The Funnies Read online

  The Custard’s Last Stand course was famous throughout the county for its thirty-foot plaster statues. Custer himself was central, his arm thrust into the air clutching his saber, his mouth a great black gob rendered wide, to indicate a battle cry. There was an Indian named Rain-in-the-Face, who, I learned as part of a school project, claimed to have personally cut out Custer’s heart on the battlefield at Little Bighorn. Also present was Tom Custer, Custer’s brother, who (I reported in the same project) was so badly mutilated by the Sioux that he could only be identified by the tattoo on his arm. There were other figures, but none as large as these three, so that the course seemed warped by a strange foreshortening. Custer’s legs straddled a tricky pond, over which golf balls were supposed to roll via a thin metal bridge. Tom Custer had a loop-the-loop wrapped around his legs. If you hit the loop just right, the ball rocketed straight into the cup. And Rain-in-the-Face, in a bizarre assimilation of divergent cultural icons, had a windmill sprouting from his abdomen. His skin was painted bright red, even his ankles.

  I ate my ice cream on the only free bench. It was free, apparently, because the view from it was blocked almost entirely by a large cardboard broadside, lashed to the fence with twisted bits of clothesline. I peered around it for a while, watching the teenagers flirt in their shorts and basketball team T-shirts. Boys mugged, knocking against each other and stealing each other’s hats. Girls rolled their eyes and fixed their hair. Then my focus shifted abruptly and I saw what the poster said.

  FunnyFest ‘98

  fun*prizes*games*autographs

  Don’t miss this year’s celebration! Meet Carl Mix IN PERSON!

  Also, kids!!! Meet your cartoon favorites Lindy, Bobby,

  Timmy and Bitty

  LIVE IN PERSON!

  Ride tickets on sale within—don’t forget to VOTE!

  Saturday, July 25, Delaware Fairgrounds

  There we were—Bobby, Rose, Bitty and I—living it up on a Ferris wheel, eating cotton candy and Italian ice, so flat-out riled that our parents could only shrug their shoulders in exasperation. Oh well! Kids!

  But live? In person? Could Francobolli have actually scheduled us into the ‘Fest, or would we be portrayed by actors? For a moment I considered actually going, to see what form the impending debacle would take.

  I finished my cone and went back into the restaurant. The line was gone now, and a few families and cooing couples leaned across tables toward one another, talking loudly. I asked about ride tickets at the counter.

  “Fifty cents a pop,” a kid told me.

  “That’s cheap,” I said.

  “Yeah, well it takes like ten to ride the friggin’ bumper cars.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What’s this about voting?”

  “Jussec.” The kid bent over and rummaged beneath the counter. When he surfaced, he was holding a printed postcard.

  I took it. “Thanks,” I said.

  When I got outside I looked at the postcard under the golf-course lights. It showed a cartoon of Timmy—of me—sitting on my father’s shoulders, holding a magic marker the size of my arm. We were facing a tall printed sign attached to a pole, and the sign said RIVERBANK. There was a big black X markered over the word.

  With growing horror, I flipped the card over. It read:

  VOTE!! for your favorite NEW NAME for Riverbank, New Jersey!

  I WANT Riverbank changed to:

  ( ) Funnyville

  ( ) Mixville

  ( ) Familytown

  ( ) Funnytown

  Pick one, affix stamp, and drop in a mailbox! It’s that easy!

  The mailing address was “Name Change Headquarters,” with a P.O. box in City Hall. I couldn’t help noticing that there was no box you could check if you didn’t want the name changed at all.

  The ice cream, which had felt so good going down, was beginning to churn stickily around in my stomach, and I felt a mild and time-honored nausea. My hands were gummed with drippings. I shoved the postcard into my pocket and started walking home.

  * * *

  Pierce had not come back, so I made my way into a dark house. There were no messages on the answering machine. I would, at some point, have to call Amanda with my new plans, but after considering the telephone for a few minutes decided that I wouldn’t do it now.

  If I was going to be a cartoonist, I thought, I would have to start acting like one.

  In my bedroom, I took the key that Mal had given me from its envelope and slipped it onto my key chain. There wasn’t much on there: my copy of the mailbox key in Philadelphia, the two keys to the apartment and a thick aluminum bottle opener from a state-run liquor store on Market Street. I dropped the keys into my pocket and headed for the studio.

  There was a smell to the place I hadn’t noticed before, a sort of dry, cigary bite in the air. I walked to the back and picked a bottle from the forest of booze on the table, then poured a few fingers of rotgut into a drinking glass. It was a “Whiskers” glass from a fast food tie-in of many years before; the cartoon cat glared with famous apathy from behind half-lidded eyes. The liquor lapped at the fringes of Whiskers’s smug smile. I pried open the mini-fridge, which had lain untouched for days. There was a tiny freezer in it, with a tray of rimy ice cubes the size of dice; I plunked a handful of these into the glass and went to the drafting table, where I sat down on my father’s orthopedic office chair for the first time. I switched on the overhead lamp, and its light flooded the drawing surface, making explicit the hints of scratches and stains that covered it. Immediately I wondered where to put my drink, then almost as quickly found the answer—a wooden stool at shoulder level, the seat discolored with water stains.

  Poor Dad, I thought.

  Everything I needed was within reach. Paper was in a low flat file to my right, inkwells on a card table to my left, pens in a plastic Philadelphia Eagles cup stuck into a crude hole on the drawing board. I helped myself to the paper: it was thick and had a shiny finish. Final draft stuff, I thought, so I rooted for something else, and found it, a thinner, rougher sketch paper. I pulled a pencil from the cup and stuck it into a nearby sharpener. It ground itself pointy with a cheerless wheeze. A few preliminary strokes produced a dark, clear line; some gentle brushings left a nice shading.

  It had been years since I’d actually handled art supplies—my work had taken on such workmanlike redundance that I had little use for the finer tools of my trade. Now I felt nostalgic, as the lines unrolled themselves under my hand. I was doing something small and precise. I was a lefty, like my father, and as I sketched—nothing in particular, the crook of the desk lamp, the edge of a table—I automatically tilted the paper clockwise forty-five degrees, to avoid smearing. I wondered if my father did this too. I tried, without success, to remember what he looked like while working.

  After a few idle minutes I rolled the chair back to the large flat file in search of a cartoon to copy. I opened a drawer at random.

  What I came up with was a fairly recent one, which I remembered from the Inquirer funny pages; it was a daily strip with a handwritten caption, apparently an early draft, as the figures were a little less refined than they usually were in the paper. Like all my father’s originals, it was about three times the size of a printed strip.

  In it, Lindy and I were standing with our mother. It looked like Lindy was being reprimanded, possibly for something she had said to me, and she had her arms crossed and a defiant pout on her eight-year-old face. My mother’s finger was extended in the classic scolding-mother manner, and she had her mouth open. The caption, between quotes, read: “It’s not what’s on the outside of a person that counts, but what’s on the inside.” And the visual punchline of the panel was what hung in a thought bubble above my head, which I contemplated with a precocious stroke on an incipient goatee: the outline of Lindy’s bare body, filled not with her external features but with her skeleton.

  Ha-ha, I got it. But looking at it now, from my father’s point of view, it seemed a weird kind of auto-voyeurism, a
n unsavory peek into the reeking roil of his subconscious. In effect it was less an opportunity for a joke (misunderstandings of the spoken word were a common topic in the Family Funnies) than an elaborate contrivance designed to allow my father to draw my sister’s innards.

  Not that her innards had anything to do with documented human anatomy. For one thing, she only had about six ribs. Her femurs were no longer than her humeri. And her skull, elongated as it had to be to fit the established FF head shape, looked less like a human bone than it did the fossilized remains of a Cenozoic-era forerunner of the horse.

  There were a few conclusions that could be reached from this cartoon. One, of course, was that my father had drawn it without thinking at all, that he had simply trotted out a cartoon to fit the crappy yuk he had dreamed up. Knowing my father, I didn’t buy this for a second. Another possibility was that he suffered odd morbid obsessions that occasionally made it onto paper. This seemed likely in fact, given the strip’s often bizarre traffic with the deceased. We were always waxing maudlin about dead relatives in the strip, particularly grandparents, and these would materialize in the air above us in billowing empyrean robes through which big fluffy wings invariably poked. There was also a running joke about an endomorphic spook who haunted the house, leaving chaos in his wake and leaving us kids to take the blame. Ghosts filled entire pews at church. Cemeteries were as busy as train stations. Seeing my sister’s deformed childhood skeleton threw me for a loop, and I groaned inwardly at the sudden thought of muscles and blood vessels tangled among my own bones, dark and wet inside me like centuries-old plumbing.

  The third possibility was that my father was aware of the inchoate weirdness of cartoon biology, and just wanted to get it out in the open. Of course the skeleton looked strange; it had to, and he had simply pointed this out in a witty sort of flourish.

  I decided that the second and third possibilities were compatible. Why not? I felt like I was making progress, understanding the strip through my father’s eyes. I flipped over my sketch paper and moved the ink drawing to the right side of the table, then cracked my knuckles, ready to go on to the copying.

  First I outlined my mother’s head: one quick loop, and I’d start filling in. But as soon as the pencil left the paper, I knew it was all wrong. Something about the chin area. I should have fleshed it out a little. I corrected it without erasing: still not enough. The next line was too much. I scribbled the entire thing out and drew another line.

  This one was better. I added hair without too much trouble, then tried eyes.

  Terrible.

  I erased them and redrew them, this time more slowly. Just little oval dots underneath quick, straight dashes, like notes between lines in a musical staff. And above them, eyebrows like fermatas, wide and expressive.

  Awful, completely awful.

  I drew another head, then another and another. I couldn’t get any as close as the second one had come. I filled the page with aborted heads, then flipped it back over and wedged some more in among my earlier drawings. Finally I took out a fresh sheet and got the head and hair on my third try, then drew and erased the eyes a dozen times, until I had worn the paper through. I tried eyes only, never got them. I did twenty noses, each one perfectly fine, perfectly believable, but not one of them my cartoon mother’s.

  I gave up on Mom and worked on Lindy. Mom was in three-quarters profile, but Lindy faced front. I did her head easily, then attacked the mouth. It looked bad. I did a few more, then redrew the head, but now that was off. I did this for about three hours, and refilled my glass as many times, until soon I was drunk and could barely keep myself from sprawling facedown on the drawing board.

  Which in fact I did, with a sickening slump, my nose mashing into the gashed, galosh-scented surface. My mouth marshaled its drool, which had begun to trickle between my cracking lips, when a creepy déjà vu struck me, and I bolted upright, sending the thread of spittle sizzling onto the lamp.

  What was that all about? I wasn’t so crocked that I couldn’t imagine how I must have looked, laid out agape over my scribblings: like Carl Mix, helplessly infarcting in the humid summer dark. It was time to quit for the night.

  eight

  On Saturday morning I swallowed another handful of aspirin and called Brad Wurster. Outside, it was a beautiful sunny day, but despite the open sliding doors off the kitchen, none of this brilliant light seemed to be getting into the house. It filled me with renewed despair. The phone rang over and over, and just as I was about to hang up, a groggy voice came on the line.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is this Brad Wurster?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Tim Mix. Carl’s son? I’m taking over the Family Funnies and I’m supposed to take lessons from you.”

  This time there was a short delay before he said “Yeah.” Both of us waited after that.

  “Well,” I said, “I wanted to set up some kind of schedule. When do we start? Do you have a studio I should come meet you at?”

  “We start Monday,” said Brad Wurster. His voice was gravelly, and to say that this was an understatement was itself a considerable understatement. He sounded like his throat was so coated with scabs and lesions that it might seize up at any second and eject itself through his mouth, like a transmission abruptly shifted from fourth to reverse.

  “What time?” I said, pen poised above a pad that had the name of a psychoactive drug printed on it.

  “Seven,” he said.

  “Seven?”

  “Seven to noon, Monday through Friday. Then you’ll go home, eat lunch and practice until six. Weekends are yours, but only a fool would skip drawing, especially someone who has so little time as you.”

  “Better practice weekends…” I said, scribbling. “Okay, where are you?”

  “Three-thirty-one Church, apartment A, New Brunswick. It’s the door in the back. Not the one with the devil painted on it, the one with the cut glass window. Knock and enter. Do not, under any circumstances, let the cats get out.”

  “Oh, no, I won’t.”

  “Good. I want you to prepare drawings. Give me about twenty sketch pages, that Wolff paper your dad uses. Cover them with Family Funnies characters.” “Family Funnies” sounded, on his tongue, like a fraternal order of concentration camp doctors.

  “Twenty pages.”

  “At least. Have a good weekend, Tim Mix.”

  “Oh, hey, sure,” I said. But he had hung up.

  * * *

  I couldn’t go out to the studio, not so soon after my dramatic failure and collapse of the night before, so I decided I would try to clean the house. Our house was laid out along fairly simple lines; the living room and dining room were at one end, the bedrooms and bathroom at the other. There were only five bedrooms, so for the first five years of her life, until Rose moved out, Bitty didn’t have her own. Instead, she was shuttled from room to room depending on the prevailing mood of the family: who was pissed off, who was happy, who should be rewarded (by not having Bitty in his or her room), who should be punished. She was never with our parents, though, unless she was unusually calm and happy, which is perhaps why she still liked them today.

  Once, there was a Family Funnies television special. My father drew all the backgrounds and storyboarded the animation, but the inking and character drawing was done by other people—the only time he ever loosened his grip on the reins. Besides the obvious oddness of hearing someone else’s voice come out of my own cartoon mouth, there was something weird about this special. It took several viewings for me to piece it together: the house.

  While some rooms, the kitchen and dining room, for instance, were the same in the daily strip as in real life, almost every other setting was purely opportunistic. If a gag required that Bobby and I had to watch television across a huge, empty room, then that room appeared in the strip without regard to the real house. If Lindy had to sit under a spreading chestnut tree, then a grove of them sprung up in the yard. If Bitty wanted to swim in the pool, a pool ya
wned instantaneously open. The TV special, it turned out, was so packed with recycled gags from the dailies that a huge amalgamation of appropriate settings had to be created for it, all of which existed in the same imaginary space, in the same half hour of television time. The resulting house was massive and impossible, riddled with paradoxes the way a pine board is riddled with knots.

  When I was eighteen and a college freshman, I mapped it. I stayed up all night getting high, rewinding and replaying the videocassette and rendering a rough architectural drawing on newsprint. There were at least thirty separate rooms, many of them occupying the same physical space; some seemed to have no connection at all to the house, emptying into hallways that didn’t exist. This ridiculous house was ten thousand square feet, easy, not including the free-floating rooms. My drawing looked like Frank Lloyd Wright through a kaleidoscope, a sort of prismatic Prairie School. I sent it to my father, with a giant hazy question mark superimposed over the whole thing, and never heard about it again.

  Plotting my cleanup, I couldn’t help but see the imaginary house superimposed upon the real one, with all the attendant dirt of two dozen extra imaginary rooms. The task seemed all but insurmountable. My only recourse was to doggedly slog through each room armed with cleaning supplies, and apply them liberally to every visible object.

  Of course I had trouble turning anything up that could be used to clean. There was no vacuum, only a frayed whisk broom and an elf-sized push sweeper with rotating stiff brushes. I picked the latter and pushed it around on the living room carpet, to no apparent effect. Though it was the middle of the day, I turned on some lamps. Their shades were covered with cobwebs and dead bugs. I employed my ratty washcloth to wipe down every surface. I moved the chairs and sofa and gathered the dust into my hands. The sliding doors were stained horribly with dirt and rainwater and cigarette smoke; I found a bottle of Windex sans spray nozzle and flicked it onto the glass with my fingers, then wiped it clean with toilet paper. The light in the kitchen and dining room doubled in intensity.