I paused dramatically, as my father had taught me to do, and then headed into the punch line.
“ ‘Officer,’ the woman said, ‘if I told you, you’d never believe me.’ “
I waited for the laughs that my father had guaranteed would come.
They didn’t.
There was nothing but total and utter silence.
I stared out at the crowd in shock. Sweat immediately popped out of every open pore in my body. How could my father do this to me? I thought. Did he know that this joke was going to tank? Was this some filial revenge he’d been waiting to take on me for all the times my mother and I had gone against his wishes and bought something he considered to be ridiculous? Or had all my father’s friends and relatives simply been humoring him all these years, laughing at his jokes so as not to hurt his feelings, and I was now finding that I had such a bad sense of humor that I wasn’t able to distinguish an authentic belly laugh from a well-intentioned pity laugh? Whichever it was, I knew I was quickly seeing fifty bucks and my reputation in the school fly right out the cafetorium window.
I stood frozen.
And then, after a few seconds of silence, I heard something strange. From somewhere in the middle of the audience, I heard a teenage girl’s voice.
“Oh,” she said.
It was an “oh” similar to the “uh-oh” I would always hear someone in the audience say during reruns of
I Love Lucy
or
The Brady Bunch.
Whenever Lucy was about to put a vase on her head that we in the audience knew was going to get stuck or whenever Bobby Brady poured an entire king-size box of laundry soap into the washing machine that we all knew was going to flood the house with suds, some woman in the studio audience, whether laugh track or living, would always go “
uh
-oh” as the reality of what she was seeing on the screen dawned on her.
As soon as this “oh” was uttered, a wave of laughter swept through the audience. At first, I thought they were laughing at the “oh,” but then I realized the laugh was not a derisive one that reveled in my failure, but the sincere laugh of an audience who needed a few moments to realize that a kid had just told them a story about a woman who thought she saw an elephant shoving cabbages up its ass. The laugh was long and loud, and I immediately felt like Johnny Carson. Every insecure gene in my body transformed into superconfident strands of comedy magician DNA. As I pulled out my Color-Changing Shoelaces and made them do their thing, the audience laughed when they were supposed to laugh, gasped when they were supposed to gasp, and applauded when I had always hoped they would applaud.
The rest of my performance was a blur. Every one of my father’s old-time jokes worked, every one of my store-bought tricks worked, and even the fancy silk scarves my mother let me produce from the Drum O’ Plenty worked, receiving the proper amount of oohs and aahs. By the time I got to my final cornball departing line, “Like the mother cow said when her baby boy calf fell off the tall cliff, ‘A little bull goes a long way,’” I could do no wrong. The audience burst into whistles and applause as I waved to them in what felt like slow motion. I was Elvis. I was Sinatra. I was the Beatles. And I never felt cooler in my life.
I ended up winning first place, even though the girl who came out and sang after me also brought the house down. Her very adult rendition of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” definitely moved the audience, but I think, at the end of the day, the judges were so tired of hearing kids sing that they gave me the prize out of gratitude for any kind of nonmusical diversion. I didn’t care what the reasons were. I simply knew that I had hit a home run on stage that night, and now I had fifty dollars and the admiration of all my peers and their parents to prove it.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was replay my performance in my head. My mother had brought along our clunky portable cassette recorder and taped my act, but she made the mistake of having my uncle Ferd hold the recorder in his lap, so that all I could hear on the tape was the faint sound of my voice telling jokes from what sounded like the inside of a toilet and my uncle breathing, laughing, and clearing his throat. This was fine with me, however, because my memory of the event was much better than the tape could relate. On the tape, my voice and delivery sounded halting and tentative, my joke delivery rushed, and the laughs of the audience not as all-encompassing. But I knew what I had heard and I knew what I had felt, and I slept with the envelope that contained the fifty dollars and had the words
FIRST PRIZE
written on it in green felt-tip marker under my pillow, so that I could touch it during the night and reassure myself that I had actually won and not dreamed the whole thing. My body felt more tingly than it did the night after Pam McGovern kissed me on the cheek for giving her that copy of “I Honestly Love You.” I slept the sleep of kings that night.
In the morning, I awoke to the sounds of singing birds. It was Saturday and I was supposed to go in to work at my father’s store, as I had done every Saturday for the past six years. Normally I dreaded it. But today I couldn’t wait. I wanted to tell everybody about my triumph and bask in their approval and work side by side with my father, the man who helped me have the best evening of my life.
As I got on my green Schwinn ten-speed and pedaled off for his store, I was lighter than air. The victory of the previous night hadn’t lost any of its luster. If anything, it had grown. I knew I could now buy fifty dollars’ worth of new tricks and expand my routine. I started thinking about my shining future in show biz, about how I would take my act out on the road, how I would perform on
The Tonight Show
and travel to all the state fairs in the country and possibly end up with my own variety show. If Doug Henning could do it, why couldn’t I? After all, I was funnier than he was. And as long as my father had jokes in his joke file, I would have an unbeatable, show-stopping act.
As I rode along through the undeveloped section of our neighborhood, which was made up of overgrown fields and deep drainage ditches, I was whistling a happy tune. I truly don’t think I’ve ever felt happier in my entire life than I did as I rode along that day, with the sun shining and the sound of an audience’s applause and approval playing on a loop in my head. As I coasted down the incline toward the main avenue my father’s store was on, I heard a car coming up behind me. I pulled my bike closer to the shoulder of the road and considered whether I should give the people in the car a little “good morning” wave, just to share my good mood with the world. It was then that the car pulled up next to me and before I could turn to look at it . . .
THWACK!!!
A huge, softball-sized glob of paper towel that had been soaked in ice water hit me full force in the side of the face. The impact was so hard that it knocked me clean off the side of my bike. My green ten-speed and I crashed onto the asphalt and then tumbled violently down into the drainage ditch, landing in an algae-thickened pool of stagnant water.
As I lay there in the ditch, my clothes soaking up the scummy pond of drainage, my face pounding and throbbing from the projectile’s impact, I was completely stunned. It felt as if I had been hit in the side of the head with a baseball bat. I had no idea who threw it or what car they were driving. I didn’t even hear anyone laugh or shout or see them drive away. I only knew that it hurt like hell and it had knocked every ounce of happiness out of me.
After a few minutes, I got up and pulled my bike out of the muck. The bike that I had so diligently washed and polished each week was now dirty and scraped. The front wheel was bent and the seat had torn on the side from its impact with the asphalt. Dazed, I clambered back up to the road and started walking my bike back to my house to change my clothes. As I walked, all I felt like doing was crying. The win at the talent show now seemed more like a burden than a triumph. Was the person in the car who threw the paper at me one of the other competitors? Was it one of their boyfriends or brothers? Was I now a marked man? Was this the other side of success, suffering the revenge of those you’ve defeated? After all, in order to win and succeed, a lot more people have to lose and not succeed. I had won the talent show and the fifty dollars, but it was now starting to feel like my victory, like most other things in life, carried an unpleasant price tag.
Or maybe they were simply some random jackasses knocking kids off bikes with ice water–soaked balls of paper towel. Either way, I felt like the universe had decided to knock me down a notch, making me pay a painful price for feeling so good about myself.
When I got to my dad’s store later that day, I had a huge red welt on the side of my face. This became more of a topic of conversation than my win at the talent show. People whom my dad had told about my victory congratulated me and I thanked them. I tried to get my excitement back again, but the moment had passed. I put the fifty dollars in the bank on Monday and ended up spending it not on more magic tricks but on fixing my bike and a record-buying spree at Peaches. I figured that listening to records in the privacy of my own room was something that would at least allow me to hide from the outside world and hopefully not upset anybody enough for them to come after me with more balls of water-soaked Bounty.
I continued doing magic in retirement homes, worked on my comedy patter, and eventually bought some new tricks with the money I made working at my dad’s store. I performed again the next year in the talent show, but this time safely out of competition, coming back as the previous year’s winner to entertain the audience as the judges tallied up their scores. My dad had helped me put together a whole new set of jokes and my act got another great reception. As I stood there soaking up the crowd’s applause, I felt good that I was only entertaining people and not trying to defeat any of my fellow performers.
After all, the fifty dollars I won had long been spent, and winning the talent show hadn’t made me any more popular with the people whom I thought I wanted to impress. But doing my act made me happy. My dad and I had found something we truly enjoyed doing together, and it was the first time in my life that I actually thought of the guy as not just my dad but my friend. And so, I figured, that had to be more important than trying to convince an audience that I was more talented than the swing choir’s Kerry Reynolds singing “Seasons in the Sun.”
But I still always looked to see who was driving up behind me whenever I rode my bike. I mean, being friends with your dad and feeling good about yourself are all well and good, but taking a wet paper towel in the side of the face is something you should always strive to avoid.
’TIS THE SEASON TO AVOID DATING
T
here was a couple in my freshman class, Cathy and Dan, who were more mature than the rest of us. Or at least I thought they were more mature than the rest of us because . . . well . . . they made out with each other all the time.
In school.
In
public.
The idea of knowing a girl who liked me so much that she’d make out with me in front of other people simply blew my mind. Just the thought of getting a girl to kiss my fourteen-year-old acned face in the privacy of her bedroom or a backyard fort or even a tent in her driveway seemed about as attainable as my childhood dream of being able to fly by flapping my arms. Patty Collins may have misguidedly wanted to kiss me when we were six, but now that I was actually old enough to do it, I simply couldn’t imagine putting my face that close to a girl’s and not having her scream in terror. And if she did let me get that close to her, I figured a quick peck on the lips would be about the most I could hope for. Or handle, for that matter. I liked the idea of holding hands with a girl as I walked down the hall and of kissing her good-bye in front of the open door to her next class, with my fellow students seeing this as they thought to themselves, Wow, Paul’s really cool. He’s got a girlfriend and she’s kissing him in front of us. She must find that ring of pimples around his mouth really sexy. But the idea of making out heavily with a girl, in public or otherwise, was both terrifying and off-putting.
It was also something I became more and more obsessed with as I watched Cathy and Dan engage in their public displays of affection.
Cathy was a very tall girl. She was Italian and had shortish black hair that had been styled into one of those ubiquitous Dorothy Hamill cuts, with a subtle touch of curling-iron work around the bangs. She had a pretty face and a large mouth with full lips and big teeth. She wasn’t skinny but seemed shapely in a six-foot-tallgirl kind of way. She had a very natural beauty about her and never really wore makeup, outside of lip gloss. Back in high school, I thought lip gloss was the sexiest thing a girl could wear. I couldn’t envision a day in the future when girls would no longer put it on. Pretty girls, at least. On the wrong girl, lip gloss just didn’t seem to work. If a girl was weird-looking or had thin lips, the gloss simply gave the illusion that she hadn’t wiped her mouth in a while. Girls like this would end up looking more like my friend George, who was a nice guy but who always had shiny wet lips and perpetual strings of white spit at the corners of his mouth that would stretch and hang on for dear life whenever he talked. The faux moisture that lip gloss provided had to be used with care, since its usage walked a constant razor’s edge between good and evil. Lip gloss was a privilege, not a right. But on Cathy, it just made her beauty complete.
Cathy had a pretty smile and was always friendly. In many ways, she didn’t really jibe with my concept of the kind of girl who would make out in public. That distinction was usually saved for the burnouts who populated the back of our school bus: tough girls in tight jeans and halter tops, the kind who fastened roach clips into their hair that had leather strings with a bead and pink feather hanging at the end. These were the girls who would wear long leather coats and black gangster hats, short rabbit-fur jackets and tube tops, girls who could be heard throughout the day yelling to each other, “Hey, Sandi, toss me a ciggy butt” and “Fuck you, Sheila, you slut!” They would occasionally show up in school pregnant and still look like they could and would kick your ass if you gave them a sidelong glance. To me, these were the kind of girls who made out in public. Girls like Cathy laughed at your jokes and actually cheered at pep rallies. You could introduce them to your mother and borrow chemistry notes from them. Simply put, Cathy was an enigma. And her enigmatic qualities were causing her to have a starring role in my sweaty little pubescent dreams more and more frequently.
My growing obsession with Cathy made me feel guilty. I’d known Dan since middle school and he was an extremely nice guy. Like Cathy, he also wasn’t the type of person I envisioned spending his days indulging his libido in front of his peers. That was the job of the freak guys who hung out in the auto shop or on the smoking patio. They were the guys with dirty hair and wispy mustaches, who smelled like cigarettes and pot and gasoline and who would occasionally throw one of the burnout girls over their shoulders and run around the school slapping her butt as she screamed and laughed until the principal yelled at them to knock it off. Dan was on the football team and was a very handsome, clean-cut guy with perfect hair, big teeth, and a perpetual tan—a Michigan ski bum, the type who always wore a form-fitting, brightly colored ski jacket with a bouquet of lift tickets sprouting from the zipper tab. Dan was one of the most polite guys I knew, almost as polite as Chris Nubellski, and I never once saw him look sad in the entire four years we were in high school together. But I guess I’d be constantly happy, too, if I looked like he did and was making out with Cathy all the time.
Cathy and Dan seemed to have everything in common. There was a picture of them in my freshman yearbook from a class ski trip. They’re standing hand in hand at the base of the ski lift, smiling broadly and looking as natural in the wintry sport setting as my friends and I looked at a
Star Trek
convention. I avoided that ski trip like the plague, having been taken skiing once by my church youth group—a trip that saw me screaming down the side of a mountain after an attempt at “snowplowing” failed. My downhill odyssey ended only after I smashed into a ski rack and sent twenty pairs of skis coasting down the beginners’ slope behind the lodge. Any fantasies about having Cathy as my girlfriend were always derailed by the thought of taking her skiing: her schussing gracefully down the diamond run as I did my best Ray Bolger impression on the bunny hill before colliding face first with a tree. No, deep down I knew we didn’t have a lot in common and, in true high-school fashion, that only made me desire her attentions more.
Sometime around November of my sophomore year, after a grade and a half of watching the two of them in perpetual liplock, I realized that I was seeing Cathy and Dan together less and less. They were still friendly with each other, but I didn’t notice a lot of making out going on. And finally, on the first Tuesday of December, my friend Tom brought me the news I had waited so long to hear.
“Hey, guess what? Dan and Cathy broke up.”
“Really?” I said, completely thrown. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I guess they got bored.”
“Are they mad at each other?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I heard they’re still friends.”
My mind raced. The Christmas Dance was coming up in a few weeks and I really wanted to go. I had never taken a girl to a dance. Not for lack of trying, though. In junior high, I took my next-door neighbor Mary to a school dance, but when we got there, they wouldn’t let us in because Mary wasn’t a student at my school. She was attending the Catholic school at the end of our street and, for some reason, it seemed my junior high had a policy against letting religious outsiders dance in our cafeteria. I was outraged as only a twelve-year-old can be and immediately saw us as two star-crossed, martyred lovers, caught in a world that neither understood our love nor would allow it. In reality, I guess I was more upset at the thought that I had been cheated out of my first official excuse to slow-dance with a girl. Not to mention the fact that my mother had bought me a spicy new blue-and-white-checked leisure suit and red turtleneck sweater that I was sure would make me a hit with all the other girls at the dance and drive Mary into a jealous rage. But I had been denied all of those pleasures, and now, with the Christmas Dance looming and Cathy a free agent, I saw my chance to set the record straight.
I spent the next few days doing reconnaissance. Step one was to start talking to Cathy. This wasn’t a big leap for me because she was in several of my classes and we had a passing acquaintance with one another. She thought it was funny when I would do Steve Martin routines, which I would always pass off as my own. It was the year before Steve Martin broke big and nobody in my school had ever heard of him. I was able to get away with my plagiarism all the way until my junior year, when Steve Martin’s song “King Tut” became a hit. After that, my former admirers turned against me and every time I would make a joke, they would ask, “Is that joke yours or did you steal it from Steve Martin, too?” I was scared straight from intellectual property theft after that but, at the time I was trying to get in with Cathy, I was still living comfortably off of Mr. Martin’s repertoire.
“I’m so
mad
at my
mother,
” I performed for Cathy, making sure to keep my tone just searching enough to seem like I was improvising the routine on the spot. “I mean, she calls me up the other day and says she needs to borrow fifty dollars so she can buy some
food.
” I put the proper disdainful emphasis on the word
food
in order to exactly replicate Mr. Martin’s delivery. The fact that the joke was only funny because Steve Martin was rich and yet I was only a sophomore with a couple of dollars in my pocket didn’t seem to ruin the routine for Cathy. She laughed at my unoriginal antics as I went in for the kill. “So, I decided I’m gonna make her work it off by moving my barbells up to the attic.”
Cathy laughed again, covering her mouth. “Oh, Paul, you’re so funny. Did you just make that up?”
I shrugged in a sly, yet vague, way that seemed to indicate “Hey, this stuff comes out of my head constantly,” covering my tracks in case I was put on trial for theft by Steve Martin’s estate. “Miss, did you actually
hear
Mr. Feig
say
that he had written the material in question
himself?
” “Well . . . um . . . not directly but—” “No further questions, your honor!”
“You’re really clever,” Cathy said in a warm tone.
I made a “thanks, I like you, too” face at her, then waited a few seconds. “Hey, I’m sorry that you and Dan broke up,” I said, making the universal sad face of the empathetic supportive confidant.
“Oh, that’s okay. We’re still really good friends.”
“Huh” was all I could reply. Things were looking promising.
Later that day, as I was heading out of my geometry class, I spotted Dan in the hallway. I quickened my step to catch up, then slowed down and feigned surprise as I came up next to him. “Oh, hey, Dan. I didn’t see you there. How’s it going?”
We exchanged a few pleasantries, and I shrewdly asked him what his skiing plans were for this winter, just to throw him off my scent. Then I came in for the kill.
“That’s too bad that you and Cathy broke up.”
“No, not really. We’ve been together for a while. We’re just really good friends.” I couldn’t fathom how someone you’d spent over a year French-kissing could suddenly be just a “really good friend.” But, then again, I was a newcomer in the
arte de l’amore.
“Cathy’s really great, isn’t she?” I said, trying very hard to keep an objective tone.
“Yeah, she’s the best. She really likes you, too. She’s always talking about how funny you are,” said Dan. He definitely threw me with that one. And, because I was fifteen years old, just hearing that Cathy liked me made me start to get a boner. I shifted my books to the front and continued.
“Really? She does?” My nonchalant tone had been put to the test with that one. My voice came off sounding as if I were trying to talk in a car that was driving down a very bumpy road.
“Yeah,” said Dan with a friendly smile. “You should ask her on a date. I think she’d go out with you.”
Boner ahoy! I pressed down on my books and tried to walk normally. This was unbelievable. Dan was pimping his ex-girlfriend out to me. It was all going so well that it made me wonder if I was being set up. I’d always remembered an episode of
My Three Sons
where Ernie started going out with his best pal’s girlfriend. Uncle Charley got all scary when he found out and said, in a tone that sounded like he was going to punch Ernie, “A real man doesn’t take another man’s girl.” Did Dan know that I was angling for Cathy? Was he laying a trap that would end with him and his football buddies going Uncle Charley on my ass? I had no way of knowing, but my fifteen-year-old libido was in too high of a gear for me to care.
In the cafeteria, I went over to Cathy, who was emptying the beef fritters from her hot lunch tray into the garbage can.
“Hey, Cathy, um . . . I was wondering . . . uh . . .” The reality of what I was about to do hit me at that very moment, but I had clearly reached the point of no return.
“What?” she said with a sweet look on her face.
“Um . . . do you want to go to the Christmas Dance with me?” Right around the word
want
I started to feel faint. I know the rest of the words came out of my mouth, but, just like when you’ve been driving and suddenly realize that you have no recollection of actually piloting the car, I couldn’t remember finishing the sentence. It was only Cathy’s face and response that made me realize I had actually gotten the full request out.
“Sure, Paul,” she said with a smile. “I’d love to go.”
I had done it! My weaselly little plan had worked. I had set a goal and seen it through. I had longed to be the guy making out with Cathy for a year and a half, and now I was well on the road to making it happen at the Christmas Dance. I was beyond happy.
And
I had a raging boner that was fortunately camouflaged by the garbage can.
I had entered a whole new world.
I spent the next few weeks getting nervous about the date. Cathy and I didn’t talk any more than we normally did, but there was now a connection between us. She would always give me a smile and a big “Hi, Paul” when we would see each other in the hallway. On top of that, word started getting around. The same gossip machine that had disseminated the news of Cathy and Dan’s breakup was now busily spreading the word of our unlikely Yuletide rendezvous.
“Man, you’re going to the dance with
Cathy
?” was a phrase I heard out of several of my friends’ mouths. I would always respond with a Hugh Hefner–esque “Hey, she
wanted
to go with me.”