I’m scared we’re going to bomb. “And. That’s. OK.”
I feel sick. “And. That’s. OK.”
The warbling troubadour who I guaran-bloody-tee hasn’t had a problem with women in his whole entire life, finishes up to thunderous applause. He nods to us in a really chummy way as he passes. The emcee takes the stage.
“Another hand for Daniel Reid, ladies and gentlemen. Although maybe more ladies, am I right?”
This guy’s schtick seems to be just to say “Am I right?” after every other line. The crowd seems to like him, though. And they certainly liked the last act. Doubt runs through me like a river. This isn’t our scene. This isn’t our crowd. We’ve sold out for a swing and a miss.
“Your next act is a local band,” the compere announces. “Making a name for themselves last year with a residency in Sneaky Pete’s, please give it up for…WIDER. THAN. PICTURES.”
We step out.
* * *
—
We give him grief, but Christ, Christian has got it.
The audience is eating out of the palm of his incredibly tight jeans. Because I daren’t look out into the masses, I need somewhere else to keep my eyes. They’ve mainly opted for Christian’s flowing locks and gyrating hips. Fair play to him. He does good hip work. I don’t need to look at the audience to know this is one of the best gigs we’ve ever played. The response is unbelievable. It’s like we are actually bigger than the Beatles even if they had Jesus on tambourine.
I check the time and see we have room for one more song. I nod to Scott and he telegraphs to the others which track to play. He opts for “Molly,” a song I know he wrote about Holly, but people seem to think is about the street slang for MDMA. He’s never corrected anyone because, hey kids, drugs are cooler than songs about how you’re still madly in love with your ex.
Scott starts things off with a fast, catchy hook, before Brandon comes crashing in with a thumping bass drum. The lead-up to Christian’s first vocals is all about atmosphere. It’s mostly me playing the ondes martenot, this weird instrument Scott’s uncle turned us on to (that’s sort of half keyboard, half theremin). It gives Christian time to really play to the crowd before it all coalesces into a beautiful waterfall of melody and rhythm.
Within a blink, it’s over. When we’re playing, it’s like I’m floating above myself. Now I’m back in my body, I can even look out for the first time tonight, toward the two hundred cheering, hollering fans. There’s a gender imbalance—skewed female—in those nearest the stage, including some regular faces I know Christian has, let’s say, enjoyed the attentions of.
Most importantly, for the next stage of our careers, there are men in suits by the bar. Suits at gigs like this means one thing: industry people looking for the next big thing. I once read an interview with one of my favorite musicians who said, “Execs have absolutely no idea what they’re looking for, they have no taste in music, no preference, no internal barometer for why they sign a band. They just go with what the crowd tell them.” If that’s true, this lot have just helped us nail the best job interview of all time.
I walk to the edge of the stage and throw up an uncharacteristic fist into the air. Scott wraps his arms around me from behind and I turn to see him sporting the goofiest grin imaginable. This is what we’ve been working for. Fighting for. Dreaming of.
Faced with the faces, my eyes fixate on the woman with the long, sleek brown hair. Her wide mouth, turned up at the corners. The girl with the skinned knee. Jess. She mouths, “That. Was. Amazing,” and beams a thousand-kilowatt smile, and I feel even better than when I was playing.
I give her a thumbs-up and her megawatt smile increases in strength. The Matthews guy who’s running the event is the only one not smiling and I realize it’s because there’s another act waiting to come on and we’ve overrun. The fact that we’re soaking up every inch of praise is only putting him further behind.
I round up the others and physically push them off the stage.
“Let’s end on a high, lads. Yeah?”
8
Kill or Cure
Jess
Thistle Street, Edinburgh
August 2, 2015
Julia is in a bad way. She’s vomited twice and can barely see for the lights. There’s no chance that we’re going on as planned, which leaves us with two choices.
Choice One: we bail. We explain the situation, maybe even get a little argy about the fact that it was their shoddy stage setup that near-blinded Julia and sent her down a migraine-hole. This leaves us out of pocket and with a pretty major black mark against our names when it comes to Edinburgh and other opportunities.
Choice Two: I go solo. Together we have over an hour’s worth of material, with a pretty even fifty–fifty split of Julia content and Jess content. There’s enough quality stuff for me to get a more than decent ten minutes out of it. And I don’t care about the crowd. I don’t. No nerves. If I tank, I tank. My brother’s words come back to me. “And. That’s. OK.” Although now they make me think of that guy outside the curry house. No. My big fear is being away from Julia.
Julia is heavily up for Choice Two. She’s constantly pushing me to do solo gigs. If we have one recurring fight it’s that she’s always telling me how big I’ll be one day. I tell her it’s us that will be big and she just smiles this all-knowing smile. Like she’s the Gandalf of comedy and I’m the Frodo. I have to “walk this path alone.” Part of me wonders if she’s faking the whole headache thing. Unless she’s storing minestrone soup in her cheeks and jettisoning it down the toilet every time I hold her hair back, that theory is garbage.
“Let’s get out of here,” I suggest. “I’ll take you back to the hotel.”
Julia shakes her head.
“Then what do you want to do?”
She dabs at the corner of her mouth with toilet tissue and wipes the sweat away from her forehead with her sleeve.
“Go out.” She steadies herself against the bowl and sits up, her back against the cubicle wall. “Smash it. For us.”
“I don’t want to do it without you.”
She raises her index finger on her right hand and makes it crooked. She points it at my left boob and (considering the state of her) perfectly reenacts the climax of E.T., delivering her line in a croaky, alien voice. “I’ll be…right…here.”
* * *
—
With Julia off in a taxi and me with nothing better to do, I decide to watch the other acts in the Showcase. As timing would have it, Tom’s band is taking the stage as I join the crowd. There are a lot of women in the front few rows and it becomes pretty evident they’re there for the lead singer. The skinniness of his jeans would make Olivia Newton-John in Grease weep. If he gyrates any more there could be an incident.
Away from Robert Plant by way of Derek Smalls, I see Tom. He’s doing his best not to be noticed. Head down, completely absorbed by the equipment around him. And there’s a lot of it. Keyboards, a harmonium, some bizarre little box with lights and pulses he keeps stabbing at. It’s like he’s working in the music section of Cash Converters. But it works.
Fuck me, it works! The music is gorgeous. Ethereal. It pulses through me and I feel this weird mix of dread and complete comfort. Wave after wave. I shut my eyes and am taken to another place. I don’t care too much for the singing and I can’t make out the words either, because the front man is making love to the mic with such gusto he’s become unintelligible. But the music. The ambience and spirit of it all. This really is something.
It takes the entirety of their set for me to remember I’m on that same stage after the act after them. And all alone. As they soak up the well-earned applause, I catch Tom’s eye. He grins a big goofy grin and my heart lifts for him. He flashes me a thumbs-up and I clap so hard I feel blisters coming up. I really want to see this guy again as soon as possible. But first…
> * * *
—
There are many great types of laughter. Contagious is good. Belly is better. Crying actual laughter tears is the best.
And there are also many bad types of laughter. The snort is OK but it makes people too wary of what their body is capable of. The etiquette laugh simply vexes me. It’s the “I’m laughing because I should be, not because I want to” laugh. It’s the kind you hear in an independent cinema coming out of a pretentious douche in a turtleneck. But nervous laughter, nervous laughter is the worst type of laughter. And that’s all the audience has given me for the first three minutes of my set. Here’s why I hate nervous laughter above all other forms. It’s neither genuine nor involuntary. It’s a pity laugh. The audience is pitying me and I can’t stand it.
Dying on one’s arse is a rite of passage for all comedians. This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time. But there’s something particularly galling when your hopes for a good show go up in smoke. And I had high hopes for this show.
One of the biggest problems is that me and Julia use a fair amount of sound and music cues. Without her to play the music, I have to stop and start the show. I might as well be announcing there’s a joke coming every thirty seconds. The fact that we can back and forth is our greatest asset. Solo, our bits are just too much. It’s time to completely rethink my approach.
“OK, that last bit went down harder than an elderly grandmother on an icy winter’s day, overladen with Christmas shopping, running for a bus you just know she won’t catch.”
From the back of the room, I hear it. A short sharp “HA.” I look up with a smile and see Tom hovering at the back of the room.
He’s not a small guy, so he stands out. Especially with his full beard, the exact same color hair, and eyes to match his face fuzz. Like a hamburger of brown. He looks down sheepishly as my eyes find him. Now I have a focal point.
Instead of the pre-planned sketches and routines, I decide to freewheel. It’s the comedic equivalent of eating a fry-up after a heavy night of booze. Kill or cure. Whatever happens next, it’ll be an experience. Something to learn from.
“These shoes,” I say, pointing to my bright, shiny footwear. “You know they made us wear these. I am contractually obligated to wear these fucking clown shoes.” I look over to David in the wings. He’s not amused but the audience chuckle. They seem to be going for my mid-set handbrake turn, so I take the mic from the stand and begin to stroll. “The worst thing is, I signed that paper. Give me that filthy cash and you can have my principles. I am another millennial learning that my existence is purely transactional.”
As I continue my snippy little takedown of the people paying my wages, my confidence grows. As does the laughter. As does the grin on Tom’s face. Considering he’s part of my critique of being a sellout, the lines coming off the top of my head must be pretty good. I focus my attention on him, as if we’re just having a chat after the show. I envision us talking about being financially screwed over by the organizers. And so, the words come out.
“Do you know how much we’re getting paid for this?”
I can hear the sound of David Matthews’s butthole clenching from the side of the stage as I riff on the size of his marketing budget compared to our wage. Maybe because it’s a little peek behind the curtain, but the crowd really go for it. It could also be that most of the audience are in the same demographic as me, most of them in dead-end jobs, getting shat on by their bosses. They can relate. After all, except for the suits at the bar, not a single one of the 18–30 audience is going to be able to afford their own house anytime in the next decade. Not at Edinburgh prices.
“But what are you gonna do?” I ask, glancing down at my watch to see I only have sixty seconds to go. “If time is money, my watch stopped a while ago. The teat of capitalism must be suckled at. So go forth and consume. Join me in bowing down at the altar of things! THINGS! THIIIINGS! Things like thongs! And kitchen tongs! And things like…er…”
Someone in the crowd yells out, “Those little plastic cases you hold a banana in!”
“Yesssss!” I cry out. “My God, what is the point of them? But tomorrow, my good people of Edinburgh, we’ll forget all this rabble-rousing and go back to buying and selling and working and buying. And when we do…well…at least I’ve got a really nice pair of shoes to do it in. Thank you and good night!”
I give the emcee a pat on the back as I pass him and he asks the crowd to give it up for me. It’s a send-off that lets me know I did good. Which, two minutes in, seemed like an impossible task. I can tell Julia we earned our money tonight.
David Matthews looks less than pleased to see me as I saunter off stage. I give him a wink for good measure. When all is said and done, I don’t think my cheap shots are going to keep him up at night. Whoever’s cutting the edit together for TV might have a tough job on their hands, though. Someone told me it airs tomorrow night. As for this night, I am sans my best friend in a city I do not know. Once I ask myself what I’ll do for tonight’s entertainment, Tom appears as if by magic at the side of the stage.
“Hey. That was great,” he says.
I mime a little bow. “I mean, the start was godawful, but I think I recovered it.”
“Just a bit. That was excellent!”
The way he says it makes my stomach twist and turn like a Slinky in a tumble dryer.
“You really think so?”
He looks back over his shoulder at the room I was just performing to.
“I know so. Every single person in that room loved it. How’s your friend?”
“Back at the hotel, sleeping it off.”
“Migraine?”
“Yeah.”
“Ouch.”
There’s a pause you could drive a snowplow through as I wait for him to follow up on his earlier offer to “see you after.” He shifts from foot to foot and I get the impression he’s about to turn on his heel and go. From inside his belly I hear his gut gurgle. It’s that loud.
“You hungry?”
He shakes his head and laughs. “Not really.”
“Do you…do you fancy a beer?” I ask.
“I’d love one,” he replies.
* * *
—
The pub he takes us to is wonderfully “Old Man Pub.” Despite it being the eve of the Festival proper, there’s still only a smattering of tourists. Me being one of them. There’s a pool table in the corner, a dartboard, and even an old-style (not-screen) jukebox. The holy trinity is a rare breed in any city these days, so it’s nice to see Edinburgh keeping it real.
When Tom returns with our drinks, I commend him on his venue choice and ask if he wants a game of pool. He says yes, and as we search our pockets for fifty-pence coins, he says something I don’t hear over the clatter of the red and yellow balls being jettisoned. I ask him to repeat it.
“Oh, I was just saying, you do righteous indignation really well. I thought the organizer was going to pull you off stage. Is that your usual stuff?”
I offer him the chance to break and he declines. “Not at all. We’re usually pretty tame. Very light on the vitriol. We don’t get the flexibility most male comics do.”
“You don’t think you could get away with being Bill Hicks with a vagina?”
“I’d love to be Bill Hicks with a vagina. But no. Everyone gets put into a bracket, and truthful anger isn’t something we’re allowed to do. In comedy, as in life, there’s the Madonna/Whore box. Right now, ‘whore’ is where people are being pushed. Even though the ‘filthy female comics’ have better clean material than any of their male peers.”
He stops chalking his cue and looks pensive, suddenly sad for me. I don’t read it as pity, more disappointment in the world at large. He shrugs and suddenly looks happy again.
“You did it tonight,” he tells me.
“What do you mean?”
“That wasn’t tame. Or light on the vitriol. Or in a box.”
He’s not wrong. I mean, for an off-the-cuff seven minutes of straight stand-up, that was exceptionally good. And unusually fierce. If I do say so myself. But for that one success I could tell Tom about a hundred times where I’ve been told I must be “on my period” by some jerk punter, because I dared raise my voice on stage. No. We’re still put into boxes. Still restricted by what we can say and how we can say it. Two thousand and fifteen years after Jesus came out of his mother’s snatch, we still can’t be ourselves. I take my frustration out on the cue ball and give it an extra whack. I fluke two reds as Tom fills the gap in my response: “Well. I thought you were great.”
I pot another without looking up, and tell him, “Your old-sad-bastard music was good too.”
We clink our cues.
“When I was at the bar Scott texted to say that that Daniel Reid fella won,” Tom informs me with a hint of bitterness.
“Who? James Blunt’s inferior cousin?”
“You mean, Chris de Burgh’s understudy?”
“The love child of Mick Hucknall and Celine Dion?”
He physically shudders at the last one.
“Can you imagine?”
Then the image appears in my head and I retch a little.
“Forget him,” I tell Tom, as I pot another couple of reds. “Who remembers the winners anyway?”
His megawatt smile is back and there’s a look on his face of pure happiness. If I had to guess, I’d say fifty percent of that happiness is because he put on a pretty great show and the rest is a mixture of booze and my company. Whatever the ratio, if he’s having half as good a time as I am, I’m doing well.
“Twenty years from now,” I continue, “you’ll be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and this night and this competition will be but a distant memory.” I’ve just the black ball to go. I line it up and look him in the eye as I pot it and win the game.
Perfect Timing Page 6