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“Guys, I really don’t want to do this,” Buck groans, hands trembling at his sides.
There’s a collective sigh from the group, all exchanging half-pitying glances and half-concealed laughs from their spots around the bar table. It’s kind of suffocating, the air in the place—dingy, dim. Doesn’t make Buck’s attempts at soothing breath exercises any easier.
The table they sit at is off-kilter, teetering precariously as Chim slaps his hands on it.
“Too bad, Buckaroo. You’re the biggest loser! We all agreed on the punishment before the season, so you can’t back out now,” he sings, his obvious glee at Buck’s discomfort only making Buck more desperate.
He shoots a pleading look to Eddie, his last resort at gaining sympathy.
“Don’t look at me,” Eddie scoffs, leaning back and throwing his hands up. “Though if it were me, I’d be begging the same way. I don’t envy you. Besides, I told you not to draft Rodgers. This is payback.”
“Really, Eddie? You’re ‘I told you so’-ing me right now? I know, okay! Sue me for loving a comeback story,” Buck laments.
Sweat is pooling on his brow, nervous jitters jolting through his body as he looks up at his graveyard. The stage is lit purple, spotlights generating a buzz of stifling heat and electricity around the black backdrop. It’s a coffin, waiting open for him.
“This is humiliating. I’m gonna puke up there.”
Hen rests a hand on his shoulder.
“You’ll be fine, Buck. It’s only five minutes.”
“Five minutes is a long time!” he squeals, or maybe whines. His voice comes out far too high and cracks halfway through, making Chim snort—though at Buck’s petulant glare he plays it off like he was choking on his drink.
“Chim’s right. We all agreed,” she shrugs, continuing. “Loser of the fantasy football league has to do a five-minute standup set.”
“It’s in writing,” Chim stage-whispers.
“Not helping,” she says, flicking his forehead. “It’ll go by fast once you’re up there.”
“I hate all of you,” Buck spits.
He turns to Eddie, pointing a finger against his chest. “Especially you.”
“Me?! Why me? At least I actually feel bad for you.”
“Because, if you had benched Jahmyr Gibbs in that last game like I asked—"
“Woah! Collusion!” Chim yells in outrage. “I knew it!”
“Fuck off, Chimney,” Buck swats a dismissive hand at him, waving him off like a pesky fly whizzing past his ear. “If you had benched him, I could’ve won that last game, and we both would’ve been safe!”
“What, and make Harry the loser? He’s a kid!” Eddie argues.
“So?! He joined the league willingly. He’s also basically eighteen and agreed to the punishment, might I add.”
“Probably not the strongest point for you to hammer home, Buck,” Hen, rather unhelpfully, supplies.
“Whatever. This is all Eddie’s fault,” he groans.
Eddie rolls his eyes, not even entertaining the blame. Buck continues to bicker under his breath, to no one in particular, until a loud screech echoes through the bar. A woman taps the microphone on the stage, grimacing apologetically at the feedback.
“Sorry about that, folks! It’s eight o’clock, so we’re going to get started!”
For all the lack of before, sympathy starts flooding when the group’s eyes settle on Buck at the announcement. He’s practically green in the face, clutching his hands into fists and sweating through his shirt.
“Our first guest tonight is…” she starts, pausing to flip through the sign-up sheet, the 118 sitting with bated breath while she fingers over the list. “Ah, here we go! First up is Jake—”
Resounding sigh of relief. Buck tunes out immediately when his name doesn’t echo through the small underground dive, turning his attention to much more pressing matters.
“You’re buying me a shot,” he nudges Eddie pointedly as the first victim—comic, Jake—makes his way to the microphone.
Unimpressed stare. “Do you think that’ll help?”
“You’re buying me several shots,” he corrects, then shrugs. “Can’t be as bad if I don’t remember any of it.”
“Could be as bad if you actually puke,” Eddie reasons.
Chimney tsks beside them, shaking his head at Buck’s naivete.
“Video proof will exist to forever remind you, even if you black out up there.”
“Hey, recording the set was never part of the deal!” he protests. “Aren’t you such a stickler for our written rules,” Buck mocks, complete with air quotes and all.
“It’s not not in our rules. It doesn’t say we can’t film it to blackmail you for the rest of your sorry, pathetic, fantasy football-losing life.”
“I’m gonna kill you. Eddie, I’m seriously going to kill him.”
“Your sister might have something to say about that, Evan,” Chim teases, unaffected.
“Oh yeah, Howard?” Buck lashes back, looking dangerously close to squaring up.
“Chim, lay off it,” Eddie finally steps in. His tone goes soft when he leans towards Buck. “You’re gonna be fine. It’s only five minutes, and there’s hardly anyone here anyway.”
He’s mostly right, to be fair—the bar is small to begin with, but with the 118 occupying one of the biggest tables, only ten remain, six of which are populated with at-most three onlookers. Twenty people bearing witness to his complete and utter self-combustion, though, is still twenty too many.
“C’mon,” Eddie sighs, placing a guiding hand on Buck’s back. “Let’s go get you a shot.”
The bar sits in the back of the space, with sticky counters and no discernible menu anywhere. Eddie mumbles to the bartender that he’ll take whatever’s on draft and nods to Buck when he asks for three tequila shots.
“Three? Fuck, Eddie, you could just say I’m gonna bomb up there.”
“One’s for me, moron.”
Buck is slowly deflating next to him; if the current comedian wasn’t yelling into the microphone, he’d be able to hear the quiet whine of it, like releasing the seal of a balloon to fizzle aimlessly through the air until it inevitably falls to its latex death. The latex death, in this case, being Buck’s untimely demise from embarrassment. The last thing Buck wants is his epigraph to read: so painfully unfunny it killed him.
As if Eddie could read his mind, he continues.
“You’re not gonna bomb, Buck.”
Buck shoots him a challenging glare, so quintessentially Buck—his cocked eyebrow and disbelieving frown—that Eddie has to relent.
“Okay, or even if you do bomb. It’s a few minutes. You’ll never see any of these people again.”
“I’ll see you guys again. Everyday pretty much, presumably for the rest of my ‘sorry, fantasy football-losing life.’”
“Well if Chim tries to show the video to anyone, or use it for blackmail, I’ll punch him.”
Buck softens, laughing a little at Eddie’s seriousness.
“You will?”
“Yes, Buck, I will. Feel better?”
He nods, throwing back the first of the shots that gets set in front of them. On the second, he waits for Eddie to grab his matching glass, priming the lime slice in his right hand, wrestling the bend of his arm around Eddie’s to honor shot-taking tradition.
“To punching Chim,” Buck toasts, a shaky exhale hardly masking his nerves.
Eddie rolls his eyes, bumping his elbow against Buck where their arms are looped.
“To being okay. And maybe punching Chimney. Only if he deserves it.”
“He does.”
The shot goes down smooth, lime bitter on his lips as the liquid settles warmly in his veins. He tries to gaslight himself into believing it was spiked with Xanax, hoping to placebo-effect himself into not having a panic attack.
Ten minutes later, the dumbass strategy has either worked and he’s bought in to the false narrative of tequila’s benzodiazepine effects, or Buck is officially too old to be drinking two shots back-to-back and is drunk already. Whichever it is, Buck isn’t complaining—his name gets called, static surrounding the syllables of ‘Evan Buckley’ from the host’s voice, and he doesn’t start hyperventilating. That is a small miracle, based on the anxiety crawling all the way up his neck when he first stepped foot into the bar.
His legs still wobble when he stands, but Eddie steadies him with a hand on his back.
“You got this. You’re gonna be fine. Five minutes, that’s it.”
“Set a timer?” Buck asks, pulling a small notepad from his jacket pocket.
Eddie nods, grabs his phone, and opens the clock app to show proof.
“I’ll start it as soon as you get up there.”
Buck managed to tune the rest of the crew out as he let Eddie help calm him, but with his first steps away from the table towards his inevitable doom, the noise comes flooding back. Chimney is whooping, Hen whistling through clasped fingers. He hears the muffled entrance of Bobby and Athena, taking seats next to Eddie, asking, “Did we miss anything?”
“Just a nervous breakdown,” Chimney laughs. “You’re just in time.”
Buck steps onto the stage with jello-legs, jello-arms, jello-pretty-much-everything. He’s never been one to shy away from attention, but the spotlight burning him like hellfire, the stagnant air of a dead crowd, and the staginess of it all is crippling. He loves being the center of attention spontaneously, or the object of praise, sure. But the high possibility of filmed, public rejection that he’s been coerced into participating in is not that. He hates this. He hates it. He would rather die. He’d rather write a letter to Chimney admitting defeat and pledging that Chimney is the ultimate champion of all things fantasy football related for the next decade to avoid this, despite the sour taste that leaves on his tongue just thinking about it.
Then he sees Eddie, holding up the unclicked timer, mouthing, “Just breathe.” He relies on the tequila coursing through him like a crutch. Takes a breath. Lets it out. Starts his humiliation ritual.
“Hi. I’m, uh…I’m Buck.” Eddie starts the timer.
“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be telling you this, but I’m only here as a punishment for losing my fantasy football league.”
Surprisingly, a few guys, retired frat boy-esque and probably in their thirties (prime fantasy football demo, so maybe it does add up), chuckle a little at that.
“So I’m sorry if these next five minutes are torture for you. But I promise, however bad it is down there, it’s worse up here for me.”
Another few scattered polite laughs. Eddie is smiling up at him; he chooses to focus on that. Probably down to 4:38 by now.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to tell knock-knock jokes at stand-up, otherwise I would’ve written down twenty of those and been done with this. But uh, I didn’t do that. Though either way, if this set is anything like my fantasy team…it’s really gonna suck.”
4:25. Eddie’s still grinning. Buck knows that look from watching Eddie go to countless art shows and band concerts and chess tournaments for Christopher over the years; he’s proud. Buck doesn’t think he’s earned that look yet—there’s still four minutes of time where he can fuck this up tremendously. Somehow, still, that look makes him think it might be okay.
Maybe. Possibly.
Another wave of nausea hits him suddenly, a bead of sweat drips onto his eyelashes.
Probably not.
“So, I’m a firefighter. LAFD,” he starts, fumbling open his script.
Chim hoots and hollers from the table, a deafening shout of ‘Yeah, 118!’ in the near-silence of the hesitant crowd.
“We have to stay really up to date with the news. Half the time we find out something’s happening because we’re called to the scene, but the other half we just watch on the TV at the station. The other day we’re watching, and I realized…I, uh, think LA is turning into a Native American reservation,” Buck mumbles into the mic, hands shaking around his little notepad.
He can’t see too much of the crowd with the spotlights blinding him, but from the palpable tension in the room he’s pretty sure they’re either very confused or worried they’re in for five minutes of blatant racism.
“I was watching, and they interviewed a guy named Chief Meteorologist.”
3:45. Bobby snorts, putting a hand to his forehead like he does when he’s fed up with Buck’s antics. Buck is counting the sound as a laugh in his book, so there’s a small win. Eddie kinda-laughs, a short puff of air, and Buck hears a couple similar reactions throughout the space.
So, not a total bomb. It maybe adds up to one total, full laugh between all the collective exhalations. One laugh is better than none. Definitely better than he was expecting.
“I have a lot of respect for Indigenous culture. Indigenous peoples anywhere, really. Ancient cultures, too. I love learning about stuff like that. Y’know their traditions, ceremonies…especially their sayings. A lot of them have just become common phrases, which is awesome. Some I don’t get, though.
“Like that old Chinese proverb, ‘give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day’…I mean, that fish must be huge.”
And Eddie—despite himself and everything he stands for—can’t help but laugh. More out of sheer shock at the stupid joke than anything, and a somewhat blind love for anything Buck does, but it is a laugh. It turns slightly hysterical after a few seconds, to the point where Chim is hopeless to resist giggling beside him, and Hen nearly sends beer out of her nose.
The rest of the audience is laughing, too; granted, not as insanely as Eddie, but they’re definitely semi-bought in.
It’s clear, the moment Buck realizes. 2:55. Almost halfway done, and he’s not completely wishing he could melt into the floor. It’s actually, surprisingly…not a total disaster.
By the time the clock is counting down to his last minute, he’s gotten several more laughs and cheers from the small crowd. Eddie has been smiling the whole time, and Buck is laser focused on that look—seeing Eddie watch him, beaming, makes him feel like he hung the moon, or at least like Eddie thinks he hung the moon. Both ways, the feeling is just as good.
“Thanks for putting up with my stupidity for the past few minutes. No offense, but I’m, uh, kinda hoping never to be back here again,” he huffs. “We’ll have to see, though. I don’t always learn from my mistakes. If I go 3-12 again, I’ll see you all next year. Thanks for not booing me off the stage.”
The timer hits 0:00 as Buck places the mic back on its stand, basking in the relief of the zeroed clock and the modest applause narrating his walk back to the table.
“Told’ya you wouldn’t bomb,” Eddie gloats, patting him on the back as he sits.
“Yeah, yeah. It could’ve been worse, I guess.”
“I’m disappointed,” Chim laments, raising his fists like he’s trying to curse some higher power. “Thought I was going to have blackmail material for life, Buckley. For life. I can’t extort you with a video of you being somewhat funny.”
“You’ll just never beat me,” Buck levels, surely cockier than he has any right to be. Sue him, he’s proud for making it through mostly unscathed. “Maybe I’ve found my new calling,” he hums, self-satisfied from the bitter look Chim wears.
“I…wouldn’t quit your day job, kid,” Bobby says, gently easing Buck’s ego back to Earth. “But as far as punishments go, you made out pretty well.”
“Also,” Chim interjects. “Let the records show I definitely will beat you. Have beaten you. Exhibit A: the league that got you into this in the first place.”
“Well, I did learn one lesson at least,” he admits, shrugging under Eddie’s grip on his shoulder. “Definitely not drafting Aaron Rodgers next year.”
“Probably just someone else who has no shot,” Eddie quips back. “You’ll have the first pick, as the reigning loser. Choose wisely.”
“Will do,” Buck mock salutes the table, taking a sip of the beer that Eddie had waiting for him.
“Christian McCaffrey first overall. Can’t go wrong with that.”
Chimney still looks painfully exasperated and unfulfilled, but he raises his glass to cheers Buck’s bottle anyway, the rest of the table following suit.
Buck shouldn’t be surprised, really, when the league starts up again the next fall, and his ‘can’t go wrong’, sure-shot, first-round pick Christian McCaffrey misses the entire season on injured reserve. Punishment gets switched to karaoke—a song of the winner’s choosing—so he also shouldn’t be surprised that Maddie informed Chim about his inability to hit a single note in Eye of the Tiger. Eddie has to try much harder to look supportive through that performance, and he does punch Chim (just lightly, he promises) when Chimney tries to pull out his phone to capture his much-awaited blackmail material.