ONCE THE MOVIE opened, things progressed very quickly, very strangely, very, very badly for the funny man. He snuck into a showing of the movie opening night. He came in after the previews and saw a theater full to bursting with middle-school to college-age kids. The movie was even worse than the funny man remembered from the screening, but oh, did they howl at every last shitty joke. (It’s not even like there were jokes, at least in the traditional, setup-punch line sense.) In some cases, half the crowd inexplicably recited punch lines along with the actors, shouting over the audio as though they’d been there before, many times. Afterwards, as the theater emptied, the funny man stayed in the back, pressing his face to the wall and watched the seats refill with a carbon-copy audience of the last showing.
His agent and manager had left thousands of messages at the house, some of them just the sound of them shrieking with excitement into the voicemail. They sounded like teenage girls listening to The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, shrill, fainting-prone. The funny man’s wife asked him how it was going and he had to force himself to hold back the tears as he said, “It’s a hit.” The gifts started arriving shortly thereafter. Constant deliveries of congratulations and well wishes from those who had been enriched by the film as well as those who wished to work with the funny man in the future because of his potential for someday enriching them: Flowers, candies, candies sculpted into the shapes of flowers, baskets stuffed with nuts and crisps and cheese and exotic spices that made the funny man sneeze when the packages were opened. Pilar practically ran out of room trying to find places for all of it. The coup de grâce was his-and-his sports cars sent by the studio, one for the funny man, and one for the boy (at one-fifth scale).
“Holy shit,” his wife said.
They had been thinking that the funny man’s rise to his previous prominence was something of a lightning strike, but in reality, it had taken years of quasi-toil in the crummy clubs, being indifferenced to death. This latest move was quantum, logarithmic, hyperspacial, like his first level of fame was akin to traveling to the moon by train and this one was like being faxed to Glaxo-23 in the Rglyplyx Nebula.
MONDAY AFTER THE opening weekend the funny man is in his manager’s office with his agent also in attendance. Their greeting hugs are closer to tackles and they can’t seem to stop smiling. The funny man has come resolved to explain everything, how it’s a misunderstanding. How he thought it was all a gag and that he never intended anything to get this far, that he is prepared to stand astride the madness and yell “stop.”
“You,” his agent says, pointing at the funny man.
“You,” his manager chimes in, also pointing. “You are a genius. That’s what they’re saying, you know that.”
“Really?” No one has ever said this word in conjunction with the funny man, most likely because it isn’t true, but that doesn’t mean it can’t feel good.
“Hell yeah!” his agent says, picking up a stack of newspapers and brandishing them like a weapon. “They’re calling you ‘the savior,’ the ‘box-office slump buster.’ Before this weekend industry gross was down eleven percent year-to-year. After this weekend, up three percent, and that’s all you, buddy.”
The funny man knows that the movie is doing well, but he had no idea it was doing this well. He wonders if there is some utility in letting them continue with whatever it is they have to say, just to, you know, see what’s what. Once invoked, genius is not a word to be casually dismissed.
“It’s a wave,” his manager says. “It’s a tsunami and you’re riding it … we are riding it, but we’ve got to strike immediately because once a wave breaks, it’s nothing but foam and seaweed and a bunch of dead shit left behind. Now, we’ve got the sequel locked in and that’s got to start soon. Brilliant move insisting that you direct this one, by the way.”
“I’m directing?” The funny man has only the vaguest memory of the negotiations. He was just throwing out random thoughts to see what would stick. Why should he remember something that was all supposed to be pretend?
“Uh, yeah,” his agent says. “Shooting starts in three months, remember? Remember how you approved the script and we hired the director of photography and everything? How the whole cast is returning? They’ve been scouting locations for weeks. If it was possible, we’d try to push it up, but since we can’t we’ve got something else planned.”
“Oh?”
The funny man’s manager takes the handoff. “Now, the window is tight, but we think we can do a full-court blitz stadium and arena tour up and going, forty shows, twenty-two cities, in forty-three days.”
His agent hands him a sheet of paper with several columns titled Date, City, Venue, Capacity, Estimated Gross, Net Proceeds. The estimated gross for each spot is a truly grotesque number. The net proceeds is pretty obscene itself.
“Just sign here, and here, and here,” his manager says, handing over additional papers.
The funny man is aware that he is at a crossroads, perhaps for the first time in his life. No, this is not his first crossroads, just the first time he is aware of it at the time of the crossing. Knowing the condom had slipped off and continuing to have sex with his future wife in the library, that was a crossroads. Doing the thing for his agent for the first time, crossroads. Signing up for the movie, crossroads. Deciding not to jump from the top of the tornado slide at fifth grade recess, crossroads. But in each of those instances only hindsight has identified them as such. In those moments he existed in a state of blissful ignorance as to the likely consequences of his choice. Even with the tornado slide incident, he didn’t exactly think he’d shatter his ankle like Tommy Rodman did when he called the funny man a wussy and nudged him aside and made the jump himself. The funny man wasn’t hesitating at the apparent danger. He was just thinking how it didn’t look particularly fun. In this moment, he knows what’s what, that to sign where his manager is telling him to sign is an irreversible choice with significant and lasting implications, most of them probably bad.
He is a genius. Everyone is saying so. They are offering him the GDP of a developing country to perform in basketball arenas and football stadiums across the country. He knows the schedule is backbreaking, particularly for someone with a balky back. He signs the papers without glancing at them, knowing that this is the wrong thing to do, but he does not care. The wave has crested the dam of his denial. He’s spent many hours of his life dreaming about this eventuality. He thought that perhaps the terrible movie would be the end of his quest, but it is more like the beginning. His life is a fairy tale (of sorts), a story not entirely in his own control, and who is he to say it should end, even if it ending right at this moment would mean living happily ever after?
THE HOUSE IS empty; no wife, no Pilar, no child. It feels oddly similar to the day they moved in and each room was bare, someone else’s home that they were just visiting. The gifts of the weekend have been cleared away. Everything smells very clean.
On the kitchen counter beside a supermarket tabloid is a note from his wife. The cover of the tabloid displays two photos: The funny man in the movie’s promotional poster, eyebrows arched, hand shoved all the way in his mouth; and his love interest stepping out of a limousine in a black suit and oversized sunglasses. Her head is ducked, but not so much that the camera doesn’t recognize her. It is all very Jackie O in mourning.
I NAILED HIM! the headline shouts above the picture. Steamy on-set romance heats up summer blockbuster, it says in smaller type beneath them. The story inside quotes a lot of anonymous crew members saying they never suspected, nor saw anything. “Duh,” the funny man thinks.
“I thought they hated each other,” one of them says. But the on-set chill gave way to a behind-the-scenes inferno, according to the lady love herself, the article continues.
The funny man yells at the ceiling as she shreds the paper into confetti before reading the note from his wife. His hands tremble as he holds it, making it hard to read. Fortunately, it is short, handwritten, the same writing she uses for the grocery list or the Christmas cards. It is as familiar to him as his own.
Shitbag—
I can’t believe it, but then again, I can. You’ve been acting weird ever since you got home. I thought it was stress. Turns out it’s guilt. I need some space to think this through. We’ve gone to Mother’s.
Love,
(Signature)
“Love.” She has signed it love. This, plus the fact that he really does have the truth on his side, means there is hope. He knows his wife is a woman of substance, of conviction, someone who cannot be purchased or paid off, and her views on infidelity are (rightly) inflexible, draconian even. She said as much before they were married, before they knew she was pregnant with the boy even, not long after they had de facto moved in together after only a couple of weeks of “dating.” They were in bed together, listening to the radio and the disc jockeys started talking about a story of a woman who affixed her unfaithful husband’s penis to his leg with Krazy Glue. The man needed surgery and skin grafts and even after all that, he sported a distinctly leftward tilt.
The funny man chuckled at the story. “That sucks,” he said.
“He got off easy,” his wife, who was not yet his wife, replied. “What do you mean?”
“I would do worse, ten times worse. A hundred times worse.” The funny man was sure she was kidding, that they were joshing around. “Like what?” he said, smiling.
She told him in enough specific detail that it seemed as though she’d spent some time thinking about it before, had maybe priced out some of the specs, done a couple of napkin sketches regarding the logistics. Rather than using a hypothetical, she kept saying, “you,” to funny man, as in, “If you were to get a blow job from a disgusting whore, I would …” The funny man was both horrified and deeply turned on. He did not know it at the time, but it was the crossroads moment when he decided that they would be getting married or at least that he would ask. She had such spirit that he was fairly sure she’d say no, and he was sure he’d love her for it.
But he has not been unfaithful! Flaky, unreliable, wayward— yes, guilty as charged—but not unfaithful. He has been filled with faith. He is bolstered by this truth. He also has the tremendous news about his impending megastardom to share with her. He is now a planet with increased gravitational pull. His agent and manager have made it clear, he is mighty. In fact, they bowed toward him as he left his manager’s office.
He dials his mother-in-law’s number and grovels his way past the bitch (she never warmed up to him, even after the thing succeeded and all those worries about his abilities as a provider were proven to be for naught) and gets his wife on the phone and pours out the whole sorry story, the encounter with the love interest, how she propositioned him (there was an audible intake of air on his wife’s part here), and her whole theory of celebrity arbitrage, but that he turned her down, flat! He slept in the bathtub! And how the bimbo took his flip little comment literally and that he was sure the movie was one big prank, and now how it not only wasn’t a prank, that he was the newest and hottest star in the celebrity universe and if he could successfully navigate eight to ten brutal months of spirit-crushing cashing-in/selling-out, at the end of it, they’ll have enough money to buy their own island, just as they’ve always wanted. No, he knows she’s never said that she wanted an actual island, it’s more of an understood thing because who doesn’t want an island with brown-skinned, loinclothed servants? No, that is not racist, because he is talking about naturally tanned people, not some sort of native tribe subjugated to the will of the white man thing. No one would possibly turn that down if it were offered, which it is. It is in the offering for him now, for them. For them!
It doesn’t take nearly as long to say everything as he thought it would and when he finishes, his wife says, “I’m having a hard time believing this.”
“Me too,” the funny man replies.