Backing Into Forward

by Jules Feiffer

  A little old lady at Quality Apparel sat behind a cluttered desk that was twice her size. She was as well turned out as my mother, with the same understated gift for tonier-than-thou dress. Her accent was guttural and unfamiliar to me, not German, not Polish, maybe East European. I launched into the spiel dictated to me by my mother. This was my second or third foray to find a potential subscriber to her hoped-for subscription service.

  The fact that the little old lady didn’t send me on my way as soon as I walked in came as a surprise, a triumph, really. I didn’t look like anyone’s idea of a salesman. I looked like who I was, a teenaged boy, twenty going on fifteen, awkwardly tall and underweight, unprepossessing to the point of invisibility, and dressed more like a high school kid than a businessman.

  The single jacket I had brought with me on the trip west was an old, not necessarily clean gabardine top with a zippered front that, with its stuffed pockets, doubled as my suitcase.

  When the little old lady went to retrieve her boss, or husband, or inker (as she termed him), I was thrilled to think that I had, through some against-type transformation, secured a foot in the door. The old lady appeared impressed by my mother’s drawings. She had carefully leafed through the sketches not once but twice, then instructed me to wait as she disappeared into the back of the shop.

  She brought back this man, a gnarled, thickset dwarf. He was a bulkier version of the woman, gnomish in a white shirt, tie, and open vest with a tailor’s tape measure hanging from his neck. From all my unwilling childhood excursions when my mother dragged me from one fashion house to another, I recognized him as the head man, the designer.

  If I managed by some inspired gift of gab to sell him my mother’s sketches, this gnome might well open up the door to a brand new Rhoda Davis syndicate, a trickle and then a flood of other subscribers to follow. That was how syndication worked. I knew that from comics.

  I let my imagination soar. Beginning with my mother’s first sale to this dear, never-to-be-forgotten-no-matter-how-high-we-climb elf at Quality Apparel, this leprechaun out of a fairy tale was going to spin my mother’s drossy sketches into gold. First a sale in Chicago, then on to St. Louis and Denver, Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles … If syndicates made cartoonists rich, then why not my mother? Hundreds of sales, money, lots of it, debts paid, the Bronx abandoned, an apartment on Fifth Avenue—no, a mansion—a spread in Vogue, where my mother once interned (referred to as the little Jewess).

  Rhoda Davis, elegant in an outfit of her own design, and her famous son, Jules, whose new comic strip was the fastest launch in newspaper history, caught by Eisenstaedt out dining at 21 or the Copa or El Morocco, helloed at from nearby tables by Gable and Bogie and Lauren Bacall and Lana Turner and Arthur Miller. And who stops by but Julie Garfield, who trades jokes with me about two Jewish boys escaping the Bronx.

  Not only would I have made it myself, I would have paid back my mother for my years of hostility and indifference to her tales of travail, poverty, indebtedness, now coming to an end as this lovable elf thumbed through her art. He and his wife, the adorable Mrs. Elf, shared, in a tongue not Yiddish but every bit as incomprehensible to me, comments on the sketches. The old man pointed out to the old lady the position of a pocket, the flare of a jacket, the shape and seam of a sleeve. And then after intense discussion in this language not Yiddish, this gnome, whom I had mistaken for a benevolent elf, this dwarf, this shithead, said to me, “It’s interesting, but we have designs for a long time like this already.”

  And I am instantly reminded of stories I have heard from my mother, going back to when I was six or seven, stories of designers examining her designs with an interest not in purchasing them but in stealing them.

  One did not copyright a three-dollar sketch. You could not protect your ideas once they were out there to be either bought or plundered. Time after time, year after year, as she aged and I aged and World War II came and went, and high school came and went, and Korea came and I was about to be drafted, year after year, the same story—the very story now newly acted out before me. And I recall with full force the rage I now felt at my mother’s humiliation. Her defeats, her desolation, her son’s manifest dream of making it right, of knight errantry, of doing for her what she could not do for herself, of being the man of the house that my father wasn’t.

  And thus, a new Jules charged forth on a white charger, improvising with concealed but venomous irony: “So you see what my mother, Miss Davis, is trying to do here: each month she’ll send you a new batch of sketches so you’ll have fresh ideas for your own designs. But if you don’t subscribe, the only drawings you’ll ever get to see of hers are the ones you’re stealing from now. You won’t see next month’s ideas or all the ideas after that, so you’re not going to have anything more of hers to steal from.”

  I had never spoken like that to a grown-up, not once in my life. In a voice calm and steady, sounding reasonable, as if I were selling Ivory soap. Nonetheless, all three of us in the anteroom of Quality Apparel went into immediate shock.

  “What are you saying?” one or the other or both of the old dwarfs screamed.

  “I said, you’re a bunch of crooks. That’s okay, my mother is used to her ideas being stolen, but we’ll forget about that if you subscribe.”

  I was talking back to the grown-ups, something neither I nor my parents had ever done. Out of sight of my rage, I was watching myself in the third person with glee. I half expected the two old farts to congratulate me. “How impressive!” “I didn’t think you’d have the nerve. Have a cup of tea.”

  But they didn’t seem to understand what a huge breakthrough this was for me. “Get out! Get out!” they screamed. Which I did, but not before I took a threatening step toward the old man, a second unprecedented act. He backpedaled in panic, which I took as the moment for my triumphal exit and curtain call. I stalked off. Floated, actually.

  I ran, leaped, and bounced off downtown buildings before I caught a train back to the South Side to Ed’s house. What had I done? What did it mean? It meant that I had it in me to become a better, stronger Super-Jules, leaping over tall buildings in a single bound. Leaping out of the Bronx and never having to return. I couldn’t wait to report to Ed.

  BREAKUP

  Ed was not of a mind to believe my story. He accepted the facts but provided his own interpretation, which was not favorable to me. Rather than me being Super-Jules, I was once again supercompliant. Leaping not over tall buildings but through hoops to please my mother. Fighting her battles when she had never once fought mine. My perception of moving forward was wrong, according to Ed. I was following my mother’s lead in an Oedipal dance, patterning my every step to her specifications. This breakthrough was, in Ed’s judgment, nothing more than the same old eyewash, the same old Bronx boy, the same old comic book fantasies.

  We had begun getting on each other’s nerves on our second day in Chicago. My first impression was that Chicago was something like Ed: brash, with an in-your-face directness that was challenging, intoxicating. Ed and I roamed the streets the first day, him rat-a-tatting a wide-ranging stream-of-consciousness chatter, I reacting with opinions no less out of bounds. Ed’s verbally assertive style put to shame the evenhanded, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other ambivalence that had long been my mainstay.

  But now on his own turf, Ed’s autodidacticism took on a nasty aspect. He had a far more serviceable memory than I. He could cite eclectic sources that I had no access to. From our first meeting in New York, our friendship had involved a degree of chiding and mockery. But in New York it was good-natured, the equivalent of towel snapping at a butt in a gym locker room. I knew Ed to be on my side, a worldly-wise coach advising me and prodding me. But here in Chicago, the prodding had turned malicious and the advice was now delivered with ill-concealed disdain.

  What else was there for us to do but fight—which I both feared and wanted—or go our separate ways? We stood out on Route 66, the flat farmland laid out before us like a boxing ring, neither of
us happy about what was to come next. It was clear that Ed’s needling had gotten even to him. “We’re getting on each other’s nerves. Why don’t we split up and meet in San Francisco.”

  A couple of minutes later he was standing alone on the highway and I was walking a half mile down. Ed had taken charge; we were not going to fight. He was not going to beat me up and lose his best friend. In any case, he had already beaten me up—a bloody nose would be redundant. He suggested that whoever got to San Francisco first should check in at the YMCA on Geary Street, and then he winked and grinned. And I, submissive to the end, shook his hand and started my solitary way down 66.

  Behind me I heard Ed singing in an Okie-accented voice. A Woody Guthrie refrain: “So long, it’s been good to know you.” I took it as a not-too-gentle reminder that I was a boy, alone, untraveled, heading west to meet my fate.

  ROAD MOVIE

  Minutes later the fun began. One ride, then another, then another. I couldn’t believe how natural it seemed, how easy it was. Within a half dozen rides in every sort of vehicle, from a hay truck to an old V-8 to a sleek and classy Buick, I was chauffeured across the state of Illinois, into Iowa, then Nebraska. Short hops, long monologues, lonely drivers, some talkative, some too talkative, others quiet, others reserved but friendly. A salesman confided the details of his unhappy marriage, no sex anymore. Late at night, another salesman decided he was too tired to go on, turned into a motel, and paid for both our rooms and breakfasts. Another driver pulled over when he saw that I had fallen asleep a few hours into our drive. In the morning when I awoke, I found a car blanket draped over me.

  I had thumbed my way into a Frank Capra movie where threats existed only for the purposes of storytelling. I was a boy adventurer, in a wondrous land to which I didn’t belong, whose storybook attractions were mapped out for me in movies and Saturday Evening Post illustrations and Booth Tarkington’s Penrod stories, which I devoured at twelve and thirteen, fictional glimpses of this world that I was now seeing in person through the windows of fast-moving cars: rural and small-town America, shingled houses bordered by white picket fences and shaded by oaks and maples and sycamores and any other tree name that I could come up with because I couldn’t tell one from another.

  This could have been (should have been) my birthright, had I only been born in the right place in the right faith. Distant farmhouse windows lit up at night, secure and cozy. Now and then, silhouettes suggestive of happy families sitting down to dinner, comfortable give-and-take, good-natured, easygoing middle-American joshing, remindful of a world I knew only from Mickey Rooney Andy Hardy movies.

  I loved my country, but I didn’t want to fight and die for it in Korea. I wanted to get laid in it, make love to Doris in it, a cross-country coming (of age). The erection I was seldom without throbbed with nationalist fervor. In my mind I had combined sex with the Saturday Evening Post, Grant Wood with making out, the Great American West with the Great American Whoopee.

  In New York, illusions of power were fueled by the comics I wrote and drew. Here on the road, power moved with these caravans of cars driving me through an alien nation, half real, half movie. Epiphanies zipped by me at five-minute intervals. The ultimate epiphany was that I was not going to die. There was not going to be just retribution for my hubris in leaving my mother and the Bronx.

  Occasions arose that should have killed me but, counterintuitively, didn’t. Three drunk teenagers picked me up in the middle of the night somewhere in the heart of Nebraska’s North Platte. I knew it was a mistake to get in their car, but I got in anyway. I didn’t want to offend them. They drove furiously, careening, swerving, nearly but not quite plunging us into ditches and gorges, laughing with disbelief when, for the fourth or fifth or twentieth time, they had by a hair’s breadth averted their sought-after suicides. While on a pee break in woods by the side of the road in the middle of the night, I stole away. They called me, came looking for me. No anger or hostility in the search, just eager to party. I hid on all fours in the brush, just off the road in Nowhere, Nebraska. I was racked with fear and ambivalence: I didn’t want to die and I didn’t want these morons to think that I looked down on them. Seconds before my guilt was going to make me rejoin them, they forgot about me and drove off.

  Somewhere in Wyoming, again late at night, I got picked up and found myself seated in the back of the car with another hitchhiker. I couldn’t see much in the dark, but I sensed within seconds more than I wanted to know. This kid, about my age, was twice my size and, in the glare of oncoming headlights, I could see small, deadened features on a face that had been hit and healed over with scar tissue too many times.

  I knew with absolute certainty that I was about to be his victim. Whenever and wherever I got out of the car, this goon would get out with me and mug me and take my money. I didn’t expect him to kill me, but his size made it clear that he could do what he wanted.

  While keeping up a pretense at conversation, I kept close watch on our surroundings, determined that, when we hit a town, I would find a brightly lit, well-peopled intersection where I planned to make my getaway.

  The street corner lay in a suburb of Cheyenne, one lit street in the middle of darkness, very little traffic, few houses, too many trees, any one of which I could be taken behind, beaten up, and robbed. Not what I was hoping for, but it was the best I could do.

  Of course, he got out with me. I stood on the corner. He stood with me. Outside the pool of light coming from the solitary streetlamp, there was only darkness and the threat of mayhem. An Alfred Hitchcock music track boomed in my head as we spoke amiably about nothing in particular. He came up with the offer that we travel together. I found the courage to say that I did best when I traveled alone. He accepted that but didn’t seem to have any plans to move on. He just stood there. Hitchcock’s background music was sounding—boom-de-boom-de-boom—increasingly ominous. I was one of the Three Little Pigs and he was the wolf, licking his chops, waiting for me to lose patience and walk down the road in the dark, closer to traffic, in search of a ride. Not me. I had no intention of budging from under this one bright streetlamp, the only one in the Midwest, apparently.

  He talked some more to me. One of the things he said was, “Do you have any money I can borrow?” The Hitchcock music was shrieking now. I said I had enough for one meal, I was going to have to look for a job the next day.

  I could see that all of this was coming to a head. I announced that I intended to stay at this spot under this light. I would stand there as long as it took for a car to pick me up. Furthermore, I didn’t think any car at this time of night was likely to pick up two riders. I suggested in a thoughtful way, as if I were trying to solve our mutual problem, that he might have a better chance for a ride if he moved a little farther down the road.

  I watched while he mulled this over. He looked around, I was certain, to gauge the chances of anyone from the nearby houses coming out in response to my screams. I wasn’t making it easy for him, so he must have decided the hell with it. He said, “See you,” and moved on. He’d find another mark to beat up and rob. I waited for him to come back. I waited and waited, and finally a car stopped for me and my waiting was over. I hadn’t gotten mugged, a fact that defied all logic. And I had learned a lesson: don’t accept a ride in a car with another hitchhiker.

  “JULES, WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

  Ed and I hooked up in San Francisco, and it was as if nothing had gone wrong between us. He was jovial and I was more so. Whatever the problem had been, it had gone away just as pre-Freudian problems were supposed to. No discussion, no analysis, no getting to the bottom of it. We behaved like men of the old school: we didn’t look back, we soldiered on. And now, we were about to get on our way to meet Doris. No advance-warning phone call—Ed’s idea was that this was to be the ultimate “Surprise!” The movielike romantic idiocy behind it was irresistible. I let him overcome the Captain Caution in me.

  But before Doris, he wanted to show me the town from his radical, raffis
h Jack London point of view—the waterfront, skid row—San Francisco as seen from a Wobbly perspective. Ed was enamored of Jack London, the early-twentieth-century tramp, seaman, and writer of men’s and boys’ stories. And so we toured the Embarcadero and Fisherman’s Wharf and Telegraph Hill and Coit Tower, with its WPA socialist-inspired murals of heavy-muscled working-class heroes, and, if memory doesn’t deceive, on the wall staring me down was Lenin. My God, what a country! I had come three thousand miles, and the first piece of West Coast art I saw featured Mimi’s Communist god. Doris, whom I met in the AYD, was going to love it when I told her this. Maybe it would lead to lovemaking.

  Doris’s address in Berkeley was not hard to find. She lived in student housing—small one- and two-bedroom apartments with a kitchen and a bathroom—that she shared with Paula, the AYD friend she hitched west with, and one other girl, not from the Northeast. It was a three-flight walk-up, which I ran up, Ed close behind, sharing my excitement and anticipation. I had built up this moment in my head and heart. I had scripted it and shot it like a film that I played and replayed who knows how many times: the door flung open, the screech of delight, Doris throwing herself at me, clamping me in a bear hug, the glee, the promise of what was to come.

  This was the final payoff for my trip west, a trip on which I would never have set foot if this girl, the obsessive object of my every thought for days now, had not goaded me into it. And she was right! This trip already gave signs of hitherto unknown resourcefulness, hitherto unsuspected courage. I stood at Doris’s door, by now an experienced hitchhiker halfway to being the man I wanted to be, bursting with excitement, prepared to be in love. How could it not go wrong?

  Doris and I stared at each other from opposite sides of the door, me with a shit-eating grin on my face, Ed behind me. I heard him giggle. She was not giggling, nor was she smiling. Understandable, I thought. I probably woke her up. She wore a T-shirt and panties. She looked less surprised by my appearance than nonplussed, as if she knew me from somewhere and if I gave her a couple of seconds she’d come up with a name.