From Jester To King II
By Simon Barget
- 426 reads
Bit of a weird one last night at Crowning Glory. Two guys at the front by my left heel, evidently Jewish, one small and feeble with glasses, the other sort of a larger protector-figure over said smaller one. The promoter has people literally crawling on the stage, crammed in like matchsticks, and you just know with all the big names they’re touting 7 days a week in every single available second past the 6pm comedy-may-now-commence-cut-off, that they’re always desperate and whoring for cash. Anyway I’d be grateful for a tiny bit of breathing space and not to feel like someone is literally crawling up my leg throughout proceedings. Plus I have to do this contortion/jump-over-leg thing just too even get near the stage let alone on to it, and I’m always worried about upending someone’s Guinness or Vodka Red Bull in the process.
Anyway as I start the set I notice thin weasly guy keeps moving and fidgeting, stretching out his legs, retracting them, stretching them out, scratching his face, picking up his drink, all of which is mildly off-putting but more to the point and maybe it’s my imagination, every time he stops and rests and actually keeps still, which is not very often at all, he fixes his eyes right on mine in some odd confrontational way, not flinching or moving in the slightest degree, like we’ve pre-ordained a staring match. Maybe he was just bored, but it was still something I kept noticing, and it was more than weird and off-putting. I don’t really know why I was paying attention. I mean there are 47 other people in the room at this point for god’s sake, which means that 6 didn’t turn up.
All of this going on while I’m trying to get through some of the material I’d done back in November trying to remember if it’s half decent. I’ll stick with the NYC threesome bit though I know it’s lame and can’t understand why people are so fond of the slightest allusion to gay sex, and then there’s the sticks vs. London bit, and I noticed that measly guy actually laughs at the throwaway line about provincial people never going to a new play because he laughs at precisely nothing for the remaining hour. I also kept the line about proudly identifying as a Jew but I’m not sure about it anymore. By the way, and so you’re not under any illusions, I am really tiring of my whole vegan-looks-obsessed-erstwhile-celeb-self-delcaring-ubervain-persona-shtick and the involuted sick joke (on me) is that I still am really vain and I still am talking about being vain, even if it is all in a self-referential kooky undermining kind of way. And I wonder then; am I honestly going to be blathering on about Ayahuasca retreat #6 at the age of 50, no nuclear family to speak of, no house, no real sense of self-worth, half-convinced that Ayahuasca has really cured me this time, when I kind of know I’m only talking about it just to have something to talk about so that I can make a living?
I felt remorseful and wrong about the new-hole-in-the-perineum story, because even if I did give birth to a figurative pillow in the Maloka that night, and even if it does touch on the whole genuine issue of gay men raising kids, it was something I tacked on in my mind as an afterthought, magnifying the mental perception of it tenfold, just so I could talk about it at a later date, because I can’t deny to myself that when I went back to my Tambo after ceremony that night I wrote down in this notebook: GAVE BIRTH TO A PILLOW thinking that it sounded funny and could be something I’d use in my oncoming special. I’m using life to fill comedy, and I know it’s normal in a way, but if I wasn’t so utterly unconvinced as to whether I am in fact a writer, then I don’t think I’d be so lured into doing this, and if something came up I’d write about it and if something didn’t, I’d be ok. But then comes this urge to self-renew and win more awards, and reassert my fame, and break America, and get another C4 sitcom despite recent real cinema feature film and Netflix special, and why can’t I just be happy as I am, like I am, like when I come back from Peru as ‘renaissance Sammy’ until it all peters out a couple of weeks after that.
Anyway, back to thin weasly Jewish guy of questionable sexuality and I know the other one wasn’t gay because when I opened my normal start-up bit with: ‘Anyone want to talk about anything?’, protector-guy chimes in with a pronounced yes and proceeds to tell the room how he’s worried about having left his kids at home with babysitter, so I’m assuming he isn’t gay and plus he didn’t strike me as being so at all, so these two are obviously not a couple in the conventional sense.
And though I manage to get out of there without almost any palaver, self-imposing the edict thou shalt not be waylaid by insincere praise, I still couldn’t manage to extricate myself from a group of ear-lobe-gouged-out, Maori-tattoo-sporting, NY-Mets-peak-as-flat-as-pancakes dudes, before realising that it was more me sidling up to them than the other way round and I caught myself in the act, whereupon I literally said ‘I’m off’ in the middle of one of the guys going on about Paris, and I scarper and I’m thinking I’m home-free and I’m walking back through Islington Passage past Fritzerl the Austrian place Pedro likes, and I shall be home in a trifle under 40 minutes and I can make a few edits before we both retire to bed.
Yet I get to Angel and I’m stepping off the last bit of the last escalator bearing right to go northbound, when I catch this somehow familiar Jewish drawl, this inflection making my hairs stand on end, this sound penetrating my cochlea and brain stem, hard-wired, the tone, accent, cadence, everything, and lo, there’s large bubbly front-row guy shouting in faux-surprised exclamatory way: Oh look it’s him, and I look up and I catch his eye and he catches mine, and though I’m now partly steeling myself for another few minutes of chatter I can’t get out of, I’m also partly intrigued about measly-thin-guy who is standing askance and still actively staring into space as if not fully visible or extant, all effete and frail, and there is just something about the way that this guy wisps in the breeze that is at once so strangely alluring yet very fucking horribly disturbing, and not that I don’t realise this immediately, but the reason I react in this polarised way is precisely because he reminds me of me, and I do not ever want to have myself mirrored back to me at inopportune times, especially when I’m mulling over what to keep and what to cull, not that I don’t adore every fibre of my being beyond anything you could ever possibly imagine ever, which is of course the most embarrassing and pathetic part of it because it’s all so confusing.
But I am always polite and I always allow the other person to be heard and indulged and although confirmed hetero parka guy starts off the interaction, weasly guy actually speaks and he blurts out almost maniacally -- bear in mind that we are standing (for context) just on the bit of the platform that’s right in front of the arch or portico bit that leads off from the main gangway -- he blurts out where did you do Ayahuasca then?, and I can’t stand that question because people always ask it and they always say they’re curious or they don’t quite know what it is, or they ask me were there spiders, anyhow I tell him, Temple of the Way of Light, and he immediately replies: ‘me too’, as in, he has also taken part in a retreat there, which was not what I was expecting at all because the way he asks wasn’t a let’s-compare-notes type of way, it was more like he was asking from a position of ignorance or wanting advice, in any case I couldn’t quite clock it.
And there is no big climax to this story other than the more I get to talking to this guy on the platform, the more deluded I realise I am, because there’s a bit in my 2017 set where I talk about how Ayahuasca completely cures me of shame, depression, awkwardness, anxiety, overthinking, overanalysing, fear of dancing, and this guy actually mentions that part of my set and asks me flat out: did it just reset me then?, and I say yes, which is a bald-faced lie, god all that stuff is still there, and then I am faced with truth rather than what I would like to believe is truth, which is that Ayahuasca had forged this gleaming new being, and as soon as he tells me that his experience was beneficial but certainly not life-changing, I immediately want to get the hell out of there and run onto the next Edgware train although I now live in Tufnell Park, because I cannot face even another second of my self-deception, and for what it’s worth I hope I didn’t come across as dismissive to a man merely owning his shit. And perhaps this all has something to do with why I felt I was being stared at throughout the gig, probed, or is this just my own paranoia again, who knows, but I could learn to be a bit more honest with myself, that wouldn’t hurt now, would it.
- Log in to post comments
Comments
a bit of honesty never hurt,
a bit of honesty never hurt, ouch, it does. It does.
- Log in to post comments