The Comedy Writer (15 page)

“No one deserves to be treated like shit.”

“Well, then, why does everyone treat me that way?
Everyone.
Sometimes I think it must be me.”

“Maybe it's just the people you hang out with.”

“I've thought about that. But the thing is, I believe in people, and I think they're basically good, I do. And then you gotta wonder … I mean, they can't all be wrong … right?”

I served a three-year-old girl a Bacardi cocktail.

My boss Joe had called the day before asking me to cover a dinner shift. This was good news, as a dinner shift meant at least a hundred bucks and a few hours away from my houseguest. In retrospect, I should've examined the dinner menu, but I assumed it was the same as the lunch menu, except with higher prices and larger servings. This proved to be not the case, and the dinner patrons were also more demanding.

I never was a particularly good waiter. I came across more the friendly idiot than the culinary expert, but my tips had always been commensurate with those of the waiters who could rattle off every last herb and the brand of butter in the bouillabaisse, so I slid by contentedly. Usually I made up the answers as I went along, but suddenly I was getting questions like, “How many grams of saturated fat in the Medaglione al Cognac?” I couldn't even give them a ballpark figure, so I'd have to turn to Chef Louie, who was very stressed and always a few minutes behind and apparently pinpointed
the duck sauce incident as the precise moment he'd fallen off-schedule.

My section had four four-tops and a party of seven, which was a pretty good load for a trainee, and with all the questions about dishes I couldn't pronounce and “special orders” and salad dressings on the side and nonfat decaf iced lattes, I quickly got in a hole. When I finally did get around to taking the big table's drink order, I had two other tables waving to me and I was really in the weeds, so I didn't question it when the last man ordered a Bacardi cocktail for his three-year-old daughter. There were six adults and the little girl and, sensing my anxiety, they'd thoughtfully rattled off their drinks in short order and the last man said, “I'll have a vodka martini straight up and a Bacardi cocktail for the little lush here.” Everyone laughed, including me, but when they returned to their conversations without clarifying the matter, I just shrugged and assumed the Bacardi was for Dad, too, and anyway a bell was ringing in the prep room and I didn't have time to argue.

When I returned with the drinks, I laid them all out and was left with the Bacardi cocktail, a fruity concoction served in a martini glass, and the man said, “That would be little Hannah's.” Naturally I thought this odd, but several tables were beckoning and a row of dishes was cooling on a stainless-steel shelf in the kitchen and Louie was hotter than ever, so I put the drink down and ran off without giving it another thought. At one point I did glance over and saw Dad pouring a sugar packet into the toddler's highball—presumably she had complained about the flavor—and this helped her get it down, and when they ordered a second round, she sucked that one down, too.

When a couple of my parties had left and I had a moment to lean against the server station, I nudged a waiter named David and
said, “Strangest thing. Those people over there ordered their little girl two Bacardi cocktails.”

“You're not serious.”

“Uh-huh. I know they do that in Texas—the old man can order booze for the kids. Something else, huh?”

He stared at me for a long time and said, “Henry, are you sure they didn't order the
Party
Cocktail?”

He opened a menu and there it was, a kiddie drink called the Party Cocktail.

My first impulse was to rush over and confess my error. David yanked me back, however, pointing out that this would do no good, the tyke was doing fine rolling around on the floor in a pile of empty sugar packets, and surely it would mean the end of my job here. And so I dropped the check off and said goodbye and thought that was the end of it, except of course David had to share his amusement with another waiter, who shared it with the busboys, who filled in the prep crew, who told the dishwashers, who regaled the cooks, who snitched to Louie, who fired my ass—not for making an innocent mistake but for not confessing my error, which of course I'd been dissuaded from doing by the motherfucking blabbermouth David.

Colleen and I were lying in bed listening to the radio. Actually, I was lying
on
the bed, which is to say, on top of the covers, and I was very annoyed. She'd granted my request to sleep in my own bed, providing that I not get under the sheets with her. So I had a blanket under me and a beach towel on top, but it seemed okay after the hard floor. The mattress was now on the floor due to a bent murphy bed frame, which had mysteriously occurred while I was at work.
“I swear on my mother's soul I didn't jump on it.”
But that's not what was bugging me; it was the radio. Colleen always needed it on to
sleep. Music didn't matter—she could listen to talk shows or Spanish stations or just plain static—it was the noise that comforted her. Each night, as soon as she would doze, I'd click it off, careful not to wake her. If she did awaken, she'd put it back on. This night, though, when she kept flipping through her
Psychology Today
, I killed it anyway. Colleen stared at the box.

“Hey.”

I rolled over.

“I like to keep that on while I sleep,” she said.

“Yeah, well, I don't. Come on, put the magazine down and turn off the light.”

Surprisingly, she did.

“Thank you.”

“You're the boss.”

She lit a cigarette in the dark and, as was her style, smoked it like a joint. She gulped it in and held the smoke a few seconds before exhaling.

“What's with the magazines, Colleen?”

“I like them.”

“Yeah … ?”

“My sister used to give them to me … Bonnie. To read. You know … she's the one who killed herself.”

“I remember Bonnie.”

“I didn't know if you remembered her name. That's the business she was in: psychology. She was good at it too, they said. Who knows? I mean, that's what they said. I guess I gotta take their word.”

“Where did she work?”

“One of the colleges.”

“Which one?”

“I don't remember. It begins with a U.”

“UCLA?”

“Yeah. I think. She was always moving around. I know she used to work at University of Rutgers, and then I lost track.”

“Were you guys close?”

“Oh, yeah. I mean, we used to be. She was my best friend when I was growing up. But then she kind of changed. The more stuff she learned, the less interesting she was.”

“That happens. Do you have any idea why she did it?”

“I think she was just really sad.”

“I mean beyond that. Was there a note?”

“I don't want to talk about it, it makes me want to cry.”

“I'm not a psychiatrist, Colleen, but I think it's probably good to talk about things that make you want to cry—I mean, as opposed to bottling them up.”

“You're right on that one—you ain't a psychiatrist. So what kind of stuff do you write anyway?”

“Urn … comedy. I guess I'm a comedy writer.”

“You don't seem like one. Tell me a joke.”

“It doesn't work that way. I'm not personally funny, I just
write
funny.”

“Huh?”

“You know, like situations, character stuff—not jokes.”

“Like give me a for instance.”

“Um, okay. Like, uh, like this screenplay I just wrote. This guy's trying to win his girlfriend back and he … uh … he … he does a lot of funny stuff. You'd have to read the whole script to understand.”

“Oh. That sounds good.”

I listened to her finish the cigarette. When she stubbed it out, she said, “I thought of one'

“Hm?”

“I thought of one of the mean things Honus did.”

“Yeah?”

“Last year on my birthday, we went up to Big Bear for the weekend and stayed with some friends of his. And I was really excited 'cause we'd never taken a trip together, but the whole time he acted like I wasn't even there. And then the last day we all went out and got shit-faced. We drove all the way around the lake and we were drinking beer and everyone had to pee, so we pulled over and the guys were all writing stuff in the snow with their pee, and Honus made a big heart and put his initials inside it, so I said, 'Hey, how come you didn't put my initials in there, too?', and he says, in front of all his friends, he says, ran out. But if I had to take a dump, I woulda put your name,' and they all laughed their asses off. Now, that's not something a guy who supposedly loves you says.”

I could hear someone jingling keys out in the hall.

“Is it?”

“No, it's not.”

“Especially on your birthday, right?”

I touched her arm. “Go to sleep,” I said, and I kept my hand there until she did.

the man cried.

It was early Saturday morning—we'd been up since six—and Colleen and I were standing among a crowd of tourists listening to a
sidewalk preacher in Venice Beach. Roller skaters and bicyclists zipped around us and, behind the preacher, in a concrete park, several skateboarders did tricks on small ramps for tips.

“It's killing us
all!”
the preacher continued. “It's spread to the great rain forests and the magnificent ice caps of Antarctica, and now to the fragile coral reefs, which are dying en masse for the first time in recorded history!”

A few of the tourists walked on, but Colleen and I stayed and listened, mainly because to my left stood a barefoot and slightly dirty beach girl with a tattoo on her ankle and a healthy set rolling around in a baggy T-shirt. Then, in keeping with the whole karmic thing, the preacher picked me out of the crowd.

“Do you, sir, know the average annual temperature of the water in the Caribbean Sea?”

The preacher was a scrappy old guy and slightly intimidating. He was missing most of his teeth and, from the looks of things, could probably lose the rest by biting into a banana.

I shrugged.

“Take a guess, good sir! Take a wild stab at immortality!”

“Seventy-five degrees.”

“Ah, but there was a time when this was nearly true. The average temperature during the last four decades has ranged between seventy-eight-point-eight and eighty-four-point-two degrees in the good name of Fahrenheit. Guess what it is today.”

Thankfully, he pointed to a bearded man with no shirt and a filthy tan. The man's corduroy shorts were bleached white, like the coral, and his legs were covered with a layer of permanent grime.

“One hundred and eight degrees,” he guessed.

The preacher jumped back, appalled. “You, sir, are an idiot. Go back to your failed commune and educate yourself.” He turned to
Colleen. “The average temperature this year in the Caribbean waters is eighty-nine-point-two degrees.
Eighty-nine-point-two degrees!
The coral is dying. And do you know why the coral is dying, my precious angel? Because of Los Angeles of the Californias! Smog is spewing from cities everywhere, it is warming the planet, it is killing the fish! We're burning the rain forests, just so a few men can afford money-squandering sports franchises. The world is going to end, people, and it's because Bo Jackson makes ten million dollars a year!”

“Wow,” Colleen said.

I took her arm, led her away. Of all the landmarks I'd visited in L.A., Venice Beach was the biggest disappointment. I'd had images of beautiful blonde roller skaters and a happy hippie subculture. What I got was a tawdry tourist trap with rip-off artists at every scummy turn. This wasn't a sunny place, it was a dark one. Hundreds of homeless people had set up a permanent camp, and there were fifty gangsters for every cop. The roller skaters were mostly skanky, tattooed crack addicts, and if you didn't keep your eyes to yourself, you'd have some turban-headed schizophrenic rolling along beside you singing a song that only a whale could understand and demanding money to get him to shut his blowhole.

“Can you believe that Bo Jackson?” she said as we walked along. “What an asshole.”

“It's a little more complicated than that.”

“Not much more, I bet.”