The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  Vaughn awoke, and after he expectorated heaping dollops of yellow and green mucus from his chest, we all went in to visit him. He had a private room through his health care with a splendid view of the bay docks, a potted plant with long, striped leaves, along with the standard television plus cable, and an adjustable bed. It wasn’t exactly plush, but last night he’d landed in a shared room with five teenagers who required almost twenty-four-hour care, surrounded by specialists and lovers, friends, family, and Vaughn was terribly afraid to hear any last words.

  That’s what I get for too much dancing, too much clowning around, Vaughn said from his bed, where an IV dripped saline into a vein in the underside of his wrist. He saw us staring at the feed. I told them not my left wrist, that’s my painting wrist. Nurse says to me, how much painting you plan to do in here? and then she sticks me with it!

  The colour was out of his cheeks. His eyes were dull. He still had to laugh.

  People get sick. It’s okay, said Wendy. You’re a fighter. I’ll bet you could still draw even with that thing in. Maybe this is a renovation. A restoration, like the Statue of Liberty or The Farm. Tomorrow you’re a whole new man.

  I feel like shit on a stick, Vaughn said and coughed up too much phlegm to swallow again, so he pulled a few Kleenexes and spat into them. I’m sorry, this stuff keeps collecting in me. Spitting’s given me a splitting headache.

  You want a chocolate bar or something? Biz asked. They got vending machines down the hall. Or coffee? Let me go.

  Vaughn said the thought of eating or drinking anything made him feel sick.

  Listen, Biz said, let me go get us all some snacks, anyway, feels too crowded in here. Then she ran from the room without waiting for a response. We saw her punch the wall hard enough to make a hole, and then she ran to the vending machines before anyone saw who’d made it.

  She’s the reason this old man’s still alive inside, Vaughn said, oblivious to what Biz had just done. Best thing to happen to me in a long time.

  Biz is amazing, said Wendy. She’s never believed in me. I’m a fraud in her books.

  Take it as a compliment, said Vaughn and reached for her hand. So long as you try, if you try, then fraudulence is at least a sign of ambition. Ambition is two-thirds of … something.

  Maybe success, said Wendy.

  I was never me, said Vaughn.

  Sure, I know what you mean, Wendy said. Don’t worry. None of us ever are, are we? Biz came back in and left him a Snickers bar and kissed him one more time. I’ll see you tomorrow, she said and smoothed his hair.

  Vaughn didn’t hear. He said, I never did my own work. I hired assistants. I’m lazy but I love life. I love life too much to work. I’m going to die a complete fraud.

  What about your clowns? said Wendy.

  Bullshit.

  You get creator status, said Biz. You invented the first and only truly rock ’n’ roll comic. The Mischiefs will be around after we’re all gone.

  I wish you could promise me that.

  Those few patients who spent their last days in 5D where Hick Elmdales had died three years ago would have no idea that now their room seemed historical, intimate in its size, now that AIDS patients occupied the entire floor of the hospital, with dedicated doctors and nurses tending to as many as a hundred beds at a time, and as much equipment and resources as budgets allowed. Men were treated for drastic peritonitis, severe edema. Another man, worse off than most from lumbago, moon face, and a broken heart. Here was a mere child of a man suffering from severe hyperammonemia, megaloblast, common cancers and rare cancers and other forms of diseases only housecats ever got before. These dreadful cases represented today’s youth, a satire, cruelly deteriorated under the plague of AIDS. Here were boys with handsome faces ravaged by invisible rats, here were dropouts of undergraduate degrees bedridden and frail as old poets, sicker than fallout victims, gasping for air, dying of it. The signs ranged from bleeding oozing rashes to hamburger eyeballs weeping melted cheese, skin pustules the size of red apples, the dry pukes, wet pukes, howling hemorrhoids, bleeding ulcers, shivers and shakes, runny nose, itchy eyes, anaphylactic shock. He was brittle and dry and ready to go. He was smoke. He was a pile of ice. He was shattered pottery. He was a tiny bird with broken wings.

  Could a mosquito’s proboscis inject you with the AIDS virus? Could a bedbug or a louse? Was AIDS on toilet seats and doorknobs? Was gay sex the cause of AIDS? Could a woman get AIDS from sex with a man with AIDS? Could your waiter give you AIDS, touching your plate? Was there AIDS in saliva? Why was there so much AIDS in New York, San Francisco, and Haiti?

  The White House gave press conferences about the threat of nuclear annihilation. We were winning. Brezhnev was all of a sudden dead. Good for us. He was a bear if there ever was a bear. The nightly news reported on the many thousands of atomic warheads in the American arsenal, pointed at strategic locations throughout Eastern Europe and Asia. The movies showed us what a nuclear strike would look like. Red Dawn made it look bad. The Day After brought home it was hideous. And the latest, Threads, was the most hideous movie ever made—because that could happen. If someone dropped a bomb, how would our faces look afterwards? What would happen to the human body if exposed to massive doses of radiation and nuclear fallout? Special-effects artists showed us. Blisters and sores would form on the skin. Joints would break down. Organs would fail. Body parts would fall off. Blindness. Third-degree burns. Vomiting. Diarrhea. Cancer.

  That night in his sleep Vaughn’s lungs filled as if a faucet had opened in his system, and after retching for an hour he drowned this way. With drowning, there’s no pain, said the doctor, whose face had android written all over it. Even as he continued to speak to us about the deceased, the doctor had clearly moved on.

  The funeral was held in Santa Maria, the cemetery where Staedtler’s parents were buried. Amid headstones and oak trees we stood at Vaughn’s plot with the many hundreds of friends and admirers, the family, mostly dressed in black. The women wore black frocks. The men in black leather jackets. When it was our turn to shovel earth over his casket, we thought selfishly of ourselves and what our chances were of surviving the eighties. Vaughn’s was not the only service being held in the cemetery that afternoon.

  We followed the procession back to a funeral home in North Beach. The old folks Vaughn’s age wore leather here, some men had ponytails, they chainsmoked, drank, and talked about drugs. The women were slanteyed as soldiers. Thing was, when Vaughn Staedtler broke into the funnies in his youth with The Mischiefs, many papers were too afraid to subscribe because of the rebel image he portrayed on and off the page. Vaughn was the outlaw son of the Staedtler family of Southern California. Two years into drawing The Mischiefs, Vaughn’s cousin ran away from home to be with him, then the SFPD arrested him in his studio and he did three months for kidnapping a fourteen-year-old and keeping her in a hotel in the North Beach. Comics fans like to point out his strip came a full two years before Elvis, and was a big success in the South, including in Memphis, where papers started carrying it in their classifieds section next to the automobiles for sale. Vaughn Staedtler was invited to appear on a parade float in Memphis with locals dressed up as the greaser characters from his strip. The older folks of Vaughn’s generation told stories about how they preferred bourbon and pure horse to grass and LSD. Some of his litigious former assistants were present, looking beleaguered, insecure about paying respects to the man on the other side of a class-action lawsuit. Bill Blackbeard said a few words about Vaughn’s significance to the world of comics, placing Staedtler alongside Walt Kelly and Al Capp as one of the great voices of irony, dissent, and bohemianism in the funny pages. Chester Gould stood with the help of an assistant and spoke of his friendship with Vaughn and the good work they did together on the board of directors of the National Cartoonists Society, despite, he said, Vaughn’s famous cantankerousness. Art Spiegelman told us he arrived this morning from New York to pay his respects. We didn’t know he’d moved.

  Explains
why you haven’t seen me around the manor much, he said and laughed. Pardon me, I’m going outside for a smoke.

  How did you know Vaughn? we asked a stranger seated at our table with a coffee and a plate of cheese in front of him. He was about our age, in his twenties, thick glasses, big hairdo, that’s why we asked.

  You know those clowns Vaughn’s been painting? Yeah? Well, those are mine. I painted them. He paints his signature, that’s all. He hired me to be his assistant. I didn’t realize that meant he wanted me to paint everything. Every day he tell me to paint a clown, one with a hatbrim full of water and a cigar on fire in his mouth, or, paint a clown with a sad expression under smiling makeup, or just, paint a clown. Fucking clowns. Funny thing is, he owes me at least five thousand dollars. He hasn’t paid me in almost a year. I’ve been borrowing from my sister’s husband to get by. He promised me they would be bought by the Guggenheim.

  You painted his fuckin’ clowns? Biz said. Did you all hear that? Wait till I tell Wendy.

  How did you know Vaughn?

  I’m his widow, Biz answered.

  I didn’t know he was remarried, said the assistant.

  Well goddamn, he sure kept secrets, didn’t he?

  And how did you know Vaughn? we asked another stranger who sat down at our table carrying a plate of Vaughn’s sister’s famous pot brownies (that he didn’t seem to know were pot brownies, judging from how fast he ate them) while Wendy was in the ladies’ room.

  I knew him through King syndicate, the man said. He plucked brownie crumbs off his corduroy blazer and ate them. I worked as a travelling salesman. For nine years I sold The Mischiefs to newspaper editors all across California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona. Tough gig but it paid.

  Wendy came back from the ladies’ room with a tissue in her hand, wiped her nose and eyes and cheeks and sniffed back a final sob. Her mind’s eye was still on the departed, now many, and she hardly noticed her company.

  A former assistant got up to speak. She had long, white hair pulled back with a loose black ribbon. She wore a grey sweater over a black dress, and her name was Phyllis Glazier. From the silence that came over the room it was obvious Glazier was part of the lawsuit. However, as soon as she started to speak, she struck a kind of peace in the room with her softspoken, musical voice and graceful gestures of a choreographer. When Phyllis was a twenty-year-old with an art diploma from a correspondence school, Vaughn gave her her first job, inking The Mischiefs. And for eight years she painted the layouts of at least twenty different pencillers ghosting for Vaughn, including many infamous dipsomaniacs like Wally Wood and Frank Frazetta. That was her art school. She hadn’t worked for Vaughn since the early sixties. She was going broke. He paid late if at all. She told us quitting was the best decision she ever made, but she never stopped missing Vaughn and his studio dungeon. She had loved working on The Mischiefs. Often Vaughn would arrive late in the afternoon to see what I’d accomplished, Glazier said, and he would point out places where I had made mistakes or could improve my line. I would set out to make the fixes and Vaughn would say, No, no, no need to fix this one, fix the next one. That was a time-saving lesson. He never touched a pen unless it was to impress a girl, but he never stopping thinking like an artist.

  We respected Vaughn’s privacy, his sister Esme said when it came time for a member of the family to speak at the lectern. When he came back from Korea I guess he changed. He turned into this wild artist. We all loved him—he was our big brother, the war hero with a comic strip about rebels, delinquents, reform school dropouts. He was a rock star before rock music, touring the country. I thought he was cooler than Elvis. I suppose we never got to see enough of the real Vaughn. All of the siblings lead such different lives. We never get to see any of each other except at these occasions, weddings and funerals. I guess the last time I saw Vaughn was … years ago now, but I brought him some of those brownies, fresh from our farm. He ate too many and passed out on the roof of his house.

  The guests all laughed knowingly. Then another person got up to speak.

  They are delicious brownies, said the travelling salesman, also laughing.

  Holy fuck, you scared me again. What are you doing here? Wendy gaped at this person seated next to her about to scarf down another brownie.

  I’m sorry, I—I wanted say something, but the sister started speaking.

  Say what?

  Our case has moved up the ladder.

  What case?

  I’m now an assistant to Rudy Giuliani, U.S. attorney for New York.

  You are no Jim Rockford, not even a Perry Mason. You’re more like Columbo when he’s scratching his head.

  The SEC reports directly to the president.

  The president. As in R. Reagan?

  I am investigating a crime, Miss Ashbubble. It might be so-called white collar but it’s still crime. A serious crime. Call that whatever TV show you want. My investigation is real.

  Wendy was rubbing her chin with mild curiosity. I love crime shows. Solving mysteries. My favourite is probably Rockford Files but I love Magnum and Remington Steele, and Miami Vice is straight up my alley with its fashion and gunplay. Have you seen it yet?

  Someone at the table next to us made a shush to quiet them, seeing as cartoonist Jeff MacNelly was at the lectern speaking. Me and Dan O’Neill got so drunk one night …

  Never mind what you’re seeing on paper with your investments, the entire bonds market is a house of cards, Chris Quiltain whispered into Wendy’s ear. Flooded with junk. Hexen is playing a Ponzi on the S&Ls. None of the junk market is liquid. He bounces debts from account to account to hide from the IRS. We chase the money. It’s an ongoing investigation.

  Say no more.

  I love that ring you’re wearing. What is it, a honeybee made of glass?

  She saw what was going on here. What’s going on here? she asked and batted her lashes over her shoulder.

  Can we find somewhere to talk, in private? Chris pleaded.

  Of course, she murmured.

  They went around the corner into the cloakroom.

  You were there? Tell me. What do you know about his wife’s disappearance?

  I know it happened, said Wendy. That’s all. One minute they’re there, the next, gone.

  Frank is trouble. He’s dangerous, said Chris. Even Reagan is starting to see the truth.

  You’re dangerous, said Wendy.

  Among the overcoats and jackets, he made his move without a second thought. Pressed himself against her, that elliptical mouth of his on hers, her back to the wall, the cage of his hands groping her ass, his mouth tasted of lip balm wax, his skin smelled of Ruthvah.

  What are you doing? said Wendy. Stop for a second. What in the blazes—?

  I’m sorry, Wendy. I don’t know what got into me. I thought you were flirting with me.

  Maybe I was. But only to find out what you’re all about.

  You’re beautiful. I’ve been following you around, watching you. Reading your comic. I interviewed you, remember? Through the mail for The Comics Journal. I feel like I know you.

  That was you? That was you. That was you. You sneak snake fucker.

  You’re the exact kind of corduroy reptile I modelled my snake Sam after.

  You’re so sexy. I want to take you out. I’d love to buy you a dinner. I think, listen to this, because it’s true. I’m in love with you. You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever—. I’m a good guy. Get to know me, I am. We could—

  Gimme a Kit Kat. Are you concussed? This just got gross. You follow me around. You’re the shadow I didn’t know I had. I don’t know you. You’re crazy. You’re cute but you’re crazy.

  Am I? Do you find me attractive?

  Look, buster, do you want to arrest me or date me?

  Date you, arrest him, Chris said. Frank Fleecen’s the one we want. You’re the one I want.

  Stop talking.

  He’s cooked, crooked, and triple crooked. I’m sure of it. You know it. You must. Tell me what you know. What h
as he told you?

  Nothing. No more out of your mouth.

  You’re in business with a dangerous man. Frank’s pulled you right into the middle of a massive swindle and you don’t even know it.

  Shut up and fuck me, you oblivious doll.

  The screech of metal coat-hangers sliding in a bunch as someone parted the coats in front of them startled everybody. A pretty voice cried out, Mercy me! and an elderly stranger, no, it was not a stranger, and not so elderly, either, but a lively athletic middle-aged woman Wendy recognized right away. It was Jean Schulz and she was with her husband.

  Charles Schulz and his wife apologized for interrupting.

  Wendy said, There’s my glasses! Right on my … face. Well, thanks so much for your help, Chris. She took her glasses off and put them back on. I don’t know how they got there.

  Yes, wow, strange, said Chris. There they are. Sometimes it’s the last place you think to look.

  How do you do? said Charles Schulz. Meanwhile we’re looking for our coats.

  It was polite of Schulz not to recognize Wendy at this moment, but it still kind of stabbed her, since the last time they met—at Hick’s wake—he had told her to call him Sparky. But now was not the time.

  STRAYS

  24

  The hospital promised to run a few more tests and make sure, but the doctors told Biz that, on the surface of things, she did not have the AIDS virus. The relief was confounding. Biz went into shock. She couldn’t be alone; she couldn’t go up to her room. She didn’t trust herself. In the week after Vaughn’s death, Wendy doted on Biz completely. They would lie together on Wendy’s mattress and Wendy rolled the joints, and one day she made a chocolate pecan pie, and she rented movies, an early John Waters, some rare shorts by Kenneth Anger, Cronenberg, Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Pasolini, Jesús Franco, as well Andy Warhol’s Dracula. Wendy’s bedroom had no draft, stifling hot, she kept the windows shut and the shades drawn and she’d warmed the air with incense. They half slept, half woke in the dim amber glow of the days and nights flickering by, eating cakes and pies and drinking coffee far too much, getting stoned on top of it. Sleeping all day, working all night, crying a lot. There was a decadence to grief and it was shameful, except shame made it harder to heal, and the cycle of pain prolonged the ordeal. The disorienting, cavernous feeling of abandonment played a number on their internal compass. Seven days passed before they awoke from this sorrow.