by Amy Gentry
“Look, you want him gone,” she said, and I nodded. “But the problem is, he’s just won five thousand dollars in a contest, plus offers of management. Opportunities.” I winced. “I don’t think losing a few hard-to-find LPs is going to set him back much. And anyway, you don’t just want him to leave, right? Because he’s probably going to do that anyway. He’ll go to New York or Los Angeles, and he’ll succeed—if anything, he’ll have a whole new group of people who don’t know what a predator he is. He will have been rewarded for his behavior, not punished.”
I could see the wheels turning, but I felt like this wasn’t the time for equivocating. “Okay, well. I don’t think it’s going to be easy to catch Fash in the act. And blackmail is out; as far as I know, he doesn’t have a girlfriend or anyone who’d really care if they found out.” It was one of the things about him that was easy to pity, if you weren’t careful. Until you heard him onstage using his loneliness as an excuse to justify sexualizing the women around him and, as I’d now experienced, groping them. “And anyway, I don’t think he’s still doing it, at least not the worst of it.”
“You mean the assaults?” She narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t your friend Kim say that happened just after he moved to Austin, four or five years ago?”
I nodded. “Yeah. He’s already been frozen out of the improv scene for that stuff.” Reluctantly, I allowed myself to consider a possibility I’d been pushing to the back of my mind since last night. “Maybe he’s learned his lesson.”
Amanda scratched her nose. “That guy? Not likely. Oh, I bet he hasn’t actually crawled into bed with any passed-out girls in a while. I would guess he acts out more in a new environment, when he’s insecure or stressed-out. Which, by the way, he will be in L.A. Success can be just as stressful as failure.” She chewed her lip, absent-mindedly tugging on a curl. “I wonder if he has a clinical diagnosis.”
“While you’re wondering, he’s probably packing up his car and looking for a subletter,” I lamented. Then I snapped my fingers. “That’s it! You could show up to see his apartment, pretend you want to sublease, and then . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Relax, Dana,” Amanda said. “I’ve already got a few ideas. I just need to do some research, that’s all. This one is not going to be quite as fast, but I promise it’ll happen.” She looked at me. “Have I ever let you down?”
I stopped in my tracks and shook my head. Amanda might act slightly nuts, but she had her own way of doing things. She was secretive, sometimes excessively so, and relished her conspiracy theories. It was as if, having rejected the Silicon Valley world so thoroughly, she had burned its mentality deeper into her psyche. All the same, I trusted her absolutely—if not to tell me everything, then at least never to lie. She maintained a kind of scrupulous adherence to the way things were that felt brave, admirable. And in such a short time, she’d opened my eyes. Was she really paranoid, or was I naive? After all, I’d been so quick to assume the Neely episode was an isolated incident, just a nasty one-off. Amanda, with her statistically inclined mind, had immediately intuited that it was a pattern and, moreover, she’d known just how to capture hard proof. That revelation had already changed how I took in new information. Kim’s story about Fash—if she had told me that same story just a couple of weeks ago, might I have shrugged it off? She herself was quick to minimize it. I thought of Branchik’s wife. Why were all of us so ready to lie to ourselves? Was the truth—that we were hemmed in on all sides by the Fashes and Branchiks and Neelys of the world, that we let ourselves be herded out of some arenas and penned into others by their behavior—just too horrible to contemplate?
“You’ll do it,” I said. “I know you’ll do it. I’m just—” I reached for words to describe my feeling of powerlessness, knowing that all around me these acts were unfolding. “Impatient.”
“Well.” She smiled like she had a present for me. “How would you like something to do while you wait?”
Amanda wasn’t kidding when she said her list was long. She showed me her spreadsheet of men who’d harassed her on the internet, their online handles listed along with the names and addresses she’d found for some of them. They lived all over the world. There were three in Texas, including one in Houston and one in El Paso. RadioMacktive666 was just the lucky one who lived in Austin.
The bulk of the harassment had come almost two years ago, right after the news item in which she’d been anonymous but identifiable, and most people had forgotten her quickly. But a tenacious few had held on until the day she erased her online identity. She opened a file full of screencaps of comments and e-mails, all scrupulously saved with notes on the trolls who’d sent them. They were mostly rape threats embroidered with varying degrees of obscenity, but RadioMacktive666 had been particularly creative, sending horrific GIFs altered to look like the violent acts in them were happening to Amanda. I looked away from these quickly.
“What’s the plan?” I said, disgusted.
“He’s a Runnr user, naturally,” she said. “He likes to pay people—preferably women—to get him Thai food, though sometimes he splashes out and orders one of those fifteen-dollar burgers with the fried egg on top. Username Carl M. I’m not giving you his real name, because the less you know, the less tempted you’ll be to look him up online and give him a way to trace you. This guy’s a lot smarter than Branchik. He could find you and dox you in a heartbeat.”
I looked over her shoulder at a screen full of numbers. In the leftmost column, there were six digits, then a space, then four digits. Dates and times. “Are those his runs?”
“Yeah.” She grinned. “See if you can figure out the pattern.”
It seemed self-explanatory. “Once a week?”
“Yeah, but what about these shifts in the pattern? These gaps here? Or here, where they come twice weekly for a while?”
I looked harder, tried to think in patterns, like Amanda. “It’s the same day of the week for about three months at a time, then it changes.” I pulled up the calendar on my phone and checked. “The most recent dates are Thursdays. And it looks like he did ten Sundays in a row last year . . . wait a minute.” I looked at the times again. “Nineteen thirty, nineteen forty-five . . . that’s right before eight o’clock. They’re all TV shows.” I started chortling. “And that one’s got to be—”
“Game of Thrones,” she finished. “The new season premieres Sunday.”
“Sunday,” I said. “That soon?”
“If we want to take advantage of a sure thing, yeah,” she said casually. “There’s no way he’ll miss this. And he’ll be hungry.”
I tried to get used to the idea. “What am I going to do once I get there?”
“Malware,” she said, holding up a flash drive. “This is a program I’m particularly proud of. The first thing it’ll do is send screenshots of his most questionable online activities to everyone in his e-mail contact list, including his boss, his coworkers, and, I’m guessing, his mother.” She smiled. “He’s too savvy to open a link, but if you can upload this to his computer, we can do some serious damage.”
“So I have to get all the way in?” I frowned. “Won’t he be there?”
“It’s definitely more dangerous,” she said, fixing me with a level gaze. “I’m in charge of software, but you should bring some hardware.”
I looked at her blankly.
“You’re hardly a giant, Dana. Remember what almost happened last time. You’re going to want some protection.” She clicked on a tab and started scrolling through a website. “Think of it as a tool, nothing more.”
I glanced at the screen and felt myself pale. Handguns, row after row, little oblique angles of destruction. “Good thing we live in Texas,” she said. “This should be a piece of cake.”
I looked for a joke but for once came up blank. Instead, I just said, “I can’t.” Amarillo was lousy with guns, but there were none in my house growing up, and I had been taught to stay as far away from them as possible. Jason’s dad hunted with rifles, but th
at was different. And even that had frankly creeped me out. This was one line I just couldn’t cross.
Amanda and I argued about self-defense for some time. In the end, I solved the problem by Googling Runnr driver self-defense, which turned up a harrowing array of stories from runners who’d been attacked on the job. As I skimmed articles with titles like “The Five Things That Could Save Your Life on a Bad Run” and “How to Tell If a Run Is a Trap,” I realized Amanda’s talk of the company endangering customers by not doing background checks on the runners had blinded me to the dangers the runners themselves faced. Just another peril of the gig economy. No wonder there were fewer female runners than male ones.
A few veteran runners suggested bringing a handgun on every run, but stun guns were by far the preferred mode of self-defense, since they were less likely to escalate tensions in a bad situation. Moreover, and this is what clinched it for Amanda, I could get my hands on one without registering it, leaving no traces to clean up afterward. Relieved, I agreed to procure a stun gun before Sunday’s premiere and left Amanda’s apartment feeling surreal. The last thing she said as I walked out the door was “Be sure to wear that awful wig. He likes blondes.”
It was only after I was out on the sidewalk and headed toward my car that I remembered I had gone to Amanda’s to talk about Fash and left with every intention of procuring a weapon.
I was still in bed the next morning when the call came.
“Hi, Dana. Larry Green here.” I racked my brain for a Larry Green I knew, but before I could answer, he said, “Look, I know this is last-minute, but we had a guest drop out of the taping this morning. Cynthia threw your name out as a replacement.”
Cynthia. Larry. I was talking to the producer of The Bestie Cast. “Wow,” I said, finally catching up. “Thanks for calling, Larry. So when—”
“We’d want to get you on as soon as possible to get the podcast up at the usual time,” he said. “We’re already behind schedule. How’s nowish?” I stammered out something affirmative. “Great, I’ll call you back in fifteen. Be ready.” He hung up without saying goodbye.
Three minutes later I was fully dressed and perched on the edge of my sofa with my cell phone in hand, not even daring to look at it lest I run the battery down from its 91 percent charge. It rang at five minutes after ten, and I answered on the first ring.
“Dana Diaz?” Larry asked, as if it were the first time we had spoken. He continued in a smooth, well-worn version of the gruff voice I’d heard a few minutes before. “This is Larry, producer for The Bestie Cast. We’re so excited to have you on the show. I’m going to patch you through to Cyndi in just a second. You’ll hear her talking for a few minutes before anyone can hear you, then she’ll say hi, and then Bob’s your uncle, as they say.” He chuckled.
“Oh my God,” I said before I could stop myself. “This is really happening.”
“Relax,” he said. And then added, with profound cruelty: “Just be funny.”
And suddenly, I was hearing Cynthia’s plummy, melodic voice on the line, midsentence: “With breakfast tacos! So, paradise on earth, right? I was recently down there judging the Funniest Person in Austin competition, a six-week-long, elimination-style battle of the local standups. That’s how I met our next guest, Dana Diaz, who placed second in the competition with an act I can only describe as, well, intriguing. Dana, are you there?”
I spent a few agonizing seconds trying to figure out whether to call her Cynthia or Cyndi, but in the end all I could come up with was “Yes, hi.”
“You’re on The Bestie Cast,” she said. In a voice of mock reproof, she added, “I need you to sound like my bestie, Dana.”
“Oh, sorry.” I laughed feebly. “Hey, girl, what’s up?” It felt horrifyingly stiff, even after she answered me in kind. For the first few minutes, I could feel her trying to loosen me up—not that the effort showed in her voice—and I tried desperately to loosen. We chatted about our parents; I told a story about Amarillo that, without a roomful of people to laugh at it, sounded so flat I felt sure no one anywhere would ever laugh at it again. She gave me opening after opening for the kind of soft-serve autobiographical anecdotes I usually trimmed out of my sets, B-material that would give me some room to spread out and show my personality. But without the energy of an audience to feed off of, I could feel myself slipping off the thin, taut wire of funny, fumbling at the trapeze Cynthia kept tossing my way as I flailed over the void.
After a few minutes of this, even Cynthia’s calm voice began to betray hints of irritation. “Tell me about Betty, a character you sometimes do in your sets.”
“Betty came to me, kind of, kind of all at once,” I stuttered. “I borrowed the wig from one of my coworkers—”
“Great, great.” Cynthia cut me off before I could start rambling about my day job. “What if you got into character for a minute and just answered some questions as Betty? I definitely have a lot of things I’d like to ask her.”
“Sure,” I said, so eager to please I didn’t quite understand what I had agreed to until it was too late.
“Okay, so my first question is: How’d you get so basic, Betty?”
One second. Two seconds. Three seconds. The excruciating sound of dead air ticked by as I ran with the phone into my bedroom, quickly located the wig on my dresser, and smashed it crookedly down on my head, ruffling it over my bangs. “Basic?” I said in Betty’s high-pitched squeak, glancing at myself in the mirror. “I’m salt of the fucking earth, bitches.”
Cynthia laughed, relieved. “Betty! So glad you could join us today. Just don’t give Larry anything else to bleep, okay?”
I garbled out a long streak of curse words, one after the other, that devolved into croaking toward the end. “How’s that?” Surrendering to Betty, I stopped trying to connect with Cynthia and started connecting with the invisible audience. Instinctively, I knew her listeners would love to hear their beloved podcast host needled—as long as it was by an imaginary character who would disappear at the end of the episode.
Cynthia rewarded my instincts with easy laughter. “That’s great, Betty. You know, Larry’s already had a rough night, this could break him. For a minute there, he was worried you weren’t going to show.”
“And miss The Betty Cast? No way.”
“That’s The Bestie Cast.”
“That’s what I said.” Betty could ride the corniest material with absolute confidence. If Dana’s rule was No blood in the water, Betty’s was Pull out your tampon and get busy splashing.
“Now tell me the truth, Betty. You’re wearing the wig, aren’t you? I heard you put it on. Listeners, we are dealing with a true artist here. Like Kaufman.”
“I’m not coughing, I’m just out of breath from running,” I quipped facilely. “And if we’re talking about wigs, I have a good story about Cynthia’s—”
“Do not even go there!” Cynthia faux-warned. “You know what, Betty? You are really lacking in social graces.”
“That’s what my psychiatrist said, only he said it with more words. Let’s see, how many words is antisocial personality disorder with homicidal tendencies?” I pretended to count but gave up at three. “Well, anyway, it’s a lot, but back then it was easier for him to talk. Because he had lips. And a tongue.”
“What happened?”
I settled onto my sofa, stretched out my legs, and held the phone in place with my shoulder while I picked at my nails. “I’m so glad you asked, Cynthia. It all started the other day when I got my dog Blister certified as a therapy animal so I could sneak into retirement-home kitchens and soak in the creamed-corn vats.” I snorted indignantly. “Who knew biting even one senior gets you kicked out of those places?”
“Wait a minute,” asked Cynthia, playing the straight man. “Why would you soak in a vat of creamed corn?”
“How do you think old people get such soft, smooshy skin?” I said. “I can tell you, though, it doesn’t taste as good as it looks, so don’t bother.”
“Creame
d corn?”
“Old-people skin.”
“It was you biting the seniors?” she said in disbelief. “What about Blister?”
“Blister’s been dead six years,” I said. “Turns out that’s another thing that’s against the rules. Now shut up and listen, bitches, Betty’s talking.”
For the next hour, as Betty rambled and Cynthia pretended shock, I lived in a double world. The apartment all around me seemed to have gone semitransparent; I could see through it to a world beyond that smelled like chlorinated pools and salt water and leather sandals and success. Finally, when I’d maneuvered Betty into the psychiatrist’s office and supplied her with an arsenal of weapons straight out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon, Betty yelped her punch line—“So I took matters into my own hands!”—and she was out.
Cynthia thanked me for the worst hour of her life, which I recognized as a compliment. “You’ve got to come out to L.A., Dana. Any plans to?”
“Definitely, definitely,” I said. My fifteen hundred dollars from the competition would pay for at least a short trip. The swimming pools seemed so close, I could almost dive into one. “Thanks for having me on The Bestie Cast, Cynthia.”
“It was The Betty Cast today. And thanks for being my bestie for an hour. See you!”
And then she was gone, and Larry the producer was back on the line, saying, “Thanks so much, Dana. You did great. The episode airs tonight, and then it’s available on the website immediately afterward, so just keep an eye out on social media.”
As I thanked him once more, the line went dead, and with it, my connection to the world beyond my apartment walls. My furniture, the television, everything went opaque again. Even the daylight coming through the drawn curtains looked dingy. In the new silence, the air conditioner rattled on and started to whir.
It was still too early to go to work. Instead, I got out the stack of business cards I’d been handed at the finals and sat down at my laptop. It was time to send out some follow-up e-mails with a link to the Bestie Cast website in the signature. If I was going to make an L.A. trip sometime soon, I would need representation.