Things We Do in the Dark(20)
“You know, you wouldn’t get so much mail if you’d just let me set you up with Facebook and Twitter,” Zoe had said a couple of months back.
The three of them were working through all his letters, one by one. They had a system: Paris would open the letters and read them out loud. Jimmy would sign a 5x7 black-and-white headshot with a Sharpie, his signature illegible due to the tremor. Zoe would address the return envelope, pop the photo in, and seal it. They would work like this until Jimmy’s hand started cramping, but he enjoyed it.
“You wouldn’t even have to do anything,” Zoe said. “I’ll manage all your accounts.”
“I’m an old dog with old tricks,” Jimmy said. “And my fans are as old as me. They don’t give a shit if I’m on social media, so why should I?”
“Uh, because of your new fans?” Zoe, exasperated, turned to Paris for help. “Is that not the entire point of doing a streaming deal? Come on, Paris, tell him.”
Paris shrugged and opened the next letter. She had no online profiles, either, so she was the last person to convince her sixty-eight-year-old husband to do anything. Jimmy could barely tolerate emails, and he despised texting.
“Kid, that’s not the point at all,” Jimmy said. “They’re paying me money to tell jokes. I can’t control what the fans like, and I learned a long time ago not to worry about it.”
“Think about it, Zoe,” Paris said. “Do you really want Jimmy on Twitter? He’s impulsive enough with the things he says.”
“I’ll write all the tweets.” Zoe looked back and forth between them. “A Twitter account could help build Jimmy’s brand.”
“Nobody writes for Jimmy but Jimmy,” said Jimmy. “And my brand is I don’t want to be on fucking Twitter.”
Paris had come to like reading her husband’s fan mail, which provided a glimpse into the parts of Jimmy’s life that Paris was least familiar with—his work, the history of his work, his legacy. She once asked him how he knew it was time to walk away from show business. He told her that his creative well had run dry for several reasons: burnout, life stress, age, mental health challenges, nearly dying. But the biggest reason was that he got sober.
“The only thing that ever brought me joy was drugs,” Jimmy said.
“You’re not serious.”
“Wish I was, kid.”
He’d been clean for four years when they met, and he was committed to staying that way. He said he felt great … but he missed being funny.
“I try to tell myself it’s okay,” he said with a shrug. “But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss it every goddamned day.”
“The drugs or the comedy?” she asked.
“Both. I’ve never had one without the other.”
Being funny—razor-sharp funny, the kind of funny that can make an audience double over with laughter while cringing at the same time, the kind of funny that hurts as much as it entertains—was Jimmy’s gift. The only thing he’d ever wanted to do was make people laugh.
According to friends who’d known him for decades, he’d always been hilarious. But the business of being funny was a whole different animal than just cracking your friends up at parties. The pressure of being “on” night after night, whether he felt like it or not, was hard. He started doing cocaine as a young comedian to give himself energy onstage and to make his brain work as fast as his mouth did. Some of his funniest milestone moments—his first appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, for example—he was too high to even remember. At the height of his fame, he was taking cocaine and Adderall to perform, Xanax to calm down, Valium to sleep, and heroin just because it felt good. Without the drugs, the funny came slower, and the humor was diluted. And all his attempts to get clean, with rehab and without, were followed by periods of depression that would last for months.
When he got clean for the last time, the funny was gone. He could still tell a good joke, but the thing that made Jimmy Peralta Jimmy Peralta had left the building.
And then it came back. By accident.
Jimmy always donated a lot of money to charity, and he was often invited to local events. A few months into their marriage, Paris went with him to a black-tie fundraising dinner at the Fairmont, where he was awarded a plaque for his generous contribution to a charity that supported mental health services in underserved neighborhoods. When he went onstage to accept it, he said a few words of thanks, then impulsively threw in a dirty joke about one of the presidential candidates … and a donkey. The laughs and applause he’d received in the hotel ballroom that night buoyed him for days. And that’s when it all began to change.
Someone caught the joke on video and uploaded it to Twitter, hashtagging it #ThePresidentsDonkey and #JimmyPeraltaLives. Within a day, it was retweeted over two hundred thousand times. Chrissy Teigen even tweet-quoted it with a cry-laugh emoji, saying “I fucking love you Jimmy Peralta.”
And that’s when he realized he might once again have something to say.
Over the next few weeks, he wrote some new jokes, testing them out on both Paris and Zoe, the two people he spent the most time with. The two women, who didn’t agree on much, could agree on this: Jimmy Peralta was still very fucking funny, and the material he was writing was relevant to everything that was currently happening in the world.