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Toby nudges him into it, and Richie, half-cut, jumps up on stage.
‘What do you call a Tyrannosaurus-Rex working in a tea shop? A tea rex!’
People groan. Someone might even throw something. Toby grins at him from the front row, raises a beer, and his eyes sparkle. Richie looks back at him and feels something. Really feels it. The feeling brings up warm brown eyes and a bad broken arm for just a second, before it disappears again.
Richie tells another stupid knock-knock joke, gets shouted off the stage, and accepts Toby’s arm round his shoulder.
‘You did great, Rich! Can’t believe you write your own material,’
‘Shut the fuck up, Tobes,’ he says, smiling. He likes this feeling.
Maybe if he gets up there tomorrow, Toby will smile at him again.
-
Richie looks up at his manager, who’s staring at him like he’s insane.
‘What, you’re gonna go on stage with that?’
‘Uh, yeah,’ says Richie, putting on a Cowboy Voice, ‘it’s diddly darn rootin-tootin awesome!’
Lewis’ face says different. He sighs, and his lips curl in a pitying way that rankles, flush under Richie's skin.
‘It’s not funny, Richie. Believe me, I’ve been in the business twenty years, and this shit,’ he gestures derogatorily with his cigarette, ‘ain’t funny. Now, take a look at this-‘
He tosses a script at Richie across the table. Richie scans the page. Dick jokes. Vagina jokes. ‘your mom’ jokes. Richie’s kind of stuff, sure. But not funny. Not his kind of funny. Drunk frat boy funny. He thought he’d moved past that in college. He’s about to say as much when-
‘Colin Crane wrote this. Emmy-award nominated Colin Crane. Say this into the mike, and you’ll never be off stage. Promise.’
Richie looks up at Lewis’ chubby, smirking face. Thinks of saying things that really will make people laugh, not just roll their eyes and tell him ‘beep-beep’. Beep-beep? Where the hell did that come from?
‘Okay.’ He says. ‘Okay, I’ll try it.’
‘You won’t regret it, Richie.’
-
He does. He really does. After the first Netflix special he tries to raise the idea of him writing his own stuff again, but it’s a straight no. Everything is vetoed, even the Voices. Especially the Voices.
At an afterparty for some up and coming little bastard Richie gets too drunk and lies on his front, phone notes open, trying to write something down. Something really funny. Something that happened to him when he was a kid- someone falling over with a splash and after a moment of concern Richie absolutely pissing himself with laughter, convinced that this was the funniest fucking thing they'd ever seen, that’s the face your mom pulls when she falls onto my dick-
Halfway through writing it, Richie passes out.
-
Being back in Derry is weird. Even excepting the clown, and the fact that Stan’s not there, and suddenly he can remember having friends and not hangers-on.
The streets look the same but different. It feels like he’s viewing them through a haze that clogs up what’s happening now with faint memories. He keeps seeing street corners and wanting to write down what happened there in case he forgets again. He starts writing jokes about them. Really funny, proper beep-beep stuff, heads above what he was doing before.
He tells one of them to Eddie one night before they go to bed, and Eddie does that unattractive snort that makes Richie’s heart leap and sink at the same time, because he knows he can’t have him. It gets him down.
It’s the perfect topic for comedy though. A sad forty year old man lusting over the most neurotic bastard he knows- what could be better?
He’ll leave out directly who it refers to when he tells Eddie, of course. Eddie’s always been his best springboard for jokes- whatever really riles Eddie up is fucking funny.
Of course, he never gets the chance to tell him.
He never gets the chance to tell Eddie a lot of things.
-
Richie is carving out two initials in wood and a whole book in his head.
E + R is not a lot for a guy like Eddie. Not even for a guy like Richie.
Richie thinks of it as his own memorial in a way, as much as it is Eddie’s. The memorial of someone too afraid to write, to tell his boss what he wanted to do, to own his success as something that was his, from him, not some jumpy New Yorker. Of someone who waited decades to tell someone else that he loved him but couldn’t. Of someone who wanted something he’d forgotten.
Richie goes back to the hotel room, gets out a good old fashioned notebook and pen, and writes.