Hating you is my job

There were seventeen people in the audience. Four were on their phones. Two were asleep. One was making sustained, unblinking eye contact with me in a way that suggested he'd either fallen deeply in love with me or had recently suffered a medical event. And Marco — my manager, my champion, the man who'd once told me I was "genuinely almost ready for the next level" — was standing in the back corner of the room making a gesture with his hand that I recognized as the universal signal to wrap it up. We're bleeding here. Seventeen people. And I was losing the room. "So I told my therapist," I said into the mic, keeping my voice bright and loose like I wasn't watching the whole thing die in real time, "I said, 'I think I've developed abandonment issues.' And she said, 'Maya, I've had to reschedule our last four appointments.' And I said, 'I know. I know you have. I know.'" Table three laughed. Genuinely. Two people, maybe three if you counted the woman who made a sound that could have been laughter or a very polite cough. I counted it. "Thank you," I said, to the laugh and also to the cough, and honestly to the guy possibly having the medical event because he was still looking at me and at this point his attention was load-bearing. "You're a beautiful audience." This was a lie. But I've been telling beautiful lies into microphones since I was twenty-two, and now my face doesn't even know it's doing it. The Velvet Anchor was not the kind of venue that launched careers. It was the kind of venue that extended them on life support for slightly longer than was medically advisable — a sixty-seat comedy club in the Tenderloin that smelled like spilled beer and optimism from 2019, with exposed brick that someone had decided was "atmospheric" and lighting that was specifically engineered to make everyone look like they were confessing to something. The stage was elevated exactly four inches above the floor, which meant I was technically performing above my audience without actually being above anything. I had been performing at the Velvet Anchor for three years. This fact, I tried not to think about it directly. I wrapped up my set with the bit about my mother's approach to emotional support (which is to say: she expresses love exclusively through asking if I've eaten and pointing out that my cousin Kevin has a dental practice now), and I got my applause — genuine, if modest, a B-minus of a sound — and I stepped off the stage and handed the mic back to the house emcee and I smiled at everyone who looked at me. I was very good at smiling. "And that was Maya Chan, everyone!" The emcee's voice followed me toward the back hallway. "Maya Chan, folks, she'll be here through—" He checked something. There was a pause. "—she'll be here tonight," he finished, which was how I learned that Marco had already made the call. I found Jade at the bar. She was exactly where she was always after my sets — perched on the corner stool, her dark curly hair piled on top of her head in a way that should have looked chaotic but somehow looked like a choice, nursing something with a little paper umbrella in it. She'd been coming to my shows since before I was funny. She'd been coming since the period I privately referred to as the Dark Times, when my jokes were more confessional than comedic, and I once made an entire room of strangers uncomfortable for eleven minutes by accident. She was my best friend and my most loyal audience member and occasionally my emergency contact, and when I dropped onto the stool beside her, and she didn't say anything immediately, I knew she'd heard the emcee's announcement too. She slid a drink in front of me. Something amber and no-nonsense. "The universe," she said, carefully, "is testing you." "The universe," I said, and drank half of it, "needs to develop a different hobby." "I'm serious. Mercury's in retrograde and your Saturn return isn't fully—" "Jade." "Right. Okay." She picked up her umbrella drink. "Do you want to talk about it?" "There's nothing to talk about." I set the glass down. "Marco's cutting my slots. The new booker at Cobb's passed on my demo. I've got seventeen dollars in my checking account until Thursday and approximately zero momentum in the direction of anything I could call a career, and tonight a man may have died watching me perform." I paused. "It's all fine. I'm processing it with humor, which my therapist says is a coping mechanism but which I prefer to think of as a personality." Jade was quiet for a moment. This was unusual. Jade was almost never quiet. Her default volume was slightly too loud for indoor spaces and her conversational style was best described as enthusiastic improvisation. The quiet meant she was choosing words, which meant the words would matter. "You know what I think?" she said. "Is it about chakras?" "It's not about chakras." "Mercury?" "Maya." I looked at her. "You're really good," she said. Simply. Without the softening qualifiers, she usually wrapped around true things. "You're genuinely really good and this room is too small for you and I think you know that and I think knowing it without being able to do anything about it is making you perform at people instead of for them, and the audience can feel it even if they can't name it." The amber drink was very interesting suddenly. Very worth looking at. "That was," I said, after a moment, "concerningly perceptive." "I pay attention." She shrugged and picked up her little paper umbrella again, twirling it between her fingers. "The universe was just a warm-up observation. That one was me." I didn't know what to do with it — the thing she'd said — so I did what I always do with true things that I'm not ready to carry yet: I folded it up and put it somewhere internal and small, and I flagged it for later, and I ordered another drink. "I'll figure it out," I said. She nodded, like she knew this, like she was just waiting for me to remember it.