The Road Narrows As You Go
Page 6
In the living room, the Bloom County artist Berkeley Breathed spat and howled at the news on the TV screen, There’s scaffolding over the Statue of Liberty, for crissakes! America is one big plastic-surgery disaster. Who am I talking to?
Art Spiegelman sat on the staircase below Bill Blackbeard, the local comics historian. Spiegelman balanced an ashtray on top of a row of books that ran up the stairs and the two friends shared a pack of Parliaments and talked about Hick, death, the chances of Armageddon. It’s a nightmarish game of chicken that’s been looming over my entire life, said Blackbeard. My parents had a bomb shelter. And I wish I had a bomb shelter.
Spiegelman scratched at his face and neck, then lit a third cigarette. Now we know how naive we were to think there was any shelter.
Patrick Poedouce said he figured if Brezhnev dropped a bomb on this house, a cartoonist could get any job he wanted.
Biz Aziz held her hand over her mouth as she retreated from the master bedroom. She had just gone to visit him. There were tears in her eyes she had to stroke away. Trembling, she sat down next to us and said, Oh he’s so small, so small, like a branch. He used to be like two-fifty. One of those guys with fat genes, or hormones, you know. He was big even when I first knew him on Geary Street, he used to sell drawings off the sidewalk, practically lived on dollar hamburgers and fifty-cent pancakes. This would be like seventy-five, seventy-four maybe. I earned next to nothing back then, Biz said, but Hick earned nothing at all. Drawing comics saved us both, that’s all there is to it. I was sure with my luck I was going to be the one who goes young, man. How angry I was as a teenager getting into aimless trouble, then luck gets me drafted to Vietnam, which turns out to be Cambodia, and the army takes away my weapon and gives me a pad of paper and some pencils instead, damn. I thought it would be me laid out there.
There he was at the far end of the table, shrouded in black cloth and charcoal shadows.
The deceased lay to rest in a handwoven Peruvian basket placed on top of the longtable in his bedroom. Green candleflames shone around him emitting no discernible light. The longtable in effect ended early at the open double doors to his bedroom, with the final feet of its length dedicated to him, for private visitations. Waiting for some sign from the afterlife, a moth’s dance of greeting, an intoxicating fragrance, a sequence of sentient lights, any kind of clue from beyond the pale that Hick knew his friends were here. This was where he had worked and slept and where he was going to spend his last weekend in the manor. They had made his room up for the occasion. Before his body arrived, Biz Aziz saw to it everything in the master bedroom was decorated in blacks, black candles burning green, black lace, black drapes pulled across the bay window overlooking the city, and not another word about Disney’s men to spoil the atmosphere. Dark black funk music accompanied the look. Periodically we raided the laundry hamper in an attempt to keep enough joints rolled to satisfy the mourners. Getting high until their eyes barely opened and drawing until their fingers cramped up was how many of them outwardly grieved. The teetotallers couldn’t blame the rest for succumbing, and anyway all of us were doodling diabolical scenes.
What did he die of? guests wanted to know, but Wendy had no definitive answer. The doctors had told her he died of a combination of pneumonia, dysentery, arthritis, inflammation, cancer, and so on. That such a young man could rack up such an extensive list of illnesses was inexplicable enough, but that in the past six months more than a dozen young men had died this same way was something of a frightening mystery.
All of Wendy’s stuff was at the other end of the longtable, in the kitchen nook, in a bay window that faced south towards the suburbs. The kitchen was a bright place and Wendy worked at night.
She rubbed her eyes. I’m afraid to go near that mucilaginous sludgepile of dirty dishes in the sink …, she said. She shook her head, pulled her bottom lip, and looked out the window. The neighbours are hardcore Evangelicals with two children under the age of ten, they must wonder what the fuck’s going on. God, I feel like I’m about to throw up out of my eyes. My gut is spazzing on me. My brain is glue. I am so broken. I can’t believe he’s dead.
All right enough monkey business, let’s get these dishes spotless for Wendy, said Rachael and slapped Twyla on the knee, pulled Mark by the ear to the sink. We can do this, Wendy, we can help you.
Filth does not know it is filth, said Mark Bread as he cracked a tall can of beer and slurped at it, looking at the dishes submerged under an oily murk in the twin sinks. There was paintbrushes and plastic easels in there, too.
Get those hands dirty, said Rachael and snapped her fingers at Patrick. That was one of Rachael’s many talents, we soon learned; she could always organize and lead us when we felt incoherent and apathetic—she pointed us in a direction. When we finished up at the sink—and you can believe it took all four of us—we felt ready for hell itself and asked for more. Wendy laughed and said that was plenty for now, invited us to sit down again in four spare chairs at the longtable and gave us stacks of paper and aimed us at some pens and pencils and said she would join us once a few more depressing phone calls got made.
It’s time to draw, she said. Go ahead.
It might have been Charles Schulz we sat down next to at the longtable, Cathy Guisewite or Dik Browne, another winner of the Reuben Award, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter. These legendary cartoonists were seated next to the most ignoble amateurs that night, us, and career or not, we all passed the time playing drawing games. Nudged in the ribs by Spain Rodriguez. C’mon, c’mon, he said, join in. We shrugged him off the first round, saying we weren’t good enough for anything but washing up.
Games are kind of a tradition with big parties at the longtable, Wendy said. You must join in.
In every round of a drawing game you had five minutes to complete your picture, the majority decided a winner and the all-out loser, who relinquished a chair to a new player. The winner invented the next challenge. One would shout out:
Draw an animal you’ve never drawn before.
Then another cartoonist would say: Draw a spaceship with no wings.
Draw your worst idea for a superhero.
Draw a whole fairy tale—in one minute.
Draw a barouche, a calash, or a landau.
Draw a wise man on a mountain.
Draw an emergency room situation.
Draw a ziggurat, xenodochium, or schloss.
Draw a plague doctor.
Draw weightlifting monsters.
Draw Ping, Pang, and Pong from Turandot.
Using your opposite hand, draw a man playing piano.
Draw a pirate in Hick’s style with your eyes closed.
Draw a horse race upside down.
Draw sex from memory.
Draw soldiers from World War One versus soldiers from the Cimbrian War.
Draw a caveman and a Neanderthal and a merchant marine.
Draw a scene from the life of Aleister Crowley.
Draw a dinosaur with landscape.
Draw a family of tourists with landscape using your wrong hand.
Draw an SF boho in the style of Fontaine Fox.
Draw a scene from Hamlet in the style of George Herriman.
Draw the San Francisco skyline in the style of Lyonel Feininger.
Draw your panic.
Draw yourself as you will look in fifty years.
Draw a Kama Sutra position performed by Shaggy and Velma.
Draw Ronald Reagan with your eyes closed.
Games preoccupied us for hours and hours over the course of the two-night wake, and so time passed almost without an appearance. Coffee kept eyes dilated all the way until Monday morning. Coffee, hot night in a cup, making our hearts race like ink on paper, we drank it for life.
Casual interrogation was another game. Questions about process, this need to know about each other’s tools, as they doodled and drank and reminisced. Not for all. Not for us. This line of questioning was intended to expose, in full, the contents of each other’s toolki
t. There was a collector’s-fetish fascination with how others did the same thing. Lay black ink on white paper, should be simple, but only in your dreams was it ever.
What type of pen? Brush or nib? What brand of nib, what size, what shape, what brand of brush, what sizes? Of all the blacks out there to choose from, what inks were favoured, what brand of watercolour was the one, what kind of paper did you go for, was the paper coated, what was its bond weight? What size did they draw their panels, and did they use a lightbox, did they trace? Did they have assistants and what were the assistants used for?
Some had invented ways to get a certain look, say, for instance, the rays of the cosmos, snowy days, rainy nights, shadows on brick, or intricate patterns on fabric. Nobody worked with quite the same set of tools, there was so much available.
What pen do you use?
The 914 Radio Esterbrook.
Name a brand, it was here. Hick had tried them all. An armoury of pens. To complement the mason jars full of brushes and pens and pencils there were hundreds of small plastic canisters to fill with diluted ink for doing washes. There were tons of flimsy watercolour palettes caked with a rainbow of paint sediment. Kneadable rubber erasers in various states of decay. T-squares, French curves, and the rest of the drafting tool family were here and ready.
Pelikan M400 14C for lettering.
Visconti black. Parker red. Holbein blue.
Yasutomo ink, swear by it. Nothing’s blacker.
Hold on, let me write that down.
And an abundance of blank paper. Reams of old yellowing paper Hicks had picked up at flea markets that smelled of vanilla. Unsealed boxes of handmade watercolour paper he mailordered for on impulse. Thousands of sheets of heavy-duty bristol boards. Arches paper. Canson brand.
Take a piece of bristol that’s as smooth as glass and lay some carbonbased black inks on it: sticks to the paper and dried so perfectly it looked already like print.
Reeves watercolours. A tray a week, a month.
Grumbacher brushes. Grumbacher pastels. Grumbacher.
The infamous Falcon pen from Bink Wells & Co. So smooth.
With the right tools, the right brands, the right materials, the right table, talent had no choice but to skyrocket. The right pen or brush matched up with the ideal ink on the perfect paper could turn mediocrity into mastery overnight. Could the tricks of Alex Toth be taught? Yes. His photographic eye for detail, no. But his advice to go with fixed-width nibs for borders and for lettering, okay, that we would try to remember. Why all these dirty bristleless toothbrushes on the longtable? For scrapes, washes, and blood spatter. What’s that you’re doing? Trimming hairs off sable brushes with a razor. The confidences of Wally Wood, were they worth considering? Wally’s eyes swam in his head. His neck was wet with sweat, soaking the collar of his shirt. He told us the best thing that ever happened to comic book artists was the Xerox machine. Three, he said. He owned three.
Alex Toth got up from his chair next to Wendy’s and threw his pens down, lifted his arms and scratched the air as if fighting for oxygen. Use them all! Tools be damned! Don’t be a hostage to your toolkit! To Wendy’s delight, he pushed himself away from the longtable, disgusted with this all-around obsession with pens. Grab a fucking Sharpie and get to work! He marched to the kitchen, shouting out, Bullshit and you know it! A drawing starts with a pencil and scrap paper!
I can’t draw Peanuts without my tools, said Charles Schulz. That Esterbrook works for me. I’m afraid to leave my comfort zone. I guess that’s why they call it a comfort zone.
Patrick took a bicycle off the ceiling and rode down the hill and bought a half a dozen Sunday newspapers so that everyone could look over the full-colour funny pages and compare colour prints from one to the other. It happened to be a Sunday of quotes by chance. With Peanuts on the front page of the USA Today pullout, Charlie Brown quoted Proverbs to Snoopy: How long, you loafer, will you lie there? How long until you rise from your sleep? and Snoopy answered with a different verse, A good man cares if his beast is hungry. Then over in Johnny Hart’s B.C. a charred Neanderthal recited from Luke at the mouth of a smouldering cave. Cathy was on a blind date with an actor who had memorized the lines of both characters from The Odd Couple—Augh!
In Pan (the last Sunday Hick delivered before he moved to 5D) the character Wendy Darling quoted freely from Shakespeare’s Cleopatra— Growing up can’t free me from my mistakes but it does free me from childishness … tell me now, will Pan die? and Pan, about to jump off a high cliff onto a ship of pirates as a stunt to impress her, paraphrased Mark Antony right back, My queen gives me brave instruction!
In the case of the one paper Patrick could find that carried Wendy Ashbubble’s Strays—the San Jose Sentinel— the quote was unattributed Baudelaire she read off Hick’s shelf—Science is a cheat. You know what schools don’t teach? her dog Buck wondered aloud. The next discovery.
That’s fine, fine work, best of luck to you, Charles Schultz told Wendy with a benign smile.
Hey, maybe you could give me some advice. I got an offer for some licensing and merchandising, but I worry I’m jumping the gun.
You should always worry, said Schulz as he dipped his nib in the inkpot.
The whole point of comics is merch, to nab those big bucks, said Johnny Hart. That’s why we’re in this slaphappy business.
Not every comic strip is here for an eternity, they reminded her, not all strips grab kids’ interest and obsess collectors and become truly timelessly popular, so remember, Wendy, beggars can’t be choosers, you should be happy, this is good news.
Your future is my past, Schulz told her. I remember my old worries with fondness.
It’s true, said Hart glumly, your ambition makes me nostalgic.
There’s no reason why every popular comic has to exploit success and inundate the world with truckloads of useless stuff nobody needs, said Biz Aziz, rolling joints to give to the needy. More product to go in the dump, more junk for rich kids to get bored over. Extraneous junk dilutes the integrity of your characters. Don’t commodify your little sweethearts, Wendy.
The requests wear you down after a while, said Schulz. And you fear going broke. So many cartoonists go broke.
Hart agreed. I know better than most cartoonists how to spend money.
Junk …, said Wendy ruminatively.
The two famous strip artists regarded Biz with a fair degree of polite skepticism. The cosmetics, the beard, the long lacquered fingernails, the mourning gown. But Biz Aziz made enough money to suit all her needs selling copies of her self-published comic book memoir, The Mizadventurez of Mizz Biz Aziz, that she didn’t concern herself with merchandise or the respect of the lowest common denominator. She was on the fifth offset issue, completing a story cycle that depicted her experience as a teenage street performer drafted to Vietnam, enlisted in the ill-fated CAT-X artist program, drawing the Christmas Offensive from behind Cambodian lines. Everything in her comic career was organized around her predilections, very businesslike when need be but bohemian more often, and more dedicated to art than any of these syndicated commercialists (her words), drawing seven days a week, costume design, and singing disco on weekends. She was the last of a generation in the city to live by an alias for good reason: her connections weren’t all clean or above board, and her income mostly went untaxed. She had no assistant to help her fill orders or keep her on deadline. What did she need merchandise for when it would only spoil her fans? This way, she told Wendy, the independent way, she was at liberty to write and draw whatever she wanted without censor, and retain the total attention of her audience. Her fans expected the character Biz Aziz to say and do whatever she wanted, for the book to stay stubbornly anti-consumerist, and nothing about the real Biz Aziz’s financials would change that fact. She might rather go broke than exploit her art.
Obviously you don’t listen to this one, said Johnny Hart. I can see for myself your comic is not part of this mad rush for the gutter that ends in total anarchy.
&n
bsp; Typical straight whiteman floccinaucinihilipilification, spat Biz Aziz and threw a fistful of sketches at him.
Excuse me? he swatted.
Fuckin’ floccinaucinihilipilification, said Biz.
Hart jumped back out of his chair and shivered when he hit the window. I’m a gag man through and through. I like jokes, that’s all.
You discredit when you don’t get it, said Biz. In showbiz we call that floccinaucinihilipilification.
You’re one of these new punks allergic to money, Hart said.
Not money, said Biz. I’m allergic to servitude.
We saw Charles Schulz cringe away from the confrontation and began to study more closely his pens and pencils, and with great care and companionship set them up for a fresh drawing. Well, he said to Wendy, whatever you decide, good luck to you.
Thank you, Mr. Schulz.
Call me Sparky.
She turned to us. Can you believe that? He told me to call him Sparky. It’s like a blessing. I should take this deal with Frank, shouldn’t I? My problem is that it feels like I stole the watch from a dead man’s wrist.
There was one sour incident around five in the morning on Sunday when Biz Aziz was flirting with Vaughn Staedtler and things were moving along well when all of a sudden Staedtler shouted a string of obscenities at his former assistants as they came into the room. His assistants were suing him for hundreds of thousands in back payment on over twenty years of work on his legacy strip, The Mischiefs, about a clique of delinquent teens. When the fight was over, Biz took Staedtler outside to calm down and eventually he left in a taxi and the assistants stayed. It was the same for the comic—Staedtler, now in his late sixties, was retired from The Mischiefs after he had lost the rights in a previous court battle to his assistants, who now carried on for the Universal Press syndicate with no decrease in subscriptions. According to them, they had done all the work for the last thirty years anyway; Staedtler hadn’t touched so much as a pencil since he got back from Korea, unless it was to pick up a girl. They even forged his signature.