I'll Be Here All Week (2 page)

“You could be clean if you wanted to be,” Rodney says.

“No way. They would eat me alive.”

“Please,” Rodney says, “save the drama for your mama.”

“Save the—” Spence rolls his eyes. “What are you, calling me from 1998?”

“Don't kill the messenger here. I'm just giving you the news. That's my job.”

“Are you reading from a book of clichés?”

“Are you listening to me, you ass?” Rodney says. “I'm trying to help you.”

Spence looks back in the mirror. He really looks awful. Two years ago he was thirty-five and looked twenty-nine. Now he looks fortysomething. When did that happen? He wonders if maybe he should go back to highlighting his hair.

“Just once,” he says, “I'd like for you to call me with good news. I had a great show last night, Rodney. Do you understand what it feels like to have you shit all over it like this the next day? Any idea how awful that is?”

“Look, it sucks and I know it,” Rodney says. “But that's business, my man. This is show
business.
And it may suck sometimes, but it's better than sitting in an office. Last I checked, you haven't had a day job for, what, ten years?”

“Nine.”

“Nine. Whatever. If I were you, I would stop feeling sorry for myself, check my ego at the door, and just do what they ask. Plenty of clubs love you. This one will, too. Just lay low tonight.”

Spence sighs. “Alright, fine.”

“I'm serious,” Rodney says. “Check your ego at the door.”

“Fine.”

“And be careful where you stick your tallywacker, will you? I think the broad you're with is the bartender's ex or something. That may be what started this whole thing.”

“So that's what the complaint might be about? Not about the show but . . . you know,” Spence looks over at What's-Her-Name. She's still watching
Full House
and doesn't seem to even notice that he's been about three seconds away from an aneurysm this entire time.

“Yeah, maybe,” Rodney says.

Unbelievable,
Spence thinks.

“Fine. Anything else?” he asks.

“Yeah, scratch Rockford, Illinois, off your schedule. The club went out of business.”

“Aw, hell,” Spence says. It was just a one-nighter in a bar, but he needed it. The gig paid four hundred bucks for one night and led right into a weekend of other gigs along the way. He booked it because the routing was perfect and gave him a hotel to stay in on his way east from a string of western gigs.

“Yeah, I know it sucks,” Rodney says. “I'll try to fill it in with something else. Maybe Baltimore or Cleveland. I dunno.”

“Lemme know, okay?”

“And send me more headshots. I'm all out of them.”

“Already?”

“Yeah, send me at least a hundred.”

“Alright.”

“Now go tell that girl you're with you just gave her the clap.”

Rodney hangs up before he's even finished with his zinger. It doesn't matter because it's essentially the same joke every time he calls. If it's not the clap, it's syphilis or herpes or genital warts.

Damn it,
Spence thinks and stares at his phone.

Another call from Rodney to ruin a perfectly good day. It has become so predictable that it's almost a routine. A show will go great only to be followed eight hours later by a call from Rodney telling him that the club is pissed for some stupid reason. They hated the shirt he wore or didn't like his joke about epilepsy or thought that his act was too dirty. Or maybe someone just hated the fact that he got laid and the bartender didn't. It's always something, and it usually has nothing to do with stand-up comedy, which is supposed to be the job description.

He tosses his cell phone on the bed and looks at Mandy or Brandy as she's watching TV. He's tired and he's hungry, but he's also a bit horny and thinks he could probably have sex with her again. She just fixed her hair, though, so she might not be up for it.

“What's up?” she asks, and he realizes he's been staring at the wall behind her head. She's attractive, but she could stand to do a little less tanning. If she keeps it up, her face will be leathery by the time she hits thirty-five.

He clears his throat. “Nothing.”

“You okay?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says. “I've just gotta get out of here.”

“But you have another show tonight.”

“I mean I have to get going. Out of the hotel. I have to do an interview for the radio.”

“Which station?” she asks as she gets up from the bed and puts her jeans on. They're bedazzled and have writing on them, and he suddenly wonders if she realizes that she's not a teenager anymore.

“I don't know,” he says. “The rock station.”

“106.7 or 92.9?” She pulls her T-shirt over her head, and her bracelets get caught in her sleeve. She stumbles around for a second, stuck in the middle of her shirt. He almost laughs at the way she wrestles her way into her clothes, her head buried somewhere inside and her arms just two awkward stubs trying to poke their way through. He thinks she looks like a low-budget
Star Trek
alien.

“106.7, I think.”

“Oh, I like that one. I'll have to tune in and listen to you.”

“Yeah. I'll be on with the morning crew, I think,” he says. “Or maybe they'll tape it and play it later.”

“
The Cubby in the Morning Show
?”

“I guess so,” he says. All of the radio shows are the same. Some “Morning Zoo Crew” sitting around pretending to laugh at each other while playing ZZ Top. He probably knows three DJs named “Cubby” at this point and has met at least six guys named after animals.

“That's pretty cool. You get to, like, hang out on the radio all day and then, like, do shows at night.”

“Something like that, yeah.”

“Better than having a job,” she says. He cracks a smile and tosses her a pair of tiny pink socks he found on the floor. He has had this same conversation so many times, it's almost as routine as the one he just had with Rodney.

Spence puts on his jeans and a sweater and checks out his hair in the mirror. He keeps wondering if maybe he should go back to highlighting it. He grabs his sunglasses off the small hotel desk because he's certain he won't be able to stand the sun when it hits him in the face. The one good thing this fleabag hotel has going for it is the blackout curtains. He opens the door, and the cold hits him at the same time as the bright sunlight. Neither feels very good, and he instantly wishes he was back in bed.

What's-Her-Name drives a Jeep. She followed him to the hotel and parked it right beside him. She must've been drunker than he remembers because her parking job sucks, and she has taken up two spaces next to his old Toyota Camry. She throws her purse into the passenger seat and then leans up against the door with her thumbs in the belt loops of her jeans. She must be at least twenty-nine but, just like Rodney, she's having a hard time accepting her age.

“I had a great time.” She bites her lower lip and looks up at him. The eyes she's making remind him of why he brought her back here in the first place, and part of him is tempted to just take her back inside and have sex with her again. But then she'd probably never leave and wind up sticking around the rest of the day.

“Drop me an e-mail or something,” he says and unlocks his car. As he opens the door, she leans in and puts her lips on his. He puts one hand around her waist and lets her tongue slip into his mouth for only a second. Before she can really connect with the kiss, he pulls away.

“I had fun,” he says and slips into his car. He rolls down the window and leans out.

“Me too.” She gets into her Jeep and sits there with the door open. “You're gonna, like, be famous one day. You know that? I bet you will. I believe it. You're really funny.”

“From your mouth to God's ears,” he says as he starts the car.

“One day, I'll tell people I knew you when.”

It's more likely you'll tell them that you slept with me when,
he thinks.

“I hope so,” he says.

She shuts her car door and starts the Jeep at the same time. He doesn't say anything, but he smiles at her and gives her a wink. She's probably a pretty cool girl, and he realizes he'd probably like her if he wasn't in such a foul mood.

Thanks for nothing, Rodney.

“See you later,” she says. She waves at him as she pulls out and drives away. He sits in his car for a minute, screwing around with the rearview mirror. Maybe later today he'll get some highlights. Then he won't look quite as old. Maybe there's a hair salon and an outlet mall nearby. He can kill two birds with one stone.

When she has pulled out of the parking lot, he shuts off his engine. He sits there for a minute, then goes back inside his hotel room and goes back to bed.

Another night in Oklahoma and another show at the Electric Pony. Spence arrives at the bar about a half hour before showtime, which Rodney has specified in all of his contracts. Like most contracts Rodney handles, it says nothing about anything he needs from the club, but everything that the club expects from him. One of those things is that he always arrives at the venue with enough time to sit around and do nothing.

He walks straight up to the bar and looks around. The Pony is only a comedy club on Fridays and Saturdays. The rest of the week, it's a country western bar and that's exactly what it will become again the minute he leaves the stage. The lights will come up, the dance floor will fill, and people will start line dancing to Toby Keith or Kenny Chesney or whatever it is that country music people listen to these days. He doesn't know.

“Drink?” one of the two bartenders says to him as he sits down in the corner seat. This particular bartender is not the one that used to date Mandy or Brandy or whatever her name is, so the guy is being pretty friendly.

The other bartender across the room is giving him dirty looks, so he can only assume that what Rodney heard is true. This makes him happy. There are few things greater than knowing that you slept with a woman that made another man extremely jealous. He got laid and the bartender didn't, and now he's walking on thin ice for it. People rarely hate comedians for the laughs they get, but often hate them for the attention that comes with it after the show.

“Whiskey, neat,” Spence says. The bartender nods and pours whatever is on the rail into a glass. He likes it when the bartenders don't measure out the booze and simply pour it straight out of the bottle. It's always annoying when he wants to have a glass of whiskey and they give him the equivalent of a shot in a rocks glass. He's always wondered who the hell sips a tiny shot of liquor. He tries to imagine Dean Martin sipping a shot of Scotch onstage and just how stupid it would have looked.

He used to not drink before shows. It was always a rule to keep his energy up, keep the show running smoothly, and keep things professional. It's not a good idea to be slurring through the show, especially not when there's the chance that people in the audience might start sending shots to the stage midway through. Now that he can do his act pretty much in his sleep, he doesn't worry too much about having a little something before the gig. Besides, he's got plenty of time to kill. The MC will go up and do at least twenty minutes of material and the show won't even start on time. That leaves him with almost an hour with nothing to do but hang.

The place is about as full as it was last night, which makes it about half empty by the looks of it. Still, it's at least a hundred people, which is good for some of these makeshift comedy shows that he's gotten used to doing. Some hotel in Lakeland, Florida, once made him perform for six people. That sucked. A hundred people in a room that seats two hundred isn't so bad when he remembers that gig in Lakeland.

“There's the funny man.” The club manager walks over and pats him a little too hard on the back. His name is Billy, although he's old enough to simply go by Bill at this point. There's something about country guys that they always keep their kid names even once they hit their fifties. Billy has a scraggly gray beard and a belly that likely hangs over an unseen, huge belt buckle. He looks like a redneck version of Santa Claus.

“Having a little hair of the dog?” Billy says as he sits down on the nearest barstool and thumbs mindlessly at a Zippo lighter in his hand, flicking it open and then closed over and over again.

“Nah,” Spence says, “just having a drink to loosen my tongue a little bit. Take the edge off.”

“Take the edge off?” Billy says. “Shit, a pro like you should be able to do this show blindfolded.”

“You'd be surprised.”

Billy laughs and flicks his Zippo open and then shut again. “Listen, you know to take it kinda easy tonight, right? Don't hit 'em too hard like you did last night, and all.”

“I'm not sure what you mean.”

“Just go a little easy, is all.”

“How did I hit them too hard?” Spence asks. “Do you mean the language?”

“Naw, it ain't nothing like that.” Billy leans in, as if he's telling him a secret. “Just watch some of the racier content. You know, the controversial stuff. No one cares if you say ‘shit' or even ‘fuck' or anything. Just try to keep it light on some of the topics.”

“Like what?” Spence asks. It's annoying enough when people want to tell him what to say. It's even more annoying when they are vague while doing it.

“Well, you did some joke last night about Jesus or God or something,” Billy finally admits. “You might want to leave that one out.”

“A joke about Jesus?”

“That's what someone said, yeah.”

“I don't know what they're talking about. I don't have any jokes about religion.”

Billy flicks his lighter. “Well, something got somebody fired up. They said you were making fun of Jesus or something like that.”

“Well, I can assure you that won't happen again,” Spence says, “since I have no idea what they're talking about.”

“Did you say
GD
?” Billy asks. “ 'Cause sometimes that's enough to piss people off around here.”

“GD?”

“You know,” Billy says and looks around, as if he's violating national security, “goddamnit.”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Well, that might be it. Best to steer clear of that tonight then.”

“So no jokes about Jesus.”

“No. Nothing making fun of religion or God or anything like that.”

“How about Jews?” Spence asks. “Can I make fun of Jews?”

Billy shrugs. “I don't see why not.”

“And the jokes about sex and drugs and pedophilia and incest and death . . . all of that's still okay?”

“Fine by me.”

“Just no jokes about Jesus and don't say
goddamnit
.”

“You got it,” Billy says.

Unbelievable,
Spence thinks.

“No problem,” he says.

“So we're clear?” Billy asks him.

“Crystal.”

Billy pats him on the back again and laughs for no real reason, then flicks his lighter open and closed a few more times. After a moment of silence passes between the two of them, Billy gets up without saying anything and walks away, wheezing his way back into his office around the corner.

When Billy is out of sight, Spence goes back to drinking his whiskey in silence. He tries to remember a single joke in his act about Jesus but can't recall one. Across the room, one of the bartenders smiles and the other one glares at him. He sips his whiskey and wonders if this is the glamorous side of show business he always heard about when he was a kid.

Goddamn,
he thinks to himself, smiles, and looks back down at his glass.

At least in the next thirty or so minutes he gets to take the stage and all will be right in the world. Club owners and bartenders and agents and managers always try to humble the comedians as much as possible when they are offstage. He knows this is just because none of them have the talent or balls to actually get up in front of the audience themselves. He has learned to shrug it off, since he knows that everything changes once the lights come up and he grabs the microphone.

“Hey, boss,” a young kid, no more than twenty-three, calls and suddenly appears next to him. The kid is too young to be a manager and too nerdy to be a bartender. Skinny, wearing a Spider-Man T-shirt and a corduroy blazer, he's apparently trying to grow a lumberjack beard. It's obvious that the kid is an amateur comedian. He fits the profile.

“How's it going?” Spence nods at the kid and raises his glass in salute.

“I'm Marshall,” the kid says, “the MC for the night.”

“Where's the kid who was here last night?” Spence asks. He liked the kid from last night.

“He's in the kitchen,” the kid says.

“Eating?”

“Working. He's the line cook.”

“Really?

“Yeah.” Marshall nods. “Billy lets us do the show one night a week if we agree to work in the kitchen the other night.”

“So last night,” Spence starts.

“I was the line cook,” Marshall finishes.

“Right.” Spence extends his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Marshall takes Spence's hand and shakes it. “Listen, I was wondering if you had anything you want me to say about you when I introduce you. You know, like any TV credits or anything like that.”

“Sure, just tell them I've been seen on
The Late Late Show
.”

Marshall pulls out a cocktail napkin and starts writing on it with a ballpoint pen. “Great stuff. Was Craig Ferguson cool?”

“I never met him,” Spence says. “I did it when Craig Kilborn was hosting.”

“Who?” Marshall asks.

“The guy before Ferguson.”

“I didn't know there was a guy before Ferguson.”

“More than one, actually. He also was the first host of
The Daily Show.
”

“No shit?”

“Scout's honor.”

“Before my time, I guess,” Marshall says. “Well, we're gonna be starting in a bit. I'll do, like, ten minutes and then bring you up. Cool?”

Spence nods at Marshall and motions to the bartender for a refill.

 

There is no green room, so he sits at the bar, watches Marshall onstage, and waits for his name to be called. He remembers back to when he used to pace the back of the room, anxiously awaiting the sound of his name being called. He would strut through the audience as he made his way to the stage, ready to take on the world. These days, he just leans against the bar and waits.

Marshall is getting chuckles, but hardly making a dent in the audience. His material is perfect for a brand-new host at his age and is perfectly safe, even if it isn't at all groundbreaking. It's observational fluff, which is what most twentysomething comedians wind up doing before they've had any real life experiences to bring to the stage. It's exactly the kind of material Jerry Seinfeld would be doing had he never become Jerry Seinfeld.

At least he didn't say
goddamnit, Spence thinks and takes the last sip of his drink.

Time flies by onstage, especially when a comic is still pretty new. Everyone imagines they speak much slower than they actually do, and they wind up with less material than they thought they had. The ten minutes Marshall was supposed to do suddenly becomes five as he winds down and gets ready to pass the microphone.

Please don't mispronounce my name,
Spence thinks as he watches Marshall trying to deliver a big closing joke that winds up being a six instead of a ten. Marshall then reaches into his pocket and pulls out the napkin he was writing on. Apparently it was too hard to memorize the words “has been seen on
The Late Late Show.
”

“Are you ready for your headliner?” Marshall says as he looks down at the napkin in his hand. The audience applauds halfheartedly, which is often the case with half-drunk crowds in makeshift comedy clubs. Marshall makes no attempt to hide the fact that he's reading off his cheat sheet as he holds the napkin up to his face. “The comic coming to the stage is a very funny man. He has been seen on
Late Night with David Letterman
. . . .”

Idiot,
Spence thinks as he watches Marshall completely screw up the intro and then mispronounce his name.
How hard is it to remember which stupid TV show I was on?

The smattering of applause leads him to the stage and, as he takes the microphone from Marshall, everything is reset and he is a brand-new man. He is all smiles and thrilled to stand in front of this room full of cowboys and rednecks. Just an hour earlier he was some guy sitting in the room. Now he's the star of the show.

It's under these lights and on this stage that he feels the most comfortable. It's here that nothing else matters. The glare is too bright for him to see Billy or the bartenders, and the lights darken everything in the background to where all he can focus on is doing his act. At the bar, he has to be social when he'd just as soon be alone, but onstage he's everyone's best friend. Onstage he's not some guy leaning on the bar drinking whiskey; he's the star of the show. Onstage he's charming and he's beloved by the audience. They love to laugh at him and he loves to hear it.

He kills. They love him. They laugh and they applaud. When it's like this and everything is right on, forty-five minutes feels like ten. Before he knows it, he's on his closing bit and bringing the show home. In a matter of minutes, he'll be back at the bar, soaking up the free drinks being sent his way and waiting to see if there's another Mandy or Brandy waiting to get to know him a little better. Even if he doesn't want to get laid or just wants to be alone tonight, it's nice to know that he has options. And, when the show goes this well, he always has options.

He was twenty-one the first time he had this feeling. He went to an open mic night at the Comedy Corner in Baltimore when he was home for Christmas. He signed up and watched the other amateurs try their jokes. Most of them sucked. A few were good. When he did it and people laughed, he knew he had to have more. He had to do it again. He wasn't even very good. Back then, he would have killed to get work at the Electric Pony in Oklahoma. Back then he would gladly work for free. Now he does it for a living and feels like he's being robbed.

But he still loves being onstage.

“You guys have been great,” Spence says as he puts the final touches on some mindless joke about masturbating penguins. He knows better, but he leans in on the microphone and decides to go for broke. “Really, you've been the best goddamned audience I've had all week. Thank you, good night!”