The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

So this isn’t a hotel. You own this penthouse?

  I didn’t want to spoil the mood. I used to live here with Sue.

  Really? Did she ever do this to you?

  She scooted up onto her knees in front of him, gulped down the last of her vodka, and slipped off her Rolex, then his.

  Those were some kung fu moves Kravis had. He wanted to clean your clock good.

  Never. The man is one big Achilles heel.

  Nevertheless, you gave him quite a low blow there.

  Had to be done.

  Just sit back and relax and drink your drink, Frank.

  29

  The Santa Claus balloon that led the parade began to drift south down Central Park West. Facing a mild if steady wind from the south, Santa danced limbo and the twist. The wind was not warm, the temperature on the ground remained a nudge below freezing. Icicles hung dripping from streetlamps and eavestroughs, and snow the colour of moon mud ran the curbsides. Standing arm in arm among the families and friends bundled up in woollies and scarves, children ages zero and up, grown adult children oohing and aahing, mature-faced babies in prams, crying, screaming, laughing, whining children, this was exactly how Wendy Ashbubble wanted to experience her first Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, her first balloons, just her and the man who loved her crowded in among the anonymous heartfelt families craning their necks at the spectacular floating dolls. The two of them freshly, secretly in love, walking on a cushion of air over the sidewalks of Manhattan, happy to be there to see her cartoon characters. She couldn’t wait to see them, her creations, massive as clouds, overhead. Santa bobbed from side to side with the plump grace of his persona and the dream logic of love itself, generosity dripping from his red nose.

  Then came a New Jersey fireman’s marching band, chased by every borough’s cheerleading squad under a three-storey thumbs-up Garfield balloon tethered to a dozen Nam veterans in wheelchairs waving meekly to the hale crowds; a Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles over the Choctawhatchee High School cheerleaders all the way from Fort Walton Beach, Florida; Dennis the Menace danced in place like a boy holding his bladder over the Wyoming All-State Spelling Bee Champions; Chloe the Clown, patron saint of clowns, over the Mike Miller Dance Team (we watched the whole thing on television back at the manor); a Superman carried by Christopher Reeve and Joe Shuster, a six-storey-high Pink Panther in a U.S. lifeguard life preserver doughnut carried by Herbert Lom and Monica Vitti; a Ronald McDonald balloon carried by local football and basketball players with children’s hospital children propped on their shoulders …

  Cameras swept overhead on cranes; at Times Square Miss Piggy and Pat Sajak were doing a live-feed colour commentary of the parade. Back home at the manor we waited to see what they had to say about the Strays balloons. We planned to celebrate getting toasted when the balloons appeared. At the moment an E.T. balloon carried by volunteers waving to the crowds, all wearing white hazmat outfits; next was a Mickey Mouse dressed as a sailor, nose-to-butt with a fancy new Spider-Man in a semifetal position about to ejaculate web from his wristband; a carrot-gnawing Bugs Bunny; a float shaped like a fully cooked Thanksgiving turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes, and even giant pineapple rings on a towtruck under a six-storey Coca-Cola bottle; Underdog, then a Smurf balloon, all as big as ferryboats, coasting twenty to a hundred feet above the street and waving to the frightened and ecstatic children cowering in their shadows—; … Wendy wondering, Where the heck’s my balloons? as a Pinocchio bounced by with fully protruded nose; Kermit the Frog smiling over them now. Frosty the Snowman, the Pillsbury Doughboy, Cat in the Hat, a Mount Rushmore float driven by the schoolteachers’ union, Yeah, but where’s Buck and Murphy? Patience, patience, Frank said when the Nintendo brothers, Mario and Luigi, reared their heads. And the most applause yet for another version of Spider-Man triggering a spunk of webline from his carpal tunnel; a Cabbage Patch doll big enough to scare any sane adult, under the belly of which Wendy caught a glimpse of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly moving towards her through the crowd.

  What were they doing here? Had they seen her? Should she wave? What was about to happen? The last thing in the world she wanted, for some reason, was for them to see her. She gently nudged Frank and said she wanted to follow Charlie Brown for a few blocks. Moving invisibly through wave after wave of great hurrahs as the spectators saw the balloon in front of them, and for the NYPD tethering Charlie Brown about to throw a softball, she and Frank avoided a social encounter. Snoopy in Red Baron regalia, tethered to veterans of the First and Second World Wars. Then some more balloons. Okay okay, said Wendy, but where’s my guys, my goddamn li’l folks, my balloons for crikey! The Michelin Man looking like a she-beast from out of the work of Edgar Rice Burroughs; Mr. Potato Head, a Care Bear, Kermit tethered to a contingent of bachelor surgeons—My Kermy! swooned Miss Piggy; a four-storey Big Bird, Scooby-Doo trailed by Raggedy-Ann; Bryant Gumble introducing Menudo live; an Uncle Sam float behind the Statue of Liberty, a Humpty-Dumpty balloon in front of another Superman. Then Fraggle Rock performed. I’m getting dizzy enough to puke I’m so excited to see my guys, Frank, on the street under the balloons many acrobats, baton twirlers, Shriners doing figure-eights in miniature cars, and ballerinas from the middle schools danced by, so did the rodeo clowns behind them, the sheepdogs moving flocks along, and the Broadway musical casts, but then finally, finally along came one of Wendy’s creations—Buck! Look, it’s Buck! I’m right here, Buck! she and Frank cheered and Wendy sobbed with joy when she saw her dog and his trademark flags for ears. Her all-yellow cat floated by in inflated form. Murphy! Murphy! Murphy! carried by what Frank said looked to be the heads of Shepherd Media and publishers at Dell.

  He looks so great! Ah, I’m so proud of him. Murphy. From the skids to Broadway, gosh, what a stroke of luck I’ve had.

  It’s not luck, said Frank. It’s pure talent and hard work. I always thought Murphy was a she.

  He is a she, Wendy said.

  Okay, but Buck is a boy?

  Sure, she said.

  Back at the manor on the Pacific coastline across time zones, we watched it live on TV. We saw at least sixty to ninety seconds of her balloons—we lost our minds. We knew these characters. Drawing them so much, they became some deep part of us, the way a nanny must feel about the children she tends as a parent. But we also drew the designs for these very balloons, and UPS’d them to the manufacturer nine months ago. This was sure some validation of our work as freeloading factotums and amateur animators. This was the material splendour of Manhattan—the Macy’s Parade—and we were a part of it. But growing up in the modest to appalling conditions we had, and in ever-changing locales where we were given mediocre to no attention and no consistent lease on parental guardianship, our only role model the hard experience of self-reliance, seeing our work in a parade of this magnitude transformed us. We wept. A dog and a cat we devoted so many back-hunched hours to mastering, there on TV. Roasted in colour commentary by Sajak and Miss Piggy, the Muppet in a cut-in video feed in the corner of the screen sniffling, Oh, hey, look what we have here, a couple of my cutie-cute friends, Murphy and Buck from Strays, aren’t they adorable, maybe a bit skinny—

  I like his little flag ears, said Sajak.

  Cute, yes, but not compared to moi or moi’s Kermy …

  And then it was on to the next set of balloons, Pac-Man chased by his ghosts Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde.

  Only because of our phone call with Wendy later on that day did we learn what happened off-camera. Our local Shepherd Media broadcast censored the footage. It started with a northerly wind that gusted strong and cold with calm temperate lulls in between. The gusts sucked at and pushed the balloons. Winds picked up force in the valley between the buildings on Seventh as they arrived in Times Square at the top of Broadway, straining the ends of the tethers.

  Piper Shepherd and his preschool granddaughter, Coleco, heir to both the Shepherd and Greenberg fortunes, were at the reins of the Buck balloon.

  Wendy told
us how giddy she was to be there to witness this sight of the blown-up version of her own creations in the Macy’s Parade, these little scribbles on paper turned giant-sized, incredible. A comic strip milestone. She kissed Frank over and over without even realizing. He wrapped his arms around her. The sky was a blue racetrack for a dozen clouds the shape of the Nike swoosh. Glittering snowflakes fell from trees and apartment ledges onto the crowd, or if compelled, snow traced the invisible pirouettes of the wind as it passed by in ferocious thrusts. All Wendy’s misgivings of the past few months vanished that morning as she saw her characters alive, levitating over the children who knew their names.

  A gust strong enough to bend the trees and pull hats off heads also made some of the balloons ahead of hers buck forward and back, and the Star Wars fans lost control of their giant R2D2. Pa-pow! its dome bopped Buck square in the snout. The winds picked up a second time. The tethers tautened to their max, and Shepherd’s little granddaughter was lifted up-up—up! Out of Piper’s reach into the air screaming, Grandaddeeeee! As Coleco held on to the tether, the Buck balloon twisted higher and higher in the air, recoiling from the R2D2 balloon’s blow in the bluster, and sent her swinging with a tiny Tarzan’s grace through the air over the paraders. Coleco, oh my, oh dear! Wa! cried Piper Shepherd as he reached after her in vain. Either he could let go of his own tether and run to try to save her, or he could try to wrestle the balloon to the ground before it yanked him up into the air as well. The balloon tipped violently this-a-way, Wendy told us, and precariously that-a-way, swooping the four-year-old heiress in a wild circle over the screaming audience watching in horror from the sidewalks as she whipped past overhead, and letting go of the tether, by luck landing her into the arms of a Paul Newman lookalike in a white foxfur coat to match his wife’s. Hallo, said Coleco.

  Wendy almost fainted with relief to see the toddler safely back on the ground and in her joy made a blunder she will always regret. She gave out a cowboylike wee-oop! and pulled the brand-new snow-white Travilla turban off her head and sent it spinning up into the air—she was cheering for the little girl’s return to solid earth alive and unbroken and didn’t care one whit if she ever saw the silly couture impulse-buy ever again—but as the turban Frisbee’d upwards, up, up, the brooch slipped off the fabric and she watched in terror as the long pin speared Buck’s stomach. A fling she told us she’d never forgive herself for, those few seconds aloft that she told us she would replay until the day she died, was all it took to ruin a perfect day. The brooch’s pin took what felt like an eternity to pop Buck. And she lived in that eternity, her heart went to that moment over and over again so that when the brooch hit, it might not have popped her character, or it might have missed the balloon altogether. But it did, the pin struck clean. The belly let out a long shriek and almost as quickly the ears and head shrivelled up, wrinkled, palsied, the rest of the balloon collapsed as a suffocating blanket over Murphy’s levitating feet. The Murphy balloon tipped forward under the weight of the raisin. The whole debacle loomed over right in front of Frank and Wendy. She saw Murphy was about to come down hard chin-first on a streetlamp. She screamed—no cowboy stuff this time, no phony yeehaw—she screamed, Take cover! like in war times. After another loud POP! and the Murphy balloon—a Lupercal product? she thought to herself—whipped back and forth whistling out air, thwacked the icicles hanging off the lamp. Spectators saw what was coming out of the sky like a Macy’s Parade atomic bomb about to go off in their faces, screaming and shouting as families and friends dived for the nearest awnings or tree branches or all squirrelled up under their jackets and umbrellas for any kind of protection against the shards of glass from the streetlamp exploding came raining down among the icicle spears and chunks of snow falling like burst luggage off the telephone poles and window ledges. Glass and ice and balloons. Piper pulled at airpockets in the fabric as he searched for the source of his granddaughter’s screaming. A nasty piece of glass broke right beside Wendy’s feet but left her unscathed.

  Dear Dr. Pazder,

  You won’t believe what happened to me … I was in New York for the Macy’s Parade and …

  30

  We didn’t complete the massive landscape painting of the Strays environs on celluloid as soon as we had promised Wendy over the phone. That was in a brief moment of delusional optimism. Our excitement about the new idea cast a spell that made us think the painting would be a snap to finish. The tracking shot we envisioned proved more difficult than our enthusiasm had anticipated. The problem was using the original character animations, and it took us months to accept that we needed to redraw everything. But Wendy didn’t fulfill her promise, either: she didn’t come home right away, so she didn’t have to watch us scrap finished work. Now it was her turn to vanish.

  Rather than fly straight home to us from New York and observe our progress on the Strays Christmas special, Frank hired two ace pilots and the couple travelled to destinations in Central America where Lupercal LLC had factories and then jetted across the Atlantic to Europe and etcetera, whereabouts together they holidayed for a further three months into the new year. She wrote us with boasts of snorkelling under the blue plastic sky off the sugar-white beaches of the Cayman Islands pictured on the postcards. Sex in mosquito-infested resorts, on a private jet, in the ocean under stars. Industrial cities in Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. Stops in Belize, Antigua, and Barbuda, the Caymans, the Virgins, all to meet in private with bank managers, factory managers, and the like. She was taking advantage. He was here to espouse the profitmaking beauty of the well-packaged high-yield bond, the power of the leverage buyout, and the future of trade between the nations. Capital must be fluid. Leverage empowers. Fucking nightly. She got over the popped balloons. Laugh it off. The parade seemed long ago when she was in Basel, her first time in Europe, where she visited art galleries full of paintings and sculptures by the dead while Frank met key managers of the Bank for International Settlements. Bombay, Hong Kong, and Taipei, havens for complex deposits. Hotels where she doodled and faxed. They jetted to Moscow.

  This is all fine and dandy, said Wendy, but when do we go home and meet the president?

  Soon, soon enough, just a few more stops, said Frank.

  The coffee was so hot in Turkey it scorched all the glands in her throat. Turks and Caicos Islands, Nauru, Malta, Alderney, Andorra, and Zug. Liechtenstein. Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland— he brokered deals to lend money at interest and deposited money in each. He passed on more and more business to Gabby for translations of Strays in foreign newspapers. He contracted the regional use of Strays to the underdogs in profitable industries like the ones he invested in back in America. She tried the coffee.

  Somewhere in the skies over Europe, Frank explained his rationale for the trip. If and when America’s economy loses energy, I need other markets to keep the debt-financing rolling. Same goes for Strays. You come close to saturating America, you need other nations to keep the dream afloat.

  You’re the richest man I ever met, said Wendy.

  Me, too, said Frank.

  Because of Jonjay’s formula?

  In part due to, yes, said Frank. You like to dwell on that. Why? What about my skills in this endeavour of ours, don’t they matter?

  What is it to you, all this money?

  Money is my business. The material stuff can come and go. But wealth itself I like. And you see, every door on earth opens to the money.

  You think money’s the key to life?

  No, but I happen to want a lot of it while I’m alive. I’m glad you seem to have gotten over what happened at the parade. It’s a thing that happens.

  Her hips did some bellydance moves. She said, I love how it feels to be naked in the aisles of an airplane.

  Some of the strip gags she faxed us while away featured Buck and Murphy on a vacation, too. A remedy for what Murphy calls the yips and yowls of too much city livin’. Buck thinks a vacation is the perfect way to empty our brains. Instead of a va
cation, they get lost, and the new and unfamiliar streets all of a sudden turn threatening when they consider the possibility of never seeing their friends at the vacant lot again. Panic sets in big-time for Murphy. Buck’s in complete denial. They are together but they feel alone. The city seems to expand under their feet the more intently they search. This sequence went on for a harrowing six weeks. Lost upon lost! Buck slaps his paws over his eyes when he finally accepts the facts—there’s no hope of ever finding their vacant lot in this superdense metropolis. Six weeks was an eternity in the life of a gradeschool reader of the funny pages, and this displacement was too much for young fans to bear. The letters to the editor were dominated by children imploring the newspapers to help the characters find their vacant lot. The strip was never so popular. A hundred new papers bought subscriptions as the story picked up steam. In fact we completed enough strips for the adventure to take seven weeks, but at the last moment, Gabby convinced her to cut a week from the storyline after she started hearing from numerous city editors who were fielding calls and letters from parents saying Strays wasn’t funny anymore. When their kids open the papers in the morning to learn the cat and dog haven’t found the vacant lot yet, it made them cry over breakfast and not want to go to school, rather stay home than risk getting lost. Crying kids convinced her.

  She wired us five grand to buy a new Xerox machine—we blew the old one up—and two hundred dollars’ worth of ink cartridges. With this we enlarged, shrank, and duplicated her characters and laid them on the lightbox to trace. All the details had to be imitated flawlessly or Gabby would call and complain, then send back strips for redraws. Tracing Xeroxes of her old strips was how we peanut-butter-and-jammed together a solution to meet her deadline of six strips a week including the doublesized Sunday colour.

  Cartoonists stopped in to No Manors with the frequency of a bus stop during the first half of the eighties, and if they hadn’t been there for it, they invariably asked us what we remembered from the weekend of Hick’s wake. But not everyone had heard the rumour that Jonjay compelled us all to eat a part of the body, so we never knew how to reply. In eighty-five, though, all the cartoonists knew because of Biz’s comic, and we even started to get phone calls from local editors and entrepreneurs. They didn’t want to talk about Strays.