Trust

…
Neutrality continued to take care of itself the next morning. I walked up to the bakery ten minutes before our 9:00 A.M. meeting time, and Len and Ronaldo were already there. They were both looking the wrong way when I approached, peering out the window in the vague direction of the Staten Island ferry. Hadn’t I said that I was staying in Brooklyn?

In any case, it gave me some extra insight I might not have gleaned if they had remembered. As I stood next to the window for the next two minutes, finishing off the portable mug of fair trade decaf my cousin’s partner had pressed on me that morning before I left their house, neither one talked to the other. They just stared out into the street, resigned to let their nine o’clock tie breaker choose the next course. Being the primary decision maker probably should have cheered me up, made me feel wanted, and important, or at least reassured me that I had done the right thing in earning a few more frequent flier miles that I never believed I’d accumulate in large enough amounts to see significant benefits.

But truthfully, it didn’t make me feel good at all. Might this be another situation where my friends come together and dream big, only to have me dash all their hopes and effectively scuttle the friendship? Whether they liked it or not, I had always preferred situations where I was Len or Ham’s sidekick, but both had made it clear that this was not the role in which they preferred to cast me.

I tucked away the empty travel mug and pushed open the door to the bakery, purposely looking in the wrong direction to give them plenty of time to notice me. Both men grinned and waved at me, and we struggled to man-hug appropriately around the table. Len looked different in a way I couldn’t immediately process, and I initially chalked it up to a few extra pounds and a slightly higher scalp, both of which he wore well. His crisp suit also surprised me; not simply by its existence, although I wondered if he had an engagement soon after ours that required that level of formality. The charcoal jacket and pants, white shirt and blue tie screamed ‘banker,’ not theatre manager.

Ronaldo also seemed prepared for bank or boardroom, but that was more appropriate in his case, given his business school roots. In fact, he was demonstrating a bit more verve with his attire, an aquamarine suit with a vest that would have been appropriate for a card sharp in a western. I suddenly felt underdressed in my rumpled linen pants and cotton t-shirt, but it was August, after all.

Standard inquiries followed; everyone felt the need to talk about their current jobs, even though we already knew where the three of us had landed. I couldn’t help but chuckle when Len and Ronaldo rather poorly feigned interest in my teaching gig. They might have respected a faculty position in a major university in New York, or maybe a UCLA film school seat, but everything in between was herding cats. I guess I felt that way myself, or I wouldn’t have courted Lil-lee’s sword the day before.

Of course they noticed the cut and asked how it had happened, so I told them about the lesson. They chortled when I finished, Len loud enough to draw some disapproving glances from the rest of the café.

“You’re lucky you didn’t poke your eye out,” he said, and motioned to a server who was actively ignoring us. “Stage combat was never your strong suit anyway, was it?”
“Like you were any better. Ampersand pulled us two letter grades higher than we deserved.”
He winced. “She bruised us plenty along the way.”

Len was right about that. Amber had drilled us mercilessly for our final project, determined not to let us screw up her GPA. She was relentless on the attack, and when you would inevitably fall behind and get whacked, she wouldn’t be angry or sorry. Her message: you did this to yourself. Ham turned out to have a knack for it, of course, so the two of them darted away from most practices unmarked and giggling all the way to the showers, while Len and I groaned with every step. Most of my memories of our penultimate semester are seen through that black and blue filter.
“Only cause she liked us.”
Ronaldo was fidgeting. He hadn’t been involved back then, and he knew it. This ancient reminiscing was probably exactly what he wanted to avoid. “Did we ever use stage combat in one of the Agents’ scenes?”
“I think I recall a situation in Prague where we staged something at the torture museum,” Len said dismissively. We hadn’t shot any scenes there, but I decided not to challenge it. “There may have been a few pulled punches here and there.” He added, a bit more charitably.
“Didn’t Amber and Ham play a pair of squabbling bums?” Ronaldo pressed, and the server finally stopped freezing us just as Len began to freeze him. We all chuckled again at the memory of our favorite vagrants.
“Right,” Len said, “But Ampersand wasn’t pulling her punches.”

The large booth in the back of the room opened up, and Ronaldo insisted we take it. Once we were settled, he popped open his briefcase and withdrew a manila envelope with a fax stapled to the front of it. He set it aside and dug deeper, drawing out a personal video player the size of a cigar box. I peered at the fax cover sheet with the name “Davos” as the sender. The mostly blank space below read “Hawkins” followed by “h: 718.555.2318″ and “w: 212.555.1848.”

Ronaldo flipped up the screen and turned it on, and cycled through a series of menus, grunting with success when he finally located what he had been looking for. He turned it around to face us, and we could see a man with a microphone on a stand. The volume caught up a moment later, and then the image jumped, and the video and audio synced into the tail end of a laugh track.

“That’s right, my folks named me Saidi. Saidi Hawkins - couldn’t sound more like the holiday where ladies stalk the guys and still be a guy’s name. And can you think of any guy that name is more wasted on?”

“A brick wall,” Len murmured. “That club respects tradition.”
“Hawkins likes for people to think he’s gay,” Ronaldo offered by way of explanation. “Nobody actually knows if it’s true, and he never comes out and says so, but he implies it heavily.”
“Wait a second,” I said, and pushed the rewind button, because shushing them seemed rude.
We heard Hawkins repeat the joke, and the audience guffawed again. He riffed on three other topics.
Hypocritical (and fabulous) politicians
Dumb Criminals (the black and white editions)
The Economy
Then the host appeared from the eaves, and Hawkins thanked the audience and left in the opposite direction. The host shouted the comedian’s name one more time over the applause, and the clip abruptly ended.

Len and I sat back in the booth while Ronaldo powered down his video player and pushed it back into its recession in the briefcase. The server came over and whisked away their mugs and plates before anyone could ask for anything else. We sat in silence for an entire minute, and then Ronaldo punctured it with equal parts glee and exasperation.
“Well, come on, Jim, Len - say something! What do you think of him?”

Len and I both started talking at once and then stopped and looked at each other. He nodded.

“The guy’s got a good delivery,” I said. “He doesn’t blaze any new territory with his material, unless you count the part with his name, but I didn’t find myself checking the time.”

“How long was that clip?” Len wanted to know.
“About four and a half minutes.” Ronaldo replied.
“That’s all?”
“That’s all unknowns get in most clubs. The hour-long set only happens when you win a cable contract.”

“And now he’s poised to get that,” I mused. “Why? It wasn’t bad, but is this really his best? We might have smiled at a few of his jokes, but would anyone watching at home crack up when they hadn’t been softened up by comedy club booze?”

Len fished out a dollar for the tip and slipped it under the jar of nutmeg. “Maybe you have to know his story. That thing Ronaldo told us about his sexuality… Who does that? What straight male would flirt with that? Alternatively, can you find an out man in this city who plays with the door to the closet that way? It’s bizarre, and risky, and utterly unique. And it might be comic genius.”

Len was still struggling to figure out why it might be so smart, so he fell silent before he could enlighten us, too. I thought of the audition process, something I was familiar with for live theatre, if not television. In theatre, you sublimated your own personality into your best reading of someone else’s character, and hoped that the casting director liked your take (and your look) for the role better than everybody else’s.

But stand-up comics were different. They wrote their own lines and created a personality that the audience would accept as the comic’s own. The smaller the distance between the comic’s own personality and the persona, the greater the damage must be when the audience rejected them. And this audience that largely didn’t know, or care were capable of dicing the performer mercilessly. I know I just had, based on four and half minutes.

“I think I see what you’re getting at,” I posited. “If we think there’s a mystery, something about Hawkins that can’t be categorized, it could become the biggest part of the set. We listen to the competently delivered jokes, but really we’re watching him try to keep his personality together.”

“Are we watching because we marvel when he succeeds, or because we want to be there when it explodes?” Len asked, and we both laughed, because of course the answer was both.

A mixture of emotions wafted across Ronaldo’s face, and then he favored us with a toothy grin. “You see? This is why I needed you on this. This guy is the next best thing who will get a cable show where the audience will watch him try to keep his persona from coming apart - but you two are in a position to help him. Won’t you help him, and be compensated handsomely? Won’t you do this little thing, and get us all a place on IMDB.com?”

I had to clench my fingers hard around the edge of the bench under the table to keep from laughing inappropriately, although Ronaldo’s enthusiasm was a bit infectious. Len had gotten better at playing the heavy since I’d seen him last, because he was shaking his head.

“We can analyze the comic all we want, but that doesn’t qualify any of us to start producing his television show. Everything we’ve suggested about this guy so far indicates that his approach is completely different - almost antithetical - to what the Agents did. We couldn’t depend on characterization, because every sketch started and ended with unknowns. We built on situations and types that people accepted as “normal” and then turned them on their heads. How does that fit in with Saidi Hawkins?”

Len finished with a full-bodied shrug and held out his palms in supplication to a higher power he didn’t believe in. It was a surprisingly hostile gesture, and Ronaldo stiffened, but didn’t reply. But if I was hoping to be let off the hook, Len dashed it several uncomfortable seconds later when he turned his whole body to face me.

“Bottom line, Jim; Ronaldo has a connection to a television executive that wants to make a show out of the comedian we just saw, and footage from the Agents Provocateur. If you think this can be done in a way that respects our material, I’ll trust your judgment. I’ll take this ride only if you say so, because I know you’re still too principled to put out crappy entertainment.”

Soon after that we said our goodbyes. Ronaldo had to go to class; Len to his theatre. We parted with the promise of meeting up at the cast party after the show. Earlier in the day I’d imagined that neutrality would have faded back into easy friendship by that point, that I’d be spending the rest of the day in vacation-mode with my friends. But they weren’t on vacation, which left me with more time to kill by myself. It wasn’t even 10:00 a.m. yet, so I decided to ride the L for a while to clear my head. It did little good; the train’s loudspeaker had a companion in Len’s challenge, still echoing in my head.

‘Still too principled to put out crappy entertainment…’ If this is Len putting his faith in me, why did it sound like the kind of put-down that insults me some, and himself even more? And worse, I still couldn’t make a convincing connection between the Agents’ sketches and Hawkin’s standup. Without some inkling by the afterparty, I might as well fly back to South Bend.

A middle-aged woman in the seat next to me began to sketch the back of the head of the older man in front of her. It looked extremely accurate, although anyone who saw it later on without seeing the model might conclude that the artist didn’t know how to render proportions. But the truth was that the man’s neck and skull were oddly shaped, longer and thinner than most, bearing no resemblance to the “average” human we might conjure up in our minds. If the picture “failed” the realism test, it was solely because of our own perceptions.

Maybe our greatest barrier to connecting the comedian to the Agents was our early perceptions about Hawkins. We were basing everything on those four and a half minutes, when we should be studying whatever information was available. If he wasn’t big enough yet to have lot of video devoted to him on the web, we’d have to see him in person. Unfortunately, even if he was performing today, there was no way it would happen before the sun went down, so that wouldn’t help us now.

Unless… I took out a notebook and tried to lure back the memory of the fax cover sheet. “Davos” I remembered. Then there was “Hawkins,” followed by… I couldn’t remember the home phone number. But I was fairly certain that the work number had ended in 1848, the year of many simultaneous European revolutions.