Read the Room

The kid on stage was twenty-six and doing a Tinder bit for a crowd that thought Tinder was something you used to start a campfire, and he was killing it, which told me everything I needed to know about this room.

His name was Brennan. He was doing the thing every twenty-something does at an open mic, which is treating dating like a spectator sport and expecting the audience to find the play-by-play hilarious. He got laughs. He was going to be fine. The retired math teacher before him did a colonoscopy bit that was better than it sounds (good timing, decent closer), and the woman before that read a poem about her garden that was definitely not comedy but got polite applause, because this was Fairhaven and people clapped for effort.

I was going to be slot seven.

Slot seven is the dignified slot. It says you’re not desperate but you did get here early, which if you think about it is the same thing wearing a nicer shirt. I sat in the second row and rewrote my opening in my head twice and drank the water someone handed me when I walked in. I counted the laughs per minute on Glenn’s set, because that’s what I do. I count. I time. I watch what the room does with its hands when it’s not sure if something is funny yet. The garden-poem lady got a cough-laugh from the man in the third row, which is the laugh people do when they feel like they should be laughing but aren’t sure at what, and two genuine smiles from the retirees who probably knew her.

Four days in Fairhaven. The house came with a dog named Percy who wanted nothing to do with me and a kitchen that smelled like someone else’s life, and after three nights of sitting in it alone I saw a sign in the bookstore window that said OPEN MIC NIGHT: ALL WELCOME, EVEN YOU. I took this personally, because I take everything personally, including signs, weather patterns, and the way the dog looks at me when I eat cereal over the sink. The kid working the register said the open mic was “pretty chill,” which is what people say about things that are not chill but are at least not on fire.

The room was the kind of room you’d expect in the back of a bookstore in a small town. Folding chairs. Christmas lights stapled to the ceiling, which gave everything the feeling of a birthday party in a storage unit. A mic stand that was either vintage or just old. Someone propped the storeroom door open with a brick, and you could see stacks of unshelved paperbacks behind it like a reading list someone gave up on.

The crowd was maybe thirty people. There were retirees who came for the community and stayed for the cookies, two college-age kids radiating complicated energy at each other from opposite ends of the same row, a woman in the third row taking pictures of everything for very committed reasons, and a couple on what looked like a first date. The first-date couple was leaning toward each other in a way that meant either this was going really well or one of them was about to excuse themselves to the bathroom and never come back. I gave it seventy-thirty in favor of going well. He laughed at her jokes. She kept touching his sleeve. These were good signs, unless you were a comedian, in which case they were two people who weren’t watching the stage.

And a man in the back by the storeroom door. He had a tool bag at his feet, a cup of coffee he wasn’t drinking, and a face I could not read, which almost never happens, because I can read every room I walk into. That’s the whole skill. That’s the whole act. Thirty years of walking into rooms and knowing, within ten seconds, who was going to laugh, who was going to try not to, and who was going to wish they were somewhere else. This man looked like he was exactly where he intended to be and did not care what anyone thought about it.

He wasn’t laughing at anything. Not Glenn’s colonoscopy, not the garden poem, not Brennan. Nobody got the man in the back.