Howie went on. “You know, like The Day the Clown Cried.”

Privately, I rolled my eyes at his lack of discretion. And in a comedy club, too, where the movie would hardly be unknown!

“Jerry’s unreleased film?” one asked.

“Wow,” another added.

“Seeing that would be a trip, Howie.”

“Everybody wants to play Hamlet, right? But dying is easy. Comedy is hard, as somebody once said.”

The skinny guy who had done the Western voice now did Jerry Lewis in Shakespeare: “Hey lady! To be or not to be, nice lady!”

This time, Howie stayed stone-faced.

“Don’t talk against Jerry,” he told him. “He’s a genius.”

There was general, solemn agreement with this. The funny kid slowly withdrew, self-consciously crossing his arms and legs. Howie was efficiently drawing in his acolytes, but he wouldn’t let them get too close.

“A genius, like I used to be,” he said, quietly, as the lights faded for another act.

I was the only one who heard him. Or who noticed that he was on his third free drink. Even though a new comic was performing, Howie kept muttering to himself. Then he turned and glared at me, with fury in his eyes.

“You’re, uh, driving back, right?” I whispered, concerned.

“Look, pal,” he mumbled through ice cubes. “Why don’t you go find outtakes from Lassie, or something?”

I was about to reiterate, indignantly, that TV trivia wasn’t my specialty, when Howie erupted, ice falling from his mouth.

“I’m not your prisoner, for chrissake!” he whispered-yelled into my ear. “I’m a free man!”

He pushed me to the side, nearly toppling me from my chair. Then, heedless of the luckless person now performing, he started to stumble to the stage.

Seeing him, the whole crowd, of course, went nuts. Ruining the current comic’s set, they started chanting “How-ie! How-ie! How-ie!” By the time Howie groped his way under the spotlight—and gently but firmly eased the other guy out of it—I couldn’t even hear myself sigh.

Howie waved a grateful hand to stop the crowd. He seemed completely sober now, before them. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” he said, and the place exploded.

Howie proceeded to perform a carefully constructed act, all of new material, except for a few old comments on toothbrushes. He convulsed the crowd with observations about retirement, children, and sneaking a cigarette away from your wife.

I realized that Howie had never retired; he had been working—“observing”—all along. Like me, he had absolutely no interest in everyday life. Unlike me, he had made a fortune from his alienation. And, after tonight, I knew he would continue to.

He saved his most hilarious material for worthless relatives, freeloaders, and nerds, remarks he delivered looking right at me.

“Let’s hear it for him!” Howie yelled. “He’s not paying for his meal tonight, either!”

Suddenly, with Howie’s direction, the spotlight shifted away from the stage. Then it shone, brutally, in my eyes. The crowd whooped and hollered, as I waved, weakly. I thought that Martin Sheen had replaced Harvey Keitel in Apocalypse Now and Jodie Foster had done the same for Nicole Kidman in Panic Room.

The ring of light moved back to the stage, leaving me blind. Howie began to expound on pocket protectors—what were they really protecting? When I opened my tearing eyes and was able to focus, I saw that the skinny young comic, who had been shot down by Howie, whose face I had never really seen, was leaving the club.

—

We closed the place. Then I waited with Howie while the garage attendant searched for his car. If he had been pumped after tennis, now he was positively hyper. Howie kept punching and kicking the air, yelling, “I killed! Killed!” More free drinks had returned him to a state of totally loopy inebriation.

When the car arrived, he pushed me away from it.

“I’m not going anywhere with you!” he yelled, sloppily. “You can keep your Jerry Lewis and your …” He groped for a word. Then, finally, he invented one: “Your Clowncried!”

“Howie—” I tried a reasonable tone, if only to get a lift home at three A.M.

“I’m not going to end up like you!” he spat, barring the car door. “I’m going back to work! I’m bored to goddamn tears! All this … retiring … is killing me! So here, you want to find that goddamned stupid film—” He counted out a few bills, one of which he stuffed in the attendant’s palm. Then he flung the others at me. “Good luck!”

In a minute, he had peeled out, his tires screaming. A baby picture of Howie’s son, Elliot, had sailed out at the same time. Now it lay in a puddle on the ground.

I stood there, the money fluttering toward my feet. The attendant only shrugged, looking bemusedly at his windfall: a hundred-dollar bill. Then he left me in the dark garage, alone.

Howie had been giving me more and more power. Finally, he’d allowed me sway over his entire professional life. That was worth a lot more than three hundred bucks, which I now stooped to retrieve. But it was probably the only thing I would ever get from him. I stuffed the dough into my front pants pocket.

I wasn’t the only one who wanted the money.

Lurking in the shadows outside, a figure now peeked in from the garage entrance. Then it disappeared. The street was otherwise empty.

I planned to sleep in my own bed that night, which was a few blocks away. I would call Dena first thing in the morning, which was an hour from now.

But first I had to get by the guy outside.

HE WAS ON MY TAIL THE MINUTE I EMERGED ONTO FORTIETH STREET. I heard his footsteps, nearly felt his breath. When I took a quick glimpse behind me, I saw a thin man, his face hidden by a sweatshirt hood.

I cut across Eighth Avenue, at full gallop.

I’d been chased so many times recently, it was almost refreshing to merely get mugged. In a second, I realized that wasn’t what was happening.

“Roy!” the guy called, coming after me.

My blood froze, as my feet found the other sidewalk. Without stopping, I looked back again, helplessly, responding to my name. His face was still a black hole beneath his hood. When I turned forward, I was heading right into a mound of garbage at the threshold of an alley.

I tripped and fell onto McDonald’s boxes, plastic wrap, Chinese food, and, yes, banana peels. But my friend was conscientious enough to help me up—yanking me by my belt loops and collar and tossing me ahead of him, into the alley.

“Alley oop!”

This wasn’t his first time hurting someone; he seemed pretty good at it. I thought about a movie in the early Eighties, Beginners, starring Elizabeth McGovern and Keith Gordon as young lovers—a Norman Lear production. It was abandoned, never started up again, and declared dead.

So nearly was I, my face pressed into asphalt. As the man stooped to hammer his fist into my side, I thought of something else. The voice he’d used on “Alley oop!” had been a Homer Simpson imitation. It was almost as good as his Jerry Lewis doing Shakespeare or his cowboy. It was the dismissed young comic.

He punched me again in the side.

“Where is it, Roy?” he said.