Chapter Twenty-Nine

ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE SETS in Oliver’s comedy career was also one of his shortest. It was the kind of night biographers might refer to as transcendent, cathartic, or even seminal. Although he doubted biographers would ever refer to it at all.

His mistake—if it could really be called a mistake—was not allowing the material to age properly. Improvising a line here or there was one thing; creating an entire routine in a single afternoon, then attempting to perform it that same night, was another. Stand-up comedy is dynamic. It’s give and take, a transaction, as much about the effect as it is about the cause. The best editors are time, attention, and honest feedback—the more brutal and objective the better. That night however, it wasn’t the crowd’s reaction that led to Oliver’s undoing. It was his own.

The weirdest thing happened today. I met my father for lunch …

Literally.

You see, we’d never been formally introduced before … or informally either, for that matter.

So far it was working. He was taking his time, allowing the material to breathe, thinking a few lines ahead, impregnating his pauses and carrying them to term. The real key would be to trust the crowd with his subtleties.

It was awkward at first, you know. We tried some small talk. My dad did that nervous-laugh thing and said, “So … it’s been a while, huh?”

I did some quick math, hoping he’d be impressed …

Let’s see, I was born twenty-six years ago, give or take a few months … add nine more for gestation … carry the two … and it comes to a neat quarter-century.

The audience did their part. They tracked along with his story, allowing him some leeway to set things up, laughing through obvious pauses.

Oliver still had confidence in the material. What he hadn’t banked on were his memories. As he milked each one for maximum comedic effect, he was forced to relive it. And the images were still too raw. For this bit to really kill, he would first need to build some emotional calluses. But it was too late now. He was onstage, mouth open, mind racing, heart rending, exposed. He tried to drown the bulge in his throat with a sip of water. But seeing the half-full mark on his homemade mug only made it worse.

A few good punch lines hovered on the horizon. So he tried to focus on those.

Finally meeting his father had been more than awkward. It was pathetic and sad, more bitter than sweet. There was nothing deep or insightful about the exchange. No healing, no catharsis. Roscoe had warned him that meeting his dad was probably a bad idea, that he’d be disappointed and end up with more questions than answers. And as usual, Roscoe was more right than not.

Oliver’s father was a sad little man named Gerard, way more interested in talking about himself than learning about the son he’d never met. Apparently he’d lost all of his money, most of his mind, and three fingers to frostbite. He wasn’t quite homeless, but it was close. He seemed exceedingly proud of his apartment and his job bagging groceries. Oliver tried hard to ignore the eerily familiar mannerisms, the deep-set canal of skin that sloped between his nostrils and full lips, and dozens of other subtle manifestations of their shared DNA.

He hadn’t gone looking for an Oprah moment or some overly emotional reunion. But he’d been determined to scrape past the superficial epidermis of names, ranks, and serial numbers. What he’d wanted was simple: a few childhood anecdotes to memorialize and to finally check “Meet Father” off his mental to-do list. But Gerard seemed to have a one-track mind. When Oliver finally worked up the nerve to broach the subject of his mother—how they met, what she was like, her losing battle with alcoholism, and her resulting illness—Gerard had steered the conversation to the only topic that seemed to interest him, what amounted to a master class of variation and theme.

“So, like I was saying,” my dad said, although he hadn’t really said much the entire time. “Been going through a rough patch lately. And if you could, you know, spare a few bucks till my next check …?”

If it’s true that only the truth is funny, then it’s equally true that the truth hurts.

As Oliver’s crying turned to outright weeping onstage, the crowd ate it up. The harder he cried, the louder they laughed. Much later, he would remember to be thankful for the crowd’s collective hilarity. In the moment, however, he wanted to climb down from the stage and individually strangle the ones laughing the hardest. Instead he dropped the microphone and left the stage.

Mattie had the night off. So Oliver spent most of his shift in the Harrington’s Business Center, googling himself. Barry had apparently been busy. There were three YouTube videos from three different angles, only one with decent sound. A groundswell of happy gossip was already building on Facebook, referring to Oliver as the Crying Comedian. There were Tweets and re-Tweets, hyperlinks, blogs, and one actual article review of a recent show on the front page of the City Rhythm website—byline Lindsey Whittaker. But she did refer to him as the “world’s saddest funnyman,” which horrified him. That was uncomfortably close to the way Roscoe described his mother. And not only was he still terrified of turning into his mother, he could now say the same thing about his father.

Oliver then googled his father for the thousandth time. And came up empty yet again.

It seemed he was stuck with his mother’s version of his biological father—a brief-yet-promising comedy career as a stand-up, followed by a longer stint in narcotics where he served as maker, seller, user, addict, and eventual informant. And of course Oliver now knew his father moonlighted as a bagboy and indiscriminate panhandler.

At least the man could multitask. This struck Oliver as profoundly funny. But he didn’t really feel like laughing.