Womanized

by Nikki Crescent

  I took a deep breath and then thought about the thousands of dollars I would be making. I could make that money last a few months, and maybe that would be enough time to get my professional career back on track.

  CHAPTER III

  The filming of the show didn’t start on a sound stage at some fancy studio; it started in my apartment. I assumed that they were going to e-mail me a place and time. Instead, they just showed up at my apartment at 6:00 AM. I opened the door and saw the host of the show standing in front of two camera operators, a man with a clipboard, and a sound guy with a microphone on a big, long pole. They crowded into my apartment as I stumbled back, still rubbing the sleep out from my eyes. “What the hell’s going on?” I asked. “What time is it even?”

  “We’re here with The Gamble. We’re going to be following you around for the next week, starting now.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? I didn’t agree to this. You can’t be in my apartment.” But it was too late. The crew was already flooding into my place, setting lights in in corners and holding light meters up all over the place. There must have been ten people suddenly crowding my place.

  “Actually, Mr. Pearson, you did agree to it. You sent in the paperwork last night,” said the man with the clipboard. There was a camera two feet from my face. I was tempted to reach out and slap it down onto the ground.

  I didn’t read the paperwork he was referring to. It was a thirty-page document sent at 11:00 PM, while I was watching a movie. I was told that I had three hours to get the paperwork back if I still wanted to be on the show. And no, I didn’t want to be on the show, but I did want the money. So I printed the forms, filled them out, scanned them, and sent them back. Then I went back to my movie. And it’s not like I didn’t try to read them. I tried to read that first page, but it was so long-winded and written in legalese. I just figured I was waiving my right to sue—and I probably was.

  “Well, I hope you like watching people sleep, because you’re about to watch me sleep for another five hours.” I dragged my feet back towards my bedroom. The crew followed. I was disappointed to see that there was already a tall light set up in the corner.

  “Change the colour temperature to blue and get that diffusion scrim out of there!” one of the crewmembers yelled as I crawled back into bed. Both of the cameras followed me. One of them remained a few feet from my face. I tried closing my eyes, but that light was still shining through my eyelids. I bit down on my tongue and tried to pretend like no one was in my room. I didn’t care if they got footage of me snoring and drooling. I didn’t care if I looked like an idiot—no man looks cool when he’s sleeping.

  Then, just as I felt like I was starting to doze off, I heard the host’s voice. “It’s 7:00 AM. Most people are getting up for work right now, but comedian Orrin Pearson is just getting to bed. He didn’t have a show last night—and he hasn’t had a show in almost a month—so it’s anyone’s guess as to why he was up so late.” I opened my eyes and saw the host’s back. He was facing the camera and holding a microphone in his hand.

  “I’m staying on schedule, in case I get a gig,” I groaned. “And I’m not just getting to bed. I’ve been in bed since 3:00 AM. That’s a normal time for a comedian to go to sleep.”

  “While Pearson sleeps, let’s take a look around his house,” said the host. Then the crew suddenly filtered out. I could hear them poking around. I thought about jumping up to stop them, but I remembered that consent form that I never read. I’m sure I gave away all of my privacy rights with that form.

  “And what do we have here? Stashed in the side table is a stack of pornography. I guess we probably won’t be seeing any porn featuring transgenders—or maybe we will,” the host said. Now I sprung out of bed. I forgot about my Playboy magazines.

  “Don’t touch that! That’s private!” I said from across the room. The cameras all swung in my direction. I cleared my throat. “Every guy has a few Playboy magazines. It’s not like I’m hiding kiddie porn or anything like that. I’m not a monster.”

  The host turned to face the cameras again. “Pearson’s apartment is small, as you might expect from a struggling comedian in New York City. The average apartment in this area rents for about two grand per month. An apartment of this size should only cost about eight hundred.”

  “So what?” I said.

  The host turned to me and smiled. Then he approached. “Orrin, we need you to relax—okay?” he said. “Just pretend like the crew isn’t here. Pretend like I’m not here, unless I’m asking you a question. We’re going to follow you around a little bit—and don’t worry, we’ll try not to get in your way. We just want to see a normal day in the life of comedian, Orrin Pearson.”

  I took a deep breath. This wasn’t worth the thousands of dollars I would be getting. It wasn’t even worth ten times that. They were just steamrolling through my apartment, trying to humiliate me. I tried to think if I had any other embarrassing magazines or trinkets lying around. I remembered a box of weed that I had in the kitchen. When the cameras were all focussed on the host again, I casually hurried over and grabbed that box. I stashed it in the back of my freezer, where they would never look. Then I looked up and saw that a camera was pointing at me.

  “Pearson is making himself some breakfast,” the host said. I closed my eyes and tried to tune him out. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea—maybe I just needed a little bit of breakfast so I could get my mind straight, so that I could ignore all of these assholes. I pulled out a pan and grabbed a couple of eggs from the fridge.

  “B-camera—get some close-ups of the pan. I want to see those eggs sizzling,” the clipboard man said.

  I tried to grab the toaster, but the cameraman was blocking the cupboard. “Can you move, please?” I asked.

  He shimmied a few inches to the side, only giving me a tiny bit of room to awkwardly squeeze the toaster out from that bottom cupboard. By the time I had it on the counter, I could smell burning. I looked over and saw that smoke was billowing up from my eggs. “Shit!” I said, rushing over. I grabbed the panhandle, forgetting that it wasn’t a protected handle. It sizzled my skin as I tried to lift it, so I ended up tossing it to the side, making a big mess of burnt eggs in my kitchen.

  “Get a close-up of his face,” said the clipboard man. “I want those red cheeks to read for the audience.” I took a deep breath and managed to settle myself down. I restarted my eggs after rinsing out the pan and rinsing my fresh burn. Though I had a feeling that they wouldn’t be using the footage of my successful breakfast—just my frustrated first try.

  The rest of the day was similar. The cameras followed me around my apartment until the host said, “Okay, Orrin. Let’s get outside. Maybe take us to one of your favourite cafes for a coffee—or maybe we can go walk around Central Park—whatever you would do on a normal day.”

  “Normally I would sit in my apartment and come up with material for my set,” I said.

  “Well not today. We need more so we can take this to TV. Let’s go get a coffee.”

  So we went out. They embarrassingly followed me with their whole crew, cameras pointed at me constantly. One of the cameramen swung around and started filming in front of me while I walked. “This café right here is perfect,” the host said.

  “But I’ve never been here in my life,” I said.

  “This café will do. Just go buy a coffee.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and went in to buy a coffee. The barista gave me a funny look as I walked up. “Sorry about the cameras. Can I just get a coffee—black.”

  “So you think you’re funny, huh?” the girl said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You think transgenders aren’t real people?” she asked.

  I sighed and rolled my head back. “Are you going to spit in my coffee? Should I just go somewhere else? I never said they aren’t real people. Of course they’re real people—literally no one thinks that. Just think about what you’re saying for a minute: do you really believe that anyone can bel
ieve that someone isn’t real because of what they choose to wear?”

  “What they choose to wear?” the woman said with a tone of outrage. “I can’t even believe what I’m hearing.”

  “You know what I mean—clothes and wigs and stuff.”

  She shook her head. Then she reached out and grabbed a cup. She filled it sloppily with black coffee, and then she slid it across the counter. “Take it. It’s on the house.”

  “On the house?” I said. “Why?”

  “Because I heard that you’re going broke.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  And that’s when it occurred to me that this was all set up by the reality show production. She was probably just an actress, and I was falling for it. I had a feeling that she probably wouldn’t be the first one of the day either—and I was right.

  The production had me take my coffee to Central Park, where I never went. They told me to just walk around wherever—until I reached a fork in the path, then they told me to take a left, and then another left at the next fork. Suddenly, I found myself standing on a scenic little bridge. There was a girl leaning against the wooden rail. She turned and looked at me and then she said, “Hey—aren’t you that comedian guy?”

  I forced a smile. “Yes, I’m that horrible, mean comedian guy.” Then I noticed her wide forehead and her flat jawline. Her dress looked especially tight around her shoulders and her bust looked awkward, as if it was just a rolled up t-shirt stuffed under her shirt. She was a transgender—exactly the kind of person I was talking about in my big mistake of a tweet.

  “I saw you perform last year at the Comedy Cave.”

  I nodded my head and smiled. “Great,” I said. “Well have a nice day now.” I tried to rush away before she could say whatever the producers told her to say.

  “I really liked your show,” she called out.

  And then I hesitated. I turned back to her and tried to figure out if she was just messing with me. “Thanks,” I said carefully. She smiled and then I went on my way, looking back occasionally to make sure she wasn’t sticking her tongue out at me or flipping me off. “That was weird,” I said to the camera.

  Finally, when I got back to my apartment, the man with the clipboard let me know that he pulled some strings and got me booked for a show at the Funny Lounge, one of the cities better small venues. “Really?” I said. “I’ve been calling them for weeks. They keep hanging up on me.”

  “They’re going to let you play. You’re on at 10:15 PM.”

  So I spent the rest of that day putting my material together, making a good mix of new stuff and old hits. I even had a few self-deprecating jokes about the whole tweet thing, and I was already planning on ending my set with a bit of an apology—nothing too teary-eyed—just enough to get me back in the world’s good books.

  I showed up early for the set with my notebook handy in my back pocket, where I always kept it. They led me to the green room and then I sat down to rehearse. I reached for that notebook, but it wasn’t there. I started checking all of my pockets, and then I looked at the show host and said, “What did you do with my notebook?”

  He smiled. “What notebook?” he said. But I knew he took it. They were trying to get me to bomb on stage—because nothing is better for TV than a massive stand-up comedy bomb.

  “Give it to me—I’m serious. I need it on stage with me.”

  “We don’t have your notebook, Orrin.”

  The venue manager poked her head in. “You’re on in ten minutes, Orrin. The set before you just cancelled. You don’t mind doing a double, do you? You’ve got lots of material, right?”

  The cameraman walked in close, with his big lens right in my face.

  “Uh, I guess that’s fine,” I said. “You haven’t seen a notebook lying around, have you?”

  She just smiled. “Okay—hope it’s a good show,” she said, as if she didn’t hear my question. Then she was gone. My heart was pounding. I was about to bomb my first show in almost a month. Now they would really never let me back in that joint. Maybe signing up for this show wasn’t such a great idea.

  When I stepped onto the stage, I didn’t get the applause that I was used to. Apparently, everyone in the crowd was familiar with my tweet. I looked around at all of the stone-cold faces, and then I realized I needed to open with a joke about the tweet, to get the elephant out of the room. “Some people just shouldn’t be allowed on Twitter—am I right?” I said. The audience didn’t even react. “I mean, the whole place is full of homophobes and racists. And when you say something on Twitter, it’s called a tweet. People are making racist and homophobic tweets.” I still wasn’t getting anything. “Can you imagine if a bird was making racist tweets in the forest? Hey—maybe they do that. Maybe they’re like, ‘Hey, there’s that damn blue jay again.’”

  The crowd remained silent.

  “Seagulls are definitely the white people of birds—am I right?”

  Still nothing. I had more bits about birds, but I had a feeling they weren’t going anywhere. So I tried to think of some older material—stuff I knew would land—but I couldn’t think of anything. My mind was suddenly blank.

  Then someone booed. Another boo followed. I tried throwing out some of my usual retorts, but no one laughed. I started to assume that the whole crowd was planted by the reality show production. It wouldn’t matter what I said—they were being paid not to laugh.

  But I was a comedian. Surely I could make anyone laugh—it was my job. If I couldn’t even make one of them laugh, maybe I wasn’t cut out to be in comedy. So I jumped to some of my older material that I could remember. “Doesn’t it suck when you accidentally reply to wrong greeting? Like when your friend says, ‘Hey man, what’s up?’ and you’re like ‘Good! You?’” Finally, I got a little bit of a chuckle. “That always happens to me. ‘Hey dude, how are you doing?’ ‘Oh, not much.’ One time I was in this garage, stealing this guy’s bike, and then he walked through the door and said, ‘What the hell are you doing with my bike?’ and I was like, ‘Pretty good, you?’”

  The crowd laughed. I felt a bit of positive energy for the first time in so long. Maybe I could get past this whole transgender thing. Maybe it was just a matter of time before people forgot about it.

  I did my next few jokes without pause, getting louder and louder laughs from the crowd. Then I said, “Want to know what I think is funny?” setting myself up for my next joke.

  “Transgender girls?” someone shouted back. The crowd became silent again and I wanted to reach into the crowd and strangle whoever opened their dumb mouth. I was suddenly thrown off. I tried to remember what I was about to say, but I was drawing a blank. I didn’t have my little notebook to refer to.

  “Um,” I said. “I mean—transgender can be funny, right?” I said. “It’s like men were all sitting around one day, trying to figure out if there was something they weren’t better at, and then one of them said, ‘What about being a woman?’ Then they all laughed until one of them said, ‘Actually, I bet I can do that better too.’” The crowd was viciously silent. But it was just a joke. I didn’t actually think that men were better than women—I was just making fun of sexists and they way that they think. But judging by the crowd’s silence, they didn’t get it—and now I felt the need to explain it, so that they wouldn’t run home to their blogs and write about how horrible I was. “That was a joke, by the way. There used to be a time when people got jokes.”

  And the booing returned, so I just cut my set short and ran away to the green room. The venue manager rushed in after me and said, “What the hell are you doing? We don’t have another act for another twenty minutes. You need to go back out there—and quit it with the sensitive subjects. Just make jokes without offending anyone.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “Literally anything I say offends someone.”

  “What about your bike stealing joke? That was funny. Do more stuff like that.”

  “All of my usual material is in my notebook. All I can do is
improv—and I’m not an improv comedian.”

  “If you ever want to preform here again, you’ll get on the stage and finish your set,” she said.

  So I had to go back out. The next twenty minutes were the longest twenty minutes of my life. I managed to squeeze a few good jokes in, but the mood was instantly killed by some reminder of what I said on Twitter. The audience was enjoying my public crucifixion. It almost seemed like they didn’t want it to end. By the end of my set, they were laughing at my pauses and my blunders more than they were laughing at my jokes. It was the most demoralizing night of my life—and I still had four days left with that damned camera crew.

  CHAPTER IV

  They woke me up early on that Tuesday morning, just a few hours after my failed comedy act. I was surprised to see the same faces standing in my bedroom, holding those same cameras and that same microphone on that same boom pole. Did they not need to sleep? Were they actually robots disguised as humans? I would have thought they would swap out crewmembers, at least every twelve hours.

  “What do you want now?” I groaned. I rolled over and tried closing my eyes, hoping I would fall back asleep and then sleep through whatever nonsense they wanted to film that morning.

  “The shuttle will be downstairs in fifteen minutes. You need to get ready, Orrin,” the host of the show said. And then he held the microphone out to me, as if I had something to say back.

  “What shuttle?”

  “To take you to the studio—for your first gamble of the show.” And that ruined my ability to fall back asleep. Now my heart was racing and thoughts were spinning around in my head. I was morbidly curious to know what the ‘gamble’ was going to be—and I was also now trying to figure out what the host meant when he said that it would be my ‘first’ gamble.

  I tried asking, but I got no answers. They just kept rushing me to get my morning routine out of the way. “Don’t worry about breakfast. There will be breakfast at the studio,” said the clipboard man as I dragged my feet over to the kitchen.