The Funnies

  He grabbed my arm just below the elbow and leaned close, reeking of aftershave. I adjusted my estimation of his age to a particularly hale early seventies. “Your pop was a great man. A great man.”

  I made a little room between us by sipping my drink. “Hey, thanks.”

  “It’s got class, that Family Funnies. Not like a couple strips I could name.”

  “Well, I’m really enjoying work—”

  He let go my arm, leaving a hand-shaped cool spot of sweat in its wake, and formed the hand into the shape of a pistol, which he brandished before me. “You know ‘N and B’ really got started a year before Kearns? Had a little strip in a small-town paper in Northern California. Called ‘The Shoehorn Gang.’ Wasn’t strictly ‘N and B’ but it was, whaddyacallit, its spiritual cousin.” From Parr’s mouth, the words “spiritual cousin” fell like lead weights at our feet. “Just because it doesn’t have the same name, those ninnies disqualify it. Of course, Kearns’s got ‘em wrapped around his little toe. Old man doesn’t even draw the damned thing anymore.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “He’s a quivering fogy!” Parr produced a drink, something clear that magnified his fingers through the glass, and downed it in a single swig. “Can barely hold a pen!”

  “So who does it?”

  He leaned back, gesturing in the air with his beefy arm, as if it were the entire world supporting the great fraud that was Art Kearns and “Art’s Kids.” “Minions! Flunkies! Whatever! Living out there on that bogus ranch of his, nodding his little white head.” He reached out to the bar—what seemed an impossible distance—and slammed down the empty glass. “You and me, kid. Nothing to worry about there. We‘re the real thing.”

  * * *

  It was nearly midnight when the unfolding spectacle of Midnight Angel came into full bloom, like a poisonous species of daisy. “Is this on?” asked the singer without irony. She gave her tambourine a tentative shake. She had the long blotchy nose of a border collie and cheeks sunken enough to eat soup out of. Her partner, camped out behind the synthesizers, had his shaggy head tipped back and was squeezing a bottle of eye drops several inches above his face. He turned to the crowd and blinked dramatically, his mouth hanging wide open.

  I was groping for the car keys when Sybil grabbed my hand and dragged me from the bar. “Igotta showya somethin’,” she said. She was drunk, but seemed not to have lost her manual dexterity. We hopped into an elevator and she pushed the button for the fifth floor. I couldn’t remember the hotel being so tall. As we rode, she stared at me with a detached intensity that made me feel like I was about to be dissected. I watched my reflection in the polished steel doors.

  Of course I knew what was going on: a blunt, clumsy seduction. I didn’t want to be a party to it, but still I followed, stumbling puppily behind her. We went to her room. She used a little magnetic credit card to open the door, then told me to follow her to the bathroom, where she began running hot water into the tub.

  I thought of Lowell’s question: did I think she was good-looking? Now, watching her watch me in the bathroom mirror, I thought, Yeah, Lowell, sure she is. But she was the wrong woman. Her pocket was still full of black pens. “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I can’t.” And I fled.

  twenty-five

  It was nearly quarter to one when I pulled into the driveway at Bobby’s house. The device he had given me to open the garage door was bulky and crude, considering the general level of immaculate newness in the house. It had three large green buttons on it, each the size and shape of dominoes, and looked like something the Army would use to detonate explosives in the desert. I pressed each of the three buttons and nothing happened. I pressed harder. A light blinked on and a sound issued from the garage like a piece of heavy road machinery; the door rumbled slowly up on metal tracks.

  Inside the house, no lights burned. Moonlight guided me to a guest bedroom, where I assumed I would be staying. Nancy (or someone) had put fresh white sheets on the bed and stacked several salmon-colored bath towels at its foot, along with matching hand towels and washcloths. The walls were covered with beige carpeting.

  There was a nightstand next to the bed. I flopped myself across the comforter, making a tremendous squeak and upsetting the stack of towels, and pulled open the drawer: nothing. I was mildly surprised, having half-expected a Gideon’s Bible and a little pile of hotel stationery. It was the latter that I wanted.

  I crept back into the hall. Bedsprings creaked behind a door: Bobby and Nancy? Sam? In the kitchen, I opened and closed drawers, looking for paper and a pen in the light of the digital microwave oven timer. I found both under the telephone, and a small safety envelope. Back in the guest room I undressed and got into the bed. The sheets had been tucked tightly under the mattress, and I left them that way, letting myself be sandwiched between them. It felt like I was lying at the bottom of a shallow sea. I propped my head up on the pillows and examined my implements: the pen was a black ballpoint with UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT stamped on it and the pad, perhaps a bit small for my needs, had the punchline from a lightbulb joke printed at the bottom of each page. I looked for the joke setups but didn’t find any.

  Dear Susan,

  I’m sorry, although I don’t really know what I’m apologizing for. That doesn’t mean I don’t think I’ve let you down somehow, because I have the feeling I did, I just am not sure how. If I seemed funny after the movie last week, maybe it was because I was a little drunk & tired and wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. But I know I don’t like this not talking, business-relationship thing, and I’m guessing you don’t either, so one way or another we should see a little more of each other.

  So far so good. I went to gnaw on the pen when I noticed it had been heavily gnawed on already. It took some serious biting to make those kind of marks in hard plastic, I knew from experience. Were they Bobby’s? Nancy’s? Sam’s? It was hard to tell, in this house, where one of them ended and the next began, so uniform was the overall effect. I imagined they would all be embarrassed to know that I was using their Federal Government pen and gag paper.

  I wish I could describe the way I’m feeling lately. Something like going to church when you’re Jewish. Or eating dog food. Things don’t seem to fit. There are things I feel I ought to be doing instead of this, but I don’t know what they are. Maybe I’m a little old to be having this problem. Whatever, I keep doing it, because it’s new and different, even though I’m kind of repulsed.

  That was all wrong, “repulsed.” Might she think I was talking about her? I paused a moment and realized that I might as well have been, though she didn’t repulse me, not in the vernacular sense, anyway, the sick-to-one’s-stomach sense. It was more like an empirical repulsion, the repulsion of two magnets aligned with like poles facing. Maybe all that was necessary to make the magnets do what they were supposed to was flip one around. Me. But I couldn’t. Did I want her in that way? Did I want a new girlfriend? I suppose I did. Those people who said they didn’t want a relationship right now because they had just come off a bad one were lying. They wanted one even more than before.

  I gnawed on the pen after all: we were family. Here I was thinking about Susan, about us. It all seemed too much to expect, love, success. Happiness. I had none of them right now and would gladly settle for just one. The bottom of the page read: Two. One to change the lightbulb and the other to change it back.

  “Hi.”

  It was Samantha, standing in my doorway, wearing pajamas with pieces of watermelon printed on them. “Hi,” I said, whispered actually, to avoid waking Bobby and Nancy. “Did I wake you up when I came back?”

  “No.” She stepped in, carefully, as if into a flower bed, and shut the door behind her. “I never sleep.”

  “Never?”

  “Almost never.” She pointed to the end of the bed. “Can I sit there?”

  “Sure,” I said, curling my legs up under me. She climbed on and sat cross-legged next to the fallen towels. I thought she had some
piece to speak, but she didn’t speak it, so I said, “What do you do? When you’re awake?”

  She shrugged. “Think. Make up people. Sometimes I read books. Grandpa gave me a little flashlight. Before he died.”

  “Do you miss him?”

  “Sort of.” She looked up suddenly. “He’s your daddy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “Sure.”

  She looked away, toward the blank black window, and sighed. “What are you doing?”

  “Writing a letter.”

  She leaned forward. “Can I see?”

  “No. It’s private.”

  “To your girlfriend,” she told me flatly, obviously bored with the idea already.

  “Not exactly.” I twirled the pen in my hand for a few seconds. “Samantha, how are things around here? Is your dad okay? Your mom?”

  “They’re okay. I’m getting a sister.”

  I hadn’t known they knew the sex. “What is her name going to be?”

  “I’m going to call her Mariette.”

  “Ah.” As with Bobby, I was running out of conversation topics. What do you say to a six-year-old? I began to get anxious that Bobby would find her here, and read something sinister or perverted into our meeting.

  “Can I come visit you and Uncle Pierce?” she said. She unfolded the washcloth and put it on her head, not in a silly way but reverentially, like an old lady in church. “Maybe over school vacation. Maybe for Christmas.”

  This jolted me. Christmas! With my brother, at home! Not to mention Thanksgiving, Labor Day. Holidays with Pierce and Mom, opening her gifts, holding them up to her inscrutable eyes. “Sure,” I said. “Any time.”

  “How about soon, before school?”

  “Well, I have to draw cartoons. And you’d have to ask your mom and dad…”

  She took off the washcloth and dropped it on the pile. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and slid off the bed. I felt jilted, as if by a lover.

  “Goodnight,” I said weakly.

  She turned, ran back, stretched out to me and gave me a kiss. “Sleepy dreams,” she said, and hurried out the door.

  * * *

  In the morning everybody ate cold cereal. The options were dumbfounding: every sugar-rich concoction under the sun, each represented by a jolly mascot. I ate the cereal formerly known as Super Sugar Crisp, which in this enlightened age had become Super Golden Crisp, its public image transformed from cheesy harbinger of tooth decay to precious Incan artifact. My mouth ached, but I scooped out every last drop of cloying milk. Looking around the table, I could see the same expression of awe on everyone’s face; it was the only moment of unqualified joy I had witnessed under this roof.

  My letter was finished, sealed and stamped, thanks to a booklet of self-adhesive American flags I’d found in the kitchen drawer; I left some change for the postage, feeling I’d taken enough already. Now the letter was in the pocket of my jeans, awaiting a mailbox.

  After breakfast, I thanked Nancy. She nodded gravely, her eyes still luminous from the sugar high. I kissed Sam on the cheek and she accepted with grace. “Tell Uncle Pierce hi,” she said.

  “You bet.”

  “Tell him I love him!” This was irony, something I’d never before heard from Sam, but which seemed to fit. Nancy and Bobby didn’t recognize it as such. Expressions of unease overpowered their faces.

  “I will,” I said.

  Bobby drove me back to the hotel. He was strangely chatty. I wondered if he was always like this mornings, before the day defeated him. “Too bad you can’t come to the plant. I ought to show you around sometime.”

  In fact, there was no reason I couldn’t go, except that I hadn’t been asked. “That would be great.”

  “Show you the sterile radiating units, they’re something else. Had to order them special from Switzerland. And the shredder, which actually is called the homogenizing refuse deintegrator, but we call it the shredder.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Oh, it’s all perfectly airtight, perfectly clean. Smells like a doctor’s office in there, no kidding.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  “Like a trip to the doctor’s,” he said, apparently to himself. We were silent for a while.

  “Sorry I came in late,” I said.

  He waved this off. “Barely noticed.”

  “Good.”

  “So, Tim. Think about what I said yesterday. About Mom.”

  “You bet.”

  “I know you think it’s the right thing. But you’re only doing it for yourself, to feel good about yourself. That’s no reason to take an old lady away from the place where she‘ll be safe.”

  I wondered if Bobby had really looked at the nursing home. The degeneration of people’s bodies, the madness, the unrelenting smell of urine. I said, “Well, that’s food for thought.”

  We had come to the hotel. A woman with antennae walked into the revolving door with a man in a robot suit. Bobby didn’t appear to notice.

  “So keep in touch,” he said.

  “I will.”

  We shook. “That was a great visit.”

  “Sure was.”

  He nodded. “Okay, right. See you, bro.”

  I got out of the car, straining to come up with a response. “Right on,” I told him, and shut the door. The sound it made was quiet as a breath.

  * * *

  I was among the first to arrive for my panel. To my surprise, there was a name placard already in place for me, along with three others: Bennett Koch, Lynn Bismarck and Ken Dorn.

  I actually did an authentic double-take. Ken Dorn? I didn’t think he’d ever had his own strip before. The other people I knew of only vaguely: Koch’s strip, “Pangaea,” had a lot of cute dinosaurs in it, and Bismarck’s was one of those serial soap-opera things, the kind that now invariably looked like Roy Lichtenstein paintings, I forgot the name.

  But Ken Dorn! I began to get a creepy feeling, like he’d been planted. I entertained the notion that he had somehow replaced me without my knowing: had I been betrayed by the Burn Syndicate’s corporate honchos? Or by the woman I possibly sort of loved? I took the sealed letter from my pocket and turned it over in my hands. I felt like a fool, and thought about tearing it to pieces.

  “Timmy Mix. Fancy meeting you.”

  He was beginning to grow a tiny mustache and goatee, and had gotten his hair shaved closer to his head. “I’d imagine you’re brimming over with insights from your training, mmm?”

  “Hello, Ken,” I said, stowing the letter. “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know? You haven’t taken any notes?” He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small stack of 3x5 note cards, fastened with a rubber band. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The issues are compelling indeed.”

  “Well…I’ve never done anything like it before.”

  “I would suppose not.”

  “So what strip have you taken over?” I said, trying to sting him. He looked off into the air, though, and crossed his arms in a pose of mock contemplation.

  “Oh, I’ve taken over the inking for a few. But I’m most interested in taking over full creative control.” He raised his eyebrows and turned to me, grinning. “Someday, that is.”

  “Oh, sure,” I said, crossing my own arms. I was almost a full foot taller than Ken Dorn. Push him over, I thought.

  “I was talking to Ray the other day, and he seemed quite impressed with my drawings. I didn’t have anything prepared, of course, but it was no trouble dashing off a few sketches…”

  “Ray? Ray Burn?”

  “Yes, Ray Burn. A good man, wouldn’t you say, Timmy? What did you talk about the last time you saw him?”

  I cleared my throat. Dorn leaned back and plucked from a chair a glazed donut and a cup of orange juice. “Well,” I said, “he told me I’m the sentimental favorite.”

  Dorn took a large bite of donut, laughing from behind his closed lips. “So you are,” he said, chewing. �
��So you are.”

  “Where did you get those?”

  “These?” he said, holding out the donut and juice. “There was a table in the hall. Participants only!”

  “Then you’ll excuse me,” I said.

  “Of course! See you behind the mike!”

  * * *

  Everyone seemed to have donuts and juice but me, and if there had been a table in the hall, it was gone now. I stood helpless among the conventioneers, squinting into various rooms. Finally I gave up and was turning to take my place in the Green Room when I saw him at last: Art Kearns.

  Kearns was being escorted by a jowly middle-aged woman wearing an “Art’s Kids” T-shirt. He clenched her arm with one hand and a scuffed wooden cane with the other. Both hands, along with the rest of Art Kearns, were shaking. He was a large man, even in this sad, crumpled state, still bearing the profile of the Wyoming cowboy he was said to have been before he became famous. He wore a white shirt and bolo tie, and a pair of dirty black jeans; his head was nearly bare, with a little red knoll of blotchy skin poking up through his hair. He was blinking, blinking, blinking his eyes, as if something tiny and painful was lodged under both lids.

  He and the woman moved slowly, and they commanded much of the hallway’s attention. A few people even set down their donuts and juice to quietly applaud. As they passed me, Kearns raised his head and his eyes met mine. He winked. I couldn’t help grinning.

  * * *

  Ben Koch had two donuts, but didn’t offer one to me. Lynn Bismarck had only juice. Dorn was finished eating. He and I sat next to each other at one end of the table, while Koch and Bismarck chatted animatedly like college freshmen, obviously falling for one another.