Published 'Beyond the Brink' 1994

 

Donboy was a stand-up comedian - always had been, always would be.  He had jokes running through him even to the darkest pit of his soul.  Armed to the teeth, too, with the courage to defeat his own lack of confidence, he stood there, spotlit, more on his own than the very solitude of death, opposite a shining darkness that he knew, but could not see, was peopled with those watching and judging him.  Hopefully crammed with such constituents of an audience, all ready to laugh out loud.  Half empty halls tended to produce a quarter hall's laughter.  The more hands to the wheel of laughter, the easier it was to reap the mass suicidal hysteria that a crowd often felt, but didn't usually recognise in itself.

 

            Donboy had perfected his act at Working Men's Clubs, interspersed with the odd seaside booking - culminating in what he now considered to be his hey-day, warming up for the so-called Big Names in order that the audience's lips would have ready laughter brimming over.

 

            His gimmick, if birth were a gimmick, was his unconscionable height.  In his early days he wielded the nickname 'Beanpole', then 'Lamp Post', finally (before he eventually became the serious stand-up comedian without a nickname to his name) 'Babbling Tower'.

 

            So, as Babbling Tower, that was just what he did.  Babbled.  Gibble-gabbled.  Jabbered.  Gibbered.  Giggled.  Bubbled.  A gurgling bone-cistern whose forte was toilet humour.  A walking burbling brain that got its laughs at the soft end of the market.

 

            Today, Donboy stood tall.  Yet, his jokes were so very much part of him, he needed to rip them out through the membranous section of his soul, dredging up ruptured fibre and bleed-riddled skeins of something he should've jettisoned in his more private moments or during the necessary ablutions of the day.

 

            The members of the audience were unaware of the pain he expended to produce their laughter.  Nor he their own pain in forcing out such laughter.  They merely awaited the Big Names for whom Donboy was warming them up as if they, the audience, were a cold bone stew on the back-burner of glib existence.

 

            "Is there anyone here who's come from far away?"

 

            He often had conjuring-tricks of the mind up his sleeve to supplement his bread-and-butter of verbal horseplay.

 

            "Me! Me!"

 

            A little girl in a yellow frock stood up at the back of the auditorium.

 

            "Your name ... let me see ... is Sarah."

 

            "No, it's Milly."

 

            Donboy still stood tall.  Milly was someone whose mind he couldn't read.  Not that he was an official mind-reader in any event.  His job was jokes.  Not see-through sleights of mental prestidigitation.  He couldn't read Milly's mind because it was his mind and little girls didn't know their own minds until they became much much older.

 

            Yet, Milly could read Donboy's mind.

 

            He thought himself simply a tragedy that desperately waited its comic relief: Macbeth's Porter who killed himself sooner than answer the relentless knocking of whomsoever was behind the castle-tower's lavatory door.

 

            The Biggest Names of all Big Name comic double acts sidled on to the stage as Donboy was carried off it.  They'd have to do without warming up tonight.  They dreaded corpsing each other, they didn't even tell any jokes.  Stooge-pigeons, both of them.

 

            Milly, nevertheless, laughed and laughed till she couldn't stop crying.  She had told a lie.  Her name was Sarah, after all.  But that, in turn, was another lie that even her blubbering couldn't flush out.

 

            And Donboy?  His name became the nobody it always was.  Donboy Nobody.  Or just another tall story.