The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  She straightened up and stared at him crossly. Spooked the daylights out of me, holy crap, man. Who are you? He took his hand off her and averted his eyes. She almost recognized him. He was not at all handsome up close, a chinless, mousy face with sleek, narrow features, dark eyelids like batwings pulled over his big bloodshot eyes, nostrils brimming with hair, and a smile straight out of a Munch painting. Right away she picked up the sly, practised friendliness of a cynic. Making a play. She saw a lot of that at No Manors and didn’t much care for the style.

  I … I saw you in the library, the headlines of your … and well, I just wondered why you were reading all those articles about Lupercal and Frank Fleecen … You don’t dress for business. Are you a student?

  What business is it of yours what I’m reading? She tipped her head over one shoulder and blinked at him.

  He blurted out, Never mind, forget it. I … I know who you are. You’re Wendy Ashbubble. I tailed you here, to the library. I’m an investigator for the Securities and Exchange Commission.

  What’s your commission?

  The SEC. The SEC is an independent … we’re a kind of police squad who oversee the stock market and the bond market. My name is Quiltain. I mean Chris Quiltain. I’m investigating the financial activities of Hexen Diamond Mistral’s high-yield bonds department for evidence of insider trading. You know, gaming the pension funds, overreaching lines of credit, bullying the S&Ls, cheating the system for personal gain and whatnot. I hope we might be able to talk, Wendy.

  A spy! Wendy was at a loss for breath. A spy. Watching me. Tailing me? I remember his face. Christ, maybe our phone is tapped. Maybe there’s bugs all over the manor. She massaged her jaw and thought for a second.

  So what did you do? we asked her. Did you talk to him?

  Hell no, I freaked out. I lost my voice. Instinct kicked in, pure instinct. Flashback to my last day of high school. I got on my bike and pedalled away as fast as my legs could push until I was sure the spy wasn’t chasing me any longer. He ran after me, though, begging me to stop, and he was pretty fast for a guy in loafers and corduroy pants. He threw a business card at me but I lost him in the tourist shuffle on Market Street. Chris Quiltain, from the SEC.

  My idea, said Jonjay and blew out a cloud of smoke as thick as a San Francisco fog.

  Tell me, please, what is it? Wendy’s fingers trembled as she reached for the joint in his mouth. What do you think is going on?

  No, my math, my algo-rhythm. The SEC guy is investigating Frank because Frank is getting rich off my formula.

  18

  Dear Dr. Pazder,

  I wish I could tell you all my secrets in these letters … Life is going OK, I guess, except there’s a man who keeps following me around saying he’s with the government …

  A fog of amnesia, a fog of secrets, a cold fog, a creeping fog, a laughing fog enveloped No Manors. A cold fog rolled in that pranked tourists dressed for a warm one. Locals got used to wearing layers on sunny days to protect from surprise fogs. One minute you’re sucking on a perspiring upper lip, soles of your shoes sticking to the sidewalk, and the next you’re clenched up, every muscle from your toes to your nostrils is seized with shivers. You’re blanketed in a fog of Alaskan winter. The fog concealed the city from itself. Fog came in waves, droves, like gangs of kids. Meanwhile steady outpourings of steam rose through vents in the potholes and from the sewer drains, from all the city’s underground saunas. Hiding below the cold bright fog, the secret city socialized in the high-temperature steamrooms that were everywhere, our version of corner stores. They were hot antidotes to the cold fog outside. Under the neon signs. Some steams came as cheap as fifty cents for a public bath, or a dollar for your own room. At the front desk, staff served you stiff white towels that smelled of Clorox and then you went down, down, down, lower and lower into the humid basements beneath the city where dimly lit hallways led to numbered rooms like in a hotel, where no bed other than a cedar bench, just private baths and showers were installed. A secret network of tunnels below the city streets opened into underground pool parties, with club lighting and brand-new music pumped in through speakers embedded in the walls. Dark disco caves for naked fornicators in squalid pools of piping-hot chlorinated water churning with what looked like strands of eggwhite. Down the hall and a flight of stairs you came to the second pool, in complete darkness. Here it was easy to get a blowjob or give. With a nod of acceptance, someone penetrated you. Mostly men. Men of all shapes and sizes. Steamrooms of all shade of sanitary. Usually we could afford squalid conditions. Graffiti on the walls of our private room depicted scenes from the Marquis de Sade or the latter pages of the Kama Sutra. Grime as thick as chocolate cake gathered in every corner and coated the grout on the tiles beneath our bare feet. Filth catering to luridness and happy depravity—the squeamish need not apply. Deep down where it counted the most, San Francisco was perverse, everyone from the policeman who arrested drunk drivers every Friday night to the philosopher Michel Foucault and the cartoonists at No Manors, we all went to the steamrooms. Here was the real San Francisco, or at least the side of the city you never saw anywhere else, where a side of its true self expressed uninhibited sensuality. The steamrooms were a social network in the dark.

  Jonjay was dismissive. You know what Frank’s going to tell you to do if you ask him. Don’t talk to anybody from the SEC. He’s going to tell you to keep quiet about everything. Every detail is kept secret. That’s modern corporate business. Hide and seek. When the enemy strikes, every shield must go up or the whole army may fall.

  She told Gabby what happened with the spy at the library. Her editor seemed unfazed. You did the right thing ditching the creep, good for you, she said. The next thing I would do is call the police. Who knows if he’s on the level. He could be some pervert or a brazen private investigator with a fake business card for every occasion. You never know for sure who you’re talking to at a public library. Somebody says they’re tailing you, says they’re SEC. That’s a creep, is who that is. You did the right thing. What if he was a fan gone psycho, right? See, this is why I never set foot in the public library. Scares me to hear this. I’ll call Frank. He’ll tell you the same thing I just did. Good for you. And never talk to the SEC without a lawyer present, that’s what he’s going to say.

  And that’s what he did say. Gabby called back to say she spoke to Frank and that Frank was also glad she pedalled away and said nothing. He agreed, never talk to the SEC. Always have a lawyer present if you do. These are not cops, he told Gabby. At least Gabby thought she should be reassured the spy was on the level. Frank knew of a Quiltain in the SEC. So he was an investigator, not a creep, pervert, letch.

  Wendy wondered how that should reassure her.

  Then Frank called her. Gabby told me everything, Wendy. I can’t believe this happened. What a bastard. Can we meet and talk?

  No, no need to, she said, just tell me what the fuck this is about. Spies tailing me to the library. Giving me heart palpitations. Are you in some serious trouble, mister? Because if you are, cut me loose. I don’t want any part of it.

  Consider spies the price of fame. I live with them on a daily basis. A scavenger like Quiltain is after you because your name rings bells in his ears, and as one of the many parasitical humans crawling on this earth who subsist on trying to rip apart the success of others, you have to endure his existence, said Frank. Quiltain thinks he can smooth-talk you into spitting up information about how I conduct my business. But our work is strictly confidential and he knows it is, and you are not required by law to answer any of his questions, nor should you. Believe me, when I hear an agent of the SEC has been watching you, I want to punch through a wall. I want to rip his stomach out and feed his half-digested shit back to him. Watching the movements of one of my clients—that is going too far. The SEC will hear about this, I assure you. I will sic my lawyer on this man for violating your privacy. Those obnoxious rats can bite the asses of my salesmen and my traders all they want, we’re used to it.
SEC agents come sniffing around our building all the time chewing out young salesmen and my assistants, demanding answers. Part of being in my line of work is negotiating with threats like the SEC—like keeping lice out of your children’s hair. But a client is out of bounds. You don’t know the rules of the game.

  Oh, I do. No, I know the rules. I know the rules better than you do, said Wendy. Don’t worry, I won’t snitch to the SEC what I know about you and your business.

  That’s good, and don’t remind me what you do know over the phone in case it’s bugged, Frank said.

  Gah. That’s the same freaky thought I had. Oh my god. How do I find out if my phone is bugged or not?

  It’s somewhere inside the phone, either the handset or the base. Listen, I want to see you—

  Wendy hammered the handset against the base screwed into the wall enough times for the phone to shatter into many flying pieces and the wall was left significantly dented. That’s how bad a case of the paranoid crawlies she had. The spy Quiltain made her skin itch and the rims of her ears burn, he made her question her relationship to America. She cried, Get me out of this crazy country! as she rooted around on the kitchen floor through the gutted parts of the phone, making no sense of the broken circuitry and bells, capacitors and transmitters, which seemed old and new at the same time. If there had been a bug it was of no use now. We needed a new phone.

  Be not forgetful to welcome strangers, for in this way some have entertained angels unawares.

  Names names names. No Manors was a mess of names. You dropped one and picked up another. No Manors was a highly productive place to live, but it was brimming with distractions, and yet the distractions fed back into the productivity. Toys, games, books, music. But most of all people. We saw a lot of our neighbour Spain Rodriguez. At one point he even lived upstairs in a room one floor above Biz, with a shared bathroom at the end of the hall, and then he moved to his own house nearby in Bernal when some gigs started to pay off. Art Spiegelman agonized over sketches of mice for Maus at the manor. Robert Crumb did a portrait of Wendy in the Basil Wolverton style that was framed and for years hung over the toilet, and Aline Kominsky published a small but thick reprint of Wendy’s high school Tijuana bibles under a pseudonym, Annie Hour, that happened to be a flip on her real name. Trina Robbins and Patricia Moodian came over with stacks of underground comix to pore over, Joyce Farmer doodled lots, and Gary Panter hitched up from L.A., they dropped in for an hour, a week, a month to socialize and doodle at the longtable, talking everything from political scandals to candy aisles. With so many cartoonists in the Bay Area and California, we were hardly ever alone, there were never fewer than ten people kicking around, and someone was always sidetracking us from our ostensible job as animators of a Strays Christmas special.

  Not everyone visited. Charles Schulz lived just a couple hours north of San Francisco but Sparky, as Wendy called him, never visited again after the wake. Down-to-earth Dik Browne came around often enough. Scandals were his specialty. The porn he drew at the longtable could knock the habit off a nun, as he liked to say. At least once a year, Dik came for what he called a lost weekend. Once he lit a mattress on fire and screaming, threw it out an open window onto the street. By the time cops, fire truck, and ambulances appeared he was long gone. A young Bill Watterson made an impression on Wendy the day he showed up at the table and started to draw. He didn’t join the debate over the stuffed animal versus the plastic doll and which one sold more however. An hour later when he hadn’t so much as made a sound aside from the sharpening of his pencil, she had to introduce herself, Wendy. She found herself mesmerized by his drawings. She saw all the hallmarks of genius: he was fast, every line he put down was loose but controlled—the line weight in the curve of a nose or fingers was just perfect—, and he knew his anatomy well enough to yank his characters around on the page. Even a doodle of a hotdog vendor in hell deserved to be framed. But the next morning as dawn showered light on the hungover guests, Watterson was gone. Wendy made an unrequited impression on Wayne White, who would not crumble to her many pickup lines. She liked his comebacks so much she later used them for gags in Strays. Name after name would drop by to draw. We tried to stay apace with the artists in our midst. Oh, our unpublishable clunkers, duds, dog shits. Oh god we were bad. We had a long way to go before our hands could yield what our good taste and critical eye demanded. But with someone like Art Spiegelman at the longtable, he would put down his cigarette and pick up one of our drawings that we thought deserved matches and the toilet, and say, Hold on a second, lemme show you a trick …, add a few more strokes here and there with his marker and hand it back to us transformed. And that was how we learned to hate ourselves and still be patient enough and forgiving enough to complete a picture.

  Wendy made an unrequited impression on Tumbleweeds’ T.K. Ryan, who dodged her advances with country & western lines she stole and used as gags in Strays, like I can’t, darlin’, I just can’t. My girl back home is a bloodhound.

  One day in the foggy summer months of eighty-three, H.R. Giger showed up with Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson at around four in the morning reeking of American whisky and asking to sit and draw with Hick and Biz. Where is Hick? Is this the place? They didn’t even know for sure.

  Sure, come on, here’s the table, said Twyla Noon.

  What’s that screaming? Hunter S. Thompson asked as he covered his ears.

  The three men stayed for two days drawing awful sick porn to compete with Dik Browne’s, smoking an entire pound from Hick’s laundry hamper, and drinking every bottle and can in the house. Giger sort of seduced Wendy or the other way around and that was part of the fun of No Manors for her, not knowing how she got into bed. The three men took off again in their dented white Cadillac immediately after Thompson suffered a possible concussion when he tripped into one of Hick’s bookshelves and a vintage plaster statue of Popeye fell on his head. Popeye remained undamaged but the last we saw of him, Hunter S. Thompson was bleeding from his hairline and reciting in a zombie monotone chapter three of The Sun Also Rises.

  Wendy carried on full monologues as she drew panels or pencilled new ideas, talked and talked even when it came time to ink the important lines, fill in the dialogue bubbles, and she could hold on to a train of thought longer than our attention spans, it didn’t matter where she was in the process, she could make art with half of her brain while the other half socialized. Privacy and solitude were the hardest part of cartooning, and likely a place to sit and work—and talk to a constant rotation of company—saved her.

  In the year Doonesbury was in repeats while Garry Trudeau took a sabbatical, Wendy invented a whole set of new places on her imaginary map of Bernal Heights, where her cartoon animals lived, and new gags to return to year after year. Like Murphy’s imaginary alter ego, Tom Clues, a rugged detective in the style of Magnum, P.I. with more guns and Buck as a sidekick who gets no love. This year she named the Laid-Back Bar, a flat tire in the empty lot where Molly, the single-mother raccoon, serves drinks to the strays. The crossroads where Francis the rabbit meets Sam the snake. During the month of Reagan’s campaign for re-election in eighty-four, many strips played on the theme of the campaign trail, and Strays was no exception. It was back in June or July that Wendy began to sketch and script the sequence to run in October and November. Sam the snake ran against Francis for mayor of the rabbit warren on a promise to protect from predators and control the population. She did jokes on the breathless news coverage of the campaign, using Nicki the parrot to recite back the speeches verbatim from inside a broken television set. Wendy stretched the election over fifteen strips, her longest sequential, and after much light satire was had, gave the results fairly to Francis.

  I can’t not give the election to the incumbent, Wendy said as she finished up the plotline. No matter how persuasive or sneaky Sam gets.

  There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits on the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder, said Ro
nald Reagan in front of an audience at the University of South Carolina that summer. This past year we’d seen the president on television as much as Bugs Bunny and Jim Rockford—Wendy’s two other preferences for background—as the news showed him stumping the country for re-election. We hear so much about the greed of business. Well frankly, I’d like to hear a little more about the courage, generosity, and creativity of business, he told the National Federation of Independent Business as television cameras rolled. And to the same audience, Reagan said, Communism works only in heaven, where they don’t need it, and in hell, where they’ve already got it.

  She slapped her forehead when she heard that—for every time she groaned at her own bad gags, Reagan’s jokes had the reassuring effect of confirming she must have a sense of humour. Funny ran in her blood.

  There is a bear in the woods … a Reagan radio commercial intoned every fifteen minutes on Shepherd Media’s local FM talk channel—it played four times an hour at least. For some people, the bear is easy to see.

  Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it’s vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who’s right, isn’t it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear.

  Everyone at Shepherd Media sure is a big fan of Reagan, Jonjay observed indifferently. He was too stoned, almost drooling. On the brink of a deep meditation even though he was at the table drawing hyenas, Megaloceros, and aurochs with charcoal. He and Mark Bread had been smoking all day as they perused Hick’s books on prehistoric cave paintings, thirty thousand years old, beautiful picture-narratives on the walls—a paleolithic graphic novel. Mark wondered, They just pulled this off? Where’s the prep sketches? and the two of them fell heads over heels into a wormhole.