The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  ALSO BY LEE HENDERSON

  The Broken Record Technique

  The Man Game

  FOR ANU

  I don’t think God wants to be worshipped.

  I think the only pure worship of God is by loving one another,

  and I think all other forms of worship become a substitute for the love that we should show one another.

  —Charles Schulz

  Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling.

  —Herman Melville

  1

  STRAYS

  What we remember most about living in the manor on the peak of Bernal Heights was the door buzzer going off in the days and nights after comic strip artist Hick Elmdales died. For years afterwards every time we heard that buzzer, the memory echoed in our ears and reminded us of the strange connection Hick’s death had to the first days of our new life. You know that sound you hear before you fall asleep, of blood whistling past your eardrum? It was the last Friday in April eighty-one, and it was our first night at No Manors.

  You might not know the name Hick Elmdales, but he drew the popular Pan strip launched back in seventy-five to further the adventures of J.M. Barrie’s characters Peter, the Lost Boys, Hook, the Darling children, signed Walt Disney. Hick lived and worked far, far away from the animation sweatshops in Los Angeles; he was up on top of a great hill overlooking all of San Francisco in a packratted five-bedroom on the main floor of a post-Edwardian dubbed No Manors. He ripped his motto and creed from the pages of the Old Testament and painted it on the wall over the front door as a constant reminder: Be not forgetful to welcome strangers, for in this way some have entertained angels unawares.

  Or devils. You never know. Hick’s open door drew no shortage of either—in the form of drifters, downtrodden artists, jawclenching junkies, and many an adolescent runaway doodler like us without a stable home to go back to or clear prospects.

  Of all the punk squats, hippie communes, and satanic covens in the Bay Area, we ended up here, at No Manors. Perched at the peak of Stoneman Street, No Manors was the highest in altitude of all the freestanding residencies on the north side of Bernal Heights, a five-storey art deco flophouse with accidental touches of Bosch and Gaudi sprouting from an Edwardian mansion built out of the original Victorian pioneer villa circa the Gold Rush. Before the hill gave way to a steep grass park and a forest of Jack Fogg trees around the microwave tower at the peak, the manor was a rather noticeable blemish or piece of history in the workingclass neighbourhood. Built as an Edwardian villa in the early nineteen hundreds and renovated in the late forties to the idea of art deco, the manor might have been the pride of the area. Now the whole exterior had been so neglected by the absentee landlord and so dicked with by tenants over the years looking for solutions to the aging edifice’s damages that even a simple thing like the front entrance was nowhere to be found.

  Two paid rent at No Manors, both comic strip artists. One was dead, and the other was not home. No one knew where to find Wendy Ashbubble. The name wasn’t familiar to us, and neither was her comic strip, Strays, but this is her story.

  According to friends at The Farm, Wendy never picked up her complimentary ticket.

  Where is she? asked a bearded six-foot man dressed in a fishscalesequin halter top, tight black leather short shorts, and, way down at the bottom of her long, black legs, a pair of espadrille wedges with three-inch woven wool heels. Her alias was Biz Aziz and she was a well-known drag queen who performed regularly in the Castro and Chinatown and had been on the bill the night before at The Farm singing Toni Fisher’s The Big Hurt and The End of the World by Skeeter Davis. As she stood up from a beanbag chair, she fanned herself with the palm of her hand and told us to put on a fresh pot of coffee.

  We happened to land at No Manors the night Hick died because we went to this all-ages show. The stage was inside an actual barn, the barn part of a hobby farm with vegetables, flowers, and a petting zoo, all situated on stolen land that sat vacant for decades next to the Cesar Chavez freeway, and it seemed everyone in the barn that night knew Hick, so when the sad news got around during a break, the whole audience and all the performers shut down and the musicians got off the stage and continued to play their instruments as we, the whole audience and the performers, walked up Bernal Hill together. No Manors sat at the dead end of Stoneman Street, right before the park on the peak.

  Biz spied out the window to see who buzzed the door, then, despite some obvious doubts this time, pressed a button to let whomever it was come on in. As per those fateful letters above the door.

  Quick, hide that Ziploc, I can’t peg these ones, might be narco, she said and pointed to the open bag of potent marijuana hanging out on the longtable between us, a pound less a few dozen joints.

  Best we could think of on short notice was under a pile of dirty clothes at the bottom of the laundry hamper in Hick’s bedroom.

  In came four brushcutted men who could have been brothers, with blotchy natural tans that gave their white flesh the complexion of fried perogies—they had big ingratiating smiles full of nacre teeth, middling to no chins, and short necks. Each man was squeezed into a golf shirt he had tucked neatly under a matching lint-free V-neck sweater in an offputting colour, pea soup, bisque, sulphur, puce. Pleated khaki slacks like long, brown paper grocery bags. They entered a room full of half-slumbering cartoonists in mourning who had spent the night drunk, stoned, and grieving now using each other as pillows and taking up every available bit of space.

  We represent the Walt Disney company. Disney himself asked us to come on his behalf. The four strangers each passed Biz Aziz their business cards, all with the familiar embossed Cinderella castle.

  How do you do?

  The men brought condolences and agreed with one another that, yes, yes, yes, and yes, there was no possible explanation for Hick’s untimely death except in the Lord and to that Biz Aziz almost laughed.

  Là-bas I hope you mean. So what cartoons you worked on? she asked the four representatives.

  No, no, we don’t do fun stuff like draw cartoons, said the heaviest-set one, whose eyes barely lifted above a squint.

  How’d you meet Hick?

  We never. Read his strip, though, funny and smart. We wondered if you might show us where he used to draw?

  From the entrance hall you could access three of the five bedrooms and the living room, which connected to a dining room, a false study, and a kitchen with a nook, and to get from here to there you had to navigate an abundance of Victorian nooks and crannies, trick doors that led to weird void rooms, and this wall or that wall might have received a facelift or two over the years to cover up the ghosts. The walls were papered, every inch covered over by bookcases overflowing and framed drawings and paintings, original Herrimans, a personalized Gould. A hoard of cheap comics now valued in the millions, rare art folios from the turn of the century, decadent novels and poetry, histories of the occult, a favourite subject—Hick’s bookmark was stuck halfway through the bestselling memoir Michelle Remembers when he fell sick. Maybe the book killed him. That was Biz’s theory. The men from Disney danced over hundreds of shoes and weaved around stacks of leather portfolios lining the floor, while above their heads loomed dozens of bicycles that hung from the ceiling, you could grab one down any time. Sculptures hung up there, too, and found objects cluttered the windowsills. Elsewhere on the floor was, for example, a lacquered and stuffed tortoise the size of a witch’s cauldron.

  Ah, so it does exist, said one Disney man to another, his palm out. You owe me five bucks.

  Running the full length of the manor was the reason for their bet: the longtable, a forty-two-foot-long drawing table juryrigged from scrap wood that started in the break
fast nook in the kitchen and ended at the bay window in Hick’s master bedroom. Fifty cartoonists could pack the longtable with room to spare. All kinds of drawing supplies and tools cluttered the surface. The hardwood floor underneath was scuffed bonewhite and stained with ink splatter. If you had to get around to the other side of it there were hinged pieces at intervals that lifted.

  Here’s where he sat. Biz brought Disney’s men towards the window. In that canewood chair, overlooking the whole city. Damn what a view. You can’t see anything now for the fog but just imagine. And behold all his drawings, shelf after shelf of portfolio stuffed to the max. What you see is what you get. That blue exercise mat was his only bed. Poor pitiable saint. Never barely went out. Everybody came to him. I loved him like a diamond engagement ring. I guess you know Hick was just about to start work on a Christmas special when he died? There’s storyboards lying around to gaze at and wonder.

  We’d like to see those, said Disney’s men, sniffing around.

  We eyed that laundry hamper and its telltale reek.

  Hick told me his Christmas special was going to be bigger than acid—going to put Peter Pan up there with Santa and Jesus, Biz Aziz told them angrily as if she was lashing out at these strangers for somehow causing the death of her friend, as if somehow Disney caused his death.—He even bought a stop-motion camera rig. He was going to get us, everyone at the longtable to help him. Instead of you all at Disney’s studio mucking … —Hick was going to make his Christmas special right here at home. Well, here’s his spot. He always got this chair by the window because check it out, this is also his bedroom. It’s too foggy to see right now but you can imagine the view. Like some coffee?

  Disney’s men said they would. As they riffled through the sheaves of paper, Biz went to the kitchen. Busying themselves as such in Hick’s bedroom, no one paid too close attention to Disney’s men, for it had been a long and solemn night of boozing and everyone was at rest. It was only eight or nine in the morning.

  At some point in their digging around one of the men came out holding a stack of Crowley and Creepy comics he seemed highly suspicious of and asked us whose collection of the devil’s work was this. We decided on a lark to claim the offending books were ours, ha! He dropped the whole stack that instant. If they weren’t Hick’s, he was not required to touch them, he explained. Shouldn’t read stuff like this, he told us, rots your brain, turns you into a puppet, that’s all these words are doing to ya. Do you want to be the devil’s puppets, is that it?

  Something like that, we said.

  Thanks for the coffee, Disney’s men said an hour later as they came out of the master bedroom after packing the contents of Hick’s life and livelihood into wood boxes, cardboard boxes, and plastic crates. Don’t worry about us. We have a dolly in the van …

  Say now where you going with all of Hick’s stuff? Biz got up once more from her chair at the longtable where she’d been drawing, and with a joint smoking in her hand, she went over and blocked the men from getting out the door. Put that shit down right now. You can’t take that. What are you, thieves? Come in here out of trust and goodwill, man’s not even in the ground …

  At that moment, the other roommate walked in. Wendy Ashbubble at last.

  Excuse me, pardon me, she said shyly, trying to budge past. Biz, you’re in my way.

  Wendy Ashbubble, you are home so late it is morning, said Biz. Guess what you just stepped into. A full-on tragedy.

  Wendy’s blouse was on inside out—how could she not notice? Her hair was a flustered mess she tried to contain within a headband on top of her pale, peanut-shaped head with those big adorably squirrellike cheeks and twinkling sarcastic eyes. We fell in love with her that instant, all four of us. Was it that she stood with a rolled shoulder slouch as if about to go straight into drawing, or that instead of using a finger to lift up her comically big eyeglasses when they slid down her nose she twitched like one of the rodents she drew? We fell for her, seeing her look so frazzled and dissociated from our scene, glossy and pale from lack of sleep, lost in her own experience. That totally goggle-eyed look on her face was that of a girl badly in need of some privacy but who knew she was not going to get it.

  I need to shower— Hey, what’s— Why are all these … Oh my god, look at all these cartoonists … is that … Chester Gould? she whispered.

  You got to listen to me, carefully, okay, Wendy? Listen. These are Disney’s men, okay? Walt Disney. The hospital called. Hick, he died yesterday. Hick is dead.

  Dead? No. What? No. No. Not possible. Wendy turned a shade of green. Oh no. She fell to her knees, then all the muscles in her face spasmed and her neck and face broke out in shiny hives. I saw him yesterday. No, this can’t be. I’m not prepared. That’s why you’re all here. I didn’t know. I was out. I was with my editor, I was with— Oh.

  It looked for a moment as though Wendy was about to vomit, so Disney’s men sensed an opportunity to budge their way past her kneeling in the doorway. We’re just doing the job that Mr. Disney asked of us.

  Put those boxes down, Wendy said. Her colour returned. That sparkle in her eye. Let me give you my perspective. Look, just look at how many guests are here and not one of them would dare remove a single dirty sock from this premises without Hick’s personal permission, that’s how much he was loved, as you can see. People come here to give, not take. Here you submit, you don’t abscond. The only stealing going on around here is of ideas, said Wendy.

  Isn’t that right, said Biz.

  These boxes are filled with property of Disney, said one of the men. It’s in his contract.

  Are you in his contract, too? Wendy said and scratched a hive. How are we supposed to trust you? You could be faking the whole spiel.

  You stand away from his work, sweethearts, Biz Aziz told them with a fist held out. Or I’ll fuckin’ lay you out cold, believe me.

  Understand how very hard this is for us personally, said the slimmest of Disney’s men, with the biggest head, though, like a breadloaf. We are just crushed to bits by this news. Disney owns Pan. And so you know, Disney can get pretty darn ugly legally when it comes to stuff like his property.

  Biz then bent over, grabbed up and overhanded a sharp bangle of costume jewellery and hit one of Disney’s men upside the eyebrow. Deep enough to draw blood. Come back with a lawyer, judge, and jury next time, you squares, she barked.

  Disney’s men had had enough. Biz ducked and dodged their fists, whooping and roundhousing in return. Wendy took a bop to the nose. We joined in with at least two dozen local cartoonists to overwhelm Disney’s men and force them to let go of the boxes in their hands. The melee lasted all of ten seconds. Wendy, screaming Graverobber! Graverobber!, was in a tug-of-war over a portfolio with one of the men from Disney. Suddenly her grip gave out, she fell hard on her ass, and Disney’s man ran out the door with the portfolio.

  The other three men saw their chance and grabbed whatever they could while a hundred or more cartoonists chased them down the block to their white Cinderella van, but not fast enough to stop them. Disney’s men sped off down the hill as we threw kitchen utensils and curses.

  As soon as Hick pressed ink to paper—in fact whatever he touched on duty—that was Disney’s property. This seemed strange to us, that someone so well off could be in our situation, i.e., own nothing.

  Wendy said, I need to call the hospital and we need to collect him. His body. We need a wicker basket. A big wicker basket.

  Where were you all night? Biz asked her.

  I’ll tell you the story, she said and stared at us. Who are these ones?

  We introduced ourselves thus:

  Twyla Noon. Twenty-one years old. Insomniac lapsed Catholic with a fast hand, fast memory. Oreo eater. Boy chaser. Photogenic from the left side. Rather lissome for someone with such a runny nose. Previous experience: obsession with Ivan Bilibin and Kay Nielsen, high school expulsion, Freudian doodles, a dream diary maintained since age nine.

  Mark Bread. Smoker’s cough. Twenty
years. Incomprehensible mutterer of Looney Tunes phrases or psychologically adept poet of the nonce. Hotdog aficionado. Habitual Psilocybe ingestor. Drawing from that place in the mind occupied by more epithets and rabble than morality. Previous experience: house painting, caricatures of teachers, high school expulsion.

  Patrick Poedouce. Sexual caterer. People pleaser. Single-minded about many things at the expense of a lot more. Jealous of everyone. Borrower who did not return or repay. Annually twenty-two years old. Snappy dresser (pinched). Bridge burner (exes and friends). Boston-born (Florence, AZ, juvie-raised). Previous experience: a stack of letters full of advice from Bill Blackbeard, a huge collection of his own juvenilia, correspondence art school dropout, total certainty in his own greatness.

  Rachael Wertmüller. Aka Aluminum Uvula. Orphan. Twenty-four. Self-loathing as lifestyle, the grotesque expression on a beautiful face. Born in Salem, Washington, where there’s still an old bylaw in effect that says you can’t have sex within city limits. Previous experience: sonic assailant and audio experimenter, doodler, collagist turned airbrush painter turned silkscreen genius, high school expulsion.

  2

  Say goodbye to the cartoonist.

  No, I won’t, I won’t let you go, she told him. After Disney’s men left the manor with their arms full of Hick’s drawings and his possessions, Wendy Ashbubble broke down and confided in us where she’d been. She talked as if it didn’t matter who was there, Biz or any other friend who would listen as she recounted her last visit with Hick, and how she reached over the chrome rail of the hospital bed and held his hand, the hand with a pen and untouched pad of paper beneath it, the hand with the two red welts. His face, his whole body was ravaged by more of them, as if someone had cruelly stubbed out lit cigarettes on his skin.

  Did you bring me a treat? Hick Elmdales asked under his breath because he didn’t want to alert his ward mates.