Ethan Chatagnier - Warnings from the Future

“Well, I showed her.”

“We had some good years, though. Ever try to hold onto something good? It’s like trying to hold onto a cat. A cat who hates you. Who has a moral objection. Now, cats are not easy to catch. But if you try and hold onto one, you are courting death. They’ll claw here: the carotid—here: the femoral. You’ll look like the end of a Scorsese film.”

“Bad things, though, they cling to you. Anybody have a bad job?”

He holds out the mike: some cheers, a lot of shouted yeah s, one louder and higher pitched than the others, screaming: “Tell it, brother.”

“I will. I will tell it,” he says. “You been in that job a long time?”

Laughter.

“I know it,” he says. “My job is terrible.”

“Bad jobs, they’re like those face-huggers from Alien . They jump on your face and hold on and shove something in your throat that you really don’t want in there. Bad jobs, bad girlfriends, bad boyfriends. That’s why, if you look back on your life, the only relationships you remember fondly are the short ones. You meet this amazing person, right? Then after a few weeks they get a sense of your personality and they’re like, ‘Fuck it, man. I’m outta here.’”

“Bad things hold onto you longer. A bad marriage can transcend time and space.”

“But good things last longer. Not while they’re going on, but the way they live in the rest of your life. You have a bad job, the day you quit, as soon as you walk out of that store or office or whatever, you get relief. When I go to my spider-clown dentist, I feel relieved as soon as I get up out of the chair. You stand up, and the fear evaporates.”

“Good things, you can hold onto those forever. Some of you out there, I know, remember the first person you were in love with. It’s probably not the person you’re here with tonight.”

“You have to look at your date now and deny it,” he says, grinning. “Go ahead. I’ll give you a minute.”

“That’s a different kind of love, and you’re happy to have it. But sometimes, when he’s asleep and you aren’t, you think back on it, you remember that guy smiling at you. You remember holding hands running through a cornfield or some other Nicholas Sparks bullshit. And maybe there’s a sense of loss with it, but you’ve got it. Isn’t that amazing? You’ve still got it swimming around up there, along with that squeaker of a basketball game you won, or the first time you got high, or that time you went skinny dipping. Or that time you had sex with a sheep.”

“No? Just me?”

“It’s like a diamond you get to carry around. A mental photo album that doesn’t just have pictures but little slices of the feelings you felt in those moments. That’s what comedy is to me. Not necessarily the TV show and the big crowds, but the moments that planted the seed. The way my friends laughed at jokes I made in high school. No one else in my family could make my dad laugh. Just me. And it was this big, meaty laugh like you’d hear out of a drunk Viking. And I could summon it at will.”

“He’s dead now, you know.”

“Shit happens.”

“But because I’ve got the memory—I mean, forty years later and I can remember just how it sounded—he isn’t.”

This wrap-up isn’t funny, but it isn’t for them. He’s been giving to them for an hour and a half now. He needs one point where he takes something back, something for himself. Free counseling, he’ll say if anybody asks. One true good thing.

An interviewer once asked Dov if he’d ever considered suicide, given how focused his act was on his own his own unhappiness. “Murder, yes. Suicide, no,” he’d answered. Another deflection. The words weren’t false, but the flippant way they came out was. That was the performer, casting no shadow. The times he was starting out and couldn’t get a paying gig; his dad’s long convalescence in a home; the months leading up to his divorce, with those hours of awful, dismissive paperwork: he’d been angry and overwhelmed and so, so unhappy, but he’d never wanted to do himself in. Not only had he not planned anything but he hadn’t thought or fantasized about it the way some people do. He’s estimated that he was more unhappy during those times than many people who actually made attempts.

He’s thought about it since—you couldn’t say frequently, but often enough—not suicide, but why it’s so easy for him to say no to it, why for him it fails to exist in the realm of possibilities. It’s what he thinks about as he grabs his coat from the rack backstage, and what he’s often thought about after his encores this tour. The closing note forms a natural trench that his thoughts can’t avoid following.

It’s cold enough that he turns up his collar before the door has slammed behind him. The cab he’s requested idles near the curb, chuffing exhaust in idyllic puffs that make him think of Christmas. A girl with a cigarette seems to be watching him from under the streetlight on the corner, her eyes following him without interest. A hot young thing from a different world than his. There’s the future and there’s the past , he thinks. He wants to arrive at some insight about the two, but after a minute the best he can come up with is Fuck ’em both . He gets in the cab, and they creep out onto the avenue, and maybe he’s being an old man about it, but the cars out on the road seem reckless tonight, some of their drivers drunk, some only tired, all of them collisions just waiting to happen. He gives the driver cross streets, and the man nods without saying anything. Dov hears a chattering, and for a moment thinks the man has a little radio in his ear before he recognizes it as a Bluetooth headset. Whoever is on the other end must be saying something funny, because the cab driver gives off a long, slow chuckle, so low and so dark it’s like he’s laughing in a different language.

Deckinger had a painting by Evan Durant in his foyer, one of the larger canvases, maybe four feet by six feet. How much it had cost him I didn’t know, but I knew other Durants, smaller Durants, had sold for more than thirty thousand. None of my friends could boast a foyer, let alone thirty large to decorate it. Rounding the corner into his living room I was confronted with a kind of optical mystery: the condo, which from its little brick façade should have been cozy if not cramped, was as spacious as the house I grew up in. That’s the type of magic money can make. A part of me hated coming to Beacon Hill, because I started to see price tags on everything: on the Durant, on Deckinger’s artisan dinner table and matching leather couches and the beveled lowball glass out of which he drank an amber liquid I didn’t want to know the price of. He had poured a glass for me as well. It tasted like a winter cake with candied fruit.

“I don’t know my spirits very well.”

“Cognac,” he said. “Paul Giraud.”

He surprised me by having the tact not to talk up the drink or say how much he’d paid for the Durant. I’d brought a portfolio for him to look at, and I set it on the table. He flipped through it quickly, then said he’d thought I would bring some of the actual pieces.

“Pumpkins?” I said. “You wanted me to haul pumpkins here on the T?”

“How do you deliver the finished product?”

“That’s just one at a time.”

“Well, that’s thinking a bit small, isn’t it?”

He wanted to play with me, to pique my artistic humors.

“You looked me up, Mr. Deckinger. Saw one of my carvings in your neighborhood, right? Consider that a sample.”

“Victor Newburn, and I really had to wring it out of him.”

Newburn was Chair of Humanities at Harvard, and lived the next street over. He had commissioned me for a jack-o’-lantern mock-up of the famous statue of the Laocoön priest and his sons being strangled by Poseidon’s serpents, one of the more interesting assignments I’d taken. I’d ended up needing two pumpkins to encompass the horizontal spread of the tableau.