The Further Adventures of The Joker (23 page)

The place was too big for comedy: the night Tiffany was murdered, there were almost as many of us waiting to go onstage as there were people in the audience. The rows of theater seats behind the tables were empty, the balconies were dark, and the private boxes were sealed off. The small lamps on the dozen tables near the stage shed little light. The place smelled of mildewed carpets, old cigars, and rot.

And
flop sweat.

There was a plainclothes detective in the audience. Max Weber, Aladdin’s manager, had pointed him out. He didn’t need to. Anybody could have spotted the shiny black suit, paunch, clip-on holster, and white socks and made the old guy as a cop.

People weren’t laughing when Tiffany died. She was having a bad night; the Roseanne Barr material wasn’t working, there was a heckler down front whom she couldn’t out-nasty, and she was sweating heavily . . . obviously just trying to get through to the end of the routine. I was on last, still at least forty-five minutes to go after Fast Eddie and a couple of others, so I was having a drink at an empty table and feeling sorry for Tiffany.

Suddenly, in midpunchline, a glass box came sliding down on wires from the dark catwalks above and slammed onto the stage, enclosing Tiffany as surely as an entymologist’s plastic jar would trap a bug.

There was a click, the mike cord was severed, and Tiffany stumbled as some sort of bottom slid under her, sealing the glass box. It couldn’t be glass of course—I realized even then that it had to be some sort of plastic or Plexiglas—but it
looked
like a glass phone booth.

Tiffany screamed, but her shouts were made almost inaudible by the cage. The plainclothes cop stared a moment and then jumped to his feet, groping for the gun on his belt.

The Joker walked onstage, aimed his cane, and shot the cop. Actually, the head of the cane flew through the air, trailing a thin wire, and slammed into the cop’s chest. The fat detective spasmed and collapsed. We learned later that the cane had fired something called a taser . . . a sort of high-voltage stun weapon. It wasn’t designed to kill. The Joker couldn’t have known that the detective had been fitted for a pacemaker . . . or maybe he did.

Anyway, the cop spasmed and died, Tiffany’s mouth moved as she pounded the Plexiglas, and the Joker bowed. He was wearing an old-style tuxedo, the formal effect spoiled only slightly by a bright green cravat he wore in lieu of a bow tie, purple spats, and purple gloves. He completed his bow and looked at Tiffany in her box as if he had just noticed her.
“God,
how sad!” He pouted almost effeminately. “Poor girl . . . trying so hard, and your only reward is
flop sweat!”

The Joker snapped his fingers. Water began pouring from invisible ducts in the box, pooling around Tiffany’s ankles. She screamed more loudly; it was just audible through the plastic. Fast Eddie Teck charged onstage, a switchblade knife in his hand. The Joker tasered him unconscious with a flick of his cane.

“For those of you who don’t
know
theater talk,” lisped the Joker, showing us flashes of his yellow teeth all the way back to the molars,
“flop sweat
is the ultimate pan notice . . . the sheen of ultimate failure, the glow of abject panic . . . the
perspiration
of
expiration!”

The liquid rose to Tiffany’s shoulders, then to her chins. Her orange silk caftan floated around her. She jumped, pounded at the walls, clawed at plastic. The fluid rose until only her mouth and nose were clear of it as she strained against the roof of the box.

I rushed toward the stage and stopped as the Joker tasered two would-be rescuers in front of me. He snapped his fingers and a second cane appeared in his other hand.

“Tut, tut.” The Joker grinned. “Never interrupt an
artist
at work.” He glanced over his shoulder at Tiffany. The box had filled with clear liquid; she was no longer struggling. A few final bubbles of air rose from her nose and open mouth and tangled in her swaying hair.

The Joker walked over to the box and patted the side of it almost affectionately. “You don’t sweat much,” he said to Tiffany’s corpse. “For a
fat
lady.”

A dozen of us had come out of the shock and horror sufficiently to prepare to rush the Joker
en masse.
He twirled his cane. “Oh, I wouldn’t recommend giving fatso mouth-to-mouth,” he said, showing an expression of revulsion. “You see, this
flop sweat
isn’t
water,
it’s hydrochloric
acid!”
He grinned at us, waggled gloved fingers, and said, “Ta ta! See you all—or at least the survivors—at the joke-off!”

He laughed insanely. A bunch of us climbed onstage, rushed him. The Joker calmly bowed, caught one of the wires above the box, and rose out of sight into the darkness.

It took us almost five minutes to find a fire ax to crack the plastic box.

It
was
acid.

The guy named Bruce appeared and performed the next night at the Carob Club. He was awful. He did a routine that wouldn’t have gotten a laugh in 1952, much less during the beginning of the hip, raunchy nineties. The jokes were flat, his timing was nonexistent, he didn’t seem to care whether the audience was there or not, and his body language was
bad.
I mean, I saw the guy move before and after the show, and although he dressed like a cartoon of a pimp—zoot-suit-shouldered polyester gold jacket, baggy green pants, a matching monkey-puke-green open-collar shirt with layers of gold chains showing, even a greasy little Wayne Newton moustache that looked like an anemic caterpillar had crawled onto his upper lip to die—despite all that, this guy
moved
like an athlete. No, better than that, he was as unselfconsciously graceful as a big cat on the veldt.

But on stage . . . klutzville. He moved like Pee Wee Herman doing an imitation of Richard Nixon.

The audience didn’t boo him, they just sat and stared as if a traffic accident was occurring on stage. There was even a splattering of applause when he got off—probably from pure relief. I mean, the man was
bad.

That’s why it was all the more confusing that night when I was hiking the six blocks to catch the subway up to Gotham Center where I’d catch the el out to Finger Park station, and who do I see down an alley but Bruce, I mean, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see this guy heading down an alley in search of a flophouse . . . he wore one weird suit and had that handsome but driven look, sort of like some out-of-work actors I’ve known . . . but there he is, 2:00
A.M.
in an alley, in the rain, and he’s getting into a
limousine.
The chauffeur is some old guy, and it’s some stretched European
übermenschen
limousine! It’s hard for most of us to take the tension and abuse and
we’re
all hoping for a break, the big time, money we can’t make any other way . . . or at least any other
legal
way. So why the hell would this poor schmuck take all the abuse and embarrassment if he didn’t have to? A guy who could afford a European limousine like that could
buy
an audience.

The next night at the Pit Stop, a strip joint that does comedy every Wednesday, Bruce was there again. Same routine. Same floppo, although this crowd was boozed up enough to start booing early. They were on the verge of throwing things when Bruce wrapped it up, bowed into that wall of boos, and walked calmly offstage.

Fast Eddie was ready to go on after him. Eddie leaned over to me and whispered,
“Anybody’d
look good after this jerk.”

Later, Boonie Sandhill and I went up to this Bruce guy in the green room.

“Howdy, y’all,” said Boonie, showing off the prognathous underbite that passed for a grin with him. “Caught your monologue, man. It’s . . . uh . . . original. Real different. Makes the rest of us look the same as stripes on a coon’s tail.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow and nodded, obviously not sure if Boonie was pulling his chain or not. I wasn’t either. We made introductions, shook hands. The guy’s handshake was easygoing enough, but I had the idea he could crush my fingers like breadsticks if he wanted to.

“Bruce,” said Boonie. “Is that your first name or last?”

The guy twitched a smile. “It’s my stage name. My . . . stand-up-comic pseudonym.”

Boonie rolled his eyes at the vocabulary. I said, “Any reason you chose the name Bruce?”

Bruce hesitated. “Homage to Lenny Bruce, I guess. He was sort of my hero.”

Boonie and I glanced at each other. This guy’s style and content bore about as much resemblance to Lenny Bruce’s stuff as did Mr. Rogers.

“Hero, huh?” said Boonie. “Too bad Lenny O.D.’d on speed.”

“Yes,” said Bruce. He was watching the closed-circuit monitor the Pit Stop had to let the green-room folks watch the action on stage. It was a crude picture—stationary camera, black-and-white fuzzy picture with poor sound—but Bruce seemed rapt. “It is too bad,” he said. “Lenny Bruce would have had a great future.”

Boonie and I looked at each other again. This guy was as miserable a liar as he was a comic; anybody who knew anything about Lenny Bruce knew that he died of an overdose of heroin.

“How come you joined the cavalcade of stars?” asked Boonie.

Bruce rubbed his chin. The guy was older than I was, but I have no idea how much older. He had the sort of rugged but understated good looks that lets a man ignore birthdays between his early thirties and late fifties. “I wanted a crack at the Gotham City Laughs of Tomorrow competition,” he said.

“You mean the big jerk-off?” said Boonie.

“Joke-off,” I said. “We call it the joke-off.”

Bruce nodded, eyes roving back to the closed-circuit TV. I had the idea that nothing made this man laugh; the idea of him making others laugh seemed . . . well . . . laughable.

“Don’t you worry about getting killed?” asked Boonie. There was no banter in his voice now and very little southern accent.

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “Oh, you mean that Joker fellow . . .”

“Yeah, that
Joker fellow,”
mimicked Boonie. “He sorta caught some of our attention.”

Bruce nodded as if mulling this over. “Sure, it worries me. But I figure it’s a chance I have to take to get a shot at the bigtime for the Gotham Comedy . . . ah . . . the joke-off. The odds seem decent.”

Boonie started to make some smart-ass reply, but I surprised him and myself by elbowing him to shut up and saying, “Right, man. That’s the way most of us feel. Say, Boonie and I are going out for coffee after the last show. Want to come?”

Bruce seemed to weigh the invitation with the same seriousness as he did everything else. “Yes,” he said. “I would.”

For the next week or so, Boonie and I spent a lot of time with Bruce after the show—in those thin, cold hours between the closing of the nightclubs and the rising of the sun through Gotham’s smog banks. Usually we hit an all-night café, mainlined strong coffee, and talked about comedy.
Boonie and I
talked about comedy. Bruce listened a lot. To tell the truth, he was a nice-enough guy. Just way too serious to be funny. He was even serious about comedy. Actually, he seemed to want to talk about the Joker most of the time: What did we think made the Joker do what he did? Why would the Joker be killing stand-up comics? What did we think of the Joker’s sense of humor?

“That ain’t a sense of humor, man,” Boonie answered more than once. “This Joker pissant is
nuts.
His idea of a punchline is pain.” And then Boonie would say, “Y’all want to analyze everything, Bruce. Petey and me, we just want to get
laughs.”

“But just what, precisely, makes people laugh?” Bruce asked late one night, early one morning. Outside the diner, cold rain was turning to snow in front of the street-sweeping machines.

Boonie snorted. “Shit-fire, boy. If we knew that, old Pete and me’d be livin’ in Bel Aire an’ sittin’ on Johnny Carson’s couch twice a week.”

“But there must be
some
formula,” persisted Bruce. “Some secret.”

Boonie shook his head. “If there is, nobody knows it. Good comedy’s like . . . like good sex . . .”

“Good sex?” repeated Bruce. Any other comic would have snapped back, “Is there such a thing as
bad sex,
lint brain?” but Bruce was listening again. Seriously.

“Uh-uh,” I interrupted. “Not sex. Surfing.”

Both of them looked at me.

“I mean it,” I said. I’d had a good night. The laughs had been strong and constant and sincere. “When I was out in California last summer, watching them surf at Malibu, I realized that a good stand-up routine’s like that. You gotta catch the wave just right . . . it’s like judging the audience . . . then get a good start, stay right on the break or curl or pipeline or whatever they call that sweet point just under the crest . . . and then ride it for all its worth, but still know when to end it.” I stopped, embarrassed, and slurped cold coffee.

Boonie stared at me. Bruce said, “And what’s the secret of riding the wave?”

For once my gaze was just as serious as Bruce’s. “The secret is using material that
means
something,” I said, surprised to hear me talking this way. “To go at the thing that’s most serious to you, most . . . well, most sacred . . . and to
make it funny.”

Bruce pondered his own coffee cup.

I pushed ahead. “I mean, look at your material, man. It’s stuff you bought from a street-corner gag writer. Am I right?”

He nodded. I
think
he nodded.

“It’s not
you,
man,” I said. “It has nothing to do with you. It’s not what scares you, what hurts you, what bugs you . . . you got to go for the stuff that’s hiding in the deepest closets, then get it out. Share it with others who’re hiding the same thing. Make it
funny.
Take some of the sting out of it.”

I had Bruce’s attention. “Do you do that, Pete?”

“Yeah,” I said and sipped coffee. I was lying. I never dealt with the core of
me
—the guilt and fear and pride and terror I’d felt since I was four years old and realized that I was black: middle-class, reasonably well-educated, not street smart, not cool, but
black.
I realized why and who I’d really been lecturing there: I’d never had the guts to do a routine about my childhood in Charity Hills, or what it means to be the only kid on your block who didn’t belong to a gang. “Yeah,” I lied again, looking at my watch. “Hell, it’s almost four-thirty. I don’t have to be at Burger Biggie until ten, but it’s a little late.” I threw some change on the table. “See you losers tomorrow.”