Chapter 35

CHAPTER 35

Maddy’s onstage, doing a five-minute open mic at LOL Comedy, and she’s bombing hard. Again. She’s only about a minute in, and no one has laughed, not one murmured chuckle. And because she led with the strongest of her new material, she knows no one will.

During the setup of her second joke, someone sneezed. Distracted and not opposed to crowd work, she acknowledged it with a Bless you . The sneezer in the darkness declined to respond. And then she totally forgot her punch line.

She looks down at Zoe and Reggie, both seated up front, hoping for a crumb of encouragement, a nod, some sign of life. Instead, their arms are folded, their heads pointed down, their body language reading too embarrassed for her to make eye contact. The rest of the club is in total darkness, and she’s grateful that she can’t see any other human eyes avoiding hers.

With four infinite more minutes to go, she holds her ground and continues, propelled by some perversely self-righteous credo to finish what she started, knowing she can’t recover, staggering through her material in a flop sweat, short of breath, dizzy with self-hatred, dying. She’s surprised she’s not more immune to the horrors of bombing, especially as this has been her singular experience since returning to open mics a few weeks ago.

Maybe she should’ve dusted off one of her old sets and eased back onto the stage with bits that already work. But she lost all that time, all that momentum, this summer and feels hurried to get back to where she was in the spring, when she was cranking out new material and crushing it. She’s trying to climb that mountain again, but it’s as if she’s missed a crucial cairn and wandered off the path, lost and alone in the woods.

The sad part is, she was convinced her set was ready. She’s like those people who audition to be a contestant on a singing reality TV show, confident they’ll be chosen and a front runner to win, when in fact, they are distressingly tone-deaf. If her set were a song, she’s totally pitchy and performing off-key. She would not get a golden ticket to Hollywood. But this is comedy, and for better or worse, getting up onstage and dying in public is the only way to know what doesn’t work. Stand-up comics are uncommonly tough or masochistic or probably both to endure the unique brutality of this punishing learning curve.

When she’s finally done, she returns the mic to the stand and presses STOP RECORDING on her phone. There’s a reluctant but obligatory flicker of limp applause, and then she bolts off the stage amid excruciating silence. Unable to stomach the thought of staying for the rest of the hour, she grabs her backpack from the chair she’d been sitting in without breaking stride and leaves the room.

As the door shuts behind her, she exhales. She survived. Some nights, most lately, that’s the best she can hope for.

She takes a seat on a stool at the bar and orders a club soda with lime, deciding that she needs a minute before taking the subway back to her dorm. She might look okay, but she feels beat up, and she knows from experience that it’s going to take a few hours before she’s fully recovered. It’s as if she spent the past five minutes repeatedly stepping in dog poop. She can swipe her shoes on the grass until they look clean, but she’s going to smell like shit for a while.

Yet she’s confident she will feel okay in a bit. After her first few bombs at the beginning of the month, she held her breath, waiting to hear depression’s footsteps at her door. Does feeling bad mean she’s depressed? Does feeling good mean she’s manic? Is any intense emotion a prelude to her next hospitalization? But depression never came. And so even though she feels pretty rotten right now, it also feels pretty damn good to know that what she’s feeling is temporary, safe, and normal.

She’ll go back to her dorm room, take a hot shower, eat dinner, take her evening meds, fill out her daily mood app, and study for her theology exam. And then, before bed, she’ll put in her AirPods and listen to the recording of this disaster on her phone, performing a forensic autopsy on her five minutes, trying to determine the multiple causes of death. As she’s sipping her club soda through a straw while imagining the rest of the evening before her, a text comes in from her mother.

M

MOM

I’m just checking in. I looked to see where you are but it says No Location Found. ?

Maddy sighs. Even though she has no grounds for argument about it, she’s frustrated with being policed, her whereabouts constantly tracked. And so she still has to turn her location sharing off whenever she goes to the comedy clubs.

M

MADDY

I’m in the basement of the library. Maybe it’s a dead zone?

She always tries to reply to her mother’s texts immediately, but when it comes to revealing where she is, when she’s at a comedy club, going dark and lying about it is the only way. Her mother and Phil thought it was too soon for Maddy to go back to school, but Maddy insisted that she was ready and staying home with no purpose was counterproductive to her mental health. Dr. Weaver agreed that it was important for Maddy to resume living her life and felt that she was stable enough. So her mother and Phil reluctantly relented and allowed Maddy to return to NYU, but her mother in particular is not a fan of this decision. It’s almost as if she’s looking for any reason to blow the whistle, throw a red flag, and pull Maddy from the game.

Her phone pings again. She assumes it’s another text from her mother, but this time it’s from her new roommate, Stella.

S

STELLA

Hey Maddy! Party at Maya’s

Room 504

Going over now

Come!

Maddy doesn’t reply. As she looks up from her phone, she sees Max walking into the bar from the comedy room, beer bottle in hand. She hasn’t been in touch with him since she went to Nashville and he went on tour. He texted her a few times over the summer, but she never responded. He’s walking straight toward her. Oh dear God.

“Hey, Banks,” he says as he sits on the stool next to her.

“Hey, I didn’t see you in there.”

“I saw you.”

“Yeah, that was a painful death,” she says.

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

“I’m so embarrassed. That was awful.”

“It needs some work.”

“How was the tour?” she asks, pivoting the conversation away from her humiliation.

“Good. Really good. We recorded the night we did UVM. It’s posted to YouTube. You should check it out.”

“Cool, I will.”

“And it’s led to some other good shit. I opened for Dan Dorfman at Mohegan Sun in August.”

“Wow, that’s great,” she says, her teeth clenching in a hard smile.

She stabs the lime at the bottom of her glass repeatedly with her straw, tearing at its translucent green flesh. Dan Dorfman is a comedy legend.

“So,” he says, cocking his head to the side. “I texted you a bunch of times.”

“I know.”

“I get that you were mad at me, but no one’s seen or heard from you since April. What happened, where’ve you been?”

She pauses, giving her brain time to concoct a lie, something believable but vague enough not to invite further questioning. But those five minutes onstage were brutal, and her brain is now lying down on a couch, incapable of being clever.

“I’ve been dealing with some mental health issues.”

She plays back what came out of her mouth. She likes that she used the word health instead of illness . A positive spin. If comedy doesn’t work out, maybe she should go into PR. She studies Max’s face for a reaction, but there’s none.

Something uncomfortable swells inside her, and it’s worse than anything she just suffered onstage. Hot and itchy, pounding on her inner walls and pulling its hair out, the discomfort rises from the floor of her stomach to the ceiling of her throat, where it becomes intolerable.

“I have bipolar disorder.”

There it is, the words spoken aloud, her admission reverberating between them, the mother of all bombs. Max nods and takes a sip from his beer bottle. His face and body are unaffected, as if she just told him the weather was nice or asked the bartender for some chicken tenders. He doesn’t look shocked or freaked out, scared of her, or sorry for her. Is this mic on?

“I figured it was something like that,” he finally says, utterly unperturbed.

“You did?”

“Yeah. That first time we met, I assumed you were either high on coke or you were manic. And when we got to know each other, you definitely weren’t a cokehead, so, yeah, bipolar checks out.”

“Huh.”

All that time she’d been hiding her diagnosis from him, convinced that he’d dip the second he found out, and he essentially knew what she had even before she did.

“You have this new deadpan thing going on. What’s that all about?” he asks.

“Meds.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding. “I thought it was part of the bit.”

“Nope, just part of my fun life. I’m trying to overcome it.”

Her meds are sedating and give her a flat affect. Her face looks Botoxed. Her voice is a bowl of plain oatmeal, an AI who gives zero fucks.

“No, don’t fight it, use it. It’s very Will Ferrell.”

“Yeah, we’re exactly the same except for the part where he’s funny and I’m drain hair.”

Max smiles. He finishes his beer and sets the bottle on the bar.

“I’m getting another. You want one?” he asks, a smile lighting up his eyes.

He looks good. He’s wearing jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair has grown long, wavy and uncombed in a way that would look sloppy on a girl but is totally sexy on a guy. Maddy checks the time on her phone. Her entire evening is already planned.

“We can work on your set, punch up your jokes,” he says. “The one about the country club is almost there.”

“Thanks, but I gotta go meet my coke dealer,” she says, deadpan, pausing for Max to crack a smile. “No, I’m gonna dip. I’m back at NYU, and I have a theology test in the morning.”

“Theology?” he asks, amused. “What the fuck does theology have to do with comedy?”

She doesn’t want to study theology. Or Russian literature or communications or Central American history. She doesn’t give a shit about graduating with a degree in anything, but reenrolling as a student at NYU was the only scenario in which she could move back to New York that her mother would agree to. So she’s repeating her sophomore year with the promise that it won’t be a repeat of sophomore year.

“Welcome to my crazy-ass double life,” she says as she grabs her backpack from the empty seat on the other side of her and stands. “Call me Hannah Montana.”

“Use it, Banks. You gotta use it all.”

Maddy steps outside. It was still light out when she entered the club at four forty-five, but not even an hour later, the day is surrendering to night, the temperature dropping from mild to chilly. She zips her coat.

As she walks at a quick clip down the sidewalk toward the subway, she catches a glimpse of herself reflected in a store window, and the image is so shocking, it stops her cold. She turns to face the window straight on, to see if she sees what she thinks she saw. And there it is.

Her bipolar, medicated, robot face is smiling.