Free The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel and Rick Moody

machine sizzled with static.
    “This next one is Eve’s favorite.”
    The product was a deep-penetrating epoxy sealer that you pumped into cracked cement to bind it into one integral piece again. The homeowner in the background eyeing his cracked sidewalk was Wesley’s former partner, Larry Banks. They split up a couple of years ago when Banks ran for mayor on the campaign platform “Anything You Want.”
    The machine jammed on the tagline “Cement cracks, this we know.”
     
    Wesley turned off the machine and opened the door. He asked the waitress for vodka.
    “I tell you about the night I met Banks?” he said. “My manager brought him to watch me work. Then after the show we all go to this Polynesian place to get stewed. Banks, he was just starting out, he orders this sissy drink for two, only he doesn’t realize it’s for two. So the waiter shows up with this washpan of rum, and Banks is all embarrassed and so on. I told him, comics can’t get embarrassed.”
    Wesley sat back down beside me and said it was time to change his life. He wanted to. “But how does a person start?”
    “Small,” I said. “Start small and work up. The way you would clean a house. You start in one room. Maybe you give yourself more time than you need to finish that room, just so you finish it. Then you go on to the next one. You start small, and then everything you do gets bigger.”
    I myself have never done it this way.
    “Of course, I could be different,” Wesley said. “Maybe everything I do will get smaller. On the other hand, there’s still the stage, you know—when it’s good up there, when I stand up there and have nothing to say but it has to work! It’s—being human on purpose, it’s falling back on the language in your mouth. It’s facing these people and saying, You think Jesus had it rough! Ah, when it’s good,” he said. “And when Evie’s good, too. When Evie’s there. In the night. Do you know what I’m saying?” he said. “Because she’s the one who is there in the night. Before her I had what you’d call contacts. Like the last one, this one that was hanging around one of the clubs—so I asked her if she’d like to go out. And she said she did. She said she wanted to go all the way out.”
    Wesley swallowed vodka.
    “Which is something I don’t even understand,” he said. “How about you? Did you ever want to die? I mean, try to make yourself die?”
    “Only once,” I said. “I drove my car real fast and I was going to have an accident but then I wasn’t going to.”
    “Well, not me, not ever,” Wesley said. “I sometimes think this is how depressed the people who commit suicide get. And then I thank God I’m a Leo.”
     
    An hour before the show, Eve met us in the bar. She looked good; Wesley said so, and everyone else noticed right along with him. Marzipan skin, white-blond hair that always looked backlit. Eve would look good in barbed wire.
    “God, my jeans are full of me,” Eve said, and undid a narrow snakeskin belt.
    A waitress came to our table and asked what could she get us.
    “I’m not drinking,” Eve said. “Just a 7UP.”
    The waitress asked if Sprite was okay.
    “No—then make it a Tab.”
    “Eve here used to live next door to the vice president of 7UP,” Wesley explained, “so she’s hip to lemon-lime drinks.”
    “So who’s here?” Eve said. “L.A.?”
    L.A. is any Hollywood agent who comes north to look at talent.
    “Supposed to be, but not,” Wesley said.
    “It’s just as well,” Eve said. “They’re such a tease. They fall all over you and then you never see them again.” She sighed. “Just like everybody else.”
    She touched Wesley’s shoulder, and he turned in his seat so that she could massage his neck with both hands.
    “She’s too good to me,” Wesley said.
    “Oh, I’m banking this,” Eve said. “I’m not just throwing it off a cliff.”
    A voice broke in behind them. “Who said comedians don’t have groupies.”
    It was