After they finish, she’ll pull the condom off him, tie a knot in it, and throw it on the carpet near the waste bin. They’ll lie in tandem, facing the ceiling, their limbs not touching, two snow-angels too bored to keep going. Her mind will harken back to his routine from the show about sex between people over thirty, how deeply unsatisfying it is. She’ll think, He made it seem like it was funny. He’ll observe her disappointment and regret already that, if this was always going to turn out poorly, he might at least have relished the experience. He’ll wish for another go, a chance to redeem himself. He’ll imagine her staying the night and him waking her up with kisses and caresses in the morning for round two. That’s not where this is going, he’ll know.
“Now you know,” he’ll say.
“Naïveté indeed,” she’ll say.
“Maybe this is the first in your series of errors in judgment.”
She’ll look into his eyes and smile gently. “How did you learn to laugh about it?”
“I didn’t,” he’ll say. “I learned to fake it.”
She’ll turn her face back up toward the ceiling, thinking hard about something, a connection her mind is trying to make. She’ll tell him, “When I played youth basketball, my coach always said, ‘When you compete, you either win or you learn.’” She’ll be flattered when this gets a belly laugh out of him, though she didn’t mean it as a joke.
“That’s a good philosophy,” he’ll say. “But it’s a terrible thing to tell someone after sex.”
She’ll laugh too. It will be the kind of laugh that makes her close her eyes, that rocks her in the ribs and curls her toes. This will be the first laugh they’ve shared that one hasn’t extorted from the other. He’ll laugh at her laughter, at the absurdity of her naked body lying there, rippling with it. A naked body, even one like hers, doesn’t look good laughing. It doesn’t have to.
When he thanks the crowd and tells them how great they were and says good night, it’s a formality. There’s always an encore these days, and though sometimes he just wants to go back to his room or drop a few bucks on a cocktail, he’s not immune to the compliment. He sits backstage in a chair with armrests, letting his head roll back and bringing a bottle of water intermittently to his lips. He can hear it clearly: first amorphous cheering, then the chant—“Dov! Dov! Dov! Dov!”—then an accompaniment of stomps and claps in rhythm. He rides it like a high for ten minutes. The promoter comes by and tells him it was great, fantastic.
He has a new energy when he returns to the stage. He always does, and he’s built the bit off that. He walks out with a big grin and some spring in the step.
“You guys are the only people in my life who want me back when I go.”
“When I was still married, I listened at the front door one time when I left. My wife said, ‘Love you,’ when I was headed out. Then after the door closed, she said, ‘I hope you get hit by a bus, you son of a bitch.’”
“Well, I showed her.”
“We had some good years, though. Ever try to hold onto something good? It’s like trying to hold onto a cat. A cat who hates you. Who has a moral objection. Now, cats are not easy to catch. But if you try and hold onto one, you are courting death. They’ll claw here: the carotid—here: the femoral. You’ll look like the end of a Scorsese film.”
“Bad things, though, they cling to you. Anybody have a bad job?”
He holds out the mike: some cheers, a lot of shouted yeahs, one louder and higher pitched than the others, screaming: “Tell it, brother.”
“I will. I will tell it,” he says. “You been in that job a long time?”
Laughter.
“I know it,” he says. “My job is terrible.”
“Bad jobs, they’re like those face-huggers from Alien. They jump on your face and hold on and shove something in your throat that you really don’t want in there. Bad jobs, bad girlfriends, bad boyfriends. That’s why, if you look back on your life, the only relationships you remember fondly are the short ones. You meet this amazing person, right? Then after a few weeks they get a sense of your personality and they’re like, ‘Fuck it, man. I’m outta here.’”
“Bad things hold onto you longer. A bad marriage can transcend time and space.”
“But good things last longer. Not while they’re going on, but the way they live in the rest of your life. You have a bad job, the day you quit, as soon as you walk out of that store or office or whatever, you get relief. When I go to my spider-clown dentist, I feel relieved as soon as I get up out of the chair. You stand up, and the fear evaporates.”
“Good things, you can hold onto those forever. Some of you out there, I know, remember the first person you were in love with. It’s probably not the person you’re here with tonight.”
“You have to look at your date now and deny it,” he says, grinning. “Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute.”
“That’s a different kind of love, and you’re happy to have it. But sometimes, when he’s asleep and you aren’t, you think back on it, you remember that guy smiling at you. You remember holding hands running through a cornfield or some other Nicholas Sparks bullshit. And maybe there’s a sense of loss with it, but you’ve got it. Isn’t that amazing? You’ve still got it swimming around up there, along with that squeaker of a basketball game you won, or the first time you got high, or that time you went skinny dipping. Or that time you had sex with a sheep.”
“No? Just me?”
“It’s like a diamond you get to carry around. A mental photo album that doesn’t just have pictures but little slices of the feelings you felt in those moments. That’s what comedy is to me. Not necessarily the TV show and the big crowds, but the moments that planted the seed. The way my friends laughed at jokes I made in high school. No one else in my family could make my dad laugh. Just me. And it was this big, meaty laugh like you’d hear out of a drunk Viking. And I could summon it at will.”
“He’s dead now, you know.”
“Shit happens.”
“But because I’ve got the memory—I mean, forty years later and I can remember just how it sounded—he isn’t.”
This wrap-up isn’t funny, but it isn’t for them. He’s been giving to them for an hour and a half now. He needs one point where he takes something back, something for himself. Free counseling, he’ll say if anybody asks. One true good thing.
An interviewer once asked Dov if he’d ever considered suicide, given how focused his act was on his own his own unhappiness. “Murder, yes. Suicide, no,” he’d answered. Another deflection. The words weren’t false, but the flippant way they came out was. That was the performer, casting no shadow. The times he was starting out and couldn’t get a paying gig; his dad’s long convalescence in a home; the months leading up to his divorce, with those hours of awful, dismissive paperwork: he’d been angry and overwhelmed and so, so unhappy, but he’d never wanted to do himself in. Not only had he not planned anything but he hadn’t thought or fantasized about it the way some people do. He’s estimated that he was more unhappy during those times than many people who actually made attempts.
He’s thought about it since—you couldn’t say frequently, but often enough—not suicide, but why it’s so easy for him to say no to it, why for him it fails to exist in the realm of possibilities. It’s what he thinks about as he grabs his coat from the rack backstage, and what he’s often thought about after his encores this tour. The closing note forms a natural trench that his thoughts can’t avoid following.