The Funny Man (13 page)

The arc of the funny man’s story in the movie is this:

1. While pulling the robbery, the funny man is pressed into service to boost one of his compatriots up through a hole drilled in the bottom of the vault. In order to keep from yelping at the pain as his buddy steps and then jumps up and down on his head as he tries to get all of the way into the vault, the funny man shoves his hand in his mouth to stifle any noise.

2. Following the heist, where the semi-hapless gang gets away with the loot, but not without triggering an alarm and pursuit by the authorities, the funny man finds he cannot remove his hand from his mouth.

3. Hijinks ensue as each member of the gang in turn tries unsuccessfully to pull the funny man’s hand from his mouth while they flee in a conversion van, weaving this way and that to avoid the SWAT-team bullets. At one point, the funny man’s arm is (thanks to special effects involving prosthetics and camera angles) shoved into his mouth up to his elbow.

4. They eventually get away from the hottest pursuit, and as they travel across the country, heading toward Mexico, and presumably freedom to spend their stolen wealth, more hijinks as the funny man looks longingly at his buddies every time they eat or drink and he tries to cram a road cheeseburger past his knuckles into his mouth.

5. At some point, he drinks a Coke through his nose.

6. Ultimately, the van breaks down and the boys are forced to hole up for a few days in the canyon, waiting for repairs, where the funny man falls for the beautiful Mexican maid who cleans their cabin. She expresses sympathy and worry over the funny man and they talk for hours, sort of, since she speaks mostly Spanish and the funny man can only scribble notes on a pad.

7. Finally, the funny man approaches her at the canyon edge as she looks wistfully across the divide, a symbol for her separation from her family, and she thinks about how much she’d like to go home, back to Mexico, but only once she can earn enough money to support her and her eleven brothers and sisters. Desperate to finally speak to her, in a heroic act, the funny man yanks his hand from his mouth and declares, “I love you, Graziella, and I have three million dollars in the van,” after which they kiss passionately and weep tears of joy.

8. After which the rattlesnake uncoils and bites the funny man in the junk.

9. Because the movie is PG-13, they will only imply that, thinking quickly, Graziella sucks the poison from the wound.

10. With her mouth.

11. Near his penis. (Get it?)

12. The rest of the movie, they periodically cut to shots of the funny man and Graziella in the back of the van, she holding a bag of ice over his comically swollen crotch as she leans in to kiss him on the cheek.

She was beautiful, and her mouth was eminently kissable, but he still could not manage to do the act with anything approaching passionate fervor no matter how many times he tried, which was many. He even imagined he was kissing his wife, which did not help. Ultimately, the director gave up trying to get a convincing kiss and ordered a take where the special effects guy triggered the snake into the funny man’s crotch before the kiss could be consummated, which everyone agreed was funnier anyway.

And so the production lurched eastward, each state line confirming what the funny man suspected from the initial table read, that the movie was terrible, that his first filmed role would be in a terrible, terrible movie, the kind of movie where everyone wonders how such a movie was conceived, let alone completed and then released. In his previous civilian life, the funny man would go to these sorts of movies and wonder this very thing: “How could this happen? How could they have turned out such a steaming heap of shit?” And now he knew, except there was still no explanation for it. It was just one of those things that happens.

The latest scene in front of the rat-infested drive-in has ceased to make any sense to the funny man. If the love interest is present, it must belong close to the end, but it is not in any script that he’s seen. He has no idea where it fits in the movie and is pretty sure it doesn’t matter anyway. The director shouts the dialogue to him off camera bit by bit, different words each take, and the funny man has found it harder and harder to stay conscious, and after a take where the funny man stands and stares blankly for a full forty-five seconds the director shouts, “Cut, we can use that!” and walks off, clapping his hands together like a cheerleader trying to psych up the team. The love interest wanders back to her chair and recommences her word search.

The funny man had recently called his agent and manager and spent a lot of long-distance roaming minutes telling them how absolutely terrible the movie is. They tried to convince him that sometimes there are miracles in the cutting room, that a skilled editor can weave something passable out of just about anything, but the funny man told them that no one can make a fine tapestry out of rotting garbage, out of entrails, out of fetid, worthless crap. The funny man tried to express to his agent and manager that he thought he was probably not going to make it through the entire shoot, that he was willing to do something crazy to get booted off the film if necessary.

This is when the funny man’s manager explained some parts of the contract to him that the funny man hadn’t bothered reading, things like he was not only obligated to finish the movie or risk his salary plus unspecified “penalties,” but he was also to be available for up to three weeks of promotional responsibilities, one of which may be outside of the continental United States, at times and places to be determined by the producers.

“What you’re saying,” the funny man said, “is that not only do I have to finish this movie, I have to go talk about how good it is afterwards?”

“Yes,” the funny man’s manager replied.

“You’re fired.”

S
INCE HE DISCOVERED
there’s no escape, all the funny man can think about is escaping. He must disappear like people in the witness protection program. If they can’t find him, they can’t make him do these things. He will go somewhere and send for his family, and they will live quietly on the considerable money he has already earned. He will take a job with parks and recreation where his job is to drive a modified golf cart going from trash can to trash can, changing out the bags. He will wear heavy work gloves and a small circular name patch on his uniform. Sometimes the bags will leak and spill on the funny man’s overalls, but he will accept this as simply part of the deal, his small sacrifice for keeping the public spaces clean. It is a life of sacrifice he envisions for himself, a life of service.

He gets out of his assigned seat and starts walking toward the road, the first steps toward his new life. The sound of the director and cinematographer arguing fades, replaced with the whiz and rumble of traffic. The funny man stands, watching the cars and trucks zoom by, then closes his eyes, raises his hand, and extends his thumb. Nothing happens other than the funny man swaying gently on his feet until he hears a car slow and pull over, tires crunching the gravel on the side of the road. The passenger-side window goes down. The funny man opens his eyes and sees a middle-aged man with a shitty comb-over leaning across the seat. He can smell the alcohol of the man’s aftershave waft toward him.

“Hey,” the man says. “I know you.”

S
O BECAUSE HE
cannot escape, he resolves to take as many others down as he can. But even this plan is quickly thwarted when at the outdoors store he asks to buy a gun, but because of the meddling federal government, they will only sell him something that shoots paint, so he buys the one that the clerk claims has the greatest stopping power.

“What will it stop?” the funny man asks. It is shaped like an assault rifle and sits heavy in his hand, the metal dull and unreflective. It feels real except for the giant plastic bin for the paintballs jutting from the top.

The clerk scratches his chin. “Guess I’ve seen it put down a woodchuck, or maybe a grackle, starling, that kind of thing.”

“Not a person?”

“No sir, can’t kill a person with that weapon. It’s for sport, you know? Competition? It’s got professional leagues and everything. Could take an eye out, maybe, which is why we recommend protection.” The clerk holds up a face mask that looks like a cross between something a hockey goalie and a snowmobiler might wear. The funny man tries it on and looks at himself in a mirror and sees that he is scary and unrecognizable.

The clerk looks at the funny man more closely. “Do I know you?”

“Nobody knows me.”

“That some kind of riddle?”

“Just the truth.” The funny man points the paint gun down the aisle and sights some of the other customers and mimes pulling the trigger.

“Bang, bang, bang,” he says.

“So you know,” the clerk says, “if’n that was a real weapon, I’m not sure I’d sell it to you, given your look and behavior and all.”

“But it isn’t real, right?”

“Right.”

“So, if I said that I’ll take all of it, you wouldn’t stop me,” the funny man says.

“Nope. I’d ask how many rounds you need?”

“How many you got?”

F
OR ABOUT NINETY
seconds, the funny man has never had more fun. The eyes of the rats glow red in the funny man’s headlamp (also purchased at the outdoors store) and as they turn to face him, he unleashes a stream of automatic paintball fire their way. They scatter throughout the abandoned diner, diving over booths and under tables, their hard nails scrabbling along the front counter. For the most part they’re far too quick for the funny man to hit, but once or twice he hears a squeal as one of the pellets connects. After the initial burst he stands still and soon the squealing stops as the rats regroup and return to the open. There must be hundreds, maybe even thousands, little pairs of devil eyes flashing wherever he turns.

The gun has an impressive rate of fire and during his second assault he quickly learns that if he leads the scurrying rodents enough, he can usually score at least a glancing blow. His breath is hot under the mask and he hears someone laughing and then realizes he is the one who is laughing in a borderline-crazy way. The funny man knows he’s not crazy, not really, because if he was really crazy he wouldn’t think about being crazy. He would simply be crazy. Still, he feels crazy, or maybe he feels like what it might feel like to be crazy without actually being crazy.

As the first load of pellets drains out of the bin, the funny man reaches for the spare to his side and clicks the ammo into place, but the pause has already leaked much of the pleasure of the adventure out of him. The mask has delayed the smell, but now it oozes around the gaps, an aggressive musk of decay that is so bad he must sniff more deeply to confirm how truly bad it smells. As he turns his head to survey the room, the headlight illuminates a handful of rat near-corpses. Some of them have clearly shattered spines, dragging their useless hind parts behind them as they go for cover. Others lay on their sides, gasping, trickles of rat blood flowing from their noses. None of their unscathed compadres appear willing to lend assistance, which figures. One stares at the funny man, its rat nose twitching, an eye replaced by blue paint that turns purple in the light of the funny man’s halogen lamp. The funny man has an urge to apologize, but that seems really crazy because they’re fucking rats after all.

A group of them have massed near the door and as the funny man heads their way, rather than dispersing they seem to grow tighter, more of them joining the mass. It looks like they are pulsing. They appear to now realize that they have the funny man outnumbered big-time, that if this is the Alamo, they are the Mexican part of the equation. The funny man fires a burst of paintballs into the ceiling.

“Beat it! I don’t want to hurt you. Not any more than I already have anyway.”

The rats stand strong, their numbers increasing by the moment. The funny man levels the gun and fires another burst just above their heads. This separates them momentarily, but in short order they are re-massed. They appear to be stacking on top of each other, a rat pyramid, growing in height, as tall as the funny man, taller even.

“So that’s how it’s going to be, huh?”

The funny man fires directly into the crowd and because they are so densely packed, most of the pellets strike home. Still, the larger population does not budge and in fact, appears to start advancing on the funny man, climbing over each other in their eagerness. He shakes the gun and the container rattles with the final handful of ammunition. Out of options, he turns and sprints away from the rats toward the front window. Earlier in the filming, during the bank heist sequence, he saw a stuntman do what he’s about to do and after watching the scene, the funny man asked him how he did it, and the stuntman replied, “There’s no particular technique or anything. The key is that you’ve just got to commit.” The funny man accelerates and as he approaches the window he crosses his arms in front of his face and leaps and the window shatters and he is outside. The stuntman did not lie. After a barrel roll across the graveled parking lot, the funny man is on his feet and sprinting toward the motel, assuming the rats are in pursuit.

W
HEN HE RETURNS
to his room at the motel reserved for cast and crew, he opens the door to find his love interest stretched across the bed. She wears short shorts and lays on her stomach facing the television, the omnipresent word search in front of her. She lightly chews the butt end of her pen. She has cranked down the thermostat on the wall-unit air conditioner and the funny man can feel the sweat evaporate from the back of his neck. She looks up at the funny man framed in the doorway and makes no note of the mask and goggles pushed up on his forehead and the empty paintball gun dangling at his side. She is beyond incurious, a blank slate. The funny man thinks that he would actually like to climb inside her brain for awhile, just to, you know, have room to stretch out and relax.

The funny man comes fully inside and leans back against the door. He is tired and sweaty and his clothes are splattered with paint and rat blood. He has come through his window-smashing leap miraculously unscathed except for a slight twinge in his back. The rats have not followed him back to his room.