The Funnies

by John Lennon

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Pierce shook his head. “Definitely.” And he went inside.

  thirty

  I couldn’t decide what to wear to my meeting with Ray Burn. It was Wednesday morning, and I had canceled my cartooning class with Wurster, in exchange for a promise to draw all day when I got back from New York. I didn’t tell him that Susan had gotten the afternoon off, faking a chronic illness and its attendant doctor’s visit, and that we planned to spend the day together.

  Considering my previous wrangles with discipline, I went out to the studio every afternoon with surprising ease. I’d had to drag myself to work in the old days. It wasn’t that I was having more fun (though I’ll admit there is greater satisfaction in drawing competently than in drawing badly); it was simply that the more work I did, the more I wanted to do. I was turning into a junkie.

  Part of my high, of course, was a boost in self-regard: I was beginning, at last, to feel like a cartoonist. Cartooning was making me into a visual thinker, my drawing into a sort of emotive shorthand. I was developing a taste for the self-contained. Oddly, this change didn’t seem to come entirely from my lessons with Wurster or the cartoons I studied: it was more like these things helped to uncover what was already true, but hidden, about my artistic sensibilities. I was establishing an aesthetic, something I’d never had before, even when I was trying to be an artist.

  All the same, I bristled at the boundaries of my one square Family Funnies panel, and even more at the raw materials available to me inside it: not my family, not even anything remotely close to me, but a coterie of cutout shills employed to deliver flimsy one-liners. I’d been trying to think of the strip as a kind of self-limitation, like a fugue or a sonnet, but even Beethoven or Keats could not have made art out of the Family Funnies.

  The irony was all too obvious: not until I had given up art for a career in schlock did I begin to feel like an artist.

  My one white oxford shirt had an ink stain on the right arm, but I decided I could wear my blue blazer on top, and avoid taking it off during the interview. I put on a pair of khaki pants and polished some old wing tips I’d salvaged from my father’s closet before the big clean-out.

  “Looking good,” Pierce told me when I came out to the kitchen. He was leaning over the coffee maker, watching fresh coffee drip into the pot. Over the past week he’d been much less gloomy than usual, and often was up and out of his room before I left the house. He had a jittery, anticipatory air about him, as if there was something up his sleeve. I let his statement take a few turns around my head, ran it through the sarcasm detector.

  “Really?” I said.

  He stood up. “Well, for you.”

  “Hmm. What are you up to today?”

  He shrugged. “Not much,” he said, but went on to explain that Mal was picking him up over his lunch hour, and the two of them were going to go see Mom. I was having some trouble getting used to the new genetic circumstances. Knowing now what had been hidden in plain sight for so long, I could see how Rose might stretch her already-strong biases against Pierce into a tacit exclusion of him from the family. But still I looked at Pierce and saw, at first impression, not a piece of Mal or a piece of my mother but a piece of myself. “We’re going to try and get her used to the idea of coming here. You know, talk about the neighborhood and the house and all.”

  “Do you think it’s going to get through?”

  He shrugged. “I dunno,” he said, and I could see that the question offended him more than a little.

  I gassed up the Caddy and stopped at the Jersey Devil, a coffee shop and bakery in Titusville. It was a little out of the way, but I had a theory: I figured if I drank coffee in the car and had a pastry to soak some of it up, I wouldn’t have to pee until I was well into the Burn Syndicate’s building on West 57th. And I needed some kind of distraction on the way to the city, a drive of geometrically increasing intensity that began with shaded country roads and derelict barns and ended with traffic jams and squeegee men.

  The shop was mostly empty. A grizzled maniac type hunkered over a steaming cup at the only occupied table, and a pretty girl in denim overalls was talking to the clerk. The clerk looked familiar. He had small round glasses, a fluffy head of curly hair and a large, assertive goatee. He was also dusted with flour. It took a moment, but it came to me: without the flour, he looked just like Leon Trotsky. The girl was saying, in a seductive, sugary voice, “I’m really looking forward to reading your manifesto.”

  “Helpya?” he asked me brightly. The girl turned and offered a vacant, half-lidded smile, and I felt like I’d just interrupted a sexual act.

  I ordered and he gave me my food in a paper sack before turning back to the girl. I had to pull myself out the door, so desperately did I want to stay and hang out with these kids. I was halfway to New York before I sorted out this feeling: it was jealousy, the kind I sometimes got when I caught a glimpse of people doing exactly what they wanted.

  * * *

  The Burn Syndicate occupied the nineteenth floor of a building that, beyond all probability, I had been in before. There was an art gallery on the fourth floor I had once had a piece in. This was probably the high point of my career as an installation artist. The show was called “Garbage, Garbage, Garbage,” and the piece I’d shown was, by necessity, only a small chunk of a larger work. It consisted of a metal trash can lid with rotten things hanging off the bottom of it, and was called “Detritus, Risen.” The show went on for three days before the gallery was shut down due to fire code violations.

  I was early for the meeting, so I stopped in for old times’ sake. On display was a series of “drawings” by a woman I’d not heard of. I had some trouble finding them. All I could see were the walls, each painted a metallic dark gray. Nothing hung on them. Then I realized that the walls were the drawings: she had apparently taken a pencil—lots of pencils, I supposed—and covered every inch of wall space with graphite and fixative. I took a postcard on the way out and put it in my jacket pocket. It was a white index card “drawn” on in the same way.

  On the nineteenth floor, I peed, then waited on a long leather couch in a lushly carpeted room that could have comfortably housed a chamber orchestra and several parked cars. Some distance away, a receptionist sat behind a wide mahogany desk. She kept glancing at her watch, then looking up at me. At about ten minutes past ten, she picked up her phone and spoke to somebody, but I was too far away to hear. She hung up, came to the couch and said, “Mr. Burn will be with you shortly. Would you like a Perrier?” I told her I would and she vanished through a smoked glass door, and returned with a bottle of Perrier, a bottle opener, a cocktail napkin and a small wooden table. She opened the bottle for me, set it on the table and returned to her desk.

  I didn’t particularly like Perrier, but I stuck to protocol and drank some anyway. It was a testament to both the decadence and puissance of the beverage industry that water could be altered so that it made you belch. After a time, someone came out for me. “Mr. Mix?” he said.

  “Yes.” It was a young man, some kind of intern or temp, with a round face and thin brown hair. He was wearing a golf shirt, untucked from a pair of jeans, and white tennis shoes.

  “Follow me,” he said. I got up, grabbed my portfolio and raised the Perrier bottle to the receptionist as I passed, grinning. She wasn’t watching.

  The temp led me through a labyrinth of cubicles, past offices with their doors slightly ajar. I looked carefully for Susan, who I thought would surely find me before the meeting, but she failed to materialize.

  Eventually the temp and I arrived at a corner office, a cavernous chamber with oaken paneling and purple carpet and windows twice as tall as I was. “Wow,” I said.

  “Yep,” the temp said proudly, sitting down behind a huge desk.

  I blinked at him. Suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn’t young at all, was in his forties and just looked young owing to his childish face, his sneakers. I stood there like a fool, clutching my portf
olio across my chest.

  “You’re…”

  “Raymond Burn. Niceta meetcha. Have a seat!”

  I lowered myself into a leather armchair, looking around for a place to put the Perrier. I opted for the floor. “Uh, well! Thanks! For seeing me!” I said, wondering if the windows opened and, if so, whether I should fling myself out one. Why hadn’t he introduced himself already? Why didn’t he shake my hand? Why didn’t I shake his? I sprung back to my feet and leaned across the desk, my hand extended. The postcard I’d gotten downstairs slipped from my pocket and fell onto the desk, so I retracted my hand, grabbed it, stuck it back into my pocket, held the pocket shut with my portfolio and re-extended the hand to where Burn’s was waiting impatiently. We shook.

  “Love your dad’s work,” he said. “Love it! You could say I’m a Fan.” He gave the shook hand a surreptitious glance, then wiped it with a handkerchief.

  “Well,” I said. I sat down again. “Me too.”

  “You better be, heh-heh. Tim, I was just talking to Ken Dorn the other day. You know Ken?”

  “A little.”

  “Ken was saying he didn’t think you had the stuff to draw the Family Funnies. Now, don’t get me wrong,” he said, holding up his empty palms. “We’re committed to you, Tim. You’ve got the legacy, you see. But I just wanted to know if maybe you had any interest in responding to that statement of Ken’s, whaddya think, Tim?”

  I set down my portfolio and noticed two enormous dark handprints on my knees. Where had they come from? I looked down at my hands: black, as if I’d been delivering newspapers all morning.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure, I have a response to that. Uh, I just want to say that I can do it, sir. I mean, I want to do it, and I’m the right man, uh, for the job…and…” I picked up the portfolio again. “And I think my portfolio will speak for itself, sir.” I lifted the heavy thing over the edge of the desk and set it down, open end first, before Ray Burn. “I think perhaps you should take them out yourself, sir, owing to the fact that my hands…I don’t know what happened…seem to be very dirty suddenly…”

  He peered over the portfolio at my hands, which I was holding out to him. “Yeah, you got yourself a little mess there, heh-heh.”

  It wasn’t just my hands and pants, of course; it was my white shirt, too, the inside of my jacket. The postcard had fallen out of my pocket again and onto my lap, and I understood now that it was the culprit. I picked it up. The penciled side was half rubbed off: it hadn’t been fixed on there after all. I could see the artist’s name, scrawled in thick black magic marker, hazy beneath the worn parts. “Maybe…” I said. “Maybe you should go ahead and give those a look, sir. While I go clean myself up a little.”

  He was already sliding the cartoons from the portfolio. “Sure, sure,” he said, distracted. I jumped to my feet and headed out of the office at a brisk jog. The maze confounded me. Which way around the desks? It took me several minutes to get back to the lobby. Once in the restroom, I dropped the postcard into the trash and looked at myself in the mirror. A disaster. Not just my clothes and hands but my face, my neck…how had I touched myself in so many places so quickly?

  I washed my hands with liquid soap from the dispenser, then wet a crumpled ball of paper towels and used them to dab at the huge stains on my shirt and pants. The towels grew dark, but the stains didn’t seem to diminish; on the contrary, they spread, losing definition, and my chest and thighs became soaked with dirty water. I took off my jacket before attempting to clean it, then decided to just leave it off, despite the inkstain on the arm. I checked myself in the mirror. I looked like I’d been splashed by a dozen cabs.

  Back in the office, though, Ray Burn was laughing. The sound was so shocking, so unself-conscious, that I considered backing out into the hallway until he was finished. Laughing! This was something, I realized, that had been missing: an audience. I stood paralyzed in the doorway, listening to him.

  “Mix!” he said. He pounded his desk. It made a sound like a bank vault door crashing open. “This is a gas!”

  “It is?”

  “‘Liberries!’ That’s it exactly! What a killer!” He moved another drawing to the top of the pile. “And how ‘bout this—‘If Puddles doesn’t use a fork, how come we have to?’ Tim, this is brilliant!”

  “Thanks!” I said.

  “It’s like you’re the reinfuckingcarnation of your old man, pardon the French. You got that same sense of humor. That’s what a good strip really needs! A sense of humor!”

  I sat down slowly, setting my jacket on the floor. I picked up the Perrier and took a sip. “I think you’re right, sir.”

  “Ray,” he said, “call me Ray.”

  “You got it, Ray.”

  He set the drawings down, and tilted his head up, toward a corner of the ceiling. I resisted the impulse to look there too. “What was it like?” he said, then looked down at me. “Living with the Maestro?”

  “You mean Dad?”

  “Yeah, yeah! Did the fans flock to the old home place? Was it a barrel of monkeys? I’ll bet it was a barrel of monkeys.”

  “Oh, sure,” I told him. “We had some prime yuks.”

  And this is what we discussed for the rest of the meeting: a highly selective, often imaginary version of my childhood, complete with adoring throngs, madcap domestic adventures, familial harmony and mountains of fan mail. To my amazement, Burn was utterly riveted. We laughed like old friends. It was fun, in a peculiar way, inventing this zany childhood for myself, and I began to realize that this was what the Family Funnies was all about: fulfilling the wishes of the American family with a delicate, photo-album detachment, letting the reader fill in the blanks with more goofy good will instead of the usual tedium and heartbreak most people’s blanks were filled with. I realized that Ray Burn was a completely fabricated person, that he had made, at some point in his life, a conscious decision to let the world fill him up according to his wishes, which he had been letting it do for so long that he no longer had an ounce of objectivity to his name, nor wanted to. Susan was right: tabula rasa. I was impressed with her judge of character.

  My departure consisted of a lot of handshaking and back-slapping. My clothes were dry now, and I looked like a third grader’s math test, blurry with inept emendations. We thanked each other profusely. I half-hoped Ken Dorn would make one of his mysterious appearances, so that I could gloat.

  “Say, Ray,” I said at the threshold of his office. “Do you know where Susan is?”

  “Susan who?”

  “Susan Caletti? Who works here?”

  “Oh, sure!” he said. “Little Susie! Yeah, she’s down in that last office.” He pointed down a long, narrow hallway, where light shined from an open door. “You two know each other?”

  “Uh…She’s my editor here, I think.”

  He slapped his forehead. “Right, duh! I dunno where my head gets to.”

  I headed down the hallway, leaving Burn with a little wave. I wondered how long he would remember our meeting.

  * * *

  “What happened to you?” Susan asked me, her eyes wide.

  I gave her the short version. “But the main thing is that Burn liked me! We got on like old pals. He thought the cartoons were hilarious.”

  “He’s a disturbing little person, isn’t he?”

  “Most assuredly.”

  She gathered her things and we left via a back hallway that emptied out near the receptionist’s desk. Susan was wearing some shimmery blue dress thing and a pair of running shoes. I wanted to grope her, and did, in the elevator. She kissed me.

  “Tim,” she said.

  “Oh God. What now?”

  “Am I that transparent? I intercepted another memo.”

  “Where do you find these things?” I asked her. “Do they just cc you every time they print out a secret communiqué?”

  “Recycling bin,” she said. “The intern leaves copies of everything in there. I think she secretly has it in for everybody.” She detached her
self from me. “Tim, the lawyers figured out a way around your contract. It’s just a matter of choice now: you or Dorn.”

  “Well, I wowed the chief,” I said, feeling my heart sink.

  “That does count for a lot. For everything, in fact.”

  “Except money.”

  She shrugged. “Except money. But Ray’s an old softie. His heart and his head. It’s a toss-up, as far as I can see.”

  “Well, no use worrying.”

  “No.”

  I pulled her back toward me. “So the plan?”

  “Ah! The plan! You’re a Friday visitor, so you’ve never known the pleasures of the Delicious Duck Wednesday specials.”

  “And I will now?” I said.

  “You certainly shall,” she answered, and that did make things a lot better.

  thirty-one

  That Saturday I woke to find Pierce sitting on the couch, playing solitaire with a deck of naked-girl playing cards. He had a look of controlled boredom on his face, as if forcing himself to act like a normal person while he weathered a particularly trying inner squall. I got myself some cereal and sat on the easy chair, facing him.

  “You’re home,” I said.

  He carefully did not look up from his card game. “Gilly’s coming.”

  “Here? Really?”

  “She’s picking me up. We’re going to go to Philly.”

  “Philly!”

  He nodded, then pulled from his pocket the worn-out warehouse key. I hadn’t seen it since I found it in the safety deposit box. “We’re going to find what it’s to.”

  I tried to conceal my excitement. I hadn’t forgotten the key, but I’d filed away semipermanently the curiosity connected with it, sure that Pierce would never get around to finding the warehouse. I asked him how they were going to look for it.

  “Gilly has a plan,” he said. It seemed that the two of them had spent much of the previous weekend poring square-eyed over the Yellow Pages and a street map of Philadelphia, marking with colored sticky dots the locations of every self-storage warehouse in the city. They were going to go and look for the right place in her car.