Not Gonna Happen Read online

  NOT GONNA HAPPEN

  Adam Carter

  Copyright 2019, © Adam Carter. All rights reserved. No content may be reproduced without permission of the author.

  Cover Design by James, GoOnWrite.com

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Lionel Ritchie and the Wardrobe.”

  It was a one-liner. Nothing needed to be said with it for the message to get across. And it was a good one-liner: the sort people didn’t get at first and had to think about. And once they got it, they laughed. One-liners were the backbone of comedy and Jack Corsac loved them.

  “Cats,” he continued. “If you were God for a day and could get rid of one animal off the face of the Earth and have no repercussions on the food chain? Cats, definitely. The way they sit on your lawn? On your shed? Just staring up at you with those cold, lazy eyes. I stared one out one time, actually stared one out. All I was doing was pulling aside my net curtain and I found a cat staring at me. So I stared it out.

  “Twenty minutes. Beat it though, the cat finally looked away. Shrugged as it did so of course – wouldn’t want to admit defeat, would it?

  “Saw in a catalogue the other day a couple of animal torture devices. A tube you attach to your dog’s lead so whenever it tries to run away from you it’s blasted by a high-pitched screech. Torture your dog to get it to behave, how cruel is that?

  “And there was a cat one, too. A loudspeaker-looking thing you can blast cats with to get them to scat from your lawn. As opposed to scatting on the lawn. Said it had two settings: silent and shrill. Advised using the silent so as not to upset the neighbour who owns the cat. Not upset the neighbour? His cat’s doing its business on my lawn and I’m the one who has to worry about not upsetting the neighbour?

  “So, I use the silent setting, of course.” He smiled. “That was sarcasm, by the way. Use the silent setting? Ha! Not gonna happen.”

  There was laughter, although not as much as there might have been. The act which had taken the stage just prior to Corsac had been terrible and Corsac knew that if he didn’t want to bomb he would have to engage the audience with one of his best lines. There was an old trick in the comedy routine of starting with your best joke, ending with your second best, and then organising all the others so that the third, fifth, seventh best etc. all followed the first, while the second, fourth, sixth etc. all preceded the finale. It was a lattice of jokes of all different qualities. Or was he supposed to end with his best and start off with his second best?

  Corsac could not remember. He had forgotten much about his profession over the years, and clichéd as it might have sounded, he had forgotten more than most people would ever know. Jack Corsac was in his mid-fifties and hadn’t been funny, hadn’t been really funny, in far too many years to count. He had started his career doing his comedy club routine, and this was where he was ending it. In the years between he had taken centre stage, had featured on Parkinson and various similar shows. One had even been recent and he had hoped this would have been the thing to kick-start his career once more. Unfortunately nothing had come of it, and he could only assume that the public no longer found him funny. He had been great in his time, but now he was nothing but a washed-up comic working the circuit which had propelled him to greatness to begin with. And the clubs he was working now? They weren’t even what you’d call respectable venues. Just dark and greasy holes in the ground where the clientele would just as soon tickle his ribs with a knife while he was trying to tickle theirs with humour.

  “Have you ever seen those staplers in Woolworths which give you an electric shock if you use them?” he asked, trying to sound far more jovial than he had felt in a long time and praying his negative energies did not exude through his depressed form. “They’re so that people don’t steal your stationery off your desk all the time. How paranoid must you be to go and fork out a tenner on something as useless as that? It’s not even as if you can use it. You just turn your desk slowly into a no-entry zone. I mean, what’s next? Barbed wire fencing made out of paperclips? Computers that explode without the right password? Assistants that have dormant training of psycho-killers in case someone asks them to do something outside of their job description? ‘Can you come and lift this box for me a moment, I ... aaaarrgh!’

  “Tell you what, though, if they ever move away from stationery and get onto a ‘keep your mother-in-law away’ range, I’m there.”

  He did not like to resort to the mother-in-law jokes. Corsac had always considered them trite, although in general he found they went down quite well. Unfortunately, society was changing so much so quickly that mothers-in-law were simply not as common these days as they used to be. There was a time when people married young, but nowadays couples co-habited more often than not, and even if they did marry there was no guarantee that either of them would even have a mother. He had always thought about incorporating something along those lines into his act, although he knew somehow it wouldn’t go down very well; and after the drivel that had been put on stage directly before him, he knew he couldn’t afford to lose his audience for even a moment.

  “I was speaking with Elvis the other day. No, I was. Name of my postman. He gave me some letters, but they were all junk mail.”

  Corsac began to stroll the length of the stage as though waiting for something.

  “I don’t know why you’re waiting like that,” he said at last, “there’s no punch-line coming. I just thought I’d share with you all how much I hate junk mail.

  “In fact I won a holiday last week, but then I suppose you all got the same letter as well. One of those ‘scratch off three numbers in a row and you win yada yada yada’, you know the spiel. So I scratched off the panels and there weren’t three numbers in a row. I looked at it, thinking to myself ‘that can’t be right’, so I looked again, but no, seriously, there weren’t three numbers in a row. So I phoned the company and complained and the lady on the other end (nice girl actually) said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, that must have been from a faulty batch. We’ll send you out a replacement.’ So I told her that for my inconvenience I wanted her to send me two. Next day I got a whole bundle of the things in the post. Stupid thing was it was the rest of the faulty batch.

  “Best thing you can do with junk mail is send off the pre-paid envelopes they give you. You get the grumpy-old-man satisfaction that at least you’re costing them money. Or just send the whole thing return to sender ...”

  Corsac glanced across the room, something he had been trying to avoid doing. The room was not packed, although there were still enough people there for him to leave an impression. They were mainly seated around small circular tables, sitting there drinking and talking, some of them even laughing. The only trouble was that he knew more of them were laughing with one another than were laughing with him. The truth was that he did not want to be doing the comedy routines any more, and he knew he was projecting this feeling onto everybody else before him. He was not losing his audience, because the fact was he had never really caught them to begin with.

  Still, he had some gags left and was determined to see the act through to the end. But only because he had promised himself never to return to this stage, and he did not want for his final act to be the one upon which he walked out midway.

  He thought quickly before starting again.

  “Well, comedy routine or routine comedy? Why do we call it a comedy routine when if I was standing up here doing something routine you’d all boo me off the stage?”

  That was of course the perfect invitation for hecklers, although thankfully no one took up the challenge. Or perhaps unfortunately, considering he didn’t want to be standing there any more than they all wanted him to be.

  “Chocolate-coated cereal,” he said. “Don’t get it. I mean, sugar-coated, f
air enough because people are gonna put sugar on their cereal anyway. But chocolate? And there’s a cereal now which is basically just cookies with milk on. I mean, what’s next? A bowl of sugar with a sprinkling of cornflakes on top?

  “In fact, I have a friend who told me he was allergic to cow’s milk. I said to him, ‘Bull, you are,’ and it turns out I was right, ‘cause a bull he was.”

  That didn’t make sense even to Corsac, and he was certain he had missed some of the joke out. Nevertheless, he continued, knowing he had only a little while longer now.

  “Speaking of cow’s milk, what’s all that about? I mean, today we put it over our breakfast and in our tea without a second thought, but what must people have thought of the very first person to have gone up to a cow and started milking it? ‘Hmm, this is a nice-looking cow, I think I’ll have some of its milk.’ In a thousand years maybe people will be drinking arsenic without a second thought, or, who knows, even eating chocolate-coated cereal without anyone standing on stage making fun of it.”

  Fun being the operative word, he thought with a cringe. No one was laughing, which meant the joke was not funny, so he decided he would need a swift one-liner. He couldn’t think of any (couldn’t think of any? It was his job to be able to think of them at a snap!) and so settled instead for a two-liner.

  “Man walks into the post office and finds there’s no queue. Now there’s a joke and a half.

  “Remember Elvis, my postman? Well he delivered some letters to my house the other week which were addressed to number eleven, while I live at number one sixteen. My number six had fallen off, so I got the post for number eleven. Tried rearranging the numbers and letters on my door to spell out Threadneedle Street EC2R 8AH, but it didn’t work.

  “Do you remember those old candy sticks which had the little red bit on the end to make them look like cigarettes but they were actually sweets? I wonder if they’d let you eat them on trains or in bars nowadays. I bet none of you rebels had the nerve to bring any.

  “Anyway, I want to finish on a poem, which I should just have time to recite before they drag me off the stage. It’s about comedy and stuff like that, I’m sure you remember what that’s like. Right, here goes:

  “I’m standing here on stage,

  And start to show my age;

  I stood here years ago

  And never missed a show.

  But now I’m old and grey

  I think I see the day

  When I’ll be standing here no more

  And head straight for the door.

  Because standing here is tough

  And I think I’ve had enough,

  So good night, everyone,

  And trust me, it’s been fun.”

  He waved a little flourish for the crowd and backed off the stage. “Good night, all.”

  There was polite applause, but then he didn’t expect anything else, and was pleased enough with that. He had not ended on anything good, hadn’t even ended on a joke, although it had been the way he had wanted to go and as such he had no regrets. On stage, the next act was appearing, although he paid no attention to it, and instead headed for his own dressing-room, or such as it was. Corsac removed his coat and planted it upon the end of a chair, then sat and gazed at his reflection into the hard, wrinkled lines of a face that had long ago forgotten how to smile. What he had left of his hair was turning grey, and his face had hardened as though to granite. He was fifty-five, and he reckoned he looked about seventy but had plastic surgery to make him look younger, when the truth was he could not even have afforded plastic surgery even if he had agreed with it. Fifty-five was not old by any means, but it was old enough to be finished. It was old enough to retire, if only he could afford to.

  “Well that was ... different.”

  Corsac saw the reflection of the other man in the mirror and did not need to turn. Harold Crotcher had been his agent for many years now and the two men knew one another like brothers. Crotcher had known Corsac was becoming tired lately, and had likely seen some of the signs that he was on the verge of retirement. Until Corsac had actually left the stage, however, neither man could truly have predicted that tonight would have been the night upon which it would all happen.

  “Don’t start on me,” Corsac warned. “I’m not in the mood.”

  “I’m not starting anything, Jack,” Crotcher sighed. “Just worried for you, that’s all.”

  “Well don’t be,” Corsac said. Crotcher was a large man who ate well and enjoyed his food. His clothes were never anything but unkempt, and his face always bore the stubble of several days. But he was also a kind man who cared for Corsac, and Corsac realised that should he retire, it would not only be himself who was out of a job, but Crotcher also. “Sorry about everything,” Corsac said. “Sorry about ... everything.”

  “Saying it twice doesn’t change anything, Jack. And the magic number in comedy is always three.”

  “I don’t do comedy. Not any more.”

  Crotcher paused to absorb that, then said, “So what do you do?”

  Corsac did not reply for several moments, and made a show of changing from his work clothes just because it meant he could do something other than talk for that time. Eventually he realised he had to say something, so began with, “I don’t know, H. Take some time off to do the gardening. Paint a fence or something, maybe even go abroad for a while.”

  “Maybe a holiday’s what you need,” Crotcher agreed, “although what then? What are you going to be doing when you’ve had your break and you realise there are still bills to pay?”

  “I’m not going back out there, H.”

  “You may have to, Jack. Let’s face it, you’re not going to be doing much of anything else. Jack, you’re pushing sixty and ...”

  “I’m fifty-five, Harold.”

  “Like the difference means anything? Between a fifteen-year-old and a twenty-year-old, sure, but when you get to our age, the more years’ difference you’re talking about, the less it actually matters. My point is that you’re past the point where anyone’s going to be wanting to take you on. In anything. Look, you’re famous for what you do, and what you do is comedy. Give me some time, Jack. Take a holiday and I’ll get you a TV spot. I promise I’ll get you back on the box. It may be small at first, but it’ll be something, and we can work from there. It’s 2007, Jack, I can make you as big in this century as you were in the last.”

  “Rebuild my career? H, you just told me I’m past it, and you were right. It’s too late to make a comeback, I’m too old.”

  “Bull, and you know it. You’re never too old, Jack. It may take a bit of reinventing, but I’ll have you back in the hearts of England before you know it.”

  “You want to change my image, I take it?”

  “What I want doesn’t come into it; it’s about what you need, Jack. You can’t carry on the way you are, but you can come back from this. Hell, if people who get arrested can come back and make a go of it, I don’t see why you can’t.”

  “Because I don’t have any notoriety? And that’s what the public wants, isn’t it? Aside from my drink problem in the early days, I don’t have anything but a squeaky-clean image. Married, two kids and a mortgage. There was a time when the public loved a family man; now if a man hasn’t embraced (stroke) denounced homosexuality or slept with six hookers at one time, no one seems to give a damn.”

  “The way of the world, I’m afraid. You either move along with it or get left behind as it passes you by.”

  “What would I have to sacrifice in order to live in this new world, H? My decency? My morals? My family perhaps?”

  “Maybe we can play on your alcoholism a little,” Crotcher thought aloud.

  “You what?”

  “Only in a jokey sense, mind. Just enough to get the papers interested.”

  “My problem, my former problem I should say, is not to be dredged up, and that’s my final say on it. I’ve been dry for over a quarter of a century now and I’m never going to poke fun at that o
r any other similar problem anyone out there faces.”

  “Not even similar problems? Drug-related stuff maybe? Or dementia?”

  Corsac fixed his old friend with a stern glare and said flatly, “There are some things which just aren’t funny.”

  “Not to you perhaps, but you have to consider the audience. You have to play to what they want.”

  “If I’m entertaining such amoral audiences, maybe I’ve been playing to the wrong bunch this whole time.”

  “Unless you want to be doing kiddies’ parties the rest of your days, you’ll have to start making some changes.”

  “At least I know where I stand with kids, H.”

  Crotcher sighed. “Look, I’m only thinking what’s best for you and Marie.”

  Corsac did not reply to this, and instead continued to change. Finally he threw on his coat and reached for his hat. There weren’t many people left in London who even wore hats, although Corsac had always preferred the olden days when the streets were never free of them; when a man could not have been considered a gentleman if he was not wearing one. Now no one seemed to care about being a gentleman at all, and consequently no one any longer cared about wearing hats. Gone was any respect, for self or others, which had existed only a few decades earlier.

  “What does Marie think about your decision?” Crotcher asked as Corsac headed for the door. When no answer was forthcoming, he raised an eyebrow. “You have told her, haven’t you?”

  “I will do. Tonight. Or tomorrow perhaps, but I will tell her, yes.”

  “Don’t you think you should have maybe talked it over with her first? It’s a life-changing decision, isn’t it?”

  “And it’s my life, H, so don’t try to make me feel bad about leaving it behind.”

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad, Jack, I just think there are some things which ...”

  “Yes you are, that’s exactly what you’re doing, and do you know why? Because if I’m not working the comedy clubs, you’ll have to get up off your backside and actually do some work for once in your life. Because now instead of just signing me up for routine after routine after routine, you’re going to have to physically go out there and try to find me work.”