Last Woman Standing

There are a hundred different versions of the moth joke, I later discovered. The moth goes into a bar, but he doesn’t order a drink; the moth walks into a gym, but he doesn’t lift weights; the moth strolls into a dealership, but he doesn’t buy a car. Eventually someone asks him why he’s there, and the moth always says the same thing: The light was on. The joke lulls you into believing that this moth, this time, is different. But he never is. In a way, it’s a joke about comedy itself. Comics aren’t happy people. We crave the light, and we don’t know why.

When I started putting together my own set, I tried to picture the author of 101 Wacky, Hilarious, Totally Crazy Jokes for Kids Ages Eight to Ten. I imagined some poor guy sitting in a bleak New York apartment with a typewriter in front of him and a stack of paper napkins on which he’d made his drunk friends write down their favorite jokes, but they were all too dirty for a kids’ book. So in the end, past deadline—with a whole batch of these joke books he’d committed to churning out—maybe he went down to the library and checked out a stack of slightly older joke books, where he found the hoary old moth joke. And somehow, the hour being late and having just watched a Woody Allen movie with his girlfriend and maybe even had an argument with her afterward, he set his version of the joke in a shrink’s office, despite the fact that one of society’s most fervent desires for children ages eight to ten is that they should have little to no idea what a psychiatrist does.

I didn’t even know how to pronounce the word, much less what it meant. But I knew this: No matter what the moth claimed, things like wife, kid, and two-car garage didn’t make anybody happy. I knew because my dad had had all those things, and he, too, had gone off looking for a light, leaving me alone in Amarillo with my mom.

Alone, that is, until Jason came along.

We met in American history in the eighth grade. We’d both been absent the day a big project was assigned, and everybody else was already in groups, so we got stuck working together. I was annoyed at first, because I could see right away that I would be doing all the work—the researching and writing of facts about Geronimo, the neat lettering on posterboard—while this dark-haired, gangly boy with glasses sat hunched over his notebook, silently doodling. But when I peeked over his shoulder at what he was drawing, a thrill went through me: David Letterman, his flattened-out, Neanderthal brow and gotcha smirk recognizable even in cartoon form.

Jason looked up, noticed my expression, and waggled his eyebrows. “What do you think, Paul? He-hee!”

It was such a perfect impression of the Letterman giggle and so incongruous with Jason’s glasses-and-acne face that I almost cracked up. Instead, I put on my best Paul Shaffer and said, “Pretty good, Dave, pretty good.”

We went back and forth a few times before we both lost it.

“What’s your favorite Stupid Pet Trick?” I asked.

“I don’t know yet, I’m not finished.”

“Finished?”

“I’m watching recordings of every episode. I’m only up to 1987.” He misinterpreted the look I gave him. “I’d be farther, but I keep having to stop and look up stuff from the monologue.”

“Wow” was all I could say. “Who else do you like?”

“Conan.”

“Duh. What about from now? Sarah Silverman?” His face soured. “Maria Bamford?”

“She’s good. I’m studying the classics first, though,” he said importantly. “The big late-night hosts. So I can get into a writers’ room someday.”

“Why not be the host? That’s what I want to do.”

“Girls never do late-night.” He said it like he was sorry to have to break the news to me.

“So I’ll be the first.”

“You’re humble,” he said. “I like that about you, Dana Diaz.”

That was how it started. Of course, in school, we couldn’t hang out without accusations of the boyfriend-girlfriend variety, but we knew who we were and what we had to offer each other. The summer after eighth grade, he started inviting me over to watch comedy specials DVR’d off of late-night cable, and I found any excuse to go. Luxuries like cable and DVRs had become rare after my dad left, and they disappeared entirely when my mom was laid off from the newly privatized helium plant. Jason had the TV mostly to himself in Mattie’s old room, which their dad had converted to a game room with a pool table and a Nintendo.

Mattie was the one dark spot. Jason’s older brother was a high-school dropout who lived at home. He looked like a version of Jason drawn from memory by someone with no particular artistic talent: black hair hanging limply over a narrow forehead, blue eyes that squinted unevenly over a broken nose. Not much bigger than Jason, really—in fact, Jason may have had an inch on him—but he was broader in the shoulders, or carried himself as if he were. He picked on Jason, but it was his unpredictability more than anything else that cast a pall over the house. Mattie spent most of his off-hours walking his big, scary German shepherd, Kenny, and lifting weights in the fume-y, stuffy garage apartment their dad had grudgingly fixed up for him when he got off drugs and got a job driving a forklift at the meatpacking plant. But every once in a while he would suddenly appear in the doorway of the TV room—“Oh, hi, Gay-son, I didn’t know you were home” — and Jason would seem to fold up in his presence. Whenever he saw me, he stared pointedly at my chest, and I had to concentrate hard to keep from crossing my arms.

Jason stole glances at my chest every now and then too, and I thought for a while that he was going to ask me out. But he never did, and soon I didn’t expect him to, which made me feel less guilty lying to my mom about the mostly adult-free situation at Jason’s house. I’d bike over while Jason’s dad was still at work—his mom, like my dad, was long gone—and we’d go straight to the TV room and settle in side by side on compressed beanbag chairs in the flickering half-light of the TV. Like any good moth, I told myself the light was the only reason I was there.

3 (#ulink_0974fe05-c7ad-547d-badb-373420ecc150)

Bat City Comedy Club’s undignified location in the elbow of a strip mall north of town belied its centrality to the Austin comedy scene. Shadowed by an overpass and flanked by fabric stores and dance studios, it celebrated the inherent ridiculousness of the whole enterprise of standup with a certain bravado that included neon signage, a bar decorated in primary colors, and a banquet room swathed in acres of comedy-and-tragedy-mask novelty carpet. You could argue it wasn’t the most appropriate carpet for a comedy club, but I’d spent enough time staring down at its nauseating pattern of ribbons and grimaces while waiting for my open-mic slot to have internalized its sobering lesson. It was a kind of memento mori of standup: Remember, you must kill.

On the night of the first round of the Funniest Person in Austin contest, I pulled my bumperless Honda Civic up to the closed businesses at the opposite end of the parking lot, as per e-mailed instructions, wishing I’d been confident enough to sign up years ago when the terrain wasn’t so crowded. I’d recognized only about half the names scheduled to compete tonight—though among them, I’d noticed with a pang, was Fash Banner, last year’s second runner-up. There was room for both of us to advance, but if the newcomers were any good or if I bombed as badly as I had the other night . . . I tried not to think about it. When I’d first come to Austin from Amarillo a decade ago, lured away from the self-pity and stagnation of my mom’s house by Jason’s tales of all-night diners and plentiful open-mics, the contest was still small and clubby, just a week or two of performances by friendly rivals who hooted and slapped each other on the back after their sets. Now there were a staggering number of preliminary rounds—night after night for weeks—and a full week of semifinals.

Of course, I had been more easily intimidated back then. Jason’s college friends had been welcoming enough toward his funny little hometown sidekick, but I was shy and self-conscious around them, painfully aware that I was in community college because I hadn’t gotten into UT, where they all went. And although Jason dragged me out to open-mics and told me over and over I was better at standup than he was, it was a long time before I believed it.

I’d always liked standup best, but, like everyone else in the Austin scene back then, I’d sampled everything. With few opportunities to perform, we took improv classes, wrote sketches, moonlighted in local theater productions, until eventually we settled into our spots like the many-shaped blocks in one of those baby puzzles in a doctor’s waiting room. The optimists stuck with improv, not caring whether they became famous, yes-and-ing their way through life in a sickeningly good mood. The delusionals went with sketch, holding out hope that someday, someone would come along and cast them in SNL. Some people would say it was the masochists who went for standup, but I’d argue we were just realists. If you bombed, at least you knew who to blame.

I was very much in a realist mood as I sized up the contestants pacing nervously under the awning. I hoped for a gaggle of newbies—anyone could sign up for prelims—but they all just looked like comics to me, smoking cigarettes and trying to ignore one another as they practiced their five-minute sets. The stage order pinned to the door gave me my first good luck of the night: I was slotted for the second half of the show, but not, thank God, the last slot. And Fash—poor Fash!—was first. I began to relax.

Avoiding the pacers, I settled myself at the bar inside and endeavored to stay calm with the help of headphones, a gin and tonic, and a chair pointedly angled away from the TV monitors streaming the main-stage competition. One by one, starting with Fash, the comics before me finished their sets. The ones who did well hovered around the bar, pecking at drinks and each other; the ones who bombed slunk out into the parking lot, avoiding eye contact. One tall guy I recognized from a coffee-shop open-mic slammed the chrome panic bar on the double doors with both hands on his way out, uttering a curse I couldn’t hear through my upbeat Beyoncé mix.

Fash, who had recovered from his set early and was seated at a bar table nearby, raised an eyebrow and gestured for me to remove my earpiece. He pointed toward the door, which was still bouncing from the impact. “Hey, all that matters is we’re having fun up there, right?”

“You keep telling yourself that, Fash.”

“Just trying to ease your mind!” he said. “I mean, not everyone goes in knowing they’re already the third-funniest person in Austin.”

“What happened to one and two, again?” I said, furrowing my eyebrows. “Oh yeah, they moved to L.A. I guess that doesn’t happen for thirdsies.”

He snapped and pointed at me. “Zing. Truly. Consider me zung.”

I smiled and returned to Beyoncé. There was no reason to let Fash psych me out. My material might not be fresh, but I knew it like the back of my hand. I’d seen comics bomb because of a clenched jaw, a flickering eyelid, a brow that kept a straight line while the mouth grinned manically below, but nerves weren’t my problem lately. My problem was sleepwalking through my set. Here, the whiff of potential fame in the air was waking me up, the adrenaline of the competition digging into me like the sharp edge of a knife. By the time it was my turn to go onstage, I was ready.

Under the lights, I breathed in the smell of sweaty metal off the dented microphone and woke up all the way. I hadn’t expected such a large audience for the preliminary rounds, but the rows of banquet-style tables were crowded. I’d rarely performed in front of so many people. I avoided looking at the judges’ tables to the left, focusing instead on the unexpected energy of the crowd. They were well primed, buzzed on the club’s two-drink minimum.

“So I’m originally from Amarillo—” I began, and someone hooted in solidarity from the audience. “Did someone just ‘wooo’?” I interrupted myself. “Did you really just ‘wooo’ for Amarillo, Texas? Examine your life.” I got my first laugh, and the stage lights transformed into a clean, solid wall of support, flaring gently in rhythm with the crowd’s laughter. I segued easily into my opening jokes, the crowd meeting me at every punch line, and kept them coming at a good clip, rushing only enough to keep the audience on its toes. By the time I got to the bit about my chest that had brought the heckler out last time (“Got these when I turned nine. Worst birthday present ever”), I felt so safe that I ad-libbed a few extra lines, teasing it out fifteen or thirty seconds longer than usual, buoyed by laughter all the way. This was going to be easier than I’d thought.

The blue light on the back wall came on, piercing the veil of the stage lights and bringing me a message: One minute to go. One minute of coasting downhill into the applause that would send me to the semifinals, which could send me to the finals, which might even send me, I was beginning to think, back to L.A. I silently thanked Austin, the so-called “velvet coffin,” for having been there when I needed a soft landing place. Even as I wrapped up my set—forty-five seconds; I could feel the rhythm of the time draining down—I was thinking about getting a subletter to cover the rest of my lease, just as I’d covered someone else’s when I first moved in. Goodbye, Austin. Behind the curtain of stage lights, I could almost feel the walls of the comedy club dissolve and transform into a vista of palm trees and smog. Thirty seconds to go.

It must have been thoughts of L.A. that made me glance involuntarily toward the judges. Perched behind a long table to the left of the audience, they were far from the spotlight’s glare, and at first I could only see silhouettes. Then something in one of the silhouettes caught my eye—a tuft of beard sticking out just under the ear in a way that made me look again, a fraction of a second longer this time. Long enough to notice the shape of the part and the glisten of sweat on a high, round forehead.

It was him. Aaron Neely was at the judges’ table.

The lights turned ice cold. Then they turned red, then black. I stopped my last joke midsentence. In the darkness, I heard my lips open and close, amplified by the mic. A wave of dizziness passed over me, and for a moment the floor felt as if it were pressing up hard against my feet. I blinked furiously to clear the black fog and said, “Um.”

The lights came back with a rushing sound. I blinked again.

The joke, the joke! I reached for it, but it was gone. So, I saw, was the audience. Chairs were creaking impatiently. Blood in the water. “Thank you,” I said and left the stage to uncertain applause.

I made my way up the aisle and through the bar, past the other comics. On the way out, I hit the panic bar on the double doors as hard as I could, hoping the chuh-kung! noise was loud enough to make Fash spill his drink.

Of course Neely was in Austin. Of course he’d followed me to the place I felt safest, the place I felt sure he was too much of a big shot to ever grace with his presence. The irony being, of course, that while I was in L.A., Austin had become just the kind of scene a guy like Neely liked.

What Neely liked. I shuddered. What he’d liked was humiliating me in the back of his SUV, showing me how small and insignificant and utterly disposable I was to a man like him and, by extension, to the industry whose highest ranks he represented. He’d shown me, in a stretch of time that felt like an eternity but probably took no more than five minutes, that I would never be in a position to make jokes, not for men like him. Because I was the joke. Setup: me, woozy and sick from whatever I’d come down with at the smoothie bar, laughing nervously as he unzipped his pants because I didn’t realize, at first, what I was seeing. Heightening: still me, now frozen in shock against the safety-locked car door as understanding dawned. Punch line: me again, blood rushing to my face, a visceral, writhing discomfort intensifying in the near silence until it felt like actual physical pain.

I was the joke, and I wasn’t even a good one. I was just something to do for fifteen minutes, a way to kill time in the back seat of his car between appointments. He hadn’t touched me while he did it, just the edge of my dress. I’d dropped my eyes, confused, and waited for him to finish, which took long enough for tears to start rolling down my cheeks and falling onto my lap.

The tears were falling again now as I stalked across the parking lot to my car, and I felt the surge of shame take me over and shake me from the inside. Why hadn’t I said something? Why had I just sat and cried, like an idiot, like a moron? It was just what he’d wanted me to do. And now I knew it wasn’t the stomach bug that had kept me riveted quietly in place, weeping, while he jerked himself off. After all, I hadn’t been sick tonight, and I’d reacted the same dumb way, with frozen, self-sabotaging terror, like a deer in the headlights. For all my bravado, in the end all it took to shut me down and drive me out of town was one obscene man I’d mistaken for a mentor when he didn’t even think I was funny—at least, not funny enough to outweigh the temptation of jacking off to my double Ds.

And didn’t that prove he was right—the fact that I couldn’t take it, that I’d run away, that I was back here in Austin instead of in a writers’ room in L.A.? For the millionth time, I thought, Nothing happened, he didn’t even touch me, words that had first echoed through my head in the half hour after he’d finished as we sat side by side in L.A. traffic—him, unbelievably, making small talk. I’d repeated the words like a mantra to myself to drown out his insipid chatting until I was home safe. And after all, it was the truth. It wasn’t as if he’d attacked me. It wasn’t rape. I, of all people, knew the difference. What was it, to cause me such shame?