#like. No one gets to judge my love of horror but true crime stans least of all

[raceydays-hopelesshaze]

I don’t think people that consume a lot of true crime content get to judge my fascination with horror movies

[lobanri]

i wrote a -shitty, tbh, but it wouldn’t stop haunting my shower time- richie tozier’s stand up post-canon thing, on a everyone lives au. i lost the thread a bit near the end, so i’m putting it up here and maybe i’ll post it on ao3 at some point. enjoy.

-

So I’m guessing- and I’m probably right, which is decidedly not how my guesses tend to go- that a lot of you came here to see if I could offer a better explanation than the tabloids about what happened last show, because (voice changes to a higher pitched, mocking voice): ‘Richie, what the genuine fuck was that’, (voice switches back.) right?

Well gee! Am I ever here to answer. And also maybe to give a stand-up performance whose entire script I threw out in favour of, like, maybe four jokes I scraped together with what’s left of my brain.

But! Explanation first. 

Okay. (short pause.) So. Imagine you’re me, the fantastic -that’s a joke in itself, right there- Richie ‘Trashmouth’ Tozier. You’re about to go out and perform in front of, okay, maybe not that many people, but still a good number, and you’re like, only a bit nervous. And then.

You get a phone call. 

It’s an unknown number. It says so, right there on the screen of your phone that’s all smudged and disgusting and maybe a little bit cracked ‘cause you keep dropping it doing dumb shit.

(again, his voice changes to a higher pitched, mocking voice)

“Oh Richie, was it someone you knew?” (voice switches back.) Of course not, dumbass, that’s why I said unknown. Duh. 

But on with the tale. 

Now, am I the type of person that answers unknown numbers? Normally, no. If your phone got stolen and you’ve ever called me from a burrowed phone about it, now you know why nobody picked up. But remember, I was about to go out into the level of hell that is an audience- not that I don't love it, I do, but being stared, and occasionally laughed at for around an hour is not what most people find a relaxing afternoon experience. 

So I picked up. Thought it’d maybe be a wrong number that would leave the other person feeling very awkward and me only slightly less so. Maybe I’d get an idea for a joke, who knows.

Suffice to say, given the whole clusterfuck that was my last show, it wasn’t a wrong number.

I pick up. I go, “Hello, who is this?”, because that’s what you say when you answer a call.

The other dude goes “Hi Richie, it’s Mike.”

In my head, I go ‘oh’. So first, apparently this is not a wrong number! Second, Mike? I don’t know any Mikes, who’s Mike?

Third, I go “Oh, shit.”

Now, have you ever noticed that a lot of comedians talk about their childhoods a lot? I’ve realized that they do this for one of three reasons; either their parents are funny, they had very fun childhoods, or they had a lot of therapy. I don’t talk about my childhood because none of those applied to me, and also because I repressed like a full 90% of it from trauma. I now have a therapist, which means I can tell you people some of it. Also because most of it came back from repression-land right there and then, because turns out I do in fact know a Mike!

Mike my childhood friend! From my childhood gang!

...The same childhood I happily repressed for twenty seven years, in fact.

Mostly from trauma.

Now you might realize that it’s literally two minutes until I have to go out in front of all you lovely judging strangers who have expectations of me already!

I certainly did. So did my agent- lovely man, genuinely hates me so much- who nevertheless had to send me out like some poor lost lamb sent to be sacrificed at the altar. So I come out- not in that way, but keep tuned to that- 

Oh wow that was loud. We’ll get to that, don’t you worry. Now that’s going to be fun. If you haven’t seen Twitter, have fun figuring this out.

But let’s try to keep this mess chronological -big word for me, I know, I stole it off some other guy.

I come out, and then I can’t remember my joke, and I can’t remember my name, and I don’t remember where I am, but turns out I can remember the time my friends and I found a corpse!

So anyway, I puke on stage.

Glamorous way to end a show, I know, but in my defense I was pretty busy. 

I’d like to make a segue here- who here grew up in a small town?

Yeah? Okay, this entire bit is for y’all. The rest of you big city folk can just check your phones or whatever.

So I grew up in a small town in Maine, called Derry. Pretty quaint, didn’t have much, there was one arcade, one pharmacy owned by a pedophile, one old abandoned -extremely haunted- crack house, and like a couple tiny stores. My friends and I used to hang out at the quarry and at that same old house, which was cool at the time and gross in hindsight.

I’ll tell you what it’s most known for; it’s the child murder capitol of the entire United States.

Oh, that’s some silence there. Are you perhaps uncomfortable? Maybe wondering if you heard that right? I’ll repeat it louder then.

IT WAS THE CHILD. MURDER. CAPITOL. 

OF THE ENTIRE UNITED STATES.

AND I GREW UP THERE.  A CHILD.

Is it clearer now why I repressed that entire experience?

So. Derry. Terrible, terrible, racist, homophobic, sexist Derry. Would I have loved to never go back? Yeah, of course. Who would?

This idiot. And his entire gang of childhood friends. Because Mike called us and went ‘Hey, could you guys come back? It’s important.’ And we went, because Mikey literally never asks for shit, so clearly this was going to be terrible. If Mike was on fire, I’m pretty sure he’d take care of it and then never mention it again.

I’ve mentioned the others a couple of times before- of course, Mike, who’s a librarian in Derry- or was, but that’s later. But, there are seven of us in our little Loser’s Club! That is the actual name, by the way. Seven Losers.

 Even if Stan made us think that was wrong, because while my reaction to remembering Derry was to puke, his was to fake his death. Yes. If you can believe it, he literally fucking faked his death to get out of that reunion.

I’ll move on a bit so I don’t spend the rest of the show dissing Stan the Man and his extreme as fuck reactions- would you believe that this man is an accountant? Like, what the fuck? Now whenever I see an accountant I wonder if they’re the type of person that would fake their death to get out of things and it’s fucking with my head every time I have to go to the bank. 

Okay. Seven- six not counting me, we’ve talked about Mike, and I’ve already said why Stan wasn’t there- we’re left with the weirdest group you’ve seen; Ben Hanscom, or Handsome really, that man got so hot, who’s a famous architect, Beverly Marsh, Bevs, very famous fashion designer -hell yeah she is actually my friend, I know, it’s weird- William Denbrough, Big Bill himself, horror author with terrible endings, leader of out weird gang, and last but the very opposite of least Eddie Kapsbrak, risk analyzer, the most germaphobic person I’ve met, who also wore fanny packs while we were kids. The last part tells you very little about him but I feel like I have to mention it from time to time, because he’s hot and all now but in my head he always had a fanny pack and it freaks me out a bit to see him without one. I also made ‘your mom’ jokes at him all the time, mostly for attention but also because sometimes he’d snap back and just verbally gut me like a fish, and I? Loved that shit.

For those of you that look like you just came to a realization, yes. You’d be right. But we’re just gonna ignore it for now, because some of the others didn’t get it yet, and I’m not gonna hold your hand until you do, I feel like I’ve dropped enough hints already.

Where was I? Oh, yeah.

They’re all hot and I hate it. How come they get to grow up and get muscles and I get to grow up to look like a beanstalk with some fucking bug-eyes and a shitty party city wig? I used to call Eddie “Eddie Spaghetti”, but then turns out that the actual noddle here was me all along.

Well. I’ll get the reunion out of the way and move to the important part; what did Mike call us there for? The answer may not surprise you, given that we were in fact in Derry, but guess what? If you thought ‘child murder’ you win nothing at all, but you’d be right. There was in fact a serial killer! Who was, uh, also… a cannibal. 

Terrible, right?

But you’d think ‘this sounds weird’, right? Some unknown dude is killing and eating people, yes, but what does that have to do with lil ol’ me?

Now’d be the time to point out that Bill’s little brother Georgie disappeared twenty seven years previous and turned out to have been literally murdered and possibly eaten along with like, some other six or seven people. And at the time, Big Bill made us all go along to go look for him. In the sewers. While we were also kids. Y’know, like those other kids that got killed.

Big Bill was charismatic, but that doesn’t mean he was the wisest guy, okay. And we were also dumb and young, so that was pretty much all it took.

Thing is that we, uh, …did actually end up finding a serial killer in the sewers. So.

Who was it? Henry Bowers. Our middle school bully. To those true crime fans that recognize the name, yeah, that Bowers.

It didn’t turn out to be that much of a surprise that our bully was the dude killing people, actually, because he was the most fucked-up kid I ever met. He broke Eds’s arm and tried to carve his name on Ben, which is genuinely fucking nuts, right? Like, what? The everliving fuck? I think he liked to kick puppies.

Now, this time around, you’d think it was some fucked up copycat or something? Nope. Dude escaped to try again, this time dressed as a clown. 

You think I’m joking here? He literally dressed as a clown to kill people. I could not begin to tell you why. 

He can’t tell you, either, because he’s currently, uh, sort of dead. As in, someone buried an axe in his spine and he died. 

In my defense-

(louder)

 he was trying to kill Mike and you’ve already heard that I’d go back into Derry for him, so. 

If you’d wondered why I came back really late, yeah, that was part of it.

The other part is that before dying he managed to stab Eddie Spaghetti in the face and make us go into that one old ass, extremely haunted crack house- don’t ask, I don’t know either- in which an entire beam fell on him. I’m genuinely baffled at how this didn’t happen earlier, because this was literally our childhood hangout spot. But karma or fate or whatever caught up with us, so it did. 

By the way, he’s okay now. We all thought he was gonna die first, of course, because how the hell else do you react when a dude’s been impaled right in front of you? He didn’t. But when we all thought he was gonna die in front of me, holding his hand -him included- he looked at me in the eye and, with all the strength his failing body could muster up, he said:

“I fucked your mom.”

So does it come as a surprise to anyone that we’re dating now?