The Funny Man (26 page)
Though years of Little League established that he is terrible at it, the funny man loves baseball. He puts on a padded batting helmet and stands in the cage. He dials up Clemens and the big man seems to be looming over him from sixty feet, six inches away. Every seven seconds the virtual Clemens rocks into his full windup and throws. The pitches seem fast as bullets and the funny man swings comically late at every one of them. He dials the speed down to Maddux but still can’t even manage a foul tip. Each cut with the bat is vicious, all of his strength behind it and soon he is winded and staggers out of the cage, leaning on the bat for support. Maybe it’s not as cool as he initially figured.
“Let me show you how it’s done,” the morning-show host says, grabbing up the helmet and bat. In the cage, while the pitches continue to whistle past, he strips down to a tank-style undershirt, revealing a physique the funny man wouldn’t mind for himself. Gripping the bat, he begins lacing line drives back at the screen, the crack of bat against ball like gunshots.
“Whoa,” the funny man says.
The morning-show host grins and drops the bat. “That’s nothing, watch this.” He takes a series of in-and-out deep breaths that remind the funny man of Lamaze class before standing astride home plate and taking 95 mph of hard cheese right in the stomach.
“Haaaahhhhhhhh!” the morning-show host screams. The next pitch drills him in the same spot. “Haaaaahhhhhhhh!” For the next one, he takes off the helmet and squats down and points his face at Clemens. The ball impacts square on the morning-show host’s award-winning nose and ricochets off his face as if he was protected by a force field. He flicks the machine off, steps out and drains the rest of his beer in three long pulls.
“Holy shit,” the funny man says. “How’d you do that?” He had had some beers and some pills before the interview, of course, so maybe he wasn’t fully facultied, but he was not hallucinating. This was not elephants playing jazz through their trumpets, surely not. “Learned it at a magical place, my friend. If you put mind over matter, then nothing matters.”
The funny man had been feeling powerful, but now he feels weak and puny next to this specimen. This is unacceptable. “Let me try,” they funny man says.
“I don’t know, man, it’s not as easy as I make it look,” the morning-show host replies.
But the funny man isn’t listening. He is tugging on his beer and then getting in the cage and cranking up the machine. He chooses Bob Gibson from the menu. Gibson retired before the advent of radar guns, but it is widely held that he threw the hardest ball in the history of baseball. The pitches whiz by the funny man and smack the tarpaulin backstop with menacing force, thunderclaps. The funny man tries breathing just like the morning-show host and counts to three in his head and straddles the plate.
The pitch from virtual Bob Gibson is a direct hit.
To the funny man’s balls.
Clemens was a notoriously high ball pitcher, but Gibson, you see, liked to work low in the zone.
Upon impact, the alcohol and anything else that was with it in the funny man’s stomach spews forth, nailing the screen a full sixty feet, six inches away. The funny man crumples to the ground even as Gibson goes into another windup. The pitches continue to zip by, just over his head, pinning him down like mortar fire, not that he could’ve gotten up anyway because he has no feeling in any of his extremities.
The funny man’s organs seem to think that a small nuclear device has been detonated in his abdomen and are busy banging into each other, rearranging themselves in the wrong spots, pancreas and spleen swapped, duodenum wondering if it’s time to retire. Breathing is out of the question, which in combination with his instantly accelerated heart rate puts him in a genuinely dangerous medical situation. For several seconds the adrenaline keeps the pain away, but once it fully floods this system, all that is left is the ache. The funny man moans like a ghost.
The morning-show host is laughing uncontrollably because the funny man has just executed the oldest and most enduring comedy routine there is. Shakespeare has no fewer than forty-nine direct or indirect references to characters getting “struck in his majesty’s kingdom.” When archeologists first uncovered the storyglyphs in the ancient pyramids they discovered drawings of one man being kicked in the balls underneath those little skirts dudes wore back then, while others stood on laughing. There are cave etchings where a hunter-gatherer is shown getting a wayward spear to the balls. Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges,
America’s Funniest Home Videos
. It’s funny because it’s true. It’s true because it’s funny.
Getting it together, the morning-show host enters the cage and turns the pitching machine off and hands the funny man a fresh, cold beer. “Here, dude, use this.”
The funny man cradles the beer to his testicles and this helps some. He can now conceive that this is not necessarily death that has come to visit him. Very close to death for the second time, recently, but not death. There have been no visits from spirits this time, though, just the ache, the ache, the ache.
After ten or so minutes he is actually able to stand, albeit hunched like a dowager, and gimp over and collapse against a column in the morning-show host’s living room. The beer is warm now and he drinks it.
Every time the morning-show host looks at the funny man, he cracks up into a fresh round of giggles. He waves his hand in apology. “Sorry, sorry, dude, honestly, I’m sorry,” but he just can’t keep it together. Ultimately he is overcome with hiccups and the funny man smells the vaporized beer fill the room.
“Holy shit, dude,” the morning-show host says. “You are one funny mofo. I can’t wait to see that movie.”
I
AM ENJOYING
my new sense of purpose. I sleep very little, but mornings I wake completely alert. I’ve been concentrating on my core with the exercises, abdominals, obliques, that plus the back and shoulders, lats/delts. Those are going to be key if I’m to make it. In the mirror, I see my shape changing, firming up, a jawline forming. The waistband of my boxers no longer bites into my belly flab. I’ve felt better only once in my life.
After exercising and before getting ready for court I make my lists and one of the items is to write a letter of apology to Barry. Earlier on in the trial he said how what people are looking for with me is closure, some way to shut the book on me and my sorry story forever. I’ve been holding them hostage, he said. Now, when I do what I am going to do, I will be denying that experience. There will be no closure. I will leave only mystery behind. (But maybe they will enjoy the mystery, who knows?) He also will not have his chance to take his “not guilty by reason of celebrity” defense to the Supreme Court. I imagine without a client that there is no actual case.
W
HEN YOU CROSS
into the White Hot Center, it is through an entryway that serves as a kind of hall of fame, a nearly endless series of head shots framed and encased under Lucite. They reach floor-to-ceiling and the ceiling is more than twenty feet high. Each is illuminated by its own individual light and collectively, it makes it look like the room is being lit by the celebrities themselves.
Chet and Darrell walked on either side of me, relaxed, nodding greetings to others that we passed. I considered the possibility that I was dead. I tried to recall the final events before the arrival of Chet and Darrell at my apartment, but things were vague.
I remembered nothing from the trip, but as I was awakened, I could tell that we were at sea on a small craft, and as we approached the dock, it was apparent that we had arrived at some sort of island. The weather was warm, dry. The breeze on the boat felt good on my face. It was dusk, suggesting we’d been traveling almost a full day, but for all I knew it could have been multiple days. In the dying light I could see white sand beaches with palm trees behind them.
Chet sat across from me on the boat as we bobbed toward the dock.
“Why do I feel so good?” I said. I really did. For the first time since I could remember my brain felt like it was the right size and situated where it belonged. The purple scrim that fogged the edges of my vision for so long had lifted. Everything was crisp and clear. When I breathed deeply my lungs didn’t hurt. I could barely even tell I was breathing. Everything felt effortless. I smelled myself and came away with lilacs. “What did you do?” I said.
“We cured your addiction, to those pills anyway.”
“Just like that?” I replied.
Chet nodded. “That’s a fairly easy thing, just a matter of readjusting the old brain chemistry, tuning it to the right frequencies. We’re very good at that, but then, we’re very good at everything.” The boat bumped against the dock and Chet leapt easily ashore and secured it to the pier with a pristine white rope. He offered me his hand and hauled me behind him. Darrel was waiting for us.
A
SHORT WALK
up the dock escorted by Chet and Darrell and a ten-minute ride in a golf cart with a perfectly silent motor and we’d arrived at the main building. It looked like a cross between Jefferson’s Monticello and a beach resort country club, all pillars and white paint with a large looming dome, a bronze phoenix sculpture affixed at the peak.
I of course recognized every picture in the hall, but I paused in front of one of them. “That’s Mitch Laver,” I said.
“Indeed, sir,” Chet replied. “Cohost of
Hello U.S.A.
, the number-one morning show in America.”
“He was here?”
“Indeed again. One of our greatest successes. When he arrived he was on the weekend shift talking up charity curling matches to cure cleft palate and screwing chicks with cellulite. Now, well, I think you know all about him.”
An almost imperceptible pressure at my elbow and Chet had me moving along as he filled me in on the initial details. “There will be a greeting and welcome from Mr. Bob after which I’ll show you to your room where dinner will be waiting. After that, you’ll want to catch some sleep because the sessions start first thing in the morning. There will be others there, but we recommend not interacting or conversing in any way at this time. It upsets Mr. Bob, and besides, there will be plenty of opportunity for socializing later when you are ready and it is productive.”
Clearing the hallway, Chet deposited me in a neoclassical rotunda, every square inch of which seemed to be fashioned from marble. Up close I could see the small fissures mapping the walls. This shit was old. A small platform raised four feet or so off the ground stood in the middle surrounded by people just like me, Q-ratings off the charts, no introductions necessary. Chet took a glass goblet of sparkling golden liquid from a tray offered by a blue tracksuited waiter with the phoenix insignia I’d seen on the card on his breast and handed it to me. “Welcome,” Chet said. His face was simultaneously beautiful and handsome. “I’ll see you after Mr. Bob’s remarks.”
None of the assembled spoke to each other, apparently having been similarly admonished by their handlers. We took shy sips from our goblets and maybe shared the barest of nods. Protocol among the famous is always a little bizarre anyway, since introductions are redundant when the mere existence of your face announces your identity. In general, we cover by acting like old friends—two-handed handshakes, cheek kissing, backslapping, you old so-and-so-ing regardless of whether or not we’ve ever met. But waiting for Mr. Bob, we acted like seventh-graders at a social.
We did not have long to wait. A man in a tracksuit identical to the waiters, only in the brightest white imaginable and with the phoenix insignia in full stitched relief on the back like something from a motorcycle gang, made his way forward and I must have blinked or looked away because I could’ve sworn he floated to the top of the platform and hovered for a moment before settling down. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, trim, medium build, with a long, hawkish nose, balding save for an orbit of hair reaching around the back of his head extending ear to ear. His voice was strong, commanding, but also calming.
“Welcome,” he said, “to the White Hot Center. I am your host, Mr. Bob.” He took a moment to rotate sixty degrees, making brief eye contact with everyone in his field of vision.
“It is popular to call this sort of enterprise a ‘retreat.’” He made air quotes around the word and wrinkled his long nose. “But this is not a helpful word,
retreat
. Under every circumstance to retreat is to give in. We hear it all the time that it is important to retreat and recharge, but this is a mistaken notion propagated by losers. While you are at the White Hot Center you are not at a retreat, you are at an ‘advance.’ If you retreat, to get back to where you were, you must cover previously traversed ground. What is the point of this? You have worked hard to march over that ground and there will be no re-marching. We are here to help you march forward to what is next, not to go backwards to what was and what has been.” He turned another ninety degrees and made eye contact with a different portion of the attendees.
“We do this,” he said, “by teaching you a very simple, very ancient, very elemental concept that we call‘the Law of Desire.’” More air quotes. “Human beings want things. It is really just this simple. We are human and because we are human we want things. A certain musical artist, whose picture you may have seen in our entryway, famously said, ‘You can’t always get what you want,’ but we showed him differently, didn’t we? Before visiting us, one would have thought it wasn’t possible for a sixty-seven-year-old man to have a physique as lean as a teenager and also continue to rock people’s faces off with songs that are more than forty years old, but guess what? It can happen. It happens by focusing on what is important, and what is important is the wanting. Only when the wanting becomes strong enough, shall we get what we want. When people do not succeed, it is a failure of desire, and nothing else. The only limits on the Law of Desire are physics, but even so, physics are not completely understood, which is to say, there are many things you want that people will say are impossible, meaning truly impossible, not merely difficult, and yet, if you put into practice what we teach you, you
will
achieve them.”