by Gary K. Wolf
He had snapped another photo with his ear hung over the lens obscuring the view. The caption? What else but: Ears Roger!
I had to keep twisting the book from side to side since most of the pictures were cockeyed.
The only way to make sense out of these was to read the caption before I looked at the photo. For instance—
Caption: A close up of my thumb!
Picture: a blurry yellow blob.
On one page, the caption read: Ooops. The photos, part of a collage, included an overexposure, an underexposure, a sunspot, and a negative.
“This is first and foremost a tour guide of Toontown, my most favorite place in the whole worldwide world and universal universe,” wrote Roger on Page One. “There’s lots and lots of interesting places to talk about. I’m going to spice up the descriptions by including a gossipy goodie about each locale. For instance: this is the Toontown Funny Bone. It stretches across Happy Trail.”
This narrative drivel was illustrated by a surprisingly good photograph of a large golden arch, reminiscent of the ones sprouting up around L.A. outside a new chain of burger joints called McToons.
“Listen to this,” I said to Cooper. I read aloud. “This is Toontown’s most prominent landmark, a large golden funny bone. We call it The Bone.
“Around the turn of the century, a depressed one-handed Toon pirate named Hannibal Hook tried to commit suicide by jumping off The Bone. Fortunately for him, he landed—kerplop!—on his big round ball of a Toon noggin. He bounced right back up to the top and over to the other side. This knocked some sense into him, and he went straight back to his pirate ship and invented the game of volleyball. Hannibal became the Toontown volleyball champion, no mean feat considering he punctured the ball every time he hit the inflated orb with his hook.”
I looked at Cooper who had been listening to my recitation. “Waddya think of that?”
I expected Cooper to be as disgusted as I was by the rabbit’s inanity.
“Durned interesting,” Cooper said seriously.
What? If this was Cooper’s level of fascination, the two of us had less in common than oil and water.
I kept reading, but to myself this time.
“Us Toons love to gossip. Gossiping is our second favorite activity after blowing raspberries. Or maybe our third after blowing raspberries and flinging custard cream pies. Or maybe our fourth after blowing raspberries, flinging custard cream pies, and dropping banana peels. Or maybe our fifth after…what? Oh, sure. Jessica tells me to cut the overture and get on with the silly symphony. Taking her cue, without further adieu, I’d like to show you, what there is to view, and do, in the greatest little city under the blue.”
I leaned over Cooper’s shoulder. “Where’s the rabbit’s place?”
“Page four,” he said.
That page was a fold-out hand-drawn map. Roger’s house, the center of both his universe and his drawing, was marked with a big red X. At the corner of Snicker and Snigger Streets was a handwritten notation: “This is where I live!”
We came to the head of the customs line.
I handed the book back to Cooper.
“Yours,” he said.
I put the book in my pocket.
We stopped in front of a small wooden structure painted in red and white stripes. The windowless structure had a peaked, shingled roof, and a small door. From the size and candy-cane color scheme, the place could have been Santa’s outhouse. A sign over the door read “Customs House.”
A smaller sign hanging at a crooked angle below it read, “Stop here. Why? Because that’s the Custom.”
Below that was another even crookeder sign reading, “Don’t argue with the Custom-er. He’s always right!”
The door slammed open. A huge hairy hand came out, followed by a huge hairy arm, both attached to a huge hairy gorilla. In true Toontown how’d-he-ever-get-in-there-in-the-first-place? fashion, the gorilla was twice as big as the house he came out of.
He wore a khaki-colored military brass-buttoned uniform. With his pendulous, simian breasts, rolls of gut flab, and dangling arms there was no way his uniform could be tailored to make him look snappy.
A holstered pistol hung from his Sam Browne belt. His itsy hat covered about a third of the space between his ears. The hat curved at the sides into a fifty mission bomber pilot style crush.
Seeing him, I wanted to laugh. Which was not a good idea given that he probably had the authority to give me a full cavity body search.
His metal name tag read: “Ask Me My Name.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Ask Me My Name,” read his word balloon.
“I just did.”
“And I told you,” he ballooned.
“No, you didn’t. You said to ask you your name.”
“No. I said: my name is Ask Me My Name. That’s my name.” He leaned in so close, my eyes were looking up the twin drain pipes he used for nostrils. “You don’t have no sense of humor, do you?”
That was an understatement.
The gorilla continued. “I could tell by the fact that you didn’t even chuckle when you saw me come out of my shack. I’m a pretty funny looking guy. Most folks give me a good guffaw when they see me for the first time.” He straightened up. “No problem. You’ll be laughing plenty before you leave Toontown.”
I doubted that.
I hadn’t been to Toontown for quite a while. I had a little trouble getting reacquainted with their speaking style. Toons who come outside the Toontown city limits, into the human world, speak in words. Simpler that way. Speeds things up since you don’t have to stand around and read everything they say. Here in Toontown, they stick to their old ways. Nothing spoken. Strictly word balloons. Same with sounds. You can see ’em but not hear ’em.
That’s the one thing I like about Toontown. So very quiet.
The gorilla sent up a word balloon of the washed out gray color and blocky lettering style used on Keep Off The Grass signs in municipal parks. “Anything to declare?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He started looking for himself.
He put one of his massive hands under the truck’s front bumper. Without the slightest strain or effort, he picked up the truck’s front end and checked out the engine’s underside.
When the truck tilted backward, Sands came sliding off the platform. He barely kept his camera from hitting the ground.
“What are you looking for?” Sands put his arms protectively around his camera, like the gorilla might pull out, examine, and confiscate the exposed film inside.
“Anything you got that’s serious,” said the gorilla. He dropped the truck with a heavy THUD.
Sands reached under his hat and scratched his head. “Gimme a for instance.” Sands’s hair piece slid halfway out the back of his cap making him look like he had a ratty badger homesteading his neck.
The gorilla shambled over to the Rolls.
Reggie had gotten out. He was standing next to the front fender. The gorilla pointed at Reggie. “Like that.”
Sands followed the gorilla to the Rolls. “What?” Sands took off his cap and used his forearm to wipe the sweat off his forehead. His rug fell to the ground behind him. “What are you talking about?”
The gorilla picked up Sands’s toupee with his toes and flipped the hairpiece into the air. The toupee spun around like a flying saucer from a fuzzy wuzzy planet and landed squarely on top of Sands’s head.
“His clothes,” answered the gorilla. His word balloon was as round, thick, and heavy as a manhole cover. The weighty balloon thudded to the ground and dented the pavement. His following balloon was half the size but just as heavy. “Too serious. This is Toontown, buddy.” His next balloon was completely different from the first two. It was shimmery,
toy-like. “No seriousness allowed in Toontown. Whatever doesn’t get a yuck, doesn’t come in.” He pointed at Reggie. “Take it off.” Back to the heavy balloon.
Reggie stood firm. “I’ll do no such thing.”
“Then you ain’t entering Toontown,” stated the gorilla.
“I will not parade around in my underwear,” declared Reggie.
“No need, though that would be funny. Change in the Customs House. There’s clothes in there you can wear.”
“Sir?” Reggie pleaded to Cooper.
“When in Rome,” Cooper responded with a shrug.
Reggie opened the door to the Customs House. He ducked his head through the door. The rest of him wouldn’t fit. No problem. The Customs House sucked him in like a swamp python inhaling a feral pig.
Using only two fingers, the gorilla lifted my duffel bag out of the car. He set my duff on the pavement.
“Whadda we got here?” He opened the bag and spilled out my weaponry. The gorilla shook his head. “Afraid not, buster. Nothing funny about any of this. I’m confiscating everything. Don’t worry. Your hardware will be here waiting for you when you go back to the cold, cruel, violent, unfunny world you come from.”
He took the duffel into the Customs House. That place must have been built by the same coach company that makes clown cars. The house wasn’t nearly big enough for the gorilla, Reggie, my duffel, and who knew what else, yet somehow they were all squeezed in.
Reggie started yelling, or as close to yelling as a man of his refined stature probably ever got. “I refuse to wear this!”
I don’t know what the gorilla said back. That’s the problem with talking to Toons with their word balloons. If you can’t see them while they’re talking, you don’t know what they’re saying. Whatever he said must have been persuasive.
“Oh, very well,” groused Reggie.
The gorilla returned with my duffel. “I replaced what you had with things more Toontown appropriate.”
The duffel contained a machine gun that shot ping pong balls. When you pulled the trigger on my new shotgun, a little flag came out that said “BANG.” The cosh, sap, billy, and cudgel had been replaced with duplicates made of soft rubber. The rubber hose was still there except now there was a spigot screwed onto one end that constantly dripped water. My handguns had been swapped for a dart gun, a cap pistol, and a cardboard gun that shot rubber bands. Instead of hand grenades I had two fourth of July sparklers and three skyrockets.
“Swell,” I said. “That stuff’ll protect me from bad guys. They’ll die laughing when they see what I’m packing.”
“Exactly right! Now you’re getting the idea,” agreed the gorilla. He eyed me suspiciously. “Turn around, lean up against the car, and spread ’em.”
I didn’t want him getting the idea that a public strip search would be the height of hilarity, so I did as he said.
He reached up and under my armpits. He tickled me! “Coochy, coochy coo.”
I’m not ticklish. He got no response.
“You are a sourpuss, ain’t cha?” he said.
He ran his massive hands over the rest of my body. He found my .45, my .38, my .25, my switchblade, brass knucks, and black jack. “Not funny,” he scolded. “Not one bit.” He also confiscated my Brylcreem and toothpaste. At least he kept his hairy paws out of my body cavities.
He made another trip into the Customs House. When he came back, he gave me a squirt gun and a knife that popped out a comb instead of a blade.
“Here’s the kind of sap we use to sap saps in Toontown,” he said. The sap he gave me was made out of sticky tree sap. He had a hard time passing the sap to me because the thing stuck to his hand and wouldn’t let go. He had to scrape the sap off with the putty-knife-sized thumbnail on his other hand. I fingered the sap gingerly so as not to get stuck myself. Yanking this out of my pocket would be slow going. The sap would come out covered with lint, and that’s not exactly menacing. If I smacked anybody hard in the noggin, I’d never be able to pry my sap loose.
“I don’t got nothing to replace brass knucks,” the gorilla said. “You can have these instead.” He gave me a Toontown weather predictor—a set of brass monkey balls.
“If you can have a gun—” I pointed to his holstered pistol, “—why can’t I?”
“You can have all you want,” he said, “so long as they’re all like this one.”
He pulled his gun, aimed the barrel at me, and pulled the trigger. A cheery little blue bird popped out. The birdie flew around my head, whistling a happy tune. I took off my hat and flailed at the creature until he got the message that I had no use for joviality and winged away.
The gorilla gave me replacements for my hair oil and toothpaste. The toothpaste was a brand I’d never heard of called Mouthful of Midnight. I unscrewed the cap. The toothpaste inside was coal black. The hair oil was called Nilcream. I rubbed a little on the back of my hand. The oil removed every trace of hair.
What did I tell you? Toon humor. They think that’s funny.
The gorilla pointed to Sands. “Sir, you’re gonna have to remove your belt and your shoelaces.”
“What? Why?”
“Nothing funnier than falling pants or floppy shoes. Don’t put them back on until after you leave or you’ll be arrested.”
Sands was filming our encounter with Customs for his documentary. Always the professional, he removed his belt and his shoelaces one handed, filming himself while he accomplished the task. He needed a while to pull the two-foot-long laces out of his knee-high boots. When he got finished, his boots flopped down around his ankles like leather bobby socks. He had to struggle to aim his camera and hold his pants up at the same time.
I gotta admit, the sight did give me a chuckle.
The gorilla raised the hood on the Rolls. He removed three of the spark plugs from its inline six cylinder engine.
“That’s an affront to fine mechanics,” I protested.
“Too bad,” said the gorilla. “Nothing funnier than a car bucking and smoking because the engine’s only firing on half its horses.”
He looked at the booze in the back seat.
“Don’t even think about taking that,” I said.
“Not a problem,” said the gorilla. “Give a Toon a shot of old John Barleycorn, and you got yourself a personal circus.”
Reggie sulked out of the Customs House. He was wearing a clown suit, yellow with purple polka dots. Instead of shoes he had his feet in a pair of the big rubber flippers deep sea swimmers use when they’re exploring the ocean floor.
I sniggered.
The gorilla eyed me and winked. “What’d I say? Sooner or later Toontown gets you yucking.”
“I’ll tell you one thing that ain’t no joke,” I said to the gorilla. “You ain’t sticking me in no clown suit.”
He opened the Rolls’ trunk. He held up my A&P bags. “Let me guess. Your luggage.”
I nodded.
He pawed through my clothing. “No clown suit for you, sir,” he said holding up and inspecting my ties. “No indeedy. What you’re wearing, what you got in reserve—heck, the way you’re shaped with your stoopy shoulders and potted belly, you’re plenty funny enough as you are.” He tilted one of his bushy eyebrows upwards, appraising me. “If I had to guess, I bet you drink way too much and pass out wherever you happen to be when you have the one that puts you over the limit. The booze gives you nightmares and dreams that make you jerk around like a loose cannon on a rolling ship. You fantasize about getting back together with the old girlfriends who dumped you for somebody better because you never kept a single promise. You shout for help with the bullies who beat you up on your grade school playground. I got no doubt you snore louder than an air raid siren.”
This monkey’s balls weren’t brass but crystal. They had to b
e since only a swami could see my past that perfectly. “So what?”
“All of that’s good for a giggle,” he said. “Toontown welcomes folks like you.”
He studied Cooper’s luggage.
“This yours?” he asked Cooper.
Cooper nodded.
The gorilla didn’t touch Cooper’s stuff.
“You ain’t dressed funny, not even a little bit. You don’t look funny, neither,” said the gorilla to Cooper. He bowed at the waist. “For you, Mister Cooper, that won’t be a problem. Here in Toontown we make allowances for movie stars. They can wear whatever they like. No matter how they’re dressed, movie stars always find a way to get into some kind of trouble that gives everybody a good giggle. You got any contraband in your luggage? Anything to declare? Any classical records? Heavy stuff. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart. We don’t allow such in Toontown.”
“Nope,” said Cooper.
“How about musical instruments? Violins, flutes, saxophones, trumpets. If you got any of those, I replace them with kazoos, washboards, tin whistles, and harmonicas.”
“Bet you don’t get many Philharmonic orchestras touring Toontown,” I said.
“Hardly ever. We do get our fair share of jug bands.” The gorilla returned his attention to Cooper. “You got any?”
“Nope,” answered Cooper.
“You got anything at all that’s the least little bit stuffy?”
Cooper shook his head.
“Fine,” said the gorilla. “Almost finished.”
He walked to the cab of the truck. “You wanna step out, sir,” he said to Miss Ethyl.
She stepped to the ground. She took off her cap, shook out her hair. I was surprised. Her tresses hung to her waist, auburn colored, long and lustrous, like a glowing piece of liquid amber. She removed her heavy eyeglasses. In true Hollywood screwball comedy fashion, that completed her transformation from modest mousey maiden to gorgeous glamour girl. She flashed the simian simp a slightly wicked smile. The sun reflecting off Sands’s camera engulfed Miss Ethyl in a backlight that turned her coveralls transparent. She was not as shapeless as she appeared. Slip her into a filmy nightie and a come-hither pose, and I’d paste her glossy inside my foot locker right between Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth.