Our destination in Bear Mountain was Lake Tiorati, Bob and I and our two girl companions, Doris and Paula, both short and stocky, and one of whom I was to fall in love with three years later. But how was I to know that Doris, smart, pretty, peasanty, might actually be thinking of me in the middle of the night in her neighboring pup tent? I was far too straitlaced to play with such thoughts. Here I was at eighteen, walking around with a twenty-four-hour hard-on but never losing sight of the fact that I was Rhoda Feiffer’s son and therefore forbidden to make moves on a girl on Bear Mountain in the middle of the night.
Moves on girls were not what I was meant to make. Pining for girls was more like it. Walking behind the James Monroe football field on Elder Avenue on spring and summer evenings, year after year as I grew into young manhood. Spotting out of the corner of my eye boys and girls, no more than weeks, maybe days, older than I, sitting on park benches lined up outside the concrete wall that bordered the field. Row after mocking row of them, making the same moves I yearned to make but never would, never could: synchronized necking as expert as the Rockettes’ routines at the Radio City Music Hall, her head tilted against his this way, his hand reaching ever closer to her breasts that way. I was content to know that I, too, would have this. But not quite yet, and not outside James Monroe, and not on Bear Mountain. It was bad timing.
Anyhow, camping wasn’t about that stuff. It was not about girls or sex or even about camping. It was about how I got there, that was the point. It was about sticking out my thumb next to Bob’s thumb and Doris’s thumb and Paula’s thumb, four left-wing kids honoring the tradition of the itinerant American—as in Dos Passos’s U.S.A., as in Dreiser’s American Tragedy, as in Woody Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” … the acting out of an American romance: hitchhiking!
We were picked up in prewar and postwar Nashes and Buicks and Studebakers and Fords on Route 9W, which we reached by walking across the George Washington Bridge. Middle-aged and older men, even an occasional woman behind the wheel. The men often the age of my father, but unlike my father these men asked me questions as if I were not there to defend, or account for, myself. These men seemed interested in me. And they weren’t homosexuals, or molesters, or any of the threats to safety that my mother might conjure up. These men afforded me the opportunity, my first, to open my mouth as if I had something to say, to try out this other Jules I was waiting to become. In these cars, with these drivers who were salesmen, businessmen, laborers, I didn’t sound like the Jules I knew from Stratford Avenue. I sounded like a stranger whose voice I didn’t recognize. I sounded like Jules, ten years into the future in Greenwich Village, chock-full of wit and trenchant observations. I reacted to my words in awe as I heard them come out of my mouth.
So in my mind these hitchhiking trips ended up not so much as trips to go camping as trips to Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. Each trip brought the doctor’s experiment closer to realization: the creation of an unfettered, less fearful me. Camping had become irrelevant. Irrelevant, too, were my three friends, whose company I enjoyed but who were cast as supporting players in this movie, me in close-up in a prewar automobile, talking up a storm, making listeners of all my supporting players, most importantly the driver. Each outing was a new test, a tryout, practice to make perfect my Dr. Frankenstein’s creation.
Two years later, Doris was my girlfriend and we necked. Everywhere. Maybe not on park benches outside James Monroe but just about everywhere else. She had a Russian girl’s sly prettiness, a twinkling eye, a teasing manner. I had a wild crush on her. We went to the RKO Chester and necked, the Bronx Zoo and necked, to Webster Hall to see Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and on the way home on the subway, we necked. In her parents’ apartment on Vyse Avenue (appropriately named), we necked … This girl, who no more than a year and a half earlier I had slept next to pup tent to pup tent and not a lascivious thought in my head, now made my head and other more vital parts of me quiver with passion.
Toward what end? I was no less Rhoda’s son than when we hitched to Bear Mountain. Late at night, I took the trolley home, sat alone in blissful discomfort on the near-empty streetcar, walked a block home with my wounding erection, sneaked into our darkened apartment, past my sleeping, unknowing parents, past my sleeping baby sister (Mimi was already out of the house, organizing the workers)—and in the throes of sexual delirium fell asleep, in anticipation of nature doing for me what I was too inhibited to do for myself. In the morning my top sheet was sticky with an emission I didn’t know the name for. My mother didn’t have a name for it either, but that didn’t stop her lecture.
I thought of Doris as my girl, and the condition I found myself in, a crush. I watchfully waited for it to develop into something more serious. I wanted us to be in love but to not rush it. I wanted to feel her up, which I had every right to do if this was love. Doris was short and solid, with round, solid breasts that I thought of day and night. I didn’t actually want to screw Doris, I just wanted to squeeze her.
We talked a lot on the phone during the week, and on weekends we spent every free minute together. She was graduating from high school and applying to colleges. I was into my third year working for Will Eisner.
By this time I knew that college did not make sense for me. Having come up short on admission tests to NYU’s Washington Square School of the Arts and Cooper Union, this decision was not hard for me to make. I was mortified by these rejections but in the end relieved. I disliked high school and didn’t think I’d do well in college. But any girl I fell for must have a college education. I wanted a girl whom I could talk about books and movies and politics with, while feeling her up. She would need college to keep up with me because I was educating myself and was quite serious about it in a manic, eclectic, and randomly left way: taking out library books on the Industrial Revolution, the robber barons, the rise of organized labor, strikes, the suppression of dissent, the Palmer raids …
Self-education was a sideline to my chief assignment, which was establishing myself as a cartoonist. By 1947 Eisner had given me, instead of the raise I asked for, my very own comic strip. It ran on the back page of the Spirit section. The Spirit section, originally sixteen pages with two accompanying features, Lady Luck and Mr. Mystic, had been downsized to eight pages. The Spirit took up seven pages, with page 8 reserved for a funny filler that I was allowed to create, Clifford. It was written from a child’s point of view and drawn in a style that I hoped would look something like Walt Kelly’s Pogo. My idea was to write and draw about the kind of kids I had grown up with, as they really were, and not as adults chose to see them—pesky, troublemaking urchins like Dennis the Menace.
I was eighteen, with the maturity of a fourteen-year-old, so this was going to take no stretch of the imagination. Drawing upon my likes, dislikes, hobbies, dreams, annoyances, and hang-ups at nine or ten years old was easy. To turn it into a nine-panel comic strip in the form of a traditional Sunday page turned out to be something I almost knew how to do, but not quite. I had an instinctive feel for the form of a Sunday comic page. I’d grown up with the Sunday supplements, studied them all, including the kids’ strips from Reg’lar Fellers to Nancy. But I was unpracticed and frustratingly limited in my craft. Full of clichés that I disdained in others. It turned out to be more natural for me to write an episode of The Spirit than to write and draw my own comic strip.
For The Spirit I had guidelines to follow, Eisner’s. It was entirely Eisner’s creation, and almost from its beginnings he had laid out a format in terms of style, pacing, plot, and subplot that made it surprisingly simple for me to write Spirit episodes once I had come up with the basic plots. I took my story lines and constructed them according to Eisner’s playbook: a splash-page introduction to attract the reader’s immediate interest and plunge us right into the story; often enough, the use of a narrator who walks center stage and addresses the reader. Taking Eisner’s lead, I came up with characters who were innocent bystanders pulled into a plot, a conspiracy, a bizarre
series of coincidences that test, demoralize, all but destroy them until, our hero, the Spirit, makes his late entry, cast in a cameo role rather than the centerpiece driving the story, which resolves itself in a traditional and violent ending, bittersweet, ironic, never entirely happy. Pure Eisner. All of this I mastered in less time than it takes the Spirit to beat up three or four bad guys.
Not ever did these stories, during the three years I wrote them, descend into hackwork. I loved writing The Spirit. I understood from the start what a great apprenticeship this was for the career that had to follow. But when it came to Clifford, my own strip, without the preset guidelines of The Spirit, I didn’t know what I was doing or how to go about doing it.
Very little shows up in Clifford to predict the sort of satire I was to create for the Village Voice just nine years later. Clifford looks today like a cross between Peanuts (not yet in print) and Calvin and Hobbes (many years away from print). Unlike Charles Schulz’s creation, which was to come along less than a year later, my little boy was as brash and self-seeking as Bill Watterson’s Calvin but living in an environment markedly closer to Charlie Brown’s. All three strips had the same aim: to say something deeper and truer about a kid’s experience than anything that had gone before.
Back page of the Spirit section, June 18, 1950
Now, even though I had preceded both Schulz and Watterson with my kids’ strip, I was still too young and callow (and cautious) to make my point or make my mark. Both in drawing and in writing I slipped too easily into cliché. Clifford, viewed today, looks less like a lead-in to Charlie Brown and Calvin than like a reflexive, occasionally reflective series of prankish, noisy, predictably smart-ass gags from a young cartoonist with an attitude.
Without Eisner’s guidelines I was on my own, and not up to it. Schulz and Watterson, older and more mature artists, came up with two of the great creations in comic strip history. I came up with a promising opening act for Sick, Sick, Sick and the Village Voice years that were to follow.
Doris was on her way to Berkeley, enrolled as a freshman at the University of California. And how was she getting there? She and her girlfriend Paula, also enrolled as a freshman, were hitchhiking. Her decision threw me for a loop. I thought (hoped) I was in love with Doris. Still and all, as I saw it, Doris wasn’t quite in my league. I was smarter, wittier, more charming, had a better sense of humor, was better read, and had more and noisier opinions. I was the dominant one in the relationship.
But it was she who was thumbing her way to Berkeley, an act so unimaginable in my scheme of things that it toppled my sense of status and elevated Doris to the rank of goddess. I couldn’t imagine myself hitching beyond Bear Mountain. Once and only once had I made it to Lake George, two hundred miles upstate. Not in my life was I going to hitchhike to California. I gave myself lots of good reasons: (1) it would break my mother’s heart, (2) I had an important job writing The Spirit and writing and drawing Clifford, which now appeared in about a half dozen newspapers and, locally, in my hometown, in the Sunday Compass. The Compass was a leftwing newspaper, not quite Communist. It could have been invented for me. The Compass carried the column of I. F. Stone, an investigative journalist whose tough takes on Eisenhower’s hard-line Cold War administration—particularly John Foster Dulles at State, his brother Allen at the CIA, and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI—filled me with a degree of rage and joyous bile that eventually determined my career as a political cartoonist. Stone made me see government as I never had before—its deliberate lies, cover-ups, and dissembling language. Its haughtiness, smugness, and obfuscation. I worshiped at the altar of I. F. Stone. And now the hitchhiking goddess Doris, braver and stronger than I, was manipulating me to abandon my twice-a-week Stone fix and follow her out to California. Doris, how could you?
Not only that, but once she got out to Berkeley, wherever that was (they had perfectly good schools in the East; hadn’t she heard of Columbia?), Doris started sending me letters that in a period of a month went from sweet affection to contempt. Her taunting inference was that I was a gutless coward too scared to hitch cross-country, which she, half my size but with twice my courage, had done. Her inference was indirect but emasculating. The girl of my dreams was telling me, as my mother and my sister Mimi so many times before had told me, that I had let her down. A flawless approach such as that left me no choice. How could I not turn my back on The Spirit, Clifford, and Izzy Stone? How could I not hitch out to Berkeley in order to walk in on her one day and yell, “Surprise!”
I was going to hitch out with Ed McLean, who not only was my best friend but had even more hitchhiking experience than the goddess Doris. If I had to go on the road, who better than Ed to go with? He was on his way to being a proletarian novelist. He already had the required résumé for his book jackets, from short-order cook to dishwasher to lathe operator. Ed would show me the ropes.
But first I had to explain to him that I wasn’t going out to Berkeley solely because I had been intimidated by Doris. Doris was a secondary reason for hitchhiking west. I had given this a lot of thought and had decided that my major reason was the draft. My number was about to come up. It had looked for a while as if I’d be able to avoid the army. The Korean War was winding down, or so it seemed, or so I dreamed. The North Koreans were in full retreat, and I was saved. At which point, General Douglas MacArthur had the bright idea of driving the enemy forces right up to the Chinese border. And China was in the war. With a million men chasing MacArthur’s army in mad retreat down the Korean peninsula.
Weeks away from settling the war and saving me from the draft, MacArthur had to make one of the great bungles of military history, the most important consequence of which was that I was now going into the army—which inspired a fresh rationale for hitchhiking to California. It wasn’t only to see Doris: “If I’m going to die for my country, first I want to see what it looks like.”
I was proud of that line. I used it on my mother, although I dared not confront her by telling her that I was hitchhiking. The story I came up with was that I was taking the bus. And then, funnily enough, once having said it, the idea seemed plausible. What if Ed and I didn’t hitch? What if we went by Greyhound bus?, I suggested to Ed.
“You want Doris to know you took the bus? When she hitched?” Ed was giggling, as he was prone to do during moments when he was making me feel like a fool. He had a high-pitched derisive giggle. Not very nice, really. He had begun, some months earlier, calling me Captain Caution, a joke I saw truth but no humor in. So we agreed on a compromise: to not make me out to be a liar to my mother, we would take the bus as far as Chicago and hitchhike from there to California.
I was a little worried that I had not heard from Doris in three weeks. But my imagination reassured me. I fantasized that once I walked in her door at Berkeley, my dramatic appearance (“Surprise!”) would change our lives forever. Spring was here, her semester soon over: the two of us would hitchhike back to New York, taking our sweet time about it, and why not? Two lovebirds delighting in the freedom of young adults on the road, crisscrossing the country, more or less headed east but in no hurry. Long, endless romantic nights at cheap roadside motels. Doris and I, virgins no more.
This was a dream to give courage to a young man whose every fear had reemerged with unparalleled intensity. My one weapon against it was lust. If my lust didn’t pull me through, I was a dead man. In fact, everything in me warned that by this act of brazenness, thinking that I could thumb my way across the country and survive … I was a dead man anyway.
Every anticipation short of lust foretold my doom. But it was too late to back out. I daren’t do that to Ed, nor could I compromise my dream coupling with Doris. One thing was certain: this was to be my final act. Unless I got lucky, and my back went out. Being confined to bed for a week or two might save my life, because then it would be too late to go to California since—ha, ha—I had to hang around to be drafted.
Fashion sketches by Rhoda Davis from the 1940s
BREAKTHROUGH
My mother had an insane idea. As long as I was going west, as long as I was going to Chicago and no doubt Denver and Phoenix and Santa Fe and San Francisco and Los Angeles, as long as I was headed for these places anyway, why didn’t I take along a batch of her fashion sketches, eight or ten new designs? And when I got to big midwestern, southwestern, and western cities, why couldn’t I, as long as I was passing through anyway (it was hardly an inconvenience), canvass five or six or a dozen local dress manufacturers to see if they would be interested in subscribing to a New York-based “stylist” (a term my mother claimed as her invention)? It wouldn’t take much of my time and it was certainly a service any good son would be happy to perform.
So there I was in Chicago at Quality Apparel, having arrived by Greyhound a day earlier. I was staying at Ed’s mother’s house on the South Side. The house looked like it was right out of Studs Lonigan. The South Side looked like it was right out of Studs Lonigan. Worn-down dwellings in Chicago struck me as romantic, mythic. Nothing worn down in the Bronx came close to mythic.
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