The Road Narrows As You Go

by Lee Henderson

  But her story sold. We all cashed in. Our memories were not our own property. Memory was a hotel room we destroyed for entertainment purposes. If we felt strapped, memories of the manor were as good as a bank account. We told producers we had animated the never-aired Strays special. This cartoon was lore in the television industry of the nineties. Nobody came forward with a copy and ABC made the mistake of trashing theirs—that was the first thing that made the cartoon so valuable and legendary. We capitalized on that fact whenever we had to. And whatever details or memorabilia we could muster to sweeten the deal on our side were sure to increase our payment at the end. We sold Wendy’s life story as if it was our own, piece by piece, and always with the same focus on the flesh, the crime, the drugs, sex, the cartoon.

  Producers sought us out for our legitimately dirty eighties experiences, to transmute our memories into new entertainment. We were asked to look for inspiration no further than under our own fingernails. They all asked for the same thing: a wake, or at least a fresh take on urban cannibalism. They wanted the longtable. They wanted the laundry hamper. They just said, Give us some more of issue nine.

  We lived at the manor at the time of Hick’s death, took part in the wake, we were there when Jonjay disappeared, and we saw Wendy’s success turn into a love affair that ended in headline news. Squatting at the manor all those years witnessing so much financed our futures. When things in life looked dire and as though all hope had come to an end for us, a new horizon opened up. This new world we entered into was eager for us to convert our life into fodder. We converted what we saw and did into latter-day careers. The flesh-eating, the deaths, the pounds upon pounds of dope, Death Valley’s sailing stones, intimations of insider trading, and Wendy’s downfall—this all became our bread and butter. If ever we were strapped, we could find work simply by mentioning to editors that we had lived at No Manors.

  As the decades passed, comix readers traded gossip about the creation of the summer Christmas special that never got aired. The manor, the forty-two-foot longtable, who made what piece of art along the way, this had all become lore. The fans shared the legends and in doing so, circulated our names. Opinions on Rachael’s musical adaptation of No Manors would appear in tributes to Pan. If you loved comics history then you hunted far and wide until you tracked down the rare copies of The Mizadventurez of Mizz Biz Aziz, and the rarest of all, number nine, where you could read all about Hick’s wake. Number ten was almost as rare, and featured Jonjay’s return to the manor and Biz’s love affair with Vaughn Staedtler prior to his death.

  Issue eleven also featured a one-page, nine-panel subplot of us slaving away on the Strays special. The only panel in the whole issue to show Wendy was the frame in the centre of this page. She’s surrounded by us and her own talk bubbles, asking questions and wanting updates, and then telling us she must go, her business manager is calling.

  And Biz clearly showed time was not measured in minutes or days for us. We drank time in coffee cups. We smoked time. We drew out the years in reams. Counting up thousands upon thousands of drawings like a cult that had fallen under the sway of the most oblivious leader. The passion to please Wendy blinded us to any other audience. It was as though she had hired us back in eighty-one to mow her lawn, and we’d said okay, and taken her money, and without a plan, each of us had sat down at a different spot in her yard willynilly and got to work using nail scissors to cut each blade one at a time. Trying to make sure all the blades got cut to an even length. Frame by frame, drawing this animation, laying down a technique, only to find it didn’t match up at all with what the others were doing. Everyone’s approach was so different. We had no other choice but to mindmeld them all into something horrendous and hopefully beautiful.

  Issue eleven of Biz’s comix ends the series. The trials and tribs of producing/directing big-production drag shows on a dental-floss budget— coupled with backstage dramas, fan mayhem, post-Nam insomnia nightmares, daymares, regrets, guilt, anger, her friendship with Hick, her love affair with Vaughn—got to her. She published a four-hundred-page hardcover edition of the entire series with Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s imprint at Pantheon in ninety-two with back-cover blurbs from Kathy Acker and Divine. She won a special citation from Pulitzer in ninety-three for groundbreaking art and literature. A twenty-city book tour across America made her a sensation, and she was the subject of a fifteen-thousand-word profile in the New York Times Magazine. After a disastrous panic attack at the San Diego Comic-Con, Biz once again removed herself from public view. The rumour was that Justine Witlaw found Biz Aziz in the Twomps, where she had gone to live with her son. A son conceived the week in seventy-one that Funkadelic released their album Maggot Brain, and now, fifteen years later, apparently her son aka Murder Dubz was heir to the throne of slain drug kingpin Felix the Cat, and if the stories were true, Biz had a room in his safehouse where she continued to draw but never published.

  It was Patrick Poedouce who confirmed the rumour. When his apartment’s front door was kicked off its hinges and his place ransacked, his eye blackened, and all that was taken was Hick’s laundry hamper, rather than quail in fear in a corner, Patrick went out the next day to find who stole it. He didn’t know where to start and his mind turned to Biz Aziz and this garret she was said to have in the house of a drug kingpin in South Oakland. When he finally found the place, a derelict Victorian in between two abandoned stucco postwar bungalows in a treeless neighbourhood, Biz Aziz said she wasn’t surprised to see him. She introduced Patrick to her son and they happily returned Hick’s laundry hamper to him. Then Biz showed Patrick what she’d been working on—a hundred and seventy pages long, it was called Murder’z Diary and depicted life in the Twomps from the point of view of her son, the extraordinarily ruthless crack dealer, amphetamine dealer, marijuana monopolist, and so on, using real quotes. Patrick persuaded her to let him show a copy around to publishers, and in 2001, Fantagraphics published Murder’z Diary with no promotional tour or interviews. Reviewers tended to praise the graphic novel for the same reasons they condemned the milieu from which the comic came, for the crack epidemic was dramatic and tragic and by this time deeply embedded in the American consciousness.

  Collectors perennially traded Strays merchandise at San Diego Comic-Con and other conventions and through new & used comic stores. You knew it was a Strays original because it bore the Lupercal trademark imprinted on the bottom. That’s around the time we started to consider what we had lying around that we could put up for sale to make a bit of extra money. The thing we knew had the most value was in those film canisters, our cartoon special. But after more than ten years, we didn’t know who had the film. We hoped it was in Wendy’s hands. But we didn’t know. No one heard from her.

  One night around three in the morning in the year 2002, surrounded by bottles of anti-retroviral medication, reams of paper, and drawing supplies, Mark Bread was lying in bed surfing eBay in the room he now rented on the third floor of No Manors for twenty dollars a week when he happened to see this:

  Strays Summer Christmas Special—this is the real deal, folks. The complete 22-minute unreleased STRAYS animated cartoon ABC cancelled a DAY before the premiere. DVD, all regions. Excellent quality transfer off original VHS dub from reels. $30 per copy + Shipping.

  The seller had original Peter Pan and Hook drawings signed by Hick Elmdales and other unheard-of Pan memorabilia posted for auction, as well as Mizadventurez issues, including issue one (only a hundred copies were printed) and issue nine. More dead giveaways, Mark thought, in the postings for Strays merch, Medusa issues, original art from Loch & Quay, not to mention The Mischiefs out-of-print books.

  Whered u git this!? Mark e-mailed—right after he clicked to order a copy of the bootleg DVD.

  It’s me, Wendy, she wrote back a few minutes later.

  OMG where r u fuck!?

  Soon after the launch of YouTube in oh-five, The Strays Summer Christmas Special was posted in three segments. Within two days, a hundred an
d fifty thousand people had watched it. A million views within a year. Irwin Gerund saw a clip posted on a blog he pilfered jokes from and wrote a squib on his ShepherdMedia.com entertainment blog, and all the Shepherd Media papers picked up the post in print and online with links to YouTube. A million more watched.

  41

  Carrying Essa’s baby girl blanketed and asleep in the same kind of cardboard box the California Institution for Women used to store her belongings, Wendy waited under a hot sun outside the gates for her taxi to arrive. This time she wouldn’t be going back into Chino, the closest suburb, where she’d been sleeping in a fifties roadside motel while the paperwork settled guardianship. Blue sky above her, and the faintest quiffs of cloud over the peaks of the mountains along the distant horizon—the air across Wendy’s face sparkled with desert dust. Now that all the paperwork was signed and baby Essa Mole Deattur Auer was in her hands, Wendy had half a mind to go back to the manor and start a new drawing, pick up right where she left off—really, she was that close to coming home. After all, it was only August; two months ago she thought she was going to win the Reuben and watch her cartoon premiere on network television.

  Straight to LAX, she told the driver. The baby woke up in the cab and wept redfaced and shaking until Wendy figured out she was hungry for a bottle of formula. At the airport she bought a one-way ticket for a coach seat to Canada. The flight to Victoria was mired by turbulence and the customs official took a long time deciding. But once through, that little city she grew up in was still there on the foot of the big island off the west coast, yes, smack where she left the city six years before. All the same people, every house, the roofshingles, not a dog missing, not even very many new books on the shelves in the library.

  Before Essa was captain of her high school’s volleyball team, before she auditioned for an all-girls’ college production of Death of a Salesman, even before she skinned her knees or learned to crawl, when she was still a baby with a round tummy and inexplicable needs, but so simple they seemed obvious and yet impossible to fathom, cyclical needs, and desperate: Was she hungry? Was she tired? Was she gassy? No? Then was she in need of a diaper change? Oh my god, maybe she was hungry? The rash, the wrinkles on her face, the diaper’s elastic imprinted in the thighs, it exhausted Wendy with worry, thrust into motherhood. Baby Essa depended on the tenderness and affection Wendy supplied. Every squirm and squawk for love. Growing was her purpose. Wendy would rather harm come to her than the baby. Essa’s babyface was more beautiful, soft, and better smelling than anything Wendy had ever seen or could imagine on this earth.

  She took up lodgings in a top-floor apartment on Dallas Road, at the very bottom of the island, across from the beach overlooking the sea that separated her home in Canada and her real home, America. And because she was the single mother of an adopted child, Wendy had little time or energy to draw. She was lucky the cheques her syndicate sent twice a year were substantial. She improvised the rest of her income. Plus the added problem, she could not breastfeed. The baby Essa desperately wanted to breastfeed. She mouthed like a fish and swallowed air and scooped her arms through the air looking for Wendy’s breasts and when she found one, aimed her head straight for it like a kamikaze pilot and latched there. If Wendy let her suck, the baby groaned and squealed and flailed her limbs, squeezing the milkless nipples between her gums until Wendy yelped and had to pry the girl off using the extra leverage of a foam swimming paddle. There was nothing pacifying about the baby’s suck. She sucked for that one keen nourishment, breastmilk, and Wendy adored the baby for her perseverance. The baby could latch through a sweater, was how desperately she wanted breastmilk. Hang there from the breast, swinging from her latch like a piece of cave art. The more she wanted Wendy’s breast, the less she took to her bottle of formula. And it agonized Wendy to see the baby resist formula. When she heard the baby cry, a place in her lower chest ached like an empty crib. One day she went through the whole operation of loading Essa into the carseat screaming and drove to the doctor’s office. She told the pediatrician about the ache in her belly when the baby cried and they weighed the baby and saw right away she was not gaining weight. At six weeks old the baby must be this heavy, the doctor said and pointed to a chart, and she is only as heavy as that. I got no milk, Doc, Wendy said. She won’t eat the formula.

  You need milk, the doctor said and leaned over his lap and started to scribble on a prescription pad. Here, go to this address and pick up some breastmilk.

  The British Columbia Breastmilk Cooperative was an adhoc sort of thing based out of a yellow brick bungalow in Victoria’s valley neighbourhood of Fernwood, across the street from a physical rehabilitation clinic and another clinic for hearing loss and speech therapy. The park nearby had a baseball diamond and tennis courts.

  On the drive there with baby Essa, Wendy passed by what looked like an old folks’ home but that billed itself on a large sign as a Christian walk-in clinic for psychiatric care for the homeless, or something like that, and under that a name caught her eye: Dr. L. Pazder.

  STRAYS

  The Anawim House was a Siamese twin of Victorian homes conjoined on a double lot. If an apartment had shot up from the rooftop, the resemblance to No Manors would be more obvious. The Anawim was far better maintained. It was the combination of the oversized house and the residents she saw inside that did it: Addicts in rehab, psych-ward halfway patients. Shufflers incapable of so much as lifting their feet off the ground. Time’s tragic freeloaders. Luggage under their eyes. Parched brows, cracked as the desert floor in Death Valley.

  Here was where Dr. Lawrence Pazder first treated Michelle Smith for satanic ritual abuse repressed-memory syndrome, of which she was the first and only example, and where it appeared he ended up working again, almost a decade later, now in a self-imposed exile from the reputation he’d gained and lost for himself as the leading expert of a false psychiatric diagnosis. The doctor’s return to Victoria came after a California journalist published an article in the SF Bay Guardian thoroughly debunking Pazder’s theories of repressed-memory and satanic abuse. Is Satanic Abuse a Hoax? read the headline. The writer found no evidence of anything like what happened in his memoir Michelle Remembers ever happening in real life, none of the satanic assaults, the murders, the live burial. Michelle’s own family refused to corroborate a single shred of what the memoir recounted. The mainstream news quickly jumped on the story and the career of Dr. Pazder fell apart in a matter of days.

  When calls to appear as an expert witness for the prosecution in child sexual abuse trials came to a dead halt, home awaited Dr. Pazder. News programs ran stories on the reversal of court decisions, of children confessing it was all made up, that doctors and police seeded their questions with the answers they wanted to hear, and former teachers and daycare workers were being exonerated of charges they were satanic pedophiles, being freed from jail with apology, and the entire decade of satanic fears began to fade away.

  At last after all these years, welcome, welcome to Anawim, come in. Of course I remember who you are, you’re the one … from all your letters, said Dr. Lawrence Pazder, who seemed not at all perturbed by the fact he never replied and instead immediately made her feel special and scheduled. Pazder had a full head of snow-white hair parted to the right, and a clownish nose that made his smile seem more innocent than it probably was. It occurred to her that Punk Anderson in Dallas looked a lot like Dr. Pazder, and Punk was a duplicitous old school pawn in larger culture wars.

  Wendy was to learn that Pazder spoke in one manner in the hallways of Anawim House and another way during sessions. When he spoke in public, you could see the Catholicism beaming out of his eyes and carrying his every word from his mouth with the spirit of forgiveness, openness, empathy, guileless gullibility, and absolute faith in the literal truth of magical realms. But once the door closed he went neutral and the professional psychiatrist came out. The godly glow faded to a sober, balanced, and empty aesthetic. A confidence took over that relied on systems of no
tebooks, charts, metrics, research. And also applied with this same objectivity, Pazder employed African spirit bobs, harmonic crystals, and rare earth magnets.

  Their second session, Pazder told her after he blew his nose into a Kleenex that he wanted to put her under hypnosis. How exciting. He dimmed the lights. Brought out a beaded African charm. He put his hands on his lap and pressed the charm into the leg of his pants. The mind’s a mysterious organ, Pazder said, sometimes our puppeteer sometimes our protector. Meat capable of keeping its own secrets. Denial, what a strangely human dilemma that animals live with and with no problem but which causes us shame, misery, and ruin. Our problem, we contain multitudes. Sometimes we experience things that are so powerful, so traumatic, the brain works for years to repress the memory. But the memories stay, just hidden. And the power of those repressed memories can still control the conscious self. The blind spot in our sense of our self is this repressed truth. That is the repressed memory of which I study. Hypnosis can disarm the patient, unlock the cellar door, and give you the safety to remember again what’s under the stairs of yourself, and identify the pain that’s causing the blind spot.

  Let’s do it, she said.

  His pendulous African charm didn’t do what she hoped it would swing by swing and put her into a weird cross-eyed zone of the unlit unconsciousness, dripping drool like Jonjay used to, and tapped into the deeper caves of herself. But it wasn’t a general anaesthetic of the mind the way she expected it would be, with time missing. She remembered everything lucidly. When Pazder told her she was under, basically she pretended she was. You are asleep. You are sinking. Sinking into deep. Deep memories. Deep memories. Memories. Memories of your childhood. Of your mom. Mom. Memories of a man. Man. Man. Do you see a Man in your deep memories, Wendy?