by Michael Ryan
I invited them all to move to tables close to the stage, which many people won’t do because they’re afraid the comic is going to mock them. I asked for volunteers to tell me their professions. Nobody raised his hand. I told them not to feel self-conscious since they could see by the standing-room-only crowd that I may not have made the best career choice myself. Still nobody raised his hand. I said, “What am I going to say? Oh, you’re a trauma surgeon. Well, fuck you.” Then they laughed and opened up and we had a good time. I told them about the cartoon of the retired guy with three days’ growth of beard reading a book in bed entitled How To Get Up And Get Dressed. The lonely guys thought that one was very funny.
The truth is, the audience is a lot funnier than any comedian. The more the audience is packed together the easier for them to laugh. Their laughter becomes infectious. They become a single organism. That’s what’s fun. The challenge for me was to make White American Middle Class Thirty-something Guy Behavior at the End of the Twentieth Century sufficiently specific to be both recognizable and ridiculous: moral mastodons limping into extinction, our hypocrisies and habits in tatters and exposed like Nineteenth-Century British colonialists dressing for high tea in the jungles of Africa—or like me on my treadmill running to endless relationship workshops with Doris and driving my Z hoping to score with the babes.
I told them about Angela, sort of. I told them I had spent a night with a woman who left the next morning before I woke up. I tried to call her, but she had given me a false name. Do you think she was trying to communicate something? A certain limit on our relationship? A certain reservation about our future? I said I had been out of the dating scene for so long maybe the protocol had changed. Maybe it had all become speed dating: one minute for talk, one minute for sex, and zero minutes to break up. Actually I thought that was a great idea. If all my relationships were compressed like that, I could date every woman on the planet. Maybe I could even find someone who would give me her real name.
There’s only one show a night in midweek gigs, Tuesday-Thursday: on at eight, out by ten. I was back at the Laguna Hotel by eleven. Don’s message was waiting for me at the front desk. I picked it up and read it:
No brother. Will call you Friday.
That was it, six words scribbled by the front desk clerk on a Laguna Hotel notepad. I took the elevator to my room, walked in, and sat down in a chair facing the ocean. Spotlights from the hotel roof illuminated the sand and rocks and crashing surf, black shattered into ethereal foamy whiteness. I was right. Sheed had lied. And if there wasn’t any brother, then there wasn’t any kidnapping and there wasn’t any ransom. The 200 grand in Angela’s purse must have been for some other purpose, a purpose that, for whatever reason, Sheed didn’t want me to know. Why? What was the money for? There was no sense trying to guess. I might never find out what Angela Chase was doing with that money or with me, or even if Angela Chase was her real name. Maybe she had stolen the name of a dead person, or Sheed had, or she would suddenly appear at my hotel room wearing a crotchless Donald Duck outfit and smoking a Cuban cigar.
What do I do now? I asked myself. I did what I always do. I called my answering machine. There was one message:
Mr. Wilder. Folsom Sheed calling. I’d be happy to meet with you at your convenience. Please call Tori and make an appointment.
Click. Beep. Beep beep beep. The end.
All right, I thought. What’s behind that? I have never been able to figure out other people’s hidden motivations, my own always being embarrassingly obvious. Sheed’s willingness to meet with me might be just his slick way to string me along. But I couldn’t be sure of that either, could I? Since he knew I knew he had lied, maybe he was afraid of what I might do, although I myself had no idea what that could be. Maybe I should be afraid of what he might do.
I took a deep breath and remembered Mr. Hanh telling me I was too hungry, that my hunger wasn’t mine but I was its. I had gone to see Sheed in the first place not to find out anything about Sabine aka Angela, but to find out if I was an accessory to a bank robbery. I thought I needed a lawyer. I came out of his office enthralled with someone named Angela Chase who had risked her life to save her brother. But Angela was no more real than Sabine. She was nothing but my hunger, a fantasy creation, myself in the mirror. Don was right. Mr. Hanh was right. People put themselves in each other’s power when they have sex together. This is what had happened to me.
My poor-me victim story served the good purpose of releasing me from obsessing about Angela for a couple of days. It was in any case pretty hard to obsess about anything in Laguna Beach, with the air at skin temperature and the ocean as background music. The world felt benign and seamless, as if it actually were made for humans to live in, despite the economic brutalities such lily-white upper-class paradise islands are built upon. Maybe I should move here and have weekly high colonics and eat nothing but organic root vegetables. I spent Wednesday and Thursday wandering around the town and taking long walks on the beach dissecting my routine, playing it over in my mind, changing it, moving this here and that there. Everybody I walked past seemed at ease, in contrast to LA—nobody acted like they were about to steal your wallet or you were about to steal theirs. It would be eerie to live here, and I’m sure there was plenty else going on underneath this surface, but it was perfect for me now to soak up the quintessential Southern California sun until I calmed down. The only one I missed was Sparky.
The 405 after the Thursday night show was like driving back from Baja: clear and clean, a straight shot, with the great jazz station out of Long Beach on my pumped Bose stereo (standard equipment in the Z). It put me in a good mood, the best I had been in since my Angela adventure. I might have a career again. The audience at the Irvine Improv wasn’t much bigger on Wednesday than on Tuesday, but on Thursday the retired double-dating couples brought in a whole minibusful from Leisure World. Since they had all probably seen Psycho when it came out in 1960. I did my three-minute rendition of the movie complete with my screeching violin imitation when Norman Bates pulls back the shower curtain dressed in his dead mother’s hair bun. Happily I had brought along my gray hair bun, lace collar, and two-foot cardboard knife. They loved it. They yelled out other Hitchcock movies and I did them too. I hadn’t performed this routine in years but it was all still there. I couldn’t remember the last time I played to an audience who had even heard of Cary Grant, much less Tippi Hedren trying to swat the birds out of her bouffant. Maybe I could specialize in wealthy retirement communities. I might become AARP’s Comedian of the Year. I felt renewed and purposeful. Maybe I wouldn’t even call Sheed. What was the hook there? Angela? The hell with Angela. The hell with women. I’d burn the pure flame. I’d sign the HBO contract, I’d take Charles’s gig at the Apollo, I’d find a new agent. It’s all lieben und arbeiten, according to Freud: love and work, the best things in life. Screw lieben, up with arbeiten.
Even at the time, I suspected these ideas were chemically induced by the adrenaline megadose of a good performance. Having hopped into the Z right after the show, I hadn’t come down during the fifty-minute trafficless drive from Irvine to Santa Monica. I was sailing when I pulled into my driveway. My life was going to be entirely different. Watch out world, here comes Robert Wilder! It was about midnight. I popped the hatchback, grabbed my suitcase, and rolled it behind me up to my door.
The door was open, about three inches. I thought, Krista. Oh well, here we go again. Back to reality. The lights were out and it was dark. I pushed the door open, stepped inside, and flipped the lights on. There she was all right, sitting at my desk with her back to me, wearing a black robe and head scarf (a real one, not my underwear)—full orthodox Islamic regalia. She had clearly lost it completely.
“My God, Krista,” I said. “Now what?”
She swiveled around in my desk chair like Mrs. Bates’s skeleton, her black eyes above her veil crinkled in amusement. I’d recognize those eyes blindfolded. They weren’t Krista’s.
“Hello, R
obert,” Angela said. She detached the veil, revealing that preternatural mouth of hers arranged in her signature lopsided grin. Why did she have to be so gorgeous? Her beauty made me angry.
“I don’t believe it,” I said to myself, aloud. What chutzpah. I sat down across the room in my recliner and stared fiercely at her.
“You may be wondering why I’m wearing the hijab,” she said.
“I don’t care if you’re wearing a tutu and antlers,” I said. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Well, here I am. Talk.”
“I need you to leave with me. Right now.”
“What? Where?”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you.”
“Ha. Ha,” I said. But I couldn’t keep myself from smiling. “If you don’t mind, I’ll do the jokes.”
“I wish it were a joke. I can’t tell you where I’m going until you go with me. If you don’t go with me you’ll be dead before morning.”
“Are you fucking crazy? Go with you? When I last saw you your name was Sabine and you worked in a bank. I haven’t heard from you since your amusing departure from our blissful honeymoon suite. Your pal Folsom Sheed made up some bullshit story about your brother being kidnapped when you don’t even have a brother. I have no idea if your name is actually Angela Chase or Daisy Duck. I have no idea why you got me to drive you and your money to Mexico, but it probably wasn’t for you to donate it to charity and work in a leper colony. Now you appear in my apartment sitting in my desk chair in the dark dressed like a Muslim. Oh sure, I’d be happy to go with you. I know a nice cliff we can drive over together.”
“Of course,” Angela said. “I realize you weren’t exactly expecting a visit quite like this, much less the news that your life’s in danger. And why would you trust me? Don’t you think I knew you wouldn’t? But I’m telling you the truth.”
“You are a comedian. I love the straight delivery. Not to mention the Muslim thing. It really works.”
She just looked at me sadly.
“I’m sorry I hurt you, okay? But I didn’t get you killed. Yet. At the risk of repeating myself, there are elite operatives tracking me right now. They know you drove me to Mexico and they may have been here already looking for you and they will not be nice to you if they find you. They could be five hours away or five minutes. But we don’t have time to argue about it.”
“But I couldn’t tell them anything. I don’t know anything about you.”
“Unfortunately, they wouldn’t buy that.”
I stood up from my recliner, and looked out the window as if to espy the “elite operatives” hiding in the bushes. As if I could have done anything but whimper if I actually saw them.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said, sitting down again. “Is this what you do to all your dates?”
“I don’t have ‘dates,’ ” she answered. “Look, what possible motive could I have for coming here but to save your life? I know perfectly well you couldn’t tell them anything that would lead them to me. Think about it for one second. Give me one good reason why I’m trying to get you out of here.”
She had me there.
“Well?” she said.
“I don’t know now, but I’m afraid I’ll find out later.”
“You don’t have to trust me,” she said. “You just have to believe me.”
Bizarrely, I did. I don’t know why but I knew she was telling the truth. Weirdly—like when I wrote the note to Sheed. Why not go with her? What if she were actually telling the truth? I certainly had more to lose not going than going. My life, for example. I knew she wouldn’t kill me, but the ninjas with their automatic pistols surrounding my apartment appeared in my mind and I started shaking.
“I must be crazy even to consider this.”
“You won’t regret it. I promise.”
I looked hard at her. She didn’t flinch. Either she was telling the truth, or she was the best liar who has ever lived.
“One more question,” I said. “Did you read Sheed’s report about you?”
“I wrote it.”
“How much of it was true?”
“UCLA, Paris, my parents. My name is Angela Chase. The rest is fiction. With a lot left out.”
“Good story,” I said. “You ought to write novels.”
“Let’s go,” she said. “You can bring your suitcase.”
15.
I rolled my suitcase out to the car, popped the hatchback, and threw it in (ten minutes after I had taken it out), still stuffed with my dirty underwear, the gamy shirts I had performed in, and Norman Bates’s gray hair bun, lace collar, and two-foot cardboard knife. Good, I thought, I might need a weapon. And my cardboard knife was surely as effective against “elite operatives” as any high-tech pistol I had no idea how to use, except possibly to blow my dick off—which, had I had the good sense to perform before I met Angela, would have kept me from being in this lunatic situation in the first place.
Angela was quite jolly when I got in to the car. She was clearly one of those people who become calm and focused in dangerous circumstances—SWAT cops, ER nurses, mercenaries who reportedly enjoy battle—very much unlike me. I hadn’t stopped shaking since I pictured the ninjas surrounding my apartment. For all I knew, they had their missile launcher aimed at my car or it would blow up when I turned the ignition. But no way was I letting Angela see I was scared.
“Ah, the Z,” Angela said, as if relaxing into a warm bath. “I had forgotten the scent of pure testosterone.”
“Would you mind telling me where I’m driving? Or would you rather I intuit it?” I asked, backing out of the driveway.
“Santa Monica Airport. ‘Would you rather intuit it?’: isn’t that what I asked you when you drove me to Malibu?”
“I never forget a joke,” I said. “Just everything else. Like how to get to Santa Monica Airport.”
“Down Ocean up Pico. Twenty-Third Street and across. It’s only a couple miles from here. Haven’t you ever been there?”
“Why would I go there? No commercial flights, only private jets.”
“Correct.”
“We’re flying somewhere, in a private jet.”
“Correct.”
“My prospects are improving already,” I said.
“The jet is probably standard government issue. We’ll be lucky if it has a rubber-band propeller.”
“So we’re on a government mission?” I asked.
“Sort of. Enough questions. We’re not flying anywhere unless we get to the airport alive.”
I checked the rearview mirrors to see if we were being followed. Nothing. This was fortunate, since I somehow missed the High Speed Evasive Maneuvers unit in high school driver’s ed. I also failed to choose the armor-plate and bulletproof windows option when I bought my Z. The streets were empty and we hit all the lights on Ocean Avenue green. The homeless people in the long skinny park fronting the Pacific were bedded down in clumps, orange and olive sleeping bags and trash bags full of clothes and all their worldly belongings clustered together so they wouldn’t be robbed or worse during the night. Santa Monica is actually a sleepy town. If anybody goes out after midnight, they go to Hollywood or somewhere else. We’d arrive at the airport in five minutes.
“So that’s a lovely outfit you’re wearing this evening,” I said to Angela, referring to her hijab (black ankle-length robe, black head scarf, black veil revealing only her eyes). “My Nice Guys Dating Manual said that’s what I’m supposed to say first thing on a date. Oh, I forgot, you don’t have ‘dates.’ ”
“You ever try to pee in one of these things in an airplane bathroom?” Angela asked. “Oh, I forgot, you’re a guy.”
“I often forget I’m a guy too,” I said. “I haven’t been in a high-speed chase for weeks. I’m also not a Muslim, as far as I know. So what’s the deal with the getup?”
“Harder to see in the dark, for one thing. Did you spot that black Mercedes?”
; “What black Mercedes?” I yelled. I almost went through the moon roof.
“It was parked. Its lights flicked on as we passed it. Anything behind you?”
“Nothing,” I said, frantically checking the mirrors.
“All right, watch out. If there’re two cars, one will signal the car ahead to block the road.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“Take a left down this alley and a right on Twenty-Fourth. Then right down the next alley and left onto Twenty-Third again.”
She was as serene as Saint Theresa instructing a novitiate. I did what she said and, after a few terrifying blocks of racing up and down alleys and scanning intersections for ambushes, we were almost at the airport. I could see it ahead of us. Nobody followed us. Nobody rammed us and machine-gunned our car. Did Angela invent the black Mercedes to go with the ninjas in their black bodysuits? Was she making up the whole story? I had to remind myself that I believed her. She certainly could have seen a black Mercedes I hadn’t noticed. Half the cars in Santa Monica are Mercedeses.
“Which gate?” I asked her.
“Any gate,” she said. “They know me. They’ll want to see your driver’s license.”
“What do I do with my car?”
“You’ll have to burn it,” Angela said.
“What? Are you kidding?”
She put her hand on my forearm—the first touch since Mexico. I wished it didn’t feel so good.
“Yes, Robert,” she said sweetly. “I am kidding. You give your car to the valet and he gives you a little yellow ticket stub. You put the ticket stub in your wallet. You give the ticket stub to the valet when you return and he gives you your car. Just like a normal airport.”