The Funnies

It was nearly quarter to one when I pulled into the driveway at Bobby’s house. The device he had given me to open the garage door was bulky and crude, considering the general level of immaculate newness in the house. It had three large green buttons on it, each the size and shape of dominoes, and looked like something the Army would use to detonate explosives in the desert. I pressed each of the three buttons and nothing happened. I pressed harder. A light blinked on and a sound issued from the garage like a piece of heavy road machinery; the door rumbled slowly up on metal tracks.

Inside the house, no lights burned. Moonlight guided me to a guest bedroom, where I assumed I would be staying. Nancy (or someone) had put fresh white sheets on the bed and stacked several salmon-colored bath towels at its foot, along with matching hand towels and washcloths. The walls were covered with beige carpeting.

There was a nightstand next to the bed. I flopped myself across the comforter, making a tremendous squeak and upsetting the stack of towels, and pulled open the drawer: nothing. I was mildly surprised, having half-expected a Gideon’s Bible and a little pile of hotel stationery. It was the latter that I wanted.

I crept back into the hall. Bedsprings creaked behind a door: Bobby and Nancy? Sam? In the kitchen, I opened and closed drawers, looking for paper and a pen in the light of the digital microwave oven timer. I found both under the telephone, and a small safety envelope. Back in the guest room I undressed and got into the bed. The sheets had been tucked tightly under the mattress, and I left them that way, letting myself be sandwiched between them. It felt like I was lying at the bottom of a shallow sea. I propped my head up on the pillows and examined my implements: the pen was a black ballpoint with UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT stamped on it and the pad, perhaps a bit small for my needs, had the punchline from a lightbulb joke printed at the bottom of each page. I looked for the joke setups but didn’t find any.

Dear Susan,

I’m sorry, although I don’t really know what I’m apologizing for. That doesn’t mean I don’t think I’ve let you down somehow, because I have the feeling I did, I just am not sure how. If I seemed funny after the movie last week, maybe it was because I was a little drunk & tired and wasn’t sure exactly what was going on. But I know I don’t like this not talking, business-relationship thing, and I’m guessing you don’t either, so one way or another we should see a little more of each other.

So far so good. I went to gnaw on the pen when I noticed it had been heavily gnawed on already. It took some serious biting to make those kind of marks in hard plastic, I knew from experience. Were they Bobby’s? Nancy’s? Sam’s? It was hard to tell, in this house, where one of them ended and the next began, so uniform was the overall effect. I imagined they would all be embarrassed to know that I was using their Federal Government pen and gag paper.

I wish I could describe the way I’m feeling lately. Something like going to church when you’re Jewish. Or eating dog food. Things don’t seem to fit. There are things I feel I ought to be doing instead of this, but I don’t know what they are. Maybe I’m a little old to be having this problem. Whatever, I keep doing it, because it’s new and different, even though I’m kind of repulsed.

That was all wrong, “repulsed.” Might she think I was talking about her? I paused a moment and realized that I might as well have been, though she didn’t repulse me, not in the vernacular sense, anyway, the sick-to-one’s-stomach sense. It was more like an empirical repulsion, the repulsion of two magnets aligned with like poles facing. Maybe all that was necessary to make the magnets do what they were supposed to was flip one around. Me. But I couldn’t. Did I want her in that way? Did I want a new girlfriend? I suppose I did. Those people who said they didn’t want a relationship right now because they had just come off a bad one were lying. They wanted one even more than before.

I gnawed on the pen after all: we were family. Here I was thinking about Susan, about us. It all seemed too much to expect, love, success. Happiness. I had none of them right now and would gladly settle for just one. The bottom of the page read: Two. One to change the lightbulb and the other to change it back.

It was Samantha, standing in my doorway, wearing pajamas with pieces of watermelon printed on them. “Hi,” I said, whispered actually, to avoid waking Bobby and Nancy. “Did I wake you up when I came back?”

“No.” She stepped in, carefully, as if into a flower bed, and shut the door behind her. “I never sleep.”

“Sure,” I said, curling my legs up under me. She climbed on and sat cross-legged next to the fallen towels. I thought she had some piece to speak, but she didn’t speak it, so I said, “What do you do? When you’re awake?”

She shrugged. “Think. Make up people. Sometimes I read books. Grandpa gave me a little flashlight. Before he died.”

She looked away, toward the blank black window, and sighed. “What are you doing?”

“To your girlfriend,” she told me flatly, obviously bored with the idea already.

“Not exactly.” I twirled the pen in my hand for a few seconds. “Samantha, how are things around here? Is your dad okay? Your mom?”

“Ah.” As with Bobby, I was running out of conversation topics. What do you say to a six-year-old? I began to get anxious that Bobby would find her here, and read something sinister or perverted into our meeting.

“Can I come visit you and Uncle Pierce?” she said. She unfolded the washcloth and put it on her head, not in a silly way but reverentially, like an old lady in church. “Maybe over school vacation. Maybe for Christmas.”

This jolted me. Christmas! With my brother, at home! Not to mention Thanksgiving, Labor Day. Holidays with Pierce and Mom, opening her gifts, holding them up to her inscrutable eyes. “Sure,” I said. “Any time.”

“Well, I have to draw cartoons. And you’d have to ask your mom and dad…”

She took off the washcloth and dropped it on the pile. “Yeah, yeah,” she said, and slid off the bed. I felt jilted, as if by a lover.

She turned, ran back, stretched out to me and gave me a kiss. “Sleepy dreams,” she said, and hurried out the door.

In the morning everybody ate cold cereal. The options were dumbfounding: every sugar-rich concoction under the sun, each represented by a jolly mascot. I ate the cereal formerly known as Super Sugar Crisp, which in this enlightened age had become Super Golden Crisp, its public image transformed from cheesy harbinger of tooth decay to precious Incan artifact. My mouth ached, but I scooped out every last drop of cloying milk. Looking around the table, I could see the same expression of awe on everyone’s face; it was the only moment of unqualified joy I had witnessed under this roof.

My letter was finished, sealed and stamped, thanks to a booklet of self-adhesive American flags I’d found in the kitchen drawer; I left some change for the postage, feeling I’d taken enough already. Now the letter was in the pocket of my jeans, awaiting a mailbox.

After breakfast, I thanked Nancy. She nodded gravely, her eyes still luminous from the sugar high. I kissed Sam on the cheek and she accepted with grace. “Tell Uncle Pierce hi,” she said.

“Tell him I love him!” This was irony, something I’d never before heard from Sam, but which seemed to fit. Nancy and Bobby didn’t recognize it as such. Expressions of unease overpowered their faces.

Bobby drove me back to the hotel. He was strangely chatty. I wondered if he was always like this mornings, before the day defeated him. “Too bad you can’t come to the plant. I ought to show you around sometime.”

In fact, there was no reason I couldn’t go, except that I hadn’t been asked. “That would be great.”

“Show you the sterile radiating units, they’re something else. Had to order them special from Switzerland. And the shredder, which actually is called the homogenizing refuse deintegrator, but we call it the shredder.”

“Oh, it’s all perfectly airtight, perfectly clean. Smells like a doctor’s office in there, no kidding.”

“Like a trip to the doctor’s,” he said, apparently to himself. We were silent for a while.

“I know you think it’s the right thing. But you’re only doing it for yourself, to feel good about yourself. That’s no reason to take an old lady away from the place where she‘ll be safe.”

I wondered if Bobby had really looked at the nursing home. The degeneration of people’s bodies, the madness, the unrelenting smell of urine. I said, “Well, that’s food for thought.”

We had come to the hotel. A woman with antennae walked into the revolving door with a man in a robot suit. Bobby didn’t appear to notice.

I got out of the car, straining to come up with a response. “Right on,” I told him, and shut the door. The sound it made was quiet as a breath.

I was among the first to arrive for my panel. To my surprise, there was a name placard already in place for me, along with three others: Bennett Koch, Lynn Bismarck and Ken Dorn.

I actually did an authentic double-take. Ken Dorn? I didn’t think he’d ever had his own strip before. The other people I knew of only vaguely: Koch’s strip, “Pangaea,” had a lot of cute dinosaurs in it, and Bismarck’s was one of those serial soap-opera things, the kind that now invariably looked like Roy Lichtenstein paintings, I forgot the name.

But Ken Dorn! I began to get a creepy feeling, like he’d been planted. I entertained the notion that he had somehow replaced me without my knowing: had I been betrayed by the Burn Syndicate’s corporate honchos? Or by the woman I possibly sort of loved? I took the sealed letter from my pocket and turned it over in my hands. I felt like a fool, and thought about tearing it to pieces.

He was beginning to grow a tiny mustache and goatee, and had gotten his hair shaved closer to his head. “I’d imagine you’re brimming over with insights from your training, mmm?”

“Don’t know? You haven’t taken any notes?” He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small stack of 3x5 note cards, fastened with a rubber band. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this. The issues are compelling indeed.”

“So what strip have you taken over?” I said, trying to sting him. He looked off into the air, though, and crossed his arms in a pose of mock contemplation.

“Oh, I’ve taken over the inking for a few. But I’m most interested in taking over full creative control.” He raised his eyebrows and turned to me, grinning. “Someday, that is.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, crossing my own arms. I was almost a full foot taller than Ken Dorn. Push him over, I thought.

“I was talking to Ray the other day, and he seemed quite impressed with my drawings. I didn’t have anything prepared, of course, but it was no trouble dashing off a few sketches…”

“Yes, Ray Burn. A good man, wouldn’t you say, Timmy? What did you talk about the last time you saw him?”

I cleared my throat. Dorn leaned back and plucked from a chair a glazed donut and a cup of orange juice. “Well,” I said, “he told me I’m the sentimental favorite.”

Dorn took a large bite of donut, laughing from behind his closed lips. “So you are,” he said, chewing. “So you are.”

“These?” he said, holding out the donut and juice. “There was a table in the hall. Participants only!”

Everyone seemed to have donuts and juice but me, and if there had been a table in the hall, it was gone now. I stood helpless among the conventioneers, squinting into various rooms. Finally I gave up and was turning to take my place in the Green Room when I saw him at last: Art Kearns.

Kearns was being escorted by a jowly middle-aged woman wearing an “Art’s Kids” T-shirt. He clenched her arm with one hand and a scuffed wooden cane with the other. Both hands, along with the rest of Art Kearns, were shaking. He was a large man, even in this sad, crumpled state, still bearing the profile of the Wyoming cowboy he was said to have been before he became famous. He wore a white shirt and bolo tie, and a pair of dirty black jeans; his head was nearly bare, with a little red knoll of blotchy skin poking up through his hair. He was blinking, blinking, blinking his eyes, as if something tiny and painful was lodged under both lids.

He and the woman moved slowly, and they commanded much of the hallway’s attention. A few people even set down their donuts and juice to quietly applaud. As they passed me, Kearns raised his head and his eyes met mine. He winked. I couldn’t help grinning.

Ben Koch had two donuts, but didn’t offer one to me. Lynn Bismarck had only juice. Dorn was finished eating. He and I sat next to each other at one end of the table, while Koch and Bismarck chatted animatedly like college freshmen, obviously falling for one another.

“Well, I’ll just have to ask my mother if she knows her. Do you get back much?”

Dorn was oblivious to them, transfixed upon his notes. I tried to peek at them, but his handwriting was indecipherable: thin lines of what looked like chocolate ice cream sprinkles. Several times he laughed privately or raised his eyebrows. I watched the room fill up and wondered if Tyro would come, until I remembered he was drawing and signing in the Blue Room. It was difficult to imagine him doing such a thing.

Koch had the gavel. He whacked it happily on the table, paused a moment to giggle with Lynn, then announced in a loud voice, “Welcome, everyone, to ‘Taking Over the Old Strips.’” People clapped. He introduced Lynn and her strip, then Ken Dorn, “who has helped produce some of our finest work for over fifteen years.” Dorn nodded. “And at my left,” Koch said, “is, I believe, Tim Mix, who you all know as Timmy in the Family Funnies. Let’s give him a hand.”

People clapped, harder than they did for Dorn. I raised my hand, scanning the crowd for a familiar face. Thus distracted, I stopped waving a few seconds too late.

“Now,” said Koch, “let me introduce our topic.” He went on at length about the cartoonist’s responsibility to his legacy, that perhaps an inherited strip is at best shared with the deceased. He pointed up the need to be honest about making people laugh. “Or cry,” he said. “Emotions are serious business. People depend on their funnies. So. There you have it. Does anyone have a question?”

“Uh, sure,” I said. “Go on.” My meek voice boomed out across the crowd and I pulled back a little from the mike and cleared my throat.

“Uh, not really. I don’t think of it as me, really. Timmy’s just, you know, a kid. I’m, uh, an adult.”

A brief mumble, like a spattering of rain. Then I watched as a large man hauled himself to his feet in the fifth row, pulling up his overalls as if he were about to go out and slop the hogs. His arm pistoned into the air. Ben Koch pointed the gavel at him.

“Tim,” the man said, “now you know there’s a cartoonists’ union, isn’t there? Are you a member of it?”

Silence. Cartoonists’ union? “Uh, no,” I said, “not yet. But I’m not actually going to start the strip until…”

“And isn’t it true your father was never a union man? If I got it right, a few people weren’t exactly disappointed your old man, ah, wasn’t able to make it to this weekend’s festivities.”

My head began a mild, plaintive ache. Voices simmered up across the room, and the man’s voice carried over them. “A lot of people here would rather see a union man take over, see, especially since your dad wasn’t particularly known for hiring from the union. Or from anywhere at all, for that matter. He was, whadyacallit, an outsider, wouldn’t you say?”

“Sir, sir,” came Dorn’s voice from beside me, “ladies and gentlemen, please. Let’s not gang up on our young man, yes? I’m sure Tim has considered all these important issues, haven’t you, Tim?” He laid his hand on my shoulder and patted, gently.

“I think we ought to take this opportunity—a great classic’s change of hands—to discuss what must be done, what we must do, to perpetuate the great tradition of the funnies.” A dull snap as the rubber band came off his stack of note cards. “Let us consider the Family Funnies’ place in the canon of daily strips, namely, its role in establishing and solidifying those values the American family holds dear…”

And he was off, dodging and parrying probing questions in my defense, explaining how the Family Funnies was written and why it was written that way, and what he would do—in the unlikely event he would draw it—to keep its feet planted firmly on virtuous ground. It was a crock of shit, but I was dead in my seat, all resolve evaporated. The large man was gone, slipped away in the commotion. Lynn and Ben whispered sweet nothings to each other, their snacks left unfinished. And Ken Dorn held the floor, a self-taught expert on my comic strip.

When it was all over, I bummed a cigarette and found a back door to slither out through. I wondered what I thought I was doing, why I had thrown away a perfectly reasonable, if imperfect, life to act out this elaborate failure. The cigarette tasted awful, as a cigarette does when employed as a side dish to a generous helping of self-pity.

It didn’t take me long to spy Dorn lurking next to a dumpster at the other end of the building, handing something to the large man from the Green Room. They finished their transaction and parted. The man got into a pickup truck, and Dorn ducked back into the hotel through a green steel door.

twenty-five