, but he is going to help me break into a new career.”

  “How?”

  “I’m going to do a stand-up comedy routine at a club in upper Manhattan called YUK!”

  “What?”

  “It sounds kind of weird, but it can lead to good money and, more importantly, I’m trying to get into his good graces.”

  “Where and when will this occur?”

  I told her when and gave her the address of the club and said that if she wanted to meet me there we could go on a date afterwards.

  “Listen,” she broke in, “you better be careful.”
/>   “Of what?”

  “Well, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but…” Her line went dead. When I called her back at work, the line was busy. I figured I’d see her at YUK!

  At the appointed time, I dressed well, popped a couple of muscle-relaxants and anti-depressants, and went to YUK! It turned out to be a filthy, stuffy, overpriced dump with the kind of audience that goes to Karaoke bars. When I decided that this wasn’t for me and turned to go, a very large-backed guy approached me.

  “You look lost,” he said.

  “I always look that way. I was just leaving.”

  “What? Did we offend you?” he replied, threateningly.

  I explained that I was a friend of Andrew Whitlock.

  “The philanthropist, sure. We was expecting you.” He put his shaggy arm around my bad back and walked me through the crowded audience, up a short, dark flight of steps. I thought he was taking me to Whitlock’s table until suddenly a spotlight came on, and I realized I was on a stage. Picking up the mike, he said, “Folks, a loud round of applause for the comical investigations of Joseph Aeiou!” He then left me alone there. They started applauding for no reason at all.

  I nervously recited a joke, “Why are Jews such rough lovers? `Cause they’re not Gentile.”

  That joke was an insider for Veronica, but I didn’t see her. Others, mainly from the bar, moved over by the stage. I went through my short list of set-piece jokes. Soon the manager with the shaggy arm had to knot on an apron and assist the waitress. The audience seemed to be a homogeneous group of some kind. Were they the Elks? Maybe the Rotary Club? I didn’t recall any tour buses parked outside. After a punch line, I shielded my eyes from the spotlight and searched for Veronica. I couldn’t see her. I then searched for some common thread that might suggest the audience was unified. Were they all wearing Viking-horn hats? Maybe they were Oriental. Nothing was apparent.

  “I’m the only comic that impersonates a clitoris,” I said, and stuck out my tongue tip just a bit at the right side of my wet, sealed lips. Then I tilted the left side of my face down, so that my mouth was vertical. A staunch silence roared, but then I heard a single girlish giggle. It was the sound of nervous embarrassment for someone else—Veronica’s tender titter.

  Unintentionally, her laugh seemed to permit an onslaught of laughs and foot stomping. Noticing a clock on the far wall, I realized with utter relief that my ten minutes were up.

  “Thank you very much,” I said. As the houselights went up, I found a standing ovation before me.

  From nowhere, the manager was up on the stage alongside me, yelling into the mike, “What do you say we give our champ one more round!” All cheered.

  “I’m outta material,” I whispered to the manager, but he had dashed off, beyond hearing, back to servicing the tables. I was alone. The intermission had ended, and the spotlight had pinned me back onto the stage. Not knowing what else to do, I started feeling through my shirt pocket. I had purchased a magic card deck in the event that something like this might arise. I nervously undid the wrapper and realized that I had never bothered to learn the tricks. Spinning about-face, I started reading the instructions, ‘To operate the magic card deck…’

  Behind me, all the while, I could hear a steady seepage of laughter. After several minutes, the instructions were only getting more confusing, and even though the audience was still laughing, I was getting increasingly nervous. I finally tried slipping the instructions back into my pocket, but accidentally dropped them on the floor. There was no time to pick them up. I began yanking other things out, looking for something else to joke about. My wallet, matches, keys, loose change—all dropped to the floor. People kept laughing, but it was bad laughter. They were laughing at the wrong things.

  “What’s so funny about that?” I finally had to ask. All laughed again.

  “Look,” I finally admitted, “I’m not a comedian, I work in a bookstore.”

  “A bookstore!” someone responded. People were choking on laughter.

  “Yeah, a fucking bookstore. What’s wrong with that?” What’s wrong with that? I thought to myself. It was where life had led me. I was adopted and, like most everyone else, I was mistreated by emotionless parents. Cycles of grade school, high school, and college had done their work at building me up and grinding me down. Now all my self-esteem could buy was a part-time job organizing the forty-eight cent outdoor books at the Strand.

  I could sleep late in the mornings and attend school in the afternoons, and I’d work out theories in history: the trends and cycles, the machinations of conspiracies, the mathematics of economies, the depletion of the American spirit, the diffusion of the American dream…. “Sometimes, I’ll admit, at bored moments, when I’m daydreaming and shouldn’t be held strictly responsible for my thoughts, I find myself pretending I’m other people and…and…” Shrieks of laughter from the audience made me realize that I had unintentionally muttered aloud all these intimate thoughts. I froze. I could feel my eyes melting with tears.

  “That’s enough,” said the manager, who had climbed up onto the stage and was tugging at my sleeve.

  “They’ve no business! That’s my life they’re laughing at!”

  “Ah, son, they just want a laugh,” he replied. The laughs were now like waves nearing high tide. They receded only to hit back harder. I snatched a beer bottle and threw it into the laughs.

  “Hey,” the manager whispered, “I’m liable if you hurt someone. Now I want you off my stage!” Then, into the mike the asshole announced, “Our next performer…”

  Before he could finish his sentence, I shoved the manager off the stage into the tables below. Then, taking hold of the microphone and its stand in both hands, I swung it around once like a hammer-thrower and released it. Still the laughs washed in. I started screaming obscenities into the crowd. They kept laughing. Finally, I dropped to the floor in a seated position and buried my face between my knees and put my hands over my ears, closed my eyes, and wondered, what did I do to deserve this? Nothing! I had done nothing, and therefore nothing wrong. I lowered myself off the platform until I got caught on something. In fact, something was holding me.

  “What’s the idea of knocking me off the stage?” the gorilla manager asked, lifting me up by the belt of my pants. “You want it, it’s yours.” The manager tumbled me back onto the stage. I scrambled around to the stairs, but the manager raced around blocking my escape.

  “Help!” I yelled, shielding my eyes from the glare. “Someone notify the police! Veronica, help!”

  The laughs had taken charge. I could no longer see or hear her. I might as well have been standing on some desolate bridge. I just let go, collapsing into the dark pool of audience before me. I hit my head on something and just lay there.

  “It’s only stage blood,” I vaguely heard someone say. Hands suddenly reached out of the darkness, grabbing me, applauding, slapping me softly.

  “Give him air,” the manager said, inspecting the gash on my forehead. I counted to three, and then with a hop I pushed the manager aside, took to my feet, and rushed out the door.

  “Shit!” some guy screamed, and then chased me. Several people in the audience also pursued.

  I raced down Second Avenue. They were going to drag me back inside and throw me up again on that stage of fire. They wanted more laughs. I could feel a trail of wetness, blood trickling down my forehead.

  “They’re laughing at me! They’re laughing at me!” I yelled, but no passerby helped. They only dodged me. I finally raced down onto a subway platform. Holding my wound, I boarded a train, the number six, packed with disparate, desperate New Yorkers, underscoring the sad fact that although people can break up, places cannot. New York was doomed to be locked together into one unharmonious circle of woe. When I finally got home, having lost enough blood to fill a pail, my phone was ringing. I answered it. Someone on the other end was laughing.

  “Who is this? WHAT DO YOU WANT?!”

  “Whitlock,” he replied, “I saw your
performance. I’m very proud of you. I had no idea you had that kind of talent.”

  “YOU WERE THERE?” I yelled. “Why didn’t you help me? They tried to kill me.”

  “They loved you.”

  “They chased me!”

  “They were running you like the bulls in Pamplona. I bet if you do it again next year, they’ll make an annual event out of running you.”

  “I don’t like being run. My head’s bleeding.”

  “I’m giving you an extra five dollars for that. Who, by the way, is Veronica? At one point you yelled out, ‘Help, Veronica.’”

  “No one, just an expression I commonly employ in moments of despair.”

  “Oh, I’ve got good news.”

  “What?”

  “The manager has told me that he’ll book you again next week.”

  “No thanks. I’m never going to revisit that humiliation and pain.”

  “Actually, I have something else lined up as well.”

  “What?”

  “An A.M.”

  “Ante Meridian?”

  “Assistant Mortician in a funeral parlor in Brooklyn—Malio Funeral Home.”

  “No way.”

  “Think about it.”

  “It gets even more disgusting when I think about it.”

  “You might find a nice girl.”

  “Huh?”

  “A nice girl.” He paused, “You might meet a nice girl.”

  “What?”

  “You might find yourself alone with her in a room together.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Maybe, on second thought,” he said, “a younger girl, or…boy, if that’s what you’re into.”

  “Where would I meet these people?”

  “At the place of business.”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, clients.”

  “What?”

  “Meeting people. A little cold at first, a little strange, but you don’t worry about convention, do you?”

  “Huh?” I sensed that the patriarch had a couple of drinks in him.

  “They can’t really chat in their condition.”