“All right, show of hands: Who here’s ever gone skydiving? Show of hands.”

I look out on the audience. It’s your typical crowd of dead-eyed, upstate Thursday nighters, kind of people who tend to populate shitty comedy holes with names like ‘The Laugh Barn.’ A good mix of stupid, smiling, drunken faces and the discontent—my people—all fucking dour and unimpressed and fast food fat. A few of ’em raise their hands (“look at me!”) and I say in my gruff, four hundred thousand cigarettes-smoked, whiskey and acid reflux rasp:

“You boring motherfuckers.”

One of the three with their hands up laughs. Guy can laugh at himself. Good for him. It’s an important skill, laughing at yourself. If I couldn’t laugh at all of the awful horseshit in this world—my own inconsequential existence included—I’d have painted the ceiling of some Midwestern roach motel with my brains by now. Maybe the Slipper Inn outside of Lake Station, Indiana. Yeah, there’s a candidate. I always hated that fucking place, what with its fleas and felons and shit reception and nearby bottom feeder comedy club ‘Skanks’—which could at least have the goddamn decency to deliver on its whorish name. Yeah, that’s how it’ll eventually go down, probably... strike out with some hairlipped bar hag at Skanks after rehashing the same ancient, dead-end jokes like a half-dead liver spotted old man band who’s been playing the same setlist of once-great hits for five fuckin’ decades. Return to my lonely room at the Slipper Inn, with its peeling paint and dripping faucet and listen to the sweaty, bearded long-haul trucker rail his meth whore in the next room over while I snort my last two lines of stepped-on coke with my last rolled-up dollar bill and pound down fourteen dollar-menu double cheeseburgers and watch the Tonight Show and for dessert put a shotgun in my mouth and blow the dust-caked ceiling fan off the fucking place. Yeah. Sure. Sounds like a plan.

The other two with their hands still hovering in the air are this grotesque IKEA catalog-couple who probably can’t even enjoy themselves fucking. Coupla textbook bickerers noon and night, these two; you can tell just by lookin’ at ‘em. No idea when they came home from work and “told each other about their day” and made plans to come out to this shithole tonight they were gonna end up the butt of some fat asshole has-been’s “jokes.” Yet, here we are:

“Seriously. There’s nothing more boring than a fucking skydiver. Everyone I’ve ever known who’s done that shit is toooootally overcompensating for being toooootally boring. You never hear cool, well-adjusted people say they went ‘skydiving.’ It’s always these unoriginal, vapid motherfuckers who can’t hold a conversation. It’s the bland housewife or Business Admin grad equivalent of the red Corvette for the balding middle-aged white guy with the thimble dick.”

Guy Who Can Laugh At Hisself is howling along with his cube-farm friends. He knows he’s fuckin’ Golf Digest-boring. These other two, though... their mouths are angry, drawn creases and that’s when I hear it from the back of the room:

“Your act’s boring, bro!”

I scan the crowd, follow the rest of the dim eyes to the back and find this stupid townie piece of shit who looks like he’s single handedly trying to bring back the mullet. Broad on his arm’s this dimwitted size-ten cud chewer shoehorned into size-eight Wranglers and suckin’ down a longneck of Molson Light like it’s the last cock on planet Earth. Fucking upstate, man.

“I seen you do this same shit in like the Eighties on youtube! Get some new shit!”

“That’s right pal, I been doin’ comedy since before your dad pushed aside the diaper and finger-fucked your infant ass in the back of his ninety-two Plymouth Acclaim. So show some respect and SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

I learned long ago you gotta head these fuckers off at the pass. Give ‘em a quarter of an inch and they’ll be trying to put their own name up on the marquee with a quickness, every time. Like everyone here paid their hard-earned money to see Billy Ray Cyrus and his flabby cum-dumpster fiancé yuck it up.

The broad pipes up: “Don’t talk to him like that, you loser! Show some respect to your paying audience !”

“Ahhhhh! Now you’re gettin’ it, sweetheart. People paid to come here, correct. To see ME , fuckface! So again, I implore you—for the sake of the civilized paying customer: SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.”

It’s never fun, the hecklers. You learn to live with it, but I ain’t lying when I say I’ve had dreams of going full ISIS on these scumbags. Beheadings, rape, torture, drownings... I do it all in my sleep, with fuckin’ glee. Then I wake up. And it’s the real world and they’re not screaming through the flames as their skin curls around them and their eyeballs boil. Them’s the breaks.

“Where the fuck was I? Jesus. Well, there you go folks. A nice walk down memory lane, with a joke from ‘The Eighties.’ You’re welcome.”

I take a swig of my beer, light a cigarette and silently curse Louis CK. That motherfucker, ushering in this era of comics burning their material every year andcoming up with a whole new act. You think I wanna be engaged with the real world enough to come up with new shit on the regular, you asshole? Let me just do my fucking jokes and cash my peanuts check and go drown my sorrows in a bucket of fried chicken for chrissakes.

“Those were the days, huh? ‘The Eighties.’ I mean, seriously, the Eighties were the greatest... that musta been like the Roaring Twenties for pedophiles, right? I mean, don’t get me wrong...”

I prime the smoke with a couple puffs, leave ‘em hanging for a few seconds while I survey the scene. There’s a handful of appreciative deviant smiles out there but mostly it’s a sea of disapproval and disdain. Too blue? Blow me. Audiences these days, man. Can’t fart in the direction without the white nights and nancies turning up their noses.

“You didn’t have the internet back then, so getting the good kiddie porn was like pullin’ teeth. Fella hadda be ‘industrious.’ Hadda make your own, in them days. But that was all right, people—we were real go-getters in the Eighties. We still believed in the American Dream. And you didn’t have all these goddamn cameras and smart phones and goddamn “selfie sticks” around in them days, to catch you in the act. All you needed was a conversion van, Polaroid camera, and a packa Jolly Ranchers and you were set .”

“You think this shit’s funny, you fat fuck?! Pedo jokes?!”

Jesus Christ. She’s back. Joe Dirt’s Doberman. I can feel my blood boiling, the pressure rising in my cholesterol-choked veins.

“Well, no. I guess you’re right. I can see how it wouldn’t be funny at all, to a fat whore who had a train ran on her by her uncles when she was six. You don’t like molestation jokes, sweetheart? Maybe you oughta skip the family reunion this year, you stupid fucking cu—”

I might be carrying three hundred-plus pounds of road burger and beer gut nowadays, but the old hot corner reflexes are still in there somewhere—I duck just as the harpy’s beer bottle explodes on the brick wall behind me.

* * *

“Cunt?!”

I’m still brushing glass out of my depressingly graying hair when Mahdi comes charging down the back hall, wagging that goddamn camel-fucking finger of his. Take your condemnation and shove it, buddy.

“You cannot say this ‘cunt’ no more Artie! This is not nineteen-ninety two! You cannot say these things like this!”

“I get it, I get. My jokes are old. I’m old. You’re old. Whatever!”

“To fuck with your jokes. They have the cell phones, they have the cameras. You cannot say the ‘c-word’.”

“My second special was called ‘THUNDERCUNT’ for fuck’s sake! Whatta they expect?!”

Big Shirley’s back here too, waiting for her turn to step in front of the firing squad and crack her broke ass jokes about the death march down the ice cream aisle and “skinny bitches.” She hops on the bandwagon: “Yeah, Art. Mahdi’s right: All of these juju zombies have smart phones. The social justice knobs are probably burning your effigy on Instagram already.”

“You shut the fuck up too, Shirl. That cow was a USDA, grade-A prime cunt and you both know it. And fuck a ‘Instagram!’ Jesus Christ, is everybody going fucking crazy?! Fuck this whole business. Fuck everything. I’m sick of it, man. All of it. I’m done. Just pay me my fucking take and you’ll never see me again.”

Mahdi just laughs his old goat herding, Middle Eastern evil fucking Jafar laugh. I could knock his teeth down his curry-coated throat.

“Done?” he laughs. “Ha! ‘Done.’ What are you gonna do, eh? Comedy’s a cruel mistress, yes—but she’s the only one who’ll fuck you these days, my tubby friend.”

“Just—give me my money, man... I’m not fuckin’ around.”

I pop open another beer bottle with my Bic lighter, its bottom caked in black, sticky resin from snuffing out untold bowls. I take a swig and the beer is good... could use a couple dozen more after that ignominious shitshow, to be honest. And now this.

“Okay, okay... you want your money? Here is your fuckin’ money.” He takes out that big, wadded billfold of his. Peels off two twenties and pockets the rest.

“The fuck is this?”

“Is your money. Appearance fee.”

“Fuck you that’s my appearance fee. Forty bucks?! I can’t fill my fucking tank on forty bucks! Look, man... I got bills. I got problems, Madhi... you don’t even know the half of it. I’m talking about some grave shit, dude. So quit fuckin’ around. Gimme what you fuckin’ owe me or shit’s gonna get real ugly, real quick.”

“I book you two hundred for thirty minute on stage. Prorated, forty dollar.”

“I did like ten minutes! That’s like, what, carry the eight... sixty-five bucks!”

“Nine and half minutes. Minus two beer. Minus aggravation.”

“Unfuckingbelievable!” I snatch the twenties and it takes every ounce of fucking self-control—obviously not my strong suit—to keep from knocking this motherfucker back to the Holy Land. “You’re such a fuckin’—”

“Don’t you say it!!”

* * *

“Cunt!”

I sling the empty beer bottle and it smashes against the side of the ‘Laugh Barn’ and for half a second I feel like a God. Then—as quickly as it was there—I’m back to being a fat slob in a parking lot with just enough beer in him to make him have to piss but no buzz. Two assholes are sitting in their car and looking at me like I’m the most pathetic piece of shit on Earth. They might be right.

“Don’t stop blowin’ each other on account’a me, ya fuckin’ queers!” I growl, and head over to Mahdi’s Lincoln Navigator to piss on the tires and the handle before getting in the Camry I basically live in now, for all intensive purposes—intents and purposes, what the fuck ever—and drive to the nearest gas station, a Nice-N-Easy off Highway Eighty-One. It’s at least warm inside, and I take a moment to bask in the heat of the hotdog cooker after opening the scuffed clear plastic door. I look over at the clerk. She’s a hulking fucking linebacker-shouldered behemoth of hairy moles and terraced chins like some shit out of Dungeons and fuckin’ Dragons but she’s fortuitously eying the black guy by the brake cleaner when I make my move—it’s a move I’ve pulled on the road a thousand times: the ol’ two-fer-one. I grab a foil wrapped bun from the steamer and unwrap it and use the tongs to grab not one, but two cheese-filled hot dogs from the cooker and stash ‘em—one in the bun, one underneath—and wrap it all back up into one neat little package. Suckers!

Couple bags of chips, chewy chocolate chip cookies, a bag of chocolate covered pretzels, ice cream sandwich and a two-liter of Mountain Dew later and I’m ready to hit the motherfuckin’ road. I step up to the Gruffalo guarding the check-out counter and say “Fifteen on pump two and the rest of it,” as I motion to the eats, but before she-he-it even starts to ring up my shit she—they?—fold their meaty John Goodman arms and look down on me with the condescension of all the school marms the world has ever known until I say “Yeah? What?” and... they... point down at that goddamn tinfoil-wrapped escapee of mine. The ol’ two-fer-one.

“Open it.”

“Fuck that. It’ll get cold.”

“You mean ‘they.’”

“What the fuck are you on about? Look, Mecklenburg, I don’t got time for this. Just ring the shit up. And fifteen on pump two.”

“Open it.”

“You open it.”

Fuck. She does. And there it is, the bun and two hotdogs all crammed in there together like some sick scene at a Bob Crane party.

“Hey, look... musta been an accident or somethin’.” But she ain’t buyin’ it, she just looks down her warted nose at me and grumbles:

“Have you no shame?”

Coming from a disgusting shambling mound like this filthy uni-sex rest stop shitter of a human being, I can only look her in the eye and answer with complete and utter honesty:

“No. I really don’t.”

She shakes her jowled head in pity and I feel like the lowest of the low but she only charges me for the one dog, which lifts my spirits a bit. I go outside and blow hot lungsful of air into my hands to stay warm while the gas pumps and then drive over and park by the air compressors to have a cigarette and eat my two-fer. They go down good, all hot and gooey processed fucking cheese and nitrates and nitrites and lips and assholes and whatever the fuck else... man that shit hits the spot. I finish it off with another smoke and as I’m sittin’ there looking out on the forlorn, empty, frost-covered lot I see it, this relic, this throwback to a bygone era: A pay phone.

Now I don’t believe in “signs” or none of that horseshit, trust me—but if I was the type to believe in signs, this would be a motherfuckin’ sign. I mean, when’s the last time you seen a pay phone? Does it even work? Can you still call 1-800-COLLECT like in the old Ricki Lake commercials? I just sit there and stare at it for a long time until my menthol’s burned down enough to singe my fat, yellowed fingers. I toss the butt out the window, roll it up and hold the burnt spot up to the cold glass until it’s too numb to hurt before digging the last of my ash-caked quarters and a couple dimes out of the ashtray, zipping up my coat, putting on my scarf and knit Giants hat and stepping out into the miserable asshole cold where I’m instantly reminded why I left for L.A. in the first place all those years ago... not just to make it in comedy—which I did by the way, you judgmental fucks. I said I was a “has-been,” not a “never-was”—but to escape this fucking cold. Look, I may be worthless and lazy and undisciplined as fuck but I ain’t stupid and it’s the definition of stupid to live some place the very fucking air wants you dead half the goddamn year. That’s right: you live in New York or Canada or New England or Wisconsin or Montana between November and March you’re a stupid fuck. I said it.

Anyway, I surprisingly manage to make it over the frost without busting my fat ass and step to the phone and I’m instantly shot back to the good old days of pagers and pay phones and ‘H’ and eightballs galore. Me and my girl Rocky—Racquel, but she earned the fuckin’ shorthand, all right? Rocky was a scrapper through and through. Took her almost a week to die after the overdose—we used to camp out in the window of our tiny matchbox apartment off Vine and stake out the pay phone across the street whenever our dealer hit us back on the beeper and said he’d call us in ten. And if some asshole went to use the phone in the meantime Rocky’d throw open the window and rain obscenities down on ‘em like a fuckin’ B-52 or Zeus’ thunderbolts until they cleared out. God damn, I loved that girl. Still do, and always will I guess. Death’s dyin’ to punch all our tickets but hey—at least you went out doin’ somethin’ you loved, babe. I mean, it’s what killed you but... ‘win some, lose some’ right?

I can’t quite bring myself to reach out and take the fucking receiver off the cradle because I’m afraid it’ll work but I finally do. And it does. The stupid, childish part of my brain that tells me to still buy lottery tickets and spend the rent on chocolate bars calls it another “sign.” I know better, but fuck it... I’m at the end of the line. There’s no such thing as repercussions from here on out. I put in the change, wait for the prompts, then dial a number I haven’t dialed in six years. It rings a couple times and suddenly she’s there on the other end.

“Hello?”

I’m fuckin’ frozen. Both my body and mind. I want to just hang up and crawl into my car and sit there until I pass out and maybe, hopefully, freeze to death.

“Who is this?”

Still I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say. Okay, I know what to say, but I don’t know how to say it. I mean, it’s been six fuckin’ years.

“Arturo...?” Her voice is so full of hope and fear that I don’t have the heart to leave her hanging any longer, so I answer:

“Hey, Ma. Yeah... it’s me.”

Great. It’s nothing major, just a little tweak in her breathing but I can tell she’s fuckin’ crying now. “Oh my God, I thought I’d never hear your voice again. Are you okay? Wait—you’re not in jail again, are you?”

“No, I’m not in fucking jail.”

“Arturo, watch your mouth.”

“Look, Ma. I... I need to come home. Not just to visit, I mean like for a while. I don’t know how long, but not long. I really need a place to stay.”

Dead air.

“Look, you know I wouldn’t be asking if—”

“You’re back on the drugs, aren’t you? Don’t lie to me—I can tell.”

“No. I’m clean. I swear. Six years N.A.—got the chip right here on my keychain. Look, you think I want to be moving back in with my fuckin’ mother at my age? It’s not that, I promise. On pop’s grave, I’m clean.”

“Okay. Okay... still. I don’t know if this is such a good idea. You know I love you, you’re my only son, but last time—”

“Ma...”

I light a cigarette, unsure if I have the balls to say it. I mean, who wants to hear this kind of shit from their own kid? She can tell from my tone that I’ve got some serious news to impart.

“What is it? Art... you can say.”

“I’m sick, Ma. I got cancer.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Two