“What! Who are you? What’s this?” said the smallest one.
“Sorry, sorry sorry.” He checked to make sure no one was injured and then took off down the hallway. He could still hear them as he ran. “We should make sure he’s not a thief! Oh dear, could he be a thief? Perhaps we ought to chase him! Chase him? Lilly wants to chase a boy! Or maybe someone’s chasing him! Oh, ladies, make sure you all have your purses.”
By the time he made his way down the circular staircase, they were all gathered at the top, peering down at him.
“I didn’t take anything!” he shouted back up. They looked so worried in their ridiculous hats that he laughed. “It’s okay! Have a good tour!”
The curved doors were propped open, and the Louisiana sky outside was a bright blue. Andrew started running down the long driveway of Dorrie’s estate, but halfway through, a little out of breath, he stopped. The ladies were wrong. He wasn’t running from anything. Dorrie wasn’t going to chase him. And he wasn’t running to anything either.
God, had she really said, “No means no?” Andrew wondered if she’d meant to make a joke. Maybe? It was too bad, really, that she’d never gotten to see him really deliver a set. They’d spent almost three days together without doing much of anything. He hadn’t even done any writing since Austin, and according to Jerry Seinfeld, you were supposed to write material every single day. Andrew tried to. Or, at least, he tried to try to. He’d heard somewhere that you needed to have half an hour of material before you could be considered a real comic. Right now he had the seven minutes he’d done at school, and the seven that didn’t go over so great in Austin, and another seven that he was ready to try out, and seven more that he should have been working on all along.
This driveway was endless. It was some grand, plantation shit. Could you make plantation jokes? Should he? It was easy to joke about offensive Asian things, but taking on slavery seemed a little advanced.
Andrew thought of the first time that Emma had come up to his room. She’d looked at the posters on his wall and, straight to Richard Pryor’s face, said, “Stand-up comedy is just so annoying, isn’t it?” That had been hard to shake, but later it made him think. What if he took every single thing that was annoying about people trying to be funny and worked it into one giant, hairy superball of a joke? Not comedy clichés, just normal people stuff. He’d left those notes stuffed into the side pocket of the car, but he still remembered most of it.
1: Hey, Carl?
2: That’s my name, don’t wear it out.
1: Can I borrow a pen?
2: That’ll be a hundred bucks.
1: Ha ha, thanks. Do you spell your name with a C or a K?
2: I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.
1: That’d be kind of drastic, don’t you think? You’d probably get sent away.
2: Don’t drop the soap, amiright? Huh? Huh?
Total gold. It was kind of hard to be two characters, but the routine worked better that way. The key was to keep it going until it was almost not funny anymore, and then it would be incredibly funny. Andrew headed back towards the city as he ran through other possibilities in his head. He’s smoking crack! Make that sound again! Oh, you don’t know the price? It must be free!
Oh, it would be horrible and irritating and brilliant. It wasn’t the sort of thing that his dad would be into, but Andrew’s friends would probably love it. Maybe he should start shooting videos of himself doing stand-up and put it on YouTube. Who needed a girlfriend when he had this, the trying and the promise?
In his luckiest childhood moments, Andrew had been able to make his mother laugh. It wasn’t something she did on her own. When his father came home early enough for dinner, she’d always start the meal off serving him awkward, hopeful heaps of food, then lapse into a quick silence that Andrew feared more than anything else as a little kid. Her nervousness thrummed out at him and underlined his own fear that even this semblance of closeness would be broken. Sometimes, though, he could make them all laugh—his mother, his father, and teenage Saina, too—laugh until the tension between his parents popped loose and they could just be together like he wanted.