Stand up Sit Down

Another long assed Jezzaz story here.

If you didn't like the long setups I put into other stories (and some have commented on that), then you surely aren't going to like this, because this is over 50% setup. I wrote it simply because I am fascinated by this whole life, so I did my research and this came out. This one I more wrote for me than anyone.

Just note, it's not a stroke story.

Even my editor pointed out that it was quite the long form, but... I'm okay with that. I expect to be marked down for that, and that's fine. I don't need a lot of comments like "the author could have removed pages of text" - look, it's free. If you don't like it, there are 45k+ other stories in Loving Wives you could read?

Edited, as usual, by the long suffering 29Wordsfornow.

So, as part of the therapy with Ms. Crenshaw, she has asked me to write a journal of what I think happened. What I saw, what I thought about it, how it affected me emotionally, that sort of thing. All from my perspective, which I suppose is the only one I really have.

Yeah, I raised my eyebrows when she told me her name was 'Ms.' Crenshaw. She smiled sympathetically and told me it was 'a necessary thing, when you deal with couples and rehabilitation therapy.' It should never be about her, therefore no hints of marital status need to be provided. Some guys can get quite heated in the thick of things and there should never be any 'what would your husband think?' statements raised. So, Ms. Crenshaw it was, even if, - as she put it, - it did make her sound like a 'militant commie lesbian'. She did say that last one with a grin, and honestly, I don't think anyone would ever really think that after spending more than ten minutes with her, sweet older lady as she is.

Apparently this is therapeutic. News to me but whatever. I did as she asked because, well... it's good to get it all down as I remember it, not as it was reported in the news, in so far as it was reported. I mean, it was more like a bit of salacious gossip and was treated as such. No one was really regarded as human, just 'people we put on pedestals remind us they are as human as the rest of us.' That's how so-called journalism in the twenty-first century goes. Build them up, then tear them down. Repeat.

For the uninitiated, I am Ben Blackcloud. Strictly speaking, I'm Benjamin, but I hate that name, only hating 'Benji' more. A fact that my erstwhile partner knew and used frequently.

My partner, ahhh yes. Yeah, you've never heard of me, almost no one has. Well, unless you are in our line of business and even then, you'd only really have heard of me if we'd put on a gig at a place you owned or managed. To a small select group of people, I was The Devil Incarnate. Always wanting more, bigger, better, but for less cost, please. Always needing a little more space, to be able to bring in a camel at 5pm, to ensure there were no American peanut M&M's in among the UK ones. All the weird self-indulgent stuff like that.

My partner though, you'd know him. Jeff Klondike, known to his fans as 'Klonkers'. Yeah, you'd got him in your mind's eye now, right? Jumping around a stage making monkey noises, or screaming out his catch phrase "JeffffffffrrEEEEEEYYYYYY", as spoken by his mother at the height of one his outrageous stories.

Being the business partner of a top stand-up comedian has its challenges, not least of which is that no one ever knows who you are, or believes you when you tell them. He was the Talent - the face out there telling the stories, making people double up with laughter and generally being the life and soul of the party. I was the invisible guy in the back ground making it happen.

What, you think that when you buy a ticket for a show, that

he

does all the work? No,

he

shows up two hours before showtime, knows his timing, selects from the now pretty large amount of material, goes on stage, tells his jokes and laps up the applause and then fucks off to get a massage, a steak and then off to a club. Who do you think books the arena? Who does the deal with Ticketmaster or their competitors? Who gets the tickets for the hanger-ons and friends of Jeff? Who arranges the hotels or the airline tickets, or rents a show coach? Who sorts out the rehearsal space? Who organizes the seating systems to be put into sports arenas, negotiates with the large screen guys so LED panels are installed, the sound groups who come in and set up mikes and speakers and run the sound booth, the lighting guys who build the huge lighting rigs and run them on the night, the guys putting together the stages and making in all the stupid practical effects that Jeff likes so much. You think he does that? Yeah, dream on. He finishes a set, jumps in a taxi and goes night clubbing. I'm the one who organizes and manages the breakdown of the stage and equipment, ensures everyone gets paid, and is the last one who turns off the lights.

Hell, who

writes his material?

I'll let you into a secret. It's not him. Even though everyone thinks he does, watch the credits at the end of one of his specials. Look and see.

The reality of it is that without me, the show doesn't happen. Jeff, when you get him on stage, is dynamite, no question about it. But without me, there is no stage and no show and no material, and what's more, he knows it. So, we are officially partners, but it's not me that goes on chat shows or appears as a contestant on game shows or has freshly worn panties with a phone number scrawled on them inserted into his jacket pocket. But Jeff is self-aware enough that he knows that without my organizational ability, my fix-it qualities and sometimes my manic insistence, plus the other service I provide (No, not that! Get your mind out of the gutter!), his show wouldn't happen as he wants, and so we are partners. On paper and, thankfully, financially. Not that anyone else really knows. It's the Jeff Klondike show, and that's how it has to be perceived, and I'm strangely okay with that.

I'm not bitter though. I know who and what I am, and I've found ways to be comfortable with it. This isn't at all what I intended when I set out from the reservation to make my fortune, but as the tribe knows, your journey is never straight. It bends with the river and when the river spills over, you go with the new flow. That is the way of things.

A little history is probably a good idea here, since it's not like I sprang from my mother's loins a fully-fledged stage manager. Comedian manager. Partner. Whatever.

I am descended from Navajo Tribe, specifically located in a small town just south of the Arizona and Utah border, called Teec Nos Pos. If you look it up on Google maps, it shows you the wrong location; what it shows you is the connection to the local main road. The actual town is south and west of that. It's pretty small, and believe me when I tell you, as a young man, I couldn't wait to get out. I'm only one half pure native, according to Ancestry.com (and the fact that my mom is from Chicago), but that's enough for where I was brought up. I endured a lot of Tribal Knowledge they tried to impart and I really didn't want any of it. That's not to say I don't respect the tribe and the customs. Of course I do; you can't be born into that and not understand how core it is. Just... I didn't want that to be all I was ever going to be. I didn't want to be "The Indian... whatever I ended up being". I wanted to be "whatever I ended up being, who happens to be Indian", if you get the difference? I didn't want to lead with being native American. I would be what I would be, and happen to be a native American as part of who I was, not the whole of who I could be.

There are plenty of what I call 'professional Native Americans' back on the ranch who lead with that in everything they do and more power to them. I just didn't want to be only seen as that.

So, I left as soon as I could. There's no bad blood; I go back often and see the folks and my brother, and share stories of where I've been and what I've seen, and we all have a few beers, dance around the fire a bit and be rude to each other with affection, just like every other family in existence. We just have more interesting back story, is how I put it.

I only tell you this so you get an idea of who I am, not that it really impacts the story. I'm five foot ten, - tall for my group, - have awesome olive skin (Well, I think it's awesome. Never really worry about sun burn!), my eyes, well because I'm only half native Indian, my eyes look like yours. It's really the hair that gives it away. Big, long, luxurious thick black tresses that if I grow it, it hangs to my shoulders and makes me look like I'm auditioning for a romance novel. I'd never get it, of course. The broken nose and puffed cheeks - yeah, I don't know where they came from either - that kind puts the kibosh on front cover imagery. If you saw me from the back and only saw the hair, you'd be convinced I was female. That has happened more than once, in fact.

Not ugly, not handsome, somewhere in between. There are silver tints in the hair now but that's excusable. Even understandable. But I get ahead of myself.

Anyway, Mom and Dad are still alive; one thing about being native American - we live a long time. Mom comes from Chicago and is as white bread as it's possible to be, and Dad, well, Dad is one of those 'professional Native Americans' I mentioned. He does tours, sweat lodges, dresses up in the whole nine yards, talks in a broken tongue, sprouts deep sounding non sequiturs and sound bites and then when he comes home from work, he puts on jeans and a sweat shirt and talks like President Biden. He is absolutely not above giving the tourist what they expect, and taking their money for it. It's not like he - we, the tribe - don't deserve it, given what the federal government has done to our people over the years.

My bro is a carpenter. He does both traditional framing work and building stuff to spec, and also studies up on traditional Navajo wood working techniques. Ah, didn't know the Navajo had any, did you? Well, we do. It's somewhat like the Japanese techniques in practice; all about making joints and connecting things in a rigid way, but using nothing other than the wood itself. So he does it both. He's married to Jo, and they have three kids who are the light of my life whenever I get home. I get to tell them of far-flung lands and celebrities that I never actually get to meet, but I hear all about because I deal with their managers, the same as they deal with me.

As I was saying, I left home as soon as I could. I went into - yeah, get this - drama. Yeah, I was a drama major at Northwestern University in Chicago. Not exactly a renowned place. It's part of their communications program. The thing is, they had a bunch of scholarships in place, and me being a minority, interested in the arts, well, it was almost a shoe in. My drama teacher at school knew a couple of people there, they put in the good word, some decent exam results, a written letter about myself, and boom, I was in. Almost 100% scholarship, only have to pay room and board.

I didn't go to LA or New York because, honestly, they are much harder to get into and everyone goes there. I picked Chicago because I wanted to get into comedy. Yeah, I know, both LA and New York have a massive comedy scene - that Mrs. Maisel show makes that painfully obvious (oh, and for the record, that show sucks. Not because its badly written or badly acted or anything, but because People Do Not Show Up To One Open Mic Night, Bombed Out Of Their Heads And Just Slay It. You just Don't. Being good at comedy takes years of experience, honing your craft and material, understanding audiences, and most importantly, understanding who YOU are, so you know how to present material that makes it uniquely yours. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel makes it out to be oh so easy, that the material just flows and it's off the cuff, and anyone can do this. They Can't. It's quite insultingly unrealistic in that way. It's a great show to watch as a viewer, but it's wincingly bad to anyone who's actually tried to do it. Rant over.)

But yeah, Chicago also has a pretty great comedy scene. So many big names have come from Second City, so it was worth it to be there. Plus, it was Away From Home and I got to reinvent myself. Definitely a plus.

All in all, college time in Chicago in the early naughts was a pretty good time. I was cool Ben, never Benji, and I played the dark and mysterious Native Indian, recipient of Secret Knowledge and Understanding of the Land to the hilt. I mean, yeah, if you've got it baby, flaunt it, right? Thank you Zero Mostel for that gem. He was so right.

Anyway, cut a long story short, I roomed with this guy Monty Tremlo - oh you'd better believe we ate out on THAT name - and it was through him that I met his cousin Jeff Klondike.

As it was, I was learning about stage craft, both in front and behind the scenes. Dramatic art, improv, stage management, writing dialog, speaking dialog, sniff-the-fart acting (yes, that is real), dance (I was crap at that. Good at the ballroom stuff, just crap at everything else) and even stage fighting. Stage fighting is an art and in order for it to look dangerous, it has to BE dangerous, which is why so much practice is required.

It was all great fun, and we put on shows and I got to strut my stuff and eventually discover that I. Just. Wasn't. Good. Enough.

Yeah, that was hard to cope with. And it was all Jeff Klondike's fault.

He wasn't part of 'our' crowd. He was definitely his own creature. I think he was doing deliveries or something during the day, like a bike messenger or something - he sure showed up to the open mic nights on a bicycle - and then doing improv and stand up at night. That's where I was introduced to him; I was brought along by Monty to a show that night where he was part of the line up to watch, and honestly? He wasn't that good. He had stage presence and knew how to milk both a joke and the audience, but his material was not that good. He evidently hadn't practiced enough either, and there was a lot of Umm's and Errr's in the performance that was off-putting.

I'd started my own explorations in that area. I'd written some stuff, tried it out on some friends, including Monty, (which is why he'd invited me to see his cousin, he told me later) and done some open mic nights at a couple of places.

Let me tell you something; it's FUCKING hard to gather the courage to do an open mic night. There's expectation. You'd better be smooth, calm and sophisticated and have your stuff down, and most of all, it has to be funny. Anything less, and you'll die a death. While everyone up there is generally starting out, the audience expects perfection with every line a laugh. It's brutal.

Many is the would be stand up that has died that first night and been destroyed by it forever. But if you get one laugh. Just one. A sincere one, well... you'll never do anything else. Or at least never want to. It's hard to earn a living as a comic; there's so much travel required for it that it destroys relationships, but of that, more later.

Anyway, I was lucky, I'd gotten a few laughs, and thought, "This is it! This is what I want to do!"

Ahh, the folly of youth. I think part of my particular problem though, looking back on it, was that I didn't lean into the Indian thing. People expected me to do that, and I just... didn't. As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to be known for the thing, not because I was a Native American who did The Thing. And because of that, I just never mentioned it, beyond making a few jokes about my hair. I think, reflecting back, if I had leant into it, made it part of the act and not felt it was so wrong and beneath me, maybe I'd have had more success. Alas, hindsight is 20-20, as any winking asshole can tell you. Still, at least I wasn't circumcised. Some members of my tribe were, and one in particular, well, they used the skin to replace his eye lids he wasn't born with. It was terrible, he was all cock-eyed, but he had incredible foresight. He was never penalized with bad vision. He just ended up a dick because that's how everyone viewed him.

See? The material is not all bad.

Anyway. That night after Jeff K's (as he styled himself at the time) set, I went to give him notes on his performance and... well, he didn't take it well.

Monty sat there, smiling like a proverbial buddha the whole time, while Jeff just sat there with a very disaffected look on his face and at the end of it said, "Let me guess. You have better material, right? You could do a better job?"

Well, yeah, but I wasn't trying to be an ass. I was just trying to give him pointers. Pointers! Oh, the naivety of youth. I thought that because I was in the program, I could give him pointers! After all, I was trained, right?

Jesus. I look back now and am amazed he didn't just punch me. Not least of which because I've seen him do exactly that since then. I mean, don't get me wrong, what I wrote was spot on in fact, both then and now. I was absolutely right in what I was pointing out, because honestly, when he writes material for himself and performs it with no one else involved, nothing has changed. It's just as bad now as it was then. But yeah, handing out that kind of critique to someone I've never even met before. Unbelievable hubris. As I said, I'm amazed I left with all my teeth.

That's not to say he accepted my thoughts in any way. No sirreee. He was about as pissed off as he could be and not start an actual fight. Monty saw it all and acted as moderator.

"Jeff, buddy. I'm sure he meant no harm, right Ben? He was just trying to help in his own stupid way," he intoned, hands out, palms down, doing his best to inject calm into the proceedings.

By this point, even I could see I was out of line.

"Yeah, I'm real sorry dude," I implored, backpedaling as fast as I verbally could.

He looked at me, scowling, eyes narrowed, trying to work out whether to just walk away, or to really put me in my place.

"So you have material, right?" he asked, after a while.

"Umm..." I replied, cleverly. I wasn't sure where he was going with this.

"Do you or don't you?" he said, changing stance, clearly ready to leave.

"Well, yes," I said, guardedly.

"Right then." He cracked his knuckles, and then nodded at Monty. "Here's what we do. I give you some material of mine, and you give me some of yours. We both perform, two different clubs, two consecutive nights. One night you go on, do both your stuff and my material. Then I do the same, the next night. I don't watch you and you don't watch me. We let the audience, and Monty here be the judge. If you are better than me, then I shut the fuck up and learn at your bended knee. If I am better than you, you take those notes and shove them up your ass. You in?"

Oh. My. God. A laugh-off! An honest to God, old fashioned laugh-off, to coin a phrase! I hadn't heard of one like this in... well, ever! I was in. Oh so in, if only to have such a great story to tell for years to come. It almost didn't matter who won, - well, it did, but not that much. It would be nice to put this clown in his place, but still...

I made a show of thinking it over, although I was in one hundred and fifty percent. Of course, I wouldn't be giving him any of my really good stuff. I mean, why make life more difficult than you have to? I'm sure he'd be doing the same. He'd be stupid not to.

But yeah. We should do this!

In the end, I nodded, held out my hand, and we shook on it, there and then.

"Right. Two weeks. I need your stuff inside of a week, so I get time to practice. I'll send mine to you via Monty, fair enough? The Comedy Club and Marcel's in two weeks' time. Both have open mic night. May the best man, notably me, win. Good luck, Tonto."