“Quite a few.” I couldn’t speak. “Big jobs.” There’s no funny or clever metaphor for what I was failing to do up there. I had lost my air of assumed normalness. I should’ve figured I’d flip out and written down every word. I was dying. I wanted to sit. I gritted my teeth and clenched my ass up and tried to go forward. “You’re smart.” I couldn’t breathe. “Very smart.” My small lungs shot puffs of white gas—performance anxiety. “An incredible guy.” The people closest to me looked as if an asteroid was coming over my shoulder and about to crush them. “Unfortunately, I’m blanking on some of your successes.” A couple of the smokers were laughing at me. Well, wouldn’t you? “I’m sure they’ll come to me in a moment.” I reached down and quietly drank an entire glass of water. “Why couldn’t I have been at some loser’s wedding now?” I said, to myself, out loud, into the microphone. “I wouldn’t have to remember so much.” Bob’s head looked like a fire engine, his nostrils flaring, and his glare made the noise of a fire engine horn. Niloo was grinning. “Can’t you stop and give somebody else a chance, for Christ’s sake?” I put the water down and gripped the mike stand. I’m going to faint, I thought. No. I’m going to explode from my bowels. And then I’ll faint.

It began as a queasy chuckle or two, and then the entire room erupted in a wave of laughter. In fact they’d been laughing for a while. All night everyone had been dying just to crack a smile—the natural tendency is to want to laugh at events like this—but no one had given them a chance. Now they had me: the buffoon. I pulled the mike from the stand and reached up to wipe the sweat off my face and they laughed at that too, the most uproarious laugh so far. What the hell?