Hookups with Trina Ch. 04: Comedians

Humor is subjective, Gary keeps telling me. His past boyfriends loved his jokes. His mom finds him hysterical. He always cracks me up. The only reason that the crowds never laugh along, he claims, is that they're too slow on the draw.

On Saturday night, I catch a train into Brooklyn and meet him at his studio apartment. I arrive in my best night-on-the-town gear: a long-sleeved, umber orange dress with brown leather boots and a grey obi belt pulled snug around my waist.

Gary, meanwhile, has shaved his face and seems content wearing all black, from his long-sleeved tee to his jeans to his sneakers. Paint his face white, and he'll be ready to mime.

Gary doesn't do standard jokes. Impressions are his game. Rambling, self-deprecating monologues in celebrity voices, interspersed with bizarre, dialogue-heavy arguments between multiple characters, all performed as a one-man show.

He swings open the apartment door, and before I can say hello, Gary dances out into the hallway, twirling an invisible cane and top hot. Full Michigan J Frog, he belts, "Trina, my honey! Trina, my baby! Trina, my ragtime gal!"

Giggling, I bite back all comments. When Gary starts a bit like this, you've got to let him finish. Besides, it only takes one glance at his inflamed nostrils to see that he's coked to the gills.

He drops to one knee and cues jazz hands for the finale. "Come on, Trina! Tell me I'm your OOOOWN!" Then, he's up on his feet, about to burst into "Michigan Rag".

I grab him gently by the ear before he can start that encore. "Let's get a move on," I say. "I want good seats for this train wreck."

He locks the door as I tug him down the hallway. Hopping on one leg against my pull, he switches gears to Cleavon Little from "Blazing Saddles". "He'p me! He'p me! Somebody he'p me!"

He bounces off the walls in the elevator, despite the puzzled and more than mildly concerned looks from the other passengers. Once we hit the pavement, I decide that I can't be bothered to drag his schizoid ass the thirteen blocks to the comedy club, so we order an Uber. Gary tries to perform a striptease for the driver, and I have to yank him into the backseat before the guy ditches us.

Unbuckled, I catch Gary sniffing at nostril drips and playing bongo drums with his knees. In his real voice, he says, "Nice dress. Where'd you get it?"

"Macys in Woodbridge. I got these boots there, too. This belt was actually a birthday --"

"Cool. Cool, cool, cool. Cool." Glancing at the driver, Gary whips what appears to be a Foghorn Leghorn Pez dispenser. He flicks back the rooster's head to reveal a square of white powder in place of a sugar tablet, sucking it right up his nasal passage.

"Somebody's flying high tonight," I say.

Snorting, he swipes the underside of his nose. "I always get edgy before a gig." With a southern-fried twang to his voice: "Ah-said, ah-said, ah-said, boy! A lil sumthin' sumthin' to take mah mahnd owff the payyyn, bo-AAY!" Then, back to normal: "Oh, shoot, sorry. Want some?"

"Eh, not for me. A couple years ago, maybe, but I've had to cool it with that shit since my sister had her close call. This girl is sticking to weed and booze tonight, thank you."

"And the cock." In full Scottish brogue: "Don't be fahrgettin' the niece heird COCK!"

"Hey, I'll not forsake it as long as it doesn't forsake me."

"Thaire's a gud gurl!" Back to his standard voice: "If the cock-wielders ever get tired of pounding your dusty muff, send the boy's my way." And one last pitstop to Trainspotting Land: "Thais cunt's alwae's up fae a lil ay they auld humptae pumptae!"

The driver is glad to get shod of us at the comedy club. It's a full house inside. We're lucky to grab a seat for two in an awkward corner of the room. Gary asks me to order him a G&T before he runs off to sign in, or whatever it is comedians do backstage. I request a Cosmo for myself and am still waiting on both drinks when Gary returns. The waiter finally brings out the rounds as the show commences.

First up, the MC introduces a hipster-looking girl with dark-rimmed glasses and a cool hoody. She looks fresh out of high school, glowing with inner buoyancy. She sticks mostly to nonsequential one-liners. I giggle at one about MySpace being so old that even perverts don't see the point. Meanwhile, Gary doesn't stop fucking with his nose and tamping one foot upon the floor.

A young buck strides onto the stage, full of spunk, only to choke the moment the MC hands him the mic. He stutters out his set, flop-sweating through his butchered punchlines. Gary whispers to me, "I hate watching this happen to kids. First time in front of a crowd, most of them turn into deer in the headlights. He's got some good lines, too, if he could just breathe and find his confidence."

Gary seems more interested in the lines coming out of the repurposed Pez dispenser than any of the ones onstage. He keeps excusing himself to the bathroom throughout the sets to maintain his own powdery cool. He stays in there a while, too. Not enough time to hand out a quick BJ, but perhaps long enough to psyche himself up in front of the mirror.

Meanwhile, we hit a series of dick and pussy jokes with the comics. The stale, typical ones that you already know. A couple chuckles here and there, but it's mostly groans. The hecklers start into one of the performers, and the MC has to usher him offstage, early, before the room starts to turn.

Gary titters beside me. In what I can only assume is an intentionally bad Irish accent, he says, "Well, I'll be fecked! If it's not this mad BAH-sterd again!"

Onto the stage shambles a man the MC announces as Danny McDowell. He looks like he just crawled out of bed following a weeklong bender. He stands close to six feet tall and probably weighs one-hundred and thirty pounds, soaking wet. He sports a ratty, gray button-down beneath a black trench coat that looks like it's spent time on the floor of every dive bar in the city.

His black, curly hair falls all over the place. He keeps brushing it out of his eyes. In one hand, he carries an opened bottle of Stella. In the other, what appears to be a stack of two-by-three-foot notecards.

Danny clears his throat into the mic. In a genuine Irish dialect, he softly slurs, "Hi there, everybody. I wanna thank all yehs for comin' out tonight. I wasn't actually gonna come out myself, but the rent's come due...as of last month...and the landlord says that if I don't put money in his palm on Monday morning, he'll be sending us to a small plot of land in the country to live out the rest of my days...beneath his brother in law's toolshed. So, please bear with us as we run down the clock once again."

Befuddled laughter ripples through the room. Gary claps his support and whispers to me, "This guy's a total psycho. You'll love him."

Danny's set isn't so much a series of jokes as it is a bizarre, abridged retelling of "The Empire Strikes Back", with illustrations. He juggles the mic and beer between his hands while holding up the crude drawings on the notecards for everyone to see.

"Because, you see, really, the vast majority of the events in the film and all the sufferin' that these beloved characters had to endure could have been largely skipped, had the Millennium Falcon not been such a piece of shite! Han Solo was too busy tryin' to get into Leia's hair curler drawer to take the clunker to the starship auto shop! So, right away, the theme of the film has nothin', nothin' AT ALL to do with stickin' to the light side of the Force. It's...Han? GO GET A FUCKIN' TUNE-UP!"

Somehow, Gary keeps his ass glued to the seat throughout the set, not missing a word. He cackles every time Danny either compares Yoda's sentence structure to that of a blue-collar, Cockney gangster or likens coming out of carbonite freezing to an Everclear hangover. "Whatever the cause, Han, you're gonna be stone-blind for the next three to four days. Get yeh some Pedialyte and start guzzlin'!"

He ends his set with a nice, cheap button about Luke Skywalker turning off the feeling in his artificial hand whenever he wants to play "the stranger" beneath the sheets. A massive round of applause as he collects his illustration cards and shambles offstage.

Gary kisses my cheek. "I'm on in fifteen. Time for some go-go powder."

I tell him, "Break a funny bone," as he runs off to the bathroom and then backstage.

Halfway through the next comic -- an exceptionally unfunny guy who labors under the assumption that punchlines work better if you scream them all -- I feel a tap on my shoulder. I look up to see Danny holding a pitcher of beer and stack of plastic cups, the illustrations tucked safely under his arm. "Would yeh mind terribly if I kept Gary's seat warm for him?"

I flash him a toothy smile. "I don't think he'd have a problem with that."

"Groovy." He drops into the chair and starts pouring the beer. "Danny McDowell, Shite-faced Irishman."

I accept the drink. "Trina, Slut Machine."

He gives me a cockeyed smirk and clicks the cups. "Well, Slut Machine, I think the three of us are gonna get along just fine."

When Gary enters the spotlight, he looks even more strung out than before. "For my opener," he says, "I give 'Airline Safety Lecture as Read by Jack Nicholson'. Thank you." He whips out a pair of sunglasses to hide his bloodshot eyes, and he launches into it.

He is spot-fucking-on. The grumpy smile, full of teeth. The pushed-out belly with the stiff shoulders and swaying wrists. The vocal, seething breaths before every sentence. While the lecture itself remains mostly unchanged from what you hear on the planes themselves, he spices it up with additional instructions. "And watch it with all these kids runnin' around loose. Would ya, folks? The next lil shit to step on my toes is goin' straight out the fuckin' window. That goes double for tappin' on the back of my seat."

Gary has me and Danny rolling in our chairs, cackling at his every tic and mannerism. The rest of the audience might be dead, for all the sound they're making. Even when he switches gears and reenacts the entirety of Monty Python's "Cheese Shop" sketch, jumping breathlessly between John Cleese and Michael Palin's parts, you could hear a pin drop in the club.

They hardly make a peep during his big finale of "Mary Had a Little Lamb", as sung by Frank Sinatra. "Mary, that crazy gal! It's fleece was-a, a-white as snow!" But Danny and I howl, seconds from pissing ourselves.

Once Gary takes his bow, my new comic buddy and I decide to meet him backstage and blow this joint. We catch him stealing another snort from the Pez dispenser as we enter the Green Room. "Hi there, PILL-grims!" he says in his best John Wayne impression. "How do ya...think I DID, up there?"

"Bravissimo!" I say, kissing him on both cheeks and then the lips.

Danny lifts his plastic cup in salute. "Yeh'd have brought the house down if they hadn't all had shite stuffed in their ears."

Gary turns camp-homosexual. "Thank you, dearies!" He clasps Danny's cheeks and kisses him on the lips.

Danny pushes him away with a scoff. "Fuck off, yeh twat!" He seizes Gary by the wrist and guides the Pez dispenser to his own nose for a bump.

Gary says, "I assume intros have been made?"

I point a finger. "Danny the Shitfaced Irishman."

Swiping his nose, Danny cocks a thumb at me. "Trina, Slut Machine."

"Excellent! Good to know we're all one big fucked up family." In an intentionally awful rendition of his friend's voice, Gary says, "Right den! Show's over! Which ay youse degenerates wants to buy thais lucky cunt a draink?"

With the sunglasses still on, he leads us into the night. We wind up at a Hibachi grill, splitting a bottle of plum wine three ways over egg rolls. We play catch-the-rice-ball-in-your-mouth with the chef. Then, we see who can down the most sake, straight from the squirt bottle.

Danny makes a mess of himself, getting it all over his shirt. I manage five seconds before waving off the chef for fear of ending up the same way. But Gary, who I have it on good authority is the Sword Swallowing Prince of Brooklyn, guzzles the rice wine for a staggering twenty-seven seconds, completely draining the squirt bottle without wasting a drop.

A preschool-aged boy sitting with his family at a nearby booth notices Danny's drawings, stacked neatly upon a vacant chair. He "oohs" and "aahs" and says that they look super cool.

Gary, always living off imitations, leaps to his feet and claims them as his own work. In a surprisingly good rendition of Danny's voice, he says, "Oh, yeh admire 'um, do ye? Tell me, do yeh enjoy the Star Wars films?"

He launches into a near-carbon-copy of his friend's set, drawings and all. The coke must have somehow kicked his memory into hyper-gear because he doesn't miss a bit. He omits only the potty words and the ending of Luke jacking off with his robotic hand. The kid and his family love it, so do the other patrons and the restaurant staff. Once he finishes, Gary takes his seat to thunderous applause.

Danny cups his chin in hand and shakes his head. "Ah will, yeh realize, be expectin' royalties for any and all cover acts."

I nudge him with my elbow. "Ah, come on, the kid loved it."

"Perhaps. But it is, of course, terribly bad form in the world of comedy to be milkin' off the work of more successful artists. Especially when said artist is the shite-faced genius yeh see seated before yeh."

Gary says, "You got 'shitfaced' right."

"Cokehead. Oi! Give us another bump, will yeh?"

They take turns sneaking to the bathroom with the Pez dispenser as we kill off the plum wine. A little after midnight, not a one of us sober, we end up back at Gary's studio apartment, kicking off our shoes at the door. With a Marx Brothers flick playing on the TV, the comedians start cutting thin lines of Bolivian marching power on a mirror on the coffee table. Still swearing off the heavy shit, I break into Gary's weed stash and light up a bong by an open window.

"Yeh know, there's no real plot to any of this, when yeh stop and give it a t'ink," Danny is saying to the TV. "It's more just a mishmash of jokes."

Gary says, "And just what do you have against the Marx Brothers?" He hops to his feet and straight into a Groucho crabwalk, complete with the voice and invisible cigar. "So, turning antisemitic, are we? Somebody's Dublin roots are showing through, I see! I thought I was the only one wearing a black shirt around here!"

"I'm from Belfast, yeh twat. But no, I'm just makin' the filmatic observation that these guys never seemed greatly concerned with plots. To me, personally, it seems they had these collections of one-liners and sight gags that they cobbled together into the loosest narrative form they could find, one that wouldn't overly perturb the viewers with the continuity errors creepin' out of every frame."

Gary puffs on his invisible cigar, mulling it over. "Hmm...Fascinating. What an interesting observation...for Goose-stepping fascist."

Danny scoffs and tosses a pillow at him. "Cokey poof."

Gary dodges it like a champ. "Jew-hater."

Smiling in his dopey haze, Danny perches on the edge of the sofa. "Ah must warn yeh, right, Gary ol' boy. If yeh continue with this line of abuse, yeh're gonna end up with egg on yer face. Want to guess what'll happen then?"

I suck down another heavy hit of smoke, watching Gary squint his eyes. "What's that?" he says.

"Yeh'll have to find another comedian to show you how to wash it back off."

You just know that Gary wants to laugh, but he plays the part, squaring up in a cartoonish karate stance. In the voice of a trailer park redneck, he says, "That's it, bo-AAY! Yer lil green ass is goin' straight through dat der WINDER!"

Danny bows his head and emits a low drone. With a sharp cry of, "OLE!" he charges Gary, catching him with a shoulder around the middle. The pair of clowns laugh hysterically as they grapple, swatting and kicking until they wind up clumsily rolling around on the floor.

I make the mistake of giggling, mid-puff. Weed smoke floods the wrong pipe, closing off the valves.

SHIT! I'M FUCKING CHOKING!

I fall forward in my seat, fighting for balance. My vision goes blurry, all red-tinges swirls, as I wheeze for breath. I abandon the bong by the windowsill, stumbling around the boys in my half-blind panic. I hear Gary cry, "He'p me! He'p me!" as I find the bathroom and lock myself inside.

I cough myself clean, hocking all sorts of nasty gunk into the sink. It's a miracle that I don't hurl from the exertion. Red-eyed and already turning cotton-mouthed, I stick my face beneath the faucet and swallow pints of water, straight from the spout.

I emerge to find the TV turned off and the boys no longer play-fighting on the floor. Instead, Danny stands by the window while Gary kneels before him and slobbers on his cock.

I freeze. "Um. Wow, guys!"

Danny's face snaps up. "Rude! Has yer mother never told yeh about knockin' before burstin' out of bathrooms?"

Gary pops the cock from his mouth, pumping it with one hand as he turns to me. "Are we watching or joining in, Trina?"

"Um...I have options?"

"Why ever not?" says Danny. "We've got dicks."

"But I don't." I watch Gary lift a confused eyebrow. "You're gay...?" I somehow have to remind him.

"And I'm sitting, or, uh...KNEELING pretty, high atop a mountain of fine, fine snow.

Danny grunts as he fucks Gary's fist. "The charlie has a certain habit of loosening one's inhibitions...mmm...not to mention the ol' orientational fluidity."

"That's right. It's Swingers Central at my pad tonight!" Gary remoistens Danny's cock with his tongue, slathering up and down his length. "So, Trina. Watching? Or joining in?"

I must carefully deliberate this question of sexual philosophy. For a full three seconds. "Eh, fuck it."

I undo my belt and let it fall. I pull off my dress over my head, tossing it behind me as I cross the floor. Quickly stripping out of my bra and panties, I ask, "Where do you all want me in this cock sandwich?"

The boys think about it. Danny rips off his shirt, revealing a lithe and hairless chest, not much muscle but almost zero fat. "Gary, show me that arse of yers. I have every intention of fuckin' it."

Gary kicks off his pants and gives us his best Paul Newman: "Fetchin' the grease, Boss, fetchin' the grease!"

Danny salivates at the sight of my naked tits and pussy. I check out his cock. Like the rest of him, it's long and skinny, but it has a nice upwards curve, the kind I could imagine stroking my clit just right. And HELL yes! He has a foreskin! They always taste SO much better, uncut. I find myself on my knees, trying to force the delicious meat down my throat.

From across the room, Gary says, "Cease and desist, Trina! That's my job!" I look up to see him approaching with a tube of KY in hand. Now naked like the rest of us, his six-inch chode stands hard and tight against his small, furry potbelly. Reaching back to lube up his asshole with a finger, he says, "You want a dick? Come get a dick."

I giggle, giving Danny's tool a couple extra licks and tugs before releasing him.

Still on my knees, they arrange me against the wall. Gary approaches, cock in hand. He passes it off to me, pounding hot with blood. I kiss the fat, meaty tip before slathering up the sides. Gary gasps as I accept him, inch at a time, into my mouth. I stroke the exposed remainder of his shaft with one hand, cupping his hairy balls with the other.

Danny rejoins the fun. Bracing himself against the wall, he vigorously greases his cock with the KY. He bends his knees and wedges his glans against Gary's asshole. I shut my eyes and slurp, hearing Gary gasp in shock and pleasure as Danny gradually enters him.

Not my first three-way, but it's clearly theirs. They squirm awkwardly for a while before they achieve any real rhythm. Still braced against the wall, Danny wraps his other hand around Gary's cute tummy, splaying his fingers open and closed. Now, he starts fucking him HARD, practically backhanding my forehead with every thrust.