THE FUNNY MAN and his wife are embarrassed by the ritual, would never tell anyone else about it, but first they’d come to love it and then they’d come to need it. In the beginning it was just weekly. One of them would look at the other across the breakfast table and say, “Do you want to call?”
“Should we?” the other would say.
“Why not?”
“Didn’t we just do it the other day?”
“A week ago two days from now, actually.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Okay.”
And the funny man would stand and get the cordless phone and bring it back to the table and invite his wife from her seat onto his lap. He would cradle her across his legs as she steadied herself with a hand draped across his shoulders. They both had the number memorized, but it was also on autodial, and the funny man would hit the button and listen to the ten-note tune and once he heard the ring and entered the account number and pass key (their wedding anniversary) at the appropriate prompt, he would place the phone between him and his wife, holding the speaker up near their pressed-together ears.
What they had discovered is that at a certain point, money makes money and then it makes more money and after that, still more money. At that point there was only one account and the money flowed in automatically and grew as if by magic, and the phone number was a special automated system where one could call and get the account balance for that day recited to them by a pleasant sounding computerized woman. Even though they continued to pay their bills: mortgage, utilities, diaper service, cleaning help, meal delivery, etc… . the amount was larger each and every time.
After hearing the number, the funny man and his wife would look at each other wide-eyed, astonished. How does one have more money despite still spending money on things like nonstick pans and a pool table and a convection oven and that one weekend in the mountains where they rented the cabin and each cabin had its own outdoor tub fed by the natural springs and the cabins were strategically placed in relation to each other and the natural foliage and no two people since Adam and Eve had spent more time naked.
Usually after the ritual one of them said how “lucky” they were and the other nodded, offering their lips to seal the agreement with a kiss.
At some point, it became daily, something they both needed to get started, and sometimes it was done in the bathroom as they brushed their teeth, or over the kitchen sink as the breakfast dishes were rinsed, or as they worked together to stuff the child into that day’s clothes.
On one day, a fair bit down the road after they’d moved into the second house, where even the closets were like rooms, it was the wife’s turn to declare themselves lucky.
She is in the bathroom and because the funny man is in the bedroom, sitting up in the bed flipping through channels on the television, she says it loudly into the mirror as she clamps a device on her eyelashes.
“We sure are lucky,” the funny man’s wife says.
“What?”
“I said, we’re lucky.”
“What?” This house is large enough that a person in the bathroom cannot be heard in the bedroom without shouting.
“Lucky!”
“I can’t hear you,” the funny man says, muting the television. His wife appears in the bathroom doorway. “I said, we sure are lucky.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“What do you mean, what do I mean?”
“I mean, do you really think we’re lucky or are you just saying that?”
“We say it every day.”
“But do you believe it?”
“We’re pretty fortunate, I think, considering,” she says, turning back into the bathroom.
The funny man jumps from the bed and follows his wife into the bathroom, fishing his penis from his fly and relieving himself as he speaks. “Considering what?”
“Considering everything,” she says, still looking in the mirror. “Can’t you wait until I’m done?”
The funny man extends the show of peeing, swirling the stream around the bowl, grunting out the last few squirts before giving the works a vigorous shake and tucking it back through his fly. “Not really,” he says. “Are you interested in my prostate exploding like the Hindenburg?”
“That’s not funny,” his wife says.
The funny man follows his wife back into the bedroom where she searches through the closet for the right pair of shoes. “What if I told you that I don’t think we’re lucky?” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“What if I told you that luck has nothing to do with what we are?”
The funny man’s wife bends over to place her shoes on her feet and he steals a glance down the front of her blouse, which makes him want to forget the argument he is for sure trying to have. “What do you mean?” she says.
“I mean, I think our circumstances are not so much due to luck, but to hard work and vision.”
The funny man’s wife steps toward him and runs the front of her hand gently down the right side of his face and then the back of her hand across the left side of his face. “I’ve got to go. Let’s talk about it when I get home.”
THE FUNNY MAN spends the day preparing to talk about it when his wife gets home.
First he looks up luck in the dictionary and sees that it has to do with chance. He looks up fortune and sees that it means pretty much the same thing as luck and that essentially they both mean things happening “without design,” things that are “fated.” Things that were meant to happen no matter what.
The funny man decides to break down the issue. He goes to the office supply store and purchases an easel, a large pad of white paper, and three different colored markers.
At the top of the first page in black he writes money. He asks himself, Is the steadily growing account growing because of luck? No, it is growing by design as a function of sound fiscal planning rooted in the deep traditions of capitalism. Is contemporary American capitalism a matter of luck? Definitely not. It is a matter of having proved itself a superior basis for commerce. Just ask the former Soviet Union. Below the word money he writes not luck in blue.
He turns the page and writes the thing at the top. What about the thing, which is what has produced the seed money that is now growing on its own and continues to provide ongoing employment in front of sizable crowds for which the funny man is paid handsomely? Is this lucky? The funny man thinks on this for awhile, remembering back to the moment it came to him, and no, this was not luck, inspiration perhaps, but inspiration is 90 percent perspiration and perspiration implies work, which is not luck.
Because he sees that he could easily run out of paper, rather than turning the page, beneath the thing he writes the boy. His son had inspired the thing—he’s said that in the interviews. Is that lucky? Not really. Perhaps if the boy had been adopted it would be a sign of luck, pure chance handing them just the right little baby boy, but no, this is his son, product of his loins and his wife’s loins, or his loins and some other part of his wife, the female equivalent of loins. This is not luck so much as good planning, or maybe chemistry, which is in the realm of science, and is, therefore, not luck.
What about the boy’s general good health and well-being, that he had been born with a hand that he could try to shove in his mouth? This is not luck, the funny man figures. Sure, people with retarded children with flippers instead of hands might be unlucky, but the rest who don’t, like him and his wife, aren’t lucky, they are simply some word that means what has happened is what should happen under normal circumstances. Call it “the odds.”
Now, he was wearing a condom when the boy was conceived. That’s true. Generally, society would hold that condom failure as unlucky, a bad break (ha ha ha), but the child is undeniably a good thing. Wouldn’t that then be a stroke of luck?
The funny man stands in front of the easel, chewing on the end of the marker as he looks at condom failure. He writes a question mark in red next to it. After a time, beneath it he adds wife’s sexiness. It was the wife’s sexiness that led to the initial encounter. Perhaps this ingredient was necessary to understand the true nature of the condom failure.
Come to think of it, he remembers the moment the condom failed, or not failed so much as slipped off, because they were standing and he’d had to crouch down to lift her on to one of the library’s shelves for a superior angle of attack, and in the moment, if he really thinks about it, he felt the condom pull free and if he asked his wife—she probably felt it as well—but neither of them did anything to put the brakes on the moment. He had wanted her from the instant she’d stamped his books, and apparently she felt the same way, and if anything, things got a bit hotter, and even afterward when the condom was removed and clearly not filled, there weren’t any recriminations, just shrugs and, believe it or not, a sequel.
The funny man draws a circle around both condom breaking and wife’s sexiness and in blue writes prob. not luck.
For some reason that time he and his friend Binder were on spring break in Vegas and decided to take peyote and drink wine and go to the desert and watch the stars pops into his head. They’d pulled to the side of the road and walked into the scrub brush and scraped a little clearing with their shoes and laid down and tweaked out for hours until the wine had overwhelmed them. They did not wake up until a state trooper nudged his boot into the funny man’s ribs, which was somewhere around noon the next day, but not before he and Binder had gotten enough sun to cause second-degree burns, which swelled their faces to purple masks. The state trooper said it himself at the time: “You goofy assholes could’ve died if not for me. What do you think of that?” The funny man and Binder couldn’t reply because their lips were too swollen and blistered, but as the funny man writes not dying in desert next to Binder on the easel, he thinks that he might’ve escaped thanks to a little luck that time.
Though aren’t we all entitled to a little luck here and there, enough to balance the scales at least? Surely there were times where misfortune befell the funny man with equal weight. And just how fortunate was he to be discovered by a state trooper on a routine patrol who had probably found college kids sleeping one off in a desert gully while their flesh was fried and the buzzards circled overhead millions of times?
The clapping man telling the funny man’s future agent about him before he died. Was that luck? What about the clapping man not dying before he even had a chance to see the funny man?
At some point, does the sheer weight of these probably non-luck-based coincidences have to add up to some luck, the way that change in a jar can turn into real money, given enough time?
The funny man turns the easel to a blank page and retreats to his chair. He has opened up a can of worms. He has thought of these things in passing before, the barest of glances before turning away with disinterest, but now he can’t stop thinking about it, the endless chain of events that led him to this particularly charmed time and place, how any of the links in that chain could have been broken in any number of ways.
He sets the massage feature to “shiatsu.” He has given names to the settings. Shiatsu is Tomoko. Swedish is Inga. Shantala is Joan, because he cannot not think of a female Indian name. He gives himself over to Tomoko and tries to forget that time when he was seven and fell off the skateboard, his head bouncing off the concrete like a basketball, the lump just off his temple bigger than a golf ball and his mother cried all the way to the hospital yelling at him, “Don’t you sleep! Don’t you go to sleep!” slapping him on the shoulder with one hand while the other twisted the wheel. “Don’t you dare fucking go to sleep!” she yelled. It was the first and maybe only time he’d heard her say “fuck.”
Or at eleven, when he was having his tonsils removed and they gave him a shot of something meant for the kid the next bed over and his heart accelerated and his vision went static and then he woke up what seemed like (and actually was) three days later.
Tomoko lays into his neck, digging right into the vertebrae. Digging in between the vertebrae, digging into his marrow like she may come out the other side. Sometimes the funny man thinks that Tomoko and maybe Inga are the only people who understand his needs. ( Joan is too rough.) The funny man grunts a little under her touch and refuses to think about swim class, the near drowning that put him off water forever, or that time just the past winter, on the way to the airport from his wife’s parents when he knows he fell asleep at the wheel, knows it because his eyes were closed and then opened and he’d sweated through his clothes in an instant.
He dozes lightly as Tomoko eases back to level 3, and the funny man fights off the thought that his wife just might be right about this luck business, because at this point, luck isn’t going to take him anywhere.
When his wife arrives home he decides that he doesn’t actually want to talk about it, which is lucky because she doesn’t want to hear it.
THERE IS SURPRISINGLY little to do in the funny man’s day-today life. There is now significant demand for the funny man, but the demand is not daily, or anything like that, certainly not even always weekly. It is somewhere between occasional and frequent. Recurrent? Persistent? He couldn’t even tell you what he does on the days he is not needed. Work? Can he really call it work?
There are demands from the funny man’s wife (she would call them requests) since he is around the house most of the day while the funny man’s wife is at her charity work, which she enjoys and has embraced since it is fulfilling in ways that are hard to articulate. These requests from the funny man’s wife seem very simple to complete when they are written on the dry erase board that hangs on the pantry door, but they are surprisingly difficult to start. He will look at the dry erase board and see an item half-smudged at the top, something like sort clothes for Goodwill and standing there, he will tell himself, Let’s get going to that closet and find the clothes that we never wear and give them to people who will wear them. When we decide on the discards, let’s write our name on the labels with a black marker so maybe the new owner will get a kick out of owning a shirt that was once owned by this famous person.
Still standing in front of the dry erase board, the funny man will scratch himself roughly underneath his boxers and continue to think. These are both excellent ideas, the giving away of the no-longer-used clothes and the writing of our name on the label. We should do this right away, without delay, because there is absolutely nothing in front of us until the week after next and the casino gig.
After this thinking and scratching, the funny man will move from the dry erase board to the refrigerator and open it and survey the contents and then close it and then he will go to the pantry, glancing sidelong at the dry erase board as he swings that door open, poking boxes and cans to the side to see what lays behind.
(Beans. Always cans of beans, different varieties, garbanzo, great northern, light red kidney. The funny man doesn’t even know how one would prepare beans.) Then the refrigerator, open-close. Pantry, open-close. To the drawer underneath the phone with the carryout menus that he will leaf through until finally he will shut the menus back in the drawer and take something like a banana from a bowl on top of the refrigerator and he will shuffle through the house and flop into the special massaging reclining chair, one leg hung over the arm and he will peel the banana with his teeth as he flips on the television and decides he should watch one of the movies that is presently showing because he is in the entertainment industry and it is a smart move to know who is doing and has done what.
On these days, the funny man’s wife comes home and asks what the funny man did that day. She stands in front of him, hands on hips, occasionally, but not unreasonably often, with a shopping bag looped over an arm, and he replies, “work on my material,” which is a joke he used to use when he had to use the bathroom, i.e., “I’ll be right back, I’ve got to go work on my material.” In truth, though, most of the time, when he is asked this question by his wife, the funny man blinks up at her with eyes saucered from staring at the television and realizes that he has no idea what he’s done that day. He does not even realize the day has gone, never to be back again.
THERE IS A nanny now for the child. She’s been in their lives for awhile actually, but it is only at the new new house (as awesome as the first one was, it was bought under a different, lesser set of circumstances and needed replacing) that she has a room (more like a wing) of her own, but still the funny man has time with his son every day without fail, like clockwork, except for those days when there is no time or when he’s on the road, of course. Each new thing the child does is a genuine and delightful surprise all the way from pretty much sleeping through the night to not shitting his diaper a dozen times a day.
All that is in the past. The child walks and talks now, which is for sure fun. Entertaining, even. He has diapers that are underwear, or perhaps underwear that double as diapers. On the days the funny man spends in his special chair he envies his son’s diaper/underwear.
There are phases, one of which was the boy pretending (or maybe not pretending) to run into the doorjamb and falling into a giggling heap over and over.
“Not bad,” the funny man thought, writing the idea in his notebook.
His son now cries instead of laughs when he sees the funny man shove his entire hand inside his mouth. He runs from the room, arms outstretched, legs stiff and stamping towards Pilar, who scoops him into her arms and rubs his hair and whispers “mijo.” This is usually the signal that father-son time is done for the day.
Shoving his entire hand in his mouth is now very easy for the funny man to do, physically, but growing increasingly difficult to do psyche-wise.
For example, there was that show at a theater that sat many times more people than had seen him be funny up until he developed his thing. On stage, after thirty minutes or so of material, the funny man says, “good night, you’ve been great” and walks into the wings without having done his thing, only to be met by the theater owner-promoter who places a large hand in the middle of the funny man’s chest and says, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”
“Show’s over, that’s it,” says the funny man, trying to brush past, which is not possible because this man is large and the passageway small.
“It doesn’t sound like it’s over,” the owner-promoter says. The audience stomps the floor and hoots through cupped hands, demanding … more.
The funny man feels suddenly angry, and flushed with anger slaps the man’s hand off his chest. “I’m not a fucking trained chimp. I’m not Shamu. I don’t own cymbals that I clap together. I don’t eat fucking halibut at the sound of a whistle and when I say the show is over, it’s over.”
The owner-promoter raises his hands in a we’re-just-talking-here gesture and smiles and then squeezes the funny man’s shoulder in a friendly/intimidating way. “Look, let me tell you what’s going to happen if this continues like you say it’s going to continue. I’m not going to punch your lights out, no. No, I’m not going to twist your thumbs off of your hands, no. I’m not going to clap my palms simultaneously over your ears and rupture your eardrums. No. First, I’m just going to send that limousine waiting for you behind the theater home. That’s my cousin’s boy behind the wheel, so for all practical purposes, he works for me. Next, I’m going to take that check with the five figures and turn it into four, but I’m still going to go on that stage and tell those fine people who are hooting and hollering out there that you’ve earned more than most of them make in a year for thirty minutes of ‘work.’ Then, I’m going to shove you out into the alley where your limousine should have been and I’m going to go on my public address system and I’m going to tell those people where to find you. You will have maybe a forty-five second head start. You’ve got some nice shoes there, leather, expensive I’m sure, but they don’t look like running shoes to me, so my recommendation is that you take a shot barefoot.” The owner-promoter pauses for a moment as the funny man looks down at his shoes. The funny man raises his eyes a hair and sees the blue-ink tattoo of an anchor on the owner-promoter’s arm.
“Now, I got no problem with making them wait a little bit. In fact, making them wait is probably a smart thing, since they’re sitting there wondering if indeed it’s going to happen, if this funny guy with his thing is going to do his thing, and in that waiting there’s a tension. Do you feel the tension?”
The funny man cocks an ear to the crowd. Their stomping and clapping is rhythmic now, timed together, like inmates before a riot in a prison movie clanking their cups against the bars, organized, angry.
“Tension is a good thing, a necessary thing. It’s where doubt lives. Even when we’re pretty sure something is going to happen, we wonder if that thing is really going to happen. We know that the guy in the hockey goalie mask is going to drive a pitchfork through the virgins. We know it. We’re sure of it, and yet when it does happen, it surprises, delights even, because of doubt. Where would we be without doubt? Without doubt we would, no doubt, do some very stupid things, and what I’m saying here is that I’m trying to keep you from doing what is for many reasons, a very stupid thing. Do you doubt what I’m trying to say?”
The funny man looks into the owner-promoter’s eyes and sees that there is a small chunk out of the gray-green iris in the right one and that come to think of it, that eye drifts just a bit to the side as well. The funny man realizes that without a doubt he does not doubt this man. He turns and walks back to the stage from the wings, a single arm raised with a fist at the end clinched so tightly the knuckles blanch.
He’s never heard such a roar in his life.
FOLLOWING THAT GIG, when he pours from the limousine in front of his house, he looks at it for a fleeing moment of rare self-awareness and wonders if it is a palace or a prison. As he approaches the front door a motion-sensitive light snaps on, causing him to blink and shade his eyes, and once inside he must deactivate and then reactivate the alarm. He doesn’t think about these things at the time because he doesn’t want to.