The Final Roll.
I hadn’t ridden the stock market since the ’87 crash, where I’d been scalped on Black Wednesday and you can’t buy many blue chips, with ten percent from the door, at a Stuck Pigs gig. My refresher course in treasury bills, ETF’s, stocks and bonds had been pummelled into me, by the media and every suit with a sandwich in the park and cabbie with a smartphone, bleating out their expert opinions about the current state of the economy – like everyone else, post zero-eight and living above ground, I’d become an expert, in sound bite economics.
I sold it to Betty’s mother like I actually knew what I was talking about. I buried the truth, in a ticker tape of bullshit. Maybe she didn’t understand, maybe she did. It didn’t matter once she took the money. Betty had co-invested ten per cent of her salary, from the Harry Bracco Talent Agency, for every year that she worked for me. The hedge fund who was managing the money, sold to another hedge fund, moved offshore and split into separately traded stocks. Ticker this, reverse split that, float this and IPO that. Keep it quiet and the IRS doesn’t come over and mug you for their thirty-four per cent. No one will ever know. I was almost starting to believe my own bullshit. Five years, of thirty-two thousand dollars per year was the best I could offer, and the closest I could come to vindication for my deeds.
Gadget had been true to his word. Four weeks, to the half-hour, my disused radiator became an ATM for a college education and a mortgage repayment plan – stocked by a large Chuppa Chupp, in exchange for my two kilo albatross, over a Stinky Sid meatloaf.
Ted arrived on stage, tapping furiously into his mobile phone.
“Ok well that’s the legal disclaimer twittered. I operate on an equal alienation policy.”
He took a cautious bead at the audience.
“Are there any mimes in the audience?...... No? …….Not a one? ……Shout now.”
He waited for a sound. The audience began to laugh. He waited. The laughter grew.
“Ok, if you can’t shout, then maybe, mime out a light bulb switching on and off, a few times, if you’re there. … A bell ringing? ……No? …….We’re in a mime-free zone then?”
He looked to the crowd with a deadpan face.
“I just hate those fuckers. They have that annoying, I’m begging you to punch me in the face – I’m pleading with you, punch out my fucking lights. Mimes are like you took the most annoying people on the planet, distilled them down in to a bastardized clown stew, ripped their tongue out, add a sprinkle of pretentious asshole and a rich, thick slather of French jazz musician from the sixties.”
The audience cheered his distain.
“You see, I used to be a mime. I’m talkin’ full badge and gun, certified mime. I’ve been to the dark-side. I’m like one of those ex-smokers. You know the type. They quit smoking and now look upon it with absolute disgust as being the filthiest habit on the planet. But me leaving the mime-hood was not a twelve step program, it was a one step program. I was nearly killed doing mime. I’m in the park one day just after being certified as a mime – Like hours after.”
Ted badly mimed taking a card out of his pocket, pointed to it and then to his head and pulls a classic mime smile and a big thumbs up. The crowd laughed.
“So, I’m standing up on a park bench, miming a window being washed to my first audience – a nice gentle old woman who’d run out of stale bread for the ducks.”
Ted mimed a window opening with a ridiculous grin on his face.
“I fell out my mime window, off the park bench on to this old woman’s Shi Tzu dog. I broke two of it’s legs and was sued for thousands. Not only that but I throw my back out – major compression on vertebrae two to five, and a sprained ankle to boot. Did the mime union do anything for me? Did they fuck? I couldn’t even get them on the phone. Every time I phoned, I could hear some heavy breathing and soft swishing sounds from the other end. So I storm down there and this pasty faced prick, mimes me a, what can I do? What can I do … Like he’s in some Italian TV soap from nineteen-eighty-two..... Then he tops it off, with, the mime one-oh-one, the big cry – Rubbing his eyes as they flowed with tears. So I punch this fucker square in the face. You know what he does? He mimes me my membership card and rips it up. Fucking mimes. And they smell bad as well. All that sweating in the park and then ‘I’ll go crash at a friends place cos I don’t have any money, because I’m an artist’………. But of course... Mimed. …….Don’t get me started.”
There must have been a lot of mime haters in the audience. They showered him with laughter. Ted’s act was being beamed out live from, The Grin Reaper Comedy Club, on a website called ‘ClubLiveActNow’ or ‘CLAN’, as the cocky, Ivey League college kid told me, when he hooked up his camera, laptop and phone to broadcast Ted’s show. Ted had become a Beta test site – one step above, a lab frog. ‘Beta Test Site’ sounded more important. Ted’s pants pissing performance, had shot through every social network site before he got the dry cleaning bill.
The kid spitting out Ted’s feed, live on the internet, had set up his own media company broadcasting live acts from small clubs on his site. Random people sent in clips from clubs off their phones and whoever gets the most votes gets a live gig on the site. Humiliation was one of the key selling points. The audience chooses every week what act they want to see live, he calls the artist, pitches them a free broadcast for their act and then sells it to the club, by telling them that they’ll slap a logo, on the top left of the shot. Everybody wins. The club wins by getting exposure, the artist gets exposure and the geek sells advertising on his site. Everybody won – except me. I was not looking at the future, I was looking at the present. I was the fucking dinosaur waiting for an asteroid but buried under a laptop. Jeffrey James the tech nerd had scored Ted a bigger audience in one night, than I would have got him, if I managed him until I was one-hundred and sixteen years old – and this was just his hobby while he put himself through law school.
Twenty-eight thousand and counting were watching Ted – a vast percentage sitting on paused video games, buffered porn and a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, waiting for Ted’s repeat water works. But Ted was good – Ted was really good.
Ted knew the majority of people, would feel a sliver better, if they saw a grown man stand on stage cracking jokes and pissing himself. It would make them feel better about themselves. This was a one shot vehicle that maybe, just maybe there might be someone watching, that liked his gags.
“He’s pretty good, your comic, he’s good. It’s a shame that the main reason people are watching is that they want to see him fail,” the cocky kid said.
“Yeah but they’re staying online, once they see he’s funny. And there’s no doubt he’s funny,” I said defending Ted’s comic honour.
He tapped into his keyboard and checked each of the countries’, viewer statistics. Ted appeared to have a big following in Denmark and Moscow.
“Point. Point. Yes you have a valid argument. But look, I’m Gen Y so that makes you like….. Gen A, or whatever. My generation, want to watch a dude’s degradation, followed by dizzying heights, followed by absolute destruction. I call it, ‘Generation Schadenfreude’.”
He wrote out the name in big imaginary marquee letters. The tech nerd, checking Ted’s latest stats, would invite his internet friends to bump on Ted’s humiliation, with a quick fix, and then graze the web for the next more fucked up act.
“I have a paper coming out on it soon for my thesis and a phone app in development.”
Ted and “dizzying heights” had never shared the same sentence before, but he was good. The cheeky, arrogant little fucker was right.
“Look on the bright side. There’s a lot of people out there watching this. It can’t be bad for business. You never know. You never know, who’ll be watching.”
You never know. Those three words, ‘You Never Know’ was a brand I’d sold to most of my clients for twenty years. That and ‘Hope for the Best’. Neither had paid off so far.
“I just flew in here from Ireland on Virgin Air and you know who I met on the airline? ....No really, guess who?.... Sean Connery, that’s who….. Did you know the first time Sean Connery flew on Virgin Air, he said to the chief stewardess... After I’m finished with thish flight schweetie, they’ll need to rename the airline,” Ted said straining one of the worst, but recognizable caricature Connery impersonations.
“So I ask him if this is true. …Including my really bad impression of Sean Connery, to Sean Connery. He doesn’t say a thing. He then reaches back and smacks me with a full fist in to my face. It was agony. There was blood everywhere. Teeth falling. There were people screaming. Well.… Ok I was screaming. But you know kind of worth losing a few front teeth to Sean Connery’s knuckles, just to hear James fucking Bond, Dr. No’s, Doctor fucking Yesh say, “I’ll show you, you schmart arshed arsh-hole.”
“Just one of those situations you never thought you’d end up in. When I was a kid I wanted to be James Bond, but I never really dreamt that the actor who plays the character James Bond would be standing over me in an airplane with a clenched fist hissing out the best Sean Connery shhhhhhh tuff. No. Didn’t think that one would be on the cards. Nay laddie.”
Jonny Truffle sent me the fourteenth text message, asking me to represent his new band ‘Kindergarden Warthogs.’ I’d been avoiding his messages for three-and-a-half weeks. Grovelling apologies had replaced abusive rants, on my answering machine. The Stuck Pigs had split in to, ‘Kindergarden Warthogs’, unintentionally misspelled and ‘Psychedelic Swine’. The split wasn’t over creative differences or musical direction – Jimmy Pignose stole Jonny Truffle’s drugs and gorged them all with Lurch, their roadie. Jonny slashed Jimmy’s drum skins and all hell broke loose, followed by emergency room visits, to separate hospitals. Ownership of the name ‘The Stuck Pigs’, was being fought out, between one lawyer who worked out of a pizzeria and another who had just graduated, with a correspondence course in law, while serving four years for arson. Their only moment of clarity, was not their new names, but the fact that they continued in the pig theme, considering they had all legally changed their names, to some association with pork. There was only so much information I could fill in between text messages, but with The Stuck Pigs, the gaps were as easy to fill, as falling off a speeding train and picking up a few bruises. Shit-storm on Meth, over Meth.
But who was I to turn down the work. My future was not going to be in the drug importation business and there was some solace in the fact, that if I didn’t represent bands like The Stuck Pigs, no one would.
“You know they say the Irish like to suffer. When I was in Ireland, I was at a traditional wake…. For those of you that don’t know what a wake is, it’s basically a massive party that goes on for days after someone dies and everyone at the wake tries to follow suit by drinking as much alcohol as possible over three days.”
The audience laughed.
“But you see the real reason that the person has a wake is not that they want friends and strangers to have a nice tipple to toast their send off. It goes on for three days because at the end of three days they know everyone within a twenty mile radius has a fucking hangover hammered, crispy fresh, from the anvil of hell. They can then sail out into the afterlife thinking, ‘you see you little bastard you should have been cryin’, not swillin’ my drink and talking shit ‘til the fucking cows come home and left out of complete fucking boredom…... And cows have a very high tolerance to boredom, let me tell you – I’ve studied those little fuckers for hours...... I use the word study, very loosely here. It was more like listening to Thin Lizzy on vinyl, drinking my Uncles’s home brew beer and looking out across the fields to try catch a glimpse of Maureen Healy. High times in my youth, I shall tell you my friends. Oh yes, crazy cows with ADD and toxic beer that could strip the Brooklyn bridge. Stuff of trilogies and franchises, I’ll have you know….”
Ted mimed talking into a telephone.
“Why don’t we just call up Steven Spielberg and tell him no, I am not allowing you to direct ‘The Ted Burns Story’. No Steven, for God’s sake man…. for once can you think big.”
Ted pointed to his imaginary phone. The audience’s laughter continued.
“You see once a mime, always a mime. It’s a bit like being one of those Delta Force Black OP’s guys. You never lose the skills. Although in my case it’s probably more like a badly spelled tattoo you got when you were seventeen and you can never really get rid of it. I never should have got that full body Meatloaf, Bat out of Hell, tattoo.”
The audience engulfed him with their laughter and empathy. Tech Nerd snapped his fingers and a smug grin crept across his face.
“We’re losing our demographic,” Tech Nerd said. “Good for your comic and good for me.”
“Huh?”
“It proves my theory. Viewers are tired waiting for him to fail so they’re switching off.”
Tech Nerd pointed to a curved graph on his laptop screen. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about and to be honest I didn’t care. I was just happy that Ted had an audience big enough to brag about. Ted being a failure was a win – only in Ted’s world could that happen. He walked off stage to a loud applause and howls for more.
“So the water pipes holding up tonight, Ted?” I asked.
“Harry, my bladder is like a fucking Ninja’s,” Ted said, just before he went back on stage for an encore. It made no sense whatsoever, but I knew what he meant.
“You know when I grew up in Ireland, I always wanted to be a career criminal. Career? I love that. Who ever coined that term, ‘Career Criminal’? In class I remember being ten years old and Mrs Flannery asked us all what we wanted to be when we grew up.
Jimmy what do you want to be?
An architect Mrs Flannery…
Very good Jimmy. Being an architect is a noble pursuit…
And Mary, what would you like to be?
A nurse miss...
That’s very good, Mary the world needs lots of nurses. And you Ted, what would you like to be when you grow up?
A criminal miss .. But not just as a job.. I want a career in it. I want to be a career criminal. Now maybe I’d watched too many episodes of ‘Kojak’ but I wanted a cool detective like Telly Savalas trying to track me down and me trying to out maneuver him. Mrs Flannery beat the shit out of me and called me a rotten child. So I chose an even more fucked up path, and became a standup comic.”
Three weeks and four days had passed since the little and large detectives paid me a visit. I called a few times to be told they had no concrete leads. Their lack of leads, loosened the noose around my neck.
“But you know I could never be a criminal cos I’m such a hairy bastard, and I’m going bald, so I’d leave enough DNA lying around the place that the Helen Keller of CSI could nail me. I’m telling you I’m like an orangutan with alopecia. I might as well leave a written confession, my name and address, directions to my house, impaled in the front door with the murder weapon.”
Ted bowed graciously and left the stage. He’d had become a warm up act for the hottest new comedy club in town and a fluffer for the main event. He’d advanced from drug mule, to show pony, for the Harry Bracco talent agency. The day was an improvement on many of it’s predecessors.
I escaped the din of the club, to savor a rare moment of success. A sweaty summer’s evening, corralled the crazies into the alley behind the club. A feral looking Santa Claus waved a bottle of brand X port at me. He grinned and abandoned any attempt at conversation. He slugged hard from the bottle.
“Happy Christmas,” I said cheerily.
He flipped me the finger.
“Happy this you prick,” he yelped.
It seemed like Santa, was having an average Harry Bracco day. It was the first time for a very long time, I wasn’t having one.