OPEN MIKE

by

Eliot Fintushel

 

o this is what I want to know.  No, really!  What time is it?  Can somebody please tell me what time it is?  No, really, cut the rim shots, Mr. Music.  Damp that symbol, will you?  What time is it?  Nobody gives me a straight answer.  Every couple minutes it's a different story.  Did you ever notice that?"

He had me doubled over, my face in my ex-date's beer.  By me, he was better than the headliner.  "Who is this guy?  Has he been around before?"  I thought I knew everybody in White Plains, but I'd never seen him.

Jake, of Jake's Yoks Spot, just shook his head and shrugged:  "Open mike!"  I peeled Jake's hand off my knee and let him continue his hello rounds, shoulder to gam, everythingohkaying all the ladies.  I just jumped back into the laugh stream, my own laugh stream; nobody in this small town dive seemed to appreciate the comic the way I did.  Shazam, Jake's bouncer, was positively hostile.  That over-the-hill hippy, cape and blue leotard with lightning bolts embroidered on the chest, if his eyes had been lasers, they would have burned a hole through my man's forehead, right through both of their Ray-bans.

They were the same Ray-bans, too, with the red frames.  Shazam's were a part of his lunatic outfit, though they didn't go too well with the Lone Ranger mask.  Personally, I'd never let Shazam into the batter's box.  I like guys who know how to dress nice.  So it's a good thing he never made the moves on me.  The same goes for most guys in this burg.

The comic adjusted his hang and went on:  "So I performed my own experiment.  Really!  A critical experiment.  From my home planet, where there is nothing like your time, I procured all the necessary parts to build a chronometer, ladies and gentlemen, a super-chronometer, correct to a millionth of a billionth of a nano-second.  I turned it on, I looked at it, and I shut it off.

"So now it's settled once and for all, and you can stop all the jawboning . . . It's two o'clock."

Actually, it was almost midnight.  My date--"Is this stuff supposed to be funny?"--had gone to wash his hands about two Budweisers ago and hadn't come back.  His loss.  Me and guys in this town are just not on the same wave length.  Pretty soon I was going to have to address the question of transportation home, though, and the man on the podium seemed like a good prospect.

I wasn't adverse to his looks, six foot something-and-a-half with a mop of jet black hair over a puss like . . . well, like a comic's: pretty, but eccentric, a Ken doll's face hot-transferred to a banana skin.  And nice threads.  There was definitely some magnetism; after every punch line, he smiled at me.  And I started smiling back.

"No, really!  Somebody should set that clock up there.  All the clocks.  Set them, and then unplug them.  Two AM.  Did I say AM?  It's two AM exactly."

I wanted to snag him on that punch line.  I had to work real hard not to crack up: "Always?  Is it always two?"  A hint of a drawl.  Do you know how to do that, girls?  It's like dropping a hanky.  It's all in the eyes.  Sometimes you can see the blood drain out of their face, and I think I know where it's going.

He was all mine.  He turned straight toward me, now that I'd given him the excuse, and for the first time that night, my man missed a beat.  After that, his eyes never strayed from my big blues, and thank you very much, Estee Lauder and Maybelline.

Some weisenheimer at a table full of drunken frat bro's was trying to unsizzle our hotline--"Get off the stage, you mortician."--but we didn't budge.  At the end of his routine, I let a strap fall over my shoulder while I smiled and applauded, maintaining eye contact, and when I reached to tug it up again, he was MayIjoinyouing me, which I adore in a man.  It's so Old School, don't you think?

I'd been looking at my shoulder.  My finger was still on the strap.  I turned my head to look up at him, and I did it with an expression of startled shyness that I used to practice in the mirror of my compact for hours at a time, every minute worth it.

My mouth is just a little open, my eyebrows arched.  You look up, then you kind of look down at your bosom like it's the Hope Diamond and he's a jewel thief, and then you look back up again.  "Whah, Mr. Rhet Butler, suh . . . "  I'm telling you, girls, it's a regular tractor beam.  Nobody with a Y chromosome can resist it, even if they were thinking buttercups and choirboys up till then, which I guarantee you they were not.

He wanted me.  But I didn't let him sit down yet.  "Hey, you were great.  Where are you from?"

The guy blushed.  "I don't know what to say.  I'm having your baby."

Isn't that crazy?  I mean, this guy is a complete crackup.  He's always on.  This is my type one hundred percent, tonight at least.  It's time to open the parlor door.  "Sit down.  You make me laugh.  I love what you do."

So he sits down, and I do the looking around the room thing to give him a chance to take me in at close range, thank you, L'oreal Colorvive, thank you Cover Girl Long 'n Lush.  I've got him.  He's mooning at me, leaning forward and cocking his head like a puppy.  "May I lick you?"

I nearly fell out of my chair.  People gawked.  I didn't care, know what I mean?  I was laughing so hard, I was just trying not to wet my panties.  "Honestly, where are you from?"

"Outer space."

"I know that!  Where in outer space?"

"Toledo."  Isn't that the limit?  This guy has me on the ropes.  When I recover bladder control, he says, "Not the one in Andromeda.  It's in Cepheus, in the Beta system.  You know Cepheus?"

"Sure.  Like the back of my hand.  You gonna take me home or what, funny man?"

"This isn't your home?"

"Cut it out!  You're killing me!"

"Oh my God!  How can I help?"

I was actually on the floor, holding onto my chair, gasping for breath.  He absolutely had my number.  "Stop it!  This guy is killing me, I swear it."

Suddenly, he stood up from the table in a panic.  He was dodging and looking around the room, all stop-action, like the Keystone Cops, and I was sitting in a puddle.  Just then the frat bro' jerk, all Guess? and Calvin Kleins, got the inspiration to stagger by and play hero.

He shoves his phthistic chest into Mr. Open Mike and burps: "You're a pretty funny guy, aren't you?"

"Help her.  She's dying."

"Is the funny guy bothering you, sweetheart?"

Once in a while I was managing to inhale.

Then my comic fell into the drunk's arms.  " . . . I'm pregnant!"

"You're whaa . . . ?"

Now everybody was laughing except for Open Mike and the drunk, and my man played it like nobody I've ever seen.  Usually, if one person laughs, say, a gag man will give him the fish eye; that makes the person laugh harder, and then the whole crowd gets to yokking, and the gag man will just stand still and wait, which can bring the house down.  But Open Mike did us a new one.  "Stop it!  I'm pregnant, I said!  She's the father.  You saw her laughing.  Can't you restrain yourselves?"  He was shrieking and wiggling like Milton Berle in drag.

Then Open Mike says to me, and he makes it sound so real I almost believe it, "I'm truly sorry.  I have to go.  I'm going into labor.  I hope you can get help."

Shazam busts through then, dropping his cash box and his rubber stamp.  He shoulders the customers out of his way.  When Open Mike sees Shazam coming at him, he make a dash for the WC.  Shazam is shouting, "You!  Kfizzsts Pukhh!!"--some gibberish name that sounds like a cat vomiting--"I knew you'd try this place sooner or later."  Then Shazam bellows at all of us: "Stop yokking, you hyenas, or you'll give him twins."  He yells after Open Mike: "I'm taking you in, Pukhh."

"What about my baby?" the guy says.  He's halfway into the WC.  Everyone is in stitches now, and crazy Mike is wiggling like he is being machine gunned or gang banged.

"You should have thought of that when you jumped the time wall, Kfizzts Pukhh."  Time wall!

That's when the fire started.

"But no one would laugh at me in Toledo.  Was I supposed to hang around and be barren forever?"

Somebody must have squirted lighter fluid in circles around Open Mike, an incredible effect.  I don't know how they did it up so close like that.  It looked like Jake wasn't even in on it; he was pissed bigtime.  He grabbed his anemic little fire extinguisher, and it spat foam all over everything, including Mike and Shazam, who I'll bet dollars to diaphragms the funny man had paid to shill.

When the fire was out, Open Mike was gone, Shazam was gone, Jake looked like a cumulus cloud, and the frat bro' was in my lap.  We looked all over for Jake and Shazam, including in the WC, where I saw some graffiti with my name in it--for which, since then, you can bet that I paid back that meatless hick ex-date of mine--but there wasn't a sign of them.

Nobody around here ever saw either of them again.

He was a funny guy, that Open Mike.  I never laughed so hard.  I wish they'd open the Yok Spot up again.  For the past month, every time you go by there it's swarming with three kinds of uniforms and four kinds of cars, City, County, State and Fed.  They won't even let Jake in.  I don't know what the beef is.  It wasn't even that big of a fire.

Oh yeah, the drunk took me home, but I couldn't make him stay past two.  He put on his dumb, red-rimmed Ray-bans and skedaddled.  As if I care!  He kept trying to make me laugh, see, but he was a dud.  His last line--"I gotta get back to Toledo before they get wise; look what they done to Kfizzsts Pukhh"--was a regular sleeping pill.

I just want to find a decent dresser who's funny.  Is that too much to ask?  A couple of kids.  A house in the suburbs.  With looks like mine, it'd be a shame to wind up an old maid, and the clock is ticking, if you know what I mean.  It is not always two AM, Mike.

Maybe I'll move to New York.