"Correct!" Joe said brighdy. "Some folks actually thought they were funny, too. Course, they were the minority."
He got an agent whose previous enterprise, a discount men's clothing store, had gone bankrupt. One thing led to another, he said, and one gigled to another, too. Eventually he found himself working second- and third-rate nightclubs from coast to coast, driving a battered but reliable old Ford pickup truck and going where Shantz, his agent, sent him. He almost never worked the weekends; on die weekends, even the thirdrate clubs wanted to book rock-and-roll bands.
This was in the late sixties and early seventies, and there'd been no shortage of what Joe called "current events material": hippies and yippies, bra-burners and Black Panthers, moviestars, and, as always, politics-but he said he had been more of a traditional joke-oriented comedian. Let Mort Sahl and George Carlin do the current-events shtick if they wanted it; he'd stick to Speaking of my mother-in-law and They say our Polish friends are dumb but let me tell you about this Irish girl I met.
During his recitation, an odd (and-to Susannah, at least-rather poignant) thing happened. Joe Collins's Mid-World accent, with its yers and yars and if-it-does-yas began to crossfade into an accent she could only identify as Wiseguy American.
She kept expecting to hear bird come out of his mouth as boid, heard-AS hoid, but she guessed that was only because she'd spent so much time with Eddie. She thought Joe Collins was one of those odd natural mimics whose voices are the auditory equivalent of Silly Putty, taking impressions that fade as quickly as diey rise to the surface. Doing a club in Brooklyn, it probably was boid and hoid; in Pittsburgh it would be burrd and hurrd; the Giant Eagle supermarket would become Jaunt Iggle.
Roland stopped him early on to ask if a comic was like a court jester, and the old man laughed heartily. "You got it. Just think of a bunch of people sitting around in a smoky room with drinks in their hands instead of the king and his courtiers."
Roland nodded, smiling.
"There are advantages to being a funnyman doing onenighters in the Midwest, though," he said. "If you tank in Dubuque, all that happens is you end up doing twenty minutes instead of forty-five and then it's on to the next town. There are probably places in Mid-World where they'd cut off your damn head for stinking up the joint."
At this the gunslinger burst out laughing, a sound that still had the power to startle Susannah (although she was laughing herself). "You say true, Joe."
In the summer of 1972, Joe had been playing a nightclub called Jango's in Cleveland, not far from the ghetto. Roland interrupted again, this time wanting to know what a ghetto was.
"In the case of Hauck," Susannah said, "it means a part of the city where most of the people are black and poor, and the cops have a habit of swinging their billyclubs first and asking questions later."
"Bing!"Joe exclaimed, and rapped his knuckles on the top of his head. "Couldn't have said it better myself!"
Again there came that odd, babyish crying sound from the front of the house, but this time the wind was in a relative lull.
Susannah glanced at Roland, but if the gunslinger heard, he gave no sign.
It was the wind, Susannah told herself. What else could it be"?
Mordred, her mind whispered back. Mordred out there, freezing.
Mordred out there dying while we sit in here with our hot coffee.
But she said nothing.
There had been trouble in Hauck for a couple of weeks, Joe said, but he'd been drinking pretty heavily ("Hitting it hard" was how he put it) and hardly realized that the crowd at his second show was about a fifth the size of the one at the first. "Hell, I was on a roll," he said. "I don't know about anyone else, but I was knocking myself dead, rolling me in the aisles."
Then someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail through the club's front window (Molotov cocktail\nd amp; a term Roland understood)
, and before you could say Take my mother-in-law... please, the place was on fire. Joe had boogied out the back, through the stage door. He'd almost made it to the street when three men
("all very black, all roughly the size of NBA centers") grabbed him. Two held; the third punched. Then someone swung a botde. Boom-boom, out go the lights. He had awakened on a grassy hillside near a deserted town called Stone's Warp, according to the signs in the empty buildings along Main Street. To Joe Collins it had looked like the set of a Western movie after all the actors had gone home.
It was around this time that Susannah decided she did not believe much of sai Collins's story. It was undoubtedly entertaining, and given Jake's first entry into Mid-World, after being run over in die street and killed while on his way to school, it was not totally implausible. But she still didn't believe much of it.