The Funnies

by John Lennon

  “Loofah?” said Pierce.

  “I like it,” Gillian told her.

  “Well, thanks. Anyway, he came to me across the yard, and there was something weird about it, I didn’t know what. So I patted his head and told him to go back to his little house, and like that, he turned around and did. But the weird thing was that his paws weren’t making any sound on the leaves, and from where I was standing he looked like he was hovering about an inch off the ground.”

  A moment of silence while everyone took this in. “Creepy,” Pierce finally said.

  “I thought it was a dream or something, but the next morning he was dead.”

  Nobody seemed surprised. “Poor Loofah,” said Gillian.

  Pierce said suddenly, “I used to have a flea circus.”

  “No kidding?” Susan said.

  “Yep. I was just a kid.” And he began to tell them the flea circus story, the fleas he got through the mail, the books and pamphlets he read to learn how to train them. I knew the story, of course, but there were elements I hadn’t heard, like the middle-aged gypsy woman who sent him letters, thinking he was older and might marry her, and the colony of fleas that simply disappeared in his room during the night without a trace. To my surprise, Pierce was a good storyteller. His timing was perfect. When he got to the tall man’s visit, which I suppose was intended to be the weird part, I listened carefully. He said that he let the man in, showed him the fleas.

  “And he totally put me down. I mean, he’d come hundreds of miles to wreck a kid’s day. He told me I was just an amateur and that my fleas were no good, and that I ought to give them to him, because he could really teach them a thing or two.”

  “So did you give them away?” Susan asked.

  “Nope. I torched ‘em. I took them out in the yard and set them on fire. Tim remembers this.”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  Pierce shook his head. “It was the cruelest thing I’ve ever done. I was a little Nazi. After that, I swore I’d never hurt another thing again. I still watch my feet to make sure I’m not stomping bugs.”

  Afterward, Gilly told a story about how she’d been in a car driven by a drunk kid, and it rolled over once in the middle of the road, landed on its wheels and kept on going, and nobody mentioned what had happened. But I wasn’t listening too carefully. Instead I was thinking about Pierce and the mysterious man. Pierce had revealed, without provocation, one of the great secrets of his childhood, and it turned out to be utterly devoid of the intrigue we had all attached to it. The tall man was nobody, just some guy, probably very lonely and jealous and insulated from the world, who couldn’t stand the paltry notoriety of a little boy, and came to steal that notoriety away. It occurred to me that maybe we had never actually asked Pierce what happened, that we had so built him up in our minds as a mythic, almost magical loner that we failed to recognize that he was just a sad, neglected kid in the early stages of a lifelong sickness. I wondered how many times we had let him stew like that in his own juices, how much we had contributed to his problems later. I was ashamed. I wanted to take my hands off the wheel, lean over and hug him, but of course I didn’t.

  We were all silent as the Caddy glided into the Philadelphia city limits. Gilly leaned over the back of Pierce’s seat and held both his hands; in the rearview I saw Susan squinting through her glasses at the hazy skyline. For a moment our eyes met and we smiled twin nervous smiles.

  The warehouse stood, dark and crumbling, on Girard Avenue, a wide two-way dissected by ancient trolley tracks. All the other cars looked like ours, but older and less kept up: hulking American tugboats from before the energy crunch. We parked easily, as the spaces were largely empty, or occupied by cars that hadn’t been moved in months. It was chilly, and the air carried the subway smell I’d learned to identify and enjoy, an organic admixture of gear oil, urine and soft pretzels.

  “That’s it?” I asked Pierce and Gilly.

  Gilly had a thin arm around him. She gave his shoulders a squeeze. “That’s it,” she said.

  The building was surrounded by chain-link fence. We stopped at a gate, where a muscular man was listening to a transistor radio. Pierce showed him the key and he waved us through.

  They were right: the door was the size of a dump truck. It was made of corrugated metal and fastened shut with a giant padlock and a swivel hook as big as my arm. Pierce stared at it, then at me.

  “Will you do it?”

  Now? I wanted to say. Shouldn’t we bow our heads or something? Say a prayer? Susan and Gilly stood side by side, several feet behind Pierce, and Susan put a tentative arm around Gilly, in a big-sisterly way. Gilly seemed to appreciate it. For the first time since I’d met her, she actually seemed uneasy, and I was glad that Pierce wasn’t looking at her. “Sure,” I told him, and held out my hand. He put the key into it.

  The lock resisted for a second, then gave, and I threw all my weight into unlatching it. The hook groaned in its eye. Then it was open. I turned around: Pierce had stepped back and was holding hands with a newly composed Gilly. “I’m gonna do it,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  The handle was cool and rough with rust, and I adjusted the position of my fingers, less for a better grip than for the sheer physicality of it, the pleasure in the sensation. I can’t describe how happy I was at that moment, so deeply involved in this adventure with these three people; I felt like I could spend every waking moment with them for the rest of my life, and be perfectly satisfied.

  The door rumbled up without the least resistance, practically pulling itself after the first few feet. This was the first indication that my father had spent a lot of time in here, but while this was occurring to me I looked up and saw what was inside, illuminated by the scummy daylight.

  “Wow,” Susan said.

  I couldn’t help the first thought that came to me, which is that this thing he had made, this monstrous piece of what I instantly recognized as installation art, was bad. Of course my second thought was that the first thought was terribly unfair, but in that brief moment of cruel judgment I saw what a fool I’d been to take on the strip, and how obvious it was that my father knew this all along, and knew I would fall for it too. He must have known I wouldn’t let him change my life, no matter how much changing it needed, unless he was dead, and far out of range for flinging I-told-you-so’s.

  Although this thing he’d made, this awful thing was telling me so. It was also apologizing, in ragged, gasping breaths. We walked in, our footsteps seeming to echo this sad fact: Sorry, they seemed to say, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry.

  What we saw first were the sloppy fifteen-foot-high Family Funnies figures painted on the walls: Mom, Bitty and me on one side; Bobby, Lindy and Puddles on the other. And on the back wall, my father himself, with two new additions to the FF cast: Mal and Pierce.

  Mal and Dad stood on opposite sides of Pierce, each with an arm around him: the son’s two fathers. Mal was rendered with a doting, fatherly air, while my father had done himself with his usual world-weariness, bent, in a neat trick of perspective, out over the floor of the storeroom. Pierce, on the other hand, was a clumsy creation at best, with a cherubic, glowing face that he had never possessed and never would. He had the same ears as Mal, and was wearing a T-shirt Pierce used to have and that I had forgotten, which read, in bubbly black Jersey-Shore-iron-on letters, BLAME MY PARENTS.

  There was more to it than just the walls, of course. We walked around the room like baffled souls thrown into purgatory, sifting through the rest, amazed that it could all have existed and been brought here, to become a part of this. At the foot of each painted character was a brand-new red metal wagon filled with junk: things my father had collected over the years that had been ours or had something to do with us. In my own wagon I found every report card I’d ever gotten, including the ones from college, which I couldn’t remember ever sending home; all my medical records up to the age of eighteen; drawings I had made, presents I had gotten my parents for Christmas, clothes
I had worn as a baby. And my penciled blueprint, blurred by the years and fuzzy at the folds, my drug-induced blueprint of our cartoon house, with all the superimposed rooms and imaginary spaces. I unfolded it gently, going easy on the creases, as if it were a map to buried treasure: the fading lines were palpable under my fingers, drawn with such vehemence they tore through in places. I could not recall the passionate anger that made them.

  I went through Mal’s wagon too. My father had filled it with things of my mother’s—a tarnished silver barrette; a shot glass; a summer blouse, the fabric worn thin. There was a manila envelope containing black and white photographs of my mother and Mal, twenty, thirty years ago, walking through a park I couldn’t identify, holding hands. The pictures were grainy and out-of-focus, and had the candid tawdriness of paid reconnaissance. There were other photos too, washed-out color snapshots my father had certainly taken, of my mother with Pierce: at the shore, holding him by his toddler hands above the roiling surf; in front of our high school, a mortarboard for him, a corsage for her. And dozens more, none that I had ever seen, none that had ever made it into the family albums. The spy pictures upset me, but these were truly shocking. How long had he hoarded them, intending someday to symbolically cede my mother to Mal? For all the misogynist presumption of the gesture, what truly amazed me was the endurance of his self-loathing: he had known for so long that he was no good, and never left the very people who reminded him of it.

  It was Pierce’s wagon that was strangest, though; he had the expected childhood relics, but his pile was comprised mostly of unfamiliar, unexplained objects. A corncob pipe, for instance, and a linen napkin stained with blood. The four of us gathered silently around him, picking through these things and spreading them out on the floor. A flashlight. A shoehorn. A deck of handmade playing cards, drawn hastily in pencil and cut out of yellow lined paper. Ice tongs.

  “I sort of remember these,” Pierce said, picking up the tongs. It was the first thing any of us had said. “I found these in somebody’s garbage. He took them away from me.”

  “What about the napkin?” Gilly asked him.

  Pierce stared at it for a long time. Something was happening to his face, but he kept it in check. “I don’t know about that,” he said finally, and we didn’t ask him about anything more.

  Eventually, the three of us moved away and looked over the rest of it. There was a cartoon of our house executed in masking tape on the storeroom floor, and a lot of old bicycles—I recognized them from years before—hanging from the ceiling on ropes. The wall space between the characters was papered with fan mail to my father, adoring letters from children requesting drawings and signatures. I read a few, but mostly they were drearily similar, like kindergarten art projects. Pierce didn’t get up, only worked his quiet way through his wagon, greeting each object with long, earnest concentration, like an anthropologist trying to decode the messages of the past. Which was what Pierce was doing, except the past was his own, of course, and not any of our business. We met up outside and waited for him, shivering a little in the cold, watching cars pass on Girard Avenue.

  It seemed like hours. When he finally came out, he got into the back of the car without saying a thing, and Gilly got in next to him.

  “Drive?” I said to Susan. She took the keys. All the silent way home, we held hands, listening to the sound the wheels made on the road and the even, exhausted breathing of Gilly and Pierce in the back.

  epilogue

  My comic strip is called “The Family Facts.” Susan, who despite her bad experiences with the Burn Syndicate remains my editor, is trying to get actual newspapers to run it. She is more optimistic about its prospects than I am. It’s not that it’s bad: it’s just true, or at least true to my memory, which of course doesn’t make it all that much truer than the Family Funnies itself. There is something funny about a family that falls apart, or almost does; I’m certain of it. But there is a family out there named Mix that doesn’t fall apart, and Ken Dorn is its patriarch, and I wonder, Susan’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, if people might prefer Ken’s version of events.

  The backyard studio is now a studio and office, home to Susan’s upstart comics syndicate, which is called Cal-Mix Enterprises (her title; I think it sounds like a cat food). So far its cartoonists’ stable echoes with the snorting of a single stud: Tyro proved easy to draw away from Fake Comix, and he is overhauling “The Emerald Forest” for its new run in an expanded number of urban free weeklies. Sometimes I visit galleries with him in New York, or he comes down to Mixville for dinner, which Pierce makes for everybody when he’s in the right mood, which is not very often but more often than before.

  We have not met Bobby and Nancy’s new daughter, and it seems increasingly unlikely that Mike will be around for the birth of his son (I went to the doctor’s with Bitty and saw him on the video monitor—pinioning his monochrome arms, his little heart winking like a firefly). Also Rose hasn’t spoken to us since we told her about the warehouse, and I doubt she’ll go down to see it. But that’s to be expected. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my new involvement with my family, it’s that voluntary change in anyone is exceptional indeed, myself included. I am loath to imagine what I’d be doing now if none of this had happened to me; then again, I feel awful viewing my parents’ demise as a great opportunity, even if that’s what it turned out, in part, to be.

  And I remembered a weird experience. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it on the trip to the warehouse, and in retrospect I can’t understand why I ever forgot it at all, so singular is it in my life: it makes me wonder what else I’ve forgotten.

  This happened during my sophomore year in college. The art supply section of the college bookstore was open late because it was finals time, and I was buying a bunch of pencils and newsprint for a drawing project I was working on. It was almost dark outside, and there was nobody else in the store save for the clerks. I was thinking about ringing up my purchases and leaving when I looked up at the counter, which stood about fifty feet from where I was standing, and saw somebody waiting in line who looked exactly like me.

  Now, what was odd was that I knew everybody in the art department, and in fact had been keeping my eyes open for friends of mine, so if somebody had come in—especially somebody who was dressed in the same T-shirt and jeans I was, and from behind, anyway, had my precise haircut, posture, etc.—I figure I would have noticed. But I hadn’t noticed anyone. And this guy seemed to have a newsprint pad and pencils, too, which he had to have gotten from the very section of the store I was shopping in.

  As I watched, this person walked out the door, onto the sidewalk, and—I swear I saw this clearly through the bookstore window—climbed into my car and drove off.

  I remember feeling agitated and more than a little embarrassed, because my car had been stolen before my eyes and I had done nothing to prevent it. At the same time, it didn’t register as a terribly big deal to me: watching a doppelganger steal my car was weirdly like lending it to my own brother. I walked to the counter and paid for my supplies. Outside, the car really was gone and I walked home.

  The police found the car abandoned and, miraculously, unharmed on the shoulder of Route 90, and it was returned to me the following day. But the more I thought about them, the more the circumstances of the theft seemed incredible at best, and at worst invented. That, at least, was what the police appeared to think. I began to wonder if I had done this myself, in some sort of stress-induced daze, and if in fact I did similar things all the time, then obscured them in my mind. I wondered if I was beginning to get sick the way Pierce had. In the end I gave up thinking about it entirely, and my life went on as planned, which plan actually turned out to be no plan at all.

  But now I wonder if that person really was me, and if he spent ten years wandering around, gathering the raw materials that a real life could be made from, in order to return them to the original me at some later date and make me whole. I wonder what that later date might be, or if perhaps it al
ready passed without my notice, meaning that what I was for all those years was never very far from what I was supposed to be.

  At any rate, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for him to show up. Anna Praegel, who is recovered, divorced, and full of pithy advice, is fond of telling us what a great life she would have had if she hadn’t sat around waiting for things to happen to her, because when they did they were invariably the wrong things. Nevertheless, it does make a good story, and I’m working on a way to fit it into the strip, which any day now should be reaching a college rag near you.

  * * *

  Not long ago I was cleaning out the cabinets under the sink when I came across a cardboard box addressed to my father. It was postmarked a few weeks after he died and had a Riverbank P.O. Box for a return address. It hadn’t been opened.

  I turned it over a few times and gave it a good shake. Something was loose in there, making a muffled, metallic sort of rattle. The box looked familiar, and I closed my eyes, remembering: it had sat on the kitchen counter, pushed back next to the broken radio, for several months, then was moved to the living room floor, just inside the sliding doors, when Pierce and Susan made pancakes together. A few weeks later it vanished, and now here it was again. I called out to Pierce, who was smoking cigarettes in his bedroom.

  He walked out looking stricken, as if he’d been watching television for days on end. I held up the box to him and he frowned.

  “Whassat?”

  “You tell me.”

  He took the box and gave it a cursory look. “It came for Dad. I don’t know what it is.”

  I opened a drawer and pulled out a dull paring knife with a green plastic handle. “Give it here,” I said. He did, and I set it on the counter and sliced through the packing tape. Pierce came up beside me and watched. I folded back the flaps and picked up a piece of cream-colored linen paper with a letterhead printed on it. The letterhead read RIVERBANK FUNERAL SERVICES, INC.