Last Woman Standing

And then, of course, there was Neely himself, a comedy hero of mine with a ruddy, pitted nose and the hands of a giant. Larger than life. Later, in the black-upholstered back seat of his SUV under black-tinted windows, merely larger than me.

When he finally dropped me off at home, unsteady on my feet but relieved to be walking at all, I found Jason sick too, hunched over the toilet in misery. The look he gave me was so awful, so full of betrayed confidence and disgust, that I knew we would never talk about what happened. And some part of me didn’t want to, feared being pulled down into the quicksand of memory in the back of Neely’s car. It was enough to know that we never got a follow-up call on the show. I had evidently flubbed the pitch.

Amanda was still waiting for a response.

“Sometimes dreams just don’t work out,” I said after a moment’s pause. “But you can’t dwell on it. You have to go back to square one. Try again.”

Amanda fixed me again with her long stare, which seemed to flip from naiveté to knowingness and back effortlessly, as if they were two sides of the same thing. “Admirable,” she said, finally.

I’d never been good at being friends with women. I couldn’t get the hang of the transactional nature of female friendship—you give me this secret, in return I share my deepest insecurity. Rinse and repeat. Even as a child, I was never interested. In fifth grade, it became clear that some girls were going to get tall and pretty, and others were going to make straight As, and others were going to act boy-crazy, and still others were going to do all these things in Spanish, which I don’t speak, even though I look like I should, and understand only when it’s my mom talking. Being funny didn’t get you into any of the cliques. When Jason appeared a few years later with his fart jokes and SNL recaps, I was grateful to be rescued from the elaborate pas de deux of girl talk forever.

But feeling Amanda withdraw slightly now, I knew enough to offer up an ersatz confession. I took a stab. “Actually, I’m kind of blocked for material right now,” I said, looking for something that wasn’t true and realizing, even as I said it, that it was. “Everything in my set feels kind of dead. Sometimes I feel like I’m dead.” Damn those whiskey sodas.

Amanda leaned forward, suddenly fierce, and wrapped her skinny fingers around my wrist. “Listen, Dana,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be driven out of town, lose your livelihood, your self-respect, everything. I let my ex lock me up and tell me I was worthless. He wasn’t even good-looking.” She chuckled, but it was a grim, unpleasant sound. “I would never have given him the time of day if I hadn’t felt dead inside. But I’m not dead. I’m still here. And so are you.” Her eyes burned drunkenly, and her knuckles pressed into my wrist bone. “Whatever happened to you in L.A., you’re not dead. The person who did it to you is the one who should feel that way, not you.”

“Nothing happened to me in L.A.,” I said, and gently pried her fingers loose.

She released me and drew back a little, seeming to come to herself. Then she looked at my wrist, which I was rubbing with my other hand, and laughed, that short bark I’d heard during my set, like a fox. She settled back into her chair.

“Right,” she said, grinning. “I’d just like to know who Nothing is, so I could find him and break his knees for you.”

Score one for the literal-minded. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

The tension suddenly drained out of me, and I felt tired of pretending. “I’ve got a better idea. How about if while you’re off breaking Nothing’s knees, I go find your ex-boyfriend and kick his ass?”

“That’d be a start,” she said. “But I warn you, if you’re looking for asses that need kicking, I’ve got a long list.”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Deal.”

I raised my glass. We clinked and swallowed in tandem. In the other room, I could hear Fash wrapping up his set, and the comics who had stuck around to watch were gearing up to head somewhere together—probably Bat City for the late-night open-mic. Any minute, one of them would be poking his head around the corner and asking me to come along. If I wanted to avoid introducing Amanda, now was the time to go.

“Hey, it was really nice meeting you,” I said. “That set was rough. And now I feel . . .” I put my hand over my heart. “Much more wasted.” She laughed. “But really, thanks.” Remembering something I was always supposed to be doing to help my comedy career, I said, “If you want to know when I’m performing around town, follow me on Facebook.”

“I stay off social media,” Amanda said. “Call me paranoid, but after working at Runnr, I know what they use that information for. Could I get your number instead?” She pushed a napkin over and handed me a pen.

I hesitated only an instant, then said, “Sure.” I jotted down my number and stood to go. As I handed the pen back, I thought of another pilot idea: Failed comic creates Instagram for fake lifestyle guru. Account goes viral. Comic must pretend to be sincere for rest of life. I started walking toward the door.

“Good luck in that contest next week,” she called after me.

“You mean break a leg,” I said reflexively.

“Only if it’s someone else’s.”

I recognized her second attempt at a lame joke and chuckled in return. It seemed possible at that moment that she might become, if not a fan, something I needed even more: a friend.

2

Waking up late with a hangover the next morning, I hustled to Laurel’s Paper and Gifts for my opening shift and nearly smacked myself on the forehead when I saw all the cars in the parking lot. I’d forgotten about the early staff meeting. I used my key to get in and hurried past the display shelves full of stationery and gilt-edged notebooks.

When I first came back from L.A., I’d dropped into Laurel’s as a customer, hoping one of those fancy notebooks might inspire me to start writing again, though in the end I wound up buying the same old pocket-size Moleskine I’ve used since they first appeared by the cash register in Amarillo’s sole Barnes and Noble. But Laurel herself, a squat, hippie-ish woman in her late fifties, happened to be managing the store that day, and I made her laugh as she was ringing me up, and then we got into a long chat that ended with her asking if I’d like to work there. It was the easiest time I’ve ever had getting hired for anything. Back then, it reinforced my idea that Austin was not only an easy place to be, but the perfect place to recover from L.A.

People say retail is boring, but I didn’t mind. After having waited tables for so long, I never wanted to see another apron again, and the days seemed to pass at an unimaginably luxurious pace in this store full of inessential luxuries. The trifling nature of the merchandise appealed to me, as did the way customers drifted around, looking for a vague something, a housewarming gift, maybe, or a stack of thank-you notes. No one ever rushed through the door needing anything more urgent than a birthday card.

Unfortunately, Laurel’s stray-dog approach to hiring had recently plagued us with Becca, a trod-upon twig of a woman with eyebrows tweezed into a perpetual look of surprise, and her boyfriend, Henry, a self-described “retail identity therapist” with sleeve tattoos and careful stubble. Henry knew how to throw serious charm at a woman in her late fifties and had rapidly edged his way into a consulting position to upscale the store. The new items he had ordered and placed among the older journals and cards were objects that, in his words, “told a story about their own creation.” The right kind of story called to mind ease, but not luxury; difference without hostility; poverty, but never disaster. Items that qualified included colorful place mats hand-woven by Indonesian women (actually nuns, but Henry said religion was a downer) and heavy stone cubes that, according to the display card, represented the thing-in-itself. Minimalist bowls in dull, hammered silver were filled with scarves of braided and distressed twine. It went without saying that it was all prohibitively expensive. The jokes practically wrote themselves. (Pilot idea: Enchanted gift shop where all the gifts can talk, but they’re even bigger assholes than the humans. Wonderfalls meets BoJack Horseman.) It was the way the whole city was headed, and I could only assume the rising rents that had driven out the store’s old-Austin neighbors were making Laurel, who’d owned the little shop for as long as I’d been alive, antsy. Or perhaps all this talk of authenticity appealed to her hippie soul. Either way, Henry was a loathsome addition to a job that was otherwise perfect for getting writing done on a little notepad I kept under the counter.

When I opened the door of the break room, Henry was already holding forth, looming over a table that was barely big enough for the rest of the staff, all women, to squeeze around it. A powerful smell of bacon and eggs reminded me of my hangover in ways both positive and negative, though from the crumpled paper bag and empty salsa cups scattered around the table, I gathered that I’d missed the breakfast tacos.

“Oh, hello, Dana,” Laurel said as I maneuvered myself around the door to close it. “Henry was just saying how we’re going to be more than just a store. We’ll be an—um—” She looked at him uncertainly.

“Aspirational lifestyle brand,” Henry filled in airily. “Which starts with everyone on the team committing to punctuality.”

I restrained an eye roll as he continued talking. Henry’s objects, with their obsessive authenticity, grossed me out. I found the idea of Indonesian nuns and Japanese ceramicists and San Salvadoran peasants sitting in their faraway countries making them unutterably depressing. As the staff members dispersed, I found myself hoping the stories behind all of these items were fabricated and they were actually mass-produced in China. Now, that would be funny.

“Flimflam artist,” Ruby muttered to me as I was taking the note later. She stood at my elbow behind the counter, her eyes on Henry and Becca fighting in the parking lot as she vindictively yanked the white paper price tags off of fountain pens to make way for the new, Henry-mandated linen tags. “I can smell it a mile away.”

Ruby fascinated me. Some ten years older than me, she came to work every day in a stylized version of a fifties secretary costume: sheath dresses with string bows at the waist, pencil skirts and Peter Pan–collared blouses, emerald-green cat’s-eye glasses on a chain around her neck. Her shellacked curls were short and red, and it took me a long time to figure out that she wore a wig. One day she took a pencil from behind her ear and I saw all the curls shift at once, just a few millimeters, in unison. “I just got sick of bad haircuts,” she explained when she noticed me noticing, and I waited until she went to the back and scribbled it down verbatim.

“Frankly, I don’t know what Becca sees in that creep,” Ruby was saying. She leaned over and whispered, “Do you think he hits her?”

The idea jolted me out of my reverie. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know, I just get a vibe,” she said. “Have you ever noticed how she always has bruises on her arms?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, that’s because she wears long sleeves. Even in the summer.” She raised her penciled eyebrows meaningfully.

“It’s still spring,” I pointed out, and Ruby shrugged. She was a hopeless gossip and paranoid to boot, but the conversation brought Amanda to mind again. Where a moment before I’d been thinking disdainfully about Henry’s objects, I now found myself imagining the tall, rangy woman from the night before standing at the displays in her leather jacket, picking things up and putting them down, swinging the little Japanese ceramic pendants in front of her face and weighing the votives in her palm. Something about her made me think she’d be able to listen to their stories. I blushed.

“Last night I met this kind of strange chick at Nomad,” I said. “She came up after my set.”

“Sounds like you’ve got a new number-one fan,” Ruby said. “Watch out.”

“I’ll be sure to hide my sledgehammer,” I said. “No, she was nice, actually. We had a lot in common, it turned out.”

“People must come up to talk to you after shows all the time.”

“Only a dozen or so per set,” I said with a straight face. “I can usually handle it.” I went back to doodling in my notebook.

Ruby jerked at another tag and looked at me. “What was strange about her?”

“Huh?”

“You said she was strange.”

“Did I?” Ruby looked at me pointedly, and I backtracked. “It was what you said about Becca that reminded me.” What was it exactly? “This woman was telling me about her ex-boyfriend, and she said, ‘He didn’t hit me.’ Just out of the blue.”

“He definitely hit her,” Ruby said sagely.

“It just seemed like a weird thing to volunteer to a total stranger.”

“Sounds like she has boundary issues. I used to have major boundary issues because of being molested as a child.” I’d grown accustomed to upsetting revelations like this from Ruby, but I never knew where to look. I kept my eyes trained on my notebook. “My therapist says I cope by controlling what I can. Like this.” She pointed at her fake hairdo, and I nodded as if it made perfect sense to me. “You have to be careful, though. They can really change your personality. This one wig I used to wear, kind of a Louise Brooks–type bob, made me really mean . . . She was bad news . . .”

My note-taking fingers were itching, but Ruby droned on until my phone buzzed under the counter. I had a sudden presentiment that it was Amanda calling, as if I had summoned her with my thoughts. Superstitiously, I let it vibrate and listened for the shudder of a voice message before glancing at the screen.

I suppressed a mild disappointment. It was Kim, the Other Girl in the Thursday-night lineup. To the extent that every girl comic has a schtick, hers was familiar: blond and skinny and kind of dirty-sexy, with a high-pitched baby voice and a foul mouth. At shows like this I was always the only brown girl opposite some Kim or other. I didn’t take it personally. It was better than when I’d left, but ironically, that was part of the problem. There had always been a strong Latinx comedy scene in Austin, but it was dominated by men. Besides, as a half-Mexican, half-Jewish woman without a word of Spanish, I’d never quite fit in there. My mom had given me her last name but failed to teach me her language, venting her anger at my dad without sacrificing her ambitions for my perfect assimilation and eventual departure from Amarillo. It had worked; I’d left. And the mainstream comedy scene run by pasty white men had worked for me too—probably because I was best friends with one. While I was in L.A. the scene had grown more diverse, but with my clumsiness for such matters, I’d somehow managed to leave Austin at exactly the wrong time to benefit from it. Missing the chance to build connections on the way up, I’d reaped none of the rewards of the new scene, just stiffer competition from a glut of newcomers.

Staring at Kim’s text—she told me to break a leg in the contest and offered herself as a practice partner if I needed to try out new material—I realized, not for the first time but with a fresh throb, how lonely I was back here in Austin. I kept my distance from comics like Kim, avoiding the preshow beers and the postshow hangouts. That went double for the guys. They were fine, all more or less like Fash. But if I didn’t want to sleep with them, and I didn’t, I knew the best I could hope for was to become a mascot, their short, cute, brown girl-buddy, great fun to pick up and swing around when they were drunk. No, thanks. I missed Jason too much to want to play that role for anyone but him.

My mom always said I must have gotten my sense of humor from my dad, and I had vague memories of him as a hairy, elfin jokester who was always winking at me and taking off his thumb to make me giggle. Still, it was my mom who bought me my first joke book sometime after he’d left. She’d taken to shopping the Saturday-morning garage sales, waking up at the crack of dawn to scoop the neighbors, and often came home with stacks of worn, dog-eared chapter books for me. Included in one of these stacks was a flimsy orange paperback called 101 Wacky, Hilarious, Totally Crazy Jokes for Kids Ages Eight to Ten.

Most of the jokes were god-awful puns, but there was one that always stuck with me. It went something like this:

A moth walks into a psychiatrist’s office and lies down on the couch.

PSYCHIATRIST: So, why don’t you start by telling me a little about yourself?

MOTH: Well, Doc, I’ve got a wife, two kids, and a nice house in the suburbs with a two-car garage.

PSYCHIATRIST: And how does that make you feel?

MOTH: Okay, I guess.

PSYCHIATRIST: Any problems?

MOTH: Nope.

PSYCHIATRIST: So you’re saying you’re perfectly happy with your life?

MOTH (thinks): Yes, I think so.

PSYCHIATRIST: Then what brought you in here today?

MOTH: The light was on.

I can still close my eyes and see the cartoon illustration, down to the last pen stroke: the moth, standing upright in a cartoon fedora, holding a briefcase in one of his hairy insect legs and shaking the psychiatrist’s hand with another, the mysterious couch looming in the background. Everything I learned about joke structure, I learned from that pathetic moth. Setup: two things that don’t go together (moth and psychiatrist). Heightening: the middle of the joke, lines that make you forget he’s a moth. Punch line: a sudden remembering.

There are a hundred different versions of the moth joke, I later discovered. The moth goes into a bar, but he doesn’t order a drink; the moth walks into a gym, but he doesn’t lift weights; the moth strolls into a dealership, but he doesn’t buy a car. Eventually someone asks him why he’s there, and the moth always says the same thing: The light was on. The joke lulls you into believing that this moth, this time, is different. But he never is. In a way, it’s a joke about comedy itself. Comics aren’t happy people. We crave the light, and we don’t know why.

When I started putting together my own set, I tried to picture the author of 101 Wacky, Hilarious, Totally Crazy Jokes for Kids Ages Eight to Ten. I imagined some poor guy sitting in a bleak New York apartment with a typewriter in front of him and a stack of paper napkins on which he’d made his drunk friends write down their favorite jokes, but they were all too dirty for a kids’ book. So in the end, past deadline—with a whole batch of these joke books he’d committed to churning out—maybe he went down to the library and checked out a stack of slightly older joke books, where he found the hoary old moth joke. And somehow, the hour being late and having just watched a Woody Allen movie with his girlfriend and maybe even had an argument with her afterward, he set his version of the joke in a shrink’s office, despite the fact that one of society’s most fervent desires for children ages eight to ten is that they should have little to no idea what a psychiatrist does.

I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word, much less what it meant. But I knew this: No matter 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.

3

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.