I sit up quietly, my heart pulsing in my neck. I cannot — will not — allow Aisha to get bitten by a possibly rabid rat. I stand, barely breathing. By the way Aisha snores, I know she’s sound asleep.
I pound the glistening pavement with my right foot, hoping to scare it off. The rat seems not to care. I stand up and take a step toward the rat. Nothing. It disregards me completely.
I keep my eye on the rat and feel behind me for the prickly porcupine that I put by my feet on the bench. A bristle jabs my finger. I pick it up and cradle it like a football. I slowly walk around until I’m behind Aisha. The last thing I want to do is scare the rat onto her bench.
I set my feet, lift my arm, hold my breath, and hurl the porcupine down at the rat. It glances off the bench and ricochets into the rat’s side. The rat squeaks, and then it scurries away, off into the darkness of the bushes behind me.
Aisha stirs. I see the whites of her eyes as she opens them. I’m looming above her, and she looks up at me and frowns. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry,” I say. “Go back to sleep.”
She sighs, closes her eyes, and turns over onto her side, pulling her foot off the ground.
When I feel safe enough to go back to my bench, I walk over and sit down, picking up the porcupine on the way. I take a deep breath. I hear no rats. I turn on my smartphone flashlight app and flash it into the bushes. I see no rats.
It’s pretty clear I won’t be closing my eyes tonight. Not gonna happen.
When my heartbeat calms, I go back to figuring out how we’re going to get the money we need. This … this isn’t suitable.
Oh, what the hell, I think. I close my eyes for a moment.
God,if you exist: Please give me an idea. If you’re so great, let’s see you do something for us to get us out of this shitstorm I created.
Amen.
I CAN’T BRING myself to wake Aisha for her turn at keeping watch. When the sun begins to rise, I haven’t slept a wink, yet I feel remarkably good for someone who just spent a night in the park and narrowly avoided a possibly rabid rat attack.
“Why’d you let me sleep?” Aisha sits up and stretches her arms above her head.
“I actually fell asleep,” I lie, and she gives me an admonishing look.
“Well, we survived, so that’s good,” she says. “We need about a hundred and fifty bucks to get my car, or we have about sixteen hours to figure out how to avoid sleeping in the park again.”
I shoot her a thumbs-up. Got it covered. Overnight, I came up with a plan. It may work, it may not, but we have at least a chance to make some of the money we need to get out of this mess.
I share my idea with Aisha. At first, she balks. When she can’t come up with a better idea, she decides to give it a try.
“Remember,” I say, as we take a bus to our destination. “The first rule is never deny my reality. And whatever you say, I won’t deny yours either.”
She raises one eyebrow. “We’re in Reno. We’re on a bus. Hard to deny that reality.”
We head for the Truckee River corridor — a shiny, recently renovated promenade overlooking the Truckee River. This is the best location for my plan, according to a site I found online. The sun is not fully up yet when we arrive, and the air is slightly chilly right off the river. To our right, a woman missing her right ear sells Native American jewelry off a red-and-blue blanket. To our left, a guy with a shaved head and huge cartoon sunglasses has set up an easel and starts hanging up caricatures he’s drawn in the past. We mark our space with the canvas bag, the Porcupine of Truth, and the satin pillow, and I find an aluminum tin lying behind a garbage can to use as a tip jar. I look over to show Aisha, but she’s fiddling with her phone. She must be looking for a response from her dad.
“Nothing?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Sorry,” I say.
“Yup.”
I wish there was something I could do to make Aisha’s life as awesome as it should be. If I could, I would. I give her a moment, and then I ask, “You ready for this?”
“No.”
“Me neither,” I say.
The temperature warms up, and a bunch of people come strolling down the street. I get myself ready. I wait for a couple of people to be near our area, and I start.
“Okay, okay,” I shout. “We are the improv comedy duo Cars-Isha. Can anyone please call out two professions?”
The two people who had been standing closest slip away.
“Tough crowd,” I mumble. “Two professions,” I repeat, louder.
People just walk by, ignoring me.
“Anyone? This is not rocket science. Just need two professions.”
“Shut up, fool,” someone yells, and when a few people laugh, my throat gets tight.
I shrug. “Something about your mom,” I yell back, and Aisha laughs behind me.
“Something about how she’s like a washing machine,” Aisha yells. “Except when I drop a load in a washing machine, it don’t follow me around for two weeks.”
I look back at her in amazement. Someone in the crowd whistles in appreciation. Some people have stopped in front of our little area.
“Something about how your mom is like a Putt-Putt course,” I say, and then I realize I have no punch line. So I play that up. “Um … something something driver?”
More whistles, and Aisha grabs my hand and lifts it over our heads. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are Cars-Isha,” she calls. “Half of our made-up-on-the-spot insults are great. Half not so much.”
I see that something’s happening. People are wandering over. I clap my hands together and jump out toward the front of our little area.
“Okay, so as I said before I was called a fool by the gentleman whose mom is a something of a whore, I need two jobs, please.”
“Prostitute,” says this caramel-skinned girl, college-aged, who has stopped to watch. Her accent sounds Latina. “Zombie killer.”
“Blow job,” some idiot guy in a suit yells out.
I riff back. “Now why is a blow job considered a job? A hand job — why is that considered work? Why is there no fuck job?” People are laughing now, and I feel the adrenaline pump into the backs of my knees.
“I know that’s work you ain’t ever gonna get,” Aisha says.
“Don’t I know it?” I say back. “Let’s just say I’m underemployed, ladies. Way underemployed.”
The Latina girl is smiling at me in this flirtatious way, and I have to look away so as to avoid boner town, population one.
“Okay, okay,” I say, feeling like a game show host. “I need a possible title of a book.”
“Hunger Games,” the Latina girl’s friend says.
“Oh-kay …” I say. “That’s like an actual book title. But I guess we can work with that. Can I get a genre? Like a movie genre?”
“Documentary,” a guy straddling a bicycle yells out. We’re beginning to attract a crowd.
I nod a few times, letting it sink in. For a moment I worry that Aisha won’t be able to do this. Then I realize I shouldn’t underestimate my friend. “All right,” I say. “Without further ado, I present to you a staged reading of the new movie, The Hunger Games: The Documentary. Performed by …” and I look at Aisha.
“Aisha Stinson, zombie killer,” she says, her voice deep and foreboding.
“Oh, come on,” I say, putting my hands on my hips and looking at her. “Isn’t it enough that I am completely undersexed in real life? Now I have to play a male hooker too?” Some of the audience laughs. I exaggeratedly roll my eyes. “Fine. Hi, my name is Carson, and I’m a male prostitute.”
We dive in, like we’ve done this a million times, even though we’ve never done it even once. Aisha sets up something about hungry zombies whose car breaks down in Reno, and they are desperate for human brains, and they need to figure out how to pay for a good brain meal before they starve to death. I dramatize the role of a naive male prostitute who happens to work the corner near where the zombies’ car broke down, and Aisha explains how the prostitute teams up with a zombie killer, because some of the prostitute’s clients have in the past turned out to be zombies. The story tosses and turns and soon it’s like a good song we’re creating, and I’m barely aware of the audience except that they’re there. We start by dramatizing the two roles, and soon we’re just telling a story with more characters and slipping in and out of our roles. We both choose the same funny parts for repetition as if it’s a chorus, and somehow Aisha circles back to the car breakdown. In the end, Aisha the zombie killer hides under the car at a service station and culls the zombies, using me the prostitute as bait. She cuts off a zombie’s head while he’s busy getting ready to chow down on me.