The Further Adventures of The Joker (26 page)

I guess none of us saw any room for argument. Not with the Joker. Not with the two guys with Uzis who escorted us onto the stage.

When we were assembled like a herd—a gaggle—a flock—I don’t know what they say out in the sticks—of sheep guarded by gun-toting goons, the Joker surveyed us cheerily. “You’re all going to do your routines,” he said. “I’m the judge for this. But guess what? I’m not looking for the funniest one anymore. I am searching for the worst, dumbest, least-funny among you.
That
one, I’m guessing, will be the Batman.” He chortled.
“Then
we’ll see just how a bad comedian dies on stage.”

We all looked at each other. At least Diana Mulhollen and a woman named Winnie Morales had nothing to worry about. The thought must have occurred simultaneously to Winnie. She held up her hand like a schoolgirl.

“A question?” said the Joker, “or do you have to go to the little girls’ room?”

“Do I gotta go through my routine, too?” said Winnie.

“Everyone does,” came the answer. “My dark foe is a devilishly clever master of disguise, even as I am. Each one of you is suspect.”

“But—” said Winnie. I halfway expected her to drop her trousers and give the Joker some physiological proof of her not being Batman.

“No exceptions, unless you’d like to forfeit your participation in the competition . . .” The Joker’s tone was ominous. Winnie seemed to pick that up. She said nothing and lowered her gaze to the stage at her feet.

“All right, then,” said the Joker, his tone lightening. “Let’s get to it. Time for our first contestant. Remember, friends, you get points for delivery and timing. For being funny, you get your life.”

This was absolutely crazy, I thought. Batman working incognito as an aspiring stand-up comic? Bat guano. I remembered the man I’d met in the police interrogation after George Marlin’s death. That aura of brooding power wasn’t anywhere among my colleagues.

I glanced over at Bruce as we both got up from our seats. That poor sucker might as well have a signed death warrant. He was as funny as—I tried to stop the thought. Too late.—a grave.

“Don’t worry, Pete,” he said. “We’ll all do our best. We’ll all pull through this together.”

Sure, I thought. Together—in a mass grave. One big pine box. Piano crate. God, was I getting hysterical? I took a deep breath. I figured I’d better start thinking about how to buff up my material to a higher sheen.

But as the Joker consulted his list, picking the first contestant, in my head I kept seeing a field of bleached skulls. Eighteen of them.

“. . . so the chief says, ‘Fine, then. I decree death
by
mongo . . .’ ” And that wrapped up five minutes of pretty decent material by Goombah Dozois, the Cajun comic. The audience exploded into deafening applause. Goombah wasn’t
that
good, but I’d gotten the feeling as we’d gone down the list of contestants that the crowd both needed a catharsis and wanted to do whatever they could to help us all survive. So they cheered everyone, good, bad, or indifferent. And even under the circumstances of being forced to be funny at gunpoint, or maybe
because
of it, some of us weren’t even as hilarious as we would have been at, say, the Carob Club Comedy Countdown.

Goombah staggered out of the spotlight and rejoined us. The Joker scanned the list and said, “All right, my friends, we only have a few contestants to go.” That included me. “So keep your pants on.” Everytime he used one of those damned catch-phrases, we all cringed, not knowing if he was about to tie it to some crude wordplay-made-flesh. This time, he didn’t.

“Our next competitor is . . . Mr. Bruce!” The crowd clapped. Bruce and I exchanged looks. His was enigmatic. He touched my arm with those iron fingers and then stepped into the spotlight. He blinked a couple times, I guess adjusting to the glare. He glanced at the Joker, then turned fully to the crowd.

“If any of you have heard me in the clubs, you know what kind of material I use. ‘Hey, being a filthy rich kid isn’t all it’s cracked up to be . . . I remember how other kids brought their lunch boxes to school.
I
had caterers from Maxim’s come to the cafeteria every day.’ Not too funny, right?”

Right, I thought. Not too funny. Not then and not now.

Bruce paused a moment. A long moment. “I’ve been thinking a lot,” he said, “about something my friend, Pete Tulley, told me.” He shrugged. “I started thinking about some things I’d vowed never to think of again.” I heard something in his voice. As little as I knew Bruce, I could still hear the keen of pain. “Let me tell you about someone I used to know.”

I sneaked a look at the Joker. He was frowning, angular chin propped on one startlingly white palm, fingers curled up around his mouth like spider legs.

“This was when I was a student in the fourth grade,” said Bruce. Huh? I thought. Richie Rich’s childhood anecdotes? “A new school-year had just started and I was in my homeroom class for the first time. It was right after lunch and I was logy. You know, feeling about like an anaconda that’s just eaten a goat. I could tell the teacher was, too.”

Good delivery, I thought. He’s picking up steam. The crowd could sense it. I saw some of the folks in the front starting to sit back in their seats instead of leaning forward anxiously.

“We looked like a perfectly good class, maybe thirty kids, all pink and scrubbed and full of enthusiasm. But as I said, we were all ready for an afternoon nap, and I think the new teacher was, too. Here he was, facing us all, and I think that for a moment, all he could do was to stare at us.” Bruce shook his head and smiled. “I think he decided to try something new. He figured he’d stall us for a bit, make conversation while he was picking which way he wanted to take the class.”

Hey, I tried to warn him telepathically, you’re starting to wander, just a little. Get back on track.

“Finally—it was only a few seconds, but it seemed like an hour in my mind—he started with the first student at the near end of the far left row, a boy. ‘Son,’ he said, ‘I’d like to find out a little bit about each of you. I want to ask about your families. Tell me something now, tell me what your father does.’

“So then the first boy said, ‘My dad’s a fire fighter.’ And he told him about what his father did. I guess that worked out so well, the teacher went on to the next student, a girl. ‘And what’s your father do?’ he asked. ‘He’s in the Army,’ came the answer. ‘He fights people.’ And so it went,” said Bruce. “On down the ranks of students, row by row, until he got to a young boy sitting right in back, in the very center.”

I was trying to think, did
I
know this joke? It was new to me. I wondered where Bruce had dug up some new material. Or maybe he was spinning the truth, maybe this really was something that had happened to him back—I still couldn’t quite believe it—when he was a fourth-grader.

“This little boy was short and dark—dark hair, dark eyes. He was quiet and very, very serious,” said Bruce. “You could tell just by looking at him that he was lonely.” There was the touch of something I couldn’t immediately identify in Bruce’s voice. Then it came to me—it was the sound of someone who wanted to cry, but couldn’t. Just that tiniest of cracks.

“I was that little boy.”

There was an odd tone in the way Bruce said it. I felt like I should hold my breath and stay very, very still.

“So then the teacher looked at the little boy and asked, ‘Son, what does
your
father do?’ I didn’t answer, but just stared back at him. I think he suddenly knew that he ought to drop it then and there, but he didn’t.”

Bruce coughed and offered the crowd an apologetic half-smile. “But then it was for him about like it is for me now. He just kept on going, bulled right on ahead. He tried to get through what he thought was my shyness and said, ‘It’s okay, son, you can talk to me. Tell me what your dad does.’

“I finally looked him straight in the eye and said in a low voice, ‘Sorry, sir, he doesn’t do anything. My father’s dead.’ ”

Somebody in the audience gasped. I swallowed. This was weird. There was
something
about Bruce’s delivery.

“He knew right then,” said Bruce, “that he ought to get out of this any way he could. He should go on to the next student. He was entering some kind of Vietnam of primary education.” He shook his head sadly. “He couldn’t. God knows why, but he looked back at the little dark-haired boy—me—and said, ‘It’s all right, son, go ahead and tell me . . . what did your daddy do before he died?’ ”

Bruce paused so momentarily that I thought I was maybe the only person catching him swallowing.

“I looked back at him, still straight in the eye, and said, ‘Well, he went
cckcckccckkkccckkk!’ ”
Bruce grabbed his own throat and mugged the visual image to go with the strangling sounds.

The crowd was stone silent.

It was like they didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to react.

Then it began. A laugh somewhere in the balcony. A titter to stage-left in the loge. People giggled, groaned, started to guffaw. The laughter spread like the Philippine flu. So far as I could see, about the only people not absolutely breaking up were the thugs with machine guns.

Then the applause began to overwhelm the laughter. As best I could see Bruce’s features from the side, he looked overwhelmed, too. He bowed slightly.

Above the roar of the audience rose a cackling from the stage. I turned my head and saw the Joker on the floor. Literally. He was holding his sides and roaring with laughter, that terrible hyena bray I first heard at the Carob the night George Marlin blew his top.

I looked back at Bruce as he stared out over that ocean of reacting human beings. In his eyes I saw the shine of tears. What did this mean? I wondered. What had it cost?

The next one up was Winnie Morales. It was pretty obvious she didn’t relish having a turn in the barrel right after Bruce’s bravura performance. She stared out over the crowd, obviously swallowed, then said, “Okay, so there were these three clergy-guys walking down the street. There was a Jewish rabbi, a Baptist preacher-fella, and an Irish bishop. They were on their way to play golf, when suddenly Saint Peter . . .”

And the next one up was me.

Well, I figured I could beat Winnie Morales. Maybe.

I knew I couldn’t beat Bruce, but hey, I didn’t want to. I just wanted to save my own hide. At least that’s what I thought until I actually stood out there, bathed in a bloody red gel-light from the follow spots. I know it’s a cliché, but time slowed for me.

Bruce’s routine replayed in my head. Something came to me with all the subtlety of getting whupped up alongside the head with a flying mallet. I felt the shock of the brilliant white light, you know?

That tired old poor-little-rich-kid routine of Bruce’s had somehow evolved to what he’d performed tonight. I was pretty sure it hadn’t come easily. I still couldn’t quite see all the cross-connections—it really was hard to see Bruce as a little boy in the fourth grade. But somehow he knew something about parents and death and had formed it into an awful-yet-effective story that had destroyed an entire theater.

It came to me. Yeah, he’d learned from me, all right. He’d listened to what I’d said back when he and Boonie and I’d been talking. Then he did the things I’d never done. He’d faced up. He’d gone
real.

Just like I claimed to do, but didn’t.

Hey, nothing like making myself feel like shit just when I was supposed to spend the most important five minutes of my life making people laugh.

The voice grated into my consciousness. “Oh, Mr. Tulley, are you going to perform or not? Has the cat got your tongue?”

Shit. I focused and saw the Joker smiling easily just a few yards away. Things snapped together inside. I hoped.

I nodded and took a deep breath. “Hey, how many of you out there realize I’m not really black?” That got a few titters. “Nope, truly I’m not. I’m black Irish.”

“Oh, yeah?” That was maybe the first heckler of the night. Good, I thought. Then I squinted and realized I’d been needled by one of the Joker’s goon squad.

So “Yeah,” I said. “The name on my driver’s license is O’Rio.” The thug looked bewildered. Nobody out beyond the lights laughed, so I used exaggerated cheerleading gestures to spell out the name I said. This time there was a ripple of laughter.

“Good, you got it. Am I going too fast for you? Hey, let’s go. You think it’s
easy
being an Oreo in the inner city, man? I mean, you should have heard me playing the dozens with tough dudes on the corner. I mean, they got to serve first—

“ ‘Hey, man, yo mama wears combat boots when she gives it away in the alley.’

“So I snap back with, ‘She ain’t givin’ it away, man. She’s in the alley pickin’ aluminum cans outta the Dumpster to pay for my Harvard education, man.’ ”

More laughter. Thank God.

“No, I mean it—the other dudes from the block were like Fast Eddie Teck, you know? Carried switchblades. Me . . .” I slipped my hand into my hip pocket and pretended to snap something out. “One time this homeboy from the Night Vultures jumps me, and so I go for my calculator . . .”

A little more laughter. And so it goes.

When all of us were done, the Joker had the house lights brought up. The eighteen of us pretty much looked like the condemned, about to be shot as examples by some military junta in a soccer stadium.

“Well—” said the Joker. “That was quite a round of performances. I’m impressed that many of you, if you should survive this evening, might actually have a future in comedy—especially now that you’ll have a great new experience to draw upon. Think of me as your agent of change; but remember, if you use any material pertaining to yours truly, to give me due acknowledgment. Otherwise I’ll have to track you down and extract my fifteen percent.” He giggled. “And I’ll wager that, for most of you, fifteen percent is a great deal more than a mere pound of flesh.” He looked contemplative, as though imagining harvesting his fee.

Then his voice changed mercurially. “Ah, yes, the matter of the incognito Bat-comic. I rather unwisely predicted I would have to make final disposition of the least funny of you.” He ambled toward us. “Unfortunately that reflects badly on
you.”
The Joker raised his cane and lightly touched it to Winnie Morales’s chest. “Don’t worry, my dear, you seem too much the mammal to be mistaken for my nemesis in a clever plastic disguise. Still—” he mused. There was fear in Winnie’s expression. “—I really ought to be consistent in my declarations.” Then he shook his head. “No, Ms. Morales, I won’t slaughter you where you stand. The memory of your performance is punishment enough.”