“Tough crowd,” I mumble. “Two professions,” I repeat, louder.

People just walk by, ignoring me.

“Anyone? This is not rocket science. Just need two professions.”

“Shut up, fool,” someone yells, and when a few people laugh, my throat gets tight.

I shrug. “Something about your mom,” I yell back, and Aisha laughs behind me.

“Something about how she’s like a washing machine,” Aisha yells. “Except when I drop a load in a washing machine, it don’t follow me around for two weeks.”

I look back at her in amazement. Someone in the crowd whistles in appreciation. Some people have stopped in front of our little area.

“Something about how your mom is like a Putt-Putt course,” I say, and then I realize I have no punch line. So I play that up. “Um … something something driver?”

More whistles, and Aisha grabs my hand and lifts it over our heads. “Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we are Cars-Isha,” she calls. “Half of our made-up-on-the-spot insults are great. Half not so much.”

I see that something’s happening. People are wandering over. I clap my hands together and jump out toward the front of our little area.

“Okay, so as I said before I was called a fool by the gentleman whose mom is a something of a whore, I need two jobs, please.”

“Prostitute,” says this caramel-skinned girl, college-aged, who has stopped to watch. Her accent sounds Latina. “Zombie killer.”

“Blow job,” some idiot guy in a suit yells out.

I riff back. “Now why is a blow job considered a job? A hand job — why is that considered work? Why is there no fuck job?” People are laughing now, and I feel the adrenaline pump into the backs of my knees.

“I know that’s work you ain’t ever gonna get,” Aisha says.

“Don’t I know it?” I say back. “Let’s just say I’m underemployed, ladies. Way underemployed.”

The Latina girl is smiling at me in this flirtatious way, and I have to look away so as to avoid boner town, population one.

“Okay, okay,” I say, feeling like a game show host. “I need a possible title of a book.”

“Hunger Games,” the Latina girl’s friend says.

“Oh-kay …” I say. “That’s like an actual book title. But I guess we can work with that. Can I get a genre? Like a movie genre?”

“Documentary,” a guy straddling a bicycle yells out. We’re beginning to attract a crowd.

I nod a few times, letting it sink in. For a moment I worry that Aisha won’t be able to do this. Then I realize I shouldn’t underestimate my friend. “All right,” I say. “Without further ado, I present to you a staged reading of the new movie, The Hunger Games: The Documentary. Performed by …” and I look at Aisha.

“Aisha Stinson, zombie killer,” she says, her voice deep and foreboding.

“Oh, come on,” I say, putting my hands on my hips and looking at her. “Isn’t it enough that I am completely undersexed in real life? Now I have to play a male hooker too?” Some of the audience laughs. I exaggeratedly roll my eyes. “Fine. Hi, my name is Carson, and I’m a male prostitute.”

We dive in, like we’ve done this a million times, even though we’ve never done it even once. Aisha sets up something about hungry zombies whose car breaks down in Reno, and they are desperate for human brains, and they need to figure out how to pay for a good brain meal before they starve to death. I dramatize the role of a naive male prostitute who happens to work the corner near where the zombies’ car broke down, and Aisha explains how the prostitute teams up with a zombie killer, because some of the prostitute’s clients have in the past turned out to be zombies. The story tosses and turns and soon it’s like a good song we’re creating, and I’m barely aware of the audience except that they’re there. We start by dramatizing the two roles, and soon we’re just telling a story with more characters and slipping in and out of our roles. We both choose the same funny parts for repetition as if it’s a chorus, and somehow Aisha circles back to the car breakdown. In the end, Aisha the zombie killer hides under the car at a service station and culls the zombies, using me the prostitute as bait. She cuts off a zombie’s head while he’s busy getting ready to chow down on me.

“Mmm … zombie brain,” Aisha says while chewing, turning her zombie killer into an actual zombie cannibal by using a deep, funny voice, and it’s as good a time as any.

“And scene!” I yell from the ground where I’m lying. I leap up, and we turn and bow. There are about fifty people watching. Some of them applaud. A lot of them don’t. Many just walk away. A few of the applauders approach the tin can and throw in change. A few even give dollar bills. We thank everyone and soon everyone is done giving.

We count our money. $22.74. We worked our asses off for $22.74. That’s not even close to enough to pay for the car repair.

“Shit,” I say.

Aisha has a better attitude. “Hey. We do that eight times today, we have ourselves a car and a little bit of money for food.”

She’s right. Yeah. We can make this work.

We go again, and we start to fine-tune our skills. Aisha finds certain characters she can do really well — a domineering, hypocritical man of God who keeps making up stuff in the Bible, for one — and I work on a falsetto I use for a baby character who believes everything that is said to him. The baby accepts all the made-up stuff, and then adds insane details to the man of God’s crazy claims, saying, “It’s in the Bible.”

The money starts to roll in, and each show we do better than the last one. About the fourth time we do the scene, I remember we have the Porcupine of Truth just sitting there. I grab her and we start this improv where Aisha goes up to heaven and I’m the gatekeeper — the Porcupine of Truth. I make the porcupine male and give him a game show host’s voice, and I ask Aisha embarrassing questions. Then we riff on the audience, who we pretend are former child stars who are now dead. I point at random people and call them Michael Jackson and River Phoenix and things like that. People just eat it up, and after that show, we change our name to The Porcupines of Truth.

I keep a count of our cash, and by the time we’ve done our fifth show, we have enough money to get the Neon. But it’s only noon, and we can make more. And truly, we could use more money. So I ask Aisha if it’s okay if we keep going, and she’s game.

We’re both on an adrenaline high when we finish up our fifteenth and final performance of the day around six p.m. We count up our money.

Holy crap balls, Reno. We’ve made $467. I count it several times because I am so amazed. I take two hundred and put it in my pocket, and I give Aisha the rest, knowing she’ll have to pay for the car. She fans her face with the cash.

We find out how to get to the auto repair shop by bus, and when we get there, our car is ready. As Aisha pays the man, I’m glowing. I feel like a new person. From the extra bounce in Aisha’s step, I can tell she feels the same.

IT’S A THREE-AND-A-HALF-HOUR drive to San Francisco, so we spend the night in a trailer at the end of a goat path, thanks to Javy Sanchez and his girlfriend, Jenny Yang — twentysomethings who take us in through surfingsofas.com. They’re cool, but we’re exhausted, so we go to bed early.

The next morning, we’re back in the car, and we know we’re officially in California when we see actual trees. A smattering of pines are a welcome sight after so much brown in Nevada, and soon the hills are illuminated, golden. I think, Golden State. Yes.