by Sarah Black
The whiteboard was propped up against the desk, and I moved it around until I could work on it standing up. I sketched out the long line of the bar, an edge of the pool table in the corner. My doppelganger cartoon character, Devil Dog, was leaning against the bar, drinking a beer. The fight raged all around. There was Jesse, riding the bully’s back like a monkey, his hands full of hair. There was a pool cue about to descend on a cowboy with a particularly clueless look on his face. Another good old boy was sliding to the ground, beer dripping off his hair. I put a look of boredom on my own face, and only the reader could see the beer bottle descending on my head, just out of my line of vision. I wrote along the bottom, Friday Night in Alpine, Texas.
When I looked up, Mr. Clayton was watching me. “You’ve got this thing I’ve noticed that’s real popular, this sly humor at yourself. You don’t mind making yourself look like a fool.”
“I’ve had lots of practice looking like a fool.”
“That’s a technique that will serve you well. How do you go from your board to putting your cartoons on the Internet?” He pulled up a stool.
“Depends where I am. I used to draw them on paper, then do a photograph. Now they’ve got these computers you can draw right on, tablets. I don’t know, though. Seems like that’s an easy way to publish crap. Sometimes, something that seems real funny to me at night isn’t all that funny in the morning. I need to find a way to let things hold for a bit.”
“I think that’s a good idea. When I first started, I used to publish one in three. My last year, it was more like one in ten. The others weren’t bad, they just weren’t great. And once you get a reputation, you can’t count on editors telling you when your quality is slipping.” He gestured toward the cartoon. “So what happened?”
He was cool about it, but I got the feeling he was worried about Jesse. “It wasn’t his fault. He came in, and everybody turned around and looked at him. These two stupid rednecks decided to play with him a little bit. He didn’t do anything but lean up against the bar and try to drink a beer.”
“Did you know who he was when you stepped in?”
I shook my head. “What I thought was a man should be able to get off the bus and grab a beer without getting jumped because of what he’s wearing.”
“He got targeted because he’s gay. And he’s never been one to hide his light under a bushel basket. It doesn’t happen very much in Alpine, to tell you the truth. We don’t really tolerate that sort of bigotry. You know he’s gay?”
I nodded again, but I didn’t say anything else. I’d never come out to a soul in my life. I wasn’t about to start with an old man I’d met the night before.
He gestured to the cartoon again. “What you lose, when you have to copy a drawing to another medium, is the spontaneous line.” He gestured to a couple of places to show me what he meant. “Natural tendency is to clean up a bit, but the lines give you a lot of mood. I don’t know. We ought to study up on some of the new technology, see how Garfield does it.”
“Hold the door! No, I got it. Oh, my God, Mary, you are going to love this!” Jesse came through the door, dragging one end of a massive old Victorian couch, the back all carved birds and curlicues, the upholstery pale-green velvet. “Is this gorgeous? Wait for it—I got two, one for me and one for you. So we can lay down and stare at the fans and think brilliant artistic thoughts. Like Paris, on the Rio Grande.”
I went over and picked up his end. The kid who had the other end was rolling his eyes, his straw Stetson pushed to the back of his head, but he straightened up when I frowned at him. “Let’s put it against the eastern wall, okay?”
After we settled it in place, I followed him back out to the truck. Painted on the side was “Marathon Art and Antiques” in fancy script. I settled on a stoic, fierce USMC warrior look, which stopped the kid’s comments in their tracks. I got the feeling JC3 had been laying on the charm a bit thick, trying to agitate the kid. We carried the other couch into the studio, set it against the western wall. Jesse pulled out his wallet, gave the kid a twenty, and thanked him very prettily. He glanced at me, and I looked back, gave him a subtle message that if he made one fag joke anywhere in West Texas for the rest of his days, I would find out, and I would find him.
The Original sighed, watched Jesse plop down on one of the couches. “I can see how it’s gonna be with you two. He’s gonna piss all over the floor, and you’re gonna mop it up. Jesse, I’ll call you when Sadie gets here with the dogs.”
I moved to the other couch. It was surprisingly comfortable. “I think it’s been re-upholstered,” I said. “Not bad. That kid say something to you? Looked like he was getting a bit of an attitude.”
“It’s always like that for me when I come down here. When I run into people who don’t know me. I can either ignore it and be myself, or use up a lot of concentration, trying to blend in. I forget about it sometimes, when I’m not here.” He gestured toward the house. “Don’t worry about cleaning up my messes, Mary. I can take care of it myself. I’ve had lots of practice.”
“Thanks for getting the couches.”
“You’re welcome. My friend Miguel did the fancy work. I want you to know that you are really welcome here. The Original looks happy. I think he’s been looking forward to you getting here.”
“So what’s your life like in San Francisco?”
“I’ve got a loft downtown, very rough red brick walls, good light. I use it as a studio and an apartment. I’ve got friends there, crazy, creative people with massive self-destructive streaks. They are always in crisis, and I mean, always. But I like to work. I mean, I get into my work, and I can paint for sixteen, eighteen hours. Then I have to unplug the phone and lock the door and just block everything else out.”
“How many paintings have you sold?”
Jesse stretched, propped one foot up along the back of the couch. “Almost all of them. Maybe thirty-five, forty. I do a lot of preliminary work, sketches and drawings, while I’m getting the idea down. I don’t improvise once I start painting, not usually. Once I’ve got the painting in my mind, I just put it down on canvas. Most of the creative work comes before. How do you work?”
“Mine’s different. I get an idea, very unfinished, and then I let it grow around some central image. I may not know what I was going to say until the cartoon’s done.”
“What are some of the themes you want to explore?”
I thought about that for a while. I hadn’t really thought about what I was doing enough to think about themes. Did cartoons have deeper ideas? The good ones did. I wanted to be one of the good ones. “I don’t know, Jesse. I haven’t spent much time thinking about what I was doing. That’ll be something to do down here, I guess. What about you?”
“I’m not sure how to describe it—maybe American culture and communication.”
I was surprised. I would have thought he would have done some work that said something about being gay. He must have read my mind. “The entire gay world is working hard on art that says, look at wonderful me! But it’s bigger than that. We’re all part of a bigger culture, and I’m really interested in how our cultural icons, and the way they’re made, communicate to us our place in the world. I suspect even those of us who think we’re free birds are being carefully manipulated into our cultural roles.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what he was talking about. “Did you study art?”
“Yeah. It was helpful for me. I went to school at Berkeley, so I was already plugged into the Bay art scene when I graduated. What about you?”
“I went into the Marine Corps a couple of years after I graduated high school. I did two years at Dine College first. Then I went to war. Then I went to war again. I’ve been soaking in it for six years now.”
“I’ve heard young Navajo men have to take the warrior’s path. Did it feel like that to you? Did you get pressured to go into the Marines?”
“No, I don’t think so, not pressured.” I thought about it some more. “It was more an expectation. And I
didn’t want to disappoint those with that expectation. And besides, my image of myself was as a warrior. And my image was also of a person who did not disappoint the people depending on him.”
“Exactly.”
I sat up. “But I wasn’t unhappy with it. It was my decision.”
“I’m not passing judgment on it, Mary. I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s just our way. Maybe what art does is to take a picture of reality, in case people aren’t looking carefully.”
I thought about this awhile. I was gonna have to run hard to keep up with him. “You make my brain tired.”
“Yeah? You make my dick hard. But I’m gonna just keep pretending I don’t know you’re gay, as long as you want to stay tucked up in the closet.”
“Can I take a nap now?”
“Go ahead. I’m not finished decorating the studio. But don’t worry! I’ll leave your half alone.”
Chapter Four
“SO WHAT are you really doing back in Marathon?” Jesse was holding his cousin out at arm’s length. “Should I be checking you for bruises?” The Original’s head popped up at that, and he stared across the kitchen at Sadie. She was tiny, with a pile of glossy red curls on her head and freckles on her upturned nose.
“JC, you’re such a pest. Don’t get Granddad worried.” She walked over and kissed the old man on the top of the head. “Granddad, I think there is too much salt in the Big Bear Dog for you. How’s your cholesterol? How’s your blood pressure?”
“It’s always higher when my grandkids visit, but that’s just from happiness. So, tell me about this hot dog stand you want to start.”
“There’s a street food revival across the country,” she said, and The Original snorted.
“Not in Marathon. We only eat food out in the streets when we don’t have a nice kitchen table to go to, or a café, both of which we got in abundance.”
“In San Francisco—”
“But you’re not in San Francisco, and that’s what I’m wondering about.”
I kept my head down over my Javelina Dog. It was good, if a little busy. I thought a decent pork sausage on the grill, down in a bun with some mustard, would have been about perfect. I would have been happy without the capers and green olives, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. She had a brittle sort of smile on her face, looked like it was about to crack. And then the tears would come. I suspected I was in the way, and The Original and Jesse wanted to give her a good going-over. I stuffed the last bite into my mouth and stood up. “Thanks, that was really great.” I pointed out to the studio. “I’m just gonna go….”
I could hear The Original before I was out the door. “What the hell do you mean, bruises?”
Out in the studio, I unpacked a few more things, rearranged my desk, but I felt like there was a huge cavern open beneath my feet. I’d gone from not enough time, drawing cartoons in between missions, in my rack at night, to having all the time in the world. Now I had the time, I didn’t have a clue where to start. Okay, goals and objectives. I copied the cartoon from the whiteboard onto my pad of good hot-pressed watercolor paper, using a black magic marker, and thought about my goals. The Marine Corps had taught me about goals. Make it measurable and give it a time limit. Okay, so I wanted to have Devil Dog in a hundred newspapers in one year. Okay, wait, back up. Was Devil Dog ready to go? Was it good enough for a hundred papers? Maybe, but it wasn’t good as it could be. Okay, getting it into the papers, that was marketing. Maybe it wasn’t time for marketing yet.
What was my goal for the cartoon? I thought about Gary Larsen. Anyone who had ever seen a Far Side cartoon could probably recognize another, because they had a—what was it Jesse had said? They had a theme. Miscommunication, which was always funny, upending man’s natural place at the top of the dog pile, and looking at the consequences.
What did I want to do? I’d started it as a way to tell jokes about the officers and not get in trouble. Then it seemed like everything about Marine Corps life, especially deployed into a war zone, had a funny edge, or at least, that edge of, can you believe this shit? I was talking to the other grunts. Now my character, Devil Dog, had stepped out of the corps and was loose in the world. Would he still be able to look around and say, can you believe this shit? I studied the cartoon I was copying. Yeah, okay. Maybe so. Who was my audience now? There were plenty of Marines and plenty of old devil dogs around, like Uncle George up in Alpine and The Original over in the house. Was the humor too specialized for the big world?
I needed to go look at some of the old cartoons, especially the old military cartoons, see how they made the jump. I finished the sketch and walked back over to the house. Jesse was sitting out on the porch, a bottle of beer resting on his knee. “Jesse, you know where your granddad keeps those big books of cartoons?”
He nodded. “Yeah. He’s got a shelf in his office.”
“You want to go in there and get me one?”
“Why? You afraid somebody’s crying in the house?”
“Maybe.”
He held up the beer. “You want one of these?”
“Sure.”
He came back a few minutes later, handed me a big book of cartoons and a Shiner Bock.
I spent an hour looking at cartoons. It looked to me like the majority had a political agenda—us-versus-them cartoons. There were some good ones using my can you believe this shit philosophy. Beetle Bailey was a classic, of course, but it had that something special—it was military, no question, but with an appeal to everyone. I went back to the studio, and Jesse trailed after me, picked up his sketchpad and lay back on his couch. I looked up gay military cartoons on some of the cartoon stock sites, and most of them followed the same pattern. The majority were firmly on one side or the other of the fence, with a strong political slant. Very few were really funny, with outrage simmering just under the surface. There was hardly anything that showed what life was like inside the military with DADT lifted.
I went to my couch, stared up at the ceiling. There was Jesse, JC3 to his friends, gay down to his pretty bare feet, on his couch. Here I was, Lorenzo Maryboy, Staff Sergeant, USMC, on my couch, here in Paris on the Rio Grande. Don’t Ask being repealed, that had meant something to me. I wasn’t leaving because I was gay and couldn’t serve, though the gay comments from the boneheads chapped my ass regularly. Mostly because they were so fucking dumb. I hated to depend on anybody that dumb to make sure my Kevlar was in good working order. What I knew about, that no other cartoonist did, was what it was like to be gay in the USMC since the gay ban had been repealed.
But the only way I could make those cartoons funny, funny for everybody, was to show the rainbow flag tattooed on my ass. I sighed, put the books down on the floor next to my couch. The beer was good. I finished the bottle, set it on the floor, and closed my eyes. I didn’t think I was ready to drop my BDUs and stand buck naked before the world.
When I woke up, it was dark outside the studio windows, and Jesse was settling himself across my hips, his sketchbook and charcoal pencil in his hand. He bent over and kissed me, took a bit of my bottom lip and sucked it into his mouth for a nibble. “zo-zo,” he whispered into my mouth. “You looked so pretty lying here, all spread out and sleepy. Too much for me to resist.” He wiggled his butt down into my groin. “Can I sketch you? Pretty please? Just pull your shirt off.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just an artist, hard at work.” I reached down for the hem of my T-shirt and pulled it up, but he stopped me when the fabric was still wrapped around my forearms. “Oh, yeah. Right there. Now I’ve got you prisoner.” He reached down, kissed me again, and this time took his time about it, tasting me, feeling the shape of my mouth, before he touched me with his tongue, and I opened up to let him in.
His tongue slid into my mouth, and I felt an electric pulse of heat move down my chest into my cock. He felt it too, when it rose and knocked against his ass. He wiggled a little, reminded me of high school, dry-humping between a couple of pair of Levi’s. H
e sat up then, rocked a little on my cock, and I could feel the heat in my belly, a flush of pleasure in my chest. He pulled his sketch pad over and turned to a clean page. I raised my eyebrows. “Do you have any reason to think I want to start something with you?”
He rocked against me again. “This big boy was awake before you were! I heard him calling to me. I wanted to sketch you like this. With your mouth wet and your eyes hot and your cock nestled all impatiently against my ass. But don’t worry.” His hand was moving over the paper. “I don’t start anything I don’t finish.”
“Did you call me zo-zo?”
“That’s going to be our secret lovemaking name. Nobody knows about it but you and me.” He reached over and kissed me on the chin, then opened to me when I moved my head and took his mouth in a big sucking bite.
He was sweet tasting, made me so hungry all of a sudden I was ready to roll him over and get the job done. “I never had anybody just climb on board and take what they wanted. Usually there’s a lot of standing around, hands in pockets, maybe one of us kicks a rock, or a clod of dirt. Maybe there’s some gazing out to the horizon. Avoid eye contact at all cost. Then we go into the shower at the same time and give each other a hand job, quick as we can in case we’re disturbed.”
“That sounds grim. But don’t worry. You’re not in Kansas anymore.”
“That’s true, but I think you’re the only boy in this room who actually lives in Oz.”
“And I’ve got the red shoes to prove it!” Jesse put the sketch book aside, leaned over, and giggled into my neck, his breath like little cotton balls touching my skin. “You should have seen your face in that bar, looking down at my shoes. But really, zo-zo, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”
I tossed the T-shirt to the floor and wrapped my arms around him. “That’s right. And fuck ’em if they don’t like red shoes. Pansy-ass bastards.”