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Sensitive content - gore, mental health, and suicidal ideations

Stanley didn’t think he had enough toes left to finish becoming a professional juggler.

He had figured that starting with tennis balls was a waste of time and that he’d get better faster by pushing outside his comfort zone like that big-faced guy on the commercials said, so he started at the advanced lessons on YouTube. Before this, Stanley had thought that limbs were only amputated for infections, like in those old Civil War movies, but he learned from a bald doctor with an accent that if you throw a sixteen-pound bowling ball 12 feet into the air and let it (accidentally) fall onto your left big toe, it will irreversably shatter the bone into many tiny pieces and the rest of the toe will explode like a grape that lost a bet with a tap dancer.

He lost the second and third toes on his left foot in a more conventional way when he tried to use running chainsaws, which he learned to start yet again on trusty old YouTube, although he had never used one before. That one was messier but less painful, which confused him, because all of his experiences with television shows told him that more blood should equal more pain, but he hadn’t even started to feel anything until he was already loaded into the ambulance and his mother was waving at him from the driveway in her robe.

It was in the hospital bed that he had accepted that maybe juggling wasn’t his calling. After all, he’d tried very hard for over a week, and he was down three toes and had gained nothing. No sooner had he given up on his dream than he was struck like lightning by a new vision of his career as a stand-up comedian. His mother was always telling him how funny he was, and he had already done all the research, watching every Netflix special available, except for the women comedians, who weren’t funny and didn’t count. Stanley felt an overwhelming conviction that after 36 years of searching, he had finally found his purpose.

-

Standing before the microphone for the first time, it occurred in the back rooms of Stanley’s mind that he maybe should have practiced or prepared before booking himself at the comedy club. He pushed this thought away without trouble, reasoning that it couldn’t be that hard and that someone with as much untapped talent as he had would bloom under pressure. He stood there staring at the audience, his eyebrow furrowed and his jaw clenched, and he mentally searched his memory for jokes, but he came up empty.

As he considered his favorite comedians, a moment of rare discernment descended: all of the best jokes made fun of people. He looked into the audience and found someone who looked different than everyone else, and he opened his mouth and said the meanest thing he could think of about those people. He surprised himself by not blatantly parroting anything he had heard before, but instead synthesizing the thousands of hours of content he had ingested in the basement into a statement that was unique and shocking.

He took a breath in through his teeth after speaking the words, and the small part of him with a sense of shame cowered in the base of his skull. The audience was silent. This was the end of his dream; he couldn’t make people laugh either, only his mother liked his jokes, and he was too ugly and fat and useless to ever get up in front of people. How stupid he had been. What had he been thinking, what an embarrassment, what a fraud. How had he ever convinced himself to do this, imagining money, fame, and beautiful women, he was just a pointless failure who couldn’t keep a job at the local dollar store. It was all their fault, this moronic audience, full of people judging who didn’t understand, people with no sense of humor, people who looked down on him and made it impossible for him to succeed at anything. If they would just give him a chance at something, they’d see how much potential he had; that they were wasting his genius asking him to do menial tasks, he was capable of more, and he should be given a chance to prove it. He hated them all, and maybe one day he would show them. Maybe he would show them what happens when you push someone down too far. Maybe he’d come back to this comedy club next week and-

Then they laughed.

The audience erupted, cackles from a woman with enormous hair in the back, deep guffaws from a bearded man in the front. They laughed and they applauded. Like a drug, the sensation of smooth lightning started in Stanley’s mouth and quickly spread into his neck, shoulders, navel, and crotch. He didn’t know it, but he’d be chasing this feeling for the rest of his stunted life. After that, it was easy; he felt like he was born to make these jokes. He finished with the story of the incompetent doctor who amputated his big toe to a standing ovation.

-

Stanley stood in the green room, shared by all the comedians, staring at his check. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to the money, but it seemed to him that both the theaters and the numbers on the checks had been getting smaller, and he’d had to share a dressing room on three out of the last five gigs. His manager said it was just a slow time in the business, but it had been getting worse for over a year, and he saw other comedians’ Netflix specials coming out, so comedy couldn’t be doing that badly. He told his manager to send a tape in, and he said that he had, but Stanley had a hard time believing they wouldn’t have wanted him to do a special if they’d seen how talented he was. Maybe he should have looked a little further than the first manager that approached him, but he was in a hurry to get to the top, and if he was honest, he was so flattered to feel wanted that he didn’t even consider shopping around.

A year ago, things had been perfect. He’d been in the local paper, even his grandmother had called and congratulated him. He was doing shows in big cities, and some of them sold out. His checks were the biggest he’d ever seen in his life, and he bought himself the nice suits he deserved and ate all the fast food he wanted. He even put a down payment on a nice new car to fit his new lifestyle. But lately, it seemed like nothing was going right for him. It was probably because of his incompetent manager, or maybe audiences just didn’t know funny anymore. Whatever it was, he had an idea to get back on top tonight.

Walking out to the microphone, he smiled, reviewing his plan. He had spent a long time thinking about it. His original secret sauce had been making fun of people, and he’d done well with jokes about every type of person that he could think of, and his audiences ate it up as he became more and more irreverent and crude. Why should anything be sacred from a good joke? After all, it’s all for a good laugh, and laughter is good for the soul. However, by some hidden intuition, he had never made jokes about the people who laughed the loudest in his audience. The women with the big hair and the men with the beards. There were plenty of things to say about them, but somehow he had never done it, even though most of the people filling seats looked just like that. Tonight, he would give them an extra dose of the shock they expected by turning his wit on them; they would get a kick out of that.

He took a big breath and said his first joke.

-

Stanley brushed dirt off the partially smoked cigarette, a treasure found in the space between the sidewalk and the curb. With all the stupid tobacco taxes, he could barely afford a pack a week anymore, and he had smoked the whole thing well before payday after a fight with his mom. She kept nagging him about helping out around the house and paying something, but he couldn’t help it if there was nothing left over after he paid for everything he needed.

He didn’t have time anyway; he was busy with his own projects, setting up his brand as a content creator on YouTube and working security at the bar to cover his expenses. Mom didn’t do anything for her money; the government just sent it to her because Dad had worked his whole life. Why shouldn’t he benefit from the free money, too? He’d take good care of her once the channel caught on; it was just a matter of time before someone saw how special his content was. Then he’d show his idiot manager. Who’s the one-trick, foul-mouthed flashfire now? He’d build a following and go viral, and finally get the recognition that he deserved. He’d been watching for years, and he knew he was funnier and more charming than most of these people with millions of followers. It was just a matter of time.

-

Stanley stared at the urn on the table and took another sip. The beer was warm; his power had been out for days. The resentment he had been nursing for the last 48 years had sunk into the base of his spine, and he felt it there as a dull rage. He was so angry, at stupid doctors, at clueless audiences, at his useless manager, and at his mother for leaving him with nothing. Nobody had ever given him a chance, never taken him seriously. If they had just let him shine for a second, everyone would have seen that he had something special, that they were wasting his gifts. But they didn’t and they wouldn’t, and there was no point now. And it wasn’t his fault.