“Maybe it was at another nightclub around town.”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. You seem much more familiar than that.” She bit her lower lip for a moment, as if deep in thought, then threw her hands in the air and said, “Oh well, maybe I’m just being crazy again. Are you performing later on tonight?”
“Yeah, I’ll be going on in about twenty minutes,” Danny said. “Maybe you’d like to join me for a drink afterwards.”
“Oh … I’m kind of with someone at the moment,” she said, gesturing toward her boyfriend, who kept throwing us hard looks.
“Bring him along,” Danny said. “Just as long as he doesn’t get in our way.”
The woman laughed. “Well, I’ll ask him, I guess.”
“Uh … so how’d you like my performance?” I said.
As if noticing me for the first time, she glanced at me briefly and said, “You were okay,” then turned back to Danny. “Do you perform here often?”
“At least once a week.”
“Well … maybe I’ll bump into you again sometime. Bye.” She gave us a little wave and returned to her seat just as Varner left the stage.
Danny sipped his wine with a big smirk on his face. I stared at him in shock. “What the fuck? How did you do that?” He pointed at the book, which I picked up off the bar and flipped through once again. “Does this teach you how to be the fucking Shadow or something?” I broke into my stereotypical black voice. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow do!”
“No, it teaches you how to tap into your inner potential.”
“What happened to you? A couple of days ago you were a total shut-in, now you’re a god damn self-help guru. What made you pick up this book in the first place?”
Danny balled his hand into a fist. “I have to learn how to play hardball if I’m going to go head to head with these studio execs.”
“What studio execs? What’re you talking about?”
“I just signed a two-year development deal with HBO. They’re going to try every trick in the book to cheat me, I know it. They think they can manipulate me like a puppet on a string, but they’ve got a big surprise coming.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute, you signed with HBO? When the hell did that happen?”
“Last week.”
“I didn’t even know you were in negotiations. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.” His voice suddenly took on a hard, brusque tone I’d never heard before—at least not from Danny. He wouldn’t look at me. He kept his eyes focused on the glass of wine.
“Okay, so you’re telling me now. That doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me before. Did you think I was going to get jealous or something? I’m happy for yo—”
Danny rose from the stool and stuck his index finger in my face. “Listen, I don’t need anyone riding my coattails,” he said. “I have to start getting serious, figure out what I’m going to do with my life. You think I want to live with my god damn father until I’m sixty? I’m tired of supporting his ass. I’m tired of playing these seedy little dives for pocket change. I need to make some real money, and I don’t need you and your idiotic platitudes getting in my way.” He lowered his finger, then glared at me with burning eyes. At last he broke eye contact and stormed past me, heading backstage.
I stared off into space, not knowing what to do. I’d never seen him like that. It was as if he’d been possessed by an alien being. I was aware of Marion not far away, piddling around with something, trying to act like she hadn’t heard the outburst. I just drank my beer, acting as if she weren’t acting.
I stuck around to see Danny perform. Something seemed different the moment he walked out on stage. He stuttered and mumbled his way through a twenty-minute set that was usually the most streamlined act in town. Strangely, no one in the audience seemed to dislike it; or rather, they reacted to it in the same lukewarm manner with which they had greeted my own performance. It was as if both the entertainer and entertained were following a conditioned script by rote, without enthusiasm, like an amputee trying to exercise a phantom arm.
I left in the middle of the applause, confused and depressed.
Back home I went to bed early, a terrible headache having bloomed beneath my skull right between the eyes. After taking a couple of aspirins I collapsed onto my mattress and stared at the blank TV screen across the room. I turned it on, just for the hell of it, and saw a news report about Israel and Palestine being on the brink of a nuclear war. I switched the channel and saw a newscaster standing in the middle of the street in South-Central, where a group of children had been shot to death while trying to walk to school. Little chalk outlines stained the crimson sidewalk. I switched the channel again, this time seeing a sermon by Pat Robertson warning the people of Florida that their state would soon be plagued by massive earthquakes if Disney World continued to endorse rampant hedonism and sodomy. Studying Robertson’s stone-face puss made me wonder how different the world would be if only people like him could have a good laugh just once in their life, just once. The TV made my headache even worse, so I shut it off and stared at the ceiling instead, welcoming the silence.
The phone rang a few seconds later. Danny was on the other end. “Sorry for what happened earlier,” he said. “I’ve been dealing with a lot of stress lately, what with these crazy contract negotiations and all. I don’t know what happened. I just went a little nuts.”
“That’s quite all right,” I said. “I know how it is.” I felt uncomfortable even talking about it. He still didn’t seem like the old Danny.
After a long, awkward moment of silence Danny said, “How would you like to work with me at Paste-Pot Pete’s tomorrow night? We’ll riff on whatever comes to mind, just like we used to at the Cyclops.”
“I’d love that.”
“We’ll go at 8:30, okay?”
“Sure … see you then.” I hung up, feeling a bit dizzy. Somehow I knew then that nothing was ever going to be the same again.
CHAPTER 3
Jimi Hendrix Meets Superman
(September 23, 2014)
I arrived an hour early at Paste-Pot Pete’s, a club on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood, in order to work out what Danny and I were going to do on stage that night. We’d teamed up dozens upon dozens of times before when the Cyclops (a comedy club/bookstore/wedding chapel) would host their “All Things Great and Stoopid” night every Sunday on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica.
Any other night I would’ve been comfortable hopping up on stage with Danny totally unprepared, certain that one of us would stumble onto something funny within seconds. Tonight I wasn’t so confident. I wanted to make sure that Danny wasn’t going to weird out on me again. Perhaps that would’ve made an interesting spectacle for the audience, but not for me. Unfortunately, Danny didn’t arrive backstage until a few minutes before we were supposed to go on. He was out of breath and his forehead was beaded with sweat.
“Where were you?” I said.
“Karen had to drop me off. We got held up in traffic.”
I glanced at my watch. “But we’re supposed to go on in—”
“I know, I know. Everything will be fine, trust me. It’ll be like The Muppets on 9/11 all over again.”
A reference to one of our oldest (and stoopidest) routines. I was surprised he even remembered it. “Well, do you have any ideas?”
“It hit me while we were in traffic. What if Jimi Hendrix met Superman?”
A smile broke out across my face. “That’s brilliant.” Endless possibilities began to bubble to the forefront of my skull.
At that moment the MC introduced us. While walking out on stage we decided I’d be Jimi and he’d be Superman. “Hey, Superman,” I said, “are you like … experienced, man?” “Boy, Jimi, am I ever! Play that groovy National Anthem again while I drop some of this Orange Sunshine.” “Hey, Supes baby, Lex Luthor and Braniac are, like, takin’ over the world.” “So what, man? Let ’em! We have
to allow them to create their own karma. I mean, what is good? What is evil? It’s yin and yang, man, it’s all yin and yang.” “Supes, you are one crazy mothafucka … for a white dude, that is.” “Groovy, Jimi. I can grok that shit, man. I mean, you’re the first darky I’ve ever seen in this part of Metropolis. In fact, you’re the first darky I’ve ever seen in my entire life.” “I bet there weren’t many of our kind allowed in Smallville, were there?” “Nope. Ma and Pa Kent would pretty much lynch ’em if they happened to sneak into town.” “That’s cool, man.” “In fact, now that I think about it, none of your kind were allowed on Krypton either. I remember Jor-El warning everybody, ‘Hey, we’ve gotta send all these darkies into the Phantom Zone or else Krypton’s gonna explode!’” “And, like, did it explode, man?” “Shit, yeah! And it’s all your fault, you dirty stinkin’ nappy headed—!” “Like, no, Superman, let me down! It’s that Orange Sunshine. It’s messing up your mind. Don’t throw me into the sunnnnnnnn!” We had Jimi fall back to Earth and land on Superman’s head, knocking him unconscious with the help of some kryptonite-laced cocaine. Jimi went through Superman’s tights looking for some cash, finding a piece of lint and a condom made of lead, then set Supes’s body on fire like a guitar and scampered off for Woodstock.
This skit ate up a good ten minutes. The audience reacted well to it. You could always expect the people at Paste-Pot Pete’s to have a sick twist of mind, which was right up my alley (a proclivity that seemed destined to keep me off The Tonight Show forever). We were doing really well until about ten minutes in, when Danny began to stutter and mumble just as he had the night before. He seemed confused, self-conscious, tongue-tied: everything Danny Oswald was not. His jokes fell flat, his impressions grew more and more incomprehensible. It was such a dramatic change that the audience seemed convinced he was doing it on purpose. I tried to save the day by coming up with a good punchline for each of his bad ones. It soon degenerated into some kind of mutated Martin & Lewis routine. The audience seemed to like it well enough, though. I was beginning to think they might laugh at anything we said. Were they all high or something? I didn’t know, I didn’t care. By the end of the set I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
I ended the show with some of my pat jokes (trying to avoid Danny’s lame attempts to step on my lines), then grabbed him by the back of the collar and dragged him off-stage where I ripped into him good.
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” I said. “Did Griffin slip you some fuckin’ ketamine or something? Did you hit your unfunny bone when you got out of bed this morning or did you just wake up and think, Boy, I wonder what it would feel like to completely humiliate Elliot today?”
Danny’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “What’re you talking about? We did great out there.”
“Yeah, at first we did, then you lost it!”
“You’re out of your mind.”
Danny tried to walk away from me. I grabbed him by the wrist and spun him around. “Listen, there’s something wrong. It’s like you’re lost in a cloud and I can’t reach you.”
Danny jerked his wrist out of my grasp. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe you’re the one who’s not funny, huh? Maybe you’re the one who’s losing it! They laughed at everything I said out there.”
“Because I was covering for you!”
“Hey, who has the development deal and who doesn’t?”
“Danny, you’re letting this thing go to your head. It’s just a development deal. It’s nothing. HBO will probably let it expire in two years without having done a damn thing for you. It’s hardly your ticket into Paradise.”
Danny waved me away and stormed out of the club through the back exit. The next act, a pianist who did boring political commentary set to music, stared at me strangely as he walked past me on his way onto the stage. I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I just stood there for awhile, staring at the wall, only half aware of the jaunty music behind me. I mulled over Danny’s words and wondered if he could be right. They had laughed at everything he’d said.
Was I the one who was losing it?
CHAPTER 4
The Attack of the Radioactive Mormons
(September 24, 2014)
That night my headaches returned. Once again I took two aspirins and nodded off to the nightly news. I saw footage of lightning-related wildfires in Florida, a Catholic priest attempting to perform an exorcism at the Capitol Building in D.C., the remains of a young black man who had been chained to the back of a truck by a couple of skinheads in God-fearing Texas and dragged across the pavement at high speeds until his head had been sheared off, dancing and cheering in the streets of Pakistan after the detonation of their latest (and vastly improved) hydrogen bomb.
Then I was in my old room at my parents’ house, sitting cross-legged on my bed. My dad was in his business suit. I think he’d just gotten home from work. His imposing figure filled the doorway as he pointed at me and yelled and yelled and yelled, ordering me to start getting “serious” about my life. “All you’re good at is mouthing off!” he said. “You think anyone’s going to pay you to be a smartass when you leave here?” Mom stood in the corner crying, pleading with him to stop. He ignored her, like he always did. I said nothing, hoping he would go away. I had just turned ten.
Then I was back at my elementary school, strolling across the lawn in front of a hallway of open school rooms, lost in boy-thoughts, savoring the precious few moments at “recess” during which I was allowed to finally think what I wanted instead of memorizing meaningless numbers and cold sentences written by dead men. The sun was bright and warm in the noon sky, not hot. No, not hot. Just right, in fact. The breeze caressed my skin. The smell of freshly mown grass filled my nostrils. The way the sunbeams bore down upon the red brick wall to my right, brightening it like gloss, remains vivid in my mind for some reason. Yeah, real fuckin’ idyllic.
That brief moment of reverie was shattered by the cry “Dog pile on Greeley!” somewhere behind me. I didn’t even stop to look over my shoulder. I knew what it meant. This happened to everybody from time to time, at least once during each semester. Some sort of weird group-think would take control of almost everybody on the playground. Somebody would shout out, “Dog pile on _______!” Fill in the blank, whoever the universe chose that day. And this person—could’ve been a boy, but could just as easily have been a girl—would try to run away. Without even thinking about it, an entire mass of kids would respond to the call by jumping on top of this person; the entire purpose was to crush the chosen individual beneath the largest mass of gyrating flesh possible. These savage outbursts would occur spontaneously, for no reason. It was just something that always happened; you could never know when to expect it. Today was my turn to run. I wasn’t fast enough, of course—nobody ever was.
Dozens upon dozens of boys from the playground leaped on top of me, pinning me to the grass, crushing my head against the ground, bending my right pinky back so sharply it snapped. Intense pain seared my brain like a firebrand, imprinting that moment—that overwhelming feeling of helplessness, of suffocation, of being pursued by faceless enemies I could never know because I would never have the time to look behind me—into my nervous system forever. Yes, imprinting all of this and one other thing: As I pulled myself inch by inch out of that pile of gyrating prepubescent male flesh, I kept yelling, “Get off me, get off me!” My finger hung limply from my hand. Tears poured out of my eyes. I glanced to my right and saw two teachers and an aide wander out of their classrooms to see what all the commotion was about. I thought, Thank God, they’re going to get me out of this mess. Instead they stood there and watched. I even remember locking eyes with one of them, a lanky red-head with pale freckled skin whose name was Mrs. Love of all things, but she just looked away and did nothing. What was the name of the other teacher? He was well over fifty, balding, thin, wore cowboy boots and loved to talk about fishing. A Math teacher. Ah yes, Mr. Taylor. Like Mrs. Love, Taylor looked away and did … nothing. The aid
e’s name has faded into the past, obscured by the pain, but she was forty-something, dumpy, destined only to get dumpier as age dragged her screaming into a well-deserved grave, a dishwater blonde with K-Mart make-up and clothes to match. This nameless woman looked away and did … nothing. Did nothing as I cried from the burning pain and dragged myself out of the pile. While inching my way out from under the kids, screaming at them to get the hell off, I felt a hand wrapping around my left wrist in an attempt to pull me free; this lasted just for a second, but it allowed me enough leeway to do the rest of the job on my own. This person was another child, I’m sure of it, but I would never know who. My friends, it seems, were as faceless as my enemies. I scrambled to my feet, trying to run as far as I could before they caught up to me again. After running for only a few seconds, however, I stopped. I stopped because I realized that no one was chasing me. If you’ve been expecting a punchline, you won’t be disappointed. Here it comes: Near the entrance to a nearby hallway I glanced over my shoulder and saw that pile of boy-flesh still humping the earth as enthusiastically as before. They didn’t even know I was gone. They didn’t even know I was gone. I wiped the tears from my face with the back of my forearm, swearing never to cry again, never to show a hint of weakness to anybody. I didn’t even go to the nurse to tend to my finger. No, I went right back to class after recess and interrupted Mrs. Love’s lecture to ridicule her into less than nothing; I had reserved my hatred not for the kids who had attacked me, but for those in authority who had stood by and done nothing. My impersonation of her reduced the class—most of whom had been crushing me only minutes before—into paroxysms of laughter. I was now a hero, at least for a brief period of time. After an hour of this I was physically dragged to the Principal’s office, where someone at last remarked, “Gee, that boy’s finger doesn’t look quite right, does it?” No one was sued for this oversight. Believe it or not there are fates worse than lawsuits, for I attacked those teachers verbally every hour of every school day until they had to send me to a therapist to cure my most peculiar “attitude problem.” I’m not certain of this, but I don’t think they succeeded.
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 4