stares. If my pothead voice has never been too convincing, it’s because my weekends in high school were actually pretty clean. Jason and I saw what drugs did to his big brother and wanted nothing to do with them. I made a mental note to work on my funny voice and kept plowing through the set. “My mom worked at the helium plant when I was a kid. For the longest time I thought she was a birthday clown.” Beat. “Take Your Daughter to Work Day was a real disappointment.”
Scanning the seats closest to the stage for a friendly face, I saw only dull-eyed drunks and bad Tinder dates. I let my mind drift into the depthless glare of the lights. It was Jason, my writing partner and best friend since we were fourteen, who’d told me long ago to find the friendliest face in the crowd when I was bombing and focus on telling all my jokes to that person alone. Jason’s trick rarely won the audience back, but I’d bombed enough by now to know that didn’t matter as much as showing the audience you were doing just fine up there, thank you. Nothing is more cringe-inducing than watching someone flail onstage. Privately, I had a name for this rule: No blood in the water.
I could feel myself fidgeting to the right and left, straining my voice to sound bigger. After four years in Los Angeles, it was a struggle to relax in this too-easy town. I missed the grind. The crowds in L.A. had been tough, but they’d made me tougher too; here in Austin, indifference was the killer. By the time I left L.A., Jason was barely talking to me, so I didn’t bother telling him what I told everybody else: I needed a break, just a short one, and then I’d return. But it was harder than it sounded. Last time I’d made the move, I was five years younger, and I wasn’t alone. Everything had been easier with Jason, who knew where we’d come from and how important it was to keep moving forward so we’d never slide back.
So much for that. After four years away, it felt like I was just starting out in Austin all over again, except the comedy scene was more crowded and the beer more expensive. The rent on my crummy apartment was going to skyrocket when the lease came up in a few months, my take from the tip jar barely covered a pint after the set, and I was still paying dues in flop sweat at dive bars and coffee shops. Twenty-eight might not be old, but it was too old for this.
“I’d like to thank my mom for giving me the initials double D.” I stared pointedly down at my chest and was rewarded with a handful of snickers. Ah, boob jokes. Comedy gold. “That made junior high a real blast.”
“Nice tits!” someone called from the back of the club.
“Bobby Mickelthwaite, is that you?” Without missing a beat, I shaded my eyes with my hand as if trying to see past the spotlights. “You haven’t changed a bit since seventh grade.” I squinted. “Except—what is it? Oh yeah, you’re a lot uglier.”
Undaunted, the voice shouted, “Take off your top!”
“Same razor-sharp wordplay, though,” I muttered and made to move on.
“Show us your tits!”
A few people booed. One yelled, “Shut up!” I felt the thrilling tang of the audience’s anger but knew that if it got out of control, the heckler would succeed in wresting their attention away from the stage permanently. I suppressed a tickle of panic. No blood in the water, I thought. Show them you can take care of yourself.
I sweetened up my voice until it dripped saccharine and said, “Who hurt you?” Then, in my normal voice: “First and last name, please. I want to know who to PayPal to make it happen again.” The audience laughed uncertainly at the suggestion of violence. “And again. And again.”
The heckler subsided into drunken mumbles, but only a few people laughed. “I’m just kidding, guys!” I said, spreading my arms wide. “I don’t make that kind of money. Maybe we can set up a GoFundMe?”
Mixed laughter and boos, though I couldn’t tell whether the boos were meant for me or the heckler. The bouncer was finally making his way over to the guy, so I picked the set back up where I’d left off, transitioning into a bit about my day job. My adrenaline was up and so was the crowd’s, but it wasn’t a good feeling. Since they hadn’t been with me before, the heckler had only condensed the toxic energy in the room into something tangible. Don’t close your eyes, I told myself, Don’t blink until you’ve got them back. But black dots began to multiply in my peripheral vision.
I heard her savage bark of laughter first, and then I spotted her: the friendly face. The woman sat at a table near the wall, a green neon beer sign lighting up her shaggy blond hair. I caught a glimpse of large eyes set far apart in deep-shadowed sockets, sharp cheekbones, white teeth clenched in a grin. I wondered why I hadn’t noticed her earlier—either she hadn’t been under the light before or she hadn’t been laughing. Now she was nodding like a dandelion in the breeze, an oasis of rapt approval, and I felt myself relaxing. I memorized her face and for the rest of my set, I looked at the crowd as usual but told my jokes solely to the dandelion woman, who intermittently let out a guffaw. The ten minutes went by mercifully fast, and then I stepped off the carpet-covered dais, out of the lights, and back into the ordinary darkness of a grimy bar.
“Give it up one more time for Dana Diaz!” Fash, the emcee, shouted to limp applause as I stepped over the amplifier cords and skirted the edge of the room heading toward the bar. “Up next . . .”
Up next was Toby, a hipster from Minneapolis who was about to move to L.A.—“So let’s give him a warm sendoff!” (Scattered applause.) After him would come Kim, aka the Other Girl, with her heavy blond bangs and Courtney Love slipdress, then James, who wore suspenders and played a ukulele. Last of all, Fash Banner, the emcee and organizer, who’d placed third last year in the annual Funniest Person in Austin contest. I didn’t have the heart to watch them all succeed or fail, one after the other. I wanted my drink in the other room, and tonight it needed to be on the strong side. “Whiskey soda,” I said to Nick, the Thursday bartender, over the sound of Toby launching into his set.
“Let me get that for you,” a voice said at my elbow, and someone slapped a credit card down and pushed it across the bar. I turned and saw the woman with the friendly face.
“Thanks,” I said. I was in no position to turn down a free drink, and I felt a lingering warmth toward the stranger for helping me get through a bad set. I surveyed the blond woman standing next to me, or rather towering over me—though it doesn’t take much to do that—and could see, close-up, that her mess of wavy hair was bleached in big chunks that had grown out around dark blond roots. The mandarin collar of her beat-up biker jacket gave her a faintly priest-like look.
“One for me too,” she added in Nicky’s direction, and I realized she meant to sit down and have a drink with me. It was too late to stop it now, so I picked up my whiskey soda on its damp cardboard coaster, gestured toward Toby on the stage to indicate we should quit talking, and started walking to the other room to see if she’d follow. In less than a minute, she appeared in the doorway of the side room with her drink and glided toward my table. The PA system was quieter here, the hum of drinkers more subdued.
“I’m Amanda,” she said, sticking her hand out. “I thought you were amazing dealing with that drunk guy, and I wanted to buy you a drink.”
It was as I had suspected; she had watched the whole set but started caring only during the heckling incident. It cast a bit of a pall on the free drink.
“Dana,” I said, shaking her hand. “And thanks. It didn’t win me any Brownie points with the crowd, though.”
“People don’t always like hearing the truth,” she said. “But guys like that need to be taken out.”
Guys
