Generations and Other True Stories (24 page)

There are thousands of families like us from many parts of rural America. Our exodus from the countryside happened all of a sudden, during the life span of a single, still-not-old generation—we who were the children in the Tabernacle during the great war that changed everything. And as our land has emptied, the little towns that lived to serve us have shriveled.

The Carlton of my childhood had a cotton gin and a feed mill, two grocery stores, a blacksmith shop, three gas stations, a laundry, a feed store, a barber shop, a Masonic lodge, a beauty shop, a telephone office, a variety store, a post office, a doctor, and a drugstore. On a hill on the edge of the town stood the two-story stone schoolhouse where I went to first grade and my grandmother Gibson taught for many years. My great-grandfather's name—I. J. Gibson—was on the cornerstone.

But the school is shut down now. Its last class graduated in 1969. Of downtown Carlton, only one business—the grocery store that belonged to Hob Thompson—survives. The Tabernacle no longer stands amidst the churches. One of the churches—the Methodist—is dead. The others are fading shadows of the robust congregations they used to be. Their
spizerinctum
is gone. If the Tabernacle still stood, and if there were to be a revival, no mothers with babies would be there, and no children playing hide-and-seek among the cars. No young sinners would be moving down the aisle toward their salvation.

Only a few dozen people remain in the town that used to be home to hundreds. Nearly all of them are old. As they depart, their places won't be filled by newcomers or new generations. Soon Carlton—like Sunshine and Honey Grove and Fairy and Altman and Alexander and the other rural communities that time already has wiped from the countryside—will live only in the memories of a few old people, and then they'll die, too.

In 1986, the sesquicentennial year of the Republic of Texas, the remaining citizens of Carlton collected the memories of many families who used to live there and in the countryside around, and compiled them into a book. In it, Betty Jo Fine McKenney, a woman of my mother's generation, wrote of her grandson, who lives in a city: “I have taken him to Carlton and shown him the names on the graves at the cemetery and explained to him how it was at one time, in the hope that we can pass it on to another generation.”

My own sons were born in 1969 and 1971. They've always lived in cities. One day when they were small, I was telling them some of the things that I've told here, and one of them said: “You sound like you lived in pioneer days.” To children born after men had walked on the moon, boys who flew in airplanes when they were infants and studied computers along with their spelling and multiplication tables, these memories
are
of “pioneer days”—a time when Texas and America were younger, fresher, simpler, and less crowded than they are now. Even so, those days aren't yet past memory, and the bitter words of the Old Testament's Preacher needn't be let to come true:

“There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of later things yet to happen among those who come after.”

Those who come after should at least hear the echoes and see the shadows.

1992

To those who view life in a slightly skewed way—which, in my opinion, is the only sane way to look at it—the retirement of Gary Larson and the end of his daily newspaper cartoon
, The Far Side,
is a major calamity. So the guy is tired and also filthy rich. Big deal. He had no business leaving us to the likes of
Nancy
and
Peanuts
and
Family Circus.

After this piece ran, I spent weeks listening to long stories about other people's nightmares
.

A Far-Gone Conclusion

For years I suffer a recurring nightmare: I'm sitting in a college classroom, about to take a final exam in organic chemistry. Suddenly I realize: I haven't attended a single lecture in this course! I've never opened the textbook! I know nothing about the subject of this exam! And it's
too late to drop the course
!

Then I wake up in a sweat.

So one morning I see a cartoon in my newspaper: A classroom full of academic-looking people—professors, apparently—each holding a duck in his lap. Another professor, standing before them on a stage, is holding a duck under his arm. But in the midst of the crowd of duck-holders is a man with large, panic-filled eyes.

The caption reads: “Suddenly, Professor Liebowitz realizes he has come to the seminar without his duck.”

A cartoon about my nightmare!

I laugh and laugh. Seeing my subconscious deep-night terror taken to such absurdity places the world and my life into a refreshingly bearable new perspective.

Does the cartoon cure me of my recurring nightmare? Of course not. I still dream the thing about once a month. But now, when I wake up, I think of ducks.

And there's that other cartoon, captioned “The Elephant's Nightmare”: An elephant is seated at a grand piano on a stage before a large audience, his eyes bulging with fear. He's thinking: “What am I doing here? I can't play this thing! I'm a
flutist
, for crying out loud!”

I have that dream, too. I'm sitting at a piano on the stage at Ed Landreth Auditorium at Texas Christian University, a contestant in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. Jackie Kennedy Onassis is in the audience. And
I don't know how to play the piano!

I wake up thinking of elephants.

These are common nightmares. Many people have them. They're about the world we live in.

The world—the American part of it—is divided into two parts: Those who attach clippings of
Family Circus
and
Peanuts
to their bulletin boards and refrigerator doors, and those who hang up
The Far Side
.

The former group lives in the delusion that the world is a warm, fuzzy, safe, sweet-smelling place that makes sense; that people are good; that dogs and children are cute and harmless; that love conquers all; that right will prevail.

The latter group knows better. Our world—the real world—is full of terror and night sweats. Danger lurks just outside our peripheral vision, ready to pounce, and we're unprepared and helpless. It's a world not far from
The Far Side
, inhabited by scoundrels, bunglers, monsters, nerds, insects, and cows, where evil and incompetence (an innocuous-looking form of evil) are determined to do us in. We know that, eventually, they will.

The only sane thing to do in the face of such a world is laugh.

Gary Larson has been helping us do that since January 1, 1980, when
The Far Side
made its debut in the
San Francisco Chronicle. A
few months later, it was offered to other newspapers through syndication. Since then,
The Far Side
has run every day in as many as nineteen hundred newspapers. It has been translated into seventeen languages. Mr. Larson's small cluster of followers has grown to multitudes. He has amassed a fortune from the sale of nineteen
Far Side
books (twenty-eight million copies in print so far) and calendars, greeting cards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs bearing imprints of his cartoons.

Oddly, he didn't grow up dreaming of being a cartoonist. He was clerking in a music store, he writes in
The PreHistory of The Far Side
, a sort of autobiography and
apologia
, when one day “the sky seemed to suddenly open up over my head and a throng of beautiful angels came flying down and swirled around me. In glorious, lilting tones, their voices rang out, ‘You haaaaate your job, you haaaaaate your job.…' And then they left.”

Mr. Larson took a couple of days off. Sitting at the kitchen table, pondering the angelic visitation, he began to draw. “I never studied art other than the required classes in grade school and junior high,” he writes. “My love was science—specifically biology and, more specifically, when placed in a common jar, which of two organisms would devour the other.”

From Mr. Larson's love of biology came the snakes, spiders, insects, crocodiles, gorillas, wolves, lions, deer, gazelles, rhinoceroses, fish, fleas, zebras, dinosaurs, amoebas, bears, penguins, slugs, elephants, sharks, whales, buffalo, aardvarks, butterflies, buzzards, earthworms, mammoths, porcupines, and squids that inhabit
The Far Side
. And scientists have acknowledged him as one of their own. Mr. Larson's drawings of these uncute, uncuddly creatures have been exhibited at such scientific places as the Denver Museum of Natural History, Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon.
Strigiphilus garylarsoni
, a biting louse, was named in his honor.

There are domestic fauna in Mr. Larson's cartoons, too—dogs, cats, sheep, horses, ducks, chickens. And his trademark cows, which entered Mr. Larson's life in 1980, only a few months after
The Far Side
began. One day he drew a cartoon of a cow trying to pole vault, clotheslining herself on the bar. Nearby, a cat is playing a fiddle and saying to an onlooker: “We've still got a couple of years before we're ready for the moon.”

“When I finished [drawing the cartoon],” Mr. Larson writes, “I sat back and stared at my little creation. Something moved me. This was
more
than just a cow—this was an entire
career
I was looking at.”

People inhabit
The Far Side
, too—Neanderthals, Indians, cowboys, Tarzan, farmers, fishermen, nagging housewives, the Lone Ranger, nerdy children, Eskimos, Dr. Frankenstein, hunters, medieval torturers and their victims, Captain Ahab, explorers in pith helmets, and, of course, scientists in lab coats, one of whom is Albert Einstein. Satan appears from time to time. Also, space aliens and, occasionally, God.

Whatever their genus, species, or planet of origin, all
Far Side
creatures behave pretty much alike. Whether as predator or as prey, their thoughts and actions are reprehensible, disgusting, incompetent, or stupid.

A family of Holsteins poses for a picture at the Grand Canyon. One calf holds up its hoof behind the head of the other.

A bespectacled female gorilla (
Far Side
wives always wear ugly eyeglasses) is grooming her mate and accuses him: “Well, well—another blond hair.…Conducting a little more ‘research' with that Jane Goodall tramp?” The guilty look on the male's face suggests he is.

A dog, sitting in front of his doghouse, reads a book titled
1001 Ways to Skin a Cat
. A cat, perched in a nearby tree, reads a book titled
Why Every Dog Should be Euthanized
.

A steer, sitting with a group of cowboys around a campfire, betrays his fellow kine, saying: “A few cattle are going to stray off in the morning, and tomorrow night a stampede is planned around midnight. Look, I gotta get back…. Remember, when we reach Santa Fe, I ain't slaughtered.”

The brave defenders of the Alamo are lined along the top of the wall, firing at the enemy. Below, a nerdish vendor peddles T-shirts imprinted: “I kicked Santa Anna's butt at the Alamo.” On his sign, the price has been slashed from $3.95 to $2.95 to $1.00.

Such a vision offends some people. Some call it bizarre. Some call it macabre. Some believe
The Far Side
warps the minds of our tender young. But for fifteen years, millions of clear-eyed realists who know we really
do
live in a boa-constrictor-swallows-pig world have counted on Mr. Larson to provide us a prophylactic laugh before we take that dangerous step outside our doors each morning.

Now it's over. After a-cartoon-every-day deadlines for all those years, Mr. Larson says he's tired. He's hanging up his pen and ink while he's still at the top of his form.

But he's only forty-four. What will he do with the rest of his life? Being a recluse, Mr. Larson isn't saying. His syndicate says everybody wanted an interview with him, so he decided not to talk to anybody. Maybe he'll just watch TV. Maybe he'll go on drawing his creatures in secret and stash them in a cave for some future generation to find, like the Dead Sea Scrolls. Maybe he'll open the restaurant that he once told a reporter he wanted to start. One that would serve nothing but cereal, and “You'd, like, have the special of the day be Rice Chex or something. And you'd offer a variety of milk from whole to 2 percent to skim.”

Well, Mr. Larson, whatever you're up to, happy new year. You've really screwed up ours.

I feel a nightmare coming on.

HE CAME FROM A SEEMINGLY NORMAL FAMILY

On August 15, 1950, in Tacoma, Washington, Vern and Doris Larson became the parents of a baby named Gary. Vern, a car salesman, and Doris, a secretary, seemed average, middle-class American folks. But before long, their baby was harboring a monkey, several lizards, and a number of snakes, including a boa constrictor, on the Larson homestead and was recruiting his brother Dan to help him turn the back yard into a swamp. Vern and Doris apparently encouraged, or at least tolerated, this.

After high school, Gary enrolled in Washington State University at Pullman, majoring in communications, inexplicably preparing himself for a career in advertising. He graduated in 1972, but never did a lick of advertising. He became half of a jazz banjo duet and, later, got a job clerking at a music store. It was there that he received the visitation of angels described in the accompanying article. After he quit the music store, he got a job as an investigator for the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Driving to work his first day on the job, he ran over a dog.

One day, Gary dashed off six cartoons, took them to a wilderness magazine in Seattle and sold them for ninety dollars. Encouraged by the promise of great wealth, he kept drawing and soon was publishing a daily cartoon called
Nature's Way
in the
Seattle Times
. The newspaper canceled him after a year because of reader complaints about his weirdness. Gary didn't mind, because he had just returned from a vacation in San Francisco, during which he had sold his cartoon to the
San Francisco Chronicle
, which soon syndicated it.