The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  Dr. Blair’s office walls were decorated with framed photos of mountainviews. She gazed at these snowcapped rockies and then at the sharp peak of the doctor’s head and its white tufts of hair blowing under the air-conditioning vent in the ceiling. Dr. Blair referred with gravitas to her psychic avalanche, and to periods in life, usually at the age of thirteen, twenty-one, thirty, and then again at forty-two, and so on, when the searing cataclysm of some tragedy, a trauma buried a generation or two ago, combined with the steeper and steeper responsibilities of one’s life to melt and thaw giant continents of icefrozen emotion and send them hurtling towards our bowels—fear, anger, resentment, shame, regret, loneliness all come shitting down the mountain of self. That cost Wendy seventy-five dollars.

  Another eminent specialist of nervous diseases, with an office in a large private rehabilitation clinic in West Menlo near the Stanford campus, offered Wendy a seat and asked her some questions with the bright-eyed, ditzy demeanour of a third-generation hair salonist about to shampoo her hair. When the doctor rose from his chair behind his oak desk to touch his reflection in a mirror, it was revealed he was no taller standing than sitting. You were once a fetus, he said, and a womb was your first home. His cute, tanned face was the result of deep cosmetic effort to resemble saddle leather. His powdery-Valium blue eyes matched nothing about his dyed brown hair or to-the-neck sideburns.

  Sometimes a person must return to their first home to find the answers. Yes, yes, he said and pressed his hands to Wendy’s forehead, then her neck, then her chest, then her stomach (her chest!). Like a faith healer, godless, but totally convinced of his powers. Then he returned to his black leather upholstered swivel chair. All very common, my dear. The usual symptoms. See if you can picture this, Wendy, the central nervous system is like cable television with a hundred thousand channels, but sometimes the body won’t pay the bill and some choices get shut off, and the longer you don’t pay, the fewer channels you get, until one channel’s left to watch. Now your teeth can’t stop from chattering. And previous to this you say your best friend and roommate died. No doubt related. But let’s try to find out what your friend’s death triggered. I want to put you inside some blankets and I want you to imagine you are back in the womb and that you are struggling to be born, and while you are struggling I want you to think of who is being born. I want you to lie down on the floor, Wendy, on top of that blanket, I’m going to roll you up in the blanket, Wendy, then I’m going to put another blanket on top of you, Wendy, and I want you to roll up into that blanket, Wendy.

  And because he was an eminent specialist and this was an hour-long session she followed the doctor’s orders and rolled up inside the blankets. Then he rolled another blanket on top of that.

  Wendy said the claustrophobia inside the doctor’s wrapped-up rebirthing blankets was so intense, wrapped as tightly as a burrito inside a burrito, the absolute worst horror of her life, she started to suffocate. It was pitch-black. There was no air. She kept sucking woolly fabric that tasted of nicotine into her mouth. She couldn’t move. When she screamed, nothing happened. She could not tell up from down. She lost feeling in her toes. Her nose ran with a torrent of mucus. She screamed and she could not breathe. It was the worst kind of dark. She couldn’t move her arms or legs at all. She couldn’t move anything. Her hands were pressed tightly to the sides of her chest. She was about to faint, die in these blankets. And the doctor was sitting on her. Muffled, she could just make out the doctor’s voice yelling, Tell me how you feel! Tell me your feelings, Wendy!

  I’m going to die, she cried. I’m dying. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Let me out. Let me out!

  That’s good, she heard the doctor’s muffled voice say, that’s excellent. You’re almost there, Wendy, push push push. You’re being born, Wendy, fight to be born, fight, Wendy, fight your way free of the past.

  She started to scrabble on the ground, not thinking anything other than how much she wanted to murder the doctor who was pressing his knees against the top of the blankets to pin her in place. She screamed and howled and the sweat poured off her and she shit herself, a whole damn avalanche of shit, and then she passed out for real.

  When she awoke she was in the emergency ward hooked up to an oxygen mask and a brain monitor. Apparently she’d gone into a coma for more than fifteen minutes and remained unconscious for another hour. The nurse told her she should sue.

  She never saw the doctor again but his bill arrived. The fee in this case was four hundred dollars.

  There were other doctors.

  Hopi therapy in a teepee. Dr. Paulson dressed as an Indian witchdoctor or shaman. All people share one thing in common regardless of culture or race regardless of religious dogma, the desire to reach as close to a permanent state of euphoria as possible.

  Finally she heard about a fellow all the way in Berkeley who sounded almost exactly like the last thing you’d want to try. His whole theory was to do nothing other than listen to you talk. He would spend an entire session without saying a word except hello and goodbye. On her second meeting with him he asked a question: What’s the worst that could happen? Then in the weeks to come the occasional question was peppered with an observation. This specialist was employed through the Nervous Disorders Department of the university and had an office on campus. He was tall and wore his hair and beard the very same length, about half an inch. Wendy said she liked that he maintained an even smile, a smile with perfect equilibrium that only ever got wider when you told him something shocking and true about yourself and only ever disappeared completely when he knew you were avoiding something on purpose. His questions sounded rhetorical, except for they weren’t. The first question he asked Wendy was not to tell him about her mother and father. Instead he asked her, What’s so bad about that?

  She told the quiet doctor she never knew her father and that her mother died a few years ago and honestly, she didn’t remember much about her, except that her mother had an old credo of her own: Don’t say no to a good opportunity.

  If somebody gives you an opportunity, take it, her mom said. Wendy remembered being about six or seven years old and the two of them were snug together on the squishy chesterfield watching early-early-morning cartoons on black-and-white TV (both mother and daughter had difficulties with bedtime). If there isn’t any work then I volunteer. That was her mom’s explanation for why she was so busy working as a stage manager and also broke. But she didn’t tell the quiet therapist about Reagan. That fact, she thought, seemed too absurd in the context of this therapist’s domesticated quiet, and might make her look certifiable.

  14

  It’s not that it didn’t occur to Wendy that most cartoons were pitched as scripts to television networks. Network producers ordered projects, they didn’t buy one premade. Normally the producer would buy a script, then give it to a cohort of professional animators toiling under the rubric of a large brandname studio, who would revise the script under the guidance of the network producer to complete the project in a palatable fashion, below budget, and on deadline. And so we kept asking her why she wanted us to make this cartoon, when nobody made a cartoon like this, not to mention we didn’t know the first thing about animation.

  Not true, she said. This is the way the Peanuts Christmas special was made, Wendy told us. Charles Schulz went to the bank for a loan, made his cartoon independent of network support, then sold the final product. That’s what I want to do. I want my creative control.

  Twyla said, That’s all fine and dandy but did Schulz’s animators at least know what they were doing? I never animated anything in my life. I still don’t know if I can draw.

  Wendy said she would learn. We would all learn. She reminded us, all animation is a picture of one drawing after another.

  That pressure is kind of heavy to put on us, though, don’t you think? Twyla said. She was flattered, but outside Wendy, her drawings had been rejected. There was an event held in a local comic store to launch an issue of Black Goliath where she showed he
r portfolio to Vince Colletta, an artist at Marvel, who rejected her at a glance—proportions were fine, adequate muscles, but he wanted to see how she put panels together before he offered her some fill-in work, and gave her his card. She called and left a message and had not heard back. After a few months of this kind of rejection, living on next to nothing, she picked up a hundred bucks drawing fishing rods, various brands of camping gear and lacrosse sticks, football shoulder pads and hockey sticks, and all kinds of balls for a sporting goods store brochure. As soon as she got paid, she wanted to give Wendy eighty dollars to pay her back some of what she thought she owed her for the room and food and the rest.

  I’m just a freeloader, Twyla said with tears welling up in her eyes. I’ve been here nine months and everyone I show my portfolio to rejects me.

  You know what Hick said when I showed up on his doorstep with all my belongings in a Samsonite hardshell? said Wendy. Nothing, he didn’t say a word, because he didn’t even notice me for three days. That’s how many others were here when I arrived. Talk about a commune. Hick never asked for a dime. All he wanted was for us to keep him company at the longtable. This cartoon is something I’ve always dreamed of. I don’t care if this ever gets bought by a network. Okay, I do care. For sure I want to sell it to a network, of course I do. I want us to make a really amazing cartoon that will get picked up and become a classic. I don’t want to sell an idea to strangers and have them make it without my input. This is my chance to do a big project all on my own.

  So in our off-hours we gravitated to Rachael’s room to tinker with flip-it drawings, or painting onto transparent cells. We began to learn the difference between keyframes and the in-betweens. If we felt especially confident maybe we’d shoot a few seconds of Buck walking through the stop-motion rig. A sixteen-frame walk was the most basic principle of animation, and if we couldn’t get that right, we couldn’t move forward with the rest. And we couldn’t get that right. Our early attempts resembled nothing like realistic locomotion, even for a bipedal dog it was more of a juddering levitation across the patch of desiccated scenery. But over time and with practice our walk started to look natural. Buck’s feet landed on solid ground, he had a consistent bounce that we later developed into more of a swagger, then used the bounce as our starting point for when we moved on to making the rabbit Francis walk. We started drawing eight frames of motion a second and that was a mistake so we moved up to sixteen frames. Sixteen separate drawings for every second meant more than twenty-one thousand drawings were needed for the entire cartoon. Hundreds and hundreds of prep sketches and full-colour concept art and failed test runs and revisions to storyline went into every picture that made the final cut. The amount of work was intimidating. Not only were we drawing, we also washed the 35 mm film in our own developing baths in the darkroom Hick had set up in a cavity, and spooled the results through a film projector to critique the results of our efforts with Wendy present as our producer, director, artist, landlord, roommate.

  Televisions distracted us. Plugged into all kinds of extension cords and power bars were television sets spanning decades of technological progress in cathode ray tube resolution, size, display. Jonjay found a lot of them on his scavenger hunts through the city’s alleys. Not one television encased in its own wood-veneer credenza with shelves, but three. Wendy had a problem—whenever she saw an abandoned TV on the sidewalk she had to bring it home with her like a stray. We arrived at No Manors after Hick—when Wendy, Biz Aziz, and a rotating league of underage and worndown cartoonists held down the fort. Televisions, lots of televisions all going simultaneously on different channels or in choirs—this furnace of sitcoms and dramas, game shows and sports. Mental agents of the new microphone. Personalities ruled. Networks shunted faces across the screen. The TV had no other story except the microphone. The story was you talk. Welcome to Sally Jessy Raphael—today: Satanism in America. Our guests are from San Francisco. Tell the world our millions of viewers what you think! Repressed memories of genitals being touched? Ask Anton LaVey. Apparently there were Satanists in our preschools perverting our children out of their senses. Children and teenagers were coming to police with extraordinary memories. Unless you asked the Satanists in San Francisco who said it was against their beliefs to force anyone to do anything without permission. Satanists were for self-discovery and against child exploitation. But that’s not what the courts were seeing. Everybody at the manor read Michelle Remembers—Hick’s hexed hospital copy was on the longtable in front of us opened to page six—What had been revealed in the Saturday session … not distressing enough to explain why these memories had been so thoroughly blocked—they had been totally buried. The doctor co-author, who discovered that memories hide inside us, helped put in jail the McCuans and the Kniffens, parents in Kern County accused of satanically abusing toddlers, thanks to his unique therapeutic techniques on the child victims. The California raisin talking about faith and fortitude and the zero option. Reaganomics. The Iron Curtain. Nuclear Armageddon. AIDS. AIDS and Reaganomics, Reaganomics and AIDS. AIDS life, AIDS social life, AIDS parties, AIDS funerals, AIDS coffee, AIDS nights, AIDS days. Reaganomics news about the deregulation of the financial market and the privatization of the prison-industrial complex. In the spring, the president went before the National Rifle Association and said, Well, it is a nasty truth, but those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun-control laws. I happen to know this from personal experience … Hardcore criminals use guns. And locking them up, the hardcore criminals up, and throwing away the key is the best gun-control law we could ever have. It was hard to argue with the only president to ever live through an assassination attempt.

  Hundreds of thousands of guns on the streets of San Francisco. Guns were poems to crazy people. Whatever the murder rate was, it was always never higher. Heat. Rounds going off in the night without echo, hemming-hawing police sirens and whirring ambulances on the streets of San Francisco, helicopters overhead. On Bernal Hill we could literally point to the familiar unmarked grey CIA Gulfstreams flying overhead— Looky, said Jonjay, it’s the CIA’s daily drop—the only airplanes landing and taking off regularly from the docks on the SF Bay, with what Jonjay suspected were shipments of untraceable cash and guns, and coming back delivering bricks of white cocaine straight from the rebel Contras who stole it out of Nicaragua. Unloaded at Hunter’s Point and Protrero Hill docks by stevedores who knew the score. Tons of untrammelled Central American coke got shipped all points north, south, and east, as well as mixed right here in SF apartments. Uncut Nicaraguan cocaine was being percolated into a soul-destroyingly potent crack rock sold to basehead junkies in Protrero and Hunter’s Point, the Tenderloin and Mission District.

  Most of the time Wendy didn’t pay attention to the news of Contras, the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr., or the crack murders and Lebanese terrorists, she didn’t care to notice who was killing more people in El Salvador, the right or the left, as much as she wanted to stay abreast of daily news and current events, she preferred for inspiration to skip straight to the funny pages in the paper, or to watch Dallas, Charlie Brown specials, and other primetime programs. Now that they were available on VHS, she told the rental stores she wanted to own her favourite movies by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, cassettes that cost her eighty or ninety dollars a pop. She had thousands of dollars’ worth of old movies, a whole bookshelf in the manor of movies in big plastic VHS boxes she watched to get ideas for jokes.

  After the break, the Hart Files. And today’s trivia, can you name these three celebrities, born today? The answers, when Entertainment Tonight returns.

  That is easy, said Smooth Patrick, who was drawing sketches for sequences in the animation.

  Jonjay tested the manor with trivia games. Best original comic strip by a former assistant.

  The Mischiefs by Vaughn Staedtler, said Biz Aziz, he was former assistant of Al Andriola on Kerry Drake.

  First comic strips by the creators of classic comic strips.

&nb
sp; Mark: Charlie Chaplin by Elzie Segar of Thimble Theatre, Popeye’s creator.

  Comic strip artists who also work in superhero comics.

  Patrick: Frank Frazetta, ghosting for Al Capp on Li’l Abner.

  Comic strip writers who are also novelists.

  Rachael: Dashiell Hammett, Agent X-9.

  Comedians who also write gags for comic strips.

  Patrick: Woody Allen.

  Comedians who have comic strips.

  Mark: Woody Allen.

  What’s that clicking sound?

  My teeth, my damn teeth grind unbeknownst to their owner, said Wendy and stretched her mouth open wide.

  If you don’t see a dentist, we said, they might all fall out.

  My hell is the dentist’s office, said Wendy.

  You want your teeth to fall out? Jonjay said. Falsies? Your jaw caves in and you lose your chin when you wear dentures.

  We got used to Hick’s body odour. Those of us who had never met him knew him. We smoked him. The weed simply reeked of harsh sweat. Biz stamped her joint out in the ashtray on the coffee table, picked up one of the joints we rolled freshly for her and lit it.

  You need to book a three-hour appointment at Gilligan’s dentist office, said Patrick.

  It feels like there’s little Gilligans trying to burrow their way out of my temples, Wendy told us.

  Gilligan’s cult, said Jonjay.

  Gilligan’s Vatican, said Biz.

  Wendy took a big pull on the joint Biz passed her and then she passed it to one of us and we pulled, saw stars, and laughed about it. One sure way to unlock the persistent grinding at the gate of her jaw was men, she confessed.

  She wrote a letter to Dr. Pazder, eminent psychologist in the burgeoning study of repressed-memory syndrome, that she had us proofread.

  Dear Dr. Pazder, M.D.,

  Hello, my name is Wendy Ashbubble, and I am a young woman in my twenties also born in Victoria, the same city as you and Michelle Smith, your most famous patient and now your lovemate. Presently I reside in San Francisco where I am a professional illustrator and cartoonist with a degree of financial success that affords me a lifetime of security and some luxury. And like Miss Smith, I too have suffered from strange vivid and constantly recurring dreams ever since my childhood. That’s why I hope to make an appointment with you at your earliest convenience. It was only after reading your memoir of what Miss Smith discovered about her past under hypnosis that I have come to believe these strange things about my life might possibly true.