The Funnies Read online

  “What about the Family Funnies?” I said. “I never thought of it as being any better than ‘Whiskers.’”

  “The jokes suck,” Brad Wurster said, looking into my eyes. “But the drawings are masterpieces of efficiency. Your father was terribly misunderstood.”

  “I see.”

  He shot me a doleful frown. I suddenly felt bad.

  “Tim,” he said. “I don’t think you do.”

  * * *

  We drew telephones from eight-thirty until noon, nonstop. For two hours, every single drawing—at least seventy-five of them—was horrible. I either filled in too much detail or not enough, over-personified or didn’t at all. Wurster was patient with me, more than I would have expected, and by eleven o’clock he was taking my hand in his and drawing with it, drawing perfect, outrageous telephones, so that I could feel, he said, what it was like. By the end I was exhausted. My hand felt like I had been whapping it against a wall all morning. Wurster walked me to the door and into the sunlight, where my skin gulped the warm air, and told me never to show up late again. “This is not supposed to be fun,” he said. “It’s work. Your father knew that.”

  “I don’t think you knew my father very well,” I told him, zipping up my portfolio and heaving it into the Caddy. “Not as well as you think you do.”

  “That’s probably true,” he said. He was standing on his porch, arms crossed, looking every inch a prison warden. “But neither did you.” He turned and opened the door, then paused a moment and turned back to me. “Dress more warmly next time. It’s hard to draw when your muscles are stiff.”

  “Okay.”

  He nodded. “Okay, then.” And went inside.

  That afternoon I ate lunch in the studio and drew phones. It wasn’t fun at all. I took a little break and cleaned the place out a bit—let some air in through the door and cracked open the windows, which hadn’t been open, apparently, in some time.

  At quarter to six, I drew something I liked. It was a phone that had been knocked off a table. The cradle was tipped up onto its back, and the receiver was flung far away, the cord stretched out taut at an oblique angle to it. Somehow—and I wasn’t pretending to myself that it was anything more than an accident—the drawing was both funny and sad. I chuckled and set it aside.

  But after that, the remaining fifteen minutes stretched out ahead of me like hours. I rubbed my eyes and switched off the lamp. I would quit early, just this once.

  eleven

  Each day, Wurster and I worked on a different inanimate object. This made me uneasy. If a week went by in which I didn’t draw a single Family Funnies character, it was, I couldn’t help but think, a week wasted. I made the mistake of telling Wurster this. “First I have to make you into a cartoonist,” he said, in the kind of voice an obsessive-compulsive might use to potty-train a child. “In general. You must acquire competence, don’t you see that?”

  Tuesday we drew tables, Wednesday, chairs and sofas. Sofas in particular gave me trouble. There was a certain lunatic puffiness to them that, properly done, could make them look both buoyant and massive at once; my sofas only looked flabby and lopsided, like jelly donuts. In my drawings I stacked telephones on chairs and chairs on sofas, occasionally happening upon a kind of weak whimsy, but mostly producing labored junk. Still, most of them were passable to the untrained eye. I could do an interior background for most strips without too much difficulty, if I had to.

  The Sunoco station left messages on the answering machine both Monday and Tuesday. Pierce never answered the phone, and this was working to my advantage regarding the car, which I had yet to make a decision on.

  But when they called on Wednesday afternoon, I had just returned from my session with Wurster and was next to the phone when it rang. It was a princess phone, and when I picked it up, I felt a mild distaste for its clammy arch against my palm.

  “Bobby Mix?”

  “That’s my brother. He’s not here.”

  “Look, we’ve had this car for practically a week now, okay?” It was her, the Sunoco woman. There was a whiff of threat to her voice, as if I might soon find myself hog-tied in the trunk as the car glacially rusted at the bottom of the river. “So is somebody gonna pick it up, or are we gonna fix it, or what?”

  “Oh, that’s my car,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called you back. I’ve been really busy…”

  “Yeah, well it’s not like the mall here, we don’t have the kind of room where we can have extra cars just lying around. So what are you gonna do about it?”

  I knotted the phone cord, then pulled it apart. The connection crackled. “Don’t fix it,” I said. “I’ll just junk it.”

  “Well, get it outta here, then.”

  “Okay, okay. Look, do you know where I can take it? A junkyard or something? Can I pay you to tow it?” The fifty dollars I’d taken from my dad was down to ten now, and I’d had fourteen with me from before.

  She told me they knew where to take it, and that I should come and clean it out, if that’s what I was going to do. I looked at my watch. My practice session was going to have to start late. I hung up, ran my aching hand under cold water for a few minutes, wiped off my face and started for the door. Then the phone rang again.

  “This is Eugene, from the garage,” a man said. “You’re junking this thing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll give you two hundred bucks for it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’ll strip it, then tow the rest to the junkyard for you. How’s that?”

  “Great,” I said.

  By two o’clock I had the two hundred in my pocket and a cardboard box of Amanda’s things rattling in the trunk of the Cadillac. It felt good to be free of the car, finally, but now that I had gone ahead with selling it I wasn’t sure what I should do with the money. In the end, I put a hundred in an envelope and sent it to West Philly. I’d explain over the phone.

  That evening I drew sofas, sofas, sofas. Once, when I got bored, I tried to draw Bitty sitting on one and ruined the entire thing.

  * * *

  Thursday afternoon I drove to New York and parked on the street about ten blocks from Delicious Duck House. It was hot out, but I kept cool walking in the shade of the tall buildings. The neighborhood was kind of a Microchinatown, just two blocks long, and great smells swirled around me as I passed the restaurants’ doorways.

  Delicious Duck was the skinniest restaurant I had ever seen. It was wide enough to accommodate only one long row of tables jammed up against the south wall; the maximum seating for any of them was three people. This row stretched all the way to the back of the place, which, once my eyes adjusted to the dim, proved to be another entrance, an entire city block away. The kitchen was in a room off this long hallway. I loved it. I found Susan munching a fortune cookie at a table near the kitchen doors.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I like watching them come in and out.”

  “That’s okay.” I took the seat across from her, so close our knees nearly touched, and gestured at the cookie. “Where’d you get that already?”

  “The people before me left it.” She held out the fortune to me. It read, You may soon be dealing from a full deck.

  “Is it working yet?” I said.

  “As soon as we’ve eaten.”

  Susan ordered a few things for both of us without asking me what I wanted. This came as a relief. I didn’t want to make any decisions. When the waiter was gone, we looked frankly at each other for a minute. I noticed the thickness of her glasses—a quarter inch, at least. The idea of glasses always scared me. What if you lost them, and then had to drive somewhere? What if they fell off at a huge rock concert, and then you had to find the car? Like the rest of the Mix organization (save for Dad, who wrecked his sight with close work), I had 20/20 vision. I said, “How bad is your eyesight?”

  “Oh, four hundred something,” she said, blushing. The blush was comprehensive, wrapping around her head like a wet pink washcloth. It vanis
hed quickly and left a barely perceptible glow.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly.” She took off her glasses and rubbed them clean on her blouse, a businesslike navy silk thing that clung to her shoulders and upper arms and breasts. Her face, without the glasses, invited touch, the way a tennis ball invites picking up. If she had been crying, I would have wiped away her tears. But of course she was doing no such thing.

  “So,” she said, replacing the glasses. “How are things with Wurster?”

  “Weird,” I said. I told her about the frigid house, the pages of telephones and furniture. She nodded, knowingly.

  “Uh-huh. Heard about it before. He knows what he’s doing.”

  “So how does he know my father?”

  “You don’t know that?” she asked. Her eyes widened, as if to take in the fullness of my ignorance.

  “No.”

  “He inked the TV special. The main characters and all that, the animated parts. Your father wouldn’t accept the usual team of animators, so Wurster said he’d do it alone. It came in way late but under budget. You’ve never heard this?”

  “Never.”

  She nodded. “He took your dad, uh, seriously.” Another blush. “Sorry. Not that he shouldn’t be…”

  “No, no,” I said. “I know it’s fluff.”

  “But he thinks your dad was some kind of genius. The drawings, I suppose.” She watched a waiter hurry from the kitchen balancing huge platters of steaming food. It made me hungry. With a demure throat-clearing that portended a white lie, she said, “I can see that, I think. Maybe.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “So.”

  “So.”

  “So tell me about Wurster,” I said. “What’s his story? Why doesn’t he have his own strip?”

  She shrugged. “He can’t get one together. God knows he’s tried. My boss has a file full of his, uh, efforts. Panel after panel of these wonderful drawings, but there’s no story at all. He has a narrative dysfunction.”

  “I see.”

  She gave me a look. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s an example. The last strip he sent us was called ‘Elliot Dunfee.’ It’s just about this guy hanging around in his apartment. There’s no setup, no punchline. Elliot fries some eggs, he gets the phone, something new in each panel. The drawings are usually in chronological order, or maybe there’ll be some extended task Elliot has to do, like wash his car. And maybe the last panel will be Elliot dropping the hose and getting himself all wet.”

  “But is it funny?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, it’s really funny. But in a wry way. There isn’t that laugh you get when you’re surprised by a joke. You just slowly break into a grin.” She demonstrated, mugging puzzlement, then spreading a wide smile across her face, like honey across a piece of Wonder bread. I laughed. “I think he’s published in the indie comics,” she said. “Comic books, I mean, where you can do the postmodern kind of thing. His stuff doesn’t really fit there either, though. I suppose he could do a one-panel gag strip or something, but I think he thinks it’s below him.”

  Our food came, and we ate it. Neither of us spoke, recognizing as we did the superfluity of conversation. In my family, to talk during dinner was an oddness my father would not tolerate; we had to eat together, but we did it silently. Amanda could never deal with this habit. Several times per meal, she opened her mouth, then snapped it shut in frustration. Eventually we bought a small television at a junk store and set it up on the dish drainer during meals, so that there was something to distract us from each other.

  Every once in a while I stole a glance at Susan. She was neither loud nor piggish, but she ate efficiently and with great speed, her chopsticks scissoring in the air before her like conductor’s batons. My food was nearly gone before I realized how much I was enjoying myself: meals at home had been marathons of discomfort, and with Amanda they were tinged with a long-standing guilt that she did nothing to discourage. I was actually eating, in relative repose, with another person.

  Susan finished first and waited with her hands folded while I put away the last pieces of rice. I set the chopsticks down in an “X” on the plate before me and raised my head.

  “Wow,” I said. “This place is great.”

  “Oh, good. We should conduct all our business meetings here.” It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be more, but I supposed that if I was going to be a cartoonist there must be. I began to get excited.

  “So,” I said. “You said something about news from corporate.”

  “Oh. Actually, not really. I mean, I thought I might.” She reddened. “All I know is that they’re eager to meet you and see your drawings, and all that.”

  “No news is good news,” I said.

  “I should tell you, though.” She lifted her eyes from her empty plate and pursed her lips. “They’ll probably have another guy lined up.”

  “What? For the strip?”

  She nodded. “Just in case you, you know, don’t work out. But they want to go with you, being as you’re in the family, and it was what your father wanted.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you think it’s going all right?” she said. “Your drawing?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I may not be good enough. It’s harder than I thought.”

  Now she frowned openly. “Well, you have the home court advantage. If you’ll pardon that metaphor. My dad is a rabid Knicks fan.”

  “Sure.”

  “I know you can do it, Tim. Really. Just keep drawing, that’s all.” She smiled a little, a quick thing that vanished immediately. “You didn’t bring anything, did you?”

  “Drawings? God, no.”

  She picked up the check and gave it a surreptitious look. “Well, bring some next week. If you want, that is.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  * * *

  When I got home, Pierce was crying. I could hear him from down the hall. I wasn’t ready to hit the studio yet, though, so I found myself staying in the house, the kitchen specifically, kneading methodically at the floor with a dishrag. The dirt came up in strata, like latex paint from an apartment cabinet. I rubbed along with the jerking rhythm of Pierce’s sobbing until I could no longer take it. Then I got up and went to him.

  I didn’t knock, just walked right in. He was lying in a ball on the floor by his dresser, shaking like a junkie. If he was embarrassed by my entrance, he didn’t show it. I knelt on the ground next to him and said, “Pierce, what’s the matter?”

  He gulped air, coughed, finally blurted, “You know.”

  I thought for a moment that he was dipping into one of his paranoid troughs again, that he meant he thought I could read his thoughts. Then it struck me that I should know, I was his brother.

  “Is it Dad?” I said.

  “It’s like g-getting out of jail,” he gasped, and he wheeled off into sobs again, one after the other, like squalls of rain.

  I let myself sink to the floor and sat there, my legs crossed. The last time I’d sat on his bedroom floor, Pierce and I were kids, and we were playing with our Lego space station, and he was crashing his spaceships into everything. He assembled all the buildings loosely, so they would shatter spectacularly when he wanted them to. And then, like that, I was crying too, as if some forgotten part of me, a part that had chugged along invisibly without any problems for my entire thirty years, had suddenly wrenched itself horribly out of whack, had cracked in half and let out this stupid, impossible flood. And it was not the kind of cry I’d had, with great catharsis and eventual relief, a thousand times before; it was more like a torrential bloodletting in which some vital humor was gushing forth and could not be recovered. With dawning horror I understood that this was my confidence draining away: not only the kind that let me do my pathetic art, or believe, however faintly, that I could become a cartoonist, but the kind that let me stumble daily out into the world. I held my head in my hands and let snot dribble through them. Was this what it was like to be Pierc
e, all the time?

  We didn’t touch. My gut ached from the ceaseless heaving of this absurd grief, and when it decided to finish it did so as quickly and unexpectedly as it began. Pierce was already done. He took a box of kleenex from a pile of several lying on the floor next to his bed and offered it to me. I grabbed a handful and honked into them, then he did the same. The sound was like a rusty safe being opened after years untouched.

  “Well,” I said. “Let’s finish the job I started.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Cleaning the place out. The clothes, the junk. Let’s get rid of it all.” I looked at my watch. It was five in the afternoon. “Before nightfall.”

  Pierce’s eyes blinked as if against a bright light. “Okay, sure.” He seemed scrubbed out from his crying jag. I was not, from mine, and was jealous.

  We hauled everything we could out of closets. There was nothing of it that I wanted. This was a new feeling to me, wanting nothing, and as we worked I probed it and turned it in my hands, marveling at its novelty. It didn’t make me feel free, only that there was nothing worth having—a sensation, I perceived, of ambiguous worth. The trunk of the Caddy quickly filled, and then the backseat, and then the passenger seat. We uncovered old silk suits, worn once to conferences or dinners; shoes that must have cost hundreds of dollars. We balled up evening gowns and scarves and blouses and jeans, clothes our mother hadn’t worn since she’d lived here and had forgotten along with almost everything else. Briefly I wondered if we ought to offer some of these things to Bobby and Rose and Bitty. But I knew that, though they might later profess to have wanted them, they would mostly be relieved they were gone. I thought about how long it took to truly bury the dead. There are cultures and religions in which they still have access to the living, and I thanked my lucky stars we weren’t in one, because there would be no sleep for us.