Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

And there it will be on a platter, as she interrupts his thoughts by leaning forward to whisper in his ear: “I want you to fuck me.” She will get an unexpected thrill from saying this so directly. With boys from her college she lets her interest remain unsaid, lets the context ferret it out, and she’ll start to wonder if that isn’t because their desire is so overt, compared to Dov’s, whose hesitation she can sense. It’s something she will want to use in the future, this statement, as direct as knocking on a door. That is the feeling she is hunting tonight, the feeling that there are things to learn about herself that the boys at U Nebraska just can’t teach her.

She’ll look at him. He’ll look at her, and then at his hands on the bar.

But all that’s later. During his set the girl sits somewhere in the dark of the middle-back-left with strangers on either side of her, one hand resting a little too high to be proper on the inside of her upper thigh. She knew what she wanted to do as soon as tickets went on sale. She’s watched the first season and has what she thinks is a sense of his life. His attempts at dating: bizarre, quixotic, embarrassing. One-night stands with women who snore during sex or turn out to be truck drivers. To her, these are dispatches from the field, warnings from the future. It’s sexy to her when he derides his body, when he talks about how abject middle-aged sex is. Not one man has ever said these things to her. More so, there are hints of the truths he’s telling already creeping into her experience. When the boys she’s had, both the boyfriends and the one-offs, roll off her after five minutes of robotic hammering, she never feels exultant like women on TV, never rolls her eyes back into her head and smiles at the ceiling. She just looks up, hands crossed over her sternum, wondering what more it takes to be happy.

He’s got her answer.

“The closest most of us get to happiness is getting used to unhappiness.”

“I’m unhappy all the time, but it doesn’t really bother me anymore. I’m so used to unhappiness I kind of think happiness would ruin my life. I’d be like, do you have any idea how long it took me to build that mountain of misery and self-loathing? Now I have to start over.”

“Couldn’t be a comedian anymore. Know what kind of gigs a happy comic gets? Birthday clown.”

“Since I turned forty my knee just hurts. Hurts to walk on it, hurts to stand on it. It’s not a medical condition—my doctor just said, ‘it happens’—and I’m used to it now. If the pain went away, here’s how it would change my life: now when I was sitting on my couch at home, I’d feel bad that I wasn’t doing any exercise. I wouldn’t go out jogging because my knee works again, but I’d know that I could. My guilt would increase. That’s the end result if my health improves. More guilt.”

True about his knee, mostly. His doctor didn’t seem to care much, but he did identify the problem: Dov’s used up all the cartilage on his right side. Dov doesn’t really know how that happened: he’s never been a hiker, never played sports. He’s done plenty of walking around the city, climbed the stairs to lots of walkups. That must be enough, he supposes. He has an alternate set of jokes about the knee: How did he wear out the cartilage on one side but not the other? Has he been taking more steps with the right leg? Did he play too much hopscotch as a kid? The physical part of that joke is what sells it, hopping on one leg across the stage, but the pain is too severe to do it on the right leg anymore, and he’s started to worry about expending the last of his cartilage on the left. When that goes, he’ll walk like an old man. Then he’ll be the old dog, dragging its back legs, that needs to be put down.

His assessment of his happiness is also not far off the mark. He wouldn’t mind being happier, but he really is used to life as is. Truth is, he only feels at ease these days around other comedians, sitting around a table at a pub, joking not about himself but about life in general. Busting someone else’s balls for a change. At this point in the tour, he and his two openers are tired of each other’s company. The road is draining. Ben heads to his room early after shows to Skype with his family. Dennis goes to trendy bars to get free drinks and pick up young women. Women have always been difficult to be around for Dov: too much grappling for control, too much deciphering of coded messages. And now with the show, the tour, and an HBO special coming up, the pressure for new material is so pressing that any time he gets to himself he spends tirelessly dissecting his own mistakes and failures, sifting out the ones that can be made funny from the ones that can’t.

He goes to the chain-restaurant bars to talk with the bartenders and maybe some crusty regulars. Every bartender is an undercover comedian. In that way, it will disappoint him the night the beautiful young girl—she says her name is Jenna—approaches him. Jenna won’t be able to tell him anything about the Mets. Jenna will have nothing interesting to say about the state of Nebraska. He could try to talk to her like a normal person, like the guy serving his cocktails, but shows are exhausting—an hour straight just talking under the lights, plus a fifteen-minute encore—and it’s so much work with young people discerning what parts of them are bland, what parts are posturing, what parts are genuine philosophies derived from their life experiences and what parts are just platitudes recycled from rock stars he’s too old to know anymore.

So when he does the easy thing and switches back into comedian mode, he’ll know he’s going to take her to bed. That too is the easy thing, the decision not hard to explain to his friends or the guy behind the bar or even himself. My id had my superego in a headlock , he’ll tell people. She was young, hot . This will be just a moment after she’s told him directly: “I want you to fuck me.” That one bald sentence will be powerful enough to conjure an image of them in the act, an image with her in the center and him closer to the edge of the frame, out of the central focus, a blur of lumpy, pale negative space.

When he turns into a performer his posture will straighten. His shoulders will uncoil, and he’ll seem a little taller.

“How do you know I don’t have AIDS?” he’ll ask.

“You don’t have AIDS.”

“How would you know?”

“It would have been in your set.”

You’re absolutely right , he’ll think—such a horrible thing he could only deal with it by joking, and a wealth of jokes would stem from it. Even simple understatement would do it: AIDS , hand on his hip, wagging his head at the crowd, just my luck . So she has some insight, he’ll think, and he’ll want to tell her simply that it makes him sad how right she is, and at the same time to guard that truth from her. Hands off my suffering . Get your own : a first draft of a response he’ll immediately discard as too revealing.

His hesitation will flush her with pride. Keeping him against the ropes will suddenly be more important than fucking him or learning a life lesson or acquiring a story to record in the online journal she updates in sporadic bursts. She’ll ask him to tell her a secret. He’ll fire back with “So what’s your angle, anyway? Child support? Paparazzi? Some kind of starfucker blog?” He’ll smile when he says it, but she’ll sense the hostility behind the question.

“Naïveté,” she’ll say. “Plain and simple.”

“Naïveté indeed. Were I to do the thing you said you want me to do, which is wrong on so many levels, you would see things you can’t unsee and feel things you can’t unfeel.”

“Like being humped by a loaf of sourdough?”