The Funnies

  I was drafting a word-mispronunciation gag. Lindy was sitting on the floor among some messily stacked books, and Timmy was standing nearby, talking to someone outside the panel (another common weirdness of FF Wurster and I had isolated during the week). Timmy was pointing to Lindy and saying, “Bobby likes strawberries and Bitty likes blueberries, but Lindy likes liberries!”

  The crisp, inarguable stupidity of this delighted me. Certainly it could pass as an original FF strip, and I figured that, if I got it right, it would be included in the final packet I submitted to the syndicate. I might even bring it to Ray Burn, if Susan still felt like setting up a meeting between us. I did several pencil roughs of the cartoon, which differed mostly in terms of placement: should Lindy be sitting on a couch or chair, or should I stick with the floor? Should Timmy be in the foreground, thus larger than Lindy, or at the same depth? I tried all the combinations, and found that Lindy on the floor, Timmy in the foreground worked best. I sketched this out three or four times, doing my best to make Timmy simply look closer, instead of unusually large. One of them looked okay, though it took me a while to figure out why: a stray line coming off Lindy’s hair seemed to form a vague corner in the room, implying spatial depth. I filled in the rest of this line and added converging floor lines, and suddenly the perspective all made sense. Excited, I got out the thick paper and Wolff B. Then there was a knock on the door.

  I jumped, bashing both knees against the underside of the desk. “Come in.”

  The door opened and in walked Uncle Mal. He was dressed, incongruously, in a pair of cutoff jeans and a loose, short-sleeved button-down shirt, and his sham black hair was mussed on the left, possibly from driving with the window open. His goofball smile was the most honest thing I’d seen all week. “I thought I’d come out and check on you,” he said. “I’ve visited half your family today.”

  “No kidding,” I said, rubbing my knees. They were throbbing so powerfully I thought I could hear them making a sound, a low electric hum.

  “Your mom today, your brother just now. Your father’s grave.”

  “You picked the toughies, didn’t you?”

  “You’re no exception, it seems.” His hands clasped each other behind his back, and he looked around the studio, nodding.

  “How’s Mom?”

  He didn’t look at me when he said, “Absent, mostly. Barely your mother anymore.”

  “I know,” I said. “We took her on a picnic…”

  “She remembered. It was all she talked about. She couldn’t recall who took her, though. I thought it might be you two.” He gave his head a quick shake, the way a dog does brushing off flies, then met my eyes. “So!” he said. “How’s the inheritance?”

  “Not so bad.” I handed him the preliminary sketch. “This is the first official attempt at a cartoon.”

  He glanced at it a second, then laughed out loud. “Funny.”

  “You think?”

  “Oh, yes. A good likeness, too, of your father’s work. Your little pants are quite skillful.” He handed the drawing back.

  “I appreciate that,” I said.

  He spent a few seconds idly nodding. He had something to say, it appeared, but couldn’t get it out. I decided to throw him a bone. “Hey,” I said, “can I ask you about a legal matter?”

  His face relaxed. “Sure.”

  I told him about Ken Dorn, about the merchandising situation with Burn Features. He nodded slowly, seriously as I talked, appearing to relish the gradual unveiling of the problem. For once I could see the appeal of attorneyhood. Problems, all problems, could be applied to an established set of rules for judgment, and solved. The answer to any dispute was there, in the books, waiting to be discovered and applied. He took a deep breath.

  “Well, if money was the only consideration here, they’d go with the other guy.”

  “Oh,” I said, crushed at having my own thoughts so succinctly voiced.

  “On the other hand, you’d be surprised at how often money isn’t the point.” He raised a single eyebrow. “Are you going to talk to this Burn guy?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Well, there you go,” he said. “Sell yourself.” He smiled a little. “If that’s not too, uh, distasteful to you, of course.”

  I shrugged. “I’m accustomed to the distasteful.”

  He chuckled, then leveled, out of nowhere, a serious gaze at me. A little of the nervousness had returned, and he wiped his face with a pale hand. “So are you learning anything about your father?” He nodded toward the drawings.

  “A little of this, a little of that.”

  “Ah! Good, good. He wasn’t all bad, you know.”

  “I never said he was.”

  At this his face flushed, and I regretted saying it. “Ah, no, of course not,” he muttered, backing toward the door.

  “Say, Mal, I didn’t mean to—”

  “No, no, I’m prying in your work.” He opened the door. “I just want to see how you’re doing, is all. I…I miss you kids. Sometimes I wish…”

  “What?” I said at last, when he had long trailed off into silence.

  He jerked out of it, looked at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. “I wish you’d all been little at once, like in the strip. That would have been…a lot of fun.”

  Poor Mal, I thought: never married, a lover of children, left with such a rotten family to play surrogate parent to. Maybe he was right; maybe it would have been fun. Somewhere in the studio there was a promotional drawing my father occasionally sent to fans, of all six of us crammed into the station wagon beneath the weight of our dozen teetering suitcases lashed to the roof rack, waving toward the frame, as if the viewer were our best friend in the world. It was easy to contrast this with our actual vacations. I recalled a final one, a last gasp effort to a secluded lake in the Adirondacks: Rose was absent, having long since moved out, and Bobby, who had just learned to drive, insisted on taking his own car. It rained, our food was absconded with by forest animals, and Pierce, unable to sleep, flung rocks into the water all night long, keeping us up with the splashing. We left in waves: Bitty got sick the third day, and Bobby drove her and Mom back home. None of them returned. Pierce and Dad and I remained, locked in a proud silence, for the rest of the week, subsisting on mouse-gnawed junk food from a nearby convenience store housed in a tarpaper shack.

  But now I could see that we were all Mal had. “Yeah,” I told him lamely. “Yeah, that would have been something,” but my face must have told a different story, because Mal only flashed a flaccid grin and walked out, making this the third—and I hoped final—conversation of the day that had ended badly.

  twenty-two

  Late that night I remembered Pierce had the car on weekends. I tried to talk him out of it, so that I could attend the conference. “Gillian could always come out here,” I told him. “I won’t be around until Sunday night.”

  He was lying on his bed, reading a paperback novel, but put it down now and gave this some thought. “She’s never been here before.”

  “Well then, I’m sure she’s dying to visit.”

  He looked at me as if I were insane. “No way,” he said finally.

  Instead, he agreed to drop me off at the hotel. It was far from being on the way to Chatsworth, the Pine Barrens town Gillian lived on the outskirts of, and I couldn’t complain. The next morning, I packed a bag with the usual items, plus a few others I thought might be useful—a sketchbook, a few things to read—and met Pierce by the car, where he was standing with shower-slick hair, staring into the distance. He brought nothing, it seemed, but the clothes on his back.

  We listened to the radio, an AM station that exclusively played country classics: Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams. The DJ wisely remained near-invisible, as when he did speak it was with a quavering, spooked voice as grave as a crow’s. The station fuzzed out halfway to Bridgewater. Pierce reached out and clicked the radio off, leaving us together in the soporific muffled hum of the Caddy’s interior.

/>   “So,” I said to my brother.

  “So,” he said.

  “What did you and Mal talk about?”

  He shifted his hands on the wheel, weighing his answer. “He came out and talked to you, huh?”

  “Not about you.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, nothing, really. Mom. Life. Et cetera.”

  I said nothing for a few miles, watching the trees drift by along Route 202. “He told me Mom’s even worse,” I finally said.

  “She didn’t know him.”

  “No.”

  He turned to me. “Let’s bring her home, man. I’m serious. Like, right away.”

  I knew this was right: visits once a week were not enough. She hadn’t even her memories to keep her company anymore, save for the stray, out-of-context recollection that floated every once in a while past her mind’s eye. Or at least it so seemed; what did I know? I was beginning to get an inkling, through the clumsy lens of my own meager loneliness, of the vast, clinical emptiness of my mother’s. “Yeah,” I said, feeling my heart shrink to a tiny, callused knob. “Yeah, we have to do that. Do you know the first thing about it?”

  He shrugged. “No. Give her medicine? Clean her up, talk to her? What is there to know, Tim? We just give her what she needs.”

  “It has to be more complicated than that,” I said, but he met this with only a silence that persisted for the rest of the trip.

  * * *

  I had no idea if Susan, in her advanced state of indifference to me, had bothered to book me a room in the hotel. I checked in at the desk to discover that she hadn’t, though I decided to chalk this up to unavailability, rather than malice. It was quarter to ten in the morning. I asked the desk clerk which way the conference was, and she pointed me toward a double doorway on the left, which opened into a long hallway.

  The first thing I saw entering was an enormous woman, stout and dense like a cannonball, wearing a studded leather bikini and scabbard. The latter contained an ornate medieval sword. The former contained, barely, the woman. She was standing at a chipped folding buffet table where two men sat wearing Star Trek Federation uniforms and Spock ears. The three looked up at me at once, goggling as if I was the one in the weird getup.

  “Uh, is this the conference?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” said one of the men. “Are you a visitor or a participant, or what are you?”

  “Mostly a visitor. I’m supposed to be on a panel.”

  The other man, who was smaller, began rifling through a clipboardful of papers. “What’s your name?” this one said.

  “Tim Mix.”

  A lot of shuffling and frowning. The big lady sidled off, resting a palm on the hilt of her sword. I looked down the hall in the direction she’d gone and saw a diverse and clumsy menagerie of people, bizzarely costumed: a space suit, some kind of animal with a lot of tentacles, a wizard and a witch ducking hand in hand into a brightly lit doorway. “I don’t see you here,” said the small Spock. “M—I—X, right?”

  “Yes,” I said, still watching the crowd. Then something occurred to me. “This is the cartoonists’ conference, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, no!” said the tall Spock, and they both laughed. “This is JerCon! We’re a science fiction conference! Your con is down the hall.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Sure enough, there was another table at the other end of the hallway. From a distance it appeared to be staffed by contemporary earthlings in conventional clothes. I made my way past the sci-fi people, peeking into ballrooms and meeting rooms. Racks of paperbacks and comic books, loud laughs from panel discussions, where characters in and out of costume spoke from behind microphones set up on table stands. I had no trouble getting registered for the cartoonists’ conference, was given a schedule and a hello-my-name-is pin with TIM MIX laser-printed onto it. Next to my name, seemingly questioning the legitimacy of my attendance, was a winking Dogberry, the wily and irreverent canine hero of “Art’s Kids.” I looked at my schedule. Art Kearns himself was the grand master of the conference, and would deliver a closing speech at tomorrow night’s awards dinner. He would be on hand afterward to give drawings and autographs to his fans.

  I scanned the list of participants, and came across some of the most famous names in cartooning: Leslie Parr, Kelsey Hoon, dozens of others I knew from my daily perusal of the funnies.

  Which, I suddenly realized, I hadn’t read all summer. Pierce didn’t subscribe to a newspaper, and apparently neither had my dad. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even missed them. I made a mental note to pick up a paper and read it sometime over the weekend, if for no other reason than to see what strips of my father’s the syndicate was running, now that he was dead.

  Meanwhile, the convention people had apparently gotten the news of his death too late to remove him from the list of participants. There he was, drawing and signing in the Red Room, speaking at a panel in the Blue Room, debating Tyro, author of the minimalist strip “The Emerald Forest,” in the Brown Room. I wondered who they had gotten to replace him: hopefully not me. I looked at the schedule for Sunday and found:

  9am-11 am: Continental Breakfast Buffet in Ballroom B

  11am: Kelsey Hoon draws and signs in Red Room

  Panel Debate: Taking Over the Old Strips, Green Room

  Tyro draws and signs in Blue Room

  12 noon: Leslie Parr draws and signs in Blue Room

  I guessed I was to be in the Green Room at eleven the next day, and decided to attend a panel debate, to see what was expected of me. I was beginning to get excited—not just about the conference, but about cartooning and being a cartoonist. I was feeling, for the first time, a part of something.

  I looked at my watch—my father’s watch. Ten o’clock. According to the schedule, no panel discussions were going on. All right, fine. Somebody named Sybil Schimmelpfennig was drawing and signing in the Blue Room, and since an open door nearby bore a felt-tip-markered sign reading “Blue,” I went in.

  The room was not exactly empty, but it was far from its capacity of about a hundred and fifty people. There were maybe thirty gathered around a table at the front, most of them gnawing on donuts and sipping coffee from paper cups, chatting animatedly to one another. A woman sat at the table, her head of dark shiny hair bent over, twitching with the motion of her drawing arm.

  It might have been a sixth sense, or perhaps just dumb logic, that made me realize this must be the Sybil, author of the strip “Sybil.” “Sybil” didn’t run in the Philly Inquirer, so I didn’t get to read it often, but it had spawned a fairly massive T-shirt and coffee mug industry and was therefore familiar. Its basic premise was this: Sybil was a thirtyish woman who worked in an office, and she complained about things. The main things she complained about were men, clothes and food. Recurrent characters were the coworker who always had good luck with men, the department store clerk who sold Sybil clothes, and the deli clerk who made the sandwiches Sybil ate and which made Sybil fat, or so she thought. Sybil always wore black: a black blouse with a white star on the chest, and either black pants or a black skirt. The oddness of the star—what kind of office worker wore such clothes, let alone all the time?—was lost in its ubiquity. Sybil posters were almost inevitable in any office. In them, Sybil was generally seated behind a desk, the papers in her “in” box towering unsteadily over the pile in her “out,” and she wore an expression of resigned exasperation. Or, in an alternate poster, usually hung in office break rooms, Sybil sat behind an enormous slice of pie, grinning coyly and saying something like “I shouldn’t…”

  I walked to the front of the Blue Room, which was not blue, stepping over a crushed glazed donut that had been ground into the carpet by someone’s heel. I listened in for a moment to the conversation coming in stifled bursts through mouthsful of food. People were talking about other conferences they’d been to. Sybil herself finished up the drawing she was working on and handed it to a thickset woman with puffy yellow hair, who thanked her politely. Sybil nodded and grinned. “An
y time,” she said. She was dressed exactly the same as her cartoon self, down to the white star. It wasn’t the usual pointy American-flag star, but a bulgy one, like a child’s toy.

  “Hi there,” she said. “How do you want it?”

  She was talking to me. I came to the table and rested my hand on the edge. Sybil Schimmelpfennig’s face, the thin, translucent kind of face you’d expect would flinch whenever it was looked at, was as twitchless and composed as a hunk of marble, and frozen into a grin so fiercely welcoming that I thought she must be mad. She had an unusually large chin. I said, “Uh, want what?”

  “Your drawing. What do you want Sybil to be saying? Something about your girlfriend or boss, maybe? What do you do for a living?”

  I considered my answer, as Sybil clearly grew impatient. “I’m a cartoonist, actually.”

  “No kidding?” she said. “What strip?”

  “I’m taking over the Family Funnies.”

  Her expression at last changed, taking on a manipulative edge that unnerved me. She looked like she knew something about me I didn’t. “Ohhh. You’re Tim Mix.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sorry to hear about your dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Right, so…” Expectant smirk.

  “So what?”

  “So what do you want here?” She swirled her pen hand in the air, pretending to draw. It was a felt-tip, which explained the characteristic fuzziness of “Sybil.” I was thrown, confused that she still assumed I wanted a drawing now that we had been established as professional equals.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

  She raised her eyebrows, making my statement seem, in retrospect, provocative. Then her hand flashed into action, squeaking across the paper like a cornered rat, leaving heads, hands, faces in its wake. She was the fastest draw I’d ever seen. She talked to me as she worked. “I’ll make you as many as you want, Tim. I love doing it. I don’t feel like a full person when I’m not drawing.” I noticed now, clipped into her breast pocket beside the star, a row of fresh black pens. “I draw in the steam on the bathroom mirror. I walk past people’s cars and draw in the dust on their doors and windows.”