Somewhere over Pennsylvania, the Wi-Fi stopped working. The flight attendants apologized for the inconvenience, but they didn’t mean it. They were the parents on the flight, Manny thought, treating all passengers like children whose problems were irrelevant but whom you still had to comfort when their toys broke. How many times had Manny, as a young dad, had to tell August that he was sorry about something he wasn’t responsible for? “I’m so sorry Cassie doesn’t want to be your friend, kiddo.” “I’m sorry you forgot your book on the bus.” “I’m sorry your sweater itches.” How was any of it his fault? Though, well, in the grand scheme of things, yes: all his fault. For making August in the first place. Every single one of August’s bad days would be on him and Rachel, in a way. Perhaps August had gone through most of the bad days he would ever have, though, perhaps he’d piled up the bulk of his allotted share in infancy. Just a few days old, he’d been diagnosed with Hirschsprung’s disease. Curable, but tricky. Baby August couldn’t shit on his own. The latter part of his intestine wouldn’t contract, wouldn’t spasm the shit along and propel it forward (downward?), so it all remained stuck up there and you had to go get it with a tube and a pump. For a year, they’d done that, Rachel and Manny, in turns, manually pulled the shit out of their infant son, until he was big and strong enough for surgery. Rachel was worried that this year of enemas would scar August forever, psychologically, and the many months of colostomy bags after that, but the boy had grown up well adjusted.
Manny had called him after Dorothy, but he’d gone straight to voicemail. He’d left a message. He would be in Chicago for a few days, but a friend was putting him up, no pressure on him to pull out the couch or anything. He’d invited him to meet for a beer at the Empty Bottle, too. He was trying to convince himself of what Dorothy had said, that showing up at the club would make him look good. It could make him look good to August, in any case. A teacher caring for his students. Manny tried to picture it, but it didn’t make much sense. Him, a teacher? He hadn’t thought this thing through when Ashbee had offered. What was expected of him exactly? Was he just supposed to sit through the students’ bad jokes and give them feedback? Was that the idea? Or was it more of a lecture type thing? He took out his notebook and decided to write down everything he’d learned in almost forty years of stand-up. He thought it would take a while, but after ten minutes, he only had this, and not much more to add:
Maybe they could watch old comedians, Manny thought, study old comedies. Or he could simply show the students how a comedy routine got written, bring to class different drafts of what he was working on at the moment, let them see how long it took to put something decent together. But then they would leak some of his new jokes online, wouldn’t they? Manny didn’t even know if he should keep working on the new show. Now that he was himself an aggressor, a predator, a part of the problem, going onstage with it would only amount to provocation.
His next show was about half-written and its working title was “Not All Adults Here”—which was, as far as Manny was concerned, what trigger warnings and safe spaces translated to: people refusing to grow up and understand that life sucked. Everyone wanting to remain in a bubble, a child, so they could keep reading YA novels on their commute without being made to feel bad about it.
Manny asked the flight attendant for another beer, which she brought over without a smile. He’d thought at first that the lack of smiling was due to her recognizing and disapproving of him, but she treated everyone the same. There were jokes to be made about flight attendants, he thought, how they’d ceased to be nice in the last few years, or pretty, same as nurses (before World War II, flight attendants had been nurses, he’d read somewhere), how those once sexually charged professions had evolved to become regular jobs, held by women who looked like your mother. Such jokes could never be made, however, in the current climate. And that was a good thing, Manny thought. As dreary as political correctness was for comedy, with all the new fences built around forbidden topics, it went both ways: people were deprived of potentially great jokes, but also spared terrible ones, sexist or otherwise. Sexist jokes still existed, of course, but comedians had to put extra thought into them now. They had to be worth the trouble their authors would get into, and so they tended to be funnier.
Not that it mattered, in Manny’s case. Sexist jokes, even good ones, would not be welcome from him ever again. No matter how the rest of his days unfolded, there would always be a vague aura of scandal around him. People would remember hearing something about Manny Reinhardt and younger women—harassment, perhaps, something sexual, certainly. Manny didn’t have sexist jokes so far in “Not All Adults Here,” and he hadn’t planned to write any, but the realization that he could never make one again bothered him. What if he found the model joke, the sexist joke to kill all other sexist jokes? What would he do with it? There was nothing personal when he made a sexist joke, nothing against his wife, his sister, his nieces, or his mother. To Manny’s mind, all the jokes existed in the form of embryonic blobs in the air, they were the thoughts people exuded and rejected all day, and his job as a comedian was to grab onto the most horrible of these thoughts and shape them right in order to serve them back to those who’d run away from them. He was in the business of finishing people’s horrible thoughts so they didn’t have to go there themselves. A dirty job, but as long as people thought horrible thoughts (and they would never stop thinking them, no matter how hard they pretended), someone would have to do it.
He didn’t always enjoy it. Sometimes, he didn’t want to go where he went. Often, he disgusted himself for going there. But if he didn’t say things that shocked even himself, then he was failing, then he wasn’t doing his job right. Right? He needed to be a little uncomfortable, the audience needed to be a little uncomfortable. If they never were, if they were always in agreement with what Manny said, then it meant Manny hadn’t gone far enough, hadn’t handed them a clean enough mirror. He didn’t understand people who went to a comedy club, or to a movie, or to the theater, to feel good about themselves. Most people weren’t good. Didn’t they want to hear from someone else who wasn’t?
Maybe he could sell his future sexist jokes, Manny thought, if future sexist jokes came along. He’d never sold a joke before, but he knew people who did. He could sell his sexist jokes to female comedians, to Dorothy, for example. Dorothy would be allowed to make them. He could sell racist jokes to Black comedians.
What would be left for him, though? If he sold all his offensive jokes to people who were allowed to make them? He could still joke about alcoholics, Manny thought, his father having been part of that community, he himself verging on membership. He could keep antisemitic jokes. Jokes about rich people. About Hollywood. Ugh. He crushed his empty beer can and gestured to the stewardess for a third. He couldn’t tell if anyone recognized him on the plane. He’d jumped from the cab to the airport’s express security line to the Admirals Club lounge to the plane’s first-class cabin without anyone bothering him. Rich people tended not to bother celebrities, though. Rich people didn’t even look at celebrities, whereas Manny knew that if he just walked across coach now, two or three guys would stop him to chat, ten would stare, twenty others would badly pretend not to stare. He’d wondered what it was with rich people, if they went through rich-people training once they’d amassed a certain amount of money, an intensive course in which they were taught how to properly eat an ortolan, and to leave celebrities alone because it was déclassé to care about fame. Although such a course couldn’t exist, or else he would’ve been offered it. He had to be richer than most people on the plane.
He wondered if Ben Kruger was richer than him. That bastard had to have made a lot of money with the Meryl Streep movie. Manny didn’t think he was jealous. He’d been offered movie roles before, had always turned them down. There was something about Kruger that annoyed him. At first, he’d thought it was the way Kruger looked—his eyes, in particular, which seemed to never fully open or close—but maybe it was bigger than that, the eyes a mere symptom of a larger condition. The neither/nor condition. Neither a bad comedian nor a good one, neither a good actor nor a bad one. Yet people seemed to love it, Kruger’s mediocrity, his in-betweenness. It was real, or whatever they called it. But now what was it with the teaching? Why had Kruger taken a teaching job? A serious one, too, not just a visiting position, like Manny was accepting. They were probably paying him a lot, but still. Was it a status thing? Could it be that Kruger believed in teaching?
His son was the main reason Manny was giving teaching a shot. August had never admired anyone more than his professors at the University of Chicago. Manny had heard him on the phone with his favorite teacher once, when August was home for Christmas after his first semester of law school. He’d heard him laugh harder than he’d ever heard him laugh before. That had hurt a bit. What could a law professor have said that was so funny? He’d wanted to take the phone from August and tell the guy, “I’m the father, I’m the one who didn’t sleep for years thinking the kid might die, who the fuck are you?”
He didn’t think about August’s childhood illness that much, to be honest, but hearing him laugh with his professor that day on the phone had brought it all back at once. It had surprised him to remember it so clearly, the anguish, the smell of the soap they used in the hospital. It had surprised him because the only parts of his life he remembered so vividly tended to be those he’d written about, and he’d never written about August’s condition. He’d promised Rachel back then, when August was a few weeks old, to never use his illness for work, for laughs, to never talk about August onstage, in fact, and he’d kept his word. He’d talked to strangers about the most private and embarrassing things (hemorrhoid treatments, taking his mother off life support), but never August. That was a long time ago, though, Manny thought. That he’d made that promise. August was healthy now, everything had turned out great. Maybe it was time to really put it behind them. Manny immediately made fun of himself for thinking that writing about something equated to “putting it behind them,” how cocky it was to believe that, to decide for the whole family what they were done with. And yet…maybe now was the perfect time to write about August, about having been August’s father, a parent to a sick child. Yes, forget movies! Manny thought. Movies were boring. They moved like warships. You controlled nothing. What Manny had to do was write an hour of comedy about August’s first years of life, when he and Rachel constantly feared he would die. A comedy special about sick babies! That was the new frontier. That would surprise everyone. Everyone would be expecting a contrite performance from him next, tepid jokes about male-female relationships, jokes about how horrible men were, and so on. No one would see the sick-child thing coming! And it would be his story, too, Manny thought. He could never be accused of having no right to tell it. Well, August could accuse him of that, he guessed. Or Rachel. If August was okay with it, though, Rachel would be, too.
Big ideas didn’t usually come to Manny like this. His shows tended to build one beat at a time, until he figured out patterns, what the whole thing, unbeknownst to him, had been about. But this, what he was going through now, this was what people referred to as “inspiration,” he thought. He could see the whole show. Rachel’s pregnancy, the baby’s first days, the terrifying wait for a diagnosis, the horrible jokes that had come to his mind, and that he’d kept to himself. He’d look like a terrible father at times, but also like a great one in the end, he’d taken such good care of August! The show would be hilarious and moving. He could almost see it write itself.
Manny looked around the first-class cabin. He had the odd feeling of being the one in charge, and the only one to know it, responsible for getting everyone where they needed to be.