what the moth claimed, things like wife, kid, and two-car garage didn’t make anybody happy. I knew because my dad had had all those things, and he, too, had gone off looking for a light, leaving me alone in Amarillo with my mom.
Alone, that is, until Jason came along.
We met in American history in the eighth grade. We’d both been absent the day a big project was assigned, and everybody else was already in groups, so we got stuck working together. I was annoyed at first, because I could see right away that I would be doing all the work—the researching and writing of facts about Geronimo, the neat lettering on posterboard—while this dark-haired, gangly boy with glasses sat hunched over his notebook, silently doodling. But when I peeked over his shoulder at what he was drawing, a thrill went through me: David Letterman, his flattened-out, Neanderthal brow and gotcha smirk recognizable even in cartoon form.
Jason looked up, noticed my expression, and waggled his eyebrows. “What do you think, Paul? He-hee!”
It was such a perfect impression of the Letterman giggle and so incongruous with Jason’s glasses-and-acne face that I almost cracked up. Instead, I put on my best Paul Shaffer and said, “Pretty good, Dave, pretty good.”
We went back and forth a few times before we both lost it.
“What’s your favorite Stupid Pet Trick?” I asked.
“I don’t know yet, I’m not finished.”
“Finished?”
“I’m watching recordings of every episode. I’m only up to 1987.” He misinterpreted the look I gave him. “I’d be farther, but I keep having to stop and look up stuff from the monologue.”
“Wow” was all I could say. “Who else do you like?”
“Conan.”
“Duh. What about from now? Sarah Silverman?” His face soured. “Maria Bamford?”
“She’s good. I’m studying the classics first, though,” he said importantly. “The big late-night hosts. So I can get into a writers’ room someday.”
“Why not be the host? That’s what I want to do.”
“Girls never do late-night.” He said it like he was sorry to have to break the news to me.
“So I’ll be the first.”
“You’re humble,” he said. “I like that about you, Dana Diaz.”
That was how it started. Of course, in school, we couldn’t hang out without accusations of the boyfriend-girlfriend variety, but we knew who we were and what we had to offer each other. The summer after eighth grade, he started inviting me over to watch comedy specials DVR’d off of late-night cable, and I found any excuse to go. Luxuries like cable and DVRs had become rare after my dad left, and they disappeared entirely when my mom was laid off from the newly privatized helium plant. Jason had the TV mostly to himself in Mattie’s old room, which their dad had converted to a game room with a pool table and a Nintendo.
Mattie was the one dark spot. Jason’s older brother was a high-school dropout who lived at home. He looked like a version of Jason drawn from memory by someone with no particular artistic talent: black hair hanging limply over a narrow forehead, blue eyes that squinted unevenly over a broken nose. Not much bigger than Jason, really—in fact, Jason may have had an inch on him—but he was broader in the shoulders, or carried himself as if he were. He picked on Jason, but it was his unpredictability more than anything else that cast a pall over the house. Mattie spent most of his off-hours walking his big, scary German shepherd, Kenny, and lifting weights in the fume-y, stuffy garage apartment their dad had grudgingly fixed up for him when he got off drugs and got a job driving a forklift at the meatpacking plant. But every once in a while he would suddenly appear in the doorway of the TV room—“Oh, hi, Gay-son, I didn’t know you were home” — and Jason would seem to fold up in his presence. Whenever he saw me, he stared pointedly at my chest, and I had to concentrate hard to keep from crossing my arms.
Jason stole glances at my chest every now and then too, and I thought for a while that he was going to ask me out. But he never did, and soon I didn’t expect him to, which made me feel less guilty lying to my mom about the mostly adult-free situation at Jason’s house. I’d bike over while Jason’s dad was still at work—his mom, like my dad, was long gone—and we’d go straight to the TV room and settle in side by side on compressed beanbag chairs in the flickering half-light of the TV. Like any good moth, I told myself the light was the only reason I was there.
Bat City Comedy Club’s undignified location in the elbow of a strip mall north of town belied its centrality to the Austin comedy scene. Shadowed by an overpass and flanked by fabric stores and dance studios, it celebrated the inherent ridiculousness of the whole enterprise of standup with a certain bravado that included neon signage, a bar decorated in primary colors, and a banquet room swathed in acres of comedy-and-tragedy-mask novelty carpet. You could argue it wasn’t the most appropriate carpet for a comedy club, but I’d spent enough time staring down at its nauseating pattern of ribbons and grimaces while waiting for my open-mic slot to have internalized its sobering lesson. It was a kind of memento mori of standup: Remember, you must kill.
On the night of the first round of the Funniest Person in Austin contest, I pulled my bumperless Honda Civic up to the closed businesses at the opposite end of the parking lot, as per e-mailed instructions, wishing I’d been confident enough to sign up years ago when the terrain wasn’t so crowded. I’d recognized only about half the names scheduled to compete tonight—though among them, I’d noticed with a pang, was Fash Banner, last year’s second runner-up. There was room for both of us to advance, but if the newcomers were any good or if I bombed as badly as I had the other night . . . I tried not to think about it. When I’d first come to Austin from Amarillo a decade ago, lured away from the self-pity and stagnation of my mom’s house by Jason’s tales of all-night diners and plentiful open-mics, the contest was still small and clubby, just a week or two of performances by friendly rivals who hooted and slapped each other on the back after their sets. Now there were a staggering number of preliminary rounds—night after night for weeks—and a full week of semifinals.
Of course, I had been more easily intimidated back then. Jason’s college friends had been welcoming enough toward his funny little hometown sidekick, but I was shy and self-conscious around them, painfully aware that I was in community college because I hadn’t gotten into UT, where they all went. And although Jason dragged me out to open-mics and told me over and over I was better at standup than he was, it was a long time before I believed it.
I’d always liked standup best, but, like everyone else in the Austin scene back then, I’d sampled everything. With few opportunities to perform, we took improv classes, wrote sketches, moonlighted in local theater productions, until eventually we settled into our spots like the many-shaped blocks in one of those baby puzzles in a doctor’s waiting room. The optimists stuck with improv, not caring whether they became famous, yes-and-ing their way through life in a sickeningly good mood. The delusionals went with sketch, holding out hope that someday, someone would come along and cast them in SNL. Some people would say it was the masochists who went for standup, but I’d argue we were just realists. If you bombed, at least you knew who to blame.
I was very much in a realist mood as I sized up the contestants pacing nervously under the awning. I hoped for a gaggle of newbies—anyone could sign up for prelims—but they all just
