Comedy

13Nov06

It’s history now, a scenario lost in time. Fatboy in a smart restaurant. Black tie, tux, smoking a cigar, perusing the menu. His date, a huge winged insect in a ball gown and costume pearls, sips a cocktail through a plastic straw. A waiter waits.

I’m cold. The whole room is cold and everything I touch increases it. I pour myself a drink, knowing I shouldn’t. The glass is cold; the blood in my fingers freezes as I clasp it. I really shouldn’t. The warmth of alcohol is artificial, a dead heat. But I knock it back regardless and pour another. I need the inflammation.

How long will it take? How many glasses? If I can drink twenty lifetimes in one day, and if doing so produces enough heat to finish this, I’ll be happy. I’ll die a funny, laughing drunk.

My father calls it his inner ear. I stretch mine and try to listen but there’s nothing laughing in there. There’s just this vacant hum, an inactive drone like the buzz of a dead radio channel, an empty space waiting for the pop of time.

Time runs in grooves, little furrows with smooth, steeply sloping banks that you can’t climb. And it makes a faint popping sound on the hour like a soap bubble bursting in your ear as it runs out on you. It’s supposedly a man made construct but that can’t be true, since there’s never enough of it.

One day I’ll have time, time to do all the things I’ve never had time to do before. Such is belief. Then I realise that what I really mean by “having time” is “owning time”, controlling it. That’s the only way. To own time is to have the time to increase time and bend it, expand or shrink it to our own ends. It’s arrogant of me, I know — my wife leaves me for this very reason — but that’s the way I am and there’s nothing I can do about it.

Imagine, Fatboy, if time was dust. You could spend a whole year in a room just letting it collect and at the end of that year — on New Year’s Eve, say, the final second about to pop — you could gather up all that dust into a great pyramid and snort it up like cocaine through a rolled up banknote or a tube of typing paper. It’s like experiencing the whole of that year in one blinding, thirty second rush, a gargantuan high, three hundred and sixty five days in a shot glass. Or, if you choose, you can do it slowly, selectively, batch it up into daily doses each containing a minute of the year. Five hundred and twenty-five thousand and six hundred hits — enough for twenty lifetimes, twenty lives out of one year of heat, and the real thing too — nothing artificial there, that’s the real thing, dust heat.

If dust was time, if dust was life you could have it all, all the time in the world. You could live forever, you could be the king of time.

I get the terror. It drags me back to the lines at the top of my screen. All the coldness of the room, the streets, the world, concentrates in the pit of my stomach, a small, hard, freezing fist-sized ball of dread. I imagine flakes of ice forming across my eyes.

What if it isn’t time I lack? What if it isn’t heat I  need? What if I have all the time in the world and the most efficient heating system in the universe and I sit in my room for eternity and nothing happens? No more sketches or skits. No more jokes. No more ironic elbow nudges. What if my screen remains for all time bereft of strange but amusingly contextualised and cunningly placed lexical choices?

Tens of millions of sheets of yellowing, rotting, horribly disintegrating typing paper flutter and flounce around behind my eyes in an invisible breeze, each one horribly blank. I hear the sound of hollow laughter.

Once terror gets its hooks into a writer working to a deadline well, he might as well shoot himself. Soon he is overtaken by a total disbelief in his abilities. He can tell himself he’s a professional, that there’s no such thing as a block but he’ll never convince himself. He will refill his glass. He has to. There are no choices any more, he has to generate heat any way he can before the cold takes over completely. Before the ice expands.

Janitors and bailiffs have broken into writers’ apartments to collect unpaid rent only to find blocks of solid, unmeltable ice hunched hopelessly over broken and frosted-over keyboards.

That’s what terror does, that’s the way he gets you. He creeps up the back of your throat and into your mouth, finds his way under your tongue where the soft membrane is and snatches it up with his talons, bites into it, paralyses you. You have to drown him — it’s the only way — or freeze to death. So you drink. And that’s when the guilt starts.

My father never drinks. In twenty years not a mouthful passes his lips while he’s working.

“You can’t write good stuff you can’t stay sober,” he tells his son. He speaks like that, omitting conjunctions; you can never quite pin down the true sense of what he’s saying; the resultant ambiguity is the source of his humour.

I take a large swallow from the bottle. I can’t write good stuff (and) I can’t stay sober. But I have to write something, anything, anything to obliterate that white obscenity, to cover that loathsome nakedness. With my eyes crunched shut I move my fingers across the keys. Soon I’m pressing and punching mindlessly, shivering with cold, fear and guilt and lack of time and onrush of alcoholic meltdown.

Take my father — please!

What does he know? He’s dead; an old dead, corn-ball one liner re-shuffler. The world is different now. Everything is different now. Comedy is different, I’m different. My chest is bursting, huge breaths increasing body heat. I’m writing. don’t know what I’m writing or what the words mean or if they mean anything at all or even if they are actual words or just bunches of random characters and I really don’t give a damn. My head’s full of the clatter of the keys, faster and faster, echoing, fading and increasing, letters tripping and tumbling onto the screen laughing and squealing and chattering like kids out of school.

Querty and the Black and White Miracle Show.

There’s a cigarette unlit between my lips; indentations of teeth on the filter. I go to the window. Through the glass I can see nothing at first but the dark. Then, briefly, as it passes beneath a street light, a figure. A girl late night walking. My eyes try to follow her but once she passes through the light she becomes just a shadow, elongating and flattening out, expanding and contracting in the glare of a passing headlight like a reflection in a deviant mirror. In seconds she’s gone and I wonder what her name is. Why is she out at this hour on such a cold night? And is it my imagination or does she look up for a split second? Does she smile at me? Is she cheating on some man? Is she a prostitute?

Late night people have defects. They’re all up to no good. That’s what I want to write about: faults, imperfections, stories told in shadow, in fairground mirror reflection, all the fear washed out, the ugliness of deformity draped in ridiculous washes of colour.

I read aloud the few lines at the top of the screen: “Fatboy in a smart restaurant…” The characters dance on the page as I slur the passage over and over again. Tommy “Fatboy” Devine, the comeback kid. No other comic in the business is more terrified of new material and yet his insistence on total originality from his writers is pathological.

For a comedian, telling a new joke or performing a virgin routine is like sky diving. You never know if the parachute is going to open. Fatboy, now, well he doesn’t simply want to jump out of a plane; he wants to dive off the moon, on television, in a “totally original” one man show after five years in the weeds.

I open a clean screen and sit there a while just staring at it. Nothing happens. The bottle on my desk is as empty as the screen and I wish I wasn’t drinking. Maybe I should get some more. A few glasses and a wrap I could work through til midday. I could call the local cab stand and get them to send a car over to the 24/7 in Kilburn.

But I don’t. I’m already falling asleep, picking up the phone in a dream, saying hello to a sleepy voice on the other end. Then the phone disappears and I fall deeper. The room becomes a smart restaurant and I’m Fatboy Devine in black tie and Tux.

The waiter waits. The insect has finished her cocktail.

“OK,” I say, “I’ll have the gazpacho, leeks vinaigrette with shrimp, marinated zucchini, the orange mousse, a bottle of  Cotes du Rhone ’68…” the insect’s wings buzz and her pearls rattle “…and you’d better bring me a plate full of shit for my fly.”

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