I'll Be Here All Week (14 page)

Jamie reaches down and pulls a notebook out from behind his feet. It was tucked up under the passenger seat pretty good, but a quick stop sent it sliding forward. An old composition notebook—it's worn out and has a coffee stain across the cover. It's been under that seat for months.

“This yours?” Jamie asks.

“Cleaning lady must've left it,” Spence says.

“This your act?”

“Not really. Just some stuff I was working on. I haven't looked at it in a while.”

“You mind?” Jamie asks.

“Knock yourself out.” Spence nods. Anything to let him enjoy his tunes for a while.

Jamie reads from the notebook. Every minute or so he smiles. He flips through the pages, then back to the front, then toward the back. He laughs once, then twice. He smiles bigger and then flips randomly through the pages again. He keeps laughing over the sounds of Robert Palmer on the radio, bobbing his head to “Simply Irresistible.”

“You don't do this stuff onstage at all?” Jamie asks after a while, his nose still in the notebook.

“Not yet,” Spence says. “I haven't worked it out yet.”

“It's great stuff, man,” Jamie says.

“You like it?”

“Yeah, man. It's good. I mean, from what I can tell. I'd have to see how you deliver it onstage, but the writing is solid, yo.”

“Thanks. That's cool.”

“For real.”

“I need to work it into my show,” Spence says. “I just haven't been able to lately. Too many bar gigs, you know? Not the place to be trying untested material. I'd rather save it for an actual comedy club and not some saloon in Oklahoma.”

“I heard that,” Jamie says. “Do you normally write this clean?”

Spence laughs. “Not at all. I'm a dick joke comic.”

Jamie laughs. “Shit, me too.”

“Aren't we all?”

“This is all clean, man.” Jamie closes the notebook and puts it back under the seat.

“That's what I was going for.”

“You trying to go clean?” Jamie asks.

Spence thinks about this for a second. He never set out to be either clean or dirty. He never wrote a single joke because it did or did not have adult language in it. It just seemed that, especially after the divorce, that's where his head went every time he wrote something new. That's how he was feeling at that point in his life, and the crowd went with it. For the past month or two, he's found himself writing cleaner material. It's just what's been coming out of him when he writes.

Ever since Montreal,
he thinks.

“I've been trying to get some TV spots,” he says.

“
The Late Late Show
again?”

Spence shrugs. “Maybe. Or
The Tonight Show
. Or
Letterman.
Or
Good Morning, Albuquerque.
Anything, really.”

“Yeah,” Jamie says, “that'd be real cool, man.”

“Maybe.”

“I talked to the guy who books
The Tonight Show
once,” Jamie says. “He came to a workshop at the Funny Bone. He knew that friend of mine who does the publicist shit. Gave me his card. He was cool. Greg something.”

“Greg Saunders,” Spence says. He's never met Greg Saunders, but he knows the name. Every comedian does.

“Yeah,” Jamie says, “that was him.”

“You ever send him a demo?”

“Nah, man,” Jamie says, “I ain't near ready for that shit. I know I'm not clean enough, either.”

“You have any jokes about shit that smells like pussy?” Spence asks.

“What the hell?” Jamie sits back and makes a disgusted face.

“Never mind.”

“Well, this week we're at an actual comedy club,” Jamie says, “not some bar gig.”

“Right you are.”

“So you should try out the new stuff.”

“Maybe,” Spence says. He tossed that notebook under the seat a couple of weeks ago and had forgotten all about it until Jamie reached down and picked it up. Lately his mind has been stuck on keeping the mediocre gigs he already has and not the possible TV work. Rodney never came through on showcases in New York, so the thought had left his mind.

“For real,” Jamie says. “It's tight, man. You could get it on tape now and send it out to bookers if it works.”

Spence shrugs. “I might just do that.”

“I tape every show,” Jamie says.

“You set a camera up in the back of the room?”

“Yeah, with a tripod and everything.”

“I used to do that.”

“You don't record your shows anymore?” Jamie asks.

Spence shrugs. “Sometimes.”

“I can't help it,” Jamie says. “I don't wanna screw up and not tape and then miss that perfect show and then be kicking myself.”

“There will be other perfect shows,” Spence says, “and a ton of bad shows.”

“Little of both, huh?” Jamie says as he looks slightly right.

“That's the job,” Spence says, hypnotized by the broken white line on the highway. Alphaville plays on the radio. Alphaville wasn't from Canada. Where the hell was Alphaville from? He can't remember. He watches the road flash by and thinks about the new material. It's clean, and that's exactly what he needs to be doing if he wants to get on TV anytime soon. Jamie thought it was funny. Spence wonders if a roomful of people from Ohio will agree with him.

 

He has always liked it at Connxtions Comedy Club in Toledo. The club is big enough to hold a large crowd but cramped enough to where the shows always feel intimate. The ceilings are low, the stage is just big enough, and Midwestern people tend to like to drink and laugh. Just the right amount of drunkenness encourages roaring laughter. Both are things he admires in his audiences.

Jamie is onstage and doing a great job, even though he's obviously new and hasn't been doing comedy for very long. The audience likes him, which is the most important part of being the opening act. His timing is good, but his presence onstage is sometimes awkward. He doesn't look out into the entire crowd and often only speaks directly to the front of the stage. And he's still not sure how to hold the microphone; it's common for newer comics to hold it too close to their mouths. Jamie has the writing down pat, but he's still learning how to deliver it onstage.

Spence stands in the back of the club as Jamie is onstage talking about what it's like to be the only kid in town with a pitbull piñata. He watches the crowd to see where the laughter seems the loudest. It's always part of his routine. He tries to get an idea of which direction the audience is going. Do they want it cleaner or dirtier? Are they old or a crowd of mostly college-aged kids? Is there one rowdy table that has been drinking since noon? He looks to make certain there isn't a regular customer leaning on a cane anywhere in the crowd.

“Here you go,” a waitress says as she hands him his glass of Scotch. He thanks her and holds it but doesn't drink. He's saving it for when he walks onstage. If he's going to be in front of a drinking crowd, he's going to have a few drinks himself. It makes him feel as if he's one of them and not just their dancing monkey.

His phone vibrates in his pocket, and he looks at the screen. It's a text message from Sam:

 

Hey, handsome. Call me later? Stuff to tell.

 

He smiles and texts back:

 

You got it.

 

He can't help but notice that he's grinning like an idiot. It's been two months of this, ever since Montreal. He used to hardly ever text people with his cell phone. When he did, it was usually responding to Rodney about a gig or a payment or something. Now he finds himself typing with his thumbs like a teenage girl every time Sam's name flashes across the screen, which seems to be more every day. At this point, he's probably chatting with her more than he does with Rodney.

The club manager appears in the back of the room and pulls out a flashlight that she aims at the stage and clicks it on and off. Jamie sees the light and nods from the stage. He saw the signal and knows it's time for him to wrap it up.

“Which is what happens if you wind up at my house,” Jamie says. “But only on Cinco de Mayo.”

Spence waits in the darkness as Jamie bounces off the stage to the sound of the crowd laughing. He's going over different ideas he's been toying with in his head and little one-liners he just came up with. At some point in the show, he will pretend to improvise. He will tease a guy in the front row, and everyone will think it's ad-libbed. He wrote the entire schtick years ago but always tries to make it look like he's just winging it.

“That was fun,” Jamie says and slaps him on the back as he walks past.

“Looked like it was,” Spence says. “Nicely done.”

“For real?” Jamie asks.

“For true.”

Jamie extends a fist in the air, and Spence bumps it with his. He really likes the kid, and it's refreshing to work with someone like him. He can count on one hand the number of actual friends he has made in this business over the years.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the local MC says as the crowd settles down a bit, “it's time for your headliner.”

Spence hears his name called and swaggers onstage, glass in hand. When he steps up to the microphone, the audience applauds as if they've already seen a great show. It feels more like an encore than his first set of the week. He always knows it's going to be a great show when the applause lasts long enough for him to make it to the microphone and set his drink down on the stool. They are warmed up and ready to go.

Thanks, Jamie,
he thinks.

“Let's hear it one more time for Jamie Hernandez,” he says. The audience explodes in more applause and cheers. They really liked the kid. Spence smiles and hopes Jamie is grinning in the back of the room somewhere.

“And that's why I only date Asian women.” He wraps up his opening number, and the laughter is deafening. What a great crowd. He has nowhere to take them but down at this point. It is his audience to lose, and all he has to do is screw it up. All he has to do is say the wrong joke at the wrong time.

The feeling that rushes over him is rare. He often feels amazing onstage; that's nothing new. It's typical to stand under the lights and feel like a star. When laughter hits him, he can't help but smile thinking that he's responsible for it. It's the only thing he knows of that feels this good. Sex doesn't consume him the way laughter does when it explodes like this. There are days when the audience laughs, but then there are days when the audience simply adores him. This time is one of those infrequent moments when he feels adored.

They are ready for everything he throws at them. He smacks them again and again with an assortment of his greatest hits.

“I just figured he was masturbating,” he says, “not that he was actually smacking a midget.”

Huge laughs. One woman in the front row snorts when she laughs. Only women snort when they laugh. It's never a man.

“Then he hit her in the face with his penis,” he says, “which was only impressive because it was possible.”

They laugh some more. He feels he can say anything to them, and they will respond with love and applause. He wants to try routines he hasn't done in years. They seem like the perfect crowd. Why not go for broke? Why not try the new material Jamie read earlier in the day? Why not pepper this killer show with something he's never tried before? If there was ever a time to try it, this is it. The only thing he has to lose is the respect and laughter of a hundred people. That's nothing he hasn't done before.

“What I miss most about being married is the sex,” he says, recalling a joke he scribbled in that notebook in the car. As he rattles off his new material, he tries to remember it all in his head. What was the follow-up to the divorce material? Where did he go after talking about being celibate? On the outside, he looks like he has done the bit a million times. He smiles and pauses at the right moment. He ends each sentence with the right inflection. It all seems rehearsed. In his head, a million equations and ideas fly by in seconds. He has to remember the jokes in that notebook. Wasn't there something about owning dogs?

After twenty minutes of nonstop laughter, it dawns on him that he did it; he actually pulled it off. He exhausted the new material, and yet it all went over just fine. There was no lull in the show and there were no moments of silence. There wasn't a point where the crowd could tell the bit was new and only smiled at him and nodded. Each joke went over just as it needed to.

I should play the lottery tonight,
he thinks.
This never happens.

Straight from the new material, he starts to round out the show with his usual closer. The profanity returns, but the audience goes right along. He switches right back into it without skipping a beat. They love it and don't seem at all weird about the fact that he went from talking about love and marriage to sex with watermelons. When he tells them they are a great crowd, he means it. He wants to take them on tour with him.

“Thank you, good night,” he says and waves to them as he steps away from the microphone. The place explodes, and all he can hear is applause and cheering. Someone whistles. It's always cool when someone whistles. He's backstage by the time the applause dies down. Jamie stands there grinning like an idiot.

“Damn, man,” Jamie says, “that was something.”

“Yeah,” Spence says. He hasn't killed like that in a long time.

“You totally brought that shit right to them, man,” Jamie says.

“That felt really good.”

“You did that new stuff, too,” Jamie says.

“Yeah, can you believe it?”

“You really need to work that into the act for good.”

“Yeah, I think you're right.”

“You want the tape?”