The Funny Man Read Online Free Page A

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    The best thing about the child is that recently his little personality has begun to emerge. Early on, the funny man found the boy distressingly inert, a warm, sleeping, crying, pissing, shitting lump that was a pleasant couch companion when watching the game, as long as he was sleeping and not shitting or crying. The funny man started calling the boy BP, short for baked potato , because he was often swaddled in a silver blanket that looked like foil. The funny man’s wife frowned at this in a way that said she thought it was adorable. It got ninety seconds in his act. But now, the child can no longer be contained by the swaddling. He loves to thrash his arms and legs, and above all, to wave them in front of his own face before trying to see how many he can stuff inside his mouth, which the funny man finds absolutely hilarious. A chip off the old block.
    Inspired, the funny man continues to tickle the child with one hand while trying to shove his other hand entirely inside his own mouth. The child’s eyes shut he laughs so hard. The funny man feels his knuckles scrape past his teeth. There is a clicking noise in the back of the funny man’s head that tells him either something important has happened or he has unhinged his jaw. He fights the urge to gag. Still laughing, the child thoroughly wets its diaper. The funny man removes his hand from all the way inside his mouth and smacks his lips together into a funny face that the child enjoys tremendously as he is carried to the changing table, dripping all the way.
    After changing the baby, the funny man calls the number on the clapping man’s card, and as it turns out, the clapping man had told the truth, though about something different than the funny man hoped. “He’s dead,” the voice on the line says. “He was dying and now he’s dead.”
    “He told me I should call. He was going to take me places,” the funny man says.
    “He mentioned you,” the voice replies. “He was my partner, said he’d seen a real funny man. I asked him if you had a ‘thing.’ He said, ‘not yet, but he will.’”
    “I do. I have a thing now,” the funny man says. “I’m sure of it.”
    “You should come by then. We’re mourning right now, but we’ll have to wrap that up soon. Tomorrow.”
    “I’m sorry to hear …” the funny man says.
    “Yeah, well, we all knew it was going to happen at some point or another. We’re all stamped with an expiration date,” the man on the other line says before hanging up.

3
    T HE FIRST TIME I saw the judge I was surprised she was a woman, and not a bad-looking one at that, mid-forties, shoulder-length brunette, trim, good grooming. When she entered the courtroom, we all shot to attention and as she mounted the steps to the bench, I saw a pair of stylish high heels beneath the hem of her robe and just above the heels a rather nice flash of leg. Sitting just outside my own consciousness, as I am now capable of, thanks to my therapist, I marveled at my inclination to notice the well-turned shape of a woman’s leg even as I’m on trial for my life. This is a reversion to a different, darker time I thought was in the past, but was apparently resummoned when I pulled the trigger six times and killed that man.
    In the midst of the worst times I self-diagnosed a sex addiction to my therapist. This was after the divorce when I was doing three sessions a week and complaining that the freedom to sleep with anyone I wanted to felt somehow confining, and how fuckedup was that? The therapist nodded thoughtfully as I described my symptoms, the “ache” I would feel when I found something attractive about a woman, an ache I was dead certain could only be satisfied by having sex with her, but then I would turn and see someone else, this one with a tiny scar on her upper lip, a slice of pale flesh that was suddenly irresistible, and the ache would turn into an anxiety and then a panic, a desperation. I would invent stories for each of them,