“My back looks like a big cheese pizza. You know the cheap kind, with all the brown bubbles? A woman I hooked up with a few months back asked if I wanted to videotape it so we could watch it later. What? It’s going to look like two pig carcasses slapping together. Of course I don’t watch to watch it.”
“Why would we make a record of this?”
They’ve got the lights a little too bright on him. The sweat is coming through, though that’s normal enough. Every set has some jokes about the sweating, a preemptive strike. The auditorium out in front of him is black, except for the twilit faces in the first two rows.
He can’t see her, the girl who will approach him that night at the bar. She’ll wait by the venue’s side door and follow his cab to TGI Friday’s. Before she heads in, she’ll sit in her car for fifteen minutes to give him some time to settle in, to text her friends about what she’s going to do, and to work up the courage she pretends to never need. He’ll notice her fashionable outfit first, just black tights and a belt around a low-cut purple blouse. And the boots, of course. She knows no man can resist expensive boots. When he sees her he’ll set eyes on her face, the youthful glow and the evocative makeup, the pageant smile, and then, not knowing she will be coming toward him, that he will soon be interacting with her, his gaze will drift downward to admire the way those tights reveal the body underneath. When she perches on the next stool over and turns that smile like a spotlight on him, he’ll think: trap set, trap sprung.
“Buy me a drink?” she’ll say.
“I’m the famous one,” he’ll reply. “You buy me a drink.”
So she’ll wave the bartender over and ask for a whiskey sour for herself and a cosmopolitan for her friend. When he asks for ID she’ll shrug in feigned embarrassment: “I forgot it.” Well, go get it is the only response she’ll get.
“Oh, hell no,” Dov will say, trap unsprung. But then she’ll smile at the bartender, take some long blinks, and ply him with a voice growing more girlish by the moment, and soon the trap is resprung, though he’s considering the metaphor of chewing his own leg off and how it would apply in this situation. Punching himself in the nuts?
“You should just leave. I don’t like you,” he’ll say, and she’ll laugh.
“I’m not over twenty-one,” she’ll say, leaning toward him, “but I am over eighteen.”
Since the show went on air, there have been run-ins like this, though never one so blatant. When she puts her driver’s license down on the bar in front of him—her birth date is in 1993, making her twenty—he’s going to want to tell her this isn’t fair, what she’s doing. She’s in that tiny sliver of life where her body is like a miracle, the limbs so slender, the breasts so perky, the waist so small and perfectly shaped that her figure’s like an ultramodern work of architecture that, sculpted from some futuristic polymer, doesn’t look like it should be able to hold itself up. He’ll want to say that because she hasn’t reached the age where fat starts depositing itself like bad debt all over the body, she has power. That she’s abusing it by sitting here next to him.
He’ll know how to take himself out of the equation: all he has to do is say no and maintain it. But he’ll also be aware of the sharkish thoughts his balls are sending to his brain: never before in his life has he had someone so young and beautiful; if she’s offering, is it wrong to take? Thousands of years of human evolution have been training him to say yes to this exact proposition.
And there it will be on a platter, as she interrupts his thoughts by leaning forward to whisper in his ear: “I want you to fuck me.” She will get an unexpected thrill from saying this so directly. With boys from her college she lets her interest remain unsaid, lets the context ferret it out, and she’ll start to wonder if that isn’t because their desire is so overt, compared to Dov’s, whose hesitation she can sense. It’s something she will want to use in the future, this statement, as direct as knocking on a door. That is the feeling she is hunting tonight, the feeling that there are things to learn about herself that the boys at U Nebraska just can’t teach her.
She’ll look at him. He’ll look at her, and then at his hands on the bar.
But all that’s later. During his set the girl sits somewhere in the dark of the middle-back-left with strangers on either side of her, one hand resting a little too high to be proper on the inside of her upper thigh. She knew what she wanted to do as soon as tickets went on sale. She’s watched the first season and has what she thinks is a sense of his life. His attempts at dating: bizarre, quixotic, embarrassing. One-night stands with women who snore during sex or turn out to be truck drivers. To her, these are dispatches from the field, warnings from the future. It’s sexy to her when he derides his body, when he talks about how abject middle-aged sex is. Not one man has ever said these things to her. More so, there are hints of the truths he’s telling already creeping into her experience. When the boys she’s had, both the boyfriends and the one-offs, roll off her after five minutes of robotic hammering, she never feels exultant like women on TV, never rolls her eyes back into her head and smiles at the ceiling. She just looks up, hands crossed over her sternum, wondering what more it takes to be happy.
He’s got her answer.
“The closest most of us get to happiness is getting used to unhappiness.”
“I’m unhappy all the time, but it doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’m so used to unhappiness I kind of think happiness would ruin my life. I’d be like, do you have any idea how long it took me to build that mountain of misery and self-loathing? Now I have to start over.”
“Couldn’t be a comedian anymore. Know what kind of gigs a happy comic gets? Birthday clown.”
“Since I turned forty my knee just hurts. Hurts to walk on it, hurts to stand on it. It’s not a medical condition—my doctor just said, ‘it happens’—and I’m used to it now. If the pain went away, here’s how it would change my life: now when I was sitting on my couch at home, I’d feel bad that I wasn’t doing any exercise. I wouldn’t go out jogging because my knee works again, but I’d know that I could. My guilt would increase. That’s the end result if my health improves. More guilt.”
True about his knee, mostly. His doctor didn’t seem to care much, but he did identify the problem: Dov’s used up all the cartilage on his right side. Dov doesn’t really know how that happened: he’s never been a hiker, never played sports. He’s done plenty of walking around the city, climbed the stairs to lots of walkups. That must be enough, he supposes. He has an alternate set of jokes about the knee: How did he wear out the cartilage on one side but not the other? Has he been taking more steps with the right leg? Did he play too much hopscotch as a kid? The physical part of that joke is what sells it, hopping on one leg across the stage, but the pain is too severe to do it on the right leg anymore, and he’s started to worry about expending the last of his cartilage on the left. When that goes, he’ll walk like an old man. Then he’ll be the old dog, dragging its back legs, that needs to be put down.
His assessment of his happiness is also not far off the mark. He wouldn’t mind being happier, but he really is used to life as is. Truth is, he only feels at ease these days around other comedians, sitting around a table at a pub, joking not about himself but about life in general. Busting someone else’s balls for a change. At this point in the tour, he and his two openers are tired of each other’s company. The road is draining. Ben heads to his room early after shows to Skype with his family. Dennis goes to trendy bars to get free drinks and pick up young women. Women have always been difficult to be around for Dov: too much grappling for control, too much deciphering of coded messages. And now with the show, the tour, and an HBO special coming up, the pressure for new material is so pressing that any time he gets to himself he spends tirelessly dissecting his own mistakes and failures, sifting out the ones that can be made funny from the ones that can’t.