The Funnies Page 9

“Will you make it home for dinner? I’ll cook for a change, har har.” Amanda was the house cook, usually. It was a bone of contention between us that while I was perfectly willing to cook, she was not willing to eat what I made. She thought I should learn to cook more elaborate and—she said—“subtle” food. You can take the man out of Tory’s, but you can’t take Tory’s out of the man.

  “Seven okay?” I said.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, I’ll see you then.”

  “Kiss kiss.”

  I was well into my next ten pages of drawings when I realized that I hadn’t asked Pierce if I could use the Caddy. I took a break sometime around one and knocked on his door. He didn’t answer.

  “I know you’re in there,” I said. “I’m just wondering if I can take the car tonight and tomorrow, until around five.”

  The creak of bedsprings. “Where are you taking it?”

  “West Philly. Then New Brunswick and New York.”

  “Somebody’s going to rip it off.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I’ll lock all the doors.” No answer. “I’m really in a bind here, Pierce.”

  “Whatever,” he said finally. I stood by the door for another minute until I realized this was just what he was always accusing me of doing. Then I went back out to the studio.

  * * *

  When I was finished I had twenty-two pages, smeared with sketches. They looked nothing like Family Funnies characters. The sight of them filled me with despair. In a few frenzied hours I had managed to demote the FF cast, if such a thing were possible, from paper-thin buffoons to abject cretins. My mother’s stylish shapeliness came off as frumpy and slutty, and all of us kids looked like malnourished ragamuffins begging in the street.

  I found my father’s leather portfolio jammed between the file cabinet and flat file, and stuffed it with my sickly sketches. On my way back to the house, I tossed it into the trunk of the car.

  * * *

  Traffic was bad on 95 South. A truck had jackknifed at the Coleman Avenue exit. I sat wedged in the bottleneck for over an hour, and when I finally squeezed through, found the open highway transformed into a Formula One fantasyland, where everyone seemed to have forgotten that the roads were policed and drove well over eighty in all lanes. I held close to the limit, two-fisting the wheel all the way to Vine Street. For some reason, a thin layer of sand coated the floor of the car, and as I drove it worked its insidious way into my shoes.

  By the time I got home I was an hour and a half late and noxious sweat had broken out in my armpits. Amanda was waiting for me. “I called and called!” she said. “Pierce had me half-convinced you’d made off for good.”

  “Traffic,” I said. “Accident. Not me.”

  This seemed to quench the fire in her eyes. They were good eyes, green and expressive, the shape of flying saucers. One pupil had a notch in it, like the pork roll my mother made us for breakfast when I was a child, and so she had a special contact lens. We kissed. It was so easy, so good that I forgot I had been dreading it.

  We ate cold Pad Thai. I took a hot bath, and Amanda led me still warm from it into the bed. For the first time in days, I felt like I was somewhere I belonged. We made rare and surprising love. We slept.

  But in the morning I went to the extra room and looked at what I had been working on. It was untitled, like all my work. There was a latex cast of the sidewalk; an old couch, left for the trash, that I’d found; a garbage can with an apartment number spray-painted on it, filled with “clean” garbage I’d gathered and painted to look rancid. It was dreadful. Worse, it was an exercise in pretension, saturated with the embarrassing conviction that I could create new contextual meaning for a scene simply by moving it into my apartment. Yet here it was, the only thing I’d thought about for the week leading up to my father’s death.

  I remembered his letter, still in the pocket of my sport coat, which was now balled up in my duffel bag in the vestibule. It isn’t right for you and never was, it said.

  “So,” Amanda said, behind me. I jumped.

  “Jesus!”

  “The Genius, Regarding his Masterpiece.”

  “I want to set it on fire.”

  She punched my shoulder. “You set me on fire last night, baby. Heh heh.”

  “Oh, hey, yeah.” I didn’t know what to say.

  “So you’ve got an appointment. Your new employer?” She was smiling, but the question was pointed and a little defensive, which tone I was supposed to notice.

  “My tutor. Brad.”

  “Sounds hunky.”

  “We’ll see,” I said.

  She took my hands. In her loose nightgown—a St. Vincent DePaul find from the week we moved in together—and her bowl cut, she looked like a child, someone the ten-year-old me would date. “We haven’t talked about this, you know, Tim.”

  “I guess we ought to.”

  “You’re pretty much moving out, I gather.”

  “It won’t be so bad,” I said. “We’re not so far away.”

  “I suppose not. There’s still the car, by the way.”

  “Oh, God…”

  “I know,” she said, sighing dramatically. She tapped an imaginary wristwatch. “You have to go.”

  “Sorry.” We stood inches apart, her arms crossed, mine hanging limp at my sides. Finally I reached up and rubbed her shoulders. It was a lame gesture, but she let herself be placated. I managed a smile, then went to the bedroom to pack up some more of my clothes.

  There was a smell the two of us made living in the same place, and it was here now, where we’d slept. I could remember what her life smelled like without me: coffee, paint and houseplants, with a whiff of bleach from somewhere. We’d met at a party in art school, got drunk, fooled around, and didn’t see each other again for five years, when we did exactly the same thing. The second time it stuck. Everything from then on in was opportunistic: around the time I was kicked out of my building, her absentee roommate, who’d gone to France to pick grapes and never returned, made it official. My temporary stay stretched into years. Our two cars turned into one. Our smells commingled.

  And I noticed this because the night before, the place smelled like her again, just her. I might have been gone a year, for all my nose knew.

  Packed, I lingered in the bedroom, watching a dog eat garbage in the alley through the narrow rear window. It was time to go, but I was having trouble: she would be out there, waiting with my parting kiss, and though I had practically become one, I didn’t want to feel like a guest.

  ten

  In the American West, if you want to go someplace, there’s only one way to get there. That’s what I brought away from the irritating, rainsoaked road trip I took with Amanda one summer through Montana and Idaho. All our shortcuts, inferred from the road atlas, turned out to be long, muddy mistakes.

  But there’s something to be said for that kind of simplicity: if you want to go, you just do it. You don’t worry about the route. This is not the case in New Jersey, where all roads lead everywhere, and route mapping is not simply a skill necessary for efficient travel, but a kind of aesthetic category, ripe for pseudo-intellectual cogitation and debate.

  To get to Brad Wurster’s studio, I could take Route 95 North from Philly past Trenton, then take 1 North to New Brunswick. Or get off 95 around Bordentown and take 130 to New Brunswick. There was, of course, the New Jersey Turnpike, or scenic 27 through Princeton and Kingston. I could even, given enough time to waste, go back through Riverbank, get on county 518 in Lambertville, and tool at about thirty-five miles an hour all the way to Kendall Park, just a short hop to my destination. Each route had, of course, its elegant little perks, which I knew well from my many bored high-speed drives in high school: the Mister Icee outside Franklin Park, the driving range at Cranbury, the water slide by Penns Neck, on a road otherwise choked with car dealerships and strip malls. But it was all a game, really; it was five-thirty in the morning, I was already late, and I would have to take the turnpike.
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br />   I listened to talk radio on the way. A guy named Manny was unleashing an ill-informed and redundant invective against the current gubernatorial administration, and the show’s host tried vainly to uh-huh him back to planet Earth. I couldn’t remember the governor’s party affiliation; she was one of those Democrats who love the rich, or a Republican with a short haircut, crouched in some ideological foxhole in the no-man’s-land of waffledom. Manny was insisting that she had had numerous extramarital affairs while a member of the state senate. The host, a smooth-voiced baritone named Bill, said, “Well, Manny, I haven’t heard those allegations myself.”

  “Every last word’s true! I got a source at the Star-Ledger…”

  “You see, I’m wondering, Manny, if that issue is even relevant to our discussion. I mean, we are talking about the Clean Water Bill here. And besides, let the innocent among us cast the first stone, or whatever.”

  “Hah?”

  “I mean, are you willing to say you’ve never fooled around yourself?”

  “I ain’t governor of New Jersey, Bill!”

  New Brunswick was not yet fully awake at seven, which was when I pulled into town. I followed the directions Brad Wurster had given me, but they depended heavily on specific landmarks, one of which—a McDonald’s with an elaborate glassed-in playground—I happened to have missed. I found myself in the parking lot of a shopping center that was home to a supermarket, a stereo store and a cellular phone shop, rifling through the phone book for a city map. I located myself on Chemical Road, near the edge of town, and found that Wurster’s house was clear on the other side, in a skein of whorled suburban streets marked Parkside Village. I tore the map out, feeling terrible for it but promising myself to put it back later, and picked my halting way through town.

  Parkside Village was not what I expected. It appeared to have been named after a predictably sterile planned community, but encompassed a much larger area that included Wurster’s neighborhood, a low, dark collection of run-down ranch-style houses with fenced yards. Most of the grass here was dead, done in by broad shade trees. The ambient temperature dropped by ten degrees, and in the excessive comfort of the Caddy, I felt like I was still in bed, floating under cool white sheets.

  I pulled into Wurster’s driveway at quarter to eight, popped the trunk, grabbed my drawings and jogged to the house. Giant pines stood in the yard, trimmed down to the trunk to a height of six feet. The door Wurster had described on the phone—the one with the devil painted on it—could hardly be called a front door, though it stood on the front wall; it was situated far off to the right and had what appeared, through its frosted window, to be a sagging metal bookcase pushed up against it on the inside. The devil himself was badly faded and crudely done, I assumed by a previous owner. His smile, an attempt at the customary maleficence, made him look like a dipsomaniacal birthday party clown. Warped, cracked clapboards showed through the house’s begrimed red paint. I found the back entrance, as instructed, and knocked on a screen door fitted uncomfortably into its frame, as if it had come from a different house entirely. “Hello?”

  Brad Wurster appeared instantly out of the darkness, like a television screen just switched on, and glared at me. “Late. Not a good sign, Tim,” he said. His in-person voice was a vaguely authoritative muck and matched his appearance: hard, grim features set in a wide, flat face; dumpy clothes too heavy for the weather; slim, tall, muscular body. He looked like a Marine gone to seed on a deserted tropical island. The door swung open and rattled against the house, and even without the bugstained screen between it and me, the interior looked impossibly black and bone-chillingly cold. I stepped inside.

  “Air conditioning?” I asked.

  “Nope.” My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark, though I could see light glowing faintly through dirty windows around the room. They all had bars on them.

  “This way.”

  I followed him down a narrow hallway, goose pimples exploding along my arms and legs. Several cats of various colors dashed past in the opposite direction. Wurster led me into a windowless room illuminated by a long fluorescent daylight-spectrum lamp. The quality of light gave the room a crisply surreal presence, and lent Wurster himself the mien of a bowler-hatted Magritte businessman, practiced and peculiar. Beneath the lamp was a long drawing board, scrubbed white and uncluttered by any papers.

  “Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a small wooden stool, the kind you spun to raise and lower. I gave it a spin and sat down. Already I was uncomfortable. I was wearing shorts, so my ankles had grown cold in the chilly air, and the seat’s several long cracks pinched the skin on my thighs. I wriggled around like a schoolboy.

  “Let’s see ‘em,” said Wurster, holding out his hand. I unzipped the portfolio and handed him the sheaf of drawings.

  He spread them on the drafting table and examined each in total silence for over a minute. I sat there for nearly half an hour, watching what few charming touches I thought I’d managed wither under his gaze. Finally he handed them back, the tendons of his head straining against the skin.

  “These are terrible. You don’t understand cartooning.”

  My embarrassment blossomed into offense. Understand cartooning? “What do you mean by that?” I said.

  “You don’t know the first thing about it. You’re trying to make these people look like people. Cartoon characters don’t look like people. The Yellow Kid did not look like a person. Dick Tracy does not look like a person. Cartoon characters are deformed freaks we are convinced are like us. You try drawing like this”—he waved his hand at my sketches, lying askew in my lap—“and people aren’t going to believe it for a minute.” He shook his head.

  “So where does that leave us?” I made sure the anger was clear in my voice. I wondered what my father had paid him to do this. I wondered, in fact, how my father knew him at all.

  “Square one,” said Wurster. He handed me a sheaf of sketch paper—the same I had done my own drawings on—and a pencil. “Today we’re going to draw telephones.”

  “Telephones?”

  “That is, we’re not going to try to accurately represent a telephone on paper. We are going to distill the comic essence of a telephone into a drawing. We are going to do a caricature of a telephone. Is this getting through to you?”

  “Sort of.”

  Wurster lunged up off his stool and stalked out of the room. I thought for a moment that he had already given up on me. What did he expect? I had never done any of this before. I was about to go find him when he returned clutching a telephone—two, actually—their cords dangling behind them along the floorboards. He sat down again and slammed the phones onto the drawing board. “Which one is better?” he said.

  “Better?”

  “Yeah. Which of these phones is the better one.”

  One was a black rotary, the kind with a heavy cradle and a thick bludgeon of a receiver. The other was a pink princess phone, with pushbuttons. I pointed to the black one.

  “I like that one better.”

  “Why?”

  Why? “I don’t know. It’s just…I don’t know.”

  “When was the last time you saw a princess phone in the comics?”

  “Never, I guess.”

  “You guess. I’ll tell you the last time I saw one. A couple of months ago in ‘Sybil.’ That comic strip is a piece of shit.” He laid one hand on each phone. “This one,” he said, lifting the black phone, “is funny. And this one is pathetic.” And he flung the princess phone out the door, where it dinged against the hall wall. I heard the frenzied toenail clicks of a fleeing cat. “Now. I want you to tell me why this is funny.”

  I stared at the phone a long time. I knew, intuitively, that it was funny, or at least more funny than the princess phone, but how could I qualify such a feeling? I decided that I must answer this question correctly, or I might fail at everything, my lessons, the strip, my inheritance. Something stirred in my chest—anxiety, I thought—but when it rose through my throat and escaped, it
did so as a slightly maniacal chortle. Wurster’s eyebrows arched, much like a cartoon character’s.

  “Well?” he said.

  “It looks like a little guy. A little blocky mouse guy or something.” I pointed. “The receiver looks like a couple of ears.” I fired off an involuntary giggle.

  “So what are you saying about it, generally speaking?”

  “It’s got a personality. The other one’s just a plastic blob.”

  “So…”

  I wasn’t catching on. “So what?”

  “If it’s got a personality,” Wurster said, “we can make fun of it.” He pushed the phone aside and produced a piece of paper and pencil. In seconds, a fully rendered, undeniably hilarious, living phone had appeared on the page. I laughed out loud. It was suspended inches above a shining coffee table, tilted slightly, and cast an amorphous smear of a shadow; the receiver hung above it, rotated slightly toward the frame. The cord between them jittered in the air like an earthworm.

  “That’s great!” I said.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “What’s it doing? It’s ringing.”

  “How do you know? There’s no boldface ‘ringggg’ hanging over it. There are no hites, no agitrons, no briffits.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hites and agitrons indicate movement.” He made marks on the page: some quick parallel lines, trailing a flying baseball; some little eyelash curves, around a goofy-looking guy’s head. “Hites mean some thing’s going in a certain direction, opposite the lines. Agitrons indicate shaking, or a back-and-forth motion. This is a briffit.” He drew a little cloud, behind the hites. “Sometimes objects, particularly those moving quickly in a linear way, leave briffits. But none of these are necessary. Humor lies primarily in implication. Everything about the phone I just drew is implied—its movement, its noise. If I added agitrons to it”—he drew in a couple of them—“it isn’t as funny anymore.”

  He was right. To my amazement, the drawing was mostly ruined.

  “I want you to understand that most cartoonists are stupid and lazy.” He said this with a half-yawn, as if he were sick and tired of its being true. “Take ‘Whiskers,’ for instance. I inked that one for years. It’s the worst kind of shit. All the jokes are having-a-bad-day garbage about dating and dieting, and the main character’s a fucking cat.” He drew, with amazing speed, the chubby and insipid Whiskers, his eyes as big as oranges. “And the visual stuff is cheap and unimaginative. Big goofy eyes, huge toothy shit-eating grins, pies in the face. I hate it.”