SOMETIMES THE TRUTH sneaks up on you when you least expect it. Like when you’re sipping coffee in a booth and one of your so-called colleagues plops down across from you and suggests that you may be wasting your talent, even if that so-called colleague is more interested in scoring some strange girl’s phone number than in helping your career.
Oliver didn’t mean to say it. As far as he knew, he’d never even considered it before. But as soon as the sentence came flying out of his mouth, he knew it was probably the most sincere thing he’d said in months. And now that he’d said it, he couldn’t take it back. Or stop thinking about it.
He really did hate his act.
Not that he was ashamed of it. Objectively speaking, he’d come up with some genuinely funny stuff. After years of serious study, Oliver had certainly figured out how to manufacture laughs. But it was the “figuring out” part that didn’t sit right. As if he’d reduced stand-up comedy to a Rubik’s Cube, a crossword puzzle, or an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Like humor was something to be solved or decoded.
Oliver finished his midnight rounds and sat in the lobby, waiting for inspiration to strike. He scribbled the words “new material” onto an otherwise blank page and stared at it. Then he waited.
But inspiration was playing hard to get.
Maybe he needed more sleep. Or a better job. Maybe the hotel was too quiet. Or he was distracted by the new girl with her serious expressions and intermittent adding-machine pyrotechnics.
In a fit of frustration, Oliver stabbed his notebook with his pen. It felt so good, he did it again … and again and again until the page was riddled with dark blue pockmarks. It wasn’t funny, but it felt good.
Finally, he slouched on the sofa, closed his eyes, and waited for inspiration to overtake him. Or sleep. He didn’t really care which.
What seemed to overtake him instead were the last cheesy tendrils of a familiar melody, courtesy of unseen speakers in the lobby ceiling. It took a few moments for Oliver’s brain to unscramble the watered-down Muzak version of the classic tune.
“Reminiscing.”
His mother adored that song, but that didn’t make it funny. Unless she tried to sing it. Everything Delores Miles sang was funny, whether she meant for it to be or not. Especially when she would stalk around the living room singing the Iron Butterfly classic, “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” According to legend, this song title was actually a drunken mispronunciation of “In the Garden of Eden.” The irony was too thick to miss.
Oliver started writing faster again. The first inklings of a decent joke began assembling in the basement of his brain for an inaugural AA meeting—making awkward small talk, building rapport, forming connections.
He knew better than to force it. So he coaxed it out one question at a time.
When was the first time Adam and Eve reminisced? Did they even realize it? Could you be nostalgic if you never had a childhood?
It wasn’t brilliant, but it did have potential. He scribbled snippets of ideas as they occurred to him about their “good ole days” in the Garden of Eden … in the days before chafing fig leaves, sibling rivalry, or phantom rib pain. But then a phone began ringing and completely derailed his train of thought. He eventually got up and followed the sound all the way to the security closet. It kept ringing, but Oliver eventually had to stand on the edge of his desk and move a pile of dusty phone books to find it. It was an old-fashioned phone—blocky plastic housing with a line of opaque buttons across the bottom. When he couldn’t think of a reason not to, he answered it, assuming it was a wrong number.
“Cool, it still works.”
“Barry?” Oliver looked longingly at his notebook. He even considered faking a bad connection or some hotel emergency. “I didn’t even know there was a phone in here.”
“I set it up when I first got to Nashville. Actually ran a couple of different businesses out of that little broom closet. Anyway, how’s my number-one client doing? Seen any ghosts lately?”
“What are you doing still up?”
“Working for you, baby. Speaking of which, do you have any idea how few comedy clubs there are in and around Nashville?”
“Two.”
“Right, okay. And of those two, can you guess how many are willing to actually pay you, Oliver Miles, to come and do your act?”
“Exactly none,” Oliver said, oddly pleased with his I-told-you-so tone. “I tried to warn you, Barry.”
“Just so you know, I’ve left several voice mails with both club owners. But they haven’t called me back yet. And if I haven’t heard from them by tomorrow, I plan to start staking out both clubs and pleading your case in person.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“No need to thank me yet. But I do need to swing by your place tomorrow and pick up some press kits.”
“Press whats?”
“You know, head shots, CDs, a list of references, press clippings, the usual stuff.” Barry had obviously been googling things like stand-up comedian + manager. “Just bring what you have to the hotel and I’ll pick it up in the security closet.”
“There are no CDs or press clippings.”
Barry didn’t respond. In fact, the only sound filtering through the receiver was canned sitcom laughter. Oliver’s first impulse was to hang up. Instead, he said, “Barry? You okay?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. I was just thinking.”
“Alright,” Oliver said. “I’ll let you get back to it then.”
“Don’t you want to know what I was thinking about?”
“Actually, I was kind of in the middle of—”
“I think I need some ethnic friends.”
“Excuse me?” Oliver squared his notebook on the desktop and uncapped his pen, just in case.
“My friends are all too white.”
“You have something against white people?”
“Mathematically speaking, yeah.”
“I’m not sure I really want to hear this.”
“It’s true. I’m sure you’ve noticed I don’t have a lot of quote-unquote friends—of any color. It’s like, you know, me and people just don’t get along. We irritate each other. But then it dawned on me that I’m surrounded by white people and figured maybe it’s not people in general that bug me. It’s Caucasians.”
“So you’re saying you think you’d get along better with other ethnic groups?”
“Statistically, I don’t see how I could miss.”
“Well,” Oliver said, scrambling to find a way off this subject, which felt like the conversational equivalent of touching Barry’s knot. “What do you plan to do about it?”
“Trash all my Weezer CDs for starters. And no more Gap or Abercrombie either, I suppose.”
“Look, Barry, I really need to get back to work.”
“That reminds me, I heard about your little greatest hits gig the other night.”
It took Oliver a few seconds to catch up. “You did?”
“Apparently it didn’t go over so well. But I also heard the girl was really hot. What was her name? Wanda?”
“Wendy.”
“She taken?”
“Not your type,” Oliver said. “At least not this week.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She doesn’t meet your new ethnic profile.”
“Oh yeah, right.” While Barry seemed to mull this over, Oliver wrote “white people” in his notebook. “So what about Mattie then? Dark hair, dark skin, big almond eyes? I’ll bet she’s something or another.”
“Yes, Mattie is definitely something,” Oliver said, grinning at nothing in particular. “And I’ll be sure to ask her as soon as we hang up.”
“Thanks, man. I was kinda hoping I wouldn’t have to come right out and ask.”
“That was a joke, Barry.”
Barry fell silent again. Oliver thought he heard channels being changed in the background. Finally, he said, “So, you want me to come down to the hotel to brainstorm or, you know, talk strategy or something?”
“It’s after midnight, Barry.”
“That’s okay, I’m not doing anything.”
“So why aren’t you covering my shift for me?”
Barry’s laughter faded as the line went dead.
“If you say so,” Barry said, sounding genuinely hurt.
Oliver replaced the receiver and stared at his notebook, waiting for the comedy fairy to magically reappear. But Adam and Eve didn’t seem so funny anymore. In fact, it seemed forced, contrived, and a bit ridiculous. He turned to a fresh page, wielded his pen, and was about to start stabbing again. But that felt even more forced, contrived, and ridiculous, like he was trying too hard. Just like the rest of his act.
At some point he realized he was drumming his ink pen between his teeth, just like Mattie. He considered barging in on her and striking up a conversation. That’s when he realized he hadn’t heard the clatter of her adding machines in a while. He walked across the lobby and let himself into the front desk area. Mattie was nowhere in sight. She probably went to the restroom while Oliver was on the phone.
So he sat at Mattie’s desk and opened his notebook.
He started moving his pen across the page in hopes that it would move something in his imagination. That’s when he realized he was transcribing his inane conversation with Barry about not having enough white friends. He read it again and realized it was funny. Or that it could be. So he kept writing. He made notes about Barry’s movable knot, his new penchant for non-white girls, and how he wanted to be Oliver’s manager to avoid doing work. This led naturally to thoughts about Mr. Sherman, a man obsessed with appearances who absentmindedly picked his nose, which segued to even more thoughts about haunted hotels, night auditors in silky pj’s, unsolved robberies, getting pummeled by a drug-addled transvestite, not to mention Oliver’s raging ineptitude as a security guard or the pretty girl with the dueling adding machines.
It dawned on him that he’d been looking in all the wrong places, or at least all the same places all the other comics were looking—airports, Burger Kings, television commercials, cereal boxes, and college campuses. He’d been mining the same ore, searching for common denominators, things that people could easily recognize and relate to.
Maybe it was time to take his mother’s advice to another, more personal level. The material culled from his own life had resonance; it rang true. He was contemplating this minor epiphany when something else began to ring true. It was a telephone.
“Front desk,” Oliver said.
The voice on the other end was breathless, bordering on panic. “I need to speak with hotel security.”
“That’s me,” Oliver said.
“I’m calling to report a prowler on the fourth floor.”
A prowler? “So there’s someone roaming your hallway?”
“No, it was a bit more, um, intimate than that.”
“Could you be a little more specific?”
“Look, I’m not crazy. I don’t even believe in ghosts. But someone, or at least something, was in my room.”
“I’ll be right up,” Oliver said.
He waited a few minutes for Mattie to return from the restroom, but decided to leave a note on her desk instead. It didn’t take long to determine that, indeed, the guest was a little crazy, that she definitely did believe in ghosts. Her tale was a stilted retelling of one of the more popular Harrington ghost stories, the one where the Old Man visits unsuspecting virgins in the middle of the night and seduces them. In short, all the guest in 403 really wanted was attention.
When Oliver returned, Mattie was at her desk abusing her adding machines.
“Hey,” he said, “you didn’t happen to be wandering around the fourth floor scaring the guests, did you?”
“Well, I certainly didn’t mean to scare anybody.” Oliver waited for her to crack a smile.