Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot

by John Callahan

  I began to submit gags to national magazines—Hustler first, because that was the most outrageous publication I could think of. At least they had the best standard reject slip. It showed a toilet with the caption, “You should draw with your other hand or become a plumber.”

  Also on my list of possibilities were Penthouse and its sister publications, Forum and Omni. I talked to people who were published there. The advice was to send ten cartoons a week, every week, always accompanied by the traditional manila self-addressed stamped envelope. When the second weekly batch bounced back to me from Penthouse, there was a pencil scrawl at the bottom of the printed reject slip. It said, “Holding one.”

  It was not exactly an acceptance; in fact, Penthouse is still holding that gag. They’ve had it so long, I’ve forgotten what it was. But that pencil note told me, “Keep going, you’ll make it in this league.” It kept me at it while spring turned into summer, and summer into fall. Batches of ten gags went out every week to Penthouse, Hustler, National Lampoon, and The New Yorker—all without acceptance.

  I was accumulating enough rejection slips to build a Japanese house. But the self-doubt that had pursued me in every other aspect of my life never infected my core belief in myself as an artist. The world was just going to have to accept me, no question about it. Perhaps these editors were just temporarily confused.

  One day I was at the mailbox, which of course I couldn’t reach. I enlisted the aid of a small Mexican kid, a spastic who lived in the apartment complex. I noticed she was pulling out a standard-sized envelope from Penthouse. Had to be a subscription campaign, or maybe an injunction from the editor to stop wasting his time. I had tried calling editors to ask their advice, but this turned out to be a mistake. Even after he became one of my regular customers, Bill Lee of Penthouse answered one of my calls about a missing cartoon with “Goddamn it, I’m a busy man! I don’t have a fucking minute to talk to you about this!”

  As soon as I was alone in the kitchen, I began to tear at that envelope with my teeth. I dropped it; I had to call a neighbor in to pick it up for me. “Do you want me to open it for you?” “No,” I said, feigning great patience. “I’ll open it myself later, no big deal.”

  As soon as he was gone, I raced back into the kitchen and began gnawing at that envelope like an escaped convict performing his first cunnilingus in twenty years. Inside was a contract for me to sign, my first. Penthouse had accepted two gags. One was a very novel pirate’s-hook gag. The other was “Warning: This Area Patrolled By Lesbians.”

  That contract meant much more to me than my college degree, which I had finally earned at the beginning of the summer. I had a purpose in life. Receiving that contract was like having an orgasm, experiencing a heroin rush, and getting a formal letter of acceptance to heaven all at the same time.

  When my free sample copy of Penthouse arrived in the mail, it lived on my lap. I showed it to every passing stranger; I showed it to a cop, a bum, a fire hydrant. I showed it to a feminist friend and she slapped me, which I secretly enjoyed. Getting into the notorious Hustler, which began accepting me not much later, made my liberal acquaintances even more uncomfortable and afforded me a lot of fun. I finally stopped submitting to Larry Flynt’s notorious magazine, though. His checks were always late.

  Now I began to publish regularly and added National Lampoon, Omni, Forum, Stereo Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and several others to my list. Each new contact seemed to lead to another. Even The New Yorker bought a gag, but they gave it to Charles Addams to redraw. There was nothing magical about all this success. A year earlier my stuff had been pretty weak. The concentrated effort required to work up more than 120 ideas in nine months had taught me a few things.

  One example: I decided I was going to do a gag about a family watching television and have the caption read as a disclaimer. “The following program contains material which may be offensive to some members of your household” is the standard form. My first variation was “The following program contains language which may be offensive to members of your household who are not lumberjacks.” It wasn’t very funny. Next I wrote, “The following program contains language that may be offensive to some members of your fucking family.” That’s getting there, I thought, but not quite right.

  I’m a minimalist and I like to turn a gag back on itself. So I redrew the gag with a caveman watching the set and changed the disclaimer to “Warning: The following program contains language.”

  I was still worrying away at this problem when, out in my wheelchair one day, I overheard two passersby react to the smell of a dumpster parked in an alley. One of them said, “Jesus, that smells bad enough to knock a buzzard off a shitwagon.” I began laughing like a berserk hyena. People on the sidewalk edged away. I went around telling the gag line to everyone I knew. Back home I painstakingly drew and redrew the cartoon until it was a perfect fit with the final gagline.

  That’s the typical evolution of one of my gags. And, as often happens, there was a by-product: the caveman gag.

  Spanking is out of fashion in liberal circles these days, which is a shame, because many kids are growing up without ever hearing that best of all bullshit clichés, “This is going to hurt me a lot more than it hurts you.” I drew many versions of that one before I settled on a rather elaborate, Rube Goldberg solution.

  That approach hadn’t worked, though, with a gag I had just finished for Forum. The situation was a patient in a doctor’s office and the cliché was “It hurts when I go like this.” I began with a machine like those Wile E. Coyote of Roadrunner fame builds to punish himself when he’s been stupid. A boot mounted on a stick kicks the patient when he pulls the string. But it seemed flat. I redrew the gag with the patient shooting a big pistol at himself, with the bullet flying through a cartoon door in his head. It was too cute, not gritty enough.

  The next attempt showed the patient flinging himself off the examination table, about to smash himself on the floor. That was better, but the gagline just didn’t call for something so oddball or neurotic. What finally worked was something more connected to ordinary human experience.

  The whole art of the gag is to give a “different” twist to the expected, the normal. Several people have told me, “Callahan, I laugh at your cartoons and at the same time I feel guilty for laughing.” The other day a guy introduced himself to me. He was a psychiatrist at the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center. He said, “I love your work,” and then added, “I’m a sick fuck too.”

  Some cartoonists wake up in the morning and say, “What a beautiful day—I think I’ll draw a desert-island gag.” I’m more likely to wake up in the morning and say, “What a beautiful day—I think I’ll draw an armless proctologist who has his patient bent over the examination table. I’ll have the doctor say, ‘I’m sure you’ll find my technique for rectal examination somewhat different in that I am gay and have no arms.’” So it seems natural to me that people hold up crucifixes to ward me off when I come down the street.

  I’m gifted with a natural “gag sense,” which allows me to invent twists that somehow reflect back on the original cliché. I love the old gag about the man in the electric chair. The warden hands him a roast and says, “Would you mind holding this? My wife’s oven is on the blink.” Of course I immediately felt compelled to top it.

  I agree with Sam Gross’s opinion that the purest cartoon is the sight gag. Sometimes sight gags get pretty complicated. In one of mine Jesus Christ is walking on the waters of Galilee, his eyes turned heavenward, a beatific expression on his face. But behind him in the boat Peter and the rest of the disciples are gesticulating frantically. For they can see what he can’t: floating in the water just in front of him is a banana peel.

  But a gag is always better if it’s simple enough to be “read” in one glance, like my Martian gag.

  I’m as much a writer as an artist, though, and for me generally the gag line comes first. In my apartment the TV is on all the time, like a respirator. One day an old Err
ol Flynn movie was on as I worked, and a line of dialogue floated into my consciousness: “Don’t be a fool, Billy!” I thought, Boy, there’s a fine old cliché.

  I try to keep the reader’s attention focused on the idea, not the image or the language. If a gag seems particularly strong, I draw it in a deliberately offhand, crude fashion to underline that strength. The contrast can be powerful. I have a friend who is very beautiful. But her beauty is given an exceptional power by the fact that she is in a wheelchair. Bob Dylan chose to sing the very powerful lyrics of “Don’t Think Twice” or “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a tired, scratchy voice backed by rudimentary guitar. I can draw beautifully if that’s what’s called for. But it almost never is. A clown’s job is to be grotesque, so he wears baggy pants and outsize shoes.

  In fact for a while I had a radio program in which I presented cartoons without any drawings at all. I’d say, “This is John Callahan with the cartoon of the day. There’s a cliff, and a blind man is being dragged over it by a little furry animal on a leash. And as he sails into space, he thinks, Why did I buy a seeing-eye lemming?” A good gag should be freestanding.

  But with drawing I can add another dimension, I can convey the nobility of the human animal caught in an oppressive world. My characters look round-shouldered, beaten, abused. There is shock and disillusionment in their eyes. They could be Kurtz, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, whispering, “The horror. The horror.” In my Crucifixion, Jesus underlines that aspect of humanity.

  Suicide is a powerful subject for comedy. But it is even more powerful if it is shown against a backdrop of ongoing, uncaring life. One of my “jumper” cartoons shows the act over, the poor guy splattered all over the sidewalk. An efficiency expert is passing with a clipboard and stopwatch.

  Comedy is the main weapon we have against “The Horror.” With it we can strike a blow at death itself. Or, at least, poke a hole in the pretentious notion that there is something dignified about it.

  Recently I have begun to do longer pieces—posters and two-to-four-page spreads that allow me to develop themes and characters. With the support of a local paper, The Clinton Street Quarterly, I have told the story of my disability in “The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life,” my alcoholism in “Callahan Unbottled,” and my sex life in “My Sexual Scrapbook,” as well as long treatments of adolescence and Catholicism. Doing these spreads is like producing and directing a small film. In fact one of them, “A Nuclear Christmas,” is now being considered for an animated short by a film company in England. They must have strong stomachs. In this parody of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” Santa is a mutant. He keeps losing limbs and growing new ones. “I’ve seventeen ears, and more that keep growing. The amount I’ll end up with, there’s no way of knowing.”

  “If you’d jumped off the seventh story instead of the twelfth you’d have achieved the same effect and saved 3.01 seconds.”

  The first of these features was drawn in response to Clinton Street Quarterly editor David Milholland’s request that I “Do something personal.” The idea to do something about my injury and the title came to me instantly. I more or less wrote the piece on a napkin in the café where we were talking.

  For it I developed a persona, a little guy with a guilty expression and hair that stands up in three unruly prongs that (unconsciously, I swear!) are not unlike Woody Woodpecker’s crest. He is dwarfed by everyone around him. Even his girlfriends are huge. Partly he’s me as I was as a kid, showing off even at age six as the stand-up comedian of the family and scandalizing them with an unvarnished takeoff of my grandfather’s alcoholic mannerisms. Partly, too, it’s me seeing the world at areola level from my wheelchair. In any event, I’m tall, and I don’t look guilty. I just finished a drawing of two paraplegics parked together on the sidewalk watching a tall man walk by. One says to the other, “You’ll never get me up there!” Partly the little guy, who turns up in most of these features, is all of us, dwarfed by all our problems and cowed by an endless supply of blowhards and bullies who want to tell us what to do.

  “Lighter Side” won some awards and attracted hundreds of letters and phone calls. I sent it to Penthouse, which by then had been publishing me for two years. They called me up. “We’d like to talk to Mr. Callahan. . . . You’ve got to be kidding! This is actually autobiographical? You are paralyzed?” I had never mentioned it to my clients. They bought the spread instantly, but three years later it is still being “held.”

  I am sometimes labeled as part of a Northwest school or movement in cartooning, comprising Lynda Barry, Gary Larsen, Matt Groening, Jim Blashfield, and Bill Plympton, among others. Sometimes the list is extended to include writers, notably Todd Grimson and Katherine Dunn, whose wit is also more than a little macabre. Something about these gray, misty mornings, maybe, infuses our work with a grim but hilarious tone. It has also been suggested that living here, far from the trendoids of New York or L.A., we are like a bunch of exiles, looking in at America from the outside.

  I don’t know about all that. I view my career as having passed through three periods. First came my “black” period. Then as I developed, I entered a “black” period. Now my horizons have widened, and I feel myself to have passed through to a third or “black” period. God knows what comes next.

  TODAY MY MIND resembles a Venus’s-flytrap, always poised and ready. If a gag even comes close, I snap shut on it, and I exclude nothing. At the moment I am obsessed with the millions on our planet who are literally starving. I won’t leave this alone. I bedevil the food neuroses of the affluent: “The Anorexic Café—Now Closed 24 Hours A Day.” Or the two bulimic girls walking along the sidewalk: “No wonder you feel bad! You haven’t thrown up anything all day.” Even harder-hitting is the gag about the day they delivered planeloads of Chinese food to Ethiopia, and everybody was hungry again an hour later. Now that’s a concept worthy of Sam Gross! I’m working on it. Frankly I don’t care if gags like that get me run out of town by a mob with pitchforks and torches, or if they pin a medal on me.

  Not that I am insensitive to criticism, far from it. I’ve been worried for days about a letter to the editor that was just printed in a Tallahassee, Florida, paper that carries my work. The writer identified himself as director of community relations for a local hospital.

  Editor:

  Regarding the drawing by “Callahan” in which the leader of a posse somewhere in the desert comes upon an empty wheelchair and says to his cohorts, “Don’t worry, he won’t get far on foot” . . .

  I’ll call it a drawing instead of a cartoon because “cartoon” implies or promises comedy or satire. And I’ll call it insensitive and thoughtless, since instead of any humor, the drawing in a few scrawled strokes tries to undermine all the remarkable good that’s been accomplished in the past several years toward better understanding of, respect for, facilities for, and opportunities for the handicapped and physically disabled.

  “Callahan” owes several million people in this country an apology. . . .

  Sorry, folks.

  Chapter 9

  In the early 1980s, toward the age of twenty-nine, I was beginning to see the possibility of making a sober, middle-class living in the profession of my choice. Solvency and self-respect were just around the corner . . . or would have been except for one tiny catch: I was not allowed to keep any of the money I made. Not a dime.

  Not long after my accident, while I was still in rehabilitation at Rancho Hospital, I received an insurance settlement of about $100,000. Half of that went as a reimbursement to MediCal; the other half, paid in installments, supplemented the tiny Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits to which I was entitled, as an ex-worker. So I was able to stay off Welfare for five years.

  Even drunk, I husbanded that money as long as I could. Maybe I sensed what was coming. The day I joined the ranks of Welfare clients was, ominously, also the day my used van finally gave up the ghost. Now I’d never be able to afford another.

  Growing up in The Dalle
s, true redneck country, I couldn’t help but assimilate the prevailing negative attitude toward Welfare. The word bums was always appended. I had just begun to enjoy the psychological freedom that came from settling some major life issues: alcohol addiction, parentage, career. Now I was to enter another form of total dependence. Not only that, but I quickly discovered that the Welfare system tends to make everyone concerned feel like a victim. Not only the clients, but also the caseworkers and administrators feel they are being “had.” No matter how well meaning they may be at the start, all concerned tend to become hostile and embittered. I was no exception.

  My SSDI entitlement was just over $600 a month. According to Welfare, that was too princely a sum. They required me to hand over $200 a month as a partial reimbursement for the $800 I was allotted for daily and weekend attendants. My rent, for a small one-bedroom, ground-floor apartment, consumed a further $325. The $75 that remained was real whoopee money. All I had to make it cover were electricity, phone, groceries, clothing, drawing supplies, envelopes, postage, copying, haircuts, dental bills other than emergency ones, and food for my cat.

  Every month Alex or Lou and I would sit at the kitchen table and try to decide what combination of rice, beans, ramen noodles, potatoes and day-old bread would last the longest with the least damage to my system. I can remember, one month when we miscalculated, having to live for several days on outdated liverwurst spread, eaten straight out of the plastic wrapper.