The Fisher Boy by Stephen Anable Read Free Book Online

curtain time “barking” in front of Quahog, pestering Commercial Street’s tourists to buy tickets. I’ve seldom depended upon the kindness of strangers, so I found barking embarrassing, a first cousin to outright panhandling. I kept pretty quiet and offered my flyers to people too timid to refuse them.
    An older man in a flasher’s raincoat the color of hummus thanked me for a flyer and asked, “Is your show men in dresses?” Roberto answered that we couldn’t afford costumes, so he said he’d try to make it. “It’s always good to broaden our audience,” Roberto reasoned.
    Twenty minutes before eight, a group of five men in camouflage that mimicked sycamore bark approached us—Christian Soldiers, for sure. My stomach felt like one of those balloons street vendors torture into animal shapes to sell to children.
    “Does your comedy make fun of God?” one of them asked.
    “Buy a ticket and find out,” Roberto said.
    “We’re after laughs,” I said, “not changing theology.”
    “Have you heard of Hollings Fair?” the Soldier asked.
    “I heard him speak once, at town hall,” I said.
    Luckily, that satisfied him. “God loves you,” he said, making it sound like a threat. Then they dispersed.
    At ten minutes to eight, we stopped barking and went inside Quahog. There were just three people in the audience
.
The restaurant was decorated with the sort of kitsch statuettes, plaster sea captains, fish sporting chefs’ hats, mermaids rising from painted waves, that often mean the menu is surf ‘n’ turf specials and baked stuffed lobster with a bad lobster-to-breadcrumb ratio.
    Quahog’s stage was miniscule, no bigger than the smallest traffic island, and without microphones. Our backstage space was smaller still, a tiny hallway truncated by a flight of stairs to a recently flooded basement. Was this where so many Big Names had gotten their start, amid these plywood walls and concrete steps the color of earwigs? This was Our Big Break, but everything smelled of wet carpeting and a bad night.
    And all of us knew this. We avoided eye contact with each other; each person was “preparing” for the show in his own way. Justin was doing his transcendental meditation and twitching a lot. Paul was blowing bubbles from a chartreuse mass of watermelon-flavored gum; Sammy was tinkering with his newly pierced eyebrow; and Brian and Andy looked as though our nachos and beer dinner had declared war on their stomachs.
    Roberto was confident, cracking his knuckles and trying out voices. “My Katharine Hepburn sounds just like my Rose Kennedy,” he was complaining.
    Andy told Roberto to keep it down, people in the audience might hear him. “What people?” Roberto laughed. He jerked aside the ancient curtain, so soft it seemed more dust than velvet. We counted eleven—
eleven
people huddled at the mock-colonial tables, in the red glow from hobnail glass lamps.
    Andy turned on me. “You said you and Roberto have been leafletting. Then why is the house so awful?”
    “Cool it, there’ll be more,” Roberto said, in a Bugs Bunny voice Andy didn’t appreciate.
    We had an unwritten rule: when the cast outnumbers the audience, the show must not go on. This wasn’t the case tonight, but, unlike Roberto and me, Andy and the others had driven many miles for such a pathetic house.
    Roberto peered back into the audience. “Swell, one guy is leaving.”
    “I hope he’s just hitting the men’s room,” I said.
    Justin was blinking out of his TM. Paul spit his bubblegum into his hand then stuck it on the wall. Everyone else was trying to act enthused. “Have an awesome night, everybody,” Brian sighed. “It’s eight-fifteen,” Andy said. “If we’re going on, we’ve got to go on now!”
    I parted the curtain and counted ten heads, all looking uneasy, almost guilty, as though they’d done something wrong, chosen the wrong show, for instance.
    Then, far back in the audience, someone shouted my name: “Mark,