TANATA:

The last thing in the world Joey Migliori wanted to be was a damn stand-up comedian. He hated stand-up comedy. But he was good at it. The owner of one the clubs where Joey headlined and entertained standing-room-only crowds took the young very reluctant, but brilliantly funny comic and self-professed failure aside one night after a show and poured him a drink. What Joey needed, Marv thought, was the “raisin extra,” a reason for being, realistic thinking, meaning, purpose, none of which Joey very surprisingly seemed to have or want, though he was enormously popular and seemed all but headed for the big time. Marv started out the conversation trying to use some reverse psychology.

“You’re not happy, Joey, I can tell,” Marv said. “But hey, you know, let’s face it … even though your material is good, hey, so what, if that’s all you have? You can’t make it in this business with just a bunch of good material. You don’t have what it takes.”

Joey looked up from the Scotch and soda he was nursing. “Hey, you really think so?”

Marv slapped the table and laughed. “Of course, hey you can’t ride forever on the great material train. Even if you’re pumping out great stuff for the rest of your life … it’s only be a matter of time, you know, because, in truth, and don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re not a good fit. You’re too funny. You don’t have what it takes to be in this business.”

“But people seem to like it,” Joey said. “I mean, I’m makin’ ‘em laugh, even all the people who have to stand up in the back. It sucks … but it’s living. At least I have someone to talk to.”

“Hey, what do they know? They don’t even know how to be somewhere on time to get a table. I get people like that all the time … and they slip me a hundred bucks or so to get in. Fuckin’ assholes … I hate doin’ business with people like that.”

“Yeah, a hundred bucks is a lot of money,” Joey agreed.

“A hundred miserable headaches,” Marv said. “Joey, do what you love doing. Do what you do best. Do what makes you a miserable, low-life piece of shit.”

“I can’t do anything but this,” Joey said, with exasperation, bordering on panic. “People are paying their money to come and see me, you know? And you offered me a raise, if I would do two more shows a week. … God, it’s killing me. I hate this point in my life … starting out happy and beloved. It sucks.”

“Tell me about it,” Marv said. “And what’s money? So I’ll take some away. What’s money? You spend it … it’s gone. And the whaddya got?”

“A lot of nothin’ … except maybe a car.”

“Death traps,” Marv said, standing up and patting Joey on the shoulder. “With the price of gasoline, and, as fat as people are gettin’ because they don’t walk anymore … whaddya need all that for? You’re dead before you know it with a lot of money. You think about it, kid. But … being dead does have a certain appeal to it.”

“Okay.” Joey looked hopeful, but his expression soured as soon as Marv walked away whistling. “Yeah it does.”

A man in a dark pin-striped suit sitting in the next booth, spun around and introduced himself once Marv was out of earshot.

“Hey, Joey, how ya doin’,” the man said, getting up on his knees and twisting awkwardly to extend his hand to Joey. “Man, I’m one of your biggest fans.”

“Look, mister,” Joey said, with an irritated tone in his voice, “I’m having a bad day, okay? Or a good one. So if you’ll just, you know, make like a speedster on third base and go home, I’d appreciate it.”

The man in the pin-striped suit jumped out of the booth laughing, which caused Joey to look up in disgust. “Really,” Joey said, “don’t make me call Marv … or the cops.”

“What’s the matter, pal?” the man in the suit said. “You look like your world is coming to an end.”

“Thanks,” Joey said. “This is the best I’ve felt all week. The worst. Trying to schmooze me isn’t going to work, either.”

The man in the suit was perplexed, but after eavesdropping on the previous conversation, he was beginning to understand, he thought, what was going on here. “Hey, kid, you don’t suffer from stage fright, do you?”

“What do you care?” Joey said caustically. “The only thing I’m afraid of is true happiness. I promised my dying father on his death bed that I would do my best, try to do everything I could not to be happy.”

The man in the suit reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. “What did you old man do, Joey?” The man in the suit tried to twist his face into a grim and foreboding mask of despair.

“Mr. Paradox,” Joey said. “He was a Vaudeville entertainer, an insult comic, and he used to take me on the road. I sat back stage and listened to all the other performers, you know, practicing their acts. A lot of ‘em were comedians, and my father hated them. I liked them only because most of them, in reality, were worthless, broken, morose sons of bitches. My dad said people who did comedy, straight, legitimate comedy, ought to be the most hated people in the world.” Joey began to tear up. “I feel like a whore every time I go out there … and get people rolling in the aisles.”

The man in the suit rubbed his chin. “Yeah, that’s a pretty low and slutty, pardon my French, thing to do. Have you given any thought to what you might like to do with your life, once you stop going against the grain?”

“Either a mortician … or a sparring partner.”

“Not bad. What else?”

“Well, since I come from an entertainment background,” Joey said, “as much as I detest it … I thought I might get all the necessary surgery so I could apply for a job as a freak in a carnival. Those people always look so sad, miserable really. The bastards.”

“Tell you what,” the man in the suit said, “you come to my club and put yourself through the agony of doing stand-up comedy for me … hey, everybody has to take the bad with the good … and I’ll pay for that operation. Whatever you want? You want your arms goin’ around here, and your legs goin’ up like this here … you name it.”

“Really?! Ah, you’re bullshittin’. My luck is too good. But I’ve really been giving a lot of thought to something like Turtle Boy, you know,” Joey said finishing his drink. “I’ll think about it.”

“Well, don’t think too long,” the man in the suit said, handing Joey his business card, “I got people lined up at my place to become as deformed as they possibly can. I think it might be a new wave in the entertainment industry. I know Chevy Chase’s agent … maybe I ought to give him a call.”

“Yeah, well,” Joey replied. “It would be just my luck. I’d probably end up making people laugh and making a lot of money … and you’ll have just fucked me up the ass. Again with the old shafteroonie.”

“Nah,” the man in the suit said, “I won’t fuck your ass … if I’m going to fuck anything, I wanna fuck up your whole life.”

Joey looked like he was about to cry. “Man, mister, that would be great.”

Marv had been watching this conversation from a distance, and walked up after the man left. “Joey,” he said, “I been thinkin’. If you will do one additional torturous show a week. I know it’s a lot to ask … but for every hundred bucks I make in tips, you know, from the standing-room only people … I’ll deduct fifty cents from your wages … but that’s not all. I have a friend I want to introduce you to. You remind me a lot of him. I think you ought to meet him.”

“What’s he do?” Joey asked, hoping whatever the man did had nothing to do with comedy or money.

“He’s got an organization called The Gotta Get Drunk and Laid Foundation,” Marv said.

“Yeah?”

“Well, I could get you on with him,” Marv said cheerfully. “You go door to door and you tell people you’re soliciting money for the Gotta Get Drunk and Laid Foundation … and see where it goes from there.”

Joey was beaming. “You’d do that for me?”

“Hey what are friends for? And for every new friend … I always make three or four friends who hate my guts. Some of these people, especially the feminists, might even try to take a poke at you, maybe even pull a gun.”

“Would that be heaven or what?” Joey’s morbidity and anxiety had never reached so deeply into his soul. “Thanks, Marv. Tell the man I’m interested. Sounds like a losing proposition.”

That night, as usual, Joey killed ‘em. They were laughing while Joey was being introduced: “And now folk, a big round of applause, or Bronx cheers, whatever you prefer, for the comic sensation who wishes he’d never been born … Joey Migliori!”

Joey shuffled out with toilet paper stuck to his shoe, and the audience loved it. Coincidentally, and strangely enough, Joey, who rarely did bathroom comedy, because it was so funny, opened with a very humorous but telling observation: “Hey, did you ever notice how after several weeks of not bathing or taking a shower … your asshole starts to burn? What’s up with that?” Apparently, the crowd, even the people in the back who paid Marv big money to get in and stand at the back of the room, had noticed, and the sustained laughter nearly made Joey sick. But he forged ahead.

“I’ve got a cousin who’s in the video rental business,” Joey said, “true story.” Joey dreaded to think how well a true story might go over, because he had read where funny stories people could relate to were the heart and soul of successful stand-up comedy. It hadn’t dawned on Joey yet to consider writing more obscure material to get him where he wanted to go, which, in all seriousness, was jail or in a hospital fighting for his life. Or not fighting.

Joey lifted the microphone from the stand with some difficulty, popping himself painfully in the chest with the mike in the struggle. “Yeah, my, uh, cousin is beginning to do really well in the business, which wouldn’t appeal to everybody, but he’s making a killing on late charges. He does fair on the rentals themselves, but when people don’t show up for several days, even a week or more after the rented movie is due, you know, just lazy, fuck-up kind of people, he can make up to twenty bucks a pop or more. That might not appeal to you, but I like the idea of working a job where you’re more likely to stay in business the more lazy, fuck-up bums you do business with can be pretty appealing for some people.” The audience, to Joey’s chagrin, was of course eating it up.

“Hey, Bill, whadda you wanna be when you grow up? … “I wanna run a business where the people who have my stuff … won’t bring it back.”

After the show Joey was forced to do the obligatory bit of having to meet his fans and sign autographs, during which he grumbled and complained, which only made them laugh. Two beautiful women had the nerve to hand him keys to their hotel rooms and stuff his pockets with money and cocaine. When the small nightmare was over, the man in the pin-striped suit walked up and tapped Joey on the shoulder just as Joey was about to walk into his dressing room. Joey whirled with his fists clenched, but saw that it was only the man in the suit.

“Hey, kid, can I have a minute?”

“If you can get me out of this hell,” Joey said. “These people love me.”

The man in the suit shook his head. “I know, pal. It’s gotta be a tough way to make a living, what with all the adulation and the excellent reviews in the paper. It only eggs these people on, doesn’t it? Somebody I guess has to play this role. I feel for ya.”

“You said a mouthful,” Joey concurred. “Don’t these people have lives? I mean, if all I had to do was stand around, or sit, and watch somebody tell jokes and laugh like a damn hyena for forty-five minutes … I’d jump off a fucking bridge. Maybe I should put something about that in my act.”

The man in the suit looked nervous, but he covered it well. He stroked his five o’ clock shadow, took a seat on a stool and blew his nose to hide his anxiety. “Kid,” he began, “I’ve got a golden opportunity for you to fuck up your life.”

“Really?!” It was the best news that Joey had heard all day.

“Yeah,” the man in the suit nodded, “but it might put peoples’ lives at risk, besides your own. … and it’s a gig in Vegas.”

Joey bit his lip and hesitated, but for just a moment. “Sure, lay it on me. You know what they say in Vegas … say La V.”

“Hey, that’s pretty good,” the man in the suit said, chuckling.

“No, it isn’t,” said Joey disagreeably.

The man in the suit held up his hands. “No, I meant that in a bad way. It’s good if you like bad things. You know, it’s what you expect to hear from a guy whose life was about to go down the tubes.”

Joey stripped off all of this clothes and sat in the middle of the floor, grabbing a hairbrush from the dressing table just before he did, causing he to stumble painfully over a chair, landing on the portable heater, which unfortunately was turned off.

“Joey,” the man in the suit said, “do you know anything about UFOs?”

“Yeah, my dad used to say the UFO stood for … U Fuck Off.”

“Why is that?”

“Because,” Joey said, beginning to hit himself in the groin with the hairbrush. “Yeow! Because, if they were supposed to have created us, like they claim, if they really intended to help us, or fuck up our lives, they’d have introduced themselves by now. My father’s dying words were. I don’t have time to wait around for these fuckers to suck the brain out of my head any longer. I wish I’d been born a cow, and lived out in New Mexico somewhere. Maybe I’d be laying out somewhere by now, decomposing in the sun, with my testicles, my lungs and my stomach removed, along with all of my blood, and it would have been the most precise and surgical-looking mutilation you could ever hope for.”

The man in the suit nodded. “I’m hip. But here’s the deal. I have a client … who would be willing to really fuck up your career, your life, everything, put you in the hospital, just like you want, or the carnival … only you wouldn’t need surgery to make you a turtle boy, you’d only have to give them a sample of your semen … and they could whip one up for you, fuse it to your back or something, or, and this is what’s so impressive … they can divide your brain into four sections, and have you thinking for three different creatures, all of which would be half human.”

Joey immediately stopped smacking himself in the groin with the hairbrush. “Hmmm,” he said, “I might need this annoying baggage down here after all. Three sections, three hybrid creatures? Why not four, if they have four sections of my brain?”

The man in the suit laughed nervously. “God, kid,” he said, “they gotta eat.”

Joey nodded his head. He fully understood. But the man in the suit hadn’t said what Joey would have to do to pursue his goal of being an utterly decadent, misshapen, deformed misfit in society, absolutely self-loathing and a sufferer of chronic, extreme and deadly depression, with three parts of his brain trying to think at once. “So, what have I got to do?”

The man in the suit cleared his throat … and pulled at his collar. “You have to do the material that they give you … these clients of mine.”

“What, are they comedy writers?” Joey asked. “And are they any good. I don’t want to end up right back where I started.”

“No, no,” the man in the suit said, “At the most, black comedy. Or at the least. But it is grim stuff. Frightening, actually. What they do is help plan the wars on earth to thin out the human population and terrify everybody else, so they’ll commit suicide instead of living on like zombies who can’t die, even if they wanted to. Or, being a receptacle for eggs from a worm-like thing that slithers up your leg and slips into your anus to do its business.”

Joey was grinning from ear to ear. “Now, you’re talkin’, daddy,” Joey said. “I knew I was going to like you.” Joey hesitated. “Will I be telling these jokes with one brain or three?”

The man in the suit looked relieved. “No, not at first. I think they understand that you couldn’t get the jokes out without all of your brain. You do enough to desensitize the population around the world as to what is about to happen, just enough, and then the day will come when you’ve achieved your goal … when they carve you up. Imagine the pain, the torment and the agony, the self-hatred and despair are … all that a person like you dreams of.”

“You know how to sell a guy, I’ll give you that.” Joey stood up and ran to the refrigerator for ice. He was bleeding, and the man in the suit didn’t want to know from where. “Hey, you’ve drawn blood. Congratulations.”

“Thanks.” Joey sat down and wrapped his legs around a large bag of ice. “When do we start?”

“As soon as you feel like you’re ready. I can give you the material now. It’s in my car.”

Joey’s privates were beginning to ache, and the bag of ice looked like it might have fused itself to the skin on Joey’s inner thighs. “Well, what are we waiting for?” But Joey stopped in his tracks. “I haven’t said anything to Marv. He’s been good to me. He’s taking money away, and, making me work extra hours. Sometimes I even have to sweep up. With a whisk broom and a little piece of cardboard.”

“Shoot,” the man in the suit said with a rude wave of his hand, which almost hit Joey in the face, “I can top that. Has Marv got any plans for brain surgery, like we’re talking about, of the sort that will result in a hideous existence for you, wracked with pain and utter remorse?”

Joey paused, but only briefly as he was pulling on a red, extra absorbent bathrobe. “Yeah, fuck ‘im. He’s never said the first thing about cutting me up. I told him once I might cut my tongue out, and I thought he was going to freak out. I should have done it, the bastard.”

“That’s the Joey I know,” the man in the suit said, “and love … to hate.”

Joey took the material home with him and read through it as he ate from what looked to be a very old quiche, with some kind of meat, which had maggots crawling all over it. “This stuff is black as hell,” he said as he read and chewed. “Talk about doomsday. Chemtrails, bio-terrorism, new strains of plagues, one called Superpox, mutilations … science which would make the Island of Dr. Moreau look like a church picnic. Count me in. All I have to do, it says here, is do this sick schtick, which I love the sound of, until sometime after 2009, so that my fellow human beings will be desensitized to all of what’s going to make life for them utterly miserable, just before the fake second coming, which will involve space ships and beings of light, and a mass transport of people to the center of the earth, where their parts will be used as spare parts in a highly advanced recycling slash population adjustment and evolution project, sponsored by some of the biggest corporate names in America. Impressive. God, I love the future.

“And you know,” Joey said, tossing a piece of rancid meat to his ailing cat, “I’ve never been to Canada, where I’ll be training. But with all the snow and cold weather … I’m sure I’ll love it. I wonder where Quebec is on the map.”

— rcg … to be continued