The first hint of all this came at age six, when I timidly showed my mother a drawing I had made of Daffy Duck, one of my lifelong role models. Nobody in the family had shown the slightest artistic talent. She was so surprised she dropped her rolling pin. After that, I got total encouragement at home. My family was thrilled about this unexpected phenomenon in its midst.
I clearly remember Sister Mary Margaret standing at the blackboard, showing the third grade how to draw a human figure: the little arches that were shoes seen straight on, the square shoulders. . . . I laughed. I could draw circles around that. A year later I would be drawing custom cartoons for Sister Mary of Joseph and illicit caricatures of Sister Mary of Joseph.
In fifth grade I “turned the corner” and gravitated toward the Incorrigibles. No more model student. I joined the gang that bullied Tim Resnik, the smartest kid in school, into letting us copy his homework, not because I needed to, but to be one of the boys. At the same time, having tasted the delights of cruelty in fourth grade, I turned my hand increasingly to caricature. I made friends with another extremely funny and extroverted junior artist, Dale McCall. Together we practiced having fun at someone else’s expense; naturally, we drew dirty pictures.
By high school, when not drinking, smoking or cutting classes, I worked up caricatures hard-hitting enough to strain relationships, but the payback in notoriety was worth it. There was a kid named Dotton who was from the wrong side of town. I worked up a strip, “Dotty,” that lampooned his career as a “greaser.” Later I pushed my friendships within the gang to the limit by such stunts as putting a tiny red penis on the tall, ectomorphic, albino Aronsen. I drew a history of the entire life of my best friend Frank Foley: His birth, the times he had to stay home from school with asthma, the moment he discovered he was lousy at sports, and so on.
An even more challenging subject was a strip describing Ralph Meyers’s stroll with a rat. Stoned on acid, Ralph was walking along the street when a big rat came right out of the sewer and—no doubt noticing that this human was in a state of deep oceanic schizophrenia—decided to walk along with him. Rat and loony kid mimicked each other’s subtlest expressions. We all found this hilarious.
At the time I was very much influenced by Don Martin, star of Mad and later of Cracked magazine, whose goofy, attenuated characters, their toes curled over the edge of the curb as if broken, their mouths grinning inanely, stumbled down the street toward whichever of life’s disasters awaited them just around the corner. Twenty years later I still feel Martin’s influence.
I also drew a lot of serious stuff. I was open to anything that would help me impress people. I walked in the woods and drew what I saw. People would say, “Look at that tree! What a wonderful broken wagon wheel!” I discovered I could sell my vignettes for good money—sixty dollars apiece. Drawing from life was a pleasure, almost a form of meditation, but it never quite satisfied me. Something was missing.
Nothing at all was missing from my nude of Mr. Wilson, my high school math teacher and a friend of my father’s. I drew him in the most sexually compromising position I could imagine. I hated his guts, and after he saw the drawing, he hated mine. So did Cathy Reardon, my eleventh and twelfth-grade English teacher. I panicked as I watched my study of her boffing a goat pass from hand to hand, accompanied by a wave of laughter, through an entire all-school assembly, so that when she finally got a look at it, she knew that everyone else had too.
I received tremendous encouragement from Don Lescher, the high school art teacher, whom, I’m sorry to say, I repaid mostly with indifference. I did not want to paint, sculpt or throw pots. So he let me leave class with a drawing pad. I would walk across the campus to Aronsen’s house, get stoned and listen to the Rolling Stones. Then, during the last ten minutes of the period, I would draw quick caricatures of my buddies in the house and of the people I passed on my way back to school. Mr. Lescher would say, “Ah, here’s what Callahan did today,” and everybody would gather around to look. It became a tradition. “Oh, yes, that’s Margaret Jones, that’s Mike Kelly. . . .” I got my strokes.
My chef d’oeuvre during this period was a two-foot-by-three-foot pencil portrait of the singer-songwriter Tom Rush, copied from an album photo. I gave it to my brother Kip for his birthday. He was moved to tears. A few years later, when I was working at the aluminum plant, I needed to impress Deborah Coker, the girl I later followed to L.A. I sneaked back home, stole the portrait from Kip’s bedroom, and presented it to her as something I’d just drawn.
Much later, when I was at Mount Angel nursing home, I drew the portrait again. I couldn’t apply the pressure needed for pencil anymore, so I used a ballpoint gripped in my $350 custom wrist splint. In ink it was much more impressive. I had it framed and gave it back to Kip. This time the whole family was moved to tears.
Except for a couple of caricatures at Rancho, I drew no cartoons in the years following my accident. But my portrait drawings had a cartoonlike quality. I drew student nurses, the sisters at Mount Angel, the patients. I was especially interested in Joe, my roommate, an eighty-year-old hobo who had become temporarily paralyzed when he fell off a moving train. I learned that old people are much more satisfying to draw, that each lined face has its own design. By contrast young faces are like balloons, relieved only by the little oases of eyes and mouth.
My favorite elderly subject was Marie Hulette, a society woman whose relatives had all died off and who was herself dying of cancer. She had a large private room with a view of the orchard. She hovered there in a sort of ghostly fashion, like Blanche DuBois. Once a pretty woman, with large eyes, a sculptured nose, and high cheekbones, she now looked much older than her sixty years, with dark circles under her eyes and yellow skin. The nurses told me, and Marie confirmed, that she was the niece of T. S. Eliot.
I visited her nearly every night. We both liked to watch What’s My Line?—less a quiz show than an excuse for some witty chitchat between sophisticated New Yorkers. I loved her cynicism: “You know, John, I look at the world through jaundiced eyes.” I drew her over and over as the cancer ravaged her. I watched her growing addiction to the Demerol the nurses gave her. She was always calling for another shot. I stayed with her during the final weeks of agony until, almost at the end, the priest kicked me out.
I hung one of my portraits of Marie outside the chapel. The nurses petitioned to remove it because it was so realistic, depicting her in extremis. Down it came.
While I was still at Mount Angel admirers arranged a show in the nearby town of Silverton—population, 3,300. I hung forty drawings. At the opening I reacted to the applause and attention by getting drunk and embarrassing everybody.
By the time I got to Portland, I was too committed to alcoholism to draw at all. I did one piece during my stay at Friendship Nursing Home: a small pen-and-ink of a beaten and dead baby, smudged. I signed it backward, mounted it on a huge mat and hung it in a show of patient art, priced at three hundred dollars. Then I sat in the hallway and enjoyed the outrage. “What is this awful thing? Oh my God . . . what kind of name is Nahallac? Whoever this Polack is, he should be locked up. . . .”
After working through the steps of the fellowship and taking the big emotional risk of the search, I began to feel a huge rush of energy. Still a senior at PSU, I was sitting in class one day, with a piece of paper and a pen before me. I suddenly realized that I had been—or should have been—a cartoonist, a gag man, all along.
I doodled a cartoon to amuse the girl sitting next to me. It wasn’t much of a gag: a beggar with dark glasses and a white cane and the sign “Glasses Too Dark to See Through.” But I thought it was well drawn and I showed it to everybody. Then I drew another, and another. Suddenly I knew this was what I did. Within forty-eight hours I had become obsessed. I drew gags continuously and during every available waking moment. Early on, I drew a beggar-on-the-street gag that comes close to describing my own personality. The guy has about twenty tin cups spread out all over the sidewalk. His sign says, “Compulsi
ve.”
Being a cartoonist had never seemed cool enough to me. If I was going to be an artist at all, I wanted to be a songwriter like Bob Dylan or a novelist like James Joyce. Of course I loved to draw. I had even learned to use the old-fashioned dip pen and pot of ink, the better to emulate the little fragmentary drawings used as column fillers in The New Yorker: a bird feeder, a section of wrought-iron fence in a Brooklyn backyard. I became masterful at such vignettes.
But drawing by itself left me unfulfilled, even though everybody was always after me to work at it. Time after time I gave it up in favor of a more respectable ambition. I thought, I’ll be a social worker, I’ll be an English teacher, I’ll get a law degree, something solid. But I’d actually feel nauseous at the thought of what I was giving up. (A curious fact was that if I drew nothing for a month or a year, I always found that when I went back to it, I had become mysteriously more skillful during the lay-off.)
But now, in the fall of 1981, I had confronted, and partly dealt with, the major issues in my life. At last I could give myself permission to follow my own instincts without middle-class inhibitions about status. I’ve noticed that successful cartoonists are rarely young. Unlike poetry or higher math, that kind of comedy seems to require a good deal of life experience. And that I had.
I came across a book by Sam Gross, the renegade star of the National Lampoon, with the wonderful title I Am Blind and My Dog Is Dead. I studied it closely. He seemed totally unafraid of the most outlandish sexual situations, disabilities, blindness. Nothing was off-limits to this outlaw. That’s what I want to do, I thought. I never dreamed Gross would shortly become my mentor and friend.
I didn’t imagine I could learn the trade from how-to books. So I tracked down the telephone numbers of Gross, Robert Mankoff of The New Yorker, and others and called them up. What size paper should I use? What kind of pen? How does one approach a magazine? They were taken aback, but friendly, especially when they realized that I was serious (I didn’t mention that I was a quadriplegic). When I complained that I had sent a cartoon to The New Yorker and the editor objected that it wasn’t funny, Mankoff told me, “Next time include a note explaining why it’s funny.” I laughed, delighted. I’d found other members of my own species. I was home.
Sam Gross is a classic gag cartoonist, revered by everybody in the field as the granddaddy of the sick cartoon. He’s featured in every magazine from The New Yorker, to National Lampoon, but the latter is his home base. He is a street-smart New Yorker, and talking to him is an honor and a pleasure: “Dey wanted all rights ta da frog gags. I told ‘em, ‘Fuckyez.’”
Gross’s work gave me the green light to go ahead and be crazy. He taught me that there were markets for the renegade. In fact, he became one of my first markets. I hadn’t yet published in a national magazine when he called me and said, “Callahan, I’m putting together a book for Harper and Row, cat cartoons. I want to buy some from you.”
I put everything on hold for a week and drew twenty, sending him my best. He bought all five, including my favorite, the cat in the Aqua-lung.
That was the first of many sales to Gross for his books; later I had the honor of appearing alongside him in National Lampoon.
I did a lot of imitating. If I saw a good Desert Island cartoon by someone, that would set me off, and I’d do twenty of them. I knew that I was dealing with a language, a series of conventional signs and symbols, and that languages are best learned by imitation. This language was that of the gag, the cliché situation to which the cartoonist gives a new twist. What he adds is his own vision, but it is the “common ground” of the traditional cartoon that allows him to convey that his unique personality to a public.
So I worked hard to become adept at the old stock situations: the beggar on the street, the two bums on the park bench, the bitch housewife screaming at her husband, the man dying of thirst in the desert or going mad on a desert island. I especially enjoy cartoons set on the street because the street is a common denominator, the basic turf of life where nothing is hidden and everyone passes by. There’s a Sam Gross gag I particularly like. It shows a little guy walking down the street with a briefcase, one of a million robots going to work. He’s walking under a street sign that says, “Curb Your Instincts.” No matter how high up the economic ladder someone climbs, they can tumble down to sidewalk level and face a choice between suicide and asking strangers for help. Enter the tin cup. I see people as, in the final analysis, helpless. Even with the confidence that comes from success, I never forget that the world remains a tough place.
I enjoy drawing that tough world and the desperation with which most people face it. Bob Dylan’s song “Desolation Row,” in which everyone—from Albert Einstein to the local pusher—is in the same dire straits, expresses it perfectly. That guy over there with the tin cup and the anxious face: will he score a few bucks and get his booze or bread? The whores, the society women, the bums, the executives, the hustlers and the hustled, all are up against the same wall. And their desperation is funny, exciting to me.
My Portland apartment had a huge bathroom with perfect light and I set up shop there in front of the mirror and drew continuously, trying to simplify everything, getting down to the bare-bones style I admired in Gross, in Kliban, and in a few others. Then and now, I worked on a tablet on my knees, holding the pen loosely in my right hand and bracing it with my left. I have to keep pressure on my fingers to keep them closed around the pen. My drawing comes from the shoulders, not just the arms and wrists. At Mount Angel I did a lot of competent, academic drawing just to prove to myself that I still could. That doesn’t interest me today.
When I thought I had something, I’d run around the neighborhood showing what I’d done to pretty girls, bums, cops on the beat, hookers. I was Mr. Cool: “By the way, I happen to have this cartoon here. . . .” I needed the reactions. It was fun and informative, I discovered in my first two years of work, to sit in a café and watch someone pick up a local weekly in which I had a cartoon, turn to the page and react with laughter, anger or dismay. I began to understand what I could do to manipulate people’s responses through a twist to the drawing here, something added to—or left out of—the caption there.
Cartooning, which I’d regarded with a certain disdain, became the center of my life. I now thought everybody should quit his job at once and become a cartoonist. I sent some gags to the Portland State University student newspaper, the Vanguard. They did an article about me and ran one of my gags, about a blind black beggar. I got my first hate mail. I was perceived as attacking Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder. I was a racist. Very shortly I was to be identified as a sexist, agist, fascist, communist—in fact, I’m merely cartoonist.
I had been worried about every detail of that gag. Should I draw the beggar with small round “blind man” sunglasses or with the huge white-framed ones I was seeing cool black types wearing on the street? Should the guy look depressed or placid? Fat or skinny? Should there be someone else on the street, an observer, to react to him? The gag line was, “Please help me, I am black and blind but not musical.” I saw I could make it even shorter. The reward was a strong reaction from the reader, which is what I aim for. I can’t tolerate indifference.
The winter this book was written, Willamette Week, a local paper, was nearly buried under letters protesting a gag that pictures two Ku Klux Klansmen draped in their bedsheets, setting out in the moonlight to commit some atrocity. One is turning to the other to say, “Don’t you just love it when they’re still warm from the dryer?” A significant percentage of the Willamette’s readership saw this as glorifying the Klan. They could not accept the suggestion that simple humans like us, concerned equally with creature comforts, wore those sheets and committed those crimes.
Then and later I was often perceived as going too far. One day I got a call from the Vanguard’s editor, “You better get down here. They want to kick you out of the paper.” I was doing a series of amputee gags and I had sent them one about a barfly with hooks
instead of hands.
I got thirty letters, and people stopped by the editorial offices to register complaints about me with the secretary: Christians, queers, teachers, foreign nationals, janitors, lab rats—all found me offensive. The student publications board convened a kind of trial. For two or three terms heated discussion involving both the faculty and the student body raged on:
To the Editor:
I found John Callahan’s cartoon in the 18 January issue of the Vanguard to be extremely insensitive and in the worst possible taste. . . . Comedy which aims at exposing the flaws in a person’s character can be healthy. This provokes laughter which helps us to identify our faults and stimulates us to seek ways to correct them. . . . Building humor on the handicaps of a victim of some accident is, however, base and without merit. This type of laughter ridicules outcomes that were not freely chosen and conditions that cannot be reversed by the victim. Among us on this campus are a number of very brave individuals who have refused to submit to their physical limitations. . . . I applaud their courage and deplore the ugliness of spirit in John Callahan’s mean cartoon.
The student editors rather unfairly slammed this dissenter with the revelation that I was paralyzed, which should have been irrelevant. It is to me, anyway; I reserve the right to draw gags about any group or individual, especially about self-righteous assholes who presume to defend the disabled. But if I weren’t disabled, I’d find some other offensive subject matter. What is interesting is the way the writer, trying to make a simple distinction, ends up ruling out whole areas—in fact the primary areas—of comedy: combat humor, gallows humor, ghetto humor, humor based on poverty or on anything else that is not “freely chosen.”
The notoriety did me no harm. I began to publish in the local papers. At the suggestion of one of my English professors I drew a version of Dante’s Inferno as a strip. He used to have me explain my gags in class because he loved to listen to the explanations. But it felt odd to be explaining, say, an anorexia gag to a roomful of affluent, self-absorbed debutantes with glazed eyes. I felt very much like a comedian who was dying onstage. I wanted to whip out a .38 and blow the class away because their nonreaction, told me clearly: “Callahan, you missed your calling, you should have been an aluminum-siding salesman.”
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