Last Woman Standing

“I lived out there for a while too,” I said. “Maybe we have mutual friends.”

“I was only there a year,” she said, swizzling her drink. “I hated it there.”

“Yeah, me too,” I lied, suddenly thinking of a pilot idea: Failed actress opens community theater in her hometown. Waiting for Guffman meets Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I fiddled with my napkin, wishing I’d brought my pen. “You probably got there right before I left. Let’s see . . .” I began running through an inventory of places we might have bumped into each other, listing improv theaters, acting workshops, networking events, even the Culver City diner where I’d waited tables. At every name, she shook her head. We’d just missed each other, although as I listed potential sources of connection, the familiar feeling strengthened rather than weakened. “Who did you hang out with there?” I asked.

“No one, really. I lost all my friends when I lost my job in tech.” She saw my questioning look and elaborated. “I was a programmer for Runnr.”

Even I, a borderline technophobe, had heard of the errand-running app that had pushed all the others out of business, though in this gig economy, more of my friends had worked as runners than used the service. My face must have betrayed some of the surprise I was feeling, tinged with shame over my assumptions—girl groups and soap operas!—because she gave me a wry grin. “Yeah, I know. I don’t look like a software engineer. Any more than you look like a standup.”

I flushed. It was true that my appearance—short and brown-skinned and shaped like my mother minus the control-top pantyhose—did not prepare most people for my extracurricular activities. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s just say none of the guys I worked with thought I looked like a programmer either. They made that abundantly clear.” She took another sip. “And that was before my supervisor started sending me dick pics.”

“Gross,” I said. Guys like that. “Is that how you lost your job?”

“Yeah.” She finished her drink, holding the straw to one side and draining it. “Like an idiot, I actually went to HR with it. Two years in the trenches of a sexual-harassment suit got me a little pile of settlement money, sure. But it also got me the cold shoulder from every startup in Silicon Valley. And then there were the trolls—someone on Reddit guessed my name from a news spot. It couldn’t have been hard to figure out. There weren’t tons of female programmers at Runnr.”

“So how’d you end up in L.A.?”

“It seemed like the best place to disappear.” She looked down into her empty drink. “One of them swatted me—you know what that means, right? They sent a SWAT team to my house. I woke up in the middle of the night to a bunch of dudes armed to the teeth pounding on my door. After that, I was a nervous wreck. I scrubbed my online profile so they couldn’t find me again, went to the dark side of the internet. And got out of town in a hurry.”

“Why acting?” I said.

She shrugged. “I was looking for something as far from the tech world as possible. I thought, Fine. Let’s see what it’s like being a pretty face.” I had to admire the way she owned it, plainly and without the standard self-deprecating gestures. “To tell you the truth, I sucked, but I kept getting auditions because of my looks.”

At this I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of bitterness. I raised my glass. “Must be nice.”

“It was okay,” she admitted. “Until I met my ex. He killed any chance I had at getting anywhere with acting. He was insanely jealous. Freaked out if I stayed late at a party or, God forbid, talked to a man. Which—everyone you need to know is a man, right? But that’s a whole other story.” She sighed and rattled the ice in her glass. “Once we moved in together, he started hiding my phone to keep me from going to auditions. Spying on me. Threatening me.” She watched me closely, almost challenging me to react. Her wide-set eyes were, I could see now, greenish gray, and what I had mistaken for frailty in them was something else, some hunger I couldn’t name.

Then she said, “He didn’t hit me, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Unsure how to respond, I fell back on irony. “Sounds like a prince.”

“He did other things. Locked me in a soundproof room.” She shuddered. “He would have hurt me bad someday. If I’d stayed.”

“I’m glad you didn’t stay,” I said.

A burst of applause from the other room signaled that Toby had finished his set, more successfully than I had mine, it sounded like. The Other Girl was being introduced, and I couldn’t help wondering whether the nice-tits guy would turn up again. I pictured him lurking just outside, waiting for a woman’s voice to come over the PA system.

I held up my empty glass and said, “Why don’t I buy the next round?”

The next round blurred into the next one after that, and too late I realized I was getting hammered. What clued me in was when I started talking about the Funniest Person in Austin contest.

“It’s stupid,” I said. “Not to mention a total long shot.”

“I’m sure it’s not,” she said, elbows slipping drunkenly on the table.

It really was, though. I would never have brought it up this way—sloppy, hopeful—with my comedy friends, because we all wanted it and all felt stupid for wanting it. But comedy was a foreign country to Amanda, and I was her only guide. There was relief in spilling my pathetic dreams to someone who wouldn’t realize how far-fetched they were.

“It’s this big competition at Bat City Comedy Club every year. Every standup in town does it. There’s prize money.” The winner got five thousand dollars, enough to move back to L.A., maybe even with a little left over to shoot a comedy special on the cheap. Or a pilot, if I could just come up with the right idea. If I won, a small but insistent voice said in my head, maybe Jason would take me back as a writing partner, and we could write the pilot together. “I was too late to sign up last year,” I went on. “But this year—” Amanda’s face lit up, and I rushed to say, “It’s impossible. All the comics in town, everyone I know, is competing.” I gestured toward the other room, where James was strumming his ukulele and wailing. “The judges are a bunch of industry people from L.A. and New York and Toronto, though, so even if you only make it to the finals . . .” I trailed off. People I knew had landed managers and agents, festival invitations, even spots on sitcoms after placing in the competition. It seemed unwise to name the possibilities.

She must have seen the raw look on my face. “Why did you come back here in the first place?”

There had been lots of reasons for leaving L.A.—our rent was climbing, and my job at the diner was wearing me out—but the final straw had been my disastrous solo meeting with Aaron Neely. Neely was a one-time comic’s comic with a self-destructive streak who had, after the usual stint in rehab, made the unusual move of putting aside his own career at its height to produce up-and-comers. In four years, Jason and I had come close to breaking through a handful of times, but when Jason snagged the pitch meeting with Neely through some minor miracle of networking, we thought this was really it, the big one. We had each vowed never to take a meeting without the other person—we were not those L.A. people—but when Jason was a no-show at the smoothie bar where Neely was waiting, I couldn’t bring myself to pass up the opportunity. After checking my phone one last time for a text from Jason, I went in, fearless in my fake Prada heels and fake Diane von Furstenberg wrap dress and fake Marc Jacobs bag, to pitch our pilot alone.

What followed was almost comically surreal. The smoothie Aaron had waiting for me at his private table, a maroon swirl of kale and beet pulp with a chalky aftertaste that I forced myself to exclaim over enthusiastically as I choked it down. The way the tall stool had seemed to tip under me halfway through the meeting, the walls around me sliding downward. The loud whispering noise that seemed to come from the ferns shielding us from the rest of the smoothie bar, gradually drowning out every sound but his voice saying, “You look terrible, please, let me take you home.”

And then, of course, there was Neely himself, a comedy hero of mine with a ruddy, pitted nose and the hands of a giant. Larger than life. Later, in the black-upholstered back seat of his SUV under black-tinted windows, merely larger than me.

When he finally dropped me off at home, unsteady on my feet but relieved to be walking at all, I found Jason sick too, hunched over the toilet in misery. The look he gave me was so awful, so full of betrayed confidence and disgust, that I knew we would never talk about what happened. And some part of me didn’t want to, feared being pulled down into the quicksand of memory in the back of Neely’s car. It was enough to know that we never got a follow-up call on the show. I had evidently flubbed the pitch.

Amanda was still waiting for a response.

“Sometimes dreams just don’t work out,” I said after a moment’s pause. “But you can’t dwell on it. You have to go back to square one. Try again.”

Amanda fixed me again with her long stare, which seemed to flip from naiveté to knowingness and back effortlessly, as if they were two sides of the same thing. “Admirable,” she said, finally.

I’d never been good at being friends with women. I couldn’t get the hang of the transactional nature of female friendship—you give me this secret, in return I share my deepest insecurity. Rinse and repeat. Even as a child, I was never interested. In fifth grade, it became clear that some girls were going to get tall and pretty, and others were going to make straight As, and others were going to act boy-crazy, and still others were going to do all these things in Spanish, which I don’t speak, even though I look like I should, and understand only when it’s my mom talking. Being funny didn’t get you into any of the cliques. When Jason appeared a few years later with his fart jokes and SNL recaps, I was grateful to be rescued from the elaborate pas de deux of girl talk forever.

But feeling Amanda withdraw slightly now, I knew enough to offer up an ersatz confession. I took a stab. “Actually, I’m kind of blocked for material right now,” I said, looking for something that wasn’t true and realizing, even as I said it, that it was. “Everything in my set feels kind of dead. Sometimes I feel like I’m dead.” Damn those whiskey sodas.

Amanda leaned forward, suddenly fierce, and wrapped her skinny fingers around my wrist. “Listen, Dana,” she said. “I know what it’s like to be driven out of town, lose your livelihood, your self-respect, everything. I let my ex lock me up and tell me I was worthless. He wasn’t even good-looking.” She chuckled, but it was a grim, unpleasant sound. “I would never have given him the time of day if I hadn’t felt dead inside. But I’m not dead. I’m still here. And so are you.” Her eyes burned drunkenly, and her knuckles pressed into my wrist bone. “Whatever happened to you in L.A., you’re not dead. The person who did it to you is the one who should feel that way, not you.”

“Nothing happened to me in L.A.,” I said, and gently pried her fingers loose.

She released me and drew back a little, seeming to come to herself. Then she looked at my wrist, which I was rubbing with my other hand, and laughed, that short bark I’d heard during my set, like a fox. She settled back into her chair.

“Right,” she said, grinning. “I’d just like to know who Nothing is, so I could find him and break his knees for you.”

Score one for the literal-minded. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

“I’ll take my chances.”

The tension suddenly drained out of me, and I felt tired of pretending. “I’ve got a better idea. How about if while you’re off breaking Nothing’s knees, I go find your ex-boyfriend and kick his ass?”

“That’d be a start,” she said. “But I warn you, if you’re looking for asses that need kicking, I’ve got a long list.”

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

“Deal.”

I raised my glass. We clinked and swallowed in tandem. In the other room, I could hear Fash wrapping up his set, and the comics who had stuck around to watch were gearing up to head somewhere together—probably Bat City for the late-night open-mic. Any minute, one of them would be poking his head around the corner and asking me to come along. If I wanted to avoid introducing Amanda, now was the time to go.

“Hey, it was really nice meeting you,” I said. “That set was rough. And now I feel . . .” I put my hand over my heart. “Much more wasted.” She laughed. “But really, thanks.” Remembering something I was always supposed to be doing to help my comedy career, I said, “If you want to know when I’m performing around town, follow me on Facebook.”

“I stay off social media,” Amanda said. “Call me paranoid, but after working at Runnr, I know what they use that information for. Could I get your number instead?” She pushed a napkin over and handed me a pen.

I hesitated only an instant, then said, “Sure.” I jotted down my number and stood to go. As I handed the pen back, I thought of another pilot idea: Failed comic creates Instagram for fake lifestyle guru. Account goes viral. Comic must pretend to be sincere for rest of life. I started walking toward the door.