The Further Adventures of The Joker (22 page)

And so I came alive at night for two years and then some, taking the 10:38
P.M.
train in from Finger Park to Gotham Center, performing for money when I could—usually at one of the East Side back-alley basement clubs, a place for the slum dwellers to come in out of the cold and for the yuppies and dinner-jacket types to go slumming—but usually I had to settle for another amateur night, another contest, or another free-drinks and dinner-if-you-get-here-early-enough performance.

I got to know most of the other comedy club circuit people. A few went on to the ranks of the serious professional. One got rich and famous and died snorting bad coke in Las Vegas last fall. Most got discouraged, dropped out, and have been replaced by younger would-be somebodies. A few, like me, have hung in there and taken what they could get—honing their material, slowly improving their performances and on-stage personalities, trying to make up in experience and sheer persistence what they lack in talent. A few of these other survivors of the Long March have become friends. Some of the rest are real assholes. All of them, friends and assholes alike, are competitors.

But in a strange way we are like some medieval guild: aging apprentices hoping to become journeymen and praying to be elevated to Master. We’re sort of a family of misfit hopefuls, sharing nothing but our common dream and the fact that we come alive only at night, in front of the audience.

And then the Joker started killing us.

It was last November in that gray, dead-branch period between the childlike nonsense of Halloween and the all-too-adult loneliness of Thanksgiving. The Carob Comedy Club on Alameda and Franklin had been staging a three-week Comedy Countdown—shows every Tuesday and Saturday—with a bunch of us eliminating each other via applause-o-meter showdown for a five-hundred-dollar first prize. That sounds like a decent amount until you realize that Al Jacobs, manager of the Carob, had over a dozen amateur comics firing off their best material twice a night, two times a week for three weeks, and only the winner would end up getting anything.

Anyway, it was the final Saturday night and the original mob of stand-ups had been winnowed down to seven—me, my cracker friend Boonie Sandhill, a tired old ex-borscht-belt comic named Dandy John Diamond, a Roseanne Barr imitation called Tiffany Strbynsky, a gifted black teenager named Fast Eddie Teck, a beautiful but not very funny medical student named Diana Mulhollen, and George Marlin. I’d drawn the first slot for the late show and the audience wasn’t just cold, it was frigid. I gave it my best shot—using my Cola Wars stuff where every major world event of the past three decades was explained as an incidental by-product of the global sales war between Coke and Pepsi—but either the material was too cerebral for this crowd or it just wasn’t my night. I knew I was out of the running even before I took my bows, reset the mike on the stand, and backed out of the spotlight. At least Tiffany waddled onstage to a warmer crowd.

Al Jacobs lets us early casualties sit at the bar and down a few comped drinks while we watch the others work. Tiffany was hot this night, but she still was only a good imitation of the real thing and even though the applause-o-meter swung almost half again as far to the right as it had for me, I knew that the race would be between Fast Eddie and George Marlin.

Marlin was next and he hit the audience hard and fast. New Jersey was overweight but he never did fat jokes; his dialect was so Brooklynesque that it made Boone Sandhill’s drawl sound normal, but Marlin didn’t rely on dialect or borough in-jokes. He rarely did the off-color stuff that makes up ninety percent of club routines these days. George was just
funny
and he generally just schmoozed along with tales from his childhood and early adolescence that had the sense of
this-really-happened,
which every comedy bit needs and so few have.

So George was telling about his days as a lonely teenager and how he was convinced he was a superhero—the Dung Beetle, armored nemesis of evil-doers everywhere—and the audience was roaring and I was on my third vodka rocks and the applause-o-meter was pinning itself and I was wondering idly whether Fast Eddie’s street-smart vulgar strut ’n’ jive routine could top this stuff, when suddenly George stopped in midroutine and stared at the microphone in his hand.

The head of the mike was growing, inflating like a balloon. George stepped back, still holding the thing and watching it expand, and because Al Jacobs was too cheap to install cordless traveling mikes, George got tangled in the wire and glanced back to see what was stopping him. Meanwhile, the audience was still roaring, thinking—as I did for a second—that the expanding mike was part of the routine, some phallic gag.

In those final seconds, George knew it wasn’t part of the night’s entertainment; the head of the mike was a metal sphere and it had grown to the size of a soccer ball. Still tangled in the cord, George started to drop the microphone as if it were the business end of a snake.

The audience roared. The mike exploded in some sort of shaped charge, taking
off
most of George’s head and smearing the maroon curtains behind him with hair, blood, and brain matter.

Laughter is like an avalanche—slow to get started, but once its moving it has an inertia of its own. Even with the gasps and screams of shock, it took ten or fifteen seconds for the last waves of laughter to die out. Then, for a moment, there was silence except for a few sobs from a woman near the front.

George’s pear-shaped body had stood there for a second or two, headless, his fingers still curved around the mike he was in the process of dropping. Then the corpse fell forward and hit the boards with a sound I will never forget, arterial blood sprayed the closest tables, and the room was filled with chaos as everyone—myself included—stood, shouted, cried for help, or merely screamed. I remember that Diane Mulholland rushed from backstage and knelt next to George—the knees of her pantyhose wicked red from the blood. She looked offstage as if seeking help. Al Jacobs rushed onstage, froze as if he were physically incapable of coming closer to the corpse, and stood there, wringing his hands and grimacing.

I set down my drink and stood on the lowest rung of the barstool, just trying to see over the heads of the mindlessly surging crowd.

And then, a moment after the laughter ended and the shouts and sobs and cries of confusion began to ebb toward a more sinister silence, then the
laughter
began.

It was not quite laughter. It was more like the frenzied barking of a jackal or the amplified cough of a hyena than any sound of mirth I’d ever heard come from a human throat. And then the face appeared.

Ten feet tall, white-skinned and green-haired, teeth yellowed within the terrible rictus that passed for a grin, the giant head materialized and floated in midair above George’s body. If George’s corpse had remained standing, this bloated visage would have replaced his missing head like someone poking his face through a cardboard cutout at a boardwalk photo booth.

It took me a second to realize that I was looking at the Joker. Living in Gotham City most of my life, I’d seen news photographs and the rare snippets of videotape, but they had seemed unreal, cartoonlike, and this nightmare face floating above George’s corpse was all too real.

Diane screamed and flinched away from the apparition. Al Jacobs backed to the edge of the stage, teetered, and crouched, holding one arm above his bald head as if ready to ward off a blow.

The Joker laughed. The image seemed solid. I saw the pores in the white flesh, noticed the pink gums above yellow teeth, and watched as the wide eyes blinked in merriment and pure insanity. The laughter echoed off walls and curtains as patrons fled, shoving over tables in their haste to reach the fire exits. Diane Mulholland slumped unconscious in a pool of George’s blood.

The image of the Joker glanced down at her as if the projection could actually
see,
smiled, and lifted its long chin. It . . .
he
. . . was looking across the heads of the crowd directly at me.

“TUT, TUT, TUT,” came the amplified voice. I remember seeing Charles Manson interviewed once on
Sixty Minutes.
Manson’s voice sounded like Dan Rather’s compared to the black-ice tones I heard now. “I GUESS THIS FELLOW HAS NO HEAD FOR COMEDY!”

The crazy laughter rose in volume. Behind me I heard shouts at the front entrance, knew the cops had arrived, but I wasn’t able to turn away from that wild-eyed gaze.

“WELL, HE WON’T BE THE LAST TO GIVE HIS ALL TO LADY COMEDY,” echoed the mad voice. The image giggled, and then a strange transformation came over the face. It was as if rats were scurrying under the white cheesecloth of the Joker’s flesh. At first, I thought it might be a malfunction of the projector or whatever it was, but then I realized that it was the Joker’s actual features that were shifting, sliding into different patterns, jerking like the expression of a doll in a clumsily made claymation cartoon.

The Joker was no longer smiling. His green hair seemed to wave like seaweed in a strong current as he glared down at the last fleeing patrons, flicked a glance at the corpse, and then returned his gaze to me. “THERE IS ONLY ONE JOKER IN GOTHAM CITY.”

He was gone. The cops burst in, ran around, swung their revolvers in that self-conscious two-armed pose we see on TV every night, and shouted at each other over the din. Some stood around George’s corpse and looked as helpless as Al Jacobs had, while others rushed back stage, guns still drawn.

I knew they wouldn’t find the Joker. I lifted my glass and finished my drink. My hands were shaking so hard that I had to use both of them to get the glass to my mouth without spilling the last of my vodka.

They kept us until almost four in the morning. I’d never been interrogated before and it wasn’t much like the movies. They didn’t grill me, they didn’t use the good cop, bad-cop routine, and nobody shone a bright light in my face. In fact, they interviewed us one at a time in the long, narrow storeroom in the back of Al’s club, and there was hardly enough light to
see
the two homicide detectives asking the questions. They sounded more tired than I was. One of them had a serious smoker’s cough and sucked on lozenges between cigarettes.

Mostly, it was boring. They went over everything twice, then a third time. Then they started again.

“Are you sure Mr. Marlin said nothing to you in the green room?” the cop with the cough asked.

I sighed and began to give the same answer I’d given them thrice before. Then a shadow in the corner behind them moved, detached itself from the darkness there, and glided toward us.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

It was the Batman. I heard his cape rustle, caught a glimpse of the peaked points on the dark cowl, but mostly he blended into the darkness in that little room. Only his face and that weird emblem on his chest seemed to reflect light.

He glided forward until he loomed over me, wrinkles in that cape glinting like black silk where they glinted at all. The cops made room for him but said nothing. I
couldn’t
say anything at that moment.

I know, you live in Gotham City most of your life, you’re supposed to see the Batman all the time. Well, you don’t, any more than you chat with Dustin Hoffman a lot if you live in L.A. or lunch with Donald Trump if you hang around New York. Oh, you see photos in the paper every once in a while and I
almost
saw Batman at a dedication of a new community center in Charity Hills once when I was twelve . . . but my dad and I got stuck in traffic and when we got there he was gone. You live in Gotham, you take a sort of pride in being identified with the Bat Guy . . . sort of like San Francisco residents are proud of the Golden Gate Bridge . . . but you don’t
see
him. To tell the truth, it’d been so long since I’d even read about him, that I’d sort of forgotten he was real.

He was real enough now.

I sat back, tried to look cool, tried not to gulp visibly as this cowled face leaned forward, neck muscles all corded under black silk, tried to listen coolly rather than scream when that gloved hand touched my shoulder. I’m thin, average height, but no wimp. Still, I had the definite impression that his hand could pulverize my collarbone and shoulder just by giving a squeeze.

He didn’t squeeze.

“Mr. Tulley,” he said. His voice sounded soft, almost preoccupied. But I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get the owner of that voice angry. “Mr. Tulley, do you know any reason why someone . . . even the Joker . . . would want to kill George Marlin?”

“Uh-uh,” I said, always a snappy one with repartee.

I could see his eyes through slits in that midnight cowl. I’m pretty observant—stand-up comics have to be—but I have no idea what color they were.

“Mr. Tulley, is there
anything
that you haven’t mentioned which you think might help us with this investigation?”

“Uh-uh.” This time I managed to punctuate it by shaking my head.

The Batman nodded—more toward the two cops than at me—and then he took a step back and seemed to blend back into the shadows like black ink spilled on a dark velvet cloth.

The cop with the smoker’s cough led me to the door while I strained to keep from peering over my shoulder at the corner.

“Thanks, Mr. Tulley,” said the detective. I could smell the lozenge he was chewing on. “Go home and get some rest. We’ll call you if we need you, but I think this’ll be all.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, grateful to be leaving, grateful to be getting out of that little room.

But it wasn’t all. Not by a long shot.

Bruce appeared one day after the second murder.

It was three nights later, some of us were working the old Aladdin Dinner Theater, figuring that whoever was taking notes on comics for the joke-off would probably hit Aladdin’s traditional Tuesday Night Laugh Riot.

Somebody hit it all right.

The Aladdin is one of the great old movie palaces built during the early days of the Depression. It’s part Taj Mahal, part Pharaoh’s tomb, a bit of Baghdad, and a whole lot of old-movie fantasy. The place is gigantic, with two levels of balconies, box seats, red carpets, murals, and corridors like caverns out of an Indiana Jones movie: rococo ornamentation everywhere, bronze hands holding torches for lighting fixtures, dusty chandeliers—the whole bit. Aladdin’s had decayed to the point of being a downtown porno theater in the sixties, was converted to a disco during the seventies, was abandoned for a while, and then became a dinner theater cum nightclub during the mid-eighties.