Excerpt
Running the Light
MondayBilly Ray Schafer stepped off the plane in Amarillo, Texas with twenty-six hundred dollars tucked down the leg of his black ostrich-skin cowboy boot. He walked to baggage claim slowly, jelly-legged and nearing lucidity, coming out from under the Xanax he snorted before the flight. He removed his suitcases from the conveyor belt and found a restaurant in the terminal that served alcohol. After three drinks he went outside to smoke until his ride arrived.
The club owner sent his son to carry Billy Ray the two hours to Tucumcari. The son had a wide pink face that smiled amiably the entire drive. He didn’t care if Billy Ray smoked in the truck—not at all, just crack the window, please. As he drove, going fast, making short work of Texas, the son, a junior at the university in Albuquerque, remarked on the buildings they passed—peeling gray barns, rusted silos, long squat adobe houses baked the color of dried blood—detailing the different methods of construction and explaining how the architecture reflected the evolution of the southwest as a region and the “resilient nature” of “these humble people.” On the barren stretches, he spewed an eclectic barrage of regional facts: “Taos Pueblo was built one thousand years after the death of Christ”; “Sante Fe is the tallest state capitol city”; “New Mexico is home to more cows than people and more chili peppers than cows”—followed by a list of famous New Mexicans. While the kid prattled, Billy Ray flirted with sleep, barely listening, finding it hard to imagine any life, human or otherwise, being lived in this blasted expanse of teeming red desert.
Based on how fast he talked, Billy Ray wondered if the kid had any amphetamines. Uppers would be helpful for his continuance. He was reaching the edge of himself.
He’d flown red-eye from Memphis to Dallas, where he suffered a four-hour layover before switching planes. In Memphis he’d performed at a nightclub patronized by black professionals, the men attired sharply in tailored suits and the women, their hair elaborate, in velvet and satin. He was not what they wanted and they were vocal in their disdain. Before Memphis, he’d done two nights in Tupelo at a rathole called Tortugas Cantina. Tortugas, which the locals called Tugs, brought in comedians on the weekend, transforming their dining room into a comedy club with the addition of a stage comprised of a single wooden pallet. The shows were sparsely attended but the staff prided themselves on entertaining the comedians and, like most service professionals, they were flush with cocaine and generous in their hospitality. Before Tupelo it was Birmingham and Huntsville and Chattanooga, Tennessee, a riverboat in Knoxville called the Smoky Queen Pearl and a biker bar in Charlotte that kept a snake in a glass tank behind the bar and fed him on hamsters, twelve days continuous of Greyhounds, rental cars and the cheapest motels starting in Virginia Beach two Wednesdays ago, twelve days of bad food and free liquor and women with low morale, twelve days away from his apartment in Los Angeles—a one bedroom in Koreatown that was less of an apartment than it was the address of a storage space where he slept on occasion. He’d been on the road more than two hundred days this year. The damage was cumulative, both physical and mental, a sense-dulling exhaustion that limited his scope of emotion to a callous and shapeless contempt. He felt like he was evaporating. Seven days to go.
They stopped for burgers at a drive-in where the carhops rode inline skates. The girl who brought their food appeared to be floating and Billy Ray registered her an angel until he saw her wheels. They ate off the tailgate, watching the clouds push and expand across the West Texas sky. When he was done eating he lit a Winston, but he could not enjoy it; the air was hot enough already.
For the rest of the drive Billy Ray shut his eyes. With no one to talk to, the son whistled to himself, the same fifteen notes repeating, and Billy Ray passed gas in protest, filling the cabin with the smell of his decay.
When they finally reached Tucumcari, they stopped at a liquor store and Billy Ray bought a six pack of Coors bottles and a small bag of ice. He instructed the kid to deliver him to his hotel, where he checked in and stripped nude and, after filling a wastepaper basket with the ice and beer, he laid on the mottled mattress and let the air conditioner lick the sweat off his body. The kid had promised to return at six-thirty to pick him up and take him to the venue. In the downtime, Billy Ray tried to nap but he was too tired, so he cracked a beer and flipped the channels until he found a network playing a show he liked. In the show, film crews followed actual police on patrol, capturing low moments of low people: domestic violence, DUIs, solicitations, assaults. The show was his favorite; he found the sincerity of lives in collapse to be absolutely compelling. In one episode, a pair of fat deputies in Fort Lauderdale, Florida uncovered a kilo of cocaine on a routine traffic stop. Billy Ray watched with envy as the police sliced into the brick to confirm it was drugs. “We just ruined someone’s party,” joked the cops. When asked, the possessor of the cocaine claimed the kilo was for personal use. “Hell yeah,” Billy Ray said and saluted the man with his beer.
The show that night was directly off the highway in a concrete roadhouse named Mingles. A banner hung on the face of the building announced BUD LIGHT PRESENTS MINGLES MONDAY NIGHT COMEDY RIOT. Pickup trucks dominated the patch of dirt out front that served as a parking lot. The kid parked away from them, behind the building. He insisted on carrying Billy Ray’s suitcase. Billy Ray followed him in through a back door into a kitchen alive with the smell of potatoes frying in dirty oil, past the lone harried cook standing with his hands on his hips in front of one of three microwaves and continuing through a set of swinging doors and into a barroom lit in low red light, decorated in maroon and black vinyl and outfitted with pool tables, dartboards and an arcade hunting simulator.
“My dad will be in later,” said the son. “Are you hungry? We got your dinner and whatever you want to drink. I’ve got to set up the chairs.”
Billy Ray requested a whiskey-coke and a menu from the bartender, a stoic man of deeply wrinkled indigenous features, his skin clay-red, his hair blue-black. He drank his highball fast and ordered another. Nothing about Mingles encouraged mingling. This was an unwelcoming place, vaguely apocalyptic. Everyone looked like a bounty hunter or a gas huffer. They were a grim clientele, all of them unlucky, the sunburnt and scarred survivors of anonymous, intimate catastrophes. They reminded Billy Ray of science fiction, these deep desert mutants, of nuclear fallout and Area 51. Looking at them gave him anxiety. He focused on his drinking. By the time the show began he was quietly very drunk.
A few minutes after eight, the owner’s son—whose name turned out to be Pauly—stepped to the microphone and introduced the opening act, a tall, thin man defined by an upright shock of stiff white hair. He wore a lab coat and went by the name Doctor Dixon Gorged. For thirty minutes, Doctor Gorged rattled off a combination of jokebook jokes and stolen material. Billy Ray identified bits by Hedberg, Carlin and Cosby among the bad doctor’s menagerie, but the crowd didn’t notice or, if they did, they didn’t care, and Doctor Gorged ended his set to decent applause.
When the Doctor walked past him on his way off the stage, Billy Ray nodded, abiding custom, and offered the traditional obligatory acknowledgment: “Good set.”
“Thanks. They’re fun. Are you the headliner?”
“I’m up next.”
The man extended his hand. “Wayne Hanson. I’m not actually a doctor.”
“No shit,” said Billy Ray. The man’s hand was warm and moist.
The owner’s son was uncomfortable behind the mic. He rocked back and forth. “Before we bring up your headliner, I just wanted to remind y’all—Bud Light drafts are two-for-one.”
Wayne Hanson/Doctor Gorged lowered his eyebrows, smushing his face apologetic. “I wish I could stay for your set, but I have to work in five hours.”
“That’s okay, man,” Billy Ray said, cinching closed his bolo tie. “I wouldn’t watch me either.”
On stage, the owner’s son did his best to bolster the energy in the room, but his false excitement came off as pleading. “Are y’all ready for your headliner?” he begged, raising a tepid affirmation from the crowd. He talked louder: “I said are y’all ready for your headliner?” The crowd responded with slightly more enthusiasm. “I’ve been hanging out with this guy all day and it has been a hoot.” He pulled a slip of paper from his coat pocket and read: “You’ve seen him on Letterman and Leno, Comedy Central and HBO.”
Wayne Hanson’s eyebrows hiked. “You did Letterman?”
“What’s the matter?” Schafer sneered. “You never seen a big star before?”
