Just Jokes Though

I stand on the stage and I tell jokes. Just jokes about my father's addictions, my inability to maintain a healthy adult relationship, that I fall too easily in- into another person's bed. The audience laughs. At a table in the back, a man with a degree thinks those things might be related, but he laughs too because they’re just jokes. I’m sure he’ll explain it to me later.

I’m the funny girl. Really, I am funny for a girl. There’s another girl here too, she’s been doing this longer, she wears a baggy t-shirt and forgot to comb her hair, and she is good at this. Like really fucking good at this, not like me where I have to take a shot of caffeine to focus enough to write anything down on my damn paper. I think about the teacher in high school that said I need meds and I wonder if that guy at the back will prescribe them to me.

Anyways, She comes up to me and she tells me I need to dress down and act more like a man. I won’t be taken seriously if I am trying to be pretty. Now I’m feeling insecure. I thought I looked good, I took extra time to do my makeup tonight. I took extra time because I don’t feel as pretty or as thin as I did four years ago. I took extra time to cover up the feelings I don’t want the audience to see because I don’t want them to know how empty I am or that I haven’t accomplished a single thing I set out to do in my adult life. I thank her for her advice and ask for her social media, maybe we will connect later, maybe she’ll book me a show.

My parents are there, it’s their first time seeing me. My dad is acting like he’s a big celebrity, a real Ricky Bobby because the whole crowd cheered when I told them he’d been sober for 15 years. They cheered because they don’t know that when I was 8 years old he left me in the back of a truck with his friend’s son who pinned me down, elbow sharp between my shoulders and arms restrained behind my back until they emerged an hour later from the inside of a house with blankets on the window. My dad doesn’t know that either, so he laughs because I laugh. He’s proud of me and gives me a hug because despite our past he’s still a pretty great dad.

My mom, a fiery redhead, acts like she’s embarrassed by how crass I can be. She thinks making a tsk tsk tsk with her tongue will make me recant my behavior on stage like she’s not the one who taught me to not let others dictate what I say. She tells me she really wishes that I wouldn’t talk about myself in the same sentence as degrading sexual acts. I see where she coming from- A man approaches me and offers to buy me a drink because he thinks my jokes are based on truth… or at least he hopes they are. She stares at us with disapproval but she’s still happy for me, happy I’ve put myself out there in the world.

The lamp of your life had started to dim, she said. I think she’s trying to be funny because the man I shared my life with before I stepped on that stage gaslit me enough that I should have illuminated that entire room. Mom laughs at my response because it’s just jokes. I’ve moved on, I am stable now. I have a new boyfriend and he’s had one too many drinks so he sits in the front row and heckles the next act. I’m pretty sure I love him but at this moment I hate him because this is the only thing I have that is just mine and I don’t want his behavior to reflect the work that I’ve done.

He’s going to ask me to move into his house one day. His white picket fence house is well above my income status, and I’m going to be really uncomfortable because I’ve made so many financial mistakes that I don’t think I belong above the poverty line. I’ll need to justify to myself that I’ve earned my place on the couch because I’m funny and he hasn’t met a funny girl like me before.

I order my own beer, I nurse it for the rest of the night with a smile on my face because I want the guy on stage to know that he’s funny and has my validation in this crowd of strangers. I laugh when the audience laughs, and when the lights come on and the laughter stops that’s my cue to get into my car and leave.

I live in a basement below some screaming kids and a set of parents that don’t love each other. The dad is racist, which is ironic because the mom is not white. I wonder if he tells her that what he says is just jokes. I wonder if she laughs. I wonder if she’ll leave him. I can’t hear their footsteps above my room, I’m completely alone, except for my dogs. Dogs don’t understand jokes, so I crawl into my bed and my dogs crawl between the crevices of my limbs intertwining themselves with my emotions. When I wake up, I’ll write a new joke and I’ll plan to get back up on stage because I can say out loud all those things that I’ve kept bottled up as long as it ’s just jokes.