8:30-8:35

8:30-8:35

The room stunk in the way all backstage green rooms stink, flop sweat, deodorant, and drugs.  Well, maybe the drugs were more of a professional luxury;  the only thing facing anyone in the room were minor possession charges as opposed to, say, a school suspension and a chance to hear the refrain “We’re so disappointed in you” at every possible opportunity.  

These days, people cheer up when they can stop counting the ‘offs’ before Broadway on two hands and say that you made it to L.A. to get big.  Amazing how expectations can get bent, once you work on them.  Plus, nothing  gets the taste of desperate flop sweat out of your mouth like a few bites of weed-infused banana bread.

Sean, sadly, was stuck smacking her lips and drinking water like a loser.  The last time she had an edible she was camping in Yellowstone.  In one of the marvelous, world-expanding moments that comes with using, Sean felt herself sinking into the ground, expanding and deepening, connecting to the supervolcano under the park.  She felt the immensity of all that slumbering molten rock and the force of its release when she projectile-vomited over anything and anyone in her immediate vicinity.  Since then, marijuana in all its forms had been added to her “No-Go” list along with beer hats, horse face masks, and dudes named Ryan.

This list was cultivated, monitored, and enforced by Kat, who had created it in the first place.  The genesis of the list came when Kat walked into their apartment to find Sean partaking in a combination of all three items, again.  After all, once is an accident, twice is coincidence, but three times is a sad invitation no one wants to RSVP to.  Having to find a stream to wash vomit out of her hair made the latest inclusion as natural as the mountain air.

Kat, luckily, didn’t have to abide by any list, so she sat quite comfortably and deliciously munching her way through a healthy serving of the banana bread.

“You know,” Sean bristled, “Technically that’s only for the talent.”

“I got you a slot, didn’t I,” replied Kat.  “That alone should get me the whole loaf.  Plus, this counts for my 10% cut.”

“Of course you would come up with some bullshit that makes it sound like you’re getting paid out of a free gig.”

It’s thinking like that, my dear,” here Kat had to pause to swallow her last bite, “that will get me the big bucks while you do all the work.”

The mood chilled.  Sean chafed in the haze of pot and vape smoke under the “No Smoking” sign, because no matter how cool or out there a place is, smoking cigarettes inside will just get dirty looks for ruining the furniture.  She began clenching and unclenching her water bottle, grasping with all her might on the throats of anyone who ever gave a shit about public health.

“Calm down,” Kat said, not even bothering to look up.  “You’ll be fine; you’ve practiced your set almost as much as the anecdotes you’ll tell on all your favorite  podcasts.”

Sean stopped mid strangle and glared at the still impassive Kat.

“Oh, yeah,” she said, “I especially liked the Yellowstone bit about how it lead you to believe in the oneness of all and how we should embrace our imminent destruction through gleeful nihilism.  It really nails that pretentious chic everybody loves but hates to admit.  Maybe you can make the stinger how your puke hit my glasses and cascaded over the rim into my eyes.”

“Right.  Well, on that note.” Sean got up and walked out the back door into night air.  She pulled out her pack of Red Sand cigarettes from the ragged pockets of her Army jacket and lit one up.  She had found the brand in one of the right-off-the-highway Indian tchotchke shops; “Come in and partake in our happy selection of lung cancer and fudge.”  It wasn’t smallpox, but she figured you had to make do with what the tools at hand.

Part of the appeal, for her, was how hard the things were to smoke.  Every breath felt like a battle, like the smoke opposed every bit of its fate until it was beaten into submission when it was finally exhaled.  The smoke drifted into the night air, an in it, Sean played out the events of the day.

Things had started with an interview Emily Vanderwolff.  She was the owner/operator of the online site Shahrazad, the “place of, by, and for women storytellers to gather for their own 1,001 nights.”  None of those creators got paid, off course-that would be unseemly- but Vanderwolff found that selling advertising space around other people’s work was very seemly indeed.  And so Sean sat, in a blue-walled room across from a woman who spent more money than could be covered up to look like an everyday housewife.

“So,” Emily asked, flashing a smile with teeth so bleached they could light up a dark room, “You won the contestant show, and now you’re getting a slot at the Comedy Store Tuesday night show.  I hear that a lot of the big names go there to practice their new material.”

Sean sighed heavily as she could internally before answering “Yeah, they’ll stop by, from time to time.”

Vanderwolff, confused by the dryness, plowed ahead.  “You must have a really good slot after winning the show.  Are you excited to get out and give ‘wow’ everyone with your brilliance?”

“Well, not really,” Sean replied, “I’ve got five minutes at 8:30, anybody famous that would notice me probably isn’t going to be there yet.”

“”That seems like kind of a snub to you, doesn’t it,” Vanderwolff said, seizing her chance to play the concerned mother figure to the hilt,  “I mean, with your accomplishments, don’t you think should be getting a more prime-time slot?”

The composure Sean had been so valiantly and vainly holding together finally broke.

“Well, no I don’t think I deserve anything.  Because what, exactly, have I accomplished?  I’m a nobody who beat out a bunch of other nobodies on a t.v. show.  Hoo-fucking-rah for me. Far as anyone in my business is concerned,casting pearls before swine would be a step-up from what I’ve done so far.”

Vanderwolff felt the interview and her fervent blandness slipping from her grasp.

“But, Shahrazad has consistently been voted one of the best sites on the internet-”

“Well, again, shows what they know.”  Sean knew the moment she said it that she had pushed too far but, fuck it, she was rolling.

“Listen, Emily, no one gets a cookie or deserves anything when they stand up on stage.  The only way you’re going to get anyone to pay attention to what you’re saying when they don’t give any kind of fucks about you is to make them.  If I can’t force people who do this for a living to pay attention,  I don’t deserve to be doing this.”

Back in the alley, the embers glowed and a smile crept across Sean’s face.  She had been pretty proud of that last bit.  Girl power, served raw.  None of that polite, sly nonsense with its feigned helplessness and caressed manipulation.  She would Hulk-smash her way into the world until it had been beaten enough to know better.  And if she couldn’t pull that off, well… she hoped it’d be a good show, at least.

She still had one more drag left when Kat popped her head out.  “You’re up.”

---------------

“Thank you, thank you.  So, to clear something about name, yes, it’s spelled S-E-A-N.  When I plopped out of my mom, she named me Shawna, which just sounds like the name of some old doo-wop song.  The thing that got me to change was that movie ‘No Way Out’, with Kevin Costner.  In like, the first ten minutes of that movie, Costner and Sean Young just start having soft-core porn sex in the back of a moving limo.  So, me, watching this movie, alone, surrounded by STP and Blur posters thought ‘Hey, maybe if I start spelling my name that way, I too can start getting euphorically drilled whenever I step outside.’ Things didn’t really turn out that way, but I kept the spelling.  Because, still, if I have to pick between hearing some cheesy song  sung to me be by choir boys in off-white tuxedos or picturing getting the lights fucked out of me whenever I hear my name, I’m going with the lights out option.

“It is a bit weird when I date a guy, though, because I always get the feeling that he’s just hooking up with me to stave off this, like, latent onset of gayness.  Because I’ve got tattoos of The Atom and Vixen, and, also, because I’ve got that smoky contralto voice and I’m really sarcastic, they tend to feel like I’m just one of the guys.  Except, you know, with a vagina.  So when they feel the urge to have sex with me it’s more like a dream come true instead of like, feeling super awkward because Chad’s been your friend for so long and you’ve bonded over all those times you leaned in really close to each other and maybe, just maybe, if your lips actually touched for a moment, it wouldn’t get weird.  But, it would, and then you’d realize that your clothes are uncomfortably stiff and you’re obsessing over a bunch of other dudes in stiff, tight clothing too.  I don’t mind it though, it’s really the closest a girl can get to being a fairy godmother in real life.  I’m just going along, helping them find their way through their journey’s.  Plus, that just feels better after you hear ‘You know what, I get it now.  I’m gay’ a disturbing number of times.

“Honestly, I’m pretty sure Caitlyn Jenner would understand me.  Except, she came round the opposite way.  When she was still Bruce, there’s no way you can tell me there weren’t guys watching him run through the Olympics thinking about the sweat dripping down his muscles, the strength that body must’ve held, and what it would feel like to experience that strength up close and personal.  I just imagine all these guys crowding around a shitty TV in the 80’s trying to find some excuse why they were breathing so heavy sitting on their asses.

“But then, a miracle!  Suddenly, Bruce is Caitlyn and a woman now, so all those comfortable feelings just get wiped away like it never happened.  Sure, most of them probably just transferred over to “Wait, she’s a tranny now? That’s still weird, right?” But after that Vogue cover shoot, I’m gonna say all of them forgot about it and went ‘Eh, I’ve done worse looking chicks.’

“So it was great seeing someone break the mold like that.  But then, right when she was being a hero to all far and wide, Caitlyn Jenner had to pick up that nasty habit of being a real, live human being and not, sadly, a new Greek statue that looked pretty bitchin’ in a white dress.  She actually said that she’s against gay marriage because ‘she’s a bit of a traditionalist.’  Now, I had to take some time to figure out how to respond to that aside from just, slack-jawed silence, but, after a lot of thought, what I came up with was: Dude, what the fuck?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m revoking all my feminists cards when I say this but, if there was ever a woman who we needed to just stand there, look pretty, and keep her damn mouth shut, it’s her.  I mean, I’m all for welcoming people into the fold, but it’s just too bad when they turn out to be such fucking cunts.”

“On the one hand, I can see why she doesn’t want to bother.  If she went out sticking up for other people, that could cut into her me-time or, maybe, interrupt all those bromides about how brave she is.  Obviously, we can’t have her risking that.”

“But it’s not like she’s unique in that.  We have lots of problems w won’t solved because, in the end, we just don’t give a shit. We have starving people everywhere and mountains of unused food, but do we put the two together?  No, because it’s gross.  We think it’s unhygienic for someone else to finish our half-eaten food, so, to make ourselves feel better, we give them nothing.  Because that’s always the important thing, us.  It’s just like every time a guy gets rejected by a girl and goes ‘Yeah, I hear ya, but, I’m gonna take care of myself  right now,  you can worry about yourself later.’

“Now, there are people out there who lament how fucked we are as a species.  I, am not one of them.  I love it, actually.  Loooove it.  That we do horrific shit to each other for basically no reason at all other than we can is what gets me out of bed in morning.  And you wanna know why?  Because that means I’ll still have a job.  With all the horrible things floating around, it makes people desperate for a distraction, like say, drinking at a comedy club on a Tuesday; but it also makes people look around for literally anyone to make sense of it all and that, my dears, is where I come in.

“See, normally, none of you even consider listening to anything I had to say about anything.  If you saw me on the street in this haircut, in these jeans, with this jacket, you’d probably say ‘I’ve got my problems, but at least I’m not Something something van Dyke over there.’  But when I’m up here?  All of you eat this shit up.  Because when you start piggybacking off my act, you feel all special when you get to bring it up with your friends.  You all get to act like you’ve got this new, sardonic take on the world that makes it all bearable.  And then, to top it all off, you get to initiate them into this whole new pact.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying any of this to put you down. Like I said, this is the kind of shit that’s going to keep me fed. So thanks again for coming out, have a great time, and, most importantly, stay afraid of the dark.”