The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  You never needed no assistants anyway, Biz told him as she sipped her espresso. She plucked the drawing of her off the table and pushed it down the neckline of her dress. She winked at the old man. You’re supertalented, Vee. You should get back in the funny pages.

  Nah, he said and scratched the nape of his neck. I got my sights on the MoMA now.

  Yeah and thanks again for picking us up, said Lil Morphine Annie, shivering and pale in her evening gown, clutching her broken wig on the floor between her ankles. Her voice was rawer than usual, she was coming down from an anxiety attack. I sure fucking hope SFPD got enough of a look to last them a while, because I for one don’t plan on visiting that party again soon.

  Vaughn’s eyes were fixed on Biz. You ravished us from up there, under the spotlights, he told her. That’s why the crowd went mad. It was a collective simultaneous orgasm.

  That’s my art, you see, to drive men mad.

  That morning instead of driving home to feed his cats and sleep, or paint more clowns, Vaughn Staedtler stayed with Biz in her room on the third floor of No Manors and so began another of his wild affairs, and one of Biz Aziz’s few intimacies.

  STRAYS

  13

  Between the summer of eighty-one and the winter of eighty-two, Frank Fleecen’s office underwrote Shepherd Media’s purchase of more than thirty local and regional newspapers, and in the next few years, with the aid of still more junk bonds, Shepherd Media amassed a practical monopoly on cable affiliates and local papers south of the Mason-Dixon line. Most papers had an unspoken liberal-intellectual bias when Shepherd Media bought them, but that would soon be reversed to an openly conservative, tabloid slant. Through massive layoffs and minimal rehires, staffs were reshaped to suit the new agenda. Shepherd Media snapped up firesale presses on the brink of disaster, underwriting new business plans for small potatoes like the Carbondale Gazette and Boonville Herald; Macon, Marietta, and Alpharetta, Odessa and Fort Worth all had newspapers for sale, Gainesville and Enid etcetera. Shepherd Media’s original loan was to the tune of fifteen million dollars, issued as part of Hexen’s high-yield bonds, those zabagliones he’d bragged about. Then the loan doubled and tripled, it grew until Shepherd Media had borrowed up to a hundred million in bonds. Shepherd Media and its sole owner, the middle-aged entrepreneur Piper Shepherd, had found a position as titan of industry.

  Impressive, except it was on a line of credit in an industry many experts considered moribund. Every year the number of regional newspapers was shrinking. Local cable affiliates were shutting down one after another, too, went the story, as capital amalgamated and interests merged. Money was like beads of mercury in that way, money joined with money, money wanted to accumulate in one place, in the hands of one. Money was accumulating in Hexen Diamond Mistral to the tune of a two hundred million American dollars in eighty-one. The entire premise behind Shepherd Media’s business plan was mocked by wiser competitors who saw smoke and mirrors. Piper Shepherd was derided on TV, portrayed as a southern gentleman of wealthy lineage with a charm school smile, the intellect of a shoe, family connections going back to the Civil War, and considering he was in his mid-fifties, the temper of a spoiled brat baby. More often than Shepherd Media, though, the journalists in New York preyed on Frank Fleecen and Hexen Diamond Mistral’s high-yield bonds division, their strategies were openly criticized in op-eds invariably written by retired high-level employees of Hexen’s competitors.

  You can slap lipstick on a pig, went the line in the op-ed in the financial section of the Washington Post, but it’s still Shepherd Media.

  The unbuyable New York Times financial analyst wrote: Far from leading the sheep, Shepherd Media is clearly one of Frank Fleecen’s most docile lambs, hypnotized by the Hexen Diamond Mistral chant—junk junk junk junk—following all his orders without question, even willing to stretch out on the chopping block, first to the slaughter come winter.

  Meanwhile, down on the ground floor of this burgeoning empire, Gabrielle Scavalda’s office had a window that looked out at pedestrians who used its reflective outer surface as a casual mirror to fix their hair and check their teeth and nose as they walked by, invariably while she was in a meeting. Once a man stuffed his hand down his pants and adjusted himself while she tried to hold a conversation with a rival editor. It was in this office in upper Manhattan where she pushed her syndicate’s travelling salesmen to make Strays their number one priority in meetings with local editors. A lot of her days were spent fielding calls and making calls. Not unlike Frank, her business was in her contacts, and at night she locked her Rolodex in a safe under her desk.

  We heard Gabby’s pitch so often we could recite it verbatim. She beat the greatness of Strays into us until we were convinced, not that we needed convincing. We were a sounding board. Quite often when she called the manor it wasn’t just to share good news or ask for an update on a revision, she used us to complain about the indolence of her travelling salesmen. Now’s the time to strongarm those editors to slot in Strays, she would tell them,—don’t let them renew another syndicate’s strip … Yeah, I’m serious, Gabby would shout at So-and-so calling from a payphone in Dottie’s Diner. What’s the nearest newspaper? You’re where? On Kilgore Road outside Toone? Okay, I know Toone. Listen, you go tell that rat Chuck Emerald at the Toone Tribune to bump Sally Forth. Save that stuff for The New Yorker, right? Okay I’m looking at my map …, Gabby would say. Tell them you finally found a note from the underground that isn’t reprehensibly perverse. Say Strays is new wave but it’s closer to Peanuts than to Amy & Jordan—say that. Same goes for a paper like Paducah’s Examiner. They don’t need headscratchers either. Dump Levy’s Law and subscribe to Strays and watch sales rise. Tell them the adventure strips are done. Judge Parker is dead weight. No one is reading sequentials anymore. A burg like Pinckneyville needs straight laughs and Strays delivers gags.

  These were Gabby’s words.

  What we gleaned from Wendy and Gabrielle: The common newspaper comic strip salesman was a dark soul with wheels under him for a reason. So far no woman had been foolish enough to apply for this unprepossessing job. The travelling strip salesman worked for a syndicate on a meagre salary plus decent commission plus maybe monthly and annual bonuses in the case of some outstanding sales. Each salesman was given a portfolio of strips to pitch and a map of America. Gas and car repairs were reimbursed, all other travel expenses including hotel were covered by a straight fifty-five-dollar per diem. Carrying a wagonload of demons and a surfeit of charm, they squandered their skills delivering hackwork to idolless editors, these men who could sell anything and chose to make a living off comics, who lived on the blacktop and raced against their own despair. These were strange, solemn, almost always solitary men with a string of cowardly divorces behind them or just as often actively polygamists. Comic strip salesmen were known to harbour multiple families across many states, some lived multiple lives, they were all a lurid, improbable secret the salesman was able to juggle. A gun in the glove compartment of course. For all intents and purposes living out of Fords and Chryslers, the salesmen drove for hours and hours every day across their patch of America and slept in motels off the highway. The hole opening up in front of them on the highway kept getting wider. Slowly going into debt. They only came to life on the job—after a shave and a shower, cup of coffee, and squared away inside a quality suit, tie knotted, the smile came out of hiding—now he was ready to sell a strip. Suddenly gregarious, outgoing, confident, and socially adept, the best comic strip salesman was the one who seemed completely indifferent to landing a new subscription but loved the chance to get to know a new friend or catch up with an old one. Friendships were key. The friendship was what counted, being pals, going for drinks, shooting the shit, bullshitting, and other shit; the business— after all, we’re just talking comic strips here—was an afterthought, more gossip than art, more of an excuse to hang out than a business. Speaking of strips, listen, Emerald, I got a deuce burning a hole in my pocket, so if you don
’t mind looking at dancing girls, let’s go have a beer.

  Aided by Shepherd Media’s near monopoly of newspapers in the southern states, and Frank Fleecen’s diligent work selling Strays to businesses, we watched Wendy’s subscriptions double, triple, then a hundredfold increase in the span of a little more than twenty-four months. Every time she ripped open a paycheque it was for an even larger sum. An incredible list of cities and towns we had never heard of before, obscure place names whose locations confounded us even when searching across an open map. Yazoo City, Mississippi; Eggnog, Utah; Coin, Iowa. A subscription to Strays now cost a newspaper four dollars for every daily strip and seven twenty-five for a Sunday oversized colour—fifty cents above the going rate for strips like Drabble, Broom-Hilda, and Geech. After the split with syndicate and Hexen, Wendy’s cut was down to a dollar and a quarter for a daily and about two-fifty for a Sunday, for every subscription, so do the math and at her peak from eighty-two to eighty-seven, when Strays was in more than a thousand newspapers across America and the rest of the world, that still adds up to a couple million dollars a year to play with. And that’s before the cheques that came from Frank Fleecen’s licences and merchandising.

  Wendy found that in the months after Hick’s death, she often woke up with a stiff jaw and sore teeth, and this persisted all summer. Her top and bottom molars felt locked together. Her temples pounded. Cold liquids gave her piercing pains throughout her entire mouth and sinuses, made her brain throb. In the fall she couldn’t stand it anymore and went and saw Dr. Spencer, the dentist on Mission Street Biz went to, who told her her masseters were in knots, she was going to crack a crown if she didn’t get some therapy. Therapy? Spencer also made an appointment for her to be fitted for a silicone mouthguard to wear at night for the rest of her life if she didn’t seek deeper help, and recommended a Jungian hypnotist named Samantha Collins in Twin Peaks and wrote down the number.

  Therapy. She shivered from toes to scalp at the tantalizing thought.

  She opened additional bank accounts with Solus First National Savings & Loans as time went on, to divide up her income streams and distribute money from each into investment pools elsewhere, and placing a tiny percent of her income every month into an account set aside just for emergencies. But in fact these accounts were all opened at the suggestion of Frank Fleecen, who used Gabby as an intermediary to give advice of this kind. All these accounts were accessible to Frank through his numbered wire transfer account, and the ostensible reason was that he was her financial manager. Doug Chimney never blinked an eye after the first time. When the account set aside for Shepherd Media’s paycheques cracked a million in November of eighty-two, Doug Chimney handled the deposit himself, rang a bell, all the tellers and the other clients in line applauded her fortunes, and back in his office he poured her a generous glass of Louis XIII to celebrate. According to the evidence from investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission, between 1981 and 1987, Wendy opened at least sixteen separate bank accounts at Solus First National, and Doug Chimney was fully aware of the extent to which her accounts were being used as operational funds for Frank Fleecen’s most complicated deals. Whenever he saw Wendy come to make a deposit, in fact, Chimney was eager to open a few private safes in his office, let her try on the Roman Empire jewels and flip through the yellowed crinkled pages of his nearly priceless, certainly irreplaceable first edition of Hans Grimmelshausen’s novel Simplicius Simplicissimus published in the year 1669. Then when she was drunk and pliable and floating on the vapours of brandy and the ego boost of all this wealth, he tried for more.

  I’m so pleased to meet someone with an appreciation for an artifact like this.

  Oh I can get into this stuff, she said. Your very own private museum, I suppose you could call it. I think it’s cool you collect antiques and rare books. I love to read.

  Do you?

  Yes, why not? My childhood babysitter was the library, you know what I mean?

  Would you like to take home an auction catalogue and see what’s coming up, perhaps something in there will catch your eye? Doug handed her a thick Sotheby’s magazine and, seeing his gold wedding band flash at her before she could say no, politely put the catalogue in her sidebag. He added that he thought she would enjoy the atmosphere of an auction. During a round, a hypersensitivity to motion slows down everything, so what looks frantic to the outsider is actually happening at a beautifully slow and exciting pace to the players, like in a sport, for those of us who have something at stake. Once in a while an object’s make and provenance combined with its rarity and beauty tells me, it speaks to me, says I must become its protector. That’s how Doug Chimney described it as he returned the three-hundred-year-old novel to its vitrine.

  After her heavy deposit and surreal conversation, Wendy ran straight across the street to Clown Alley and ordered two bacon cheeseburgers and sat and stared at the front doors of Solus First National Savings & Loans and considered the insane idea of going back in there and ravishing the manager of the bank. She was a millionaire. Inside those walls lay her fortune. She wanted to make a bed on the carpet in Douglas Chimney’s office out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and fuck him on that money mattress. What was her problem? Why didn’t she just go home? She was already halfway through the second burger when she realized she’d eaten the first. Obviously Doug Chimney was hitting on her—he asked her to join him for Sotheby’s auctions. She wasn’t attracted to Doug Chimney or his position of power so much as she was attracted to the idea that he wanted to risk the troubles of infidelity for an hour with her. This propensity for illicit flings kept her single and perhaps if not lonely—after all she had us—then miserable anyway. At night her teeth grinding was louder than the creak of the old floorboards, we thought she was sleepwalking in her room until the dentist alerted her—the jaw pain and sensitive molars were why she had an appointment later that day with Dr. Samantha Collins, who clarified right away that she was a post-Jungian talk-based therapist who specialized in patients suffering from bruxism, vestibulodynia, and dystonia.

  Dr. Collins had a private practice out of her home on Palo Alto Avenue near the water reservoir, an eggshell-white set of Modernist cubes unevenly balanced on top of one another, offset by sheets of tempered green glass. She charged a hundred and twenty dollars for fifty minutes on a warm cracked leather couch facing a view of Golden Gate Park. For that price, Wendy did more than talk about the nocturnal dreams she had while grinding her teeth. She told her doctor about daydreams, random agonies, and even her sex fantasies.

  If Jonjay won’t, then I imagine having lots of flings and affairs because then, you know, that’s easy. I’d rather go to one of these orgy rooms downtown. Steamrooms. I’m too busy for a steady man, I’ve got drawing comics to think about. So that rules out the mistress role for me, too. I don’t want guys to think I show up twice. Is that crazy? Sometimes I think the aura of free love brought me here. Teeth grinding aside, what I want you to tell me, Dr. Collins, is if you think I’m crazy.

  So did you return to see the bank manager? Dr. Collins inquired politely, with a medical persistence, her legs crossing and recrossing inside her skirt, a Bic pen poised over a fresh page on a yellow legal pad.

  I told him I wanted one more look at his Simplicius Simplicissimus.

  She saw Dr. Collins for four more sessions and then moved on to a new type of treatment when it didn’t stop her teeth grinding, or clenching the mouthguard when she remembered to put it in. Once she was given this go-ahead to seek out therapy, even from a dentist, Wendy let herself indulge in all of its forms, sampling from therapy’s many options, and meeting eccentric and well-to-do practitioners one after the other. She seemed to derive some kind of entertainment value from these expensive visits. This, and her dream of an animated cartoon, were what she spent most of her money on. Not clothes or furniture or expensive vacations. The rest of her income got socked away. Even with the expense of therapy, she didn’t burn through her escalating income half as fast
as she made it.

  She shopped for therapy with the same open mind and restless curiosity to try on all trends that she took to the malls, the salons, the music she listened to. In therapy she paid for the deeper attention sex in San Francisco couldn’t provide her. In the Yellow Pages under Therapy and related searches she found enough names and promising leads in the Bay Area to entertain her for months if not years. Instead of seeing therapy as something to commit to with one doctor, her plan was to commit to seeking therapy from all kinds of different doctors and mentalists, to find out which of these practices and practitioners worked for her, and this way slowly, over the years, winnow down her auditions to a select cast of rotating geniuses who together might unravel her problem.

  By way of introduction to her new doctors she would ask, What is your usual approach with the average everyday commonplace upwardlymobile middleclass single art-type woman with psychothenia, homebody tendencies, neurastheniac at the best of times, teeth-grinding sex-addicted insomniac such as myself, with a half-Jewish theatre mother, half-mystery father of rosy complexion and fine sense of humour.