Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“ Uncooked sourdough. Can you imagine that and want anything to do with it?”

She will imagine it—something in all her planning she’s never done—him on top of her, grunting and sweating, his baggy midsection audibly slapping against hers, and find she’s not repulsed. Perhaps she should be repulsed, she’ll think, but she finds it endearing. In the scene she pictures, he’ll be shy and apologetic during sex, and she’ll comfort him and move against him and take the reins and touch his cheek. In that moment she’ll think she could be attracted to any body type, that under the right conditions or in the right mood she could be turned on by someone fat or scrawny, hopelessly short or dented with a weird concave chest. She’ll feel she understands suddenly how women with fat husbands can stand to go to bed with them, something that’s always mystified her before.

“Yes,” she’ll say, simply, honestly.

“Naïveté indeed,” he’ll say, touched by the sentiment, wanting more than anything to run away.

He talks about fear during his set as well. “I’m scared of everything,” he says. “Spiders. Clowns. Dentists. Everyone’s scared of those things. Clown dentists—don’t ask. My dad had a dark sense of humor. Spider-clown dentists. I just thought of that, but it’s pretty fucking scary, right?”

“Imagine a spider with a clown face, crawling toward you with a drill and that hook thing.”

“Tell that to your kids and they’ll shit their pants.”

“Other people’s babies are the scariest thing. Friends always want me to hold their babies, and I don’t want to do it. I just don’t want to. They’re too fragile. It’s because I have this weird fantasy—maybe fantasy is the wrong word—this idea that I’ll be holding the baby and it will just crack in half like an egg. And then they’ll look at me like, ‘Holy shit , what did you do?’ and I’ll be like ‘I don’t know, it just cracked in half.’ And they’ll be like ‘Babies don’t just crack in half.’ And I’ll just shrug like, ‘What can I say?’”

“I’m scared of my life changing, because it feels like every decision I’ve made in my professional and personal life has been a huge mistake.” This part relies on a big shit-eating grin. The audience has to buy that this really is a source of amusement for him. Some jokes run on empathy. He suspects that many people, perhaps even most people, feel this way: that their life is a series of errors in judgment. He sees some of the heads in the front row nodding. The bad comedians, the jock comics, the shock comics, the goofsters, never do this—bond with their audience over a shared negative experience—but it’s this moment, he feels, that they’ll remember. It’s in the hush that settles in after the laughter. “If there’s a change coming down the pike,” he says, “it’s not going to be positive.” It’s the closest thing to a gift he can give them, the promise that all this can be laughed about.

He’ll be too scared to undress Jenna in the hotel that night, scared that he’ll get the sudden urge to be physically rough with her, or that she’ll instinctively recoil when he touches his palm to her ribcage. So he’ll sit on the edge of the bed, untying his shoes like a husband getting home from work. She’ll stand there, tall in her leather boots, waiting for his next step. When he goes to his belt, still not looking at her, she’ll pull the blouse over her head, and he’ll take a small comfort in the way her tights reach so high up on her waist they cover her belly button and something about it looks silly. She’ll take off her boots to take off her tights, and standing in front of him in just her panties, she’ll ask him if he wants the boots back on. He’ll shake his head, still looking at the floor.

His reluctance to take off his white underwear will be sad to her in a way that’s not endearing, but she’ll slide them off him anyway. He’ll tell her, “I don’t want to be on top.” He won’t go into detail, but he hates the idea of his gut hanging onto her flat belly. It’s fair enough with women over thirty-five, women ranging from poochy to just plain round, but it will seem like too awful a memory to brand onto a twenty-year-old girl who still believes in good in the world.

Riding him will be an underwhelming experience for her. She will think that word exactly: underwhelming . He’s not repulsive, as he makes himself out to be, no look or smell of bread dough, just a normal guy in his forties with some extra weight on him. But she will want some intensity of emotion or a moment of humor—she loves to laugh during sex, but no boys can make it happen, and in fact none of them try. Instead she’ll find him constantly retreating. She’ll look for the mischievous glint that, during their exchanges at the bar, lit up his eyes, but he’ll have them squeezed shut as if anticipating a vaccine shot.

After they finish, she’ll pull the condom off him, tie a knot in it, and throw it on the carpet near the waste bin. They’ll lie in tandem, facing the ceiling, their limbs not touching, two snow-angels too bored to keep going. Her mind will harken back to his routine from the show about sex between people over thirty, how deeply unsatisfying it is. She’ll think, He made it seem like it was funny . He’ll observe her disappointment and regret already that, if this was always going to turn out poorly, he might at least have relished the experience. He’ll wish for another go, a chance to redeem himself. He’ll imagine her staying the night and him waking her up with kisses and caresses in the morning for round two. That’s not where this is going, he’ll know.

“Now you know,” he’ll say.

“Naïveté indeed,” she’ll say.

“Maybe this is the first in your series of errors in judgment.”

She’ll look into his eyes and smile gently. “How did you learn to laugh about it?”

“I didn’t,” he’ll say. “I learned to fake it.”

She’ll turn her face back up toward the ceiling, thinking hard about something, a connection her mind is trying to make. She’ll tell him, “When I played youth basketball, my coach always said, ‘When you compete, you either win or you learn.’” She’ll be flattered when this gets a belly laugh out of him, though she didn’t mean it as a joke.

“That’s a good philosophy,” he’ll say. “But it’s a terrible thing to tell someone after sex.”

She’ll laugh too. It will be the kind of laugh that makes her close her eyes, that rocks her in the ribs and curls her toes. This will be the first laugh they’ve shared that one hasn’t extorted from the other. He’ll laugh at her laughter, at the absurdity of her naked body lying there, rippling with it. A naked body, even one like hers, doesn’t look good laughing. It doesn’t have to.

When he thanks the crowd and tells them how great they were and says good night, it’s a formality. There’s always an encore these days, and though sometimes he just wants to go back to his room or drop a few bucks on a cocktail, he’s not immune to the compliment. He sits backstage in a chair with armrests, letting his head roll back and bringing a bottle of water intermittently to his lips. He can hear it clearly: first amorphous cheering, then the chant—“Dov! Dov! Dov! Dov!”—then an accompaniment of stomps and claps in rhythm. He rides it like a high for ten minutes. The promoter comes by and tells him it was great, fantastic.

He has a new energy when he returns to the stage. He always does, and he’s built the bit off that. He walks out with a big grin and some spring in the step.

“You guys are the only people in my life who want me back when I go.”

“When I was still married, I listened at the front door one time when I left. My wife said, ‘Love you,’ when I was headed out. Then after the door closed, she said, ‘I hope you get hit by a bus, you son of a bitch.’”