The Funny Man (25 page)

My agent is surprised to hear from me. The signature work is the manager’s business, so my agent has not had much to do with me for some time. Nominally, he still works for me, but without a body that he can move to different places, I am not much use to him. In the life of my agent, I am a chess piece on the side of the board.

“I’m writing a book,” I tell him.

“Really?” he says.

“You sound surprised.”

“I just figured you’re busy, and everything.”

“I’ve got nothing but time,” I say. I feel like I can hear him squirm on the other end of the phone. With me a two-time failure and
this close
to incarceration, there’s not much to underpin our relationship. Transaction is our fuel, and there’s nothing left to transact.

“So what’s it about?” he says.

“It’s about how to seduce and fuck your wife.”

“Ha!” he says, but as a genuine laugh it is unconvincing. I sort of miss the days when people didn’t feel obligated to laugh at what I’ve said. “Seriously, what is it? I want to know.”

“It’s the story of my life.”

I hear the springs of his chair squeak as he leans back. This is his doing-business position. I’ve seen it many times. “Well, big man, I think you know there’s some hurdles there.”

He is referring to the fact that a person convicted of a crime is, by law, not allowed to profit from those crimes.

“It’s okay,” I reply. “It’s thinly veiled fiction and I’m not using any names, like when I write about you, rather than calling you Gord, I just refer to you as ‘the agent.’ Frazier is just ‘the manager,’ and Beth is ‘the wife’ until she’s the ‘ex-wife.’ I call myself ‘the funny man.’ I’m the villain. I’m finding it considerably less painful to do it that way. It’s like it’s me, but not and when I can’t remember something, or can’t bear to remember something, or don’t know something, I just make it up. I’m pretty sure that most of it’s true, except for the parts that obviously aren’t. Some stuff I have to make up just so it’s a decent story. I’m calling it ‘An American Saga’.”

I can hear Gord’s wheels turning over the phone. “But isn’t a saga supposed to be about heroic deeds done in far off lands?”

“I think I’ve done my share of pillaging. I possess some spoils.”

“But if it’s fiction, how are we going to trade on the whole behind-the-scenes true-story angle?”

“Wink and nudge, wink and nudge, say no more,” I say. “You say it’s all made up, but everyone will know it isn’t. Or that it doesn’t really matter because no one will ever know the truth.”

“It could work, I guess,” he replies. “People seem to like that kind of thing. Let me put out some feelers.”

“No time for feelers, put it out there and take the first decent offer. I need some dough. I’m willing to sacrifice royalties for a bigger front end. If you can sell it inside of two weeks, I’ll give you an extra five percent commission.” These are magic words.

“Consider it done,” Gord says.

There is a silence on both ends of the line that I fill. “I guess that’s it, then,” I say. “Drop me a line when you have an offer for me.” I go to hang up when Gord interrupts.

“Wait,” he says. “In the book, what am I like?”

“You’re the same soul-sucking bastard you are in real life,” I say with all due affection before hanging up.

Technically, this would be my second published book. You can still find the first with my name on it on the shelves, but I didn’t write it. I’ve never even read it. I can’t even entirely remember what it was about. It was one of the many things my name was added to with my permission but without my knowledge. It did well, making its own little pile of money. Now that I am writing a book for real I’ve found it to be rewarding, though difficult. It’s pleasing to do something that is entirely my own, a rarity in the entertainment world. Even my trial is not so much mine, as Barry’s and the prosecutor’s and the judge’s and all the people watching and waiting to hear my fate. My life is the fuel for that machine, an indispensable part, but one of many.

The goal, as far as I can see it, is to make the book as true as possible, as faithful to one’s experience as you can get, but I’ve found this often entails straying from the precise way events may have unfolded since the memory falls short of the truth of the matter. Perhaps this is one of those truths, that we fall short.

And of course there are the things that happened that no one would believe—
stranger than fiction
is the term—and so I’m going to leave them out of what I will share with the rest of the world, but in leaving them out that does not mean they didn’t happen or aren’t going to happen in the future.

25

W
HAT IS THERE
to say about the sequel? Does it help to catalog all of the ill-conceived or even non-conceived moves?

1. The funny man was to be the film’s director, but he had no idea how to direct a film.

2. The script that he approved when he thought the whole thing was a hoax was actually a thinly veiled rewrite of a classic episode of a legendary television show involving pies and a conveyor belt that everyone would recognize as being ripped off and would for sure bring a massive lawsuit, so it had to be ditched entirely.

3. With no time (nor idea how) to write a new script, the funny man decides that they will simply improvise the entire movie over a loose structure.

4. When this proves a failure, he then decides to shift gears and make the movie about a guy trying and failing to make a sequel to a successful movie. He does this by bringing various figures from the movie into his production trailer and then encouraging them to tell him the “truth” about their feelings regarding the other participants in the movie. He claims that everything is confidential, that it is all “just between them,” but the funny man, of course, secretly films everything.

5. Most damagingly, at no point does the funny man put his entire hand in his mouth. All of the other bad moves were forgivable if he had simply done this, but he would not.

The funny man amasses nearly six hundred hours of footage, which he trims to a svelte 420-minute rough cut before slicing to the absolute bone for a 232-minute final product. Fully under the sway of his increasingly complicated cocktail of pills as well as his belief in his own genius, the funny man is immensely proud of the movie. He believes it reveals something deeply true about life and humanity and making movies, namely that it’s all total bullshit. He forbids anyone else from seeing the movie, which he refers to as “the film.” The funny man is done with mere “movies.” With nothing to work from, marketing settles on this tagline as the sales hook:
You liked it before. See it again, only a little bit different
. This is terribly false advertising (and will in fact result in lawsuits), but they did the best they could under the circumstances. Millions are spent promoting something that no one is even sure exists.

But the funny man is supremely confident. He’s forgotten what it might be like to be wrong. He has broken new ground with this film. No one before has trod where he is now treading. Other footprints are neither in front of nor behind him. It is like the poem about Jesus where supposedly Jesus is always there, but when the guy looks back in the sand he sees only one set of footprints and the guy says “what the fuck, Jesus, where were you during those times?” and Jesus says, “step off, motherfucker, where you see one set of footprints, that’s me carrying your weak ass,” only in this case, it’s the funny man carrying the rest of the moribund entertainment industry.

It will be nearly impossible to outdo the original, box office—wise. The funny man knows this, but that’s not what this film is about. Trying to do that is a mug’s game, a sucker bet, so he has savvily gone the other way. This film is about how that
can’t
be done, so you’ve got to do something else. The lack of box office will actually strengthen the overall indictment at the core of the film. He imagines it will earn him a whole new level of respect from the people who previously have seen him as that dumb guy with the stupid thing. The off-Broadway play may not be necessary after all.

Rampant speculation about the film flies through the entertaino-sphere, but all of it is wrong, which hugely pleases the funny man. He refuses to do any publicity, save a single interview with the male cohost of the leading morning show that he likes to watch. The morning show is thrilled with this exclusive arrangement and given the near total lack of confirmable information about the sequel, there is a tremendous amount of anticipation for the appearance. The morning show will receive its highest ratings ever even though no actual news will be broken.

The camera light goes on and the stagehand points at the set where the funny man sits facing the morning-show television host, two pals in easy chairs that just happen to be hanging out in front of a camera. The morning-show television host tells the funny man how good it is to see him and looks at the funny man with moist and friendly eyes that seem to indicate sincerity. This endears the morning-show television host to his audience. It makes him seem human.

The morning-show television host looks at an index card on his lap and says, “This has been a really big year for you. So, tell me, what’s the biggest thing that has changed?”

The funny man could give a true answer. He could spill his guts to the morning-show host, tell him things he will not even share with his therapist. How when he was nearly killed in a bar in what he’s pretty sure was Ft. Worth, as his vision closed down to a pinpoint, he was visited by a spirit that
he’s
not calling God, but others grounded in the Judeo-Christian faith might, and this God spoke to him in the voice of a woman and what she said was, “Whatever you do is the right thing because you did it.” And from this moment the funny man understood himself to be divinely inspired, which is what is behind the film he has come to not talk about.

Or the funny man could talk about the more than occasional surge of power he feels as he walks the streets and sees people noticing him, how he imagines that he may be able to knock a building to the ground using only the powerful fists of this powerful man.

Instead, he looks at the morning television-show host, flicks at the crease in his slacks and says, “Well, if I had to pick just the one thing, it’d have to be …” Here the funny man looks around the morning television show studio, as though he’s delivering a big secret. (This is known as “timing.”)

“… better hookers,” he says. Stagehands laugh, and the host hides his smile behind an index card.

“Oops, can I say that?” the funny man says, looking fake sheepish. “Is this live?” Of course he knows that it is live and that it will get him talked about, which is what he really wants. “They can just edit that out, can’t they?” The stagehands and the host laugh harder. The funny man wonders if he should stand on the chair arms and pretend to look around for the people who are laughing.

The host collects himself and asks the funny man what he hopes the audience gets out of the new production, what his desired reaction might be. The funny man considers telling the truth, which would be this: “I hope, that when the credits roll, each member of the audience turns to their neighbor and gives into the urge to tear each other into teeny-tiny little pieces that will scatter the theater floor, pieces that we would sweep up and drop as confetti on the next audience at the next showing and over and over again. People would wonder why every show is sold out, yet no one ever leaves the theater.”

Instead, he says, “We just want the kids to have a good time. We’re all about the good time.”

When the interview ends and the morning-show television host breaks to commercial, he leans over to the funny man and says, “Look, maybe after this last cooking segment you’d like to go grab a beer.”

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” the funny man replies.

“Exactly,” the morning show host says. “Quitting time.”

T
HE FUNNY MAN’S
near-death experience has ended his fascination with
his
people, so the morning-show host suggests they go back to his place for “a few.” The morning-show host is an interesting specimen to the funny man. He is quite famous himself, far more famous than most of the people he is tasked with interviewing. (Not more famous than the funny man, though.) For years the morning-show host was just a weekend, substitute morning-show host until all of the sudden people recognized his talent and next thing you know they were nudging the chair of the female morning-show host over to make some extra room.

The morning-show host has also reaped some of the spoils of fame, including a marriage to a Chilean supermodel that was often reported as troubled and recently ended in divorce. The funny man has seen pictures of the morning-show host in the tabloids with two mocha-skinned children with dark eyes and perfect faces. They always seem to be eating ice cream together, the cones melting down the children’s knuckles. The funny man suspects these are staged in order to demonstrate that even though he is married to a psychotic ex-model harpy, the morning show host is a generous and tolerant father …

… with a kick-ass bachelor pad in a high-rise almost directly across the park from the funny man’s new place. Unlike the funny man, who decided to outfit his apartment with furniture and appliances and stuff like that, the morning-show host has instead installed a regulation-sized batting cage. But this is not just any batting cage. Unlike other batting cages where the pitching machine is two oppositely rotating wheels that squeeze the ball between them, firing it at the designated MPH, this pitching machine features a video screen on which the greatest pitchers of all time are projected at actual size, and as they wind up and throw, it looks as though they are actually hurling the ball. With a press of a button you can be taking cuts at Clemens’s heater, Koufax’s curve, or Niekro’s knuckler.

“This is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,” the funny man says. “I know, right?” the morning-show host replies, tugging his tie down and shrugging off his suit coat. He pulls a beer out of the refrigerator, the only other piece of equipment visible, and tosses it to the funny man. “Go ahead,” he says. “Give it a shot.”