Okay. Okay okay okay. Wendy accepted hers. He claimed Wendy’s piece was foreskin and came with a spell of forgetting—the instant she swallowed she forgot the names of who stayed and who left, if Johnny Hart stayed on or was it Dik Browne? Chester Gould and his oxygen tank? And even as she accepted her piece she denied any of the scene was real.
We remember somewhat differently. We remember the nervous, agreeable laughter from the guests that invariably followed his very morbid offering. What did we eat that night? Props, like the corpse pieces in a Halloween haunted house. That was always Wendy’s belief. No one took Jonjay seriously except for in his meaning. How could you accept anything but the soul of the gag, which was so dark it seemed appropriate, given who Hick was, and why Hick had considered Jonjay his best friend—because Jonjay was the kind of friend who would think of this. Jonjay was a savage but not a maniac. So we took bites. Biz Aziz chewed a heartvalve. She ate and ate without progress, marvelling at the tenacity of the muscle. Wendy choked back a second mouthful.
Once upon a time we shared in this common misconception of there being a divide between fact and fiction, but after that night our sense of the reality of events and the certainty of objects was forever deranged. How life seemed to be made up of the kind of person who controlled perception while most other kinds of people yielded to it. Even though we snuck in and inspected the body later, after everyone had had a piece, just to see if bits were missing—and there weren’t, there were not—in all parts of our lives thereafter, both mentally and physically, Jonjay’s prank would haunt us.
9
We wanted Jonjay to tell us one way or another, was the meal real or wasn’t it? Twyla was the first to put the question to him, and he would ask us in return: Why do you want to know? Would that put you at ease? What do you recall?
We remember green light, green minutes, when, after hours of threatening to do so, Jonjay appeared carrying those pieces for us to eat. This sense of humour, so closely imitating ritual and evidently an appropriate honour to the deceased, was another reason we couldn’t tell if what we’d eaten was in truth a fiction, or if that limpid white flesh we thought might be raw calamari between our teeth was off his body. Then there’s a blank space, an absence or gap not in the narrative but in our conviction. We remember the body was removed by gentlemen mortuarists who would cremate and bury Hick in a cemetery plot in Daly City. One day we would go visit, but not soon.
Stop thinking about it, Jonjay warned us. Move on.
And for the moment, we did. Our attention couldn’t cling forever to the sides of that big wicker basket. We took care of Wendy as she spent the rest of the week bedridden with a chest cold that wouldn’t quit her. She slept twenty hours at a stretch. When she didn’t sleep she lay on pillows on the living room floor and read sporadically from the bestselling Michelle Remembers. For two reasons Wendy made herself read the entire book: because Hick never finished reading it before the hospital, and because it took place in Victoria. Michelle Remembers contributed to her sickness’s creeps for the satanic story was all true. Every word. She knew this island town described in these pages, it was her hometown. She and her mom used to go on bicycle rides along the seawall and frequently passed the Ross Bay cemetery where Michelle was abused by Satanists. When Wendy was asleep we all took turns reading from it too—the unlocked memories of unimaginable satanic ritual abuse Michelle had been the victim of in her early childhood, including an intentional car crash on a highway, being buried alive in a grave, and numerous other sacrificial rites in forests and caves, culminating in visitations from none other than Jesus and Azazel, aka Satan himself. All of it Michelle repressed for two decades, until in her college years Dr. Pazder’s unique style of Catholicized psychiatric hypnosis uncovered the truth in therapy sessions. Later the doctor would divorce his wife in order to marry his patient.
No, not possible—it still never occurred to Wendy that Jonjay would do something so heinous. Magic was his motive, not cruelty. The reason Jonjay thought it was a good idea to perform this sort of mad theatrical mockery of flesh after death could be found in Michelle Remembers—and in almost all the books on Hick’s shelves. This occult sideshow was Hick’s lurid fascination, as an artist, not as a practitioner. Hick wouldn’t condone actual practice of superstition, but he loved the aesthetic of the decadent. You could tell just by scanning the titles and authors how interested he was in whatever tread on the meridian, and how this theme inspired his drawings and his story arcs in Pan. Leading a double life as an amateur demonologist stoked by the literature of this tradition gave his Pan its subtle subversive side. Therefore Wendy would finish the last book, benign as all the rest, and break the fake curse—petty symptoms begone! She blew her nose for the thousandth time and coughed out a pint of slime.
And her second reason to read contradicted the first. Break the fake curse while looking for the proof this memoir offered of the existence of the supernatural occult forces she felt so strongly surrounded her growing up in that small rainy city on the island. Why else would such a picturesque little city village fill her with such unimaginable dread? For as long as she could recall—crib days even, those days were rattled, too.
Wendy didn’t like being Canadian. She told people she was from Cleveland. She wanted to be a fullblooded American like the rest of us; she didn’t want anything so insignificant as a birthplace to hold her back. She wanted American children to read her comics, buy her toys, and watch her cartoon on American televisions, and we were going to help her.
After a week bedridden with flaring rashes, fever flashes, shiversshakes, she said it out loud: Nope, I think I have what Hick had. That’s it. I’m done for. It’s that fucking memoir. You shouldn’t have read it, you fools. We’re all going to die. And she threw the book at the wall. I finished every last word so help me. Who’s next? Wendy stumbled and pressed herself against the wall, knocking down an original Dick Tracy drawing, I have this unspeakable modern dilemma, the George Orwell disease, the gay-related plague, that’s what the nurses whispered in the corridor, now we have it, too.
Rachael brought her hot lemonwater and sent her back to bed with a Valium she bought on a street corner in the Mission. Sleep, sweet friend, you’ll be okay, she said and pet Wendy’s hair out of her face, slicked down with a cold sweat.
Teeth grinding. Wendy developed a near-permanent jaw clench after Hick’s death, and at night or when she wasn’t paying attention, her molars and bicuspids would squeak and crack out of tension so loud you could hear it through the walls.
I need to see a doctor about my teeth, she told Gabby over the phone.
What about your teeth?
I grind them.
You grind. Well, yeah, sign up for our Shepherd health care plan. There’s plenty of options to choose from.
Goddamn Michelle Remembers.
Who?
The book may be cursed, said Wendy.
No idea what you’re talking about.
Sleep was no escape—it was worse. She slept heavily. When she awoke her jaw was sore. All day long she was aware of a free-floating anxiety that never left her head, a grinding like a crazy caffeine rush that made her want to shit herself from migraine pain and then go carry a sign down the street with the words The End is Near!
We all needed help. So one day we did the horrible and grabbed the keys to her lime-green Gremlin and drove to see Dr. Dritz in 5D, who recommended blood tests for all of us. The waiting room was full of these elderly men in their mid-twenties and thirties—hair falling out, flannel jackets a size or more too big, soiled shirts, and bodies ravaged by shigellosis, pneumonia, dead veins, burnt loins, pullulating cancer scabs. The waiting room ashtrays needed to be emptied. One of these young men leaned over to Mark and said, The plague is the new black. Mark, who rarely did, laughed. While we waited we flipped through current events magazines and national newspapers—Ronald Reagan was the cowboy president who survived assassination and everyone had an observation about that but not o
ne of the journalists wrote a word about this new fashion for dying sweeping the boys of San Francisco.
The nurse let us know that unless we heard back within twenty-four hours then our bloodwork was negative. A gloom settled over us and we flinched at the sound of the phone every time it rang. Michelle Remembers was put out of view. Biz wouldn’t leave her studio upstairs. Wendy began to pack her few belongings and prepared for some kind of journey. Jonjay lay on the floor beside the bejewelled tiles of the carapace of his shellacked tortoise and caressed the creature’s glazed face, reminiscing. He missed the days taking Dorian, his ninety-three-year-old pet, on a slow walk through Haight-Ashbury and everyone gawking and taking pictures. That was the life, Jonjay and a ravishing tortoise. This whole manor smells like death, we need to get out of here, he said and got up from one seat and went and straddled his tortoise. Let’s go, my one and only friend, giddyup. Take me back to whence I came.
When there was no doubt we were in the clear, we celebrated. Tacitly. We didn’t admit how happy we were to be alive. We chalked it up to the magic Jonjay played on us, placing a spell on our palates. Patrick took a bicycle and ran a trapline from one end of the city’s bars to the other, and then on to the steamrooms to burn off the alcohol and meet singles and threesomes for anonymous sex. Mark’s way was to drink six cans of beer and a mickey of rye, smoke three joints, and pass out in front of the turntable for thirteen hours listening to the crackle at end of side A. Biz ate copious drugs of all rate and function and spent the weekend in the Castro village a celebrity tripping from house party to house party.
And Wendy crawled out of the fear and woke up from all that praying and sat down for the first time in a while at the longtable, and with Rachael and Twyla beside her, she got down to work on another Strays strip—Buck and Murphy in a round of Ping-Pong.
If all else fails, I go with Ping-Pong, she said.
We remember that one wall of the living room was dedicated to a massive collection of vinyl. Hick’s bootleg funk collection alone ran up to a thousand discs. He owned all the Brill Building seven-inch singles he could get his hands on. Most of the time we spent with Biz Aziz was flipping records; she loved to listen to rare Parliament or Carole King tunes while drawing, oldies gave her ideas for stage material and heavy funk was her heart and soul. She did all her drawing at No Manors; every page of her comic memoir was completed here. It turned out Biz rented a single room on a corner of the third floor, which she used as a kind of green room and costume department—all five hundred square feet was dedicated to her live performance persona. (No room for a drawing table there.) She was something of a drag nurse to the other queens in town who needed mending or on occasion commissioned dresses from her. In fact, Biz was our main source—once a month she dropped off a pound of marijuana she got from her boy in Oakland, for which we paid a thousand dollars. Split into ounces and dimebags, it was easily turned into ten or twelve thousand a month. This never would have happened if local cartoonists hadn’t stopped by No Manors so often asking to try some, heard we had some, here’s some cash. (None of us had the street smarts to survive on a corner.) This was how we sold a lot of very sweaty-smelling weed without much hassle, and we split the profits among the five of us, Biz included. Our fast-paced side business put cash in our pockets at a time when being Wendy’s assistants was more of an honorific or internship than a paycheque.
While all this went on Manila Convençion parked her white VW van on the street outside for a few weeks, running an extension cord and plugging into the side of No Manors, trying desperately to woo Jonjay back onto the road with her. The iceberg lettuce megafarms beckoned to her and she threatened to leave for them almost every day, but when Jonjay didn’t seem upset at this prospect, she stayed longer. Wendy had ways to keep him on the premises, asking him to do favours in Hick’s memory, long overdue repairs to the place, protection against more of Disney’s henchmen, money to tide her over until she could take on the lease.
For the time being, Hick’s master bedroom remained preserved as he had left it, laundry hamper and its contents included.
10
STRAYS
Our first job as Wendy’s assistants was to pretend to be. She wanted to impress her new business partner with a bustling team, so when Frank came over at dusk one evening for his appointment to see the animals, she walked him through her studio and introduced us as her factotums. He had his transparent ploy to see her again and she had her ploy to impress him—and strangely, Wendy made it sound like these two motives were at odds. She’d deflect him with a small army of professionalism.
Twyla Noon was who asked impertinent questions, and in the days following the wake all she wanted to know was whether Wendy planned to sleep with Frank again. The answer was emphatically no, Wendy wasn’t going to give up her social life to become some suburbanite’s idea of a mistress. That was a one-time well-played mistake on a mutual whim. Besides, now that Jonjay had returned home, her infatuation with him didn’t leave much room in her imagination for a married man. That was the answer Twyla didn’t want to hear, gunning for Jonjay herself.
As we helped Wendy ink-panel borders in prep for a weekly Strays strip she told us the story of how she met Jonjay. This was only about two years ago, back in her hometown of Victoria after she got expelled from school. Left to her own devices, she ended up loitering downtown all week, selling off stock of her pornographic comics to the other delinquents—she was done with sex drawings for the moment, and now she drew beasts. He had hitchhiked into Canada to visit some famed occult artist-poet living in her neighbourhood whom she’d never heard of, and while he was at it, since it was the season, he was going to pick wild edible mushrooms, dry them, and sell them to connoisseurs overseas. She saw him wander into Horizone, the video arcade in the basement where she sat most days of the week and drew beasts like the peacock monster, Adramelch, the Scox, Count Bifron, and the Zozo. Meanwhile he reached the twentysecond level on Pong on one quarter. A crowd formed around him to watch in awe. Everyone’s stunned face in his face. Nothing fazed him. The speed at which the pong flew at those upper levels was dizzying. Kids were awestruck. A legend was made. Wendy didn’t get up from her table to spectate like the rest of them, instead she sat back and drew the whole scene—she drew the sequence in four pages, starting with this beautiful stranger and three local skids in sleeveless jean jackets watching on either side of the screen, to the moment when he passed level nineteen and a punk girl fainted. Level twenty-two, the pong shot out like a bullet and Jonjay kept the joystick rattling with it for another fifty seconds before the screen froze. The screen literally froze mid-pong. There it was. Nothing moved. Pong or person. Everything froze. He blew up Pong. You could see for yourself that his bar was barely about to hit the pong. Computer jammed. The arcade went totally quiet, then erupted. The owner came over, took a Polaroid with Jonjay and the frozen screen, then unplugged and plugged back in Pong.
When the hubbub died down, and he got a chance, he came straight over to see her. This was how she hoped it would play out, him coming to her. Wendy the cool. Something about his no-nonsense swagger made her loins drool (her words). He said he saw her out of the corner of his eye and could tell she was drawing. What was she drawing? She showed him. He liked the pictures. He said he didn’t realize she was drawing the scene. Then she brought out the demon doodles she wanted to print together as a ’zine. Those really impressed him. He thought her style was freaky and fresh and he sat down at the table in the back of the arcade next to her and took up a pen of his own. It turned out he could draw anything. I started crushing on him like one-two-three, Wendy snapped her fingers. I forgot all about money and gave him copies of my dirty comics for free, I said, Take them, I can’t look at them another second. He made his own comic, too, he said. He took a copy out of his rucksack of The Artist, it was offset printed and twenty-two pages long, in full colour. Inspired by his friend Hick Elmdales, The Artist was Jonjay’s only attempt at a comic and much too good a
t that. In it, the Artist was an average citizen endowed with supernatural powers by a highly evolved being the size of a cosmos, enabling him to create art out of thin air. Jonjay’s drawing style was indelible, enviable, totally his own, confident, fast lines pushing and pulling the eye across the page, panels filled with bold shadows, the art was kinetic and unglued. She asked if she could keep it. He said it was his last copy of a hundred, but okay. They got to talking. She told Jonjay she was in the mood to run away—where did that come from?—she never voiced this thought until now, but listening to herself she believed it, sincerely. He told her all about all the cartoonists living in San Francisco, and about the situation at his home, No Manors, where Disney’s ghostwriter-ghostartist for Pan lived and everybody hung out. That sounded like the place for her.
She said those words to him, What happens if I kiss you?
He said, Here in the arcade?
Yeah for sure here or anywhere. As soon as possible. Like our lives depend on it.
Okay, he said and kissed her. He tasted of seasalt, like a caramel you’d dropped in the ocean. Can we go back to your place? he asked. Quickly she processed this: she wasn’t a virgin but she’d never brought a boy back to her apartment before. That would break a lot of her mom’s house rules.
Isn’t there somewhere else? My mother sleeps on the living room hide-a-bed. Screw it, let’s go to my place. I don’t care. I can lock my door. She’ll have to break it down.
The lights were off in the apartment and her mother wasn’t home, but in the morning when the two of them awoke they discovered she had done the laundry, cleaned all their clothes, and Jonjay’s were folded neatly and laid out at the door, including socks and underwear. Cheap coffee was percolating aromatically and the first round of toast just popped out of the toaster with a cheap jolt. She whispered to Jonjay her mother never made breakfast—this was her embarrassing display of benevolence to prove Mom was cool with the presence of a naked boy in Wendy’s bed and finding their clothes all over the apartment as if the two teenagers had exploded. The moment she left the bedroom to say good morning to her mother, Jonjay opened the window and climbed out. (She was mistaken about more than his age, she would someday learn.)
The Road Narrows As You Go Page 8