Out of Whack (16 page)

       The music regained its upbeat tempo, and we filed off the stage. “Last time he had a guillotine,” said Tampon Man. “It was pretty cool.”

       A few of the contestants went off to practice some more, while the rest of us stayed near the curtain so we could hopefully watch the competition botch their routines. Hold For Laughter squeezed his eyes shut and whispered “You’re funny, you’re funny, you’re funny,” until he was introduced as Jason Kierar.

       “Wish me luck,” he said, stepping onto the stage.

       No amount of luck I could impart upon him would have helped. It was gruesome. I don’t think I’d ever witnessed anything more painful than watching the poor soul hold for laughter when there were no laughs forthcoming.

       A minute into the routine, Tampon Man smiled at me and made a sound like a bomb dropping and exploding.

       “You’d think after twenty years of buying clothes, she’d know which ones to pick,” said Jason, stumbling over his words. The audience was dead silent.

       “Someone find him a noose,” one of the contestants said. There was some chuckling from the others.

       I didn’t chuckle. This was no longer a simple case of pre-show jitters. I was absolutely terrified. All of my fantasies about this event had involved giving a slam-bang performance and having the crowd roar with laughter. I didn’t until that moment realize that this could be a nightmare. An audience will applaud a bad singer out of politeness, but they won’t laugh at a bad comedian just to be nice.

       Five minutes alone with a silent audience is a long time.

       “Oh, God, make it stop,” wailed Tampon Man in mock agony.

       Some sweat from my forehead ran down into my eyes. I wiped it away and continued to watch Jason, who was no longer even trying. He ran his lines together without any inflection or sense of timing. He finished and quickly strode off the stage to lackluster applause.

       As he walked past me, I reached out and touched his shoulder. “Hey, you sounded pretty good out there. Not your fault the audience was dead.”

       “Oh, yeah, right,” he said, his voice cracking a bit. “Jesus, I can’t believe I asked all my relatives to come see this.”

       “Well, it’s hard to be the first one.”

       “Especially if you suck.” Jason turned and headed for the exit. I watched him go, feeling sick to my stomach.

       “I really feel sorry for him,” Flaming Hair told me. “I know him pretty well. He’s been wanting to do stand-up for as long as he can remember, but this is the first time he’s ever worked up the courage to actually get up on stage. I guarantee he’ll never do it again.”

       “That’s horrible,” I said.

       Flaming Hair nodded, then shrugged. “It’s sad, but let’s face it, he didn’t have any talent. I don’t care how much you want to be a comedian, if you’re not funny, you’re not going to make it. At least now he doesn’t have to wonder any more.”

“Our First Performance”

       The next two performers also did stand-up comedy, and though they fared much better than Jason, they didn’t get anything more than some decent chuckles from the audience. I don’t know how good their material was, because at this point I wasn’t hearing much else beyond the voice in my head shouting “YOU’RE GOING TO DIE! YOU’RE GOING TO DIE!”

       Now, after countless hours of rehearsal, I was starting to doubt whether our skit was any good. However, expressing these doubts to Travis was not one of my more astute tactical moves.

       “What do you mean, is our skit any good?” he demanded. “Of course it’s good!”

       “Are you sure?”

       “Look, there’s nothing wrong with a little healthy tension,” he said. “But take some deep breaths, count to ten, think of a happy time in your childhood, and get the hell over it. It’s getting close to our turn.”

       Number four was currently on stage, doing a song and dance number where the “humor” was dependent on singing very, very badly. Even though the audience wasn’t responding, this guy was tough to feel sorry for. I wanted something very heavy to fall on him.

       “Should we go over the skit one more time?” I asked.

       “No, we should not. You need to relax. Seth, we really have a chance at this! So far everyone else has been pathetic!”

       The song ended, and after making an anti-witty joke about the president, Saul introduced Flaming Hair. She strode onto stage with a confidence that made me jealous. To this day I’m positive that she was a confidence-sucking vampire who’d made me her victim.

       Her routine was about the trials of visiting a hairdresser, and she got a big laugh right away. The laughs kept coming as Travis looked at me with genuine concern.

       “Seth, you’re green. I didn’t even know that people could actually turn green, but you are one green person.”

       “Is he all right?” said another girl who hadn’t performed yet. “His face is all grey.”

       “It’s green,” Travis corrected.

       “No, it’s a dull grey.”

       “That’s just the light back here. If you look closely, it’s green.”

       The girl looked closely and shook her head. “Grey.”

       “Yeah, whatever, you go ahead and believe that.” He looked me in the eye. “Seth, we’re going to do a green-removal exercise, okay?”

       I nodded.

       “Now, I want you to breathe in, slowly and deeply.”

       I breathed in, slowly and deeply.

       “Now, I want you to exhale the entire breath, slowly.”

       I exhaled the entire breath, slowly.

       “Now, I want you to breathe in, once again slowly and deeply.”

       I hiccupped.

       Travis raised an eyebrow. “Did you just hiccup?”

       I hiccupped in response.

       Genuine panic filled Travis’ features. “You have to talk out there! We can’t do our skit with you hiccupping!”

       Flaming Hair’s routine ended with a huge laugh and loud applause from the audience. She walked off stage, grinning.

       “They’re on number six now,” Travis told me. “I need you to get rid of those things pronto!” He gestured to Awful Singer. “Could you get us a cup of water?”

       “Sure, no problem.” Awful Singer hurried over to the stage exit.

       I tried to hold my breath, but the hiccups burst through. The second performer approached us. “You should scare him,” he said, helpfully.

       “How about this?” asked Travis, glaring at me. “If your hiccups don’t stop, I’m going to murder you in your sleep. Is that scary enough?”

       Flaming Hair walked over to me. “What you should do is grab that little dangly thing in the back of your throat and give it a nice tug. Cures them every time.”

       “Swallowing sugar works,” said the guy who was last in the lineup.

       “Do you have any?” Travis asked.

       “No.”

       “Hiccup, hiccup, hiccup,” I remarked.

       “Listen to me, Seth,” said Travis. “I can understand you being nervous and wanting to ralph all over the place. But if you screw this up because of a case of hiccups, I will destroy you and everything you stand for.”

       “It’s not my—hiccup—fault!”

       “Get him a paper bag to breathe into,” Flaming Hair suggested.

       Tampon Man was watching the proceedings with amusement. “I think if you punch him in the stomach they’ll go away.”

       Awful Singer returned with a Styrofoam cup of water. “You need to drink this upside-down,” he said.

       “Say—hiccup—what?” I asked.

       “No, really, it works. Can you do a handstand?”

       “Oh, sure, have him do a handstand while he’s hiccupping so he can break his neck,” muttered Travis.

       “Well, I guess he can put his head between his legs and drink it,” Awful Singer said.

       “I think it’s supposed to be seven sips of water, followed by seven more sips,” said Flaming Hair.

       “While you recite dirty limericks,” added Tampon Man.

       I let out an exceptionally loud hiccup that hurt my throat.

       Travis looked at the guy with number ten. “Do you want to trade us numbers?”

       The guy shook his head. “No way.”

       “It’ll give the judges time to forget if you bomb.”

       “Nope. You know, I think if you try to do fake hiccups, it makes the real ones stop.”

       “Shut the—hiccup—up,” I told him, taking the cup of water. As I took a drink, I hiccupped and sprayed water all over my shirt.

       “I’m almost up,” said Tampon Man. “Hope you get those taken care of in time.”

       I hiccupped a couple more times. I tried to use Jedi mind tricks to make them go away, but nothing was working. I didn’t want to cancel, but what were we going to do?

       “Seth, we’re good friends, right?” Travis asked.

       I nodded with a hiccup.

       “And so we can have rough times and sometimes hurt each other and still come out of it friends, right?”

       I nodded without the hiccup. On-stage, Saul was introducing Tampon Man.

       “Good. So you’ll get over this.” He drew back his hand and slapped me hard across the face, nearly knocking me out of the chair.

       Several of the other competitors winced. Tampon Man looked shocked, then hurried on-stage to do his routine. I glared at Travis and massaged my stinging cheek as I did a missing tooth check.

       “How are the hiccups?” Travis asked.

       I waited for a moment. “I think they’re gone.”

       “Are you positive? I’d be more than happy to smack you again to make sure.”

       “No, they’re gone. Thanks. We’d better get ready.”

       I stood up and we walked over to the other side of the stage, where the desks we had procured to use in our skit were waiting. Although, to be completely accurate, I’d have to revise that last sentence to read “were
supposed
to be waiting.”

       “Where the hell are the desks?” Travis demanded.

       “They were right here!” I insisted.

       “I know they were right here,” Travis snapped. “I put them here! Where are they now?”

       On-stage, Tampon Man was receiving all kinds of laughs, having found a deep mine of comedy in feminine hygiene products.

       Travis and I scurried around the backstage area, trying desperately to find our desks. A quick survey of the other contestants revealed that none of them had any idea where they had gone.

       “Please trade numbers with us,” Travis begged Number Ten. “I’ll hire somebody to bear your children.”

       Number Ten shook his head. “Nope.”

       The onstage laughter continued. I looked around for something that could substitute as a newscaster’s desk, but there was nothing. “We’re dead,” said Travis.

       Tampon Man ended his routine to wild applause. “Okay, we’ll just use chairs,” I said, grabbing one. “The audience can use their imaginations.”

       Saul’s voice boomed from on-stage. “Was that great or what? And we’ve got even more great stuff for you tonight, with the comedy duo Out of Whack! Let’s give them a big hand!”

       Travis glared at the entire world, grabbed a chair, and walked onto the stage. My stomach felt like it dropped to my knees, bounced up, hit me in the chin, then ricocheted like a pinball machine through my entire chest area.

       I watched through the side of the curtain as Travis set down his chair and had a seat. I forced myself to take a breath. Then I hiccupped again.

       Travis stared out into the audience, then began to speak in his carefully rehearsed newscaster tone. “Good evening, and welcome to the evening news.”

       I bit down on my finger to stifle another hiccup as Travis smoothly performed the opening bit, earning a big laugh at the “Fooled You!” sign.

       It was working! So far our skit was working!

       I prayed to the goddess of hiccups to release her hold on my throat. I put both hands over my mouth and held my breath.
Please please please please make them go away.

       “...apparently the victim of a stabbing, as evidenced by the knife in his chest.” Another solid laugh. I closed my eyes and continued to hold my breath and concentrated my entire being on getting rid of the hiccups. Travis continued to perform flawlessly.

       “...yeah, the beer chugging-king bit the dust.” The audience was really enjoying it!

       The laughs died down. Why was Travis still pausing?

       “I can’t believe Vinnie Faltermeyer is dead,” Travis said, raising his voice. “I just can’t believe it.”

       Why was he ad-libbing? Did he forget the line?