The Funnies Read online

  fourteen

  My cleaning jag had left me feeling jittery and unfulfilled, so I spent the rest of the afternoon purging the studio: though I’d had the windows cracked open for days, it still had the same musty ripeness my father had left in it. I took the car-washing supplies from the garage—rags, sponges, a stiff brush misshapen by years spent jammed into the corner of a box—and filled a bucket with warm soapy water.

  The first few items were hard to throw away, but after that it was easy. I filled a garbage bag and a half with old newspapers, food containers and xeroxed pages from books. I crawled around on the floor and pulled the dusty corpses of pencils and pens from under the baseboard heaters. I threw the empty bottles into a box for the recycling center.

  In the end, the source of the smell turned up under the drafting table, pushed all the way to the wall: a china dinner plate covered with cigar ends and ash. I emptied this into a trash bag and washed the plate. Then I crawled back under to see what else was there.

  To my surprise, it was this: 35-15-24, the combination to my father’s safe. I found it written on a piece of masking tape, curled upon itself in a gray snarl of dust and hair; I only noticed it because it stuck to my finger as I tried to throw it out. Maybe it had been fixed to the underside of the desk.

  I tried the combination in vain several times without success. To fiddie with the dial I had to crouch, and my Achilles tendons stretched themselves out to an unnatural length, giving me the feeling that my feet might snap off at any moment. Was this an ailment common to thieves, safecracker’s ankle? Finally the tumblers clicked in an expectant way, and when I tugged at the handle the door swung silently open, as if by magic. I lowered my butt to the floor and peered inside. There wasn’t much: an old book, a manila envelope. I peeked into the envelope first and saw only cartoons. No money. I set it aside and opened the book. It had been published in 1922, by the Trenton Star Press, and its title page read:

  Where Dat Kitty?

  a Cartoon Treasury by Galway Mix

  Galway Mix was my grandfather, whom I knew only as a wheezing old man in an armchair, a crotchety Irishman, barely comprehensible through his thick brogue, who was obsessed with inclement weather. I also knew he had drawn a cartoon for the newspaper once, but I never knew what it was about or for how long it had been published. I turned the page and saw a thin cartoon black man, dressed in frayed overalls with shafts of wheat sticking out of his pockets. The man’s lips were white and thick as croissants, puckered around a dark stupefied O, and his eyes bulged out of his head like a toad’s. His hands were snarled in his hair, and he was hovering several inches above the ground.

  Of course it was the most racist cartoon I’d ever seen. Underneath it were the words “To Carl, who wants to be a Cartoonist,” and below that was my grandfather’s signature. He had drawn another, rougher picture of the black man’s face and added “Love, Pap.”

  I turned to the first page. There were four three-paneled cartoons. The first one went like this: in the first panel, the black man was in a chair, rubbing his stomach. His voice bubble read, “Ooo-ee, I’m hongry for some corn pone!” A small cat was rubbing itself against his legs. In the second, he was pouring some batter into a pan, and saying, “Hmm…Where dat kitty?” In the third, the corn pone was finished, steaming in its iron skillet, and the cat’s head was sticking up out of it, charred and frazzled. The black man was doing what he had been doing on the dedication page: jumping in astonishment, gripping his head.

  As it turned out, every single strip was like this. The black man chose a task, lost the cat, then found the cat somehow entangled in the task. “I loves the banjo,” the man said in one strip, as he strummed. “Where dat kitty?” he wondered in the second, and in the third, the cat’s head had punched its way through the sounding head of the banjo and wedged itself between the strings.

  I read the whole thing. The cat turned up in an automobile engine, a horse’s mouth, a chicken coop, a well (“I’s thirsty!”). It was awful and great simultaneously: a formal puzzle to be “solved” over and over, a clever series of means to the same worthless end. I was reminded of Wurster’s grueling exercises, and how they were supposed to make a good cartoonist out of me. In a way, this had happened to my grandfather. The strip was, its over- and undertones aside, endlessly ingenious. It was also, much like the Family Funnies, utterly shallow.

  For the first time in a solid week of actual work, I was reminded of what a pitiful contribution I was making to the world of creative enterprise. Who needed the Family Funnies? What kind of people enjoyed it, week after week? I could see them now, with their perfect teeth and golf-inspired clothes, gathered around the kitchen table, complacently tittering at the Sunday comics. If my grandfather was anywhere near as smart as my father, then he must have faced the same problem: do I make the comic strip something worth doing, or do I just do it? And it appeared they made the same decision.

  I put the book down and pulled out the manila folder, then slid the drawings from it. For a second, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: my cartoon mother, standing, a look of consternation on her face, my father’s head looming goofily over her shoulder. Then I noticed they were naked. I turned the drawing on its side. Her legs were parted slightly, his hands clamped over her breasts. Visible between her legs was the base of his penis, shaded in with a couple of quick lines. Folds of boobflesh squeezed out between his fingers, and his eyes were half-closed over a look of intense and slightly sinister desire. And her face: that irritated expression barely masked something else, an intense and embarrassed pleasure.

  I turned to the next page. More of the same, this time her on top of him, and then after that a rogues’ gallery of sexual poses and acts I had not ever previously imagined my parents privy to. My mother dominated each drawing, her breasts and crotch, and her pained features.

  Why had he done this? Somehow his boozing and ranting and womanizing just didn’t measure up to the sheer indignity of these drawings: not only was my mother forced to act out his fantasies, she was made to dislike it, and then to enjoy disliking it. It was the secret expression of my father’s desires, and it was his apology for them, and it was his justification for doing it in spite of the apology.

  But in the end it was him I felt truly sorry for. If drawing those pictures was a lonely act, keeping them in the safe was an act of profound desolation. It was as if he’d kept a chunk of the heart that would kill him suspended in a jar, so that he could moon over it whenever he wanted, up to the day he died.

  I put the drawings back in the envelope. Then I stuffed it, along with the book, into the garbage bag.

  * * *

  Later, after my trips to the recycling center and the dump, I curled up on the couch and watched, for the first time in years, the Family Funnies television special. It was a Thanksgiving affair, washed in the appropriate earth tones and bright fall colors. The special first aired on a Thanksgiving Day sometime in the late seventies, and I remembered gathering in the living room with my family to watch it. Dad was drunk in protest. He had gotten louder and louder, and made increasingly less sense, as our meal progressed, and by the end the rest of us had stopped trying to carry on our own conversations around him and began to pack, like squirrels sensing the imminence of winter, as much food into our bellies as we could fit. During the special, I struggled with the sleep-inducing properties of turkey, knowing that if I fell unconscious my body would eject most of what I’d eaten. From the panicked expressions of nausea on my siblings’ faces, I could tell they were doing the same thing.

  It was with considerable relief that we received the good news: Dad liked the special. The plot was silly, really—the Thanksgiving turkey is stolen, an angel appears to Bobby in church, our dead dog Puddles saves the day—but Dad snorted and cackled at his own jokes, repeating them at top volume in a slurred voice and spilling liquor in wide wet arcs all over the living room floor.

  There could have been no clearer evidence of our real family’
s divergence from the one we were watching on TV. While the FF Mom bustled about in her apron and heels, making preparations for the big feast, the actual Mom was slumped glowering in an armchair, rhythmically clenching and unclenching the fingers of one hand and rubbing her temple with the other. The more frenetic and demented things became on the screen, the gloomier they got in the living room, until my father’s laughs turned to sobs, and we were all sent to bed. I stayed awake a long time, plugging my ears with my fingers and trying to remember each and every scene of the Peanuts special, which came on next and which I was missing for the first time ever.

  Tonight, however, I attempted to focus on the bizarre animation of Brad Wurster. In one sense, the special was much like others of its time: cheesy animation, with fewer drawings per second, and backgrounds that, for simplicity’s sake, didn’t move at all. But in another sense it was strangely accomplished. Wurster had taken the limitations imposed on him by the special’s budget and created a subtly disorienting, visually arresting semi-masterpiece. I turned the sound down to blot out the context and watched the images move in slow motion.

  Wurster seemed to break an obvious rule of animation, which was that all parts of a character’s body, if moving, should be doing so at once. Instead, he moved about half of a character’s body in one frame and the other half in the next, so that it possessed, at full speed, a strange unbalancedness that complemented perfectly the situation on the screen. Bobby, when he gazed up at the altar and saw the friendly angel, seemed to sway, barely perceptibly, in the pew; his eyes closed one at a time and opened the same way. My mother, nonplussed at the turkey’s disappearance, looked like her head was about to bobble right off her shoulders. It was as if the actors portaying my family had been replaced by passionate but unpracticed Eastern European understudies. I stared transfixed until I got too hungry to go on, then I turned off the set and walked downtown, still dazed, in the day’s last light.

  Custard’s Last Stand was curiously lethargic, as if the throng had just received some mildly bad news. People engaged in measured conversations. Teenagers hatched plots in subdued groups. I got into line and quickly grew bored waiting, and so scanned the customers in front of me to see who was slowing things up. That’s when I noticed somebody familiar. A short man with a guarded posture, like he feared sudden arrest by rogue cops. I waited until he was given his food, then watched him turn around.

  It was Ken Dorn. I tried to remember where he said he was from. Hadn’t he come some distance to attend the funeral? What, then, was he doing standing, as he was now, at the big window in Custard’s Last Stand, watching kids play golf? I studied him as I waited for my hot dog. Rain-in-the-Face, in a neat trick of perspective, seemed ready to plunge his giant wooden axe into Ken’s head.

  Dorn stiffened, as if he knew he was being watched. Maybe he did. I averted my eyes before he had a chance to turn, and when I accepted my food from the cashier I made sure not to look directly at him. If his presence had something to do with me, I didn’t want him to know I knew he was here. But I could see him at the corner of my eye, watching.

  That night, I fell into a strange and intense sort of concentration. I sat in the studio for hours, drawing, oblivious of the time, of the room around me, of the place where the pencil met the paper: it was more like a single entity, part me, part comic strip, part pencil and paper, that created images by subtly changing itself. And as the night wore on, I began to feel myself changing, as if at first I’d failed to absorb Wurster’s training, which had only now found my muscles, where it guided them from character to character, from prop to prop, each more refined than the last, each more convincing.

  But that’s as far as it went. My heart still wasn’t in it, even if my body was. Still, I felt as happy as I’d been all day—no great feat, admittedly—because, for a change, I was getting somewhere.

  fifteen

  Wurster liked my new drawings, or at least didn’t find them particularly offensive, and we spent the week immersing ourselves in the work, poring over the FF Treasury and making lists of images, situations and combinations of characters that were likely to pop up in Family Funnies cartoons. I worked on a few minor characters, like Father Loomis, the neighbors and Puddles the dog. We discovered that Puddles was always drawn in profile, always sitting (even when the strip was about him, as when the family was leaving for a trip and he was sad, or the family was returning from one, and he was happy)—an unexpected shortcut, and one less thing we would have to worry about. I let myself be consumed by the strip, despite my considerable misgivings, feeling the kind of fullness a condemned man does after his sumptuous last meal.

  I mentioned to Wurster that I had watched the Thanksgiving special. His face darkened.

  “I think it’s great,” I said. “Your animation is unreal. Have you done any since then?”

  He waited a long time before saying, “They stifled me at every turn,” and beyond that he wouldn’t talk about it.

  Wednesday night I called Susan, thinking I would return to New York for lunch. I had found that, while working, I got excited thinking about it; the trip, the connection to Burn Features and the free meal were the only things I had to look forward to all week long. She wasn’t home, so I left her a message and went back to work, with instructions for Pierce to come fetch me if she called.

  Pierce, true to form, had slipped into a funk. He had returned from his weekend trip looking haggard and paranoid, and when he walked into the house he seemed surprised to find me there, as if all that had gone on were a delusional nightmare he thought he’d rid himself of. He spent most of the week indoors, in his bedroom, and I didn’t dare ask how his visit had been, let alone who this mystery lover was or what she did with her time.

  Meanwhile I had decided to do something with my mother over the weekend—possibly even get her out of the home, if she was feeling well enough, and bring her someplace nice, perhaps Washington Crossing Park, for a picnic lunch. I tried talking to her on the phone, but without my face there to remind her, she repeatedly forgot who I was and segued spontaneously into conversations with other people. I found myself playing the part of her late sister, my grandfather and (apparently) a maladroit plumber who must once have given her a bum deal: “No, ma’am,” I assured her in a mushmouthed plumber’s voice, “of course we’ll pay for the water damage.”

  Susan called back around sundown, which was coming noticeably earlier in the day. I heard the phone ringing through the open doors of the house and studio, and when Pierce didn’t come to fetch me, I went in, curious. Pierce was nowhere in sight but the receiver was lying on its side on the countertop. I picked it up and listened.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “Susan!”

  “Oh, hi,” she said. “You called.”

  “Yep. Lunch tomorrow?”

  “Actually, I was thinking,” she said. “Since I’m going to see you Saturday, why don’t we bag it this week?”

  “Like, a bag lunch.”

  “No, like let’s cancel.”

  “Where are we going to see each other Saturday?”

  There was a brief silence. “Uh, FunnyFest?”

  “Oh,” I said. “That’s right.”

  “You forgot?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to butt in, you know. But I think you ought to go. People are probably very sad about your father. They’re kind of expecting you.”

  I thought about the mayor’s gleeful wheedling at the wake. “I don’t like this, Susan.”

  “You won’t have to do anything, you know. Just sort of be around.”

  “Nobody even knows who I am.”

  “Sure they do. Look,” she said, “let me chaperone you. I’ll buy the food.”

  “Well, if you put it that way, sure,” I said.

  * * *

  Susan parked at the house Saturday morning. She was wearing sunglasses, a pair of cutoffs and a white T-shirt. “You look different in your civvies
,” I said. She did. She looked festive, vaguely sporting, if not athletic. She stepped through the front door.

  “Nice digs,” she told me. We stood before each other, unsure of what to do, of what our tenuous business relationship demanded. In the end I stuck out my hand and we shook. Susan snorted. “Well,” she said.

  “Well.”

  “I’ve never seen the studio.”

  “Really?” I had pictured her and my father enjoying gin and tonics in the doorway, with a fan trained on them.

  “Really,” she said. She looked around. “Where’s your brother?”

  “I guess in his room.”

  “Ah.”

  We went out to the studio and I showed her around. She paused before the drafting table and ran her hand over it, and peered into the open, empty safe. “It’s so small.”

  “Well, you know. It was just him.”

  She nodded, then took off her sunglasses. We looked at each other. “So are you having fun?” she said.

  “Fun? No, not exactly.” I told her about the week’s work.

  “You think you’ll be ready?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know anything.”

  We walked to town. It was ten o’clock, time for the mayor’s opening speech, though I was nearly certain he would start late. When we arrived at the dusty town park alongside the fairgrounds, the bandstand was empty and a few people were milling around, eating fried dough out of paper napkins. Around us, in a huge ring, the food vendors were lighting up the charcoal for the first wave of meals. Children stood patiently with their parents, waiting to be titillated. Family Funnies shirts were being staple-gunned to plywood planks, and coffee mugs hung on brass hooks. I spied several rent-a-cops loitering near the food, and beyond the park, at the river’s edge, the fairgrounds were knotted with mechanical rides: a Ferris wheel, something that looked like a tilt-a-whirl.