Cold Turkey

Good, God, doctors are the dumbest creatures on earth.

The stupidity of his clients, despite them having a medical degree, boggled Mark’s mind as he lit a cigarette at the start of his ten-minute break. Well, now it was an eight-minute break because Cora had stopped him in the hall to ask him, yet again, how to set the parameters for adding customer profiles in the program so that new patients would update under the protocols they just created and not the old ones.

“It’s in the updated index file,” he told her.

“I get an error message every time,” she droned.

“Just follow the instructions in the index and…”

Two minutes of this. It cut into his menthol-flavored break on the company’s balcony patio, a time and place devoid of obnoxious obstacles like his coworkers or the idiot doctors who used their software.

A long inhale on a cigarette warmed Mark’s lungs. The monkey on his back jumped off, if only for a moment.

“This is going to put us in an early grave,” came an unfamiliar voice from behind him.

“Jesus…” Mark blurted, nearly spitting out his cigarette. A gorgeous programmer sat puffing on her vape pen on the usually vacant picnic table. He had seen her before. She was part of an outside team brought in to move deadlines up and help the company deliver more profits in the fiscal blah blah blah… She had him smitten from afar and offered Mark something pleasant to look at in an otherwise drab office complex. The nose rings and tattoos on her arms had all the hallmarks of someone with sexy indifference to her job and all the programming skills to be an ace hacker. Damn, she was cool.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to spook ya,” she said, calmly taking another puff.

“It’s fine. I’m usually alone out here.”

“So what kills us first – the addiction or the job?” she said, hopping down and extending a tattoo-covered hand. “Kat.”

“Mark. And if I die at my desk, then it would be the greatest tragedy of my life.”

“So how do you want to die?” she asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What’s your ideal way to go? Mine is being trampled to death at an EDM rave.”

He sucked on his nicotine and wondered. Mark, of course, had no idea he was going to die that day. It was probably best he didn’t know.

Selecting an answer to her question was hard to do. He could make up a canned answer that was utter crap and Kat would know it. He consciously wanted to impress her. She was a gorgeous stranger who gave him the time of day. So, maybe a skydiving accident? Yeah. Right.

On the other hand, he could have told the truth. His most predictable cause of death would be an eventual case of lung cancer, where the symptoms were long ignored, chemo woefully ineffective, and his lonely apartment was the last sight he took in before biting the dust in his recliner. No parents. No siblings. No chance at any excitement. His flabby body and desk job contributed to an ever-increasing sedentary lifestyle that only a gamer nerd like he could live. In the end, his cats would discover his body before his friends did. This was a realistic ending, but come on, this wouldn’t land him any points with the hot programmer in front of him.

“Ideal way to go… I jump off this balcony as the building crumbles to the ground during a massive earthquake. Hopefully, the news crews pick up my swan dive on live stream.”

“Not bad, not bad.” She nodded. Kat walked past him and leaned against the railing. The balcony overlooked a big, beautiful… concrete building across the street. There was a city park on the other side of that building, visible only if you got the right angle. “Theoretically,” she said, leaning her head over the edge, “if you could jump far enough, the last thing you see before you die might be the trees in the park. Not the worst thing.”

“Yeah, but if I miss, then I’ll splat in front of that pretentious coffee shop. I hate their coffee. They burn their beans.”

They smiled and puffed on in silence. She then took a long drag and asked, “So you hate your job here?”

“Not my dream job,” Mark said plainly.

“What is your dream?”

He smiled and, not seeing any harm in being honest – he likely wouldn’t see her again after this week anyway – freely surrendered the truth. “Improv comedian.”

“Really? Have you ever tried it?” she asked, attempting to sound relatively unimpressed.

“No.”

“You should. There’s a comedy club a few blocks from here. Why don’t you do open mic night and try it out?”

He smirked and dipped his head in shame. Who does that, something daring by themselves? The smoking, the dead-end job, and the video games were the balm that covered the pain of not achieving anything significant by the age of 27.

“I’ll go with you. I’ve wanted to check it out before we leave,” Kat said, offering him her sparkling blue eyes and longing for him to say yet.

“I don’t know…” he began until he saw her flirtatious advances.

“Look,” she said, whipping out her phone and looking up the club’s schedule in seconds. “Tonight at 8:00 pm. Open mic. Meet there at 7:30 pm?” She shoved the glowing screen in Mark’s face.

Alright. 7:30 pm it was. Right before the time of his death.

Mark gripped his drink and wouldn’t take his eyes off the stage, like it was some majestic wild beast he had discovered. Kat was bickering with the waiter about the strength of her drink or rather lack thereof. Mark wasn’t listening. He pulled out the jokes he scribbled at his desk earlier that day and ran through them again. He knew the jokes well. He’d been thinking of them for years, practicing them to his cats nightly as he fed them their usual slop. The cats never laughed. Seeing the jokes on paper for the first time, Mark could see why. They stunk, so he spent the better part of the afternoon workshopping them through AI programs and ignoring client calls until they felt snappy and sharp. He rehearsed them in the bathroom at work three times and once more in his apartment before walking over to the club. The jokes were all he thought about since his conversation with Kat. It was all he wanted to do. He was ready. This was happening.

A woman in all black with a clipboard and headset barreled over to their table. “Mark?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“You’re third. You’ll get 5 minutes. Go up when the emcee calls your name, and the timer in the back will start once you get on stage. When time’s up, get off. Got it?”

He nodded.

“Good,” she said and took off to the next table.

“So, does this feel like you’re living your dream yet?” Kat asked, turning to Mark.

It did. The club felt exactly like he pictured it in his fantasies. The dim room, low ceilings, and ratty booth chairs were perfect. Absolutely perfect. If he could live there, he would. In fact, that’s exactly what he had decided to do. This was his new office. No more medical programming… systems bookings… whatever-the-heck-he-did nonsense that he sold his life to for the past five years. One quick email to the boss before he took the stage bought him a new life.

“You quit your job?” Kat blurted loudly as he explained what he had done.

“Sent the email ten minutes ago,” he replied.

The emcee’s grainy voice grabbed their attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s his first open mic. Give a warm welcome to Mark Grady!”

Thirty people gave a meager applause. Mark took the mic in his left hand as the stage spots blinded him. A moment later, his eyes adjusted, and the handful of guests in the room came into focus. All Mark could hear was the pulse of his heart, banging nervously against his chest. It was okay. He had prepared. He knew his jokes.

The first one stumbled out. Laughs. He got laughs! A guy in the second row crossed his arms, leaned back, and smiled. Mark did that. He made that guy relax and laugh. Mark’s heart leapt with the lightest, most pleasant high in the world.

The second joke came out. No laugh. Mark’s throat stopped up. His Adam’s apple turned to stone. He tried to swallow, but nothing went down his pipe – his mouth dried up. His armpits, however, did not. All the moisture in his body went there. Flop sweat started to bead across his shirt. It was okay. He had five minutes in total. Surely it was almost over. The clock in the back glowed, “00:04:39” and counted down to “00:04:38” only after an eternity had passed. Never mind. All he could do was press on.

He started on the third joke and got lost. He tried saying it again, got it right, but the moment had passed. It sucked the air out of the room.

Fumbling, he pulled the scratch paper from his pocket and attempted to read the chicken scratch. The verbs on the page turned to nouns, and the nouns to conjunctions. Total nonsense. His fourth joke fell flat.

The fifth got a smirk and the rest played to silence. By the end, he exited the stage to five people giving him a pathetic clap that signaled the great relief of the audience. The torture, for everyone, was over.

Covered in sweat and trembling, Mark made his way back to the booth he shared with Kat. She stared at him with gaping eyes that told him the set was as bad as he thought, if not worse. She patted him on the back pitifully, and they proceeded not to speak again until the end of the evening.

There, in the booth, Mark slumped and accepted his death. He wondered if jumping from the company building wouldn’t have been a better idea.

They parted ways at the entrance of the club. Since he had no job to return to, he would not see her the next day at work. It would be her last day at their office anyway. Kat’s company would send her to another location the following week.

“Since you have no job now and, you know, you may want to leave town after that… our company’s always hiring so… I’ll put in a good word if you need something.” Kat offered this gesture out of real kindness, but it somehow made everything worse for Mark.

“Thanks,” he murmured.

“Well. See ya,” she said as she turned and made her way back to her hotel.

He could get his job back, Mark thought. What was he thinking earlier? Mesmerized by the romance of his fantasy, he had made a grave error. He yanked his phone from his pocket and pulled open his email to undo the damage with his boss. The email app opened up and at the top of the unread pile was a reply from his boss. The preview didn’t look good. Before he could open it to reply, his phone died.

So, this is how it ends, he thought. Lost the girl. Lost my job. Lost my dignity. Death by stage.

He collapsed into a stool at the bar and hung his head so it rested on the sticky, cold counter. If he could melt into the floor, he would. He needed to freight-train a bunch of cigarettes immediately but had only one left. That wasn’t going to cut it.

“Hey, buddy, you gotta go,” said the woman with the clipboard. She had marched her way over to him and waited impatiently for his response. “Buddy. Sorry your set sucked. Happens every week. You’ll be fine. But I got a sold-out headliner starting in 20 minutes, and you either get out or get an application to work the bar because that’s the only way I can let you stay here.”

Mark slowly cocked his head, still strewn out over the bar, and met her stern gaze. Behind her remained the magical stage. With it glowing under the lights, he envisioned a figure on the stage with the low din of laughter filling the space. He remembered the first joke. It got a laugh. He got a laugh. People laughed because… of… him.

“I’ll take an application,” he uttered quickly.

“What?”

“You said I could get an application to work the bar so I could stay. I’ll take the application.”

“Have you worked a bar before?” she replied coldly.

“I waited tables at a Cheddars in college for four years.”

She eyed him sternly and took note of his desperation. He wasn’t desperate for a job. Mark was desperate to stay there, to soak up through osmosis whatever magic that room held. Somehow, that might raise him from the dead.

“Wait here,” she mumbled, annoyed. “I’ll get the manager.”

Mark sat up in his chair and wouldn’t take his eyes off the stage. Reaching into his pocket, he produced his last cigarette. Raising it to his mouth, he recalled the sound of laughter he got from one adequately written joke. If he could make another joke at least as good as that one…

A trash can rested behind the bar. Mark confidently tossed his last cigarette toward it. He missed. That was okay. Even if he missed, he needed to quit anyway.