He feels that mood hit him again, and he wants to wrap up in the filthy hotel comforter and sleep away the rest of the day.
He’d sleep right through the show, wake up tomorrow, and hopefully all of this would be behind him. Instead, he knows that he has to go find a suit and do so without bankrupting himself.
Maybe dressing in a suit would actually look good on a guy my age, Spence thinks to himself and, for the first time in at least a week, he genuinely makes himself smile. Somehow this thought gives him enough motivation to get in his car. Before he does, he looks down at his phone for a text message from Sam, even though it’s not there. Feeling that pang in his stomach return, he texts her anyway:
I MISS YOU.
17
Several fitting rooms and a few hours later, he walks into the Comedy Café in Des Moines wearing a very stylish black suit, fresh blue shirt, and a bright blue tie. It all seems a bit silly considering his casual black boots, but he had to draw the line somewhere. It seems even sillier when thinking that he’s about to walk onstage and talk about animals screwing while dressed like a maître d’. Why people think a comedian’s attire matters is lost on him, but he does like to get paid.
He walks into the club and notices that the place is, indeed, packed for some local fund-raiser. He can’t tell what the charity is, though. There are signs posted everywhere, but he’s too busy noticing the people in the audience. Not only is no one else in a suit, no one is even wearing a tie. In fact, he’s probably never seen such a lazy-looking group of people in one place in a long time. The double takes from the waitresses let him know how obviously out of place he looks.
“Whoa!” A familiar, high-pitched voice comes from behind the bar. Dustin is standing there with a bartender, pouring drinks and laughing. “Look at Mister Fancy Pants!”
“You dressed up for comedy or for a funeral?” the bartender says. A kid barely in his twenties and looking like he has had his fair share of crystal meth, he claps his skinny hands together every time he finishes speaking.
“Hell, I should have you seating people before you go onstage!” Dustin says, and his bartender laughs.
“I told you he’d fall for it!” the bartender says and extends his right hand forward for a high five. Dustin is more than happy to oblige, and the two of them giggle like hyenas.
“Shit, I thought for sure he wouldn’t give in,” Dustin says.
Spence loosens his tie while Dustin and the bartender laugh. This is not the first time he has seen this prank pulled, but it is the first time it has been pulled on him. It’s normally done to new comics by headliners. It’s considered a sort of initiation into the business to have your chops busted a little. It rarely involves forcing the comic to go out and buy an entire suit. Now he’s out three hundred bucks. He thinks about how nice it would be to wear the suit to Dustin’s funeral.
“Ha,” he says flatly, “you got me. Ha.”
Dustin laughs. “Shit, I should tell that to all the comics. I think it’d be nice to have y’all dressed that good.”
“So I take it this isn’t the Jaycees,” Spence says.
“Nope,” Dustin says. “Some bowling league or something.”
“Hilarious,” Spence lies.
“Yeah, I thought so,” Dustin says.
“Do you have any idea how much money this cost me?”
“Hope you saved the receipts.”
“I’m wearing it,” Spence says. “I can’t return it now.”
“You shoulda tucked the tags in.” The bartender laughs and high-fives Dustin again.
“You should reimburse me,” Spence says to Dustin and ignores the bartender.
“Good luck with that,” Dustin says and gives a long, shit-eating grin to the bartender. They laugh another time, keeping the joke alive way longer than it deserves. With one last snort of his nose, Dustin pats the bartender on the shoulder and walks back into his office.
Spence stands there and counts to ten before loosening his tie and following Dustin back behind the bar. In his office, Dustin sits down at his cluttered desk. All comedy club owners seem to have cluttered desks. Spence wonders why more of them don’t have desks that look like the one Emma Simpson has in Nebraska. He thinks about how nicely arranged her computer cables were. If he had them right now, he’d strangle Dustin with them.
“Look on the bright side,” Dustin says and reaches into his back pocket for a round can of Skoal. “At least you got a new suit, right?”
“Sure,” Spence says and sits in front of the desk.
“Hey, what happened to your face?” Dustin says, finally noticing the healing scrapes and bruises.
“An accident in the changing room,” Spence says.
“Really?”
Spence stares straight ahead at Dustin, who doesn’t get the remark. After a second, he stops trying to understand it and just shakes his head. Then he thumps his index finger several times across the can of Skoal. “Listen,” Dustin says, “I need you to keep the show clean tonight, okay?”
“Just like you needed me to wear a suit.”
“I’m serious.” Dustin puts a wad of tobacco under his bottom lip and stares straight ahead. “These people are good customers. This bowling group. I don’t need nobody getting pissed off. We always try to keep it clean for them.”
“No one told me this before.”
“I’m telling you now,” Dustin says and spits into a plastic cup he has sitting on the desk. Inside that cup is probably three inches of tobacco spit. It probably hasn’t been emptied all day, maybe all week.
“I’ve never really been a clean comic,” Spence says. He has plenty of clean material. He has written a ton of new stuff in the past month. Doing a clean show really wouldn’t be hard for him at this point, but he’s wearing a suit he didn’t even want to buy.
“Well, I need you to be a clean comic tonight, whether you’re used to it or not,” Dustin says.
“Kind of short notice, don’t you think?”
“A good comedian should be able to work clean or dirty, depending on what he’s told to do,” Dustin says.
“I always hear club owners say that,” Spence says, “but never comedians.”
“It’s true.” Dustin spits again.
“How long have you been a comedian?” Spence asks. He knows he should just let it go, but the pricey tie around his neck just makes him angrier.
“Just keep it clean,” Dustin says. “Do someone else’s routine if you don’t have clean jokes of your own. I don’t give a shit. But I don’t want any complaints. It’s that simple.”
“Sure. It’s easy.”
“You can say ‘damn,’ you can say ‘ass’ or whatever. No f-bombs,” Dustin says. Somewhere over the past few years, people in the business started referring to the word fuck as an f-bomb. All other words are simply called what they are, but the word fuck gets a special name for it, even offstage. Spence has always hated this and thinks it’s childish. This doesn’t help his temper a single bit.
“No f-bombs,” he says to Dustin.
“Alrighty,” Dustin says, “guess that’s about it. Don’t make fun of bowlers, I guess.”
“Sure. Do I get free food?”
“Yeah,” Dustin says and hands him a laminated sheet of paper. “You can order off the kids’ menu. Everything else is full price.”
“The kids’ menu? Really?”
“Used to give a full comp on everything, but too many comedians abused it,” Dustin says. “Ordering filet minon and halibut and whatever else.”
“Okay,” Spence says, “but can I just have a discount, then? Gimme whatever money you discount on the kids stuff and let me apply it to something on the regular menu.”
“Do you want the chicken nuggets or not?” Dustin says and spits into the cup.
A half hour later, Spence stands backstage, listening to the host tell a few jokes before bringing him to the stage. The middle act just got done and did just fine with plenty of jokes that weren’t ve
ry clean. No one seemed to mind. In fact, they seemed to enjoy it. These are bowlers, not a prayer group. They’d be happy with a dirty show.
Get over yourself, Spence, he thinks, and just do what you were told.
He has plenty of new material now. He knows he can go onstage and do a clean show. This is no big deal for him. It’s the perfect time to try his newest bits. He can be that comedian he watched on TV when he was a kid—that comedian who always wore a shirt and tie and told clever jokes that were considered PG-rated at worst. It’s not that hard. He’ll be just fine.
He looks down and notices that he’s already starting to get sweat on his new suit. His pocket vibrates, and he pulls out his phone, hoping for a little encouragement from Sam, something to make him feel better before he does his monkey dance. Instead, it’s a text message from Beth:
Hey, give me a call when you can, will you?
Cripes, he thinks, like I don’t have enough shit to think about.
“Ladies and gentlemen”—the host onstage raises his voice—“are you ready for your headliner?”
The crowd applauds vigorously, and Spence waits for the sound of his name being called. When it is, he bounces out onstage with the biggest smile he’s ever had. He shakes hands with the host and takes the microphone. It doesn’t matter what he’s wearing. It doesn’t matter what he had for dinner. All that matters now is that he is exactly where he loves to be. He is in charge, ready to take the audience where he wants to take them. They will go because they will love him. They will be his friends; they always are. They trust him because this is what he does.
“Hello, hello, hello,” he says as the applause dies down and the crowd hangs on his opening words. “It is really fucking amazing to be here with all of you fuckers!”
He sits alone at the bar, waiting for Dustin to finish counting up all the money, finishing up his paperwork, masturbating, or whatever the hell he has been doing for almost two hours. The club is empty; everyone has gone home, including the staff. The bartender has gone somewhere to probably smoke meth.
Happy to be by himself, Spence sits in the dark with only the neon beer signs at the bar to keep him company. Sipping on a glass of whiskey, there’s a very nice calmness to the empty club and the sound of nothing but neon humming in the air. His head still buzzes from the sounds of the night: laughter, applause, cheering. But, if he just concentrates on his glass of booze and the silence around him, it relaxes him just enough. He feels his phone vibrate and pulls it out of the pocket of his sweat-soaked, three-hundred-dollar suit. Everything around him stops when he realizes that it’s a text message from Sam. He almost doesn’t want to read it. If she hates his guts, it will ruin an otherwise great night. And maybe the rest of his year.
I MISS YOU, TOO.
He smiles. He hopes this means forgiveness and is not essentially another good-bye. Plenty of women missed him and still never spoke to him again. One girl apparently missed him enough to poison his drink.
“Yo,” Dustin calls from inside his office.
Spence knows he killed tonight. He did it by doing the same act he’s done a million times before in front of a million different audiences. If he wanted to offend them, they weren’t buying it. If they weren’t interested in hearing his dick jokes, their laughter betrayed them.
So much for the audience wanting a clean show, he thinks.
Spence puts his phone his pocket and walks into the office. He closes the door behind him, even though he and Dustin are the only two people left in the building. He knows that Dustin is pissed. That’s the only reason he has been kept waiting for so long. He prepares himself for whatever is going to be thrown his way but promises himself not to lose his temper.
Just smile and nod, he tells himself, and let Rodney earn his pay.
Dustin counts a stack of bills in his hand. Then he counts it again. He whispers numbers out loud while he does it. Other than this, he doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t make eye contact at all.
“Here you go.” He takes a stack of bills and puts them in his shirt pocket. Then he takes another stack of bills, paper clips them together, and tosses the wad across the desk. “Count it.”
Spence picks up the bills and does a quick count.
“This is only half,” he says.
“Right,” Dustin says.
“And the other half?” Spence asks.
“I told you not to be dirty.”
“You also told me I had to wear a suit.”
“That was a joke,” Dustin says.
“Sorry,” Spence says, “I guess I just thought you were joking again when you told me not to be dirty.”
Dustin picks up his Skoal can, thumps on it with his index finger, and says, “You know I wasn’t joking.”
“Seemed like it to me.”
“I said no f-bombs.”
“The audience loved the show,” Spence says. “That’s all that matters. It was a great set.”
“That’s beside the point. I told you to keep it clean,” Dustin says.
“The point is to make the audience happy.”
“The point is to do what I tell you.”
“I’m not your dishwasher or your bartender,” Spence says, and he sees Dustin’s eyebrows furrow.
“No, but you’re still my employee for the night, and you do what you’re told.”
“And the other comics?”
“What about them?”
“They weren’t any cleaner than I was.”
Dustin scoffs. “Don’t worry about them. I’m talking to you. You’re the headliner, and you should know better.”
Spence takes a deep breath before speaking. “The audience liked what they got.”
“A good comedian can do that and still be clean.”
“With all due respect,” Spence says, “how the hell would you know?”
Dustin sits there and finally makes eye contact. He glares over his dirty saliva-filled cup as he spits another mouthful of tobacco juice into it. Then he sets the cup back down on the desk and exhales. A full thirty seconds goes by with neither of them speaking. Dustin drums his fingers on the desk as if he’s about to make a big proclamation and can’t quite come out with it.
“We’re done here,” Dustin says finally.
“Pay me the other half,” Spence says.
“You broke the rules. That’s how it works.”
“No, it’s not. I did my job.”
“And you’re getting paid what I decide you deserve.” Dustin spits.
“We have a contract.”
“Tell Rodney about it.”
“To hell with Rodney,” Spence says. “You’re going to pay me my money.”
“Good luck with that.”
It all happens so fast that Dustin has no hope of defending himself. It’s not the force of the attack so much as the surprise. An entire body flies across the desk, hands reaching and feet kicking. Dustin is knocked out of his chair and to the floor so fast that he swallows the wad of tobacco that was in the cup.
Spence grabs Dustin by the shirt and hoists him up off the ground. He wants so much to punch Dustin in the face, to take his foot and bring it up as swiftly and as hard as possible into Dustin’s crotch. Instead, he grabs him around the throat and pushes him hard against the filing cabinet. Still gagging from swallowing his tobacco, Dustin only gets up as far as his knees, flailing his arms around, trying to make contact.
“Gimme my money, asshole.” Spence growls and slaps Dustin’s hands down as if he’s playing with a doll. He reaches into Dustin’s shirt pocket and digs. He hits pay dirt and takes the wad of bills and stuffs them into the pocket of his new suit. He should just let Dustin go right here where he’s got him. Instead he squeezes harder for just a second longer and shoves him back against the filing cabinet again. “How does it feel?” he screams into Dustin’s ear as he tightens the grip around his neck. “You feel in charge now, asshole?”
After a few more seconds, he releases Dustin and backs away. Dus
tin drops to his knees and fumbles around on the floor, gasping for air and still choking on tobacco spit.
“Not so tough without your bartender here, are you?” Spence says, and starts to walk out of the office. “You shouldn’t have waited so long to pay me. You might’ve had someone here to back you up.”
“You son of a bitch,” Dustin yells after him. “You’re dead! You hear me? You’re dead!”
Spence turns and looks back at Dustin. He straightens his tie and catches his breath. He’d probably laugh at the sight of himself if he weren’t so angry. Dusting himself off like he’s getting ready for a boardroom meeting.
“I’m going to ruin you, cocksucker!” Dustin yells, sliding around on papers that fell off the desk. If it had been as clean as Emma’s desk, he would have been on his feet already. “You’re finished!”
“Who the hell are you?” Spence says, even surprised himself at how calm he sounds. Dustin pulls back and almost falls down again as Spence steps toward him. “You’re some nobody who took out a loan and opened a bar. You’re nothing. You’re not a comic. You’re not even a good comedy club manager.”
He lunges forward again with his fist cocked back, but stops short. Dustin flinches and puts his hands up in front of his face.
“Pussy,” Spence says. He reaches down on the desk, takes the cup full of tobacco juice, and throws it across the room. It covers Dustin, running down his face and the top of his shirt. The sweet smell of spit and spearmint fills the room. Dustin curses in a voice even higher than his usual one and almost gags from the filth covering him.
“Son of a—” Dustin says as several days’ worth of spit and old tobacco drips down his neck and chest.
“When you go trying to ruin me,” Spence says, “remember what a little bitch you were just now. Make sure you don’t leave that part out.”
He knocks over a chair on his way out of the office and slams the door so hard it sounds as if it might come off the hinges. He’s out the door and in his car seconds later. He half expects Dustin to come running outside with a shotgun. He doesn’t wait to see what happens next. He peels out of the parking lot and drives as fast as he can in whatever direction he was pointed when he started the car. He doesn’t even know if he’s going toward his hotel. He’s not looking at the road so much as looking at the distant horizon ahead.
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