Stand up

A Story by SR Steed

The old man lazed back in his chair and puffed out his cheeks. I just stood there and waited for his judgement. He read my material, squinting over each line with unconcealed irritation, as if what lay in his hands was a mere piece of paper with words on it. When he finished reading he exhaled emphatically and looked up to me with strained and twitchy eyes.

“Uhhh?” I asked.

“This won’t do,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

I blinked several times in sympathy. “You okay?”

“It’s nothing. Forgot my glasses. Forget about that. You can’t use this.”

“Are you serious?” I said, failing to hide a note of panic. It came out a little too loud, a little too forced. “Why can’t I? Ain’t this, you know, not right?”

“I can assure you those are all idiotic questions.”

The room we occupied had irregular dimensions, it was supposed to be a room in which I presumed humans are meant to do something, though what a human could do in a room like this in a club like this was anybody’s guess. The walls cramped us in but the ceiling hung up high, and as I looked up it struck me with a swaying sensation of inverted vertigo. Its height was incongruous with the height of the ceiling in the hallway outside, and seemed to serve no purpose, except maybe to taunt me. The second I stepped into the room I suffered the almost imperceptible feeling of being sucked up. To get my bearing I leaned against the door, and could hear the staff as they rushed up and down the hall. In the not too distant background there were the sounds of people settling at tables, ordering drinks, and hoping to have a good time.

“So wait, why then, why are you getting a say over my material?”

“Typical. The comedian thinks he can waltz into any establishment and say whatever he likes.”

Yes I do. “Yes. No I…” I stopped and creased up my nose. Start again. “What can I use?”

“Something funny, perhaps. Maybe something not so cruel.” He brought his thumb and forefinger up to pull off his glasses, presumably in an attempt at graveness, but after a couple of perplexed pinches at thin air he remembered his glasses weren’t there and made up for this by pretending to brush an imaginary fly or something away from his face. “My people want to relax. They don’t want to listen to a know it all rant and rave and force his politically correct agenda down our throats.”

“Politically correct? How can it be, on the one hand, be cruel, then all of a sudden be all politically correct?”

He sighed. “You don’t have time for this. Just do something more appropriate or don’t do it all, and stop asking me such stupid questions.”

“What stupid questions?”

Instead of answering he got up, making me step away from the door before I could say anything, and left. He left me with that ceiling, and those walls, and on one of those walls was the pronounced ticking of a tiny clock telling me I was on in ten minutes. A sweat was coming on, add to that the room being so confined, and the usual preparatory was pacing out of the question. I sat down in the now unoccupied chair, but the unbespectacled man’s vestigial warmth didn’t help.

He had said, “My people want to relax.” My people? The way he matter-of-factly challenged me had me thinking he was the owner or the manager or the like. But now, he could be a customer referring to fellow customers. He could be anybody. He could be the head of a work party on a night out, drunk on all that power he thinks is his as organiser, or the father of a good clean fun type of family with some other good clean fun families who have no business being at a club at this time of night, yet I had tried to justify myself, what I do and how I do it, to this total stranger. Or maybe he was with the club after all, and happened to refer to his customers in an odd way. Whatever the case it was not what I needed, it was the opposite of what I needed, and was delivered to me in a baffling form, as it always is. Why can’t things make sense?

In that not too distant background a scream rang out, followed by a lot of laughs. Someone had done something stupid or clumsy in front of a lot of people. They’re all enjoying themselves. At another time I’d have took what sounded like a receptive audience as good news. But all I thought of was of me being an unnecessary add-on, trying to dictate what laughs are allowed, and forcing some agenda I didn’t know I had down their throats.

A single knock on the door gave me a start. “Two minutes,” said a floating female voice from the other side. The clock confirmed this. So that was eight minutes wasted on fretting. I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I hadn’t even decided what I was to do about this man and his orders. I picked up my notes he had left strewn on the floor, uncrumpled it, and read it through. I couldn’t take anything in. It just seemed like a piece of paper with words on it.

“Alright, any second now,” said the other side of the door. I recrumpled the notes back into my pocket and got out into the hallway to find it empty. Whoever had told me how long I’ve got had work of her own to do, my warnings being just another inconvenience in her hectic schedule. The dimly lit hallway narrowed, or appeared to narrow, down my left, which way ended in a few upward steps that would lead me to where I was supposed to perform. That narrow end, and the conversations emanating beyond it, did nothing to help shake off my invertigo. If that man wanted his people to relax why didn’t he take them to a bingo hall or a brothel? This is no place to relax. This is comedy here.

I closed my eyes and imagined strolling out past the audience and out of the front entrance and doing all those things I’d never actually do. But this was interrupted by someone in real life over-enthusiastically announcing my name. My time had come, and I went out there, and died a horrible death.