Last Woman Standing

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 looked like comics to me, smoking cigarettes and trying to ignore one another as they practiced their five-minute sets. The stage order pinned to the door gave me my first good luck of the night: I was slotted for the second half of the show, but not, thank God, the last slot. And Fash—poor Fash!—was first. I began to relax.

Avoiding the pacers, I settled myself at the bar inside and endeavored to stay calm with the help of headphones, a gin and tonic, and a chair pointedly angled away from the TV monitors streaming the main-stage competition. One by one, starting with Fash, the comics before me finished their sets. The ones who did well hovered around the bar, pecking at drinks and each other; the ones who bombed slunk out into the parking lot, avoiding eye contact. One tall guy I recognized from a coffee-shop open-mic slammed the chrome panic bar on the double doors with both hands on his way out, uttering a curse I couldn’t hear through my upbeat Beyoncé mix.

Fash, who had recovered from his set early and was seated at a bar table nearby, raised an eyebrow and gestured for me to remove my earpiece. He pointed toward the door, which was still bouncing from the impact. “Hey, all that matters is we’re having fun up there, right?”

“You keep telling yourself that, Fash.”

“Just trying to ease your mind!” he said. “I mean, not everyone goes in knowing they’re already the third-funniest person in Austin.”

“What happened to one and two, again?” I said, furrowing my eyebrows. “Oh yeah, they moved to L.A. I guess that doesn’t happen for thirdsies.”

He snapped and pointed at me. “Zing. Truly. Consider me zung.”

I smiled and returned to Beyoncé. There was no reason to let Fash psych me out. My material might not be fresh, but I knew it like the back of my hand. I’d seen comics bomb because of a clenched jaw, a flickering eyelid, a brow that kept a straight line while the mouth grinned manically below, but nerves weren’t my problem lately. My problem was sleepwalking through my set. Here, the whiff of potential fame in the air was waking me up, the adrenaline of the competition digging into me like the sharp edge of a knife. By the time it was my turn to go onstage, I was ready.

Under the lights, I breathed in the smell of sweaty metal off the dented microphone and woke up all the way. I hadn’t expected such a large audience for the preliminary rounds, but the rows of banquet-style tables were crowded. I’d rarely performed in front of so many people. I avoided looking at the judges’ tables to the left, focusing instead on the unexpected energy of the crowd. They were well primed, buzzed on the club’s two-drink minimum.

“So I’m originally from Amarillo—” I began, and someone hooted in solidarity from the audience. “Did someone just ‘wooo’?” I interrupted myself. “Did you really just ‘wooo’ for Amarillo, Texas? Examine your life.” I got my first laugh, and the stage lights transformed into a clean, solid wall of support, flaring gently in rhythm with the crowd’s laughter. I segued easily into my opening jokes, the crowd meeting me at every punch line, and kept them coming at a good clip, rushing only enough to keep the audience on its toes. By the time I got to the bit about my chest that had brought the heckler out last time (“Got these when I turned nine. Worst birthday present ever”), I felt so safe that I ad-libbed a few extra lines, teasing it out fifteen or thirty seconds longer than usual, buoyed by laughter all the way. This was going to be easier than I’d thought.

The blue light on the back wall came on, piercing the veil of the stage lights and bringing me a message: One minute to go. One minute of coasting downhill into the applause that would send me to the semifinals, which could send me to the finals, which might even send me, I was beginning to think, back to L.A. I silently thanked Austin, the so-called “velvet coffin,” for having been there when I needed a soft landing place. Even as I wrapped up my set—forty-five seconds; I could feel the rhythm of the time draining down—I was thinking about getting a subletter to cover the rest of my lease, just as I’d covered someone else’s when I first moved in. Goodbye, Austin. Behind the curtain of stage lights, I could almost feel the walls of the comedy club dissolve and transform into a vista of palm trees and smog. Thirty seconds to go.

It must have been thoughts of L.A. that made me glance involuntarily toward the judges. Perched behind a long table to the left of the audience, they were far from the spotlight’s glare, and at first I could only see silhouettes. Then something in one of the silhouettes caught my eye—a tuft of beard sticking out just under the ear in a way that made me look again, a fraction of a second longer this time. Long enough to notice the shape of the part and the glisten of sweat on a high, round forehead.

It was him. Aaron Neely was at the judges’ table.

The lights turned ice cold. Then they turned red, then black. I stopped my last joke midsentence. In the darkness, I heard my lips open and close, amplified by the mic. A wave of dizziness passed over me, and for a moment the floor felt as if it were pressing up hard against my feet. I blinked furiously to clear the black fog and said, “Um.”

The lights came back with a rushing sound. I blinked again.

The joke, the joke! I reached for it, but it was gone. So, I saw, was the audience. Chairs were creaking impatiently. Blood in the water. “Thank you,” I said and left the stage to uncertain applause.

I made my way up the aisle and through the bar, past the other comics. On the way out, I hit the panic bar on the double doors as hard as I could, hoping the chuh-kung! noise was loud enough to make Fash spill his drink.

Of course Neely was in Austin. Of course he’d followed me to the place I felt safest, the place I felt sure he was too much of a big shot to ever grace with his presence. The irony being, of course, that while I was in L.A., Austin had become just the kind of scene a guy like Neely liked.

What Neely liked. I shuddered. What he’d liked was humiliating me in the back of his SUV, showing me how small and insignificant and utterly disposable I was to a man like him and, by extension, to the industry whose highest ranks he represented. He’d shown me, in a stretch of time that felt like an eternity but probably took no more than five minutes, that I would never be in a position to make jokes, not for men like him. Because I was the joke. Setup: me, woozy and sick from whatever I’d come down with at the smoothie bar, laughing nervously as he unzipped his pants because I didn’t realize, at first, what I was seeing. Heightening: still me, now frozen in shock against the safety-locked car door as understanding dawned. Punch line: me again, blood rushing to my face, a visceral, writhing discomfort intensifying in the near silence until it felt like actual physical pain.

I was the joke, and I wasn’t even a good one. I was just something to do for fifteen minutes, a way to kill time in the back seat of his car between appointments. He hadn’t touched me while he did it, just the edge of my dress. I’d dropped my eyes, confused, and waited for him to finish, which took long enough for tears to start rolling down my cheeks and falling onto my lap.

The tears were falling again now as I stalked across the parking lot to my car, and I felt the surge of shame take me over and shake me from the inside. Why hadn’t I said something? Why had I just sat and cried, like an idiot, like a moron? It was just what he’d wanted me to do. And now I knew it wasn’t the stomach bug that had kept me riveted quietly in place, weeping, while he jerked himself off. After all, I hadn’t been sick tonight, and I’d reacted the same dumb way, with frozen, self-sabotaging terror, like a deer in the headlights. For all my bravado, in the end all it took to shut me down and drive me out of town was one obscene man I’d mistaken for a mentor when he didn’t even think I was funny—at least, not funny enough to outweigh the temptation of jacking off to my double Ds.

And didn’t that prove he was right—the fact that I couldn’t take it, that I’d run away, that I was back here in Austin instead of in a writers’ room in L.A.? For the millionth time, I thought, Nothing happened, he didn’t even touch me, words that had first echoed through my head in the half hour after he’d finished as we sat side by side in L.A. traffic—him, unbelievably, making small talk. I’d repeated the words like a mantra to myself to drown out his insipid chatting until I was home safe. And after all, it was the truth. It wasn’t as if he’d attacked me. It wasn’t rape. I, of all people, knew the difference. What was it, to cause me such shame?

When his car finally stopped in front of my house and the automatic door lock clicked, Neely himself told me what it was, with the unanswerable authority of someone who could take a joke, who was, in fact, in charge of deciding what constituted a joke in the first place. As I scrabbled at the door handle and stepped down to the curb, the last words I heard him say were: “Come on. This is a funny story. You’ll be able to use it someday.”

There was someone following me across the dark parking lot. Someone tall, because the footsteps behind me—how long had they been there?—punctuated by the rhythmic creak of boots suggested a lengthy stride. Passing under a lamp, I watched my shadow spring out ahead of me, and in the few feet before the circle of light faded completely, I could see another shadow trembling just under my right heel. I squeezed my eyes shut for a millisecond to clear them of tears and tried to push down the thought of Neely. He couldn’t have left the judges’ table early—could he? I strained to catch a glimpse of my car in the narrow alleys between Suburbans and jacked-up pickup trucks. Without slackening my pace, I fumbled in my purse for the keys. When I found them, I slotted each jagged key between my fingers, then squeezed the key ring until it bit my palm. My Honda emerged into view. I increased my pace and heard the footsteps speed up behind me. I was almost there.

Just as I was reaching to unlock the door, I felt a hand on my shoulder and whirled around. A tall woman stood in front of me, her shock of hair backlit by the long-necked street lamp: Amanda.

“Jesus, you scared me to death!”

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was just trying to catch up. I wasn’t trying to freak you out.”

“Mission not accomplished!” My heart was racing, the tension of the past few minutes releasing all at once. “What is it this time?” Snapping at someone, anyone, felt amazingly good. My rage at what had happened onstage was almost overpowering, and I was coldly aware that Amanda was the perfect person to take it out on. A random stranger I’d only just met, new in town, she existed completely apart from the rest of my life, was barely a person to me. I remembered Ruby’s “number-one fan” remark and felt a new surge of irritation. “Why are you suddenly everywhere I look? What are you, pumpkin spice?”

She fell back half a step, stunned into silence. “I—I’m sorry,” she said again. “I just saw your name in the paper, in the listings for—”

“And, what, you want to tell me some more sob stories?” I said nastily. But it was me who was on the verge of tears.

Amanda noticed. She had regained her composure, that eerie, wide-eyed stillness, as if she were waiting for my next move. “You’ve been crying,” she said. “What happened in there? You think you messed up?”

“I did terrific, thanks,” I said reflexively. “A regular king of comedy. Anyway, learn your terms. It’s called bombing.”

“You didn’t bomb,” she said. “You were the best of the night.” I stifled a sneering comment as she went on. “You choked a little at the end, but trust me, it wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Thanks, Coach,” I sneered. Then, suddenly, just like last time, my defenses came tumbling down without warning, and I found myself telling her the truth. “Look, I didn’t finish a joke. Even if the rest of the set killed, there’s no way the judges will let me through on that mess.” The danger of tears eased up as I explained the situation, but my next thought threatened to bring them back. “And even if by some miracle I did advance to the next round—” I broke off. I wasn’t going to come back to get judged by Neely again. I couldn’t stand in the spotlight and have him stare at me the way he’d stared at me in the back of the SUV. What if he came up to me after the show, tried to talk to me?

Amanda’s eyes narrowed. “Is this something to do with what happened to you in L.A.?” She saw my expression. “I know, I know, nothing happened in L.A., right? Absolutely nothing. Just like nothing happened in there.” She jerked her thumb back toward the neon sign in the distance. “Listen, I get it. You don’t want to tell anybody. But I’m not anybody, am I? Nobody important, anyway.”

It was so close to what I’d been thinking only a moment before—that Amanda was nothing to me, no one, and therefore it didn’t matter what I said to her—that it startled me.

She saw me waver. “Let’s just go somewhere and have a drink and talk.”

The adrenaline lessening, I felt exhaustion setting in. “It’s stupid,” I said. “It’s nothing to get this upset over.”

“But you are this upset.”

She was right. I was this upset, and there was nobody in my world to talk to about it. Who was I going to tell—Kim? Fash? I couldn’t even tell Jason right after it happened, and he’d been my best friend. He’d already been so mad that I took the meeting alone, I’d thought he might blame me. But even worse than that, on a level that was itself embarrassing to admit, I’d been afraid Jason would laugh—that anyone I told would laugh. Afraid everyone would see it like Neely did: a dirty joke with me as the punch line.

Looking at Amanda, I knew she wouldn’t laugh.

I unlocked the car door and gestured for her to come around to the passenger side. She opened the door and got in, and I slid behind the steering wheel. Once the doors were closed, the silence of dead air cocooned us. I glanced around anyway, just in case, looking into the darkened cars that seemed suddenly menacing. No one was around, and we were all the way across the parking lot from Bat City, where the last few comics were shredding their fingernails under the awning as they waited their turns.

So I told Amanda what happened in L.A.

“That’s disgusting,” she said. “He really did that?”

I nodded my head. “It got on my dress. I threw it away when I got home.” It had been my favorite audition outfit, an exceptionally flattering wrap dress. I almost gagged remembering how I’d gotten up in the middle of the night, worried that Jason might see, and stuffed it all the way to the bottom of the kitchen trash can, under used paper towels and greasy takeout containers and half a leftover rotisserie chicken that had been in the refrigerator for two weeks. Back in bed, I’d tossed and turned, and finally I got up a second time to dig it out and take it outside to the dumpster in the back alley.

“He assaulted you.”

“I don’t think it counts as assault. Does it?” I laughed weakly, but Amanda looked deadly serious. “Honestly, I think the reason he did—that—was because it’s so absurd,” I said. “I mean, who could I tell? The police? He jerked off in front of me. He didn’t steal my wallet.” I had wanted to see this exact look on Amanda’s face—the Guys like that look—but now that it was happening, I felt somewhat ridiculous. “I survived.”

“Surviving isn’t living,” she said shortly. “These guys—Aaron Neely, my shithead supervisor, my asshole ex-boyfriend—they’re living. Believe me. They’re not losing any sleep over it. They’re not wondering if it was assault or not, worrying about whether they’ll bump into you someday. They can go anywhere, do anything. That’s living.” She clenched a fist. “Neely may not even remember you. He’s probably done it to a lot of women.”

That hadn’t occurred to me. I’d been thinking of the incident in the back of the SUV as something specific to me, something to do with my particular shape and size, the plunging neckline of that particular wrap dress, or maybe even the events in my particular past. As if Neely could tell at a glance what had happened to me long ago.

“It doesn’t matter anyway, because I’m out of the competition. There’s no way I’ll advance now.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” she said shrewdly. “If he does remember you, he might want to keep you in the competition just to see you squirm. Guys like that”—there was that phrase again—“it’s the power trip they get off on.”

She was right. Even with my flub, he’d have enough sway on the judging panel to advance me. The rest of the judges would be locals; they almost never snagged celebrities and industry types for the preliminaries, which dragged on for weeks. I wondered if he was scoping the city for a longer-term project. I put my head in my hands. If Neely was planning to cast and shoot something in Austin, the nightmare could go on indefinitely. He’d be here semi-permanently, showing up at open-mics and showcases, surrounded by Fash and other comics currying favor, impossible to avoid. Pilot idea: Woman hides in mascot costume to avoid local dirtbag, zipper sticks. She’s stuck in giant armadillo outfit forever. I could almost hear the velvet coffin slamming shut.

A text rattled my phone. I pulled it out and took a look. It was from Kim. “Oh my God,” I said. “You’re right.” I slowly turned it around so Amanda could see all the exclamation points.

“I told you it was a good set,” she said, unfazed.

“Or it’s what you said—he just wants to fuck with me.” I groaned. “What am I going to do? I can’t go back in there.”

“Send a text,” she said slowly, with a thoughtful expression. “Get her to tell the people in charge that you’re not feeling well.” I looked at her skeptically. “What? It’s not a lie.”

“But I can’t do the semifinals next week,” I said in despair. “Not with him in there. Next time I won’t even make it onstage.”

Amanda nodded. “Don’t worry about that now. I’ll take care of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Programmer. I’ve got skills, remember?” she said, wiggling her fingers like a magician. “Just leave it to me.” She opened the car door and got out. “And Dana? Don’t contact me for a few days.”

She was gone before I remembered that while she had my number, I didn’t have hers. Not that it mattered. Neely wasn’t going anywhere, at least not because of anything Amanda did. She might be a genius programmer for all I knew, but she had no idea how my world worked.

I had to text Kim something, though, and it couldn’t very well be the truth. I stared down at my phone and typed, Bad shellfish, talk tomorrow. I added three puke emojis, pushed the green arrow, and peeled out of the parking lot. I couldn’t wait to be home in bed.

4

For a few days after the prelims, I kept my head down, skipped the open-mics, and focused on showing up at Laurel’s on time. I was sure now that I would need this job for the foreseeable future, and it wouldn’t be a good idea to lose it with my upcoming rent hike. I dug up the lease renewal from the pile of papers on my filthy kitchen table—though I made a point of being coiffed and heeled in public, my house was a mess—and scanned through it again. There was a fifty-dollar rent break if I paid first and last on signing. I studied the numbers in my checking account, trying to figure out how much I could conceivably save in the next month by cutting all bar tabs, eating only rice and beans, and curbing my Zappos habit. It was time to set a real budget, like an adult. I wished I had asked Jason about the software he used to keep track of the grocery budget when we lived together. I hated computers.

I hadn’t yet decided what to do about the semifinals, but at first, the mere fact of having told someone about Neely made me feel almost as if the problem had been solved. Austin was in full spring mode, the perfect crystal-blue days strung one after another like beads on a necklace, each one seventy degrees Fahrenheit with just enough breeze to ruffle the crape myrtles. It was easy weather to love and feel loved by. March had already slipped by, and April was about to do the same. With the weight of secrecy lifted slightly, I wanted to enjoy myself at last. At times it felt as if I had dreamed it all up—not just Amanda, who seemed unreal when she wasn’t right in front of me, but even Neely himself. I’d been sick, after all, which had made the whole thing feel like a nightmare. How likely was it that what had happened had really happened, at least the way I remembered it?

Of course, I knew perfectly well that everything with Neely had happened just as I remembered, and that the feeling wouldn’t last. But the temporary relief was so welcome that I indulged it for as long as it lasted, responding graciously to the handful of well-wishers texting me congratulations and pretending to all and sundry, including myself, that my surprise advancement in the contest was good news and only good news. I even banged out a few scenes for the lifestyle guru pilot, feeling momentarily unblocked.

After a day or so, though, the relief wore off, and a half shade of brightness leached out of the spring days. When I glanced at my text messages, I couldn’t help wondering whether any of them would be from Amanda, though she’d made it clear, in her conspiratorial way, that we wouldn’t be in touch for a while. What could she possibly have meant by “I’ll take care of it”? Now, after almost doubting her existence, I caught myself fantasizing that any minute I’d get a text from her saying it was done, whatever it was, and Neely wouldn’t be at the semifinals. This was nonsense and I knew it. Still, I wished I had Amanda’s number, so I could call and find out what she had meant.