God, she was a terror. The weirdest thing about her? The mom? She was born with no fuckin’ vagina. This is true. She didn’t get one until after she was married. The doctors had to scoop one out with a fuckin’ Baskin and Robbins utensil when she was eighteen or somethin’. Even more strange is the fact that her husband Phil knew all this and married her anyway. Imagine marrying a psychotic Barbie doll. The worst of both worlds—all nagging, no shagging.
Her parents hated me. First they were scared I was gonna get her pregnant, then they blamed me when she turned bi-sexual on ’em. Can you believe that? Mom’s got no fuckin’ vagina, so they adopt this kid, she hits puberty, decides she likes rubbing fuzzies with the chick down the street, and it’s my fault? “You’re a bad influence. You turned my daughter into a lesbian.” Right. House, M.D. had to slit you open with a shoehorn and you’re questioning my sexuality? I told ’em, Go find a kid with no cunt if you’re so concerned. I’m sure there must be some floatin’ around out there. Just flip through the back of the L.A. Weekly. Special pregnancy-free children. No assembly required. No freakin’ maintenance.
Where the fuck was I? Oh, yeah! So her mom answers the phone and goes, “Hello?”
Now, at this point I’m in a panic because I’m almost dead and I’ve lost all capacity for speech. So I think I said something like, “Hhhhrrrmmmmhuher!”
Her mom goes, “Oh, just a minute. Tina! It’s Elliot!” Five or ten or sixteen minutes go by. Finally Tina answers the phone: “Hello?”
“Hhhhrrrmmmmhuher!”
“What? You’ve taken a hun dred pills?”
“Hhhhrrm!”
“A hundred and one pills? Oh my God! Just stay there. I’ll call for help.” She hangs up, runs around the room twelve times fast in a circle, stops, and goes, “AAAAAAAA!”
Her mom peeks into the room. “What’s wrong, dear?”
“Hhhhrrrmmmhuher!”
“What? Elliot’s taken a hun dred pills?”
“Hhhrrrm!”
“He’s taken a hundred and one pills? Oh my God!”
So they manage to call the paramedics. The ambulance arrives at my house driven by the Keystone Kops. Yeah. This is true. Harpo Marx is on the roof playing with the siren, Woody Allen’s in the back, fretting. It’s crazy. It’s a real party.
So we make it to the hospital where they pull my stomach out through my mouth and wring it out like a dish towel until there’s not a trace of poison left inside. They even manage to find an old sock monkey I’d been searching for for a long time. Eventually someone decides to notify my parents, right? My father strolls into the hospital room in this business suit, this briefcase dangling from his hand. He goes [sighing]: “Okay … what have you done now?” I’m thinking, “Boy, Dad, inspire the will to live.”
A few months later Tina leaves me for this cheerleader, my mom dies of brain cancer, and my dad orders me to go to work to pay for the hospital bills. The last I heard Tina’s mother was renting out her artificial vagina to pick up some extra cash. I guess you can do whatever the hell you want with it as long as you bring it back in the shape you found it. And, uh, I became a comedian, of course. But other than that everything turned out fine. I mean, I haven’t tried to kill myself again in the past … three hours or so. So what’s new with you?
When I was in high school I tried to kill myself. I was depressed, y’see, so my parents sent me to a therapist because they were afraid. The therapist didn’t do shit. He sat there and stared at me, scribbling shit down in his notebook, while I talked and talked and talked. Just like I’m doing now. Nothing ever got accomplished. Every time I left that office, I was more depressed than when I came in.
One time the two of us debated the various drawbacks and virtues of suicide. He quoted G. K. Chesterton at me: “Suicide is the last gasp of a narcissist.” I quoted James Branch Cabell back at him: “The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.” He didn’t know what to say to that one. He had a lot of degrees hanging on his wall, but he didn’t know crap about human beings.
So, anyway, I wanted to stop seeing the son of a bitch, y’know? My parents wouldn’t let me. They forced me to go. Twice a week, for three years. By the time I was eighteen I couldn’t stand it anymore. The bastard was so depressing, I just decided to end it all.
I went into my room, turned on the television—maybe The Simpsons? I don’t know. I poured out all the pills my therapist had given me to “cure” my depression. All they’d done was make it fuckin’ worse, y’know? So I figured I’d give those little blue fuckers the chance to end my funk. Forever.
I drank them all down with fruit juice. What was I thinking? Was I trying to be fuckin’ healthy? It doesn’t make any sense, I know. I’m just tellin’ you what happened, okay?
I just sat there thinkin’ about the Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons. The Coyote never falls until he looks down, right? You know. You know what I mean. That’s what I did. I looked down. I looked down and saw the endless pit of cold hellish darkness I knew I’d sink into if I let myself fall asleep right then and there. So I called my girlfriend. Her name was Tina. She wasn’t much to look at, she’d cheated on me about five dozen times, but what the hell. She said she loved me. Why not believe it? Hell, what was the alternative?
Well … the pills, I guess. But they were turning out not to be too much of an alternative. I guess I drank way too much fruit juice. Twenty-two ounces of Prune Juice Medley can wreak havoc with your digestive system, particularly when you mix it with pharmaceutical grade speed. I called Tina, and her mom answered the phone. I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I couldn’t understand anything. I couldn’t talk. I remember crying, wanting somebody to erase the past hour, but that was impossible. I was lying flat on the floor, trying to mumble into the receiver … but it seemed to be crawling away from me. The whole damn world seemed to be crawling away from me.
I woke up in the hospital, two fat nurses hovering over me, forcing liquid charcoal down my esophagus. I gagged and threw up tar three or four times. Then they shoved these white plastic tubes down there and pumped my stomach. Imagine half of a vacuum being lodged way way down into the middle of your fuckin’ chest and you can’t spit it up, no matter how hard you try. I felt claustrophobic, like the walls of the whole damn world were closing in on me. I wanted to die again … just as long as the pain would stop right then and there. Just stop. Please … just stop.
It didn’t. I was awake for the whole ordeal, and I was still awake hours later when my father came into my hospital room and cussed me out so loud the nurse had to drag him away. He called me a faggot and said I wasn’t fit to be his son. My mother just patted him on the shoulder and quietly asked him to forgive me. “Be like the Jesus,” she’d say to him, “be like the Jesus.”
I had to share a room with a girl who was recovering from a heroin overdose. She was just a couple of years older than me. I remember having a fantasy of us falling in love with each other. We never spoke to each other. She never even noticed me. She just kept staring at the corner of the ceiling, mumbling jingles from old commercials. I tried to join in at one point, when I recognized one, but she acted as if I wasn’t even there. I was a ghost to her, beneath her notice. I think I fell in love with that girl; I never even knew her name. I wonder if she’s still alive now.
Tina managed to visit me once, with some pimply-faced dude in tow. He became her new boyfriend a couple of weeks after I was let out of the hospital. She broke up with me on the same day I had to go back to my therapist and tell him why I tried to commit suicide. And I told him. I told him it was the last gasp of a narcissist… . So what’s new with you?
“So what’s new with you?” The cassette’s last sentence hung out there in the silence. I had timed it perfectly. The taped story came to an end at the exact moment that I put down the microphone and stared at the audience. I held that stare for a while, said nothing else, then placed the microphone gent
ly on the stool and strolled off into the wings.
Later, I came out again and took the exact opposite approach, launching into mainstream mode. You know, routines with real jokes in them. Imagine that. I proceeded to riff with the audience, now and then weaving in my set jokes. I got a good reaction that night, but not a great reaction. I sensed a strange lack of enthusiasm on the part of the audience, as if some of them were just going through the motions. I wondered if I’d unbalanced them too much with that first act. I found that a little hard to believe. I mean, this was a real cutting-edge dive. Usually the people in the audience were total freaks. They liked stuff that was off the wall. Tonight, I had no idea what they liked.
You rarely get sympathetic laughter in standup comedy, no matter where you are. If they think you’re funny they laugh, and if they think otherwise they let you know very quickly. To encounter this unreadable flat affect in the faces of some of the audience members was disturbing. At one point I even tried to make a joke about it, wondering aloud if a group of tourists had been bussed in from the Village of the Damned expressly to catch my act. They didn’t seem to catch the reference. Obscure pop culture references are always hit and miss anyway, so I just shrugged it off—or tried to.
After I finished my set I headed backstage, feeling like a G.I. who’d been under siege all night by Viet Cong snipers, emerging from the rice paddies at dawn to make his way back to base in order to tell the tale to his friends. I heard Ivan, the owner, call my name. He patted me on the back and said, “You did a great job out there, man. Bizarre, but great.”
“Yeah, I thought so. But didn’t you notice something weird about the audience?”
Ivan bit his lower lip, pulled his long brown hair back into a ponytail. What with his bushy moustache and beard, his unkempt sideburns, and his tye-dye shirt, he looked like he’d just stepped out of a PBS documentary about Haight-Ashbury. He was an aging hippie, though you wouldn’t know it from his fat bank account. He owned a number of nightclubs around town, but Prospero’s was his main love. As a former standup comedian himself, he’d taken up the crusade of saving experimental comedy from total extinction.
“Now that you mention it,” he said, “the clientele’s been dipping off lately. People who usually come in at least once a week never come in at all anymore. And the ones who do come in seem … I don’t know, different somehow.”
“What do you mean different?”
Ivan shrugged. “I don’t know, not quite as hyped up as they usually are. You know. This place is usually hoppin’ with the hippest dudes in town. But lately, I don’t know … instead of artists and writers and actors, we seem to be attracting accountants and bank tellers. Real fuckin’ squares.”
“Where are they all coming from?”
“No, man, I don’t mean we’re getting actual accountants and bank tellers, I mean the artists and the writers and the actors are all behaving like accountants and bank tellers. They’ve turned into real stiffs. It’s like The Walking Dead out there some nights. Hardly anyone ignores the no-smoking ban anymore. That’s a load of worry off my shoulders, of course, but still … it’s kind of depressing. I thought Southern California was the last bastion of rebellion. Instead they’re all rollin’ over like Ted Cruz at a hog callin’ contest. What with all the pollution that’s pumped into the sky from all the fancy foreign cars cloggin’ up all the freeways, what the hell do they care what we suck into our lungs in our own free time?”
“It’s not pollution that’s the problem,” I said, “it’s cow farts.”
Ivan tilted his head and just stared at me for a second. “What the fuck’re you smokin’, man?”
“Nothing, nothing. Listen, I’m gonna head on over to the bar, okay?”
“Fine, have whatever you want. Uh, say, that Ted Cruz simile was pretty good, wasn’t it? Maybe you can use that in your act.”
“Maybe. Catch you later, Ivan.” I patted him on his bony shoulder and made a bee-line for the bar. I was surprised to find Danny sitting on one of the stools, knocking back a glass of red wine. I’d never seen him drinking anything other than beer. “What the hell?” I said, sliding onto the stool beside him. “Did the beer tap run dry or something?”
Danny launched into his dead-on Bela Lugosi impersonation. “I don’t drink … wine.” He broke character. “Oh, well. I guess I can’t use that line anymore, can I?” He took a sip from the glass.
I gestured for Marion, the bartender, to get me a glass of beer. Marion was a beautiful redhead in her early twenties, possibly the last person on Earth a depressed guy wanted to look at while he was getting smashed. Someone should pass a law that all bartenders can only be old burly guys with nicknames like “Bull” or “Popeye.”
“So why the sudden wine fetish?” I said.
Danny shrugged. “Karen introduced me to its subtle, refined qualities. It’s good for the heart, you know.”
It took a few moments to figure out who Karen was. “Hey, you mean Griffin? Since when did she become Karen?”
“Since Friday night.”
“Oh my God.” I lowered my head into my hands. “I can’t believe it. This is impossible. On the first date?” Danny nodded. “Incredible, just incredible.” Marion placed a glass of beer in front of me. I downed two large gulps, then wiped the foam from my lips with the back of my forearm. My usual table manners were the first casualty of my shock. “How did you manage it?”
Danny snapped his fingers. “It was as easy as 3.141.”
The image of Griffin’s spiked hair rolling around on a bed as she sucked on Danny’s face was difficult to eject from my mind long enough to hold a rational conversation with him. I grabbed his forearm. “Please. You’ve got to give me all the details.”
He shook his head. “I respect her too much for that.”
I dismissed his comment with a wave of my hand. “You didn’t get anywhere with her.”
He shrugged. He didn’t care whether I believed him or not. That convinced me all the more. I grabbed his wrist and squeezed it in desperation. “Please, you have to tell me how you did it.”
He took another sip of wine, then said, “Mirroring.”
“Excuse me?”
“A technique of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.”
It was like he’d suddenly begun speaking another language. “What the hell’re you talking about?”
He leaned close to me and said, “I’ve been reading this book that these former Pentagon guys wrote that tells you how to deal with people in the business world.”
“What is this, some hypnosis book?”
Danny shook his head again and reached into his inside jacket pocket. He pulled out a small mass market paperback entitled The Warrior’s Edge, the cover of which depicted a man in a business suit cocking back a bow and arrow. The suit looked just like the one my father wore to the hospital when I was eighteen.
“It’s amazing,” Danny said. “You can get people to do what you want just by mirroring their body movements.”
I took the book from him and flipped through it. “So did you see the advertisement for this in the back of an old comic book between the sea monkey ads and the trick shaving foam?”
“I’m telling you it works.” He glanced around the room, then pointed at a hot blonde chick who was sitting at a small table with some young surfer dude, probably her boyfriend. They were both laughing at the comedian on stage, a guy named Jack Varner who was doing a routine about radioactive Mormons in Utah. “I bet I can get that blonde to come over here by the time Jack’s done with his set without me saying a word.”
“Oh, you’ll use semaphore or something.”
He held his hand in the air like a boy scout. “I promise not to attract her attention in any way.”
“You’re on. What’re we betting?”
“If I lose I have to spill the beans about what happened between me and Karen on Friday night.”
“Perfect. And if I lose?”
Danny shrugged. “You have to buy m
e a beer at Ye Rustic Inn sometime.”
I slapped my hand on the table top. “Which I probably would’ve done anyway! It’s almost a win-win situation for me.” I brushed my hands together eagerly. “Oh, I can’t wait to hear those sordid little details. Maybe I’ll work ’em into my act.”
“You have my permission to do so. Now shh. This takes some concentration.” Danny turned sideways on his stool as if he were watching Varner’s performance, but out of the corner of his eye he was observing the blonde, studying her every movement. Slowly, he began to position his body in such a way that it was an exact mirror-image of her own. Whenever she changed position, he changed position as well. At some point Danny even seemed to have altered his breathing patterns to match hers. Sometimes it seemed as if the blonde had unconsciously begun to mimic Danny’s gestures, but I knew that was impossible. As Varner’s performance continued I noticed the blonde glancing over at us every few minutes or so, staring at Danny with a puzzled look on her face. I checked my watch. It was almost nine p.m. I knew Varner would be done within a few minutes. My initial skepticism had given way to nervous apprehension. Silently I urged Varner to hurry up and be done with it.
Just as Varner launched into his big finale, an amazing impression of Vladimir Putin doing whip-its during a G8 conference, the blonde glanced over at us one last time, whispered something to her boyfriend, then got up from her chair and began walking toward us.
Oh my God, I can’t believe this, I thought.
She sauntered right up to Danny and said, “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“Well, I’ve performed here quite a bit,” Danny said. “Perhaps you’ve seen me on stage.”
“Oh, are you a comedian?” she asked, smiling, obviously very impressed.
Danny shrugged as if it were no big deal. “Oh, yeah… .”
The woman frowned. “But this is the first time I’ve ever been here. I couldn’t have seen you on stage.”
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 3