Fault Line

by Janet Tashjian

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Take my life … please.

  Life is what you’re stuck with while you’re waiting to have one.

  My boyfriend and I are in our own little world. But it’s okay-they know us here.

  Here’s my worst fear for a college roommate-she’s wearing a PETA-T-shirt, talking about how cockroaches are human too … .

  Hey, who put the stop-payment on my reality check?

  A relationship is a lot like a hot bath. The more you get used to it: the more you realize it’s not so hot …

  Put on the headdress and the eyeliner, honey–you’re Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.

  Next time someone offers me a drink, at the fountain of knowledge, I’m going to use more than a shot glass.

  Also by

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  For Christy

  Take my life … please.

  Laughter is one of the only things in life you can count on to bail you out of anything. Even when you’re grief-stricken, shocked, or petrified, laughter can bring you back to that place deep inside that knows there’s life beyond your pain. I remember the day I learned this in my bones: my uncle Danny had just died, and my mother had spent most of the morning sobbing at the kitchen table. I was maybe four at the time, feeling more helpless than usual. My father had brought up some extra chairs from the basement for all the relatives who would be coming in from out of town. I didn’t notice when I sat on one that it was missing its cane seat. PLOP—I went right through the frame of the chair onto the floor. I didn’t cry; I grinned—the shock of the fall was a welcome surprise from all the sadness. My mother burst into laughter at the sight of her little girl sprawled on the rug, smiling. Which of course made me fall through the chair again. And again. It was as if I had waved a magic wand. Before my very eyes, she was transformed from a broken-hearted woman back into good old Mom. Because of my actions, because of me. Humor was something thunderous from the heavens, with a power to change things in an instant.

  Of course, bottling something as formidable as lightning is a tricky thing. Trickier still to do it night after night. Most of the time when I’m onstage, I feel like an alchemist: mixing a little bit of this story, a slice of that detail to come up with a fresh and humorous aha for the crowd to enjoy. But sometimes you fall flat, with a joke so inert you want to hang your coat on it. Those nights, it’s back to the drawing board, pure and simple.

  Here’s what I want more than anything: not to headline the Improv, not to join the cast of SNL. (Okay, you nailed me. OF COURSE I WANT THOSE THINGS. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.) But more than those—much more—I want to learn how to trust my instincts. It’s the part of comedy I haven’t gotten a handle on yet, although I work on those skills all the time. Where I intuitively come up with some thought on the spot that binds me and the audience together for a brief moment—I get goose bumps just thinking about it. During each performance, there’s some connection with the audience, but I’m talking about the cathartic, spontaneous kind. The search for that link keeps me writing jokes, keeps me auditioning, keeps me hoping lightning can strike.

  I’m like Ben Franklin in a storm, holding a kite, a key, and ajar.

  Waiting to connect.

  “I bombed last night,” I told my friend Abby

  “The Bob Marley routine, I bet. Becky, it’s just not funny.”

  “I love that bit.”

  “There’s no payoff.”

  “I was going for something different.”

  “Like what—audience narcolepsy?” Abby asked. “Tell the one about your mother hosting that drag-queen Tupperware party with Delilah. Now that’s funny.”

  “I was aiming a little higher than Delilah demonstrating her version of the Tupperware burp.”

  “Too bad you weren’t this funny last night,” she said. “You would’ve killed.”

  Abby and I were closer than sisters—not that I knew what that was like, having only my six-year-old brother, Christopher, to compare her to. She and I met because our last names both begin with M, and we were assigned to the same homeroom every year. Sometime in junior high, we discovered our mutual love of comedy and old movies. She was gorgeous, I was quiet; we never would’ve hooked up on our own. It took something as random as a letter of the alphabet to forge a friendship this strong. Funny how that works.

  But even after all these years, I still couldn’t figure Abby out. She had a crude sense of humor—constantly pulling pranks, laughing at fart jokes—yet woke up at five o’clock every morning to meditate. She hated hanging out with a lot of people, yet craved a packed house. She loved to travel, yet refused to apply to colleges outside of San Francisco because she wanted to continue her practice at the local Zen Center. My best friend was an enigma even to me.

  We grabbed two coffees and a booth for our usual round of Saturday catch-up at the local diner. We talked about how the comedy scene was slowly turning around (finally!). We wished we’d been born fifteen or twenty years earlier, when San Francisco was one of the top cities in the country to work, when Robin Williams performed to SRO crowds several nights a week. Back then, Margaret Cho had left home at sixteen to hit the road; now, at seventeen, we usually had to lie our way into the clubs. The Punch Line wouldn’t even let us in without a parent—were they kidding? Because we were still learning, no gig was a waste, not even emceeing shows at the community center or Y. And—hope of hopes!—a scout for Conan or Letterman might spot us someday and ask us to perform.

  Although the school year had just begun, the Saturday morning yak-fest was fast becoming our senior-year routine. It never got Abby and me an inch closer to playing bigger clubs, but it reassured us that we weren’t wasting our time practicing into tape recorders and mirrors for nothing, that we actually might have a minuscule shot at being funny for a living.

  We ordered two more coffees to go, then headed to Union Square for Saturday Ritual #2. For years our school had had a community service requirement for seniors. Most of the other students had volunteered in a church or homeless shelter, but not us. Because Abby had been going to the Zen Center since she was twelve, she talked one of the monks into signing off on our “outreach program.”

  Our idea—filtered through Abby’s love of Zen and our mutual flair for the theatrical—was to get people to be more present, more aware. So we went to various locales in the city and flashed cards with Zen mottos at the people walking by: ARE YOU AWAKE? ARE YOU HERE OR SOMEWHERE ELSE? WAKE UP! And Abby’s favorite, WHEREVER YOU GO, THERE YOU ARE. People usually either ignored us or thought we wanted money—we collected fifteen dollars our first time out—but once in a while someone really got it. Those people would look us in the eyes and smile, become more present in their day.

  “This is so much better than calling out bingo numbers at the nursing home,” Abby said.

  “I’m almost convinced we are performing a service,” I agreed. “That last guy shifted right in front of me.”

  “I keep telling you, you’ve got to come to the Center. A roomful of people meditating for hours.” Abby flashed her card and a smile at a mother wheeling crying twins in a stroller. The poor woman looked like she didn’t want to be present.

  Maybe it was the beautiful fall weather or a very conscious neighborhood, but several other people really responded. An old man put down his groceries and asked us about our project; we ended up talking to him for twenty minutes.

  After an hour and a half, we packed it in.

  “You want to come to the movies with Kevin and me?” Abby asked.

  Going to the movies was an opportunity I’d usually never say no to, but I had two papers to finish. Kevin was a nice guy Abby had
met through her brother, Billy; I never felt like a fifth wheel joining them. I liked Kevin a lot but knew not to get too attached to the guys who stepped through the revolving door of Abby’s affections.

  I left Abby in Union Square and headed home. When a woman walked by me carrying a Chihuahua wearing a calico bonnet, I took out my notebook and logged the image for future use.

  Ed Lynch from the next street over walked by too; he had graduated from my high school the year before. Even though we passed each other almost every day, he never bothered to nod or say hello. I had given up trying to be friendly months ago. It wasn’t just Ed. When it came to most guys, it was as if I were wearing invisibility sunscreen. It’s not that there was anything wrong with me—okay, maybe I was a bit on the uncoordinated side, too eager to please—but with most guys it seemed as if processing my presence wasn’t worth their time.

  Friends and family have always described me as two things: smart and funny. Never pretty, never interesting, just smart and funny. I wasn’t complaining—those were necessary qualities for my chosen line of work—but it would be nice to at least register on the attractiveness scale once in a while.

  Unlike Abby I hadn’t had a boyfriend since Peter last year, and even that was stretching the definition of boyfriend way past anything Webster would have recognized. I had better luck holding the attention of a roomful of people in a comedy club than a guy—I couldn’t decide if that was good or just plain pathetic. Idea for a routine—in my neighborhood growing up, I was everybody else’s invisible friend.

  I looked at the card peeking out of my bag. ARE YOU AWARE?

  I finished the rest of the sentence in my mind. ARE YOU AWARE THAT NO ONE IS AWARE OF YOU?

  I scribbled a quick bit about Zen riddles in my notebook. Just because Abby wasn’t going to use them in her act didn’t mean I couldn’t give it a go. They’d be better than the sex, drugs, and parents jokes that filled the sets of most comics my age.

  I smiled, thinking about the sign from last year’s comedy workshop that I’d hung over my desk at home: IF LIFE GIVES IT TO YOU, USE IT.

  Being in comedy was similar to working at a giant recycling center—nothing went to waste.

  When I first told my mother I wanted to hit the comedy scene, she flipped. Late nights, grades, alcohol, secondhand smoke—blah, blah, blah. It took two years of playing local parties and talent shows before she finally let me drag her to the Comedy Stop downtown. (One good thing about living in the city: I’ve grown up bopping around the many different neighborhoods, using public transportation, and always—always—gathering material.)

  I started sneaking into teen open-mike nights at the local Jewish Community Center. I wasn’t Jewish, so the first time I went, I pinned one of the shoulder pads from one of my mother’s suits onto the back of my head for a yarmulke. I found out when I got there, of course, that the men usually wore the yarmulkes. The woman who helped me unpin the shoulder pad took pity and let me run through my routine anyway. It was my first time onstage, but I strode to the microphone with confidence. All the awards I’d won in school for academic excellence paled in comparison to the scattered applause of a handful of kids sitting in a Nob Hill gym at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

  I was fifteen years old and hooked.

  A few of the clubs used to let us sneak in underage, until the city clamped down on the drinking laws. So for almost three years—God bless her—my mother sat in smoky clubs and watched me perform. (Except when I auditioned; I was always so nervous, I made her wait outside.) On open-mike nights like this one, the quality of material could be iffy at best. Mom never complained.

  When Mom couldn’t go, she sent her assistant to be the adult who accompanied us. Delilah had been with us for years. She was a tall, black, athletic drag queen who was my uncle Danny’s boyfriend up until the end. Uncle Danny contracted AIDS back in the early eighties; his illness brought us here from Seattle. Mom and Delilah comforted Uncle Danny through his pain, then comforted each other when he finally died. Mom and Dad said we were staying in San Francisco because of the weather and the career opportunities, but even then I knew Mom couldn’t bear the thought of leaving the city where her only brother was buried. When Delilah’s travel agency went under a few years later, Mom hired her as a full-time Jill-of-all-trades. I never knew Delilah’s real name or saw her out of costume; she flipped if anyone referred to her as “he.” She was known around the Castro for her impersonations of TV moms. When she walked down the street as Carol Brady, people hounded her for autographs.

  Mom sat down in the back of the club, ordered herself a beer, and told me to have fun. I headed to the lobby to wait with Abby

  “Are you doing the bit about the stuttering telemarketers?” she asked.

  “Nah. This is my new Leap Year set. I’m not sure it’s ready yet. What are you doing?”

  Abby put out her cigarette at the bar. “My I-hate-the-Olympics bit.”

  One of my favorites.

  “Hey, let’s scrap our routines and just wing it,” Abby suggested.

  “Yeah, right.” I kept walking.

  She blocked my path. “I’m serious. Like that Improv class we took last year at the Learning Center.”

  “Half of those skits we did were horrible,” I said.

  “The other half were brilliant. Come on—BE HERE Now, remember?”

  “No way. There’s too much at stake.”

  “There’s nothing at stake,” she said. “The only people here are tourists and freaks like us.”

  I told her not everyone was Paula Poundstone, having impromptu dialogues with the audience all night. Abby barely listened; she’d heard my excuses before. I knew sooner or later I’d have to let go and trust my instincts more, but it scared the life out of me. Standing onstage in front of people? No problem. Winging it without a script? Trusting in my gut that I’d know what to do? Problem. Big Problem.

  Rick, the manager, approached the mike.

  He’d owned the Comedy Stop for twenty years, had seen all the heavy hitters come and go and go and go … . His stories of Jon Stewart showing up to encourage the newcomers kept all of us eyeing the door in anticipation. Rick was shorter than I and wore the same Buzzcocks T-shirt every night. The fact that he encouraged us and kept us on the open-mike list made Abby and me overlook the fact that we’d never been paid a cent. Because we valued his friendship—and the experience—we never mocked his lack of wardrobe in our sets.

  I leaned against the wall and watched Abby perform. I knew most of her routines as well as my own. She riffed on the Olympic judges, the bobsled team, then ad-libbed with a woman drinking a martini at the front table. They went back and forth about the closing ceremonies until the woman’s friends were in hysterics. Abby was great at thinking on her feet, one of the best.

  As the audience applauded, I performed my preshow warm-up—jumping up and down like a pogo stick, shaking out my arms and legs. I set my tape recorder on a stack of boxes and pressed “record.” I’d been taping all my shows since Mr. Ellin’s comedy-writing class last year. He said, “Learn from your audience; they’ll tell you everything you need to know about your act.” Since then, I analyzed every show—where the audience stayed with me, where they drifted off. And most important, what I could do differently next time. It was a comedy postmortem I kept in my current notebook; I looked forward to the ritual in a masochistic kind of way.

  Before Abby came off, I searched through my bag for the Zen cards. ARE YOU PRESENT? WHAT DO YOU SEE?

  Hopefully people laughing.

  I handed Abby my bag, watched Rick introduce me, then took the stage.

  Some snippets from my set:

  “Hi, I’m Becky and I’m bissextile.”

  A few hoots.

  “I wish it were half as exciting as it sounds. It just means I was born on a Leap Year.”

  Dead air. Not good.

  “When I was a kid, those February 29 birthdays—the REAL birthdays—THOSEwere the only years
I didn’t feel like a fraud. My mother worked that frog theme like a pro. Frog napkins, frog plates, even a ridiculous chocolate cake shaped like a frog. As if frogs are the only things that can leap—couldn’t we have based one of those parties on a ballerina or gazelle? Talk about feeding into my lovv self-esteem …”

  A few chuckles—probably Mom. I knew this set wasn’t ready.

  “The bad nevvs is that on my last birthday I was only four and three-quarters; the good news is, that’s just about the mental age of most of the guys at my school.”

  Laughter—anally.

  “I wish this whole one-in-four concept applied to losing weight … if a bag of Oreos contained a quarter of the calories, now THAT would be a good thing.”

  Polite laughter. Worse than none at all.

  “But I want to know why a groundhog gets his own day every year and I don’t. It isn’t fair. I actually started a Leap Year support group in the basement of our church. I call it our three-step program.”

  Mild applause. At this rate, I’ll be lucky to be performing on cruise ships.

  “Thanks—good night.”

  9/10

  NOTES TO SELF:

  Add to leap Year st—“During elections, my vote only counts for a quarter of the items on the ballot”—no, not there yet.

  Don’t follow Abby.

  They’re already planning the stupid harvest dance. Why does everything at school have to be based one couples?

  New idea—a riff on rap fairy tales—Little Rend Riding-in-the-Hood, Rapunzel with hair extensions—could be funny (or at least better than my Leap Year set).

  My parents’ career paths couldn’t have been more different. Mom ran her own law firm; Dad was a waiter. Not at the local greasy spoon, but a professional, been-doing-it-for-twenty-years kind of waiter. He worked in the Ritz-Carlton Dining Room, arguably the most prestigious restaurant in a city known for its cuisine. None of that “Hi, I’m Bennett. I’ll be your waiter tonight” kind of stuff—just silent, impeccable service, anticipating the customers’ whims even before they knew they needed anything. Our family had lived on Dad’s income quite adequately for years while Mom was starting her practice. One of her first clients was an unknown local software company. She worked for next to nothing in the beginning, then made the intuitive decision to get paid in stock when they went public. She sealed the deal with the CEO right there at the Ritz while my father waited on them. Other women might have met their client somewhere else or not acknowledged their husband was a waiter, but not Mom. She introduced the CEO to Dad over drinks, and when she stuck a pen in the CEO’s hand after coffee, my father dusted away the crumbs from the table to make room for the contract. Mom’s one-woman law firm sure could have used the money up-front, but Mom’s always been big on risk taking. She watched the stock go from three dollars to sixteen to ninety to two hundred, finally selling her shares at two hundred thirty-nine. Mom gave half the credit to Dad, saying his recommendation of the stuffed Dover sole clinched the deal.