Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

QUESTIONS

How can opposite things exist at once, even in memory? Grief and persistence. Retreat and embrace. Music and silence. With the averages tipped so far toward silence it’s a wonder a single sound can catch. Art should be more difficult. More difficult than what? Is she Liberace? She sweats enough without fur coats, but is it there, in the announcements, the challenges, the gauntlets thrown? Grief and persistence. Retreat and embrace. What could she do but alternate? There is no going forward past a certain bond of caretaking and niceties, no going back to the terrible days she misses more than anything. Sometimes she feels there is nothing more ahead. Is that why it is so comforting, this idea that she could be wrong about everything? She reminds herself there is no forward or back, only ever the one moment: now, the standing, sweat-soaked; the bow. She has pulled it off. She hasn’t. Only she knows whether or not she has brought it off, but if the audience stands, if they applaud, how much does it matter? Some will say she played perfectly.

Oh, Charlie—what would you say? A question too foolish to even ask, but that’s exactly what she’s done.

Dov is already sweating when he takes the stage. It’s not nerves, not after all these years. Adrenaline, he calls it. Or just fat, sweaty middle age. “Omaha,” he says. He shakes his head dismissively. Their response is warm enough. “Usually I say something good about the city I’m in. You’ll give me a pass on that, right?” Laughter throughout. This opener plays well everywhere but the major metros and the South. His first hard lesson learned when he started touring years ago: make fun of the South, but never in the South. Midwesterners, at least the kind that come to comedy shows, won’t trust you unless you insult them. “I mean, you guys understand. You live here. You didn’t pay me to blow sunshine up your ass.” Then into the bit suggesting if anyone ever did offer, in the literal sense, to blow sunshine up his ass, he’d do it in a heartbeat. “Really? You’re going to pass on that? It sounds fantastic.” They like the ass humor. Good thing. Plenty more of it to come.

“Kind of a college town, Omaha. Young crowd? Young people, make some noise.”

He holds out his microphone and the auditorium fills up with howling. He brings it back to his face to quiet them.

“Old people, go ‘Ah, fuck it.’”

Laughter. He leaves a little pause. Lets them wonder what’s next.

“You guys think sex is fun?”

The roar this time is even louder. His ears go tinny. He quiets them again.

“Yep,” he says. “Definitely a young crowd.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts, kids. You’ve got maybe five years.”

“People my age, we don’t have sex for fun. We just have sex because, I don’t know, it’s just something we’re supposed to do, like going into work, except with a much greater chance of humiliation.” He describes how he looks naked: like an unbaked loaf of sourdough. Smells like it too, he says. The latter is untrue, but the former accurate: he stood naked in front of his full-length mirror for forty-five minutes one day, brainstorming similes on a yellow legal pad. Not the most fun day, scrutinizing his terrible body, hunting for language vivid enough to convey just how ugly it was. The runner-up is that his belly looks like a bunch of pugs taped together. Too surreal, he thinks, so he’s only testing it in smaller venues.

He’s known for this: the self-scrutiny, the guilt, the shame. His persona—a failure, an out-of-shape, hypocritical, amoral, sexually deviant divorcée—is seeded in truth, and the rest of the jokes flow forth from it, carrying the weight that makes it convincing. Because he’s laughing along, because he makes it effortless, because it’s not about them. People think it’s easy standing up there deconstructing himself for an hour. They’re right only to the extent that comedy is like a sport, no time to dwell on anything while the clock runs, just enough mindspace free to do quick assessments and make minor adjustments. When you walk off the stage it feels like you just went on a minute earlier. What gets him is the rest of the night, the bar or the hotel, where he replays the jokes in his mind and is now just the butt of them, rather than the teller. His second hard lesson: the thrill of the laughter lasts only as long as the laughter.

“My back looks like a big cheese pizza. You know the cheap kind, with all the brown bubbles? A woman I hooked up with a few months back asked if I wanted to videotape it so we could watch it later. What ? It’s going to look like two pig carcasses slapping together. Of course I don’t watch to watch it.”

“Why would we make a record of this?”

They’ve got the lights a little too bright on him. The sweat is coming through, though that’s normal enough. Every set has some jokes about the sweating, a preemptive strike. The auditorium out in front of him is black, except for the twilit faces in the first two rows.

He can’t see her, the girl who will approach him that night at the bar. She’ll wait by the venue’s side door and follow his cab to TGI Friday’s. Before she heads in, she’ll sit in her car for fifteen minutes to give him some time to settle in, to text her friends about what she’s going to do, and to work up the courage she pretends to never need. He’ll notice her fashionable outfit first, just black tights and a belt around a low-cut purple blouse. And the boots, of course. She knows no man can resist expensive boots. When he sees her he’ll set eyes on her face, the youthful glow and the evocative makeup, the pageant smile, and then, not knowing she will be coming toward him, that he will soon be interacting with her, his gaze will drift downward to admire the way those tights reveal the body underneath. When she perches on the next stool over and turns that smile like a spotlight on him, he’ll think: trap set, trap sprung.

“Buy me a drink?” she’ll say.

“I’m the famous one,” he’ll reply. “You buy me a drink.”

So she’ll wave the bartender over and ask for a whiskey sour for herself and a cosmopolitan for her friend. When he asks for ID she’ll shrug in feigned embarrassment: “I forgot it.” Well , go get it is the only response she’ll get.

“Oh, hell no,” Dov will say, trap unsprung. But then she’ll smile at the bartender, take some long blinks, and ply him with a voice growing more girlish by the moment, and soon the trap is resprung, though he’s considering the metaphor of chewing his own leg off and how it would apply in this situation. Punching himself in the nuts?

“You should just leave. I don’t like you,” he’ll say, and she’ll laugh.

“I’m not over twenty-one,” she’ll say, leaning toward him, “but I am over eighteen.”

Since the show went on air, there have been run-ins like this, though never one so blatant. When she puts her driver’s license down on the bar in front of him—her birth date is in 1993, making her twenty—he’s going to want to tell her this isn’t fair, what she’s doing. She’s in that tiny sliver of life where her body is like a miracle, the limbs so slender, the breasts so perky, the waist so small and perfectly shaped that her figure’s like an ultramodern work of architecture that, sculpted from some futuristic polymer, doesn’t look like it should be able to hold itself up. He’ll want to say that because she hasn’t reached the age where fat starts depositing itself like bad debt all over the body, she has power. That she’s abusing it by sitting here next to him.

He’ll know how to take himself out of the equation: all he has to do is say no and maintain it. But he’ll also be aware of the sharkish thoughts his balls are sending to his brain: never before in his life has he had someone so young and beautiful; if she’s offering, is it wrong to take? Thousands of years of human evolution have been training him to say yes to this exact proposition.