In spite of the snow, Manny’s flight landed ahead of schedule. He’d spent the last forty minutes in the air working, writing down memories of Brooklyn Hospital’s pediatric ward, the long hours he’d spent there with Rachel, August, and all those other sick children he’d never asked about. What he had on paper so far wasn’t funny, but it didn’t matter. He just had to let it all out for now, how cold and afraid he’d been (why was it always so cold in hospitals?), how cowardly, how angry at Rachel, at times, for talking to other parents in the hallways, for letting their worry add to her own. Manny had never felt so selfish as when August was sick. Hospitals were places of high contamination, and the fact that the ailments August and other children suffered were mostly congenital malformations and noncontagious blood diseases was of no comfort to Manny at the time. He was afraid of another type of contamination, of his family’s bad luck piled on by other families’ worse luck. Snowballing. When he saw a deformed kid on the ward, he looked away, didn’t even nod at the parents. He held his breath, too. He thought bad luck would travel like bad smells.
Manny had been so focused on remembering his son as a newborn that he experienced a moment of unreality when he turned his phone back on and saw a text message from all-grown August, sent an hour earlier.
Manny had almost forgotten about the Empty Bottle, or why he’d come to Chicago in the first place. He wanted to skip it now, skip Dorothy’s apartment, too, just check in at the airport’s Hilton and write all night, like in the good old days. He knew he would have to ask August for permission to use his life story, but if he came to him with an idea of how the show would be structured, the beats, it would be a stronger case. His son would see the thought that had gone into it. He felt bad canceling on August, knew that Rachel would probably give him a hard time about it, but August would understand. He respected hard work. Manny was starting to type his excuse when his son’s next message came:
Manny didn’t let this stop him. He could still tell him he wasn’t feeling well and ask to meet tomorrow instead.
came another message.
Now it was trickier. Now third parties were involved. Parties Manny hadn’t disappointed yet. August had likely told them he would be coming.
Manny erased the message he’d been working on.
he replied.
He put his phone back in his pocket and looked for directions to a cab. He made accidental eye contact with a woman who seemed to recognize him, and he pretended to need something from the Hudson News immediately to his right. The woman could’ve been a fan with no interest in his present troubles, but Manny didn’t risk it. He’d been insulted on the street a dozen times since the stories had broken. Mostly about the proposals, only once about punching Lipschitz. Several news outlets had labeled him a predator after one of the three women maintained he’d offered marriage before they’d fucked. Manny was pretty sure he’d said it after sex, but he didn’t feel like correcting the woman’s story yet. If there ended up being a trial and the timing of the proposals became a pivotal detail, he would give his version, but now, in all honesty, he couldn’t really see the difference it made. It wasn’t like any of these women had been saving themselves and he’d ruined it.
Manny thought he could get something for August from Hudson News while he was there. He used to bring him a present from each tour stop back in the day. Toys at first, but then August had started asking for unique things, things that could only be found wherever Manny went. Manny had brought home local papers after that, the Tampa Bay Times, The Bellingham Herald, which August proceeded to read from front page to obituaries. Rachel had found it cute, how nerdy that was, and how close the boy wanted to be to his dad, going over the news of the towns Manny had been in on the day that he’d been there. Who passed on Legos to read about the weather in Raleigh? she’d marveled. Last week’s weather in Raleigh? What a quirky child they had! It had made Manny uneasy, though. August’s interest in what had happened in those cities was the photo negative of what his had been, and he’d been there. On tour, he tended to forget where he was. He slept until noon and woke up sad most days not to be in his bed, with Rachel. He saw the long hours before a show as time to kill, not opportunities for discovery. Why was his son so interested in knowing where he’d been? People were the same everywhere. Manny had brought the newspapers as a joke, and his son hadn’t gotten it.
There wasn’t anything nice to bring back from the Hudson News, really. A model airplane could be funny, Manny thought, because it was the type of thing good dads bought for their sons in the movies, but perhaps he should steer away from self-deprecating joke gifts. Self-deprecation was just another way to talk about yourself, and he should be a good father tonight, not joke about all the times that he’d sucked. Tonight would be about August: August’s life, August’s internship, the trial August hoped to work on. Manny would listen and offer advice, if advice was requested.
People magazine had a starlet on its cover, one who’d been sentenced to hundreds of hours of community service after being caught shoplifting and who was now letting the world know how transformed she’d been by the experience. She’d served her sentence but was still volunteering at a homeless shelter in L.A. Manny wondered if he would have to do something like that, too. His agent had hinted at it, asking if there wasn’t anything they could use to make him look like a good guy. Any volunteer work he did on the side? Of course not. He donated a lot of money to cancer research, though, he’d said. Over the years, he’d probably given a million dollars. He’d been proud to tell Michelle this. He’d never told anyone about it before, not even Rachel. He believed that charity wasn’t something you advertised, that advertising it rendered it worthless. So he was ashamed to realize he’d expected praise from Michelle, when he’d told her. All she’d said, however, was it didn’t really count, because all Manny had done was give money, and not time. Manny was afraid she’d suggest he visit cancer wards now, make the dying people laugh. He didn’t want to see people with cancer.
Manny considered getting August a T-shirt from the Hudson News rack, but quickly realized he didn’t know his size. He knew it wasn’t a symptom of being a bad father not to know your son’s size, but it still disturbed him to think that there’d been a time when he’d kept track of his baby boy’s slightest variation in weight, when he’d learned to think in grams to better care for him, and to feel his stomach for signs of obstruction. For years, he’d kept track of the kid’s temperature, of how much and when he’d last eaten, and now Manny had to think about it before he could remember August’s age. The distance they kept as adults, though, was a positive thing. They were able to keep it because August was cured. It was proof that Manny’s strategy of avoiding contact with other people’s pain and hardship had paid off and kept theirs circumscribed, somewhere in the past, inside a black sphere, Manny pictured, getting smaller and smaller behind them as time went on. They’d made it. They’d avoided contamination.
He’d started giving money to cancer research when Rachel, during one of August’s many hospital stays, had befriended a mother in pediatric oncology. Manny’d never met the woman himself. He’d refused to set foot on the cancer floor. He hadn’t had much money at the time, but he’d begun making small donations to leading labs in cancer research, the Anderson Center, the NIH, Stanford. August’s two following surgeries had gone splendidly. Even Rachel’s friend’s son had started doing better, or so Rachel reported. Manny had kept giving. As he gave more, his career took off, too. August began shitting on his own. Manny kept giving. The more he gave, the more famous he became, and if fame meant touring extensively, being less a part of his child’s life, Manny reasoned it was a way to balance out the intrusiveness he’d been forced into at first, pulling the shit out of August several times a day. It was good to give August some space once he could do everything by himself. Manny cheated on Rachel one night in Ohio and made his first-ever five-figure donation the following day. He never gave less after that. When Rachel started talking about couples’ therapy, he doubled his usual donation. The day their divorce was finalized was the day he gave the most. Since then, he’d kept the donations steady, the same amount twice a year. Maybe he hadn’t given as much as he could have the last few years, and that’s why life was catching up with him. He worried now that Lipschitz and the women’s accusations would only be the beginning. The beginning of a long fall. He hadn’t given anything to cancer research since it had all started. He’d felt the situation demanded something different, something drastic. Perhaps Michelle was right and he ought to forget about money, upgrade to time given to those who suffered. The problem was, no one wanted his time now. No one wanted Manny to spend it on them. Except maybe journalists. There was this journalist who kept asking him for quotes and corroborations. He could give her a few minutes, Manny thought. That would make her day. Maybe he could even tell her about what he was working on, a special about his son’s illness…Is that how he would phrase it? He could pretend that he’d already been working on it the night he’d punched Lipschitz. Yes, that was a great idea, Manny thought as he handed the checkout guy a Take 5 and a Red Bull. He could tell the journalist how writing about the hardest four years of his life had made him vulnerable, his nerves so very raw. Journalists loved that word.
“You’re Manny Reinhardt!” the checkout guy said. His name tag said “Severin.” “Fuck these bitches, man!”
“Excuse me?” Manny said.
“Fuck these bitches!” Severin repeated.
The emphasis switch made Manny think he was talking about a group of girls near them, rude customers, perhaps.
“They’re taking advantage of you,” Severin added, grabbing the Take 5 and Red Bull from Manny’s hands. “Clear as day. They’re just climbers, everyone can see that.”
Manny had only worried about being insulted so far, not offered support. He’d read a few people arguing under articles online that he wasn’t a predator but just a sad guy trying to get laid, and weren’t we all, and even though the comments had cheered him somewhat, he’d sensed that they came from men trying to defend themselves more than they were standing up for him. He’d come to terms with the idea that “sad guy trying to get laid” was probably the best characterization he could hope for these days, yet the interpretation that he was the real victim here disturbed him.
“They were using you for your connections,” Severin went on.
He had Manny’s Take 5 in one hand, the can of Red Bull in the other, and with them he drew circles and lines in the air—circles for the people in the story he was telling himself, lines for what they’d wanted from one another. He said the word “bitches” a few more times, and then finally scanned the Take 5, but not the Red Bull. He would never scan the Red Bull, Manny realized, that second beep would never come and put an end to this.
“No one will ever trust any of these bitches,” Severin said. “They’ll never work in Hollywood, believe me. Maybe some lousy director will give one of them a role in a movie no one will see, but then, if anything, it will all be reality TV after that.”
“I don’t need the Red Bull, actually,” Manny said.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
He didn’t need the Take 5 either, in all honesty, but walking out on it would be a sign of weakness.
“How much do I owe you?”
Severin stared at him for a few seconds. Manny thought he was calculating his next move, thinking about what he could say to force an interaction worth transforming into an anecdote later. Manny knew one of two things could happen at this point. The man could either tell him a story or ask for one. It wasn’t true that people were always asking comedians for a joke, but they did seem to at least want a story when they met one offstage, a snippet of what was on his mind. Manny was already thinking about what he could say—perhaps he should mention his son was waiting for him in the city, that’s why he was in a hurry, and his son had been sick as a child, did Severin know that? But then he thought he saw Severin swallow back tears.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Severin nodded.
“You remind me of my old man, is all,” he said.
“Was your old man fat and Jewish?” Manny asked.
A joke, he thought, given Severin’s being Black and skinny, but then he remembered adoption was a thing that people did.
“It’s in the voice,” Severin said.
The voice? Manny wanted to ask again if the dad had been fat and Jewish, but stopped himself.
“When I was a kid,” Severin went on, “he could do all the voices. Trading Places—he could say all of Murphy’s lines, and Aykroyd’s lines, and even Jamie Lee Curtis’s lines, in their own voices.”
“Sounds like a great guy,” Manny said.
“Your voice is very close to what his real voice was like, though.”
But that wasn’t it, that wasn’t what Severin had wanted to delay Manny with. What Severin had wanted to delay Manny with was the following story: In middle school, he, Severin, had had a friend, Jimmy. He would hang out at Jimmy’s every day after school. Jimmy was a huge Jim Carrey fan, and together they would watch Dumb and Dumber almost every afternoon, or The Mask, sometimes Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. This was the mid-nineties, Severin told Manny. Jim Carrey hadn’t taken his Truman Show/Man on the Moon turn yet. Anyway. Jimmy knew a lot about Jim Carrey from interviews he’d read in movie magazines. He dreamed of a career in Hollywood and felt a kinship with Carrey. Not only had they both been named James, but Jim Carrey’s father had been an accountant, just like Jimmy’s, and Jim Carrey had grown up in the suburbs of Toronto, which was basically Canadian Chicago, Jimmy said, and so the Chicago suburb he and Severin were growing up in had to be similar to what Jim Carrey had had as a child, in terms of what was on sensory offer. Jimmy spent a lot of time talking about Jim. Whenever something didn’t go the way he wanted (baseball practice, mostly), he drew parallels with Carrey’s setbacks (his many rejections from SNL). Severin couldn’t tell, though, how serious Jimmy was about becoming an actor, or a comic. There was never a mention of acting classes, let alone of writing sketches, of writing anything. It seemed Jimmy expected that wanting fame hard enough would lead it to his door.
“Your friend sounds like an idiot,” Manny said to Severin, hoping to speed things up. People usually held you hostage with their life story, not an old friend’s, so he assumed Jimmy was only a preamble to Severin’s leading act. Wrong calculation on his part. Insulting Jimmy had the opposite effect: it sent Severin on a tangent of excuses for Jimmy’s character, which included a tedious yet vague flash-forward to Jimmy’s time in high school, how he’d fallen in with the wrong crowd, a mention of a drug addiction that Jimmy couldn’t have foreseen in middle school but was somehow supposed to absolve him from (or explain, in retrospect) all the stupid things he’d done or believed back when he hadn’t even known about opiates. Manny didn’t like that kind of thinking. Everyone was going to have some terrible thing happen to them at some point in life. Everyone, in the end, if you measured their worth against the amount that they’d suffered, could be absolved. Or partly absolved. That wasn’t a good reason not to tell people when they were being assholes. Or else what? Would our only option be to love everyone in anticipation of the shit that was going to befall them? And how was a Hudson News guy able to go on and on about his childhood friend like this? Wasn’t O’Hare supposed to be one of the busiest airports in the world? Where was everybody?
Severin got back on track with his Jimmy/Jim Carrey story, and Manny vowed not to interrupt him again.
Jimmy desperately wanted to be friends with Jim Carrey, Severin resumed. To the point that Severin could feel insulted, at times, seeing in Jimmy’s desire an implication that he, Severin, wasn’t a good enough friend, that only Jim Carrey could really understand what Jimmy went through. But then it was true, Severin admitted, that he didn’t always quite get it, what Jimmy “went through.” Jimmy mostly seemed angry that he had to go to school in the morning, and to believe there were countless better ways to spend his time and creative energy, though once again, Severin said, he’d never heard Jimmy say anything about writing, or seen him take any steps to put a show together. When Severin finally asked about it one day, whether Jimmy was writing anything, they had a disagreement on the meaning of inspiration. Jimmy said that Severin didn’t understand the first thing about making art, that you couldn’t just decide to write something great, force it into existence. One day, it just came to you. That was how art worked. When he said again that Severin didn’t get it, but that Jim Carrey would, Severin suggested Jimmy write him a letter. It was public knowledge what agency Jim Carrey was with, he was pretty sure he’d seen a journalist mention it in one of the interviews: Jimmy could send a letter care of Jim’s agent, become Jim Carrey’s pen pal. Jimmy got to work almost immediately. He put Severin in charge of finding the interview in which Jim Carrey’s agent was mentioned and calling 411 for an address. By the time he wrote down the Beverly Hills zip code on a Post-it and hung up with directory assistance, Severin assumed Jimmy would be done with his letter to Jim, but he was only getting started.
“I’d never seen him spend so much time on anything,” Severin told Manny. “When I saw he was actually crumpling paper like in the movies, writing drafts, I thought it could take a while, and I might as well kill time writing my own letter to Jim Carrey.”
Perhaps Manny could see where this was going, Severin said.
“Jim Carrey ended up responding to my fan letter, and not Jimmy’s.”
Severin received a personalized letter, warm and kind, written by hand—unmistakably Carrey’s hand, according to Jimmy, who recognized the signature from several autographed photos he’d seen, and declared that the rest of the writing matched it.
“Wait, you showed your friend your letter from Carrey even though he didn’t get one?” Manny said, breaking his rule not to interrupt again.
“I know,” Severin said. “That was stupid. I was so sure his own letter was coming.”
For a few days, they looked at Jim Carrey’s letter together, alternating between casualness (“Jim wrote a letter, no big deal”) and a verging-on-demented attention to detail that one might think was reserved for scripture analysis (“Why would Jim call the L.A. sun ‘opaque’?”). Severin had mentioned loving dinosaurs in his letter, and Jim Carrey had drawn a string of them below his signature, though only of the herbivorous kind—a decision the two friends couldn’t help but think deliberate and full of meaning. But what meaning exactly? The colors were beautiful.
The next couple of weeks had been the happiest of their lives so far. Full of promise and anticipation. Jimmy imagined what his own letter would contain. At that point, they still thought it had gotten lost, delayed in the mail, or that perhaps it was so long and intricate that Jim Carrey was still composing it. When a form response came, however (typed and not handwritten, “Your support means the world to me,” etc.), that was the end of their friendship. Jimmy couldn’t save face after that.
“We never really had a fight,” Severin told Manny, “but I could tell Jimmy was mad I sent my own letter to Jim Carrey to begin with. And he was right to be. I loved Jim Carrey, but not as much as Jimmy did, and it wasn’t worth losing a friend over.”
“You couldn’t have known what was going to happen,” Manny said, but Severin wasn’t listening.
“I should’ve never written this letter,” he said. “It only brought me trouble.”
For his story was not over yet.
It took his parents a little while to notice the rift with Jimmy. When his father did and asked what had happened, Severin considered lying—he thought his father would be disappointed in him for wasting time writing to celebrities, and even more so for caring about a response. But Severin couldn’t lie to his father. He was the one person he could never lie to. What bothered Severin’s father, though, when Severin told him the story, was not so much that his son had written to a celebrity but that the celebrity was Jim Carrey. “Why didn’t you write to Eddie Murphy?” he said. “Did Jimmy make you write to Jim Carrey? Do you even like Jim Carrey?” After which Severin understood that he not only did like Jim Carrey, but in fact liked him a lot more than he did Eddie Murphy. He didn’t tell his father that last part.
“I didn’t want to hurt his feelings,” he explained to Manny.
“Actually, I don’t need the Take 5 either,” Manny said, but Severin kept going.
“The day he found out about my letter to Jim Carrey,” he said, “my dad asked me to write to Eddie Murphy.”
When Eddie Murphy didn’t respond to Severin’s letter, his father encouraged him to write a second, then a third. The boy received the same form response every time.
“My father was confused,” Severin said. “He didn’t understand why Jim Carrey would answer and not Eddie. He kept calling him Eddie. Like, the more Eddie Murphy dissed us, the more my father talked about him like a friend who had to have his reasons.”
“Eddie’s a very busy man,” Manny said.
“I told my father that!” Severin said. “I said, ‘Eddie’s busy! He gets hundreds of these letters, thousands, and I’m not that special.’ My dad, though, he kept saying it was something else, like Eddie was deliberately not answering, like maybe he was teaching me a life lesson. Maybe my letters had to be better, maybe I had to put more work into them and then he would answer. Like Eddie was trying to show me that life wasn’t easy for a Black kid and I had to work ten times harder than white people for anything, including a response from him. That’s what my dad thought. He was convinced Jim Carrey only answered me out of pity, because I was Black. I told my father I never said I was Black in my letter to Jim Carrey, but he said I must have. He became a little crazy over the whole thing.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Manny said. He knew Eddie Murphy had not thought twice about Severin’s letters—if he’d even seen them at all. Manny himself had answered little fan mail over the years, and there’d never been any rhyme or reason to which letters deserved a response and which didn’t. He’d left smart and funny letters unanswered (letters that had actually pleased him, sometimes even moved him, let him believe for a second that his life and work were not entirely in vain) and spent hours crafting elaborate responses to idiots who’d just written to call him a turd.
“I’m sure Eddie wanted to write back and didn’t get the time,” he told Severin. “The best letters we get are often the hardest to respond to. We think our response would be more disappointing than not answering at all.”
A lie. Manny had never thought that an absence of response could ruin someone’s week, or year (or even more, it seemed, in Severin’s case). He’d only ever imagined the positive, how a letter from him could make someone happy, for a minute or two.
“I don’t really care that he didn’t answer,” Severin said. “I don’t think my letters were that good, to be honest. My dad kind of fixated on it, though. I stopped writing after the third letter, and I thought he’d forgotten all about it, but when my mother died six years later, he said again that I should write to Eddie. I don’t know what he expected from that. Like if he thought that the pain I was in over my mom would make me worthy of an answer this time. Anyway. Eddie didn’t respond to that letter either.”
Manny didn’t say he was sorry this time. What kind of father asked his bereaved son to write to a celebrity?
“Your father sounds like an interesting guy,” he said diplomatically. “When did he pass?”
Turned out the father was still alive, though perhaps not for much longer. The reason Severin had spoken about his voice in the past tense earlier was that the old man had had cancer in his jaw and had to have most of it removed. He couldn’t speak anymore.
Hearing the word “cancer” annoyed Manny. He was okay thinking or talking about it himself, but when others did, he felt a breach open, he felt exposed.
“I’m sorry to hear about your father’s illness,” he said, after which a new customer came to his rescue, finally, entering Hudson News with purchasing needs, a deliberate approach to the energy drinks display. “I hope he gets better,” Manny added, meaning it, too, feeling his own freedom within reach.
“I don’t think he will,” Severin said. He hadn’t acknowledged the new customer’s presence yet but did lower his voice for what came next. “I know you know Eddie,” he said. “I was thinking maybe you could convince him to write back to us, you know, before my father dies. It would mean so much to him.”
He didn’t wait for Manny’s response. He wrote his name and address on a piece of paper and gave it to him.
“I put down my email, too, if Eddie prefers that. An email would be fine, I think. Will you ask him?”
Manny knew he wouldn’t. He didn’t know Eddie that well. Why did people ever ask him anything?
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
Severin didn’t thank him, just nodded. The new customer came to stand in line behind Manny, and Manny left the store without drink or food, and without turning around, either (an exit in side steps), for fear of being recognized by the man at his back, for fear of hearing more stories.
The cabdriver didn’t recognize Manny, but quickly told him about his idea for a TV show anyway. A show about cabdrivers, and all the different kinds of people they met. Like no one else ever had this idea, Manny thought. He didn’t want to be a dick, but it was hard not to judge everyone all the time. Here was the interesting show, to his mind: a show about a cabdriver with no curiosity for his customers whatsoever. Though maybe it was the same show, in the end, and Manny should relax. He’d chanced upon the best kind of driver. The cabdrivers who told you about how interesting their job was because they got to meet all sorts of people were the ones who never asked you a single question.