by Amy Gentry
“Don’t forget your prize money, Dana! It’s great to see the ladies doing so well this year, isn’t it? And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for . . .”
Numb with disappointment, I didn’t need to listen to the rest. I stared at the check in my hand. Fifteen hundred dollars. As the emcee announced the inevitable winner and the crowd went wild, I occupied myself with catching the robe bearer’s eye and pointing toward her high heels until she caught my drift, looked down, and stepped off the hem. When she lifted her arms to drape the Funniest Person in Austin robe over Fash’s back, she would not become a joke. At least I could control that.
But offstage, the reality that I had just won second place my first time in the competition began to dawn on me. Several people pressed cards into my hand, saying, “Do you have an agent?” and “Do you have a manager?” I smiled dumbly and thanked them all and then observed the crowd parting before a tall black woman, her braids gathered in a low, thick bundle, her face radiating the same kind of surreal quality of celebrity Aaron Neely’s had. She was smiling broadly as she leaned over and grasped my hand.
“Hi, Dana, I’m Cynthia Omari,” she said unnecessarily. “You were great up there.” She continued talking over my stammered thanks. “You know what, Dana, we’re always looking for guests on The Bestie Cast. I’ll have to hook you up with my producer Larry to get you booked, but I’d love to have you sometime.”
“I—I love The Bestie Cast” was all I could manage.
“You’re sweet!” she exclaimed, looking around us at the rapidly emptying banquet tables. “This is so much fun, I don’t know whether to send Aaron a get-well-soon card or a thank-you note.” She leaned over and said in my ear, “By the way, if it was up to me, you’d have won first place. But I’m so glad I got to meet you, at least.”
“Me too,” I said stupidly. “I mean, I’m glad to meet you too.”
Then, wonder of wonders, she handed me, not her card, but her phone, with a new-contact screen open, and told me to enter my number and e-mail address. When I’d given it back to her she said, “Good. We’ll get you on the podcast soon. Now go celebrate!” and whirled away, quickly becoming obscured by the mob of people around Fash.
Kim walked up, grinning wildly, her cheeks streaked with mascara tears that made her look more like Courtney Love than ever. “Victory party at Chacha’s, everyone’s coming, you in?” she said, and given Cynthia’s parting exhortation, I didn’t feel like I could say no.
It was always Christmas at Chacha’s, a dive bar a few blocks from Bat City festooned year-round with silvery tinsel, paper bells, and strands of blinking vintage lights. Sitting in the disorienting glow, sipping drink after drink purchased by well-wishers and hangers-on who’d followed us to the bar, I started getting fuzzy fast. Fash held court by the Christmas tree in the corner, his bulbous gold crown and fake-fur-trimmed red robe giving him the look of one of those old-world Santa figurines advertised in Parade magazine around the holidays. Surrounded by friends and the finalists who cared about looking like good sports, he brandished his scepter, a glitter-filled Toy Joy baton with an Austin-themed snow globe duct-taped to the top, swirling with tiny black bats instead of snow. A flash went off; a reporter from the Chronicle had also followed us over from the club, perhaps hoping for an alcohol-fueled feature story to break the monotony of the same postcompetition write-up he had to do every year.
Ruby and Becca had surprised me by showing up briefly at the bar to represent the Laurel’s crew. Nobody at work had ever come to one of my shows before. Ruby looked exultant in her forest-green wasp-waisted frock, turning every once in a while to someone nearby to say, “That was my wig up there.”
“I knew that blond one was lucky,” she said, stirring an unseasonal mug of hot cocoa with a peppermint stick. In fact, she’d lent me the Betty wig grudgingly, with a set of instructions for its care that I had so far completely ignored, but I gathered that she felt well compensated in reflected glory. Through the descending fog of alcohol, I thanked her profusely.
“I can’t believe you came,” I said, sincerely moved.
“Of course! I wouldn’t miss my wig’s debut. You hang on to it for as long as you want. Just thank me when you win an Oscar with it.”
“I think Travolta has Best Wig on lock, but thanks anyway,” I said, and was rewarded with a sympathetic nod. “Anyway, now you know what I’m working on all the time in that notebook.”
“Oh, I know. I read it whenever you go to the bathroom.” My smile went rigid on my face as I remembered all the notes about Ruby I’d jotted down, but she rattled on. “Don’t bother saying goodbye to Becca, she won’t hear you. Henry’s been blowing up her phone all night demanding to know who she’s really with. Did you look?” She raised her eyebrows meaningfully and gestured toward her upper arms, and I noticed that Becca was wearing a sleeveless shirt for once.
“I don’t see any—” I said, and she cut me off.
“Makeup,” she said behind her hand. “Spray tan.” She grabbed Becca, who was hunched over her phone, oblivious, and moved off toward the door.
After I’d waved goodbye, I found myself stranded between Fash’s adoring mob and Kim’s friends from her bartending job. With Ruby and Becca gone, I suddenly felt the absence of friends who’d come just to see me. I finished my drink more quickly than I intended to, bought another, and, with no one to talk to, downed it fast. I half expected Amanda to show up, the way she had for the first round of the competition, but since the swap, she’d insisted it was a good idea for us to keep away from each other, at least in public. It was obviously the right thing to do, but the irony it created felt especially acute now: the one person who was willing to do the most for me and for whom I’d done the most could not be seen in my company. I was beginning to depend on Amanda, but when she wasn’t with me, she felt disconcertingly like an imaginary friend.
The reporter, perhaps seeing that I was alone, seized his moment to pounce. “Dana, you placed second your very first year in the competition. What do you think won it for you?”
“It’s an honor even to compete,” I said, irritated to find myself slurring my words. “Austin’s got a great comedy scene. Everyone did really great out there tonight.”
“I saw your semifinals performance,” the reporter said. “Your material tonight was different and very provocative. Is it risky to debut new material in the finals?”
As I readied another canned response, he raised his camera and started snapping pictures. The flash made me dizzy, and as I gesticulated with my drink, I got the impression he wasn’t really listening to my answers.
“And what do you think about another white male comic taking home the big prize?” he said between clicks. “Is it time for a change in Austin?”
Still safe behind his camera, the rat bastard, and clicking away. I had just said, with spiteful tact, “Austin is changing, all right,” when Fash sidled up to me, the flash having finally lured him from his throne to see who could be stealing his press.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” I said. “What do you think, Fash? Is it time for someone other than a white dude to win Funniest Person?”
“What’s important is that we’re all having fun up there,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulder and squeezing.
“How about a picture with the runners-up?” the reporter said. “Stay right there.” He took a few steps over to Kim’s table.
Fash stayed glued to my shoulder. “Kim! Kim!” He leaned over me to shout and got so close I could smell his mustache oil. His eyes were watering sentimentally, I noted with distaste. As I shrank away, he mumbled sorrowfully, “You don’t like me, Dana. Nobody really likes me.”
Conscious of the scene we were making in the middle of the bar, I said, “Everybody likes you, Fash. That’s why you won.”
“Yeah, they do, don’t they?” He brightened up momentarily, but soon darkened again, shaking his head. “But now that I won, they’re all going to hate me.” To my
horror, the rims of his eyes grew even redder, and I found my eyes prickling sympathetically from sheer proximity. “I want you to like me, Dana. Why don’t you like me?”
Just then, the photographer returned with Kim. At the sight of the camera, Fash snapped his head up as if it were attached to marionette strings, his maudlin mood disappearing so completely I found myself doubting whether I had seen it at all. “Kim! Third place!” he shouted. “Last year I got third. That means you’re going to win next year.”
“So you’ve said,” Kim said. “Several times.”
“Last year I was third and look at me now!”
“Congratulations, Fash.” Kim sighed and positioned herself to my right, putting her arm around my shoulders. “Take the picture?” she pleaded with the photographer.
“Winner in the middle!” Fash shouted. “King of comedy in the middle!”
“I’ll get a few different shots,” the reporter said diplomatically. The bulb flashed a few times, and then he tapped Kim’s shoulder, gently shepherding her over to Fash’s left side. She grimaced visibly but submitted, and Fash, now between us, wrapped his other arm around her shoulders. Her own arms hung limply at her sides. “That’s good, that’s good,” the reporter said, backing away with his camera in front of his face. “Hold it.”
“It’s good to be king,” Fash said, squeezing us to him roughly. He moved his hand from my shoulder to my back a few times, then quickly wriggled his hand along the band of my bra to my armpit and dug his fingers into the side of my breast. I went stiff.
“Hold it, hold it,” the reporter was saying. “Smile, everyone!”
I forced a rictus onto my face, Fash’s fingers still maintaining their death grip on my side-boob. The flash went off five or six times, the fingertips wiggling up and down slightly.
“That’s enough,” Kim said abruptly, and she pulled away. “I gotta pee.”
I broke free of his other arm, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Hey, Kim, wait!” Fash called after her, the desolate look flashing across his face again for just a moment. I started to follow her to the bathroom, but Fash stayed glued to the reporter. As I walked away, I heard him say, “Third place kind of sucks, to be honest,” and I knew that the look had disappeared again as quickly as it had come.
In the bathroom, Kim was leaning over the sink, splashing water on her face. When she looked up and saw me in the mirror, she said, “Fash is so disgusting.”
“I take it he did the boob thing with you too?” I said.
“It’s pathetic,” she said, yanking a handful of rough paper towels from the dispenser and rubbing them all over her face. “I mean, you can’t really be surprised,” she said between swipes. “He’s been pulling that shit since he first came to Austin.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, a couple years after me.” She tossed the soggy paper towels in the trash. “We took level one together, if you can believe it.”
Among comedy performers, “level one” means one thing. “Improv? That doesn’t seem like your scene.”
“I was really into it for a while.” She was rummaging through her purse for something. “Anyway, you know how it is. People are so nice in improv—it’s all that yes-and crap—and when Fash came around, everybody just adored him, you know? And I thought since people were acting like they knew him, they, you know, knew him. Like, vouched for him. So I was nice too. Aha!” She found the eyeliner pencil she was looking for and pulled off its cap triumphantly.
“What do you mean, nice?”
Kim was leaning forward, pulling at her lower lash line and reapplying the black crayon liberally under her eyes. “I mean, apparently he did it to several women in the scene. It wasn’t just me.”
“It?” The stuffy bathroom was making me feel a little dizzy. I leaned against a stall and felt the whole structure shudder under me.
“You know. You’re hanging out after a show with a bunch of people at his place, and then everybody else leaves. And he keeps saying, ‘Hey, you can crash here.’ And you know it’s stupid, and you just want to go home, but you’re so drunk. And cab service sucks here.” She finished one eye and moved to the other. “He keeps insisting that you can take the bed and he’ll take the couch because he’s such a fucking gentleman, and you’re finally just too tired to argue. And then you wake up and he’s next to you under the covers . . .” She snapped the cap back on abruptly and mimed an obscene gesture with her hips.
“Oh my God. Really?” For a moment I smelled tequila, felt the brutish, awful weight on top of me, saw the black outline against glowing TV static. Then I pushed it out of my mind. “What did you do?”
“I mean, don’t get it twisted. He was pretty easy to fight off. Like I said, pathetic.” She dropped the eyeliner back in her purse. “He started crying like a baby.” Fluttering her eyelashes up and down in the mirror, she flicked a few stray dots of eyeliner off her cheeks. “Eventually someone caught on and word got around, and he got banned from a couple of theaters. That’s why he doesn’t do improv anymore.”
“Neither do you,” I pointed out.
“I guess I wasn’t that into it after all,” she said in a way that signaled the conversation was over. She gestured toward the stalls. “Did you have to go?”
“Yeah. Will you wait for me?”
“Yeah, bitch. Go.”
I didn’t have to, but I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to get in touch with Amanda and didn’t want to text her in front of Kim. The feeling had been growing all night, a kind of restless itch, scratched temporarily by my set in character as Betty but now back with a vengeance. Gradually, over the course of the night, I had come to understand what—who—was causing it.
I closed the stall door behind me and had already pulled out my phone when Kim said, from the other side of the stall door, “Dana?”
“Yeah?” I stopped texting.
“You’re, like, good friends with Jason Murphy, right?”
It was so unexpected that I just said, “Yeah.” In a hurry, before I could think too hard about whether it was still true or not.
“I mean, you were roommates in L.A.?”
“Yeah.”
Her voice sounded funny, but since I couldn’t see her face, I couldn’t tell exactly what kind of funny. “No hard feelings, right?” Before I could respond, she said, “I thought for a while when you came back, maybe you had something against me? I mean, I don’t know what he would have said—”
“He didn’t say anything about you,” I said truthfully, suddenly wondering why I’d never realized Jason and Kim had gone out. Jason had leveled up his dating game in Austin, and when I joined him I was often intimidated by how improbably blond and beautiful his girlfriends were. But they never lasted long. They’d always had to reckon with me, the best friend who’d known him longer than they had. Eventually Katie or Jenna or Bella or Rose would exit stage left, and I would still be in the spotlight with Jason. I’d been only dimly aware of Kim’s presence in Austin five years ago—she was, as she said, mostly doing improv back then—but it didn’t particularly surprise me that she’d been one of the parade of skinny, button-nosed blondes in the background.
“Oh. Well, that’s good,” Kim said. I realized I had been silent for a while. “I mean, it was a long time ago.”
“No hard feelings,” I said. “None at all.” I flushed the john for appearance’s sake and opened the stall door. She was leaning against the opposite wall. “I’m glad we’re friends now.”
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “One of us should really have won first place tonight. On the bright side, maybe Fash will move to L.A. and get hit by a cab.”
“Or eaten by a shark,” I said. “I hear they have those there.” When we were out of the bathroom, I realized I’d been too distracted by Kim’s questions about Jason to finish my text to Amanda. “I think I’m taking off,” I said with only a quick glance at my phone.
But Kim noticed. “Secret boyfriend?”
“You’re so mysterious these days.” She winked. “I thought maybe you were texting someone in the stall just now.”
“I was just looking at the time,” I said lamely. “I didn’t realize how late it was. I have to work early.”
“Gotcha.” She looked amused, and I dropped my phone in my purse and gave her a hug.
“Congrats again.”
“You too. I like your new bit,” she said gruffly. “Drive safe, you.”
I nodded. I’d thought better of texting my next name to Amanda—too risky—and instead asked her if I could come over. I spent the car ride home imagining us sipping wine on the balcony and discussing how to rid the Austin scene of the scourge that was Fash.
9
“Hmmm, Fash Banner. Tricky.”
“What’s tricky about it?” I was stalking back and forth by Amanda’s giant windows, daring someone to see me. I knew I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I didn’t want to lose momentum. What Kim had told me in the bathroom about Fash had been burning a hole in my brain.
Amanda was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, laptop open, sipping her habitual glass of red wine. “Well, since he just won, he’s fairly high-profile right now—”
“Higher-profile than Aaron Neely?” I said in disbelief.
“No, no, of course not.” Amanda looked mildly irritated. “But far more directly connected to you. Nobody knew about your meeting with Neely.”
“Just Jason,” I said. “But what about Branchik?”
“People at Runnr know about my connection to Branchik, but they don’t know I’m anywhere near him. He doesn’t know I’m anywhere near him.” She paused, frowning thoughtfully. “I’m not saying we can’t do it. But it’s going to require more care. A different approach, maybe.”
“Can’t you just break in and smash his record collection or something?”