Chapter 23

CHAPTER 23

Maddy waits at the foot of Max’s futon mattress, the only sliver of floor space in his tiny bedroom where a person can stand, arms crossed, hopeful for encouraging feedback. Max is her audience. He’s sitting on the futon, barefoot in jeans and a black T-shirt, his back against a pillow and the wall, inhaling a hit off his vape pen.

His room in the three-bedroom Brooklyn apartment he shares with two other guys is spare, nothing on the walls, no shades or curtains on the windows, plain navy-blue sheets and a Mexican blanket on the unmade bed. There’s a dried-up potted plant way past any possibility of reviving on his dresser. Every time she’s here, she wonders where he got it, if he bought it or someone gave it to him, and if he’ll ever throw it out. She never asks. His bedside table is a leaning tower of empty pizza boxes. It looks as if he’s just moved in and hasn’t had the chance to unpack yet, but he’s lived here for two years. It’s the room of someone who doesn’t spend much time at home and doesn’t intend to stay long.

It’s also the bedroom of someone with no money. Unlike Maddy, who still has to pay to play, Max earns actual cash as a comedian, but he’s not making bank. She figures he makes about $200 a week. By day, he’s an Uber driver, which she supposes could earn enough to pay the bills.

But something about his poor-struggling-comedian shtick doesn’t quite add up. For instance, he doesn’t drive for Uber every day. Sometimes he doesn’t roll out of bed until noon, and he’s always off at three so he can hang out with her. While she’s flattered that he would sacrifice earning money to spend time together, she’s also registered that he can afford to make that decision. He hustles hard for his comedy, but there’s not a whiff of worry on him over paying rent or how long it might take for him to “make it.”

She registers the latest iPhone in his hand, his $400 sneakers on the floor. Someone’s bankrolling him, most likely his parents. He’s four years older than she is, which seems too old to still be financially dependent on Mommy and Daddy, but who is she to judge? It’s not like she’s ever paid rent anywhere.

“I like the emotional-age premise,” says Max. “You’re not going to win over the guys—”

“You know I don’t care about the guys.”

“Then I’ll say it again. You risk losing half your audience. More,” he adds. “Cuz the ladies won’t laugh if their dates don’t.”

He’s right. Maddy wouldn’t believe it if she hadn’t seen it herself over and over. Women who come to the clubs with boyfriends or husbands don’t even crack a smile unless the guys they’re with are already laughing out loud. It doesn’t matter if they’re on a first date or celebrating twenty-five years of marriage. The women wait and see. Men give the permission to laugh.

“I still don’t care.”

She’s an infant in the comedy scene, but she’s already seasoned enough to know that the majority of guys aren’t interested in laughing at a female comic no matter what she says. Laughter is a loss of control, and most guys are reluctant if not entirely unwilling to relinquish that kind of power to a girl. So why would she tailor her material to try to win the approval of the dudes? That’s a mountain with no apex, not worth the climb. She’ll mind her manners with thank you and I’m sorry and her truth clamped behind the cage of a sweet smile to make men comfortable out in the real world, but when it’s her spotlight on the comedy club stage, that’s her world now, and she’s going to say whatever the fuck she wants.

“You’re getting better.”

“Thanks. I’m definitely more confident.”

So far, every stint onstage for the past month has been a five-minute roller-coaster ride of I suck, I’m great, I suck . That kind of rapid up and down, ricocheting from self-loathing to self-esteem and back, is enough to make any sane person crazy. She would know . But she hasn’t backed down, and lately, she’s been feeling consistently pretty good.

“That’s really important. It puts your audience at ease.”

She writes every day at Starbucks for an hour after her shift ends at two. She’s on notebook #14. Then she meets Max at his apartment most afternoons for an hour or two. They talk comedy and watch it. Relishing his role as her older, more experienced mentor, Max always picks who they watch, and he’s obsessed with the seventies, so it’s usually Richard Pryor, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Steve Martin. They also riff off each other, practice their material, write, smoke weed, and fuck.

She does five or six open mics a week, sometimes two a night, spending all her tip money and more for five minutes of stage time, bombing all over the city, but less and less so lately. She’s getting better. And no matter how hard she bombs, there is always one laugh that salvages the effort and keeps her hooked, addicted to that elusive, ecstatic high of surprising a reluctant person into cracking up. One laugh is all she needs to keep going.

Tonight, assuming she can draw in ten strangers, she’s doing her first bringer show. Open mics are super early, usually five o’clock, four at Zen Comedy in Brooklyn. It’s still daylight outside, which doesn’t draw anyone other than aspiring comics like her into the clubs. But the bringer shows are at seven, and both the slightly later time and the nature of the invitation bring actual civilians into the audience.

Instead of paying for stage time, she has to bark for it. Like the guy who lured her into her first comedy club last November, she has to stand out on the sidewalk and ask anyone who happens by, Hey, you wanna see a live comedy show tonight? She wishes she could do this disguised in a costume like one of the characters in Times Square, dressed as Spider-Man or Elsa. The thought of harassing strangers, begging them to come watch her perform, makes her cringe. But if she can coax in ten people who all agree to buy two drinks, she will get eight minutes of real stage time. Totally worth it.

Eight is a giant stretch for her at the moment. It might not seem like much, but those three additional minutes need about ten more laughs to work. If the audience is hot, she thinks she’ll maybe get two. Given the embryonic state of her new material, it’s going to be rough, but she summons Simone’s attitude. Do it before you’re ready.

She’s assembled her eight-minute set like an Oreo. The familiar material from her well-practiced five-minute set is the cookie and will go first and last. Her new, untried material will be the creamy white stuff in the middle. So even if the middle sucks, people will leave with a mouthful of something tasty.

“But who are these forty-year-old guys you’re hooking up with?” asks Max.

“Gross, I’m not. It’s just a bit.”

“You need to make it really about you, Banks. That’s where the buried treasure is. That’s how you go from good to great. Reveal you who are to the world, be vulnerable and honest with the audience, and they’ll love you.”

He talks as if he’s Eddie fucking Murphy, but she doesn’t mind. She loves learning from him. He’s taught her how to tighten her punches and make them stronger, how to create callbacks that feel like moments of poetry. He’s encouraged her to let go of material that doesn’t work and helped her to further develop what does.

But this piece of advice is a pill she can’t bring herself to swallow. If she reveals who she really is to Max, she’s certain he’ll ghost her. Look at how Adam reacted. When bipolar disorder turned her life into a dumpster fire, and she was waiting for the medications to douse the flames, Adam was first out of the burning building. She can’t even reveal who she really is to her own grandmother.

Nothing is off-limits onstage, except for who she really is. She’s bipolar. And while she doesn’t care about losing the men in the audience, she doesn’t want to lose Max.

“Do it one more time.”

“I gotta go. I won’t even have a set to bomb if I can’t bring ten people in.”

“You’ll get ’em. Simone and I are coming, so you only need eight. And I’ll stand out there and help.”

She smiles, touched and grateful, adoring him more than she did eight minutes ago.

“Okay—”

“But take your clothes off first.”

He hits his vape pen and exhales a cloud of smoke.

“Ha ha, very funny.”

“I’m serious.”

“You want me to do my set naked?”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Think about it. If you can do your set confident while totally physically vulnerable, then you’re going to be bulletproof onstage.”

The open mic community is a small world, populated with the same cast of aspiring new comedians—Reggie, Bobby V., Matt, Brad, Ishaan. Zoe Beton is the only other female comic in her orbit. Whenever Maddy is onstage, she can feel all the dudes looking at her tits, judging her booty, their attention diverted away from what she’s saying, evaluating whether they’d like to fuck her. She’s pocketed the humiliating possibility that she has in fact already fucked one or more of them during her manic episode in the fall. She knows she hooked up with a number of guys in comedy clubs when she was manic back in November, but other than Max, she can’t for the life of her remember how many or who.

She’s taken to wearing more and more clothing onstage to hide her body from them, jackets zipped up over crewneck sweaters or sweatshirts that cover her ass, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She could stand up there dressed in a white NASA astronaut onesie and helmet, and those testosterone-poisoned chuckleheads would probably just use it and fantasize about having sex in space.

“Plus I’ll enjoy it,” says Max, smiling, his long legs outstretched and crossed at the ankles as he takes another hit from his vape pen. “So really, it’s a win-win.”

She sighs in dramatic acquiescence and pulls her shirt over her head. She takes everything off but the bracelets on her arms. She clears her throat and begins her eight minutes. Her eyes glued to Max’s face, she delivers the first punch line. She follows his eyes as they roam her boobs and soft belly, her thick thighs and bare feet. He looks at her naked flesh and thinks he’s seeing all of her, but he’s oblivious to the vulnerability that lies beneath.