Funnyman
By W. T. Paterson
Through the glow of the red chili pepper string lights running the perimeter of my porch, I watched a drifter boy talking to my neighbor’s daughter. The girl’s father stood by watching from a sandpit picking lint out of his bellybutton, a cud of dip fattening his lip. It felt like being back on the stage of a small club.
“What’s up, funnyman,” my neighbor said. He waddled over and hobbled up the only two stairs in stiff jean shorts that fell to the top of his bony knees where scars wrapped the flesh like vines.
I stepped back to look at the glowing peppers. The Nevada desert wind wailed through the torn-up screen.
“What do you make of this one?” He spit black sludge an empty beer can.
“There are no happy endings,” I said. He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder with such force that I wanted to dig my fingers into his hideous lips and rip the ink from his mouth. I never bothered to learn his name, so I called him Mud, which he seemed to enjoy.
His daughter looked no older than thirteen, the same age as my ex-wife when we first met. In the eighteen years we spent together, we fell in love, out of love, and made a child to love instead. A girl named Beatrice. I called her Beats.
Then, during my first late-night talk show appearance, my ex wrapped her sedan around a telephone pole and gave up the ghost.
The drifter boy had a faded homemade tattoo on his forearm. Fire, maybe. I looked at my own arm where scars wrapped the flesh like vines. The reason people turn away from suicide at the last second is because they’re too afraid it’s going to hurt.
Mud belched and I considered kicking that idiot face first into the golden sand. Then he said ‘scuse me and I forgave him.
The girl looked over at her father. Mud smiled and waved. The girl flipped him off. Mud laughed.
“Grow up so fast, don’t they?” he asked, and scratched his face with yellow fingernails. I unplugged the lights.
“Septic needs draining,” I said.
“Call’em up, funnyman,” Mud said, and hocked another glob into the can.
When I first arrived, Mud learned of my TV appearance. He rounded up his daughter and made me perform in my living room. It was the first time I’d told a joke in a year.
Women love to ask questions. Luckily, men think they have all the answers. I call that balance, folks!
Mud hollered so loud, I thought he might keel over. His daughter hid behind her hands.
Mother birds push their babies out of nests after a few weeks so that they learn to fly. Humans? 18 years! I call that Stockholm syndrome, folks!
Mud howled like coyote with mange. The girl rolled her eyes. She looked like my wife who filed for divorce right as my career gained steam.
I talked about getting wasted on Bourbon Street and stumbling into a fortuneteller to get my palm read. The twist is that it wasn’t a fortuneteller, it was a brothel.
That’s what I call a real hand-job, folks!
That part isn’t true, but the fortuneteller is. I wasn’t wasted, but I was upset that the crowd talked through my entire set. It was Beats’ birthday and my wife told me not to come visit, so I booked a show as far away as I could.
The fortuneteller was a beautiful Haitian woman with an accent. She told me I could manifest whatever I wanted so as long as I tucked a special sack of herbs under my pillow.
“I want my wife out of the picture,” I said, and smiled at how clever I was. The woman told me to be more specific. I said that I hoped my wife wrapped her car around a telephone pole, and then asked the fortuneteller out for a drink. She agreed. She wore a necklace made out of dried chili peppers, but after two drinks, she disappeared, and I never saw her again.
In my living room, Mud repeated the word brothel spraying spit from his lips. His daughter stood up and left.
Now, on the porch, the girl eyed her father and followed the boy to his flimsy blue tent on the outskirts of our commune. Mud’s eyes went dark and he limped down the steps.
“If I imagine the worst, it ain’t gon’ happen, right?” he asked.
I told him that it’s the stuff we never consider that gets us.
Like how Beats was in the car when my wife wrapped the Sedan around a telephone pole and how after the happiest moment of my life, things were never the same.
I bent over and plugged the string lights back in. Mud paced until a gust of wind whipped sand so hard that it forced him inside and I could no longer breathe with open eyes.
W. T. Paterson is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, MFA candidate for Fiction at the University of New Hampshire, and graduate of Second City Chicago. His work has appeared in over 70 publications worldwide including Fiction Magazine, The Delhousie Review, and Fresh Ink. A number of stories have been anthologized by Lycan Valley, North 2 South Press, and Thuggish Itch. He spends most nights yelling for his cat to “Get down from there!”
