About six or seven on Sunday night, the front door swung open and in came Jonjay.
8
Jonjay gave off a powdered-stone smell of crushed gravel mixed with trail dust and mountain dirt and a cement quarry—sand dripped from the creases in his tattered clothes. His jacket and jeans were so frayed that it looked as if he was covered in cat hair. His own hair was long, frayed, almost white it was so blond, his tan was as black as red wine in the bottle, his mouth was cracked and dry, and his hands were so callused. Nevertheless he was gorgeous, one of the angels or demons. His blond beard hung in greasy tentacles. He wore a pair of blown-to-bits hiking boots, and his bare, blackened toes stuck out the caps as if he’d run here from Russia. He dropped a leather portfolio on the floor and big sheets of toothy watercolour paper featuring delicate drawings of gnarled little trees spilled out around him. He didn’t look at anyone. He said, Where is he? Took me ten days. I’m too late, aren’t I?
Ten days? He’s only been— Yes, since Friday, but—. Where have you been, Jonjay? Wendy said and started to cry. He died on Friday.
Jonjay’s eyes went black as they fixed on the master bedroom, and he walked straight past Wendy in a kind of zombie daze. He was suffering from sunstroke and dehydration but we didn’t know that yet. He made his way down the longtable running a hand over the surface for balance, almost as though he was blind, nodding to himself and whispering until he was in front of the entrance to the bedroom, where he paused and wondered aloud about his next step before going forward.
Bonjour hello, came a girl’s voice.
Jonjay hadn’t arrived alone. With him was a girl of nineteen or twenty, also sunbleached blond and a deep summer tan for so early in the season. Her petite figure had big curves; she was swinging a set of keys around her finger distractedly. Her attitude and face were familiar—the disinterested pout, the glassy focus. She told us her name was Manila, she picked up Jonjay on the 395, three hours south of Yosemite. Thought he was a dead animal, she said. I pulled over and rolled down the window. He lifted an arm and groaned at me. I almost died.
Manila saved my life, Jonjay cried out from the darkness, and pointed back towards her as he proceeded closer to the body. Someone fix her a drink.
I told him he needs help, he needs a hospital, Manila said, but he told me he had to come straight here. He was raving. Visions of this. Someone get him electrolytes or he’s going to die. What’s the scene here?
She was not surprised to learn this was a wake. Not after Jonjay had told her about the intense field of psychic energy that told him to make his way home. She believed him because she believed psychic energy flowed through everything, especially her body. She was not surprised she saved Jonjay’s life, since he was born under the hour of the dragon and she was a Taurus ascending. She came to the conclusion he was the one artist on earth who understood her soul.
Jonjay leaned over the wicker basket and saw the waxed skin and stitched-together lips of the boy and no, even he denied this emaciated dome was Hick’s. But he fell to his bare knees, then stood again as fast, unaware he’d fainted or not wanting to be seen praying. These gruesome almost robotic or bestial rites of grief, no one was free of this truth, a revulsion to death. We watched Jonjay’s shoulders flinch with discernment at the hollowed-out face of his dear friend, white with mortuarist chalk to conceal as much as possible. It was Wendy who had put the pen and pencil in his hands resting on his chest. Yes. But just to see him now you could tell this knight’s body weighed less than a small child’s. A skeleton enrobed in a thin veil of powdered silk.
Jonjay embraced the body, kissed the sewn lips, then lifted himself away with a loud exhale. Actually a dryheave. Then he turned to the curtains. He tripped on a leg of the longtable as he left the master bedroom backwards in a hurry and started to speak. Candles trembled, nothing fell. He talked to Biz and then to Wendy, that is, if his monologue was directed at anybody at all, other than himself:
This one. This one used to churn his brains to make art. Hick climbed out of the mud of the Tenderloin to flip comics on their head. You read his comics. He spoke in that argot. He was no intellectual. He drew damn good pictures. And last time I saw him feels like yesterday. It was more than a year ago. Instead of time, he passes. Soon is not a fair promise to a best friend, I realize that now. And now. I’ve learned now doesn’t exist as time. Now is a muscle. You can train hard of yourself to live for longer and longer periods of time in the now. Hick must have been scared to die. To contemplate an end. He never wanted to, he told me so. He believed his dependence on comics kept him young, he would live forever. It was the two of us, we salvaged the lunchroom tables and picnic benches and YMCA cafeteria tables or should I say stole to make this forty-two-foot longtable. We built this beauty. We studied all the possible inking techniques for comics. Silkscreening for covers, and printmaking techniques, and we set up the plates in the spare bedroom for twelve-colour separation just to sell T-shirts of our own design. We learned how to take pictures with fully manual cameras and do all the steps to the darkroom process to develop our pictures in a darkroom we built in this house. I was there when he bought that stop-motion camera rig for thirteen dollars off the pawnbroker across the street from Berkeley. All the editing equipment he owns I helped him find. We self-taught each other animation. Now will someone get me some paper? Will one of you find me a pen or pencil? I feel so diabolically woozy I have to sit down and make a drawing.
The guests all raised their glasses or smokes in a toast and drank, puffed, and watched as Jonjay found a place at the longtable.
Patrick snapped up a pristine Pentel black ballpoint, Rachael found a stack of bristol board, Twyla poured a tall glass of water, and Mark wellrolled two joints. Biz massaged his shoulders.
I’m beyond the brink, Jonjay said. I saw infinite horizons out there in the mountains. I spent the last three months with thousand-year-old trees. He pulled his hair and said, It’s the dead I’m afraid of. The dead who are revolting. Can anything be done with the dead? What did the tribes used to do when a guru or a shaman died? Can we at least eat the dead?
He downed his glass of water and begged for another. Manila was right there with lemonade.
What is this? Jonjay inspected the joint in his fingers, sniffed it up and down and thought that this wasn’t just the usual, it smelled distinctly of Hick’s B.O. We told him the bag was hiding in the laundry hamper with his dirties.
Promise me you’ll never wash those or we’ll lose the last of his spirit, Jonjay said and took a plastic lighter from the table and ignited the joint and inhaled twice. Those clothes are infused with the reek of his unreal talents and it’s got deep into this grass. Damn. I feel his powers already as a I smoke, can’t you?
Yes, we did in fact. Hick Elmdales’s presence was an unfathomable strength in the room that no one could argue with, a cloud of weedsmoke pressuring us to impress him, or the idea of him, the thought of his body there bearing down on our shoulders as we tried to stroke beauty out of a blank page. The expiring self penetrating through scented candles almost to a rank taste.
Where have you been? Wendy wanted to know.
His pupils focused long enough to recognize Wendy. Was he angry? he asked her, and Wendy promised that no, Hick forgave him—how could you possibly know?
But I did know, said Jonjay, that’s what’s so strange. For the past three months I was trekking and bouldering alone up and down in the White Mountains drawing and painting the bristlecone pines, he said. Alone and completely lost in the dry desert mountains, contemplating the multitudes, surrounded by ancient trees. I dreamed of city streets. Some of these bristlecone pines are thousands of years old. That’s why I went to see them. Then ten days ago I got a message to come back, something was the matter with Hick.
What message, from who?
From a bristlecone tree, Jonjay said, staring off into the distance of the white page in front of him as he started to draw, hand moving spontaneously over the paper, a t
ree, no, a crocodile with a clock in his mouth. I sat in front of this one bristlecone pine and I saw litter trapped in its lower branches, and when I reached over to grab it I saw what it was, the face of Hick’s Peter Pan from the cardboard package to a toy. Something about this little fragment off one of his pictures told me he was in trouble. I came back as soon as I could.
You’re not too late for this. His last wish was that you be here and you are, so there’s that. Wendy dried her eyes and then cried again.
We can’t let his body go to waste, it’s wrong.
He asked for gags and pranks, said Wendy. Don’t take his wishes too far.
Jonjay sat back and examined his crocodile, a veritable dragon. Look, that’s Hick’s sweat on our brains, Jonjay told her, he’s improved my markmaking, and my vision, my whole perspective. This doodle is as good as any I ever drew. I can see through the illusion of the white page to the perfect drawing inside. Imagine what you could draw, said Jonjay, and what we could all draw and what we could endure if we ate his eyes and ears and arms and hands.
You’re grossing me out to the max, Wendy said.
Look, if we don’t eat him something else will, Jonjay said. I know better than a worm how to eat this man. If we love him shouldn’t we at least eat some of him? His mouth. His eyes. His fingers. His ears? I’ll go around like a waiter and take everyone’s order.
Don’t be sick, please, she said. Where’s your manners? My life just got smooked, pancaked. A grand piano of misery just fell on my heart.
But aren’t you afraid you aren’t inoculated from whatever it is killed him so suddenly? said Jonjay.
That’s a lousy punchline, Jonjay. You do need liquids.
Who is he? we whispered to Wendy as soon as we got the chance.
Who indeed! Boo-hoo! She collapsed her face into the palms of her hands and said, He’s back! The boy came back. Now I’m sunk. I thought I’d never see him again. He convinced me to move here. And he’s been the irreplaceable absence in my life ever since I did. I expected to reunite a year ago. And it was only to replace him why I chased surfers up and down Marin County. Gee whiz, when I first got to SF I was like plucking married mycologists out of Golden Gate Park for some of that green thumb action, and flirting with arcade game grandmasters to get close to the feeling I yearned for. I fooled around with homeless chalk artists on Haight trying to find a little bit of the lowly artist in Jonjay. There was a small piece in each of these guys that reminded me of a part of Jonjay. Pheromones in common. The same walk. That carnally innocent smile. Different flakes of what I needed to make a muddled version of Jonjay in my heart.
Well, what’s the matter, then? we wondered. If you’re hot for him, here he is.
I guess so, she said glumly. After all that daydreaming for the man, I’m not ready for the real again. And what if he’s with that girl now? Ugh, I can’t stand the thought of him with some tart not me. I don’t know how to be his platonic friend. That would be the worst. My problem is I don’t like to share and my hot crush was safe from real competition when he only existed in the loins of my memory.
It was after midnight when Ronald Reagan appeared on television. Most sets were on mute, as the evening news repeated his words, Our government is too big and it spends too much … The answer to a government that’s too big is to stop feeding its growth. Well, it’s time to change the diet and to change it in the right way.
It’s strange when the man you’ve been told your whole life is your father becomes president, Wendy told us. He was only the host of General Electric Theater when Mom pointed to him on the TV and said, Look, there’s your dad. When he almost got assassinated last month, I cried.
My dad is a rodeo clown, said Rachael. Never see him. Not a part of my life.
My dad is in for life without parole, said Patrick with a tone of acid indifference. Killed his brother.
Dad is a libertarian, Mom is a librarian, said Twyla. First time I ran away I was fifteen.
Merchant marine, said Mark Bread of his own paterfamilias.
Orphanages called me their son, said Jonjay. First met Hick in such circumstances, two foster kids neglected under the same roof.
We learned a little more about his new friend Manila and her family woes, too. She was the Mexican-Québécois heiress-in-exile to the Convençion family fortune in iceberg lettuce. The iceberg lettuce grew on megafarms in the boot of southern Mexico. Her side of the Convençions lived on massive reindeer ranches in rural Quebec, and all their taxes went through a black box LLC in Nevada. A year ago after a European tryst with a married cousin, she bought a VW van from a palm reader and left the Quebec reindeers behind and went driving south to visit the iceberg lettuce megafarms. Her plan: reclaim her fortune. Frozen out of her family’s bank account, Manila told us she stayed in pocket by making the best of a bad reputation, rooming at five-star hotels with ineligible men who paid her for sex and to help end arranged marriages by getting caught in the suburban society pages in the lounge with whatever local twit scion, and then she would drive to another city’s rich enclave and do the same thing all over again, and in between she slept in the back of her all-white VW van, stealing away tens of thousands of dollars in the process. We were astounded by these stories and the money she described. She said she often needed to wash away the minor irritation that was her celebrity. Park somewhere up the 101 like Coos Bay or Crescent Beach and suntan on the VW’s rooftop and surf all afternoon and at night by campfire read Huysmans in the original French. Manila thought of herself more as a sorceress than a runaway exiled rich girl. She spoke five languages and wanted to write, perhaps poetry.
Art is an orphanage, said Biz Aziz. When you make art, you leave your parents’ hopes for you at the door to the studio. My parents came on a boatload of refugees from the coast of Africa during the Second World War. When my mother was murdered in Hagerstown city, my dad moved west. Cancer ate him. I raised myself since I was ten years old right here in San Franpsycho.
It took Biz Aziz another three years to complete her depiction of this wake. The cartoonist’s death would appear in local comic shops late in eighty-four. Biz Aziz narrates the story of Jonjay’s arrival and how he contrived to get us all to eat of the body of the deceased. She draws the guests in her inimitable style, unrecognizable silhouettes, trembling shadow portraits of cartoonists supposedly lining up to eat the flesh of a dead man. Captions with some panels spell out the situation and name a few names. She supplies no distinction between the real and the fictitious, the magical thinking and the actual doing. Biz didn’t show any hints on the page that Jonjay’s ceremony was a game or a trick he played, except surely it had to be. Wendy was convinced it was a gag. Biz might have believed the flesh was real at the time, or she was blurring the truth now in her uncensored comic. Part of being uncensored was the right to shock.
We remember green light before dawn floating between a black sky and black horizon. This lingering green anomaly, it was Hick’s spirit’s farewell. It was an unusual chlorophyll-green glow, the same colour as the candleflames surrounding his basket, and lasted unusually long. Gave us the shivers, the ghostliness of this aurora. As some guests, entirely exhausted, found their coats and shoes, dawn dragged out its rise up over a green-drenched Oakland that Monday morning. And when a single spear of bright yellow sunlight launched over the horizon and signalled the end, the manor began to empty—single file, heads bowed, out on to Stoneman Street and down the hill into San Francisco. The sunrise left green globules of its presentiment inside the manor. Zen celadon-green orbs hovered in meditative circles and formed prayerful clusters throughout the rooms in an eerie attempt to communicate, it would seem. You could see these orbs only out of the corner of your third eye, so to speak, but they must have meant Hick was still here with us in some fashion. When finally around eight in the morning these vapours left us completely, so did warmth. Though sunlight flooded the rooms, our fingers got so cold so fast they felt numb. We could see our breath in front of our faces. W
endy cranked the heat. We put on blankets.
Some trick. Eating Jonjay’s offerings horrified us. To go along with the prank even as a piece of theatre made us gag. He made us go first, the strangers in the room—he gave us the loins, of all things, that he placed on paper plates. Closer inspection revealed our own doodles from earlier in the evening under the slivers of Hick’s body. Laughing at him to cover for our fear, we said, No way.
He said, Go ahead.
When it came their turn, the other guests balked and blanched, too. We heard Art Spiegelman belching with nausea near a potted fern. But no one turned him down when he presented another morbid slice off the corpse. With the table manners of an upscale waiter, he named the cut and served it to you on a plate made of paper, the drawing on it your own. It was Hick’s best friend who told the cartoonists, The dead want to give, it’s the living who are afraid to take. Jonjay was acting like a seer or warlock or fool as he foretold the occult properties of this great man’s flesh and warned us to prepare for what would hit us after the digestion of this numinous portion.
Swallowing the gross slippery flesh, what was going down our throats, was it takeout sushi? Was that the thing, raw fish used to trick us? Where did he get his props at such a moment’s notice? In Biz’s version of events in issue nine of her comic book, Jonjay is seen taking a fresh X-Acto blade from the longtable and going alone into the ink shadows of the master bedroom—; no witnesses as he performs the rite. When he returns to the others, it is with his hands cupped around a paper plate for a small filet. Isn’t your art tempted if not your gut? he tempted you. He pitched the flesh to us: Your hands want to draw the way Hick’s hands could. What cartoonist wants to live without a taste of that effortlessness? The worms don’t deserve him. Let’s share some of the secrets that made up his greatness and inoculate ourselves from what killed him.
The Road Narrows As You Go Page 7