“So high schools all take different approaches to sex ed. [Lean into the mic.] My school was the condom-on-the-banana-terrify-kids-so-that-they-think-they-could-contract-aids-from-a-wet-dream-or-from-a-lingering-wink variety. [Left eye wink, right eye wink makes whole face wonky.] Heavy on the pictures of oozing sores and pus-filled blisters fostering a general sense of dread and panic around sex. [Pacing.] Which makes everyone’s first time so special. [Stop pacing.] I’m finally going to go all the way! And contract some horrible disease and transform into a ginormous slug, and I’ll be forced to go to all the local high schools, a goopy mucus mess gooping behind me, and tell my sad-sack story [lean into the mic]—with the help of a retractable tentacle language interpreter—as a cautionary tale. Basically, if the sex ed at my high school was a movie genre [lean into the mic] it would be [long beat] horror.”
People chuckled with one or two guffaws thrown in. I could hear each chair-adjustment creak and beer-gulping swallow. Up on that small stage I felt alive, converted into a viler, wilier, wilder version of myself. At parties I often stammered or bit my lip, uncertain of my role, but in this context I knew what was expected: people came to the open mic to hear people tell jokes or, more commonly, to hear themselves tell jokes.
I knew I wouldn’t be the worst person there because a few people always bombed. At least I had some grasp of structure: setup, punchline, topper, callback. I’d taken classes and watched YouTube videos and Netflix specials. I threw myself into different voices. Laughter fortified my confidence and encouraged me to be bigger, bolder. I paced and stomped and curtsied.
When the clapping stopped, my anxiety surged. The room shrank. The stale smell of beer and bodies overwhelmed me. I hurried off-stage and beelined for the washroom, a tentative smile twisting my face. I didn’t make eye contact with anyone because I was certain they’d give me a look swollen with pity or scorn. Two years of stand-up and still a wimp. I locked myself in a stall and performed deep breathing exercises, visualizing every inch of skin gulping restorative oxygen. They laughed, right? For sure, for sure. They definitely laughed.
I used to spend this time checking my Twitter feed, a zing of energy skipping through my blood when someone favourited or retweeted one of my tweets, but I’d deleted my account three months ago. Dopamine surges of social media approval couldn’t counteract the added stress of seeing how many more followers other comedians had, how many more gigs and opportunities.
Calm enough to face any of the regulars who were still milling at the bar, I exited my chamber. One pint after a set is my rule. You never know who might want to talk to you or book you for a real gig. Most people had already wandered into the night, but along with a few older amateur comics—the ones who still made jokes about how women love shopping for shoes more than sucking dick—there was a skinny, curly brown-haired guy wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, sitting by himself and sipping a glass of red wine.
I sat and ordered a beer.
“Slugs have astonishing sex lives. The Kama Sutra would be their kindergarten textbook.” The guy, who I now saw was barely older than a teenager, angled his stool to face mine. “Leopard slugs swing from branches on self-created mucus rope like Cirque de Soleil silk aerialists, entwining themselves—caressing, devoted and present. Each lover both male and female, exchanging roles. It’s very consensual and very hot.”
“Good to know?” I glanced at the bartender to see if she was hearing what I was hearing, but she was at the other end of the room in a cloud of dishwasher steam. “Are you a biology student? An art student?”
“I’m just saying you might want to rethink that part of your set. If there were a sexually transmitted disease that could make me a slug, I would fuck everyone who’d consent to have me.”
“Duly noted.”
He chugged the rest of his wine, nodded at me and left.
As I walked home that night, weaving between troupes of stumbling drunk twenty-year-olds, I tried to parse that conversation, tried to decide whether I would spin it as funny or creepy when I told my husband Ben about it. I didn’t think the guy had wanted to impress me with his comedic timing. Too earnest and spacy for that. Then again, maybe he was just a shitty joke-teller; most people were, most of the time I was.
And bringing up sex immediately was an aggressive move. A power play, one all women are used to, but this time it hadn’t felt as icky or boring as it usually did. Maybe because of his young age? His ambiguous sexual orientation? Maybe because I’d found the slug sex description intriguing, even beautiful? Maybe because I hadn’t considered changing anything about my set for months, for years, and the prospect both excited and terrified me.
I couldn’t resolve my feelings about the encounter yet, so when my husband stirred from sleep and asked drowsily how my night went, I told him, Fine, same old, same old, get some rest you have to wake up early for work, then went to the living room and read everything I could find about slugs on the Internet.
“You know what I always wanted though? [Lean into the mic, long beat.] One of those fake babies, one of those fake crying [speed up and some pacing], fake pooping mechanical ones you’re supposed to carry around and care for over a week while you’re trying to finish your calculus homework and go to swim practice, so you realize all on your own that you don’t have the emotional maturity for a baby, and that—no duh [throw hand in the air, casually]—you should stay far, far away from penis or at least wrap it up. Anyway, I was asking my husband about whether or not they had these baby cockblockers at his school and he said, no way, they were an all-boys Catholic school and you absolutely didn’t talk about sex, you just were not allowed to have it. [Lean into the mic.] I was like, um, you’re not supposed to have sex with the babies!”
The reception to this joke depends, even more than normal, on audience intoxication. Drunk people love dirty jokes, even better if they involve babies, while sober people are more likely to temper their laughter based on cues from their friends or dates. Since it was only eight, the audience coughed and tittered politely, punctuated by a table-slapping cackle from my friend Janice, an investment banker and amateur Muay Thai fighter who attended my open mic sets at least once a month, often with a new gorgeous, Eastern European girlfriend in tow. Today she was alone, her muscular legs spread wide, treating herself to a pitcher of sangria.
As I progressed through my set, the lines, normally as instinctive as breathing, now felt angular and garish in my mouth. I stumbled self-consciously. How many times had Janice heard me say the exact same words in the exact same order? What was cute coming from someone in her twenties was surely contrived, try-hard, tragic even, coming from someone in her thirties.
Somehow I finished and headed to the washroom. My meditation retreat ended when Janice banged on the stall.
“Did you drown?”
I opened the door. She entered and slid the lock closed. From her purse she produced a baggie of cocaine and did a bump on the end of a shiny gold key before offering me some. I declined. Janice was confusing me for the younger me, the one who wrote all those jokes. She snorted a bit more.
“More people might have come if you’d tweeted about the show,” she said.
“I deleted Twitter. Remember? Mental health, panic attacks, night terrors, et cetera.”
“I thought you’d decided to be serious about this comedy thing.”
“I am serious.”
“Then Twitter would make sense, career-wise. I’m just saying.”
“Thanks,” I said, forcing a smile.
We headed to the bar area, Janice practically skipping, her pupils as large as billboard periods. The slug sex guy was there, wearing the same outfit and drinking the same wine. In this lighting, he resembled my high school boyfriend Dave, a devout Christian who’d begged and begged to watch me masturbate then broke up with me, disgusted, after I’d complied.
My throat was scratchy. My heartbeat whirred as though I’d received a contact coke high. Should I talk to him or ignore him?
Without noticing the shift in my mood, Janice led us to two seats directly beside slug-sex guy and proceeded to flirt with the bartender.
Filling my lungs with air, I tapped the man—boy, really, as he couldn’t be over nineteen—on the shoulder.
“Banana slugs have been known to get their dicks stuck in slug snatches and then either he or his partner has to gnaw off the penis to free it.” I’d rehearsed this fact this morning and I couldn’t stop talking or I’d lose my momentum. Janice and the bartender and anyone within hearing distance focused their attention on me. “It’s called apophallation. How does that affect your slutty gastropod theory?”
He drew back and stared at me with glazed, blank eyes.
“Sorry,” he said in a meek voice. “I’m not sure…”
“What the fuck, Amanda?” Janice said. “And I thought I was the wasted one.”
“Are you a comedian?” he said. “I’m new here. Probably just too stupid to get the joke. Sorry.”
Janice put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed. He winced. “Apologies for my friend. She’s off her meds.”
“I thought… I must have mistaken you for…” My cheeks burned. I kept my eyes on the foam deflating atop my beer. “Excuse me.”
Once in the washroom, I splashed cold water on my face. What happened out there? Was it the guy’s twin brother? Was he blackout drunk last time? Was I just exhausted and confused? That could be it. I’d barely slept last night or the night before that or really since the last show. Still, that didn’t explain it. Did it? Remembering the boy’s soft, innocent voice, his genuine appearance of confusion sent new surges of embarrassment through my gut. I needed a distraction. I took the phone out of my bag and navigated to the Twitter home page but stopped myself at the last second.
Why should I care what other people thought of me anyway? I could be strong, an independent woman fearlessly spewing humour and truth into the world, bringing people together in a common emotional experience, freeing them from the compromises, privations and degradations of daily life. Or at least I could work toward being that kind of woman. I wished, not for the first time, that my stage persona could replace my weakling everyday identity.
Holding my head high, I returned to my friend at the bar. On the way there, the boy bumped into me and whispered, “Why don’t you wear a wedding ring if you’re married to Mr. Catholic School?”
“I lost it,” I replied, rubbing the spot where, three years earlier, there would have been a modest silver band decorated with a diamond speck, a modest silver band that I’d forgotten in some gas station washroom, that could be in a pawn shop or at the bottom of a lake or on another person’s finger by now. “And just never replaced it.”
He smiled as though we both knew I was lying and he was indulging me, a soft papa spoiling his baby girl.
“But seriously I recently had this pregnancy scare. My period was, like, [long beat, lean into the mic] three hours late. Whatever. I’m a hypochondriac. I realize pregnancy isn’t a disease, but kinda, right? Anyway, so my period is late and I’m thinking, can I have this baby? [Pacing.] Like, are babies into whiskey and documentaries about climate change? Do they enjoy smoking weed and blasting Dolly Parton and dancing around the kitchen? Do they have insightful things to say about contemporary poetry? [Long beat.] Probably not. So, okay, that’s one option down. So, can I have the baby and give it away? [Speeding up.] Like could I give the baby to some awesome queer couple who are these radical artists who make organic baby food from the heirloom beets they grow in their backyard and who will silkscreen the baby’s onesie with mind-blowing quotes from Audre Lorde or Judith Butler and who will nurture that child and allow her to express herself? And she’ll choose her own name and it’ll be Glacier and Glacier’ll live this wonderful, powerful little life full of creative fulfillment and wonder, and when she’s fifteen [speed up even more], she’ll reach out to me and we’ll meet and she’ll just think I’m so amazing and cool and she’ll just praise me for how brave I was to give her away and, like, she’ll be kinda obsessed with me and [take a quick breath to emphasize how quickly you’re talking] I’ll write an article about how devastating but vital the experience of giving away a child is and Glacier’ll share the article through all the newest, hippest social media platforms and tweet about how great I am all the time and we’ll do interviews together [panting by now] on all the podcasts and then I’ll write a book and then a book is basically a movie deal and me and Glacier will be so so so so tight. [Slow way way down, lean into the mic.] But she won’t need that much emotional support from me or that much money or anything because her parents are these, like, total earth goddesses.”
“What do you think?” I asked Ben, who was sitting on the battered, plaid couch, various densely printed forms and contracts fanned on the coffee table in front of him. He worked long hours as a lawyer, which, combined with my nocturnal schedule, made finding couple time difficult.
“Did you change something?”
“Yes,” I said, annoyed. “I told you I’m working on my material.” Even though the old jokes felt stale, I wasn’t ready to scrap everything and start over. “I added tons of details. The heirloom beets. The Audre Lorde. And I changed the name from Lemondrop to Glacier. More of a climate change edge this way. More realistic and political.” I hated the way I talked about comedy sometimes, as though it were a noble calling and not a pathetic plea for external validation.
“Oh, right. An improvement, definitely.”
“You didn’t even listen. You’re always distracted by your fucking work.” I picked up a piece of paper only to realize it wasn’t a contract at all but an energy bill—a pretty massive one.
He yanked it from my hand. “What do you want me to say? I’ve been supportive. Many women have utterly unsupportive partners, recklessly, cruelly unsupportive, but not me. You’ve been doing this ever since we got married. I’ve supported you, stayed silent and let you go on stage and tell all these lies about us.”
“Let me? You let me? And I’m not telling lies. It’s a character I play. My comedic alter-ego. People know the difference.”
He gave me his oh please, not everyone is from the big city and studied cultural theory look.
“People who know comedy know the difference. And that’s my audience. Those are my people.”
“And they’re more important to you than I am?”
“I could be telling way more personal jokes, you know.”
“You’d have to write them.”
That hurt. “No one wants to hear about a woman who can’t have a baby. It’s just sad.”
We’d had this argument many times before, and at this point it usually fizzled—we’re both more flighters than fighters—but this time Ben took several deep breaths, as though psyching himself up to continue. “It’s not my choice to be sterile, you know.” He fiddled with his hands. “You don’t need to throw it in my face.”
“I know that.” His dejected expression softened me. “And it could be either of us. We won’t know until the results come back.” I realized then that we hadn’t actually taken the tests yet. “Until we find the time to take the tests and the results come back.” One more missing step, enough to create a comedy bit, anything to deflect from the real possibility that we’d never have kids and that without them our relationship would wither. “Until we get a referral to the right doctor and they take the tests and the results come back.”
“I just—I just get the feeling it’s me.”
I rubbed his elbow. “Eighteen months isn’t long, isn’t anything. We actually have to be awake at the same time to have the baby-making sex. You’re always at work.”
The word sex switched him on. He grabbed a belt loop in my jeans and pulled me toward him. “Someone has to pay the bills.”
“Speaking of which…” I wriggled free of his embrace and rummaged through the papers for the energy bill from earlier, but he slapped my hand—like a child or dog still learning not to play rough—and began sorting everything into piles.
“They’re in a very specific order,” he said.
“I think you have a bill mixed in somewhere…”
“When did you decide to reactivate your Twitter account?”
I stopped my investigation. “What are you taking about? You know I deleted my account three months ago.”
He opened his laptop and showed me my profile, which featured a blurry—and many chinned—picture of me standing in front of a microphone and a bio that read Amanda Hunt tells jokes at open mics around town.
“Look,” Ben said.
Panicking and confused, I scanned the tweets. Was I the victim of a hoax, an identity theft, a character assassination? As I read, my heart rate settled. The tweets were mostly just announcements about upcoming shows, jokes from my set and some Amy Schumer retweets. A boring, neutered rendering of my personality, but not malevolent. It occurred to me it might be fan-made, and I was touched. Then I clicked around some more. I was following fifty people—all D-list celebrities, plus Janice. Twenty-five followers, a full hundred less than my previous account. Embarrassing. Who was follower number one? Surprise, surprise: Janice.
“Janice,” I said. “What the fuck?”
I was going to call her when I noticed a familiar face. He wore a collared blue shirt instead of his usual white T-shirt and his face had the bland confidence of a mediocre accountant rather than the timid yet smirky arrogance of a schoolboy, but it was him. I was sure. His name, supposedly, was Greg Shape, and his handle was @greatshape, a choice so inane it teetered on brilliance. A joke like that—assuming it was a joke—lived or died by delivery. I went to his profile. His last three tweets were all retweets of my feed—my fake feed, fan feed, friend feed, I didn’t know what to call it. I imagined him clicking the retweet icon. I imagined him clicking while sitting cross-legged on a mattress in his apartment—a shitty basement place with roaches, the kind you can only tolerate when you’re young. I imagined him clicking with one hand and stroking himself with the other.
“Why would Janice do that?” Ben asked, leaning over to look at the screen. “And who is Greg?”
I closed the computer and wrapped my arms around his neck. “Shall we try again?”
“And then I’m thinking like, no, this is ridiculous, I don’t want to get stretch marks and not drink or do mushrooms for nine months [left eye wink] and shove an [lean into mic] alien out my vagina and have it be all stretched and busted up and shit. And then I’m thinking: I’ll have an abortion. It will be this really empowering moment because I’ll finally be able to prove how pro-choice I am, and I’ll gather all my female friends around me and we’ll be so open with each other and they’ll support me and it will be this bonding experience. And then I’ll get the abortion and it will be kinda sad and tough but I’ll feel totally calm about how it was the right choice. And I’ll talk to some pro-life people and I’ll be so authentic and moving when I describe my experience that I’ll change their minds. It’ll turn into this huge movement [gesture with arms, but don’t drop mic!!] and people will be like, oh yeah, why do I care so much about what women do with their uteruses? [Speed up.] And the fetus billboard industry will collapse, and I’ll write all these articles and they’ll go viral, and then it’s [sing-songy voice, maybe actually hop?] hop-skip-jump: book. [Again, louder.] Hop-skip-jump: movie deal. And I’ll be this feminist icon [speed up] talking on panels and I’ll be so radically vulnerable, and people will be obsessed with me and they’ll tweet about me and praise me but they won’t need much from me emotionally or financially because they have other people for that! [Lean into the mic.] You know?”
I knew I was rushing, bulldozing through the pauses, the cracks in logic that gestured for the audience to enter the demented, silly, self-involved world I’d created, a world that seemed increasingly remote. But I had to keep talking or I was going to panic. Greg was in the corner, sitting at the table next to Ben, who was sitting with Janice. All of them in one room, watching me screw up.
After some lacklustre applause, I joined Janice and my husband at the bar. Greg, absorbed in his wine, was perched on the other side of the room. Seeing Janice and Ben together disoriented me. It seemed imperative to keep all three of these people as far apart as possible. It was as though my favourite characters from different television shows had appeared in the same crossover episode. I didn’t want them to interact, to wrestle for dominance, one reality gobbling the others. Or maybe I was a character in several different television shows and my personality had begun to migrate, become fluid. I worried I would use my reverent and earnest drama voice in a slapstick comedy or my husky femme fatale voice in a sexless mother-of-the-tween-idol role.
I pecked Ben on the cheek and asked him to order me a beer before dragging Janice to the washroom. “Twitter,” I said.
“I thought we discussed this.” Janice bristled, launching straight into self-defence, assuming, no doubt, that although I’d been calm when I’d first confronted her, I had worked myself into a fury and was now going to berate her. “I said I’d take it down after a week if you still wanted me to get rid of it. I told you what that brand manager said. I sent you that article. How vital—”
“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “I think you’re right. I need it for my career.”
Janice nodded, surprised. “Great,” she said, drawing out the word and examining my demeanour for any potential booby traps. Finding none, she continued. “Great, that’s great. The password is Glacier.”
“Glacier?”
She smiled. “Much better than Lemondrop.”
I reached for my phone and signed in. Notifications! Retweets and followers and likes! Why had I ever deprived myself?
“What does Ben think about the return to social media?”
I shrugged, clicking and clicking.
“I guess he has other things to worry about,” Janice said. “Why didn’t you tell me he lost his job? I had to hear it from one of the partners at his firm. This bombshell, a Tippi Hedren bottle blonde I went on a date with last night named Maya something. Do you know her? Anyway, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Not in this economy.”
All the muscles in my body slackened. Chills scurried over my skin. I sat on the toilet and ran my hands through my hair.
“Two months ago?” Janice said.
I stared at her, remembering the mystery bill.
“I’m sure he was going to tell you,” Janice said. “Shit! You really didn’t know?”
“He’s been going to work every day,” I whispered. “Wearing his suit and everything.”
“I don’t know what to say…”
I stood up. “Do you have any coke?”
“Is that the best idea?” Janice said. “Shouldn’t we discuss, debate, express our feelings?”
“Nope,” I said. “Coke, coke and more coke.”
All my insecurities melted away as I returned to the bar, soaring high, the back of my throat coated in chemicals. I ignored Ben, who had been cornered by one of the regular comics, a name-dropping woman with aggressive cleavage, and floated over to Greg.
“Washroom,” I said. “Now.”
He grinned at me as though he’d been expecting this, then chugged his wine.
Not even the beads of piss speckling the seat and the faint iron smell emanating from the silver bin could dampen my excitement. Nor could the prospect of someone walking in. Let Ben in. Let Janice in. Give me an audience. I didn’t give a fuck.
“I can’t create a rope of mucus for us to swing on,” I said. “But I can pretend to be a slug.” I pressed my hands into my thighs and undulated my body, a vertical snake dance.
Yanking my hair, he pushed me against the metal wall. With his face so close to mine, I could see faint wrinkles by his eyes.
The sex was swift and vaguely painful. Maybe the drugs had desensitized me, but I couldn’t feel much and had the sensation of drifting above my body. He didn’t even attempt to touch my clit, so I tried to help myself. It was over so quickly.
As he was doing up his jeans, I asked, “How was it?”
“Same as usual,” he said.
The stall door banged shut behind him. The taps blasted. Soap plopped stickily from a dispenser. I tried to assess the situation, to perform an inventory of my bodily and emotional reactions. Was I surprised? Ashamed? I didn’t know. If I had to choose an adjective to describe my mood at that moment it would be awake. My pants still around my ankles, I went on Twitter and stalked through the people Greg followed. Marisa, Iffah, Ariana, Kim: female comedians, all of them. It was so obvious. I laughed and laughed and deleted my account.
“And so I go into the washroom and there’s blood on my underwear and for a minute I’m super bummed. [Long beat, lean into the mic.] Like not about the underwear, those were already covered in a decades-worth of period stains. [Lean into the mic.] I’m just bummed because I was this close [demonstrate with fingers] to being super famous. [Lean into the mic.] But at least now I don’t have to feel guilty or weird or anything but super-duper pumped about how much coke I just snorted. You know?”
I forced myself to tell all the old jokes one last time, to give them a proper burial before the final punchline. A punchline is a revelation, a conversion. It alters everything that came before it, tripping the audience and forcing them to balance in a new reality. But it can also be cruel and stubborn, over-determining the meaning of a story.
Two months after I removed Twitter and Ben from my life, I went to the washroom, as usual. Did my breathing exercises, as usual. But unlike Comedy Amanda, Everyday Amanda didn’t have any blood on her underwear, and if the two vertical lines ignited by her urine that morning were to be believed, there wouldn’t be any again for many months. And here’s the thing, the sucker punchline: I was happy, relieved. Ready.