Way the Crow Flies (86 page)

What business are you in?

The funny business
.

What are you selling?

Stories
.

She died at Yuk Yuk’s, then auditioned at the Old Fire Hall for the Second City touring company. She hit the road, and often the Fire Hall stage itself, when the main company took a night off. It was almost as rare to cross over from stand-up to improv as it was to be a female stand-up in the first place. But she loved having a gang, she gloried in high-speed improvisation, doing sketches that were “about something”—politics, pop culture, the hostile grocery clerk this morning, processing whatever had happened in her day, working it all out at night on stage. In between sketches, ransacking the flea-bitten costume pile backstage; the exultation that accompanied the appearance of a new character courtesy of that red shirt, that hat, those boots, without which you would never be able to do that character again—“where th
e fuck
is that red shirt?!” The bizarre and strangely ritualized behaviour that preceded every performance, jokes among themselves so gross they’d have had to import earth-moving equipment to go any lower. Big huge Tony prancing nearly nude through the dressing rooms like a Las Vegas showgirl, seizing
and humping the company dry-cleaning with great graphic gusto when it arrived, then hitting the stage with a wholesome smile, ready to entertain the Rotary Club. They toured relentlessly,
Welcome to Kingston, Gananoque, Chatham, Hamilton, Windsor, Sudbury, North Bay, Timmins
. They played roller rinks where punchlines took ten seconds to hit the back of the arena. They did benefits—once for a Holocaust museum where the emcee brought out a child’s shoe from Auschwitz before introducing them, “Now here to entertain us …”

She bought a vintage VW bug and retraced the tour on her own, doing stand-up in every burg with a university or bar.
Alone, alone, all, all alone. Alone on a wide wide sea
. She did the club-sandwich circuit and graduated from seedy motels to Holiday Inns. She honed her craft before rooms where half the tables were empty and the other half full of lonely guys waiting for the stripper to come on. She survived a stag party of drunken engineers who tossed a blow-up doll around the room throughout her act—“isn’t it a shame when cousins marry?” She performed for musty nickel miners and their dates, who had turned out in the misprinted expectation of singing along with Stompin’ Tom Connors. She learned to love the beehived silhouettes that came to pack her return gigs in the taverns and “cabana rooms” of borscht-belt north. Make the women laugh, put the guys at ease, then turn up the heat until, by the end, she had come out as a burly nickel miner trapped in the body of a muff-diving lezzie. It helped that she was cute.

It was after Stonewall but before “gay pride.” If she wasn’t murdered in the parking lot, she would be taken into countless gnarly normal hearts. It helped that she met Christine—a Women’s Studies major whose father was a cop in Timmins. Madeleine didn’t have to explain contradiction to her. Christine wore batik dresses with police boots, kept her hair long and drove standard. She regularly rescued Madeleine, turning up in Sarnia with a cooler full of pesto and wine, a pillow from home, and a willingness to have sex that involved nothing but sleep afterwards.

She quit the touring company before she could be fired or promoted, and focused on in-town. Christine told her what to read and Madeleine sharpened her mental knives late-nights in Toronto at a
boozecan-cum-salon called Rear Window. She started out as The Astonishing Elastowoman. She branched out with The Astonishing Elastowoman’s Introduction to Classics of Western Civilization. She branched and branched and branched. She became known for her bendy body and bizarre male characters, including Anita Bryant. There was Lou, a powder-blue-polyester-leisure-suited lounge lizard who accompanied himself on accordion and sang with an outrageous French accent. There was Roger of Roger’s Room, a fifteen-year-old boy obsessed with
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, prone to tears and fond of his pet turtle. At the end of every sketch, he would look down the sights of an AK-47 and name all the people he saw there the way the chick on
Romper Room
used to do with her magic mirror. And there was Maurice.

She began to headline in places with air conditioning, and graduated to concert halls across the country and to venues in Chicago and New York, where people bought tickets with her name printed on them. She crossed over into TV, into film, she crossed over and over and over. She merged feminism with humour, she merged being out of the closet with being in the mainstream, she merged and merged.

It helped that she was used to moving.

Jack and Mimi saw many of her shows. Jack saw most of them. She wished her brother could have seen one.

Propelled by the feeling of juggling, of entering a time-space continuum where she could see thoughts coming and pluck them from the air the way Superman plucks speeding bullets; by the revelation that everything is connected—start anywhere, go go go, you will inevitably wind up back at this spot, because space is curved and so are thoughts, a thousand boomerangs—she couldn’t focus on one thing, so she focused on everything.

She did it where it was safe: on stage, in front of many strangers who had paid good money and expected a good time. In person she remained shy well into her twenties.

If Madeleine stopped: all the balls would drop. The atoms would disperse. She would look down, see the void beneath her feet, the precipice just out of reach; hear the tin-can sound effect of feet racing for purchase on thin air—
Mother!—
and zoom straight down to the Wile E. Coyote bottom with a powdery
pok!

She arrives at the faux-rustic double doors of the Pickle Barrel Family Restaurant and pushes them open. The reassuring aroma of ketchup and fried food greets her, along with a blast of “Crocodile Rock”—all oldies, all the time. She spots the others at a big round table loaded with beer, nachos, burgers and wings. This is After-Three TV. She, one other woman and four men, all thirty-something, have been together for seven years. A combination of Second City alumni and renegades. When they first got together, they realized that each, at one time, had been the “bad” kid at school, the one required to remain “after three.”

They are crowded around the table with Shelly and two of their regular directors, who look as though they haven’t slept in a week, along with an even more haggard-looking script editor and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the Pretty Department—hair and makeup Überfrau—who just broke up with her boyfriend and doesn’t want to drink alone. Hands criss-cross the table, helping themselves to every plate but the one directly in front of them. At a distance of a table or two, the group looks perfectly at home up here in the land o’ malls. They don’t appear bohemian—even if Madeleine’s personal style tends toward urban-lesbian-warehouse chic. On the whole, they resemble nice generic white people; a Judeo-Christian cross-section of North Americana, somewhere between university student and middle management, and there, but for a small yet crucial quirk, went they all.

When you look closely, however, you can see that they all have the thing in their eye. The result of an accident or a gift. Perhaps God dropped each of them on the head before they were born. Light seems to reflect at an odd angle from their irises—the visible effect, possibly, of information that, having entered the brain obliquely, exits the eye at a corresponding tilt. Something, at some point, smote or stroked them. Each lives in genial terror of being found out and exposed as a fraud. Each is fuelled by a combustible blend of exuberance and self-loathing, informed by a mix of savvy and gullibility. None was cool in high school. Denizens of the great in-between of belonging and not belonging; dwellers in the cracks of sidewalks; stateless citizens of the world; strangers among us, familiar to all. Comedians. These are Madeleine’s people.

She starts toward them. She is not the only one to harbour a pool of perfectly black water at her core, still as onyx, unreflecting of any light at all, whence, if comedy occasionally bubbles up, it is either hysterically funny or just plain ill. Or right on the line—like Maurice.

Ron waves, Linda makes room, Tony asks if she got lost again; Madeleine adjusts her balls and says, in Tony’s voice, “I stopped on the way to drain the peg,” and they laugh. They have been meeting here for over a year and she still can’t find the place. Someone pours her a glass of draft.

This watering hole of choice is loud enough for them to be able to hear themselves think. Madeleine squeezes into the banquette and yields to a bone-crusher from Tony, who outweighs her two to one. Good for a laugh, better than hours of therapy. Tony could make a fortune. He almost has; so have some of the others at this table—like Madeleine, poised at the brink.

“You’re not finished that wing, eat that wing,” Maury says to her.

“I ate it.”

“You didn’t, look at all the meat you left, here, give.”

“Take.”

“I’ll show you how to eat a wing, you’re so obviously a goy, eating a wing like that.”

Early thirty-something existential moment of truth, when you first realize that not everyone you worked with in your twenties is a genius, that some people are “wild and crazy” and others simply have a substance problem, that the alluring sexy-sad people are just depressive, that depression is rage slowed down, that mania is grief speeded up. The first great winnowing.

Ron says to Linda, “The haunted house bit was funnier the first time—”

“It was shit.”

“No it was funny when you came on after I did the—”

“When you do that thing with the lamp, it screws up my—”

“No, you got a laugh!”

“That was not my laugh.”

“Shelly, she got a laugh, am I right?”

These are the last immortal days, racing toward that next great good place, Your Life. Last days of travelling light, before slowing,
turning and, with a hand shading the eyes, espying the moving van heaving into sight with all your stuff on it, finally being brought out of storage. Stuff you forgot you owned.

They drink and eat and talk all at once; the men talk the loudest because they have bigger larynxes and millennia of entitlement. The women tell them to shut up and they do, chastened like terriers but, like terriers, only briefly. No one ever resents Tony for hogging a scene because he somehow seems generous even when he’s pulling focus; everyone knows Ron is a genius but Tony is the only one who can really deep down stand him any more, and everyone is in love with Linda. She has a strange beauty and is severely gifted at coming in under the radar, but her brand of comedy is easily trampled by a Ron. Maury is solid, especially in drag, Howard is the Art Carney guy, Madeleine walks a tight rope between writing for the company and taking too much space with her low-staus characters that nonetheless command centre stage. The six of them love one another, are suspicious of one another, can’t stand one another—they are a company. They can anticipate who’s going to bite whom next and how hard.

“We should take Linda’s newlywed thing and—”

“We should make a sequel—”

“We should do the sequel
first
—”

Out of this come the sparks for next week’s show, charted by Shelly on a tablet of lined paper in the form of squiggles and diagrams. The boxes and arrows remind Madeleine of her father. There is method in this madness. A map for improv that will lead to a script that will remain fluid until past the final take. Writing is a hellish task, best snuck up on, whacked on the head, robbed and left for dead. Tonight, among the munchies, the beer and the noise, writing is what they are doing.

“Someone should write this down,” says Howard—someone always says this at some point.

“Madeleine, this one reeks of you,” says Ron—this is a devious way of sticking her with the actual writing. Writing. Opening a vein in your wrist with a spoon. No one wants to do it—

“He’s right, it stinks of you, McCarthy,” says Tony.

—the sit-down kind, the stuff you do alone, Marlborough-man writing.

“I’d rather apply this salsa to an open wound,” she replies.

Shelly writes on her tablet. “Madeleine … ‘Breaking News’.”

“How come, when it comes to writing stuff down,” Madeleine snarks, reaching for a napkin, “you’re all dylsexic?”

Howard says, “I’m a hemophiliac, if I slip while writing I could die.”

It sounds flippant, but it’s a delicate negotiation: Madeleine taking on the “dirty work,” while the others play down their need of her, keeping resentment in check. In turn, she plays down her ability and pays her dues, contributing to the ensemble to make up for her starturns. It may not be fair—Ron doesn’t pay dues—but the truth is Madeleine can write and, like many writers, will only write with a gun to her head so it’s just as well … plus, this way she gets to be a solo act in the bosom of an ensemble. The best of both worlds. She makes notes on the napkin, then reaches for another. Shelly knows better than to offer a sheet of paper. That would be too much like writing.

Shelly has three kids. Madeleine wishes at times that she were one of them. In a sense, though, she is. All six of them are.

On the way back to their cars in the parking lot of the silent studio, Shelly asks her, “What’ve you got for me?”

“A shameful craving to see you naked but for a clipboard.”

Shelly is like a hard-nosed version of dear old Miss Lang. There are really only about five people in the world.

“I’m not going to talk you into this, Madeleine.”

Shelly has brokered a U.S. network option on Madeleine’s idea for a one-hour special. A pilot for a series starring a real live out-of-the-closet gay comedian called Madeleine.
This could be my big bweak, doc
. So far she has written three words. The title:
Stark Raving Madeleine
.

“The others’ve got their own stuff going too, you know,” says Shelly.

“I know.”

It’s inevitable that the After-Threes will evolve careers in their own right. Some have already soloed, and hived off in various combinations for film, TV and live gigs in New York and L.A., making life backstage at After-Three tense, and life on stage even more of a feeding frenzy. Madeleine has wangled a coveted green card, thanks
to a recent stint on
Saturday Night Live
after Lorne Michaels saw her at Massey Hall in Toronto. She entered the bear pit for three adrenal weeks. She wrote and grew pale like the other crypt-dwelling writers. She lost ten pounds and Christine told her she had an eating disorder, but it was pure speed—the metabolic kind. She had an affair by accident—bold production assistant, empty office—but virtuously avoided the coke, the only recreational drug she has ever truly enjoyed. She told Christine about her stalwart abstinence but not, of course, about the headset-wearing drug-substitute who, in the scheme of things, mattered not at all. Really.