Published in the April 2014 issue
Six minutes. At an Ottawa comedy club called Yuk Yuk's, I'd be given six minutes to stand up in front of strangers and make them laugh. "Be prepared," Howard, the club's owner, wrote me in an e-mail. "No winging it." It was Amateur Night, but it wasn't Fuck-Around Night. Of the ten comics on the bill, I would be the only virgin. Some of the others would be professionals, field-testing new routines; some of them would be hopefuls like me, but hopefuls who had found their sacks sooner. Everybody else on that stage would know things that I did not know.
Six minutes. I didn't even know if that was a little or a lot. I took a few days to mull over what to talk about—I didn't feel right calling it a bit, using language that I hadn't earned, but I guess that's what it was. There are comedians who tell stories and comedians who tell jokes, and I wanted to tell a story. I didn't want to tell some story I would tell my drunk friends, one of my go-to tales about dressing like a giant beaver or my buddy finding his mom's enormous dildo, even though that story kills. I wanted to be a fabricator, the owner-operator of material. I ended up writing a riff about erections, fucking Ted Nugent—that's fucking the verb—and the celebrity-death montage on Oscar night. I read it out loud into a recorder. It was eleven minutes long. I cut and polished and rewrote, and there was something familiar, even comforting, about that sort of work. But as I walked around my empty house, rehearsing with an invisible microphone in front of a mirror, I felt like an actor playing the part of a comedian. I felt like I was playing make-believe.
I'd wanted to try stand-up for a long time, for reasons I can't really articulate, because it's an impossible ambition to explain. How do you tell people you think you're funny or that you would like to live out their most private nightmares? Nearly every time I mentioned the idea to somebody, their immediate reaction was horror, like I was telling them that I harbored this secret desire to eat my own flesh. My wife would literally put her hands over her ears and leave the room, and I never had a counter for her shame-by-proxy. Except that years ago, I had watched my friend Tony try it, and I admired and envied him so much. I just thought it was such a stony thing to do. It felt necessary.
I met with Tony the afternoon before my performance—such a grand word for the six minutes I'd spend shitting my pants. I'd hauled up to Ottawa, telling my dashboard about that time I fucked Ted Nugent for the entire three-hour drive. All I needed was a pep talk and a beer. Tony, who has now done more than a hundred routines, had already given me some advice. "Don't wear a funny shirt," he'd written me. So that morning, I'd pulled on a plain gray T-shirt. It was the least funny shirt I owned.
In a cozy little bar, Tony gave me some more advice. Don't go for the easy crass laugh, he said; don't confuse shocking with funny. And don't memorize your material: Know what you want to say, but not how to say it. That's how amateurs usually trip themselves up—they recite rather than perform, and if they miss a line or even a word, the rest of their bit can vanish from them like dreams. Now it was my turn to react with horror, because I'd committed to memory exactly how I wanted to describe fucking Ted Nugent, "like working a key into a sticky lock." Tony must have seen my pupils dilate. "I'm sure you'll be fine," he said a little quickly. "It's six minutes of your life. What's the worst that can happen?" And then he took a really big drink of his beer.
Some other friends joined us, and we walked through the blistering cold to Yuk Yuk's, with its low ceiling and brightly lit stage, a single microphone in a stand casting a shadow on the wall. It looked really stark. It reminded me of a boxing ring for some reason. I met Howard and the emcee, a tall guy named Wafik, and they gave me a quick breakdown. I'd go seventh. Wafik would probably tell the crowd I was a virgin; that sometimes softened things up. "But you never know," he said. After five and a half minutes onstage, I'd see a red light go on. That was my warning. At six minutes, one way or another, I was done.
That's when I saw Mike MacDonald in the club. He's a Canadian comedy legend, a beloved veteran of the late-night circuit. I looked at the full lineup, scrawled on a sheet in the back. He was going third. Terrific. I ordered a bottle of Heineken, swallowed it whole, and ordered another. The houselights went down. The show was about to start. Tony told me not to sit with him and our friends. "Stand over there," he said, pointing to the little clutch of comics near the bar. "Tonight you're one of them, not one of us."
The first man up, an amateur, had it a little rough, maybe a couple semi-laughs. "How much time do I have up here, anyway?" he said, and Howard immediately yelled "Time!" from somewhere in the dark. The second guy, a chubby guy in a hoodie, did better. It was easy to tell that he'd been up there before. He had the looseness that only practice can bring.
And then Mike MacDonald walked up. He said he'd recently had a liver transplant and it had saved his life. He wasn't being funny. He was talking about how six minutes on Amateur Night now felt like a gift to him. He was barely holding it together up there. But then he began to gather his old steam, and he launched into this great bit about how every question on Family Feud can be answered with "Dead hooker." He read a list of real questions from the show, and the crowd—not huge, maybe forty or fifty of us, of them—laughed as hard as it had. MacDonald kind of swelled with each connecting line, and the audience drew in. By the end of his six minutes, the walls were closer to him than they had been at the start. He didn't fill the room; he made the room feel smaller.
Three more comedians came and went with varying degrees of success, the amateurs taking turns getting waxed by the professionals. I finished my beer and got another. The closer I edged to my spot, the more nervous I became. I was feigning composure, but I didn't feel composed. I felt like I needed to wipe my ass with a towel.
Wafik went up to introduce me. He said I was a virgin, and the room was suddenly the size of a football field. There were loud groans. "Hey, he might be funny," Wafik said, the way someone says, "Hey, I think it's clearing up" in the middle of a downpour that's not clearing up. Wafik talked about necrophilia for a while and then realized he'd forgotten my name. Jesus Christ. One of my friends yelled it to him. The crowd applauded.
I made the short walk to the stage and took the single step from the floor. I put my beer on a stool and began to pull the microphone out of its stand. There was a kind of buzzing in my ears. Somewhere a clock started: five and a half minutes from the red light, six minutes from kill or bomb or the great muddy gulf in between. I looked up from the microphone, and all I could see was light.
In the middleof a much warmer night last summer, I woke up with a weird sensation in my stomach—an uncomfortable fullness, as though I'd somehow hit a buffet in my sleep. I went into the bathroom, and there is no delicate way to describe what happened next: My asshole turned into the elevator from The Shining. There was a lot of blood. A pint of it, maybe more. And then my insides filled back up and emptied again like a bellows. I woke up my wife and said something like "I think you'd better call an ambulance." Then I fell down.
I've had gut troubles since I was a teenager. My gallbladder was taken out a few years ago; a calcified stretch of my small intestine was cut away a couple years after that. I think because there was such an obvious equation in those experiences—a pain, a source, and a remedy—I wasn't scared on either of those nights. But the night I just started bleeding out of my ass was terrifying because it contained no math. I was in the best shape of my adult life. There was no evident cause or cure. There wasn't even any pain. I think that's what scared me the most: I didn't hurt, which meant I wasn't injured. I was dying.
My wife called the ambulance, and then she dragged me down the stairs and out onto the front porch. I continued to bleed out in the dark. I can remember only flashes of that eternity on the porch. But I do remember believing, with as much certainty as I've believed anything in my entire life, that I was going to die. By then, my legs and hands had gone completely numb, and I began drifting in and out of consciousness. This was it. My eyes began filling like my guts, first with tears, and then with a warm orange light.
All I could see was light. I have been a godless man, and I remember thinking: Oh no, I've been so wrong. How could I have been so wrong? The light was heaven. That was my last night's second certainty. And then I was in the back of an ambulance, strapped to a stretcher to stop my convulsions, and then I was in the hospital, and then some IVs were stuck in me, and then I woke up the next morning, my poor wife sitting beside me, saucer-eyed, just shaking her head. Almost as mysteriously as it had started, the bleeding had stopped. I'd lost between three and four pints. I felt tired and weak, but I was alive on the first morning of my life that I was surprised to wake up. I went through some tests, but medical science failed to explain what had happened that night. I still don't know. It was as though an invisible spigot had been turned on and then off, but I don't know where, exactly, or how or why.
I did, however, receive an answer to a different question. The night I got back home, I went out onto the front porch. And there was that warm orange light again: the streetlight just across the road. What I had thought was heaven was only electricity. In my fading away, I had confused one miracle for another. I often catch that streetlight through the front window, and all these months later I still feel something go funny inside me when I do. I was going to turn forty a few months after the bloodletting. I'm pretty sure I was headed for a midlife crisis anyway, but mine got supercharged that night. It didn't make me want to be young again or deny my age. It just made me want to get the most out of the time I have.
So I turned forty on the deck of a ship steaming across the Drake Passage, bound for Antarctica, my seventh continent. On the first day of my forties, I watched a whale jump out of the ocean and the sun never set. A few days later, I went swimming in some of the coldest, blackest water on earth. I've signed up to run my first marathon in May. I've booked my flight to Brazil for the World Cup in June. I'm going to a party at the Playboy Mansion in July, and I'm going to take my best friend to Iceland in August. I'm going to say yes this year as many times as I can. I'm determined to do everything I've always wanted to do, everything I've ever talked about doing or dreamed about doing, because I know that tonight I might die.
The light is white, not orange, and there's no confusing it with heaven, but it's blinding all the same. I can't see the bar at the back of the room or the room or any of the faces in it. I can't even see the stage or, it seems, my feet, which are lost somewhere in the glow beneath me. I am very concerned about falling. "This is going exactly the way I dreamed it would," I say, out loud, deadpan, and from somewhere out there, I hear laughter. That's laughter, without a doubt—not giggling or chortling or snickering, but laughter—and I earned it. It's mine to keep. I feel my shoulders relax just a little. I lift the empty microphone stand to the back of the stage, look at my shadow on the wall, take a shallow breath, turn around, and launch into my routine: "When I was a teenager, like a lot of teenagers, my greatest fear in life …" And I feel, almost instantly, like a marionette somehow, like my hands and mouth and brain are all working, but they're working independent of one another and maybe even independent of me. I'm just talking, not thinking, and each line of my bit—my bit—is right there waiting, one after the other. I feel like I'm taking a quiz and know all the answers. And whenever I pause to come up for air, there's a little more laughter. It never reaches uproarious, but the walls are inching closer. The air is getting thicker. A minute or two in, I have the most supremely conscious thought: Everything's fine. Everything's going to be fine. Some lines that seemed funny on the page aren't working out loud, and I think I should improvise here, or maybe it's there, but those windows streak by like highway exits, too late to turn around. Now, after three or four minutes, maybe—I really have no idea—I'm experiencing my life's second systemic override. Waves of endorphins are rushing in. Biology is taking over again. I'm not in control anymore. I pick up my beer bottle a couple times, but I realize even while I'm doing it that I'm not actually drinking from it. I don't have the physical wherewithal to take a sip. But it's okay, I tell myself. I'm still doing it. I'm doing what I've always wanted to do. There's another little burst of laughter. After all the doubts and fears I've had, after all the sleepless wondering and being unable to think beyond these six necessary minutes, I'm not scared anymore. Maybe I'll never be scared again. The buzzing in my ears stops. More laughter. I'm forty years old, and I'm just beginning. I'm starting over, in the wake of men who are so much better at this than me, and it feels so good to be that guy again, looking up. God, it feels like such a blessing to be off balance, to be uncertain. I'm so happy. Five minutes gone and everything's possible. My feet begin to lift off the floor. I see the red light shining through the white light. My time is almost up.
No comments:
Post a Comment