He goes to the chain-restaurant bars to talk with the bartenders and maybe some crusty regulars. Every bartender is an undercover comedian. In that way, it will disappoint him the night the beautiful young girl—she says her name is Jenna—approaches him. Jenna won’t be able to tell him anything about the Mets. Jenna will have nothing interesting to say about the state of Nebraska. He could try to talk to her like a normal person, like the guy serving his cocktails, but shows are exhausting—an hour straight just talking under the lights, plus a fifteen-minute encore—and it’s so much work with young people discerning what parts of them are bland, what parts are posturing, what parts are genuine philosophies derived from their life experiences and what parts are just platitudes recycled from rock stars he’s too old to know anymore.
So when he does the easy thing and switches back into comedian mode, he’ll know he’s going to take her to bed. That too is the easy thing, the decision not hard to explain to his friends or the guy behind the bar or even himself. My id had my superego in a headlock, he’ll tell people. She was young, hot. This will be just a moment after she’s told him directly: “I want you to fuck me.” That one bald sentence will be powerful enough to conjure an image of them in the act, an image with her in the center and him closer to the edge of the frame, out of the central focus, a blur of lumpy, pale negative space.
When he turns into a performer his posture will straighten. His shoulders will uncoil, and he’ll seem a little taller.
“How do you know I don’t have AIDS?” he’ll ask.
“You don’t have AIDS.”
“How would you know?”
“It would have been in your set.”
You’re absolutely right, he’ll think—such a horrible thing he could only deal with it by joking, and a wealth of jokes would stem from it. Even simple understatement would do it: AIDS, hand on his hip, wagging his head at the crowd, just my luck. So she has some insight, he’ll think, and he’ll want to tell her simply that it makes him sad how right she is, and at the same time to guard that truth from her. Hands off my suffering. Get your own: a first draft of a response he’ll immediately discard as too revealing.
His hesitation will flush her with pride. Keeping him against the ropes will suddenly be more important than fucking him or learning a life lesson or acquiring a story to record in the online journal she updates in sporadic bursts. She’ll ask him to tell her a secret. He’ll fire back with “So what’s your angle, anyway? Child support? Paparazzi? Some kind of starfucker blog?” He’ll smile when he says it, but she’ll sense the hostility behind the question.
“Naïveté,” she’ll say. “Plain and simple.”
“Naïveté indeed. Were I to do the thing you said you want me to do, which is wrong on so many levels, you would see things you can’t unsee and feel things you can’t unfeel.”
“Like being humped by a loaf of sourdough?”
“Uncooked sourdough. Can you imagine that and want anything to do with it?”
She will imagine it—something in all her planning she’s never done—him on top of her, grunting and sweating, his baggy midsection audibly slapping against hers, and find she’s not repulsed. Perhaps she should be repulsed, she’ll think, but she finds it endearing. In the scene she pictures, he’ll be shy and apologetic during sex, and she’ll comfort him and move against him and take the reins and touch his cheek. In that moment she’ll think she could be attracted to any body type, that under the right conditions or in the right mood she could be turned on by someone fat or scrawny, hopelessly short or dented with a weird concave chest. She’ll feel she understands suddenly how women with fat husbands can stand to go to bed with them, something that’s always mystified her before.
“Yes,” she’ll say, simply, honestly.
“Naïveté indeed,” he’ll say, touched by the sentiment, wanting more than anything to run away.
He talks about fear during his set as well. “I’m scared of everything,” he says. “Spiders. Clowns. Dentists. Everyone’s scared of those things. Clown dentists—don’t ask. My dad had a dark sense of humor. Spider-clown dentists. I just thought of that, but it’s pretty fucking scary, right?”
“Imagine a spider with a clown face, crawling toward you with a drill and that hook thing.”
“Tell that to your kids and they’ll shit their pants.”
“Other people’s babies are the scariest thing. Friends always want me to hold their babies, and I don’t want to do it. I just don’t want to. They’re too fragile. It’s because I have this weird fantasy—maybe fantasy is the wrong word—this idea that I’ll be holding the baby and it will just crack in half like an egg. And then they’ll look at me like, ‘Holy shit, what did you do?’ and I’ll be like ‘I don’t know, it just cracked in half.’ And they’ll be like ‘Babies don’t just crack in half.’ And I’ll just shrug like, ‘What can I say?’”
“I’m scared of my life changing, because it feels like every decision I’ve made in my professional and personal life has been a huge mistake.” This part relies on a big shit-eating grin. The audience has to buy that this really is a source of amusement for him. Some jokes run on empathy. He suspects that many people, perhaps even most people, feel this way: that their life is a series of errors in judgment. He sees some of the heads in the front row nodding. The bad comedians, the jock comics, the shock comics, the goofsters, never do this—bond with their audience over a shared negative experience—but it’s this moment, he feels, that they’ll remember. It’s in the hush that settles in after the laughter. “If there’s a change coming down the pike,” he says, “it’s not going to be positive.” It’s the closest thing to a gift he can give them, the promise that all this can be laughed about.
He’ll be too scared to undress Jenna in the hotel that night, scared that he’ll get the sudden urge to be physically rough with her, or that she’ll instinctively recoil when he touches his palm to her ribcage. So he’ll sit on the edge of the bed, untying his shoes like a husband getting home from work. She’ll stand there, tall in her leather boots, waiting for his next step. When he goes to his belt, still not looking at her, she’ll pull the blouse over her head, and he’ll take a small comfort in the way her tights reach so high up on her waist they cover her belly button and something about it looks silly. She’ll take off her boots to take off her tights, and standing in front of him in just her panties, she’ll ask him if he wants the boots back on. He’ll shake his head, still looking at the floor.
His reluctance to take off his white underwear will be sad to her in a way that’s not endearing, but she’ll slide them off him anyway. He’ll tell her, “I don’t want to be on top.” He won’t go into detail, but he hates the idea of his gut hanging onto her flat belly. It’s fair enough with women over thirty-five, women ranging from poochy to just plain round, but it will seem like too awful a memory to brand onto a twenty-year-old girl who still believes in good in the world.
Riding him will be an underwhelming experience for her. She will think that word exactly: underwhelming. He’s not repulsive, as he makes himself out to be, no look or smell of bread dough, just a normal guy in his forties with some extra weight on him. But she will want some intensity of emotion or a moment of humor—she loves to laugh during sex, but no boys can make it happen, and in fact none of them try. Instead she’ll find him constantly retreating. She’ll look for the mischievous glint that, during their exchanges at the bar, lit up his eyes, but he’ll have them squeezed shut as if anticipating a vaccine shot.