Day 6 - Only Laugh - Chapter 6 (1395 words)

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ONLY LAUGH WHEN IT HURTS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 6

The green room was red. It always had been but today it held considerably more significance to Tony.

Symbolism, portents, a foreshadowing perhaps? But back here, up the stairs and behind the stage it was a much different prospect than it had been in his own imagining up till now. 

Slowly but surely each day he had attacked the work the doctors had been doing and reopened the wound. It  had hurt him, it was sure that it did hurt but only in a small amount, like a drip feed of pain. Every time he made that cut, tore that hole a micrometer, it was like a pinprick of fire.

He knew now that there was no way he could go through with his plan.

Not one person had told him to do what he had contemplated, no one brave enough to suggest that self harm was a viable entertainment option. His assistant had quietly and unquestioningly got a knife, sharp and sterilized often to avoid infection, but the details of that conversation were minimalism and stoic at their most verbose. The real reasons and intents for any thing he asked for were always unspoken. John's job was at heart to give or get Tony whatever he wanted. He could have asked for almost anything. Drugs, girls, weapons and perhaps test the boundaries of what an assistant would assist him with. Anything that would enhance or further the artistic process? Evidently harm was not out of the question at all, it was the driving force behind what got him here.

They had worked on material, but it did not feel special or even that funny enough for Tony and the encouraging but fake smiles of his agent and the Club manager did nothing to allay his fears that this, ride, was slowing down.

The audience wanted blood. Not in a bloodthirsty way, or not in the traditional sense of blood thirstiness. They was an unspoken contract that this, this circumstance, was ok. A barrier had been breached, by way of sympathy and publicity this attack had become a freeing event for the crowds who watched and the ordinary inside of people that wanted to be a little more unbound by convention.

It had limits of course. A few days to a week after Tony's second appearance a few copycat videos cropped up online. Spotty and pale, the video quality was poor and amateurish compared to the HD capture from the Club that night. Jokes, some of them very good, would pour out the mouths of wannabe centres of attention, and the blood would follow. Sometimes it was real, sometimes it was staged and obviously so. The simulated ones died a death of their own with word of mouth and comments sections condemning them to oblivion with the cry of 'fake' and the certain death of no more views. 

The real ones, they surprised everyone. With a few marginal exceptions no one said a word about them and they too dropped away. The wounds in the real victims, those willing and able to self-harm for attention would heal over in time. Where there had been hundreds of pundits weighing in on Tony's performance  understood to be unintentional and unfortunate, there had been only the fiercest of critics condemning the slippery slope that would lead to the real damage to these deluded fans. Without oxygen the flames died out and now there was only Tony.

If only one major news figure had made an example of one of these videos, they may have taken off. Whether by choice or by unintentional bias to the randomness of Tony's situation they only had eyes for him and everything else was opaque at best. Unseeable, unusable. 

So no one said the obvious. That Tony was in a unique position where his pain alone was acceptable, but he could not force it on the audience, it's nature was random. He was attacked, he inadvertently popped his stitches and the universal language of cool had transited from what was was unacceptable to something unpredictable and interesting to the demographic that mattered.

Now a month after his attack the wound was still open and with antibiotics and dressings there was no infection but end in sight. He waited through the professional warm up acts and in between the sets he heard a chanting of his name. 

There was nothing he could think of, nothing he could do or say. His material sounded hollow in his ears as he listened to jokes, so very similar in structure and tone rolling off the tongues of more accomplished performers on stage, warming the sheets for him to lie down in and die.

So close, and yet so far. Unfair.

His chest wobbled from the inside out with a fear, not that he could not be funny, but that the audience would not allow him to be funny. 

Even if he was hilarious. He would be trapped in his own legend, only a month old and already painted into a corner.

What do they want from me? 

The second of 4 opening comedians had finished his set and there was to be two more before Tony came on after the mid evening break. Allow the audience some time to settle to drink more and to ready themselves for the main event.

But there wasn't going to be one.

The MC was dragging on the in between moments, where he got to self promote his way into the audiences hearts and with quips and a gentle poking of the bear he made his way to the next act, waiting in the tiny wings near the stairs.

Fuck it.

Tony stood bolt upright, an audible thud as his feet snapped to the ground from where he had been sitting. He set his head, bullish and ram-ready to take his exit from the red-green room. 

The stairs flew underneath him and fell away behind him with a crumbling foggy descent to his past, where he could no longer retreat to. There was no going back from this, there was only one way out. Through the audience, there was no back door, just the darkened room.

The lights were up in the house, the MC interacting with the crowd and all of the stage lit up left to right, including the exit and entry points for the acts. 

Shit.

The waiting comedian was bouncing up and down on his heels, memorizing and revising at the last seconds fall and shaking out the demons that infested his confidence until the first laugh would slap the sense back into his ego.

No way out, only through.

Tony sidestepped his opening act, strode around his shock and surprise and took the stage.

The MC saw the faces in crowd looking to his side, before he knew that Tony had walked out on stage. His reaction was swift and appropriate. He killed the joke he was working on, the evisceration of an ordinary job, the comedy cannon fodder of the improvised set. Silently he stood aside and mimed a mocking overacted yet somehow respectful bow and walked off stage his arm extended towards the star act, impatient to take his time in the spotlight.

The black mist of single vision clouded Tony's face and he looked fierce and determined to careen off the stage, into the crowd and out the door. 

The lights in the house went out and the spotlight clicked on him a second later and he halted perfectly in front of the microphone.

This is not the door, this is the place I wanted to avoid. No one is here now.

The room was blackened and invisible to him now and in a split second it all came rushing back. There was a chance.

"Fuck waiting, right?" Tony gripped the stand twisted hard, dislodging the screw and painfully adjusting the microphone to the right height. The crosshatched metal extrerior, designed to give him purchase, bit into his soft palm.

There was a titter that grew in the audience and he choked his hand down on that metal roughness.

"Life's too short yeah?" He twsited harder and felt sorry for whomever would be trying to loosen the mic after him now.

"Or at least, mine will be." Self deprecating enough he got a laugh.

The pain and the laughter rang in his ears.