Suzie Valedon approaches the night like a boxer. Her left hook is stuffed with non-sequitors and puns, while her right is brimming with enough energy to grab your own hand and run through the city streets, which she and I do almost every night.
She works at a patiserrie, seen in the photo on the right, and she’s a beautiful confusion to almost all of her customers. I go there to sit and watch, listen and laugh. When a white mustachio’d walrus harrumphed that he wanted a pancake, she went into the back, and — don’t ask me how — came out with a cake in the shape of the god Pan. These and other stunts are some of the reasons cited when she’s fired again and again.
Her wallet is full of two dollar bills. When she buys me coffee and asks how my jokes are coming, the waitress looks at the greens in her hand then down at the drawer and doesn’t know where to put the money. Lines back up and out the door after we pay.
The third time I met her I thought I was playing chess again: the same way you could see the pieces four or five moves ahead and feel the haze of something unfolding you could classify time with her.
I play the lawyer — I am a lawyer, but I like to play one as well — I get an extra large suitcase, buy remote controlled cars and dressed them up like ambulances, just to keep my track record high — and usually walk in when she expects to be fired, hand over a card, and say, “This woman is represented by an attorney.” The card reads, “Being the man who just gave you the card. Me.”
I try this joke on her: “We all know Mark Twain is the father of modern stand-up. He’s famous for the words, ‘My name is Huckleberry Finn. What’s the deal with that?’” — and she laughs, and so it’s going in the routine.
*
We play soccer in the elevator on the way up to a party one night, and a few hours later, the host leads us into a room where a man’s shirtless and on the floor and so far gone that Suzie suggests now might be the time to claim to be owners of a company that needs investors … He’d been dumped, and drank himself into a stupor, and so kept repeating “Why can’t people love? Why can’t people love?” over and over again and after a few “Well, they do’s” and we realized he wasn’t listening to what we were saying, I started to riff out responses, like —
1) They used to, but agape kidnapped eros, philia, storge, and thelema, and since they killed the first two hostage negotiators, there’s no knowing what’ll happen now.
2) Love? Who said anything about love? I said Godzilla. Get up! He’s coming! Run for your life! Or, uh, stumble!
3) Error 404, probably.
4) In the name of love, I know that your heart will go on, and even though I’d do anything, I wouldn’t do that?
5) Hey, how can you tell when a turkey’s done? It flushes. Am I right? Who wants to high five? Come on, lift your arms.
And she chides me for making fun of the poor guy, — “Have some empathy, for goodness sake” — until he says, “Don’t you think women’s bodies are like drugs? Your body looks like a drug to me. A good drug,” and she sighs.
“Oh, come on, now —” I say, and move to take charge but she stops me and says, “Like you’ve had the privilege of dealing with a parade of schlups all your life,” and I laugh, having sat behind my friends as they’ve composed countless letters and e-mails in the poorest of tastes (a friend of mine studying philosophy thought it would be funny to begin his missive with, ‘My dear, allow me to discuss the eschatology and tautology of thine nips, as they are, indeed, the last word,’ and you could almost hear the eye-rolling groan/scream at her apartment across the town), seeing the earnestness behind these crash-and-burns, and marveling at the laugh from both sides of the coin: the horror and sincerity.
*
One night I’m up onstage and tell the crowd, “All right, there’s a secret joke hidden in here. If anyone can find it, I’ll pay for all your meals.” Then I read a poem.
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But now the theory goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose
But were always a rose.
And there’s a long silence but Suzie’s laughing and when everyone looks at her, which you would assume to be the communal narrative, but, no, she’s looking at their faces — that’s the joke — and goes, “What? This is hilarious,” as even though both of us are soaked in enough irony to break a sponge, we know what the silence means, as I’m sure you do, too, and we relish it so. The birdjoy of the joke. I pay for their meals.
*
She spends a week traveling with the Lowell Division of the Hell’s Angels inquiring after their favorite children’s literature. Some say the Redwall series, while others broach Madeline L’engle, The Pushcart War, Roald Dahl, sharing which ones they read to their children and which ones they keep for themselves. She gets a whole bar counter’s worth of bikers to toast each other as mice and badgers and hares with absurd cockney accents, and tells me this with pride, glee, and I’m struck by her easy access to that batch of emotions, easy enough to almost call it a talent, rendered both proud and a grainular-sized sort of sad.
She goes on: one of the motorcyclists talks about a loop-de-loop highway, and they took her on a tour that afternoon: “I told them I hated the notion of all that gas going sploosh” — arm gestures accompanied sound effect — “but they have giant hot air balloons with these weird fan-nets they said were environmentally friendly, and when we were at the top of the loop, we were within arm’s reach of the balloon guys. Man. I really should get them something for the next holiday we make up.”
“I’m losing track of the holidays!” I said. “Can’t November have Thanksgiving and, y’know, only Thanksgiving?”
She grinned. “Silly, please. That’s why we have November Awareness Month.”
“How could I forget?”
*
But I forgot to mention one story: I left The Comedy Studio one night, met her in front of the Zine Library — dinner was to be had; her shoes had fallen off the porch, and the legs were still kicking the feet, and she called, “Los Soludos, Muchacho!” though she knew every language in the book but Spanish and I’m struck by a wave of heat, and I have to sit down.
She raised an eyebrow. “What’s up?”
“Have you ever thought about the fact that Bottom’s dream, a bottomless one, might be dreamed best by two people? You know, vaudevillians of the mind? ‘I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours?’ Two people taking imaginary cigarette breaks? All those songless songs the old poets talk about? That sort of thing?”
And just then a quarter fell out of her ear, and she frowned, giving it a look.
But with the money I got from passing the hat at the club, and what she got from selling her Hell’s Angels article, the nightly haul came to enough cash for us to bus to the city zoo downtown, where we could watch tiny hedgehogs explosively transform into flocks of parrots, and, this being much more fun, watch scientists bang clipboards against their heads, going, “But how? How?”
And so we set off to dinner in the middle of the road, as we were tired of how small the sidewalks were, and we heard a car beep behind us. “I’m sorry!” I called. “We thought we were cars.” They honked the horn again. “Don’t you think so many troubles of the world would be solved if cars were able to have polite conversation like this?” Another horn. “No? Well, gosh, that’s too bad,” and we walked back to the sidewalk. We doppler past two men playing chess —
“Can I tell you a story?” She bites my shoulder. Yes. “When I was six, my Mom told me to throw some rock-solid bagels outside for the pigeons. So I go to the window with the trey of peanut-butter and seeded bagels, open the window — there’s snow all over the backyard and fort — and I flip the bagels off the tray, and they disappear, and they never came down.”
“Secrets of flight,” she mumbled, then fell back to sleep. I spent a moment making sure my nose wasn’t engulfed by her hair — she’d pushed it out of the way, curled it beneath her neck — then returned to sleep, too.
— but manage to hear this much of the conversation:
“Look at them,” the old man said to his friend. “They bring out the life in each other. Doesn’t that make you sick?”
“Real sick.”
And then we go faster.
