The Funnies

by John Lennon

  “Oh, you’re from Ohio too! Which town?”

  “Sandusky.”

  “Oh, you’re kidding me. I have an aunt in Sandusky.”

  “Really!”

  “Ida Loos.”

  “Well, I’ll just have to ask my mother if she knows her. Do you get back much?”

  “Not much.”

  “Well, we’ll have to go together sometime!”

  “Why not?”

  Dorn was oblivious to them, transfixed upon his notes. I tried to peek at them, but his handwriting was indecipherable: thin lines of what looked like chocolate ice cream sprinkles. Several times he laughed privately or raised his eyebrows. I watched the room fill up and wondered if Tyro would come, until I remembered he was drawing and signing in the Blue Room. It was difficult to imagine him doing such a thing.

  Koch had the gavel. He whacked it happily on the table, paused a moment to giggle with Lynn, then announced in a loud voice, “Welcome, everyone, to ‘Taking Over the Old Strips.’” People clapped. He introduced Lynn and her strip, then Ken Dorn, “who has helped produce some of our finest work for over fifteen years.” Dorn nodded. “And at my left,” Koch said, “is, I believe, Tim Mix, who you all know as Timmy in the Family Funnies. Let’s give him a hand.”

  People clapped, harder than they did for Dorn. I raised my hand, scanning the crowd for a familiar face. Thus distracted, I stopped waving a few seconds too late.

  “Now,” said Koch, “let me introduce our topic.” He went on at length about the cartoonist’s responsibility to his legacy, that perhaps an inherited strip is at best shared with the deceased. He pointed up the need to be honest about making people laugh. “Or cry,” he said. “Emotions are serious business. People depend on their funnies. So. There you have it. Does anyone have a question?”

  A man stood up in the audience. “I have a question for Tim Mix,” he said.

  Koch leaned over the table and shot me a smug smile. “Tim?”

  “Uh, sure,” I said. “Go on.” My meek voice boomed out across the crowd and I pulled back a little from the mike and cleared my throat.

  “What’s it like, drawing yourself? Is it, you know, weird?”

  “Uh, not really. I don’t think of it as me, really. Timmy’s just, you know, a kid. I’m, uh, an adult.”

  A ragged laugh went up. I didn’t understand why.

  “Mr. Mix?” somebody asked. “Did your father train you?”

  “No. No, he didn’t. I’m…I’m still learning, actually.”

  A brief mumble, like a spattering of rain. Then I watched as a large man hauled himself to his feet in the fifth row, pulling up his overalls as if he were about to go out and slop the hogs. His arm pistoned into the air. Ben Koch pointed the gavel at him.

  “Tim,” the man said, “now you know there’s a cartoonists’ union, isn’t there? Are you a member of it?”

  Silence. Cartoonists’ union? “Uh, no,” I said, “not yet. But I’m not actually going to start the strip until…”

  “And isn’t it true your father was never a union man? If I got it right, a few people weren’t exactly disappointed your old man, ah, wasn’t able to make it to this weekend’s festivities.”

  My head began a mild, plaintive ache. Voices simmered up across the room, and the man’s voice carried over them. “A lot of people here would rather see a union man take over, see, especially since your dad wasn’t particularly known for hiring from the union. Or from anywhere at all, for that matter. He was, whadyacallit, an outsider, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, uh…I suppose he was kind of…”

  “Sir, sir,” came Dorn’s voice from beside me, “ladies and gentlemen, please. Let’s not gang up on our young man, yes? I’m sure Tim has considered all these important issues, haven’t you, Tim?” He laid his hand on my shoulder and patted, gently.

  “Sure. I…”

  “I think we ought to take this opportunity—a great classic’s change of hands—to discuss what must be done, what we must do, to perpetuate the great tradition of the funnies.” A dull snap as the rubber band came off his stack of note cards. “Let us consider the Family Funnies’ place in the canon of daily strips, namely, its role in establishing and solidifying those values the American family holds dear…”

  And he was off, dodging and parrying probing questions in my defense, explaining how the Family Funnies was written and why it was written that way, and what he would do—in the unlikely event he would draw it—to keep its feet planted firmly on virtuous ground. It was a crock of shit, but I was dead in my seat, all resolve evaporated. The large man was gone, slipped away in the commotion. Lynn and Ben whispered sweet nothings to each other, their snacks left unfinished. And Ken Dorn held the floor, a self-taught expert on my comic strip.

  * * *

  When it was all over, I bummed a cigarette and found a back door to slither out through. I wondered what I thought I was doing, why I had thrown away a perfectly reasonable, if imperfect, life to act out this elaborate failure. The cigarette tasted awful, as a cigarette does when employed as a side dish to a generous helping of self-pity.

  It didn’t take me long to spy Dorn lurking next to a dumpster at the other end of the building, handing something to the large man from the Green Room. They finished their transaction and parted. The man got into a pickup truck, and Dorn ducked back into the hotel through a green steel door.

  I stubbed out my cigarette underfoot, sick of myself, and slunk back inside.

  twenty-six

  The Kearns event was a buffet dinner, keynote speech and drawing/signing, to be held in the Grand Ballroom down the hall. It wasn’t to start until four-thirty, and I was hungry beyond description. The morning’s cold cereal had rushed through me like an electric pulse, leaving behind a dry, slightly scorched taste in my mouth and a yawning gulf in my stomach, though I realized that part of this was probably from making a fool of myself—of being made a fool of—in the Green Room. I set off in search of food, taking a detour at the men’s room in the lobby.

  Inside, I realized I wasn’t alone. This is always obvious in a public restroom. In gangster movies, people often hide from the hit men by standing on toilet seats in lavatory stalls, but to me, such scenes are highly implausible. Every surface in a restroom reflects and amplifies sound. Air currents shift at a human body’s slightest motion. In this case, a specific smell tipped me off: the dank, vegetative odor of pot. I ignored it and picked a stall, sat down and did my business, trying to minimize the noise. I got out and washed my hands.

  In the mirror I could see a pair of black boots and the cuffs of black jeans, motionless under a stall door. I took a gamble.

  “Tyro?”

  “Hello, Mix.”

  There were no paper towels. I forewent the hot air dryer and wiped my hands on my pants. “How’s it going?”

  “It’s fucked,” he said. “Want a joint?”

  Why not? “Sure,” I said.

  There was a rustle, then a fat white cigarette rolled across the floor at me, shedding marijuana like a molting pigeon. A lighter followed it, clattering across the tiles. I picked them both up and sat in the stall adjoining Tyro, where I committed my misdemeanor. It had been years since I’d hung out with anyone who smoked. I felt like a greaser.

  “I got humiliated today,” I said, passing the lighter under the dividing wall.

  “It’s got around.”

  “Already?”

  “Sybil told me.” I heard a deep breath. “She’s pissed at you, buddy.”

  “We had a little misunderstanding.”

  “Let me guess. She tried hustling you and you wimped out.”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Maybe it was a mistake.” I could feel the unsent letter crackling in my back pocket. I considered flushing it down the toilet.

  There was a long pause before he said, surprising me, “I like her, but she’s too depressed for me. Women read my strip and they think I’ll wanna sit around quoting Nietszche with ‘em.
”

  “You don’t?”

  “Hell, no.” After a minute, he added, quietly, “It’s an aesthetic, not a Weltanschauung.”

  I smoked awhile in silence, waiting for the pot to take effect. I concentrated, vigilant for changes in my mood. It wasn’t until I was thoroughly fed up that I realized I wasn’t fed up at all anymore, and the stall suddenly seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to be, with the walls verdant and mildly reflective and a pool of clear water beneath me. I said, “I think I’m falling for this girl.”

  “Not Sybil.”

  “Not Sybil.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “Being a dick,” I said, stunning myself with my crassness. I scrambled to soften it. “I guess.”

  He coughed. “Want to get something to eat?”

  I dropped the end of the cigarette into the toilet. “You bet,” I said.

  * * *

  We got microwaved burritos at the Kwik Stop adjoining the hotel, and ate them out on the curb. I couldn’t fill myself fast enough, and ended up going in for another. Tyro watched people walking in and out of the store and made up secret obsessions for them. “Ass freak,” he said. “Angora goatfucker.” I put my head in my hands and watched spilled gasoline trace prismatic amoebas in a puddle of water.

  “So Mix,” Tyro said. “Why are you doing this shit?”

  “Cartooning?”

  “No, animal sacrifice.”

  I didn’t want to talk about it. “Hard to say,” I said.

  “Is it the money?”

  Of course that was part of it, but if money was all I ever wanted, I would probably have it already. The truth was that my life was fine, and could have stayed fine indefinitely, but I didn’t want fine, I wanted great. So I had to change something. But I had no guiding ambition, and in my fumbling for one seemed to have traded fine for pathetic. I was feeling like I could spend years just trying to get things back to fine again. I wouldn’t have said this to Tyro even if I could, at that moment, have formed the complex sentences necessary to do so. All I said was, “Not really.”

  “So why? Why are you so interested in the Family Funnies?”

  “It’s my family,” I said.

  “You’re telling me that strip is more interesting than the genuine article?”

  “There is no genuine article.” This had the ring of gloomy, fatalistic truth to me.

  Tyro shook his head. “Bullshit,” he said.

  * * *

  We went to the buffet together. I was still hungry, even after the burritos, and loaded my plate with Italian sausage and pierogies, which anywhere else in the world but New Jersey would have been an unacceptable contradiction. We sat at a table with some Fans, who didn’t talk to us. Many of them wore Dogberry T-shirts, with Kearns’s looping signature under the drawing.

  “I hear he still has horses on the ranch.”

  “Is that so? Does he ride?”

  “Oh, I’d imagine he must. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, naturally.”

  I watched Tyro eat. His exterior calm was astonishing, though it was clear this was not his natural, primeval state: under the table his feet twitched to an obsessive internal rhythm, and he fussed at his jeans and shirt surreptitiously, not out of vanity, it seemed, but of minor yet irrepressible discomfort. I could guess at his childhood: pure nerd until his junior year in high school, when suddenly he became bony and dangerous, a sexual beacon to girls who months before would have had nothing to do with him—cheerleaders, honor students. It made him wary of people who expected things from him. He ignored the Fans and absorbed himself in his food until Kearns was introduced by, of all people, Leslie Parr.

  Parr stood massively on the plywood stage, hunched over the lectern like an Army colonel preparing to outline battle plans with his quirt. What he said about Kearns probably looked respectful enough on paper—some saccharine blather about the strip’s immeasurable influence and timeless appeal—but his voice reeked so strongly of contempt that I half-expected riot. Nobody else seemed to notice, though.

  “Of course, I could stand up here yammering all day, give y’all time to polish off that chicken tertrazzini or whatever you got there”—polite laughter—“but you wanna see the genuine article, and lucky for you we got ‘im right here, the mangy old goat of the funny papers, Art Kearns!”

  Thundering applause, from all quarters including mine. My cogitations on the curb, which already in the glum aftermath of artificial stimulants seemed no more or less significant than a low-wattage light being switched on in a musty attic full of junk, had no effect on my slavish devotion to Kearns, whom I still considered tack-sharp and dignified, even in his weakened state. His progress to the lectern was prolonged and excruciating, and the applause flagged and reinvigorated several times before he finally arrived, supported by his assistant. She took a moment to steady him before the mike, then sat down upstage on a folding chair.

  “Well thanks,” said Kearns, his voice thin and crusty as an old piece of wire, and everyone clapped again. Tyro picked up a sausage with his fingers and chomped off a thumb-sized chunk.

  “It’s a real honor, speaking to you here. I’ve been in this business a long time. Longer’n you can imagine. And I’ve drawn a lot of strips, for sure. But it’s all ‘cause of you all that ‘Art’s Kids’ is still popular. ‘Smuch as it was fifty years ago.” His oratory trickled out over the crowd like a leak in a cellar wall. All his sentences were of uniform length. I looked around me and found people eating quietly, cleaning off their eyeglasses or squinting earnestly at Kearns, as if in an effort to see the words better. I waited for the introduction to stop and his speech, per se, to begin. But minutes passed, and pretty soon he stopped talking, and after a pause that lingered a beat or two too long, everyone caught on that this had been his speech, it was over, and it was time to start clapping. So they did. Kearns turned from the lectern and his assistant leapt to her feet to support him, and together they walked off, to further applause.

  Les Parr was quick to retake the mike. “All right!” he screamed, as if it had not been Kearns on stage at all, but Elvis Presley. His grin was less celebratory than triumphal, and he pointed at Kearns’s receding form with what looked, from where I was sitting, like open mockery. “Y’all finish eating, and Art’s gonna move over to this table here”—he pointed to where some people were unfolding a buffet table, stage right—“and draw y’all some pictures, okay? All right, let’s give the old boy one more hand!”

  More clapping, weaker this time. Kearns, who had nearly made it to his seat, half-turned and accepted it, nodding. And then the noise retreated into scabrous mumbled conversation and giggling. Tyro held up his empty plate and nodded his head at it.

  “Seconds?” he said.

  * * *

  Afterward, I wanted to wait and meet Kearns. Tyro would have none of it. “I’m history,” he said. “More than thirty-six hours in Jersey gives me the willies.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  To my surprise, he stuck out his hand to be shook. It was an ironic gesture, accompanied by a pompous fake smirk, but his grip on my fingers was strong and honest. “It was good meeting you, Mix. I thought I’d have to hate everybody.”

  “Glad to be of service.”

  “Let me know how things go,” he said.

  “You’ll see me in the funny papers.”

  He made a face. “Shit, Mix, I can’t read that trash. Drop me a note or something.”

  “Yeah, sure,” I said, but we didn’t exchange addresses or telephone numbers. He didn’t say goodbye either, only made a little pistol with his hand, cocked his thumb and shot me right between the eyes.

  * * *

  The line to see Kearns was nearly fifty yards long, but I got in it anyway. People seemed to be holding things for Kearns to sign or draw on. Was it possible that there was no paper for the cartoonist?

  “They ran out,” someone told me. “He keeps making mistakes and starting over.”<
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  “So, do you have anything…extra? You could give me?”

  His name tag read STEVE GOPP, WASHINGTON POST. “Nah, I just got these two.” He held up a couple of magazine subscription cards, one with a grease stain on the corner. “One of ‘em’s for my kid.”

  I scanned the floor for dropped programs or dinner napkins. My own program had somehow gotten away from me. The line, which had seemed stuck, was moving now, and as I came closer to the table I set to the task of persuading myself that asking for autographs was crass and demeaning, and a handshake and pleased-ta-meetcha would be sufficient. Then I remembered I had some paper with me after all.

  “Now, you look familiar,” Kearns said to me, smiling. His right eye was milky with growths and it was a wonder to me that he could see at all.

  “I’m Tim Mix,” I said. “Maybe you knew my father Carl. He drew the Family Funnies.”

  “Nah, that ain’t it. You look like my granddaughter’s boyfriend. You ride a motorcycle?”

  “No, sir.”

  He nodded slowly. “Kill yourself on one of them things. So,” he said. “Whatcha got for me?”

  I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and set it on the table in front of him. He turned it over and read the address. “To your sweetie?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Well, we’ll give you a little something for luck here.” He brought his felt-tipped marker to the envelope and began to draw. His hand shook, teetering at the very edge of his control. When lines appeared, they did so in a rhythmic fuzz, like pipe cleaners bent into shapes by a child. For some time, I waited for the patterns to become recognizable, then finally gave up. Eventually Kearns handed the envelope back to me.

  “There you go,” he said. “Little shaky, but it’s the real McCoy.”

  “Hey, thanks,” I said.

  We shook hands. It was like grabbing a branch. “No problem,” he told me. “Whatever you got yourself into with that girl, this oughta straighten it out.”