The Straight Man - Roger L Simon Read Free Page B

just one particular senior
citizen. I mean—"
    "I know. I know. 'The greatest good for the
greatest number.' Thank you, Jeremy Bentham."
    "Thank God you still remember something in this
narcissistic culture hell-bent on navel contemplation and acquisition
of personal possessions."
    "All right. All right." We were pulling up
to the valet parking of the Fun Zone. "Is it all right if I give
this exploited worker my BMW or should I park it myself?"
    " How else do you expect him to make a living?"
    On the east end of the Sunset Strip, the Fun Zone
("the Omphalos of American Comedy") was your basic L.A.
Eighties Trendoid Post-Deco club with a dusty rose and gray tile
facade and a brushed stainless steel front door that looked like it
was borrowed from the engine room of the Queen Mary. You drove up to
it by a side driveway that cut between the club and a recently built
piece of work called the Albergo Picasso, a self-described
"European-style spa  hotel" done on the exterior in a
series of multicolored squares said to derive from the master's
Cubist Period and on the interior in "harmonious tones" out
of his Blue and Rose periods. It was the kind of place my New York
friends would once have used for a facile put-down of L.A. but now
would rush to stay in, because with its minimalist cuisine, German
cars, and diminishing smog, Los Angeles had become, by attrition, the
spiritual capital of today's "material world." And that, as
the lady sang, was where we lived.
    The heady smell off me, or at least the dream of it,
was the driving motif of the Fun Zone itself. The moment you passed
through its steel portals you were in a corridor lined with hundreds
of autographed photos of aspiring comics who had performed at the
club hoping to land two minutes on Johnny or Merv or—who
knew?—maybe even a raunchy comedy for Warner Bros. in which they
could strut their stuff in this summer's food fight. As if part of a
definite hierarchy, the corridor opened onto a larger lobby decorated
with oversize portraits of the greats of comedy from Chaplin to Lenny
Bruce. At the opposite end of the lobby, in a place of honor just
beside the entrance to the main room (the Fun Zone had three
rooms—one for the star attraction, one for the up-and-comers, and a
third, called The Combat Zone, for women comics only) was a
twelve-foot-high portrait of the God himself, Richard Pryor, the man
who had put the club on the map as the place to be in funnyland when
he had premiered his first one-man show there almost ten years ago.
    Not far from Pryor, and clearly recently installed,
was a lesser photograph of Ptak and King. With Mike's corpse only a
week in the ground, there were several people standing around eyeing
it curiously when Sonya and I stepped forward.
    "What a marshmallow," she said, staring
right in Ptak's face. I had to admit her evaluation of the soft,
fleshy blond man with the slight overbite gazing out from the black
and white still was not very different from mine. I had seen Ptak
perform once, as a guest on the Letterman show, and didn't think he
was particularly funny. He seemed to have less talent than most
straight men. He couldn't sing, he couldn't dance, and he certainly
couldn't tell a joke. In fact, he was sort of an anachronism, the
kind of comic foil that didn't seem necessary in this day and age.
King, on the other hand, was like a black, street version of Dennis
the Menace, all unbridled id, an uptight white man's worst fantasy
turned outrageous—a comic mugger. In the photograph he looked as if
he were made of wire, all muscle and bone in sneakers, jeans, tank
top, and baseball cap turned around backward.
    He had a wide grin on his face that defied you to
decide whether it was evil or mischievous and so much energy he
vibrated off the photograph. He was so magnetic, within a second you
forgot Ptak was even up there with him, like so much instant mashed
potatoes vanished down a drain.
    " Now, that's what I call sexy," said Sonya.
She