Sam Tallent's Running the Light: Tale of a god-gifted comedian masquerading as joker and joke

Irish Times

2 days ago

Running the Light
Author
:
Sam Tallent
ISBN-13
:
978-1399632898
Publisher
:
White Rabbit
Guideline Price
:
£20
Writing tutors call it subcultural insider information. Anthony Bourdain blew the lid off the psychic cesspit of restaurant back rooms with Kitchen Confidential. FX Toole exposed all the dirty tricks employed by fight corner cut-men in his short story collection Rope Burns. Now we have comedian Sam Tallent's fictional tell-all Running the Light.
If Bourdain's first readers and champions were fellow line cooks, Tallent's original audience was his peers. Running the Light's original incarnation was as an online venture, self-published in May 2020, as Covid snuffed out the last lights of the live circuit. Five years later, White Rabbit are publishing it in physical form. The lag is fortunate.
Half a decade ago, the culture was still too censorious and self-righteous to tolerate such a spiritually rotten protagonist as Billy Ray Schafer. We're not talking Richard Pryor or Bill Hicks here. This is the tale of a god-gifted but ageing, violent, alcoholic, drug-addicted comedian masquerading as joker and joke, running on a misery wheel of airport bars, rental cars and cheap hotel rooms for 200 days of the year, solitary but always in service, numbing the ghosts with coke, smokes and booze.
Schafer's existence is a netherworld of strip mall Bud bars, of one-nighters spent acting as dancing monkey for good old boys in the secret sanctums of country club back rooms, slouching onstage after terminal cancer testifiers and geek show hucksters peddling duck shit bingo.
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All this would be pointless degradation without the redemptive factor of the craft. Tallent writes exceptionally well about the grind, yes, but also the reason for the grind, the daylong gravitational pull towards showtime, the controlled ordeal of the gig, the large adrenaline spike followed by hours drinking with anyone who'll stand your company, squalid episodes in public restrooms, the desperate lengths the solitary comedian will go to in order to avoid the hollow comedown of returning to an empty hotel room, snorting alone, drinking alone, afraid to face the phantoms of betrayed ex-wives and the contempt of estranged sons.
Tallent writes: 'When he was young he could take off on a premise running only to catch up to his own flight of imagination sixty minutes later, his clothes soaked and the air itself crackling with the urgency of what he'd done. Those days were gone, but even drunk and coked and spun and pilled, he still killed harder than the reductive drivel being peddled in theaters and arenas by the skeletons he envied. Despite his failures with sobriety, monogamy, business and fatherhood, he was still funny, and funny is the hardest thing to be.'
But this flimsy bravado is laced with toxic self-disgust. This is not Bukowski-lite. The performer's psyche is conveyed here as a volatile cocktail of ego and fragility, a queasy bipolar roundabout of gut-level sadness balanced by resilience: Schafer's kindred are Bad Blake in Thomas Cobb's Crazy Heart or Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, the modern day equivalents of washed-up pugs looking for one last pay-day, or the old pro too old to rock 'n' roll and too young to die.
The only deliverance to be found is in love or family, but it's too late for that. Billy Ray's sins are not too grievous to be forgiven by others, but by himself. As he drives across the southwest over the course of the week that maps this book's plunging narrative arc, he penetrates deeper into America's Heart of Darkness, yes, but also an internal wasteland. He's done hard time for the worst of crimes, but he's too institutionalised to leave the prison of his soul, choking on his own one-liners, the smile becomes a rictus grin.
The bottom-out, when it comes, is horrific. Thrown down among the transients, wandering the streets of Denver, he witnesses the entropic pageantry of the 5th Annual Zombie Crawl:
'He had never heard of such a thing but it made sense. As a species, humankind was bored and increasingly bullshit passed for fun. Their mirth disgusted him. Their happiness was ostracizing. Numb to inorganic novelty, he pitied them their false calamity. Their lives – staid, monotonous – were so safe and predictable these people were forced to organise chaos and pretend they were dead. It was disappointing, For a moment he thought he'd made it to Armageddon.'
Running the Light is Dante as gag-artist, trapped in a Diabolical Comedy. Or maybe, in the end, a disgraced Odysseus searching for a way back home to contrition and forgiveness. Read it and weep. I did, through my fingers.
Peter Murphy is a writer, journalist and spoken word artist. He records and performs under the name Cursed Murphy