Vesti La Giubba
My wife and I went to see a comedian for our 17th anniversary. We left the kids at home by themselves, the eldest being sixteen and able to watch the younger two. We dressed in our finest wools, satins, and expensive perfumes, though the show was in a bar-style comedy club. The comedian was a cynical Fred Stoller type, so banal we assumed he was putting on an act. It wouldn’t have made sense for someone like that to be so funny. He talked about suicide, a choice that made the crowd go quiet with uneasy anticipation.
“Suicide. Sometimes I’ll get so depressed, I don’t even wanna commit suicide. I lay in bed, thinkin’, ‘What should I do today? Should I commit suicide?’ Ehh, not worth the effort.’”
I laughed from within my whiskey glass. I remembered how I used to feel that way, and now I had my young kids, my pretty wife, my easy job. After the show ended, my wife and I stayed for another drink. We left soon after finishing our drinks and paying our tab.
A few months after the show, my wife dropped a newspaper on the table, flipped to an article in the culture section: the comedian had committed suicide. He’d driven into a wall at a hundred miles an hour. His car had crumpled like the bellows of an accordion, and he had died on impact. My wife looked at me, chewing on her lip, pulling at the lines on her face: “I don’t know,” she said, “should we be proud?”
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