Steve Martin
by Joshua Hebburn
You said stop with the stand-up comedian thing. So I am in my apartment spinning quietly in a circle in the middle of my living room, and I'm alone-ish. The spinning is literal, I’m literally turning in circles in one place. My place. I don't know either. I stick my arms out. It seems like a good enough idea. It's like sitting in the car for a few more minutes when you could be getting out, mounting the stair, going home. Or, did you read that poem by William Carlos Williams? Who’s to say I’m not happy? Me? I guess what I mean is the “you said/so I’m” is not entirely credible. There’s context. I have been thinking, as in doing it as an activity. That is to say I’ve been connecting things in my head until they make shapes, which is to say ideas. They aren’t exactly geometric. I’m doing it right now. You can’t spend all day just saying I love you. But I wonder if anybody’s tried it. The Artist is Present, but you stare at your loved ones and say I love you until neither of you can take it anymore. I started slow, now I’m spinning faster. Or how about: The Artist is Present but the performance is delivered to a possible audience of only one. I’ll be sitting at the dining table, and I won’t have informed you, I am now an artist who is only present. As I turn the paint of this apartment’s living room is like clay being turned on a potter’s wheel. The spinning is literal! Why does every apartment in Los Angeles look like this, this brown? In Modern Love there was an essay about a series of thirty-six questions, questions of increasing disclosure, that a psychological researcher used to produce love feelings in strangers. I think this performance could have the opposite effect, or is it affect? The lack of thirty-six questions aroused, or thirty-six questions silenced. I’m spinning and trying not to think of you the infliction of you—your eyebrows, the bridge of your nose, the tip of your nose, the shape of your nostrils, the space between the tip of your nose and the septum, the shape between your lips and your septum, the divot in the flesh between the lips and the septum, the philtrum, which I would like to put my finger gently on—finally, I’m starting to feel sick. I imagine the face you make when you’re hurt. You’re in the next room. Lovesick. You’re naked. This is also literal. You have Scandinavian good looks and coloration. I imagine your flesh refracted in a glacier, making it seem as if the glacier can blush in a glacierish way. In this metaphor I'm not the ice. This is intended only to vividly evoke an image. AwooOOOga! Pheet Phew! Hell-o-o-o nurse! That sort of thing. You say I look like Mr. Steve Martin. I am Steve Martin with an oily black pencil mustache. I am evil Steve Martin who makes you laugh and refuses to write you a love poem. I refuse to read you a love poem from the collection of Love Poems on your bedside table, author Pablo Neruda. Good Steve Martin is sneaking out and so quickly buying you a teddy bear holding outstretched an overstuffed heart, and then he makes you chuckle. Why did Steve Martin send chest x-rays to his girlfriend every month? I’m getting dizzy, and I have achieved a feeling in my duodenum. Another psychological researcher discovered that if you throw up after eating or drinking something, there’s a definite interval between the eating and drinking, if you throw up after then you no longer find that thing appealing. I can’t drink sambuca anymore. This is why a person’s cancered grandfather couldn’t eat his favorite food. I think of Emil Cirorian, A zoologist who observed gorillas in their habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hours and hours without doing stuff. Didn’t they get bored? This is a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activities. You have returned me to the status of Emil’s happy ape. I think of various facts of our coupling and they slap against the monotony and slide away. I do not experience clarity, only greater and lesser blur. I have been watching the happy, middle class and beautiful people on the television in the various stages of their comedy and drama, and I have been unmoved, thinking only of you. Not about you, of you. You. Brow to bridge to septum to philtrum. I am getting very dizzy. Phil, the Latin root for horny, or something. I’m feeling really sick. I find myself moving into floor, or, as they say, the floor is coming up to me. I'm a fall down comedian. Ugh. I'm sure somebody has told that joke before. The floor is flat. I swear that's not the premise of my action, the joke. The floor is a tough audience. Snare drum. Snare ba-drum-tsh. The Comedian is Present. I'm not, I’m not saying to myself I love you until I can't stand it, but in a non-literal way I suppose I am. I'm a tough audience. I close my eyes. But Doctor, I am the clown Pagliacci. Have you seen Watchmen? I don’t know a lot of things about you. I am on a wobbly darkness like a comic book page. I am on a shifting darkness like the deck of a ship deep in the hold of a night storm, far out in the sea, away, away from everything I could understand completely, headed to somewhere I don’t know. This is melodramatic puke. I have already made my decision and know it and I won’t accept the consequences as everyone always does. Fuck it, fuck it fuck it, fuck it.
Joshua Hebburn edits fiction for Hobart. His own has appeared in New World Writing, Forever Mag and X-R-A-Y. He recommends "Bloop" by Kevin Maloney from the No Contact archives.
