Last Woman Standing

by Amy Gentry

  Dazed, she shook her head no.

  “Right. You never said you did. You just let me believe it so I’d have to take your third name,” I said. With my free hand, I gestured to Jason. “Well, I did. And now it looks an awful lot like you owe me one.” She stared at me. “He was my third name too, as it turns out. I guess you knew that, if you talked to Mattie.” I closed my eyes for a moment, then opened them. “But don’t worry, Amanda. You can still do your part.” I smiled and looked pointedly at the mic stand. “You can still get my back.”

  “Dana. What are you—” She looked down at the mic stand too and then suddenly dropped it as if it had burned her. It clattered to the floor, the base rolling, describing a wide arc that came to rest against Jason’s solid body. “Wait a minute.”

  “He was your kill, Amanda,” I said. “This one’s on you. And you did most of it anyway. Everything but pulling the trigger.” She started to come toward me. “Speaking of feeling triggered.” My eyes on hers, I started to sob hysterically into the phone.

  “Dana—”

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  As I gulped and hiccupped into the receiver, Amanda looked again at Jason, then at me, as if doing some difficult math problem in her head. Then she seemed to give up. She looked down at him once more and said, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

  The dispatcher begged me to be calm, and I managed to choke the words out through my hysteria: “She killed him. My boyfriend’s ex. She’s been stalking us. She’s still in the house.” I rattled off our address. “Please come quick. She’s—oh my God!” I screamed once and let the phone drop to the floor with a clatter. Then I scooted it past the door frame and kicked it as hard as I could down the hall. “They’ll be here soon. We live right around the corner from a police station.” I looked down at Jason. “Lived.” I gestured at my two black eyes, my bloody nose. “Wait until they see what you did to my face.”

  Amanda was still swaying uncertainly, eyeballing the gun and the stun gun where they lay on the floor across the room.

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “I could get there a lot faster than you. For what it’s worth, I believe you. I think I always did. You’ve told the truth about everything, haven’t you? Branchik and Carl M. And Jason.”

  She nodded, eyes wide.

  “Truth after truth, and where has it gotten you? Nobody wants to believe the world is what it is. I don’t blame them. Look at what the truth has done to you, Amanda. Look what you’ve become.”

  But it was me she looked at, her eyes narrow. “I have everything on you, Dana. Every word you said while you were beating a man half to death. His every scream, auto-recorded and filed away on a little flash drive about this big.” She held her thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “And only I know where it is.”

  I panicked for a moment, then shook the image from my mind. “You’re bluffing,” I said. “If that drive exists, you’ll never turn it over to the police. You’d go down too.”

  She wheeled and started for the door, and I was tempted momentarily by the mic stand. But the police sirens were already wailing in the background and putting my fingerprints over hers would ruin valuable evidence. Besides, I needed her alive. I needed her to tell the truth once more in court, where a dead woman is easier to believe than a live one, every time.

  One Year Later

  26

  “So, a moth walks into a psychiatrist’s office and lies down on the couch.”

  The important thing about telling a dumb joke onstage is the irony. I have mastered it, along with the voices, the flat affect, all the slightly distancing techniques that come with the more absurd, less autobiographical standup I do now. No more bits about my mom, my hometown, my weight. It’s too easy to slip into the kind of confessional standup that so many women do onstage, throwing yourself under the bus, showing your belly. I wouldn’t say what I do now is less personal; in a way, it’s more intimate than ever, because it leaves me room to bleed. If there’s anything I’ve learned about comedy, about life, it’s that the blood is always in the water. The trick is developing a taste for it.

  “The psychiatrist says, ‘Tell me a little about yourself. What do you do?’ The moth says, ‘I’m a family man. I have a wife, kids. A two-car garage. I guess you could say I have it all.’”

  Nervous titters. The hometown crowd packing the North Door for the taping of my comedy special tonight definitely have the right look. They shift eagerly from side to side, giggling nervously through the setup, conscious of the cameras trained on them and loosened by the drink coupons we handed out liberally at the door. The North Door, known affectionately as the ND, is an awkward space, cavernous and mouth-shaped, but uniquely photogenic when filled to capacity, its staircases and randomly placed balconies lined with audience members craning their necks for a better view. There’s a rumor going around that the ND is in danger of closing its doors, like so many of Austin’s beloved downtown venues; its position just east of the freeway has protected it thus far, but the east side is no longer safe from gentrification. Laurel’s Paper and Gifts is the latest casualty, I noticed when Ubering past my old workplace on the way here. It looks like the new owner kept part of the old name, probably to save money on signage. The sign now reads LAUREL + HENRY.

  “The psychiatrist asks”—on this line, I lean forward, my lips so close to the mic I’m practically making out with it—“‘And how does that make you feel?’”

  If the rumors are true, this comedy special might be among the last shows performed here. It’s sad, of course, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t influenced my decision to record here, in a homely venue that still projects something of a “weird” Austin vibe, even if the clubs that graced the city in the Slacker era of weirdness are all long gone. If the ND does shut down, we might see a nostalgia boost in the streaming revenue. Cynthia would like that, and keeping Cynthia happy is as important as keeping the audience laughing.

  It was Cynthia’s idea to tape in Austin in the first place. A hometown hero always gets a warm welcome, and my reputation in L.A. is still tinged with scandal. Here, the reverberations of Amanda Dorn’s celebrity-adjacent murder trial are faint, dimly associated with typical West Coast excesses, and ultimately outweighed by my status as a local girl. Cynthia had her own reasons for wanting to film here, of course, as she does for everything. She liked what she saw when she judged the Bat City contest; she thinks Austin is the new Portland and wants to set the show we’re developing here. She’ll be spending a few extra days in Austin after the shoot, scoping out locations. I hooked her up with Kim Rinski as a tour guide—it was the least I could do. Although I will never know exactly what Jason did to Kim when they were dating, I understand now why she stopped talking to me and declined my invitation to Amarillo when she found out Jason and I were together. I’m not sure how much she’s guessed about Jason’s demise, but if she has intuited the truth somehow, it hasn’t endeared me to her further. Maybe a role in one of Cynthia’s projects, or even a guest spot on The Bestie Cast, will soften her toward me again.

  As for me, the minute we wrap, I plan to hop the first flight back to L.A.

  Onstage, the moth is giving the psychiatrist his usual line: “I’m fine, I guess. I haven’t really thought about it.” The shrink replies, “Are you sure you don’t have a guilt complex?” And the moth says, “Not really. I’m pretty happy with my life.” “Perhaps you’re having a midlife crisis?” “No, no,” says the moth.

  Whether a joke kills or bombs depends more on how you feel telling it than on the joke itself, and the moth joke is proof of that. It’s inane, yet it gets bigger laughs on every line. I’ve stopped trying to figure out why, which Cynthia says is the key to success. Let your id take over, she told me once. The audience can feel the truth coming through the gag, even if they don’t recognize what they’re getting, and it’s a shock to the system. As someone intimately familiar with what a person getting shocked actually looks like, I can assure you that this i
s a lousy metaphor, but I nodded when Cynthia said it. My long years as Jason’s sidekick made me into a fantastic listener.

  Finally, after a few more shaggy-dog lines, I get to the punch line: “‘The light was’—squish.”

  I mime the psychiatrist nonchalantly grinding the toe of his shoe on the stage. The audience erupts. In my normal voice, I say, “I’m sorry, did I not mention he’s a moth?” The laughs are going strong, so I throw in my tags. “His insurance doesn’t cover mental health. Also, he’s, like, this big.” I hold my finger and thumb an inch apart. “Never forget, y’all. Size matters. Take it from a double D.”

  And so forth.

  The trial went like clockwork.

  In the first of several windfalls for the prosecution’s case against Amanda Dorn, Amanda did not hire her own attorney, taking the court-assigned public defender instead. At first I assumed this was a deliberate move on her part; after all, with the remainder of her settlement money, she could have afforded someone expensive. I racked my brain trying to figure out her angle, but the answer turned out to be simple. In addition to the criminal charges, Amanda was facing a civil suit from Runnr for breaching her nondisclosure agreement. Beyond her illegal use of trade secrets, the crimes she’d committed dressed as a Runnr employee had damaged the company’s reputation, they claimed, forcing them to state publicly, with contrition, that they were overhauling their hiring process and instituting background checks for their customers’ safety. In the meantime, they had filed a vindictive injunction to freeze Amanda’s bank accounts until after the criminal claims were settled.

  To give Amanda’s harried-looking public defender credit, I’m sure she tried to keep Amanda far away from the stand. But Amanda has always been her own worst enemy. The only defense she would consider was the truth—that her lesser crimes were committed on behalf of the comedian Dana Diaz, with whom she had entered into a revenge pact and who had committed similar crimes for Amanda, including the killing of Jason Murphy. It was the truth, but it sounded like something I had dreamed up for a Betty monologue. The prosecution’s case was that Amanda was a deranged fan who, after obsessively stalking an ex-boyfriend, had transferred her fixation to me. I felt for Amanda’s attorney.

  On the stand, Amanda burned with a phoenix-like radiance that must have struck the jury as something akin to lunacy. I recognized it as unrepentant zeal for her mission, and although it frightened me, I couldn’t help but find it scorchingly beautiful as well. Gaunter than ever after her time in custody awaiting trial, she spoke of the app she’d been creating in the tender tones of a mother talking about her only child. Of Jason, she spoke as little as possible and always with contempt, repeating her eyewitness account of his murder with very little embroidery. Her comments about his past abusive behavior raised objection after objection from the prosecutor, all along the lines of “The deceased is not on trial!” The defense sat back and let Amanda’s testimony about Jason’s abuse get struck from the record, since it only provided the prosecution with a motive.

  She spoke of me frankly and fervently as a friend with whom she’d had differences, and this, along with her fiery description of the injustices inflicted on me by the men she’d targeted, did 90 percent of the prosecutor’s job for him. Ruby did her part, too, recalling, with a thrill in her voice, how I’d told her about meeting Amanda the morning after it happened and how she’d warned me to watch out for my new “number-one fan.”

  “A real boundary pusher, is what I said,” Ruby said, wearing a sober navy suit from the forties. “But Dana is just so trusting.”

  By the time I took the stand, the groundwork had been laid for my strongest performance to date. After all, I do my best work in front of a microphone, where the truest truth comes out sounding like hilarious exaggeration and where a lie, if guilelessly told, can become historical fact. Besides, it was all so nearly true. The story of how Amanda and I met at one of my standup gigs. How at first I thought her talk of revenge was a joke and how troubled I was when I started to suspect she was serious. My attempts to distance myself after that, corroborated by the phone company records showing Amanda’s increasingly frequent calls. And then, so few people had ever actually seen me with Amanda—we had been as careful as secret lovers. I was even able to point to the timing of my well-known stage creation Betty and confess, with the embarrassment of someone revealing tricks of the trade, that Betty had been partially inspired by the real-life character I’d met in the bar that night. This, too, was close to the truth.

  “I was exaggerating for comic effect,” I explained, and then shook my head. “I never imagined Amanda was really dangerous.”

  What the police had discovered in Amanda’s storage locker had done the rest.

  Thank God, the flash drive full of spyware recordings—if it even existed—was inadmissible, since California requires two-party consent for all recordings. Given the lack of any evidence, the truth was an outlandish defense. But perhaps Amanda knew the video of her beating Neely with the steering-wheel lock would surface eventually. And once it did—edited selectively to ensure Neely’s cooperation and corroborated by security-camera footage of Amanda in the hotel lobby—there was simply no point in denying she had committed assault and battery under circumstances remarkably similar to those of Jason’s murder. When Neely himself took the stand after months of seclusion to testify that he was the man in the video and identify Amanda as his attacker, you could practically feel the stampede of celebrity-trial junkies coming from miles away to join the mob of journalists already reporting on the trial of the so-called Runnr Revengr.

  “She destroyed my health, both physical and mental,” Neely said, and I believed him; he looked much thinner and sallower than when I had seen him last, with puffy bags sagging under his eyes. I couldn’t believe I had ever been afraid of him. “My career will never be the same. I will never be the same.”

  Questioned about the attack, Amanda refused to be cowed. “I came back in the room and the man had his Willy Wonka out. What would you do?” she snapped.

  The judge pounded his gavel and the prosecutor loudly announced that Aaron Neely was not on trial either, but the damage had been done. Amanda’s flippant allusion to rumors that had been circulating on the internet for years seemed to mark a turning point for the trial. For the first time, she had gained the sympathy of her audience. Within hours, T-shirt vendors popped up like mushrooms on the sidewalk outside the courthouse selling images of Neely Photoshopped into a purple Wonka tailcoat and top hat. Overnight, a handful of think-pieces sprouted up with titles like “Amanda Dorn, Feminist Hero?” and “I Wish I Had Done What Amanda Did.” For a moment it seemed that public opinion had swayed in Amanda’s direction. At the peak of the frenzy, a sextet of radical feminist protesters were dragged from the courtroom after they all stood up simultaneously in the gallery, mouths duct-shaped shut, and unzipped their orange jumpsuits to reveal the words FREE AMANDA Sharpied on their bare breasts.

  That was the beginning of the end, however. After just a few days, the men’s rights activists who’d been loudly protesting Amanda’s deification were joined by second-wave feminists in the Atlantic and the New York Times worrying about the slippery slope and Twitter personalities lambasting Amanda for trying to pull a woman of color (me) down with her. And then, just as the tide was turning, something much worse came out. A leak in the Austin Police Department revealed transcripts of Facebook chats between Amanda and Fash Banner, the tragic young comic who had killed himself after going off his psychiatric medications. While there was nothing technically incriminating in the leaked conversations, it certainly sounded like Amanda was encouraging him. “They want you to be numb,” one chat transcript read. “I’ve been there. But I went off mine in January, and I’m free now. You can be too.”

  The next day in court, Amanda’s lawyer said that, in light of recent revelations about her client’s mental state, she wanted a psychiatric evaluation to determine whether the defendant was competent to stand
trial. Amanda promptly fired her counsel and announced that she was representing herself. No mistrial was declared; on the contrary, the judge appeared to relish this new turn of events. Apparently, he did not appreciate the media circus Amanda had brought into his courtroom, and he seemed delighted as the odds mounted against her.

  But the final blow to the Free Amanda movement came in the form of a surprise witness for the prosecution, a scruffy programmer from Austin who’d been attacked under similar circumstances as Neely and Jason during the same six-week period. When the prosecutor called to the stand Carl Montgomery, who looked the same as the last time I’d seen him except for a rusty beard covering half his face, my heart nearly stopped.

  “That’s her,” he said, and I pinched the skin of my thigh as hard as I could to keep from bolting from the courtroom.

  But he wasn’t pointing at me.

  Never have I been so grateful for a man’s inability to rip his gaze away from a television screen full of naked women long enough to pay attention to the real woman standing in front of him—at least, not until he was being pummeled too hard to know the difference between tall and short, real blond and fake. To be fair, I guess we all look alike when you’re getting kicked in the groin.

  Amanda had no alibi for the Carl attack. I remember the exact moment when her shoulders slumped at the defense table and she seemed to accept her fate. It was when Carl, who’d been absent-mindedly rooting around in his beard during his testimony, scratching his fingers back and forth hypnotically, suddenly pulled the hairs aside. The scar was the thickness of a pencil in the middle and straggled a good six inches across his face, from one ear all the way down to the jaw, where it was joined by another one across his chin. There was an audible gasp in the courtroom.

  Amanda never admitted to either the Carl strike or Jason’s murder. But as the story shaped itself around her, even she must have been able to tell that her denials sounded increasingly hollow. Even her staunchest defenders, the ones who still maintained she was justified in what she’d done, didn’t believe her. The guilty verdict was returned with dizzying swiftness, the sentence of life without parole unusually harsh for a woman. The judge stressed in the sentencing that Amanda was being made to answer not just for the life she had taken, but for her specious justifications, which diverted attention from the real victims of rape and abuse.