The Funnies (16 page)

Paul Crumb brought us our pancakes. I smiled perfunctorily, Bitty generously. Paul didn't smile back. I smothered the pancakes with syrup and took a bite. They were not entirely unappealing, tasting one moment like a breath of spring air, the next like a sofa cushion.

We couldn't speak while eating, so I listened to the other people around us. To my right, two women were having what sounded like a business lunch. After a few minutes, it became clear that one was giving the other a color analysis, the kind that helped you get dressed in the morning. Are you a Winter? A Summer? I stole a few glances at the women. They were regular, thirtyish people, sort of attractive. Both were utterly rapt. The customer turned out to be an Autumn. “No offense,” said the analyst—whose clothes, I thought, were ill-fitting and strangely colored—“but that outfit is all wrong for you.” The customer nodded, looking down at her clothes as if she had just spilled something gluey and slightly toxic on herself.

For a minute I wanted to get up and stop them. I wanted to tell the customer woman that she looked fine and that there was no reason to pay for the other woman's advice.
Shame on you
, I wanted to tell the analyst. But it became clear that they were both perfectly happy and having a good time, and it was none of my business. My mouth clogged up with pancake and I swallowed hard, suddenly lonely. I thought about my frequent breakfasts out with Amanda, and the great time we invariably had at them. I wondered what she was having for lunch: probably nothing. She didn't eat when she was under stress.

Bitty paid our bill. It felt strange, accepting this from her; I used to buy her ice cream with the money I made raking yards, in exchange for her doing the household chores I was responsible for. But I had no money of my own, not until the strip was officially mine. I felt like the ne‘er-do-well prince of a deposed royal family.

We went to the multiplex outside town to see
Benny II
, the movie Bitty had been looking forward to. It was a strange movie, apparently the sequel to a popular film about a dolphin, which I hadn't seen. The main character, a marine biologist named James, had been a boy in the first movie, and had been saved by the dolphin, Benny, in some kind of sea disaster; now he was involved in a righteous plot to sabotage a Japanese tuna boat known for its inhumane treatment of dolphins. Benny was recruited for the cause, and led other dolphins in a salvo of head-butting against the ship, saving James and his new girlfriend, who had been captured by the greedy fishermen. Benny was a friendly and clever animal. His motives seemed far purer than humans'. As the credits rolled, Bitty's body shook with sobs. At first I thought she had broken down, and would soon reveal to me some awful personal problem, or talk to me about our father, but as we got up to leave I realized she had been moved by
Benny II
.

Out in the parking lot, we couldn't find the car. People were everywhere. For the life of me I couldn't recall any landmark we'd parked near, and neither could Bitty. We decided to go into the mall the theater was part of, in the hope that the crowd would thin out. We found a slatted bench next to a huge fake ficus tree and sat down.

“Nice ficus,” Bitty said. “Are you bored?”

“Oh, no,” I lied.

“I am.”

I watched a child drag his mother into a video game arcade. “You can't play the beat-ups,” the mother said.

“What was your wedding like?” I asked Bitty.

She shrugged. “We went down to Atlantic City. Mike wanted to be married by a sea captain.”

“In Atlantic City?”

“Well, we didn't find one. We got married by a justice of the peace. He took us out onto a pier.” She sighed. “I love the shore.”

“I haven't been for ages,” I said.

“Well, it was a little cold, the water. But we went in.” She dug into her purse and pulled out a cigarette. I didn't know she smoked. Then she said, “Do you think Rose hates me?”

“I doubt it. I mean, I don't know. How would I know that?”

“She treated me funny at the funeral.”

“Maybe she hates us all.”

“Maybe,” Bitty said. “We go up to Newark Sundays to eat dinner with Mike's family. They laugh and joke and have a good time.” She looked at me, holding the cigarette in the air like a question. “We never did that. Even when we weren't eating. I mean, I'm not stupid, I know that other families are different, but you know, I just sit there getting more and more pissed off at them. I want to tell them, ‘Shut up! All of you shut up!' They're smug, is what they are.”

“And Rose?”

She smoked. “We invited them over for dinner. Andrew, specifically. And this look came over him, like, Oh, Jesus, I want to say yes but Rose is going to be pissed. And sure enough: he comes back to us later saying, I don't think we'll be able to make it.”

“Poor guy,” I said.

She shook her head. “No, he loves her. They have each other, I mean. He's a nice person and all, Tim, but he doesn't care if they get chummy with us or not.”

“It's that important to you?”

“Actually, yes, it is. Mike has his brothers and uncles. I want a sister. It's not a hell of a lot to ask.”

“It's a lot to ask of Rose.”

“No kidding.” She seemed disappointed by the cigarette and, finding no ashtrays, put it out in the giant ficus pot. “The last of my college friends has left Jersey. There's nobody to hang around with.”

“What about Mike?”

“Mike's Mike. He's a smart guy, but he acts dumb around his dumb friends and their dumb wives. I get lonelier around them than I do alone.”

“Have more lunches with me,” I said.

She smiled. “Yeah, okay. How lonely are you?”

“Lonely.”

“We all are, aren't we? Pierce, duh, no kidding. But Rose and all that hate, hate, forget, forget, and Bobby, with his rules. I bet fucking Bobby's like taking a driving lesson.”

“I wouldn't know.”

She stood up and kicked my shin. “Like I would,” she said.

* * *

We found the car about forty feet from the front door of the theater. While the AC cooled down we split the rest of Bitty's candy bar. It was extremely soft and got on our hands, and we sat licking them off and listening to the radio. I felt like we had made a breakthrough: or, more precisely, we discovered that there had been nothing to break through besides our own apathy and/or laziness. When she dropped me off we kissed each other's cheeks.

I wanted to call someone, to tell them what I'd done, though I understood that to most people, having lunch with a sibling was a negligible accomplishment. Even so, my appetite for conversation had been whetted. I picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone, hoping someone might occur to me. No one did, though.

My cleaning jag had left me feeling jittery and unfulfilled, so I spent the rest of the afternoon purging the studio: though I'd had the windows cracked open for days, it still had the same musty ripeness my father had left in it. I took the car-washing supplies from the garage—rags, sponges, a stiff brush misshapen by years spent jammed into the corner of a box—and filled a bucket with warm soapy water.

The first few items were hard to throw away, but after that it was easy. I filled a garbage bag and a half with old newspapers, food containers and xeroxed pages from books. I crawled around on the floor and pulled the dusty corpses of pencils and pens from under the baseboard heaters. I threw the empty bottles into a box for the recycling center.

In the end, the source of the smell turned up under the drafting table, pushed all the way to the wall: a china dinner plate covered with cigar ends and ash. I emptied this into a trash bag and washed the plate. Then I crawled back under to see what else was there.

To my surprise, it was this: 35-15-24, the combination to my father's safe. I found it written on a piece of masking tape, curled upon itself in a gray snarl of dust and hair; I only noticed it because it stuck to my finger as I tried to throw it out. Maybe it had been fixed to the underside of the desk.

I tried the combination in vain several times without success. To fiddie with the dial I had to crouch, and my Achilles tendons stretched themselves out to an unnatural length, giving me the feeling that my feet might snap off at any moment. Was this an ailment common to thieves, safecracker's ankle? Finally the tumblers clicked in an expectant way, and when I tugged at the handle the door swung silently open, as if by magic. I lowered my butt to the floor and peered inside. There wasn't much: an old book, a manila envelope. I peeked into the envelope first and saw only cartoons. No money. I set it aside and opened the book. It had been published in 1922, by the Trenton Star Press, and its title page read:

Galway Mix was my grandfather, whom I knew only as a wheezing old man in an armchair, a crotchety Irishman, barely comprehensible through his thick brogue, who was obsessed with inclement weather. I also knew he had drawn a cartoon for the newspaper once, but I never knew what it was about or for how long it had been published. I turned the page and saw a thin cartoon black man, dressed in frayed overalls with shafts of wheat sticking out of his pockets. The man's lips were white and thick as croissants, puckered around a dark stupefied O, and his eyes bulged out of his head like a toad's. His hands were snarled in his hair, and he was hovering several inches above the ground.

Of course it was the most racist cartoon I'd ever seen. Underneath it were the words “To Carl, who wants to be a Cartoonist,” and below that was my grandfather's signature. He had drawn another, rougher picture of the black man's face and added “Love, Pap.”

I turned to the first page. There were four three-paneled cartoons. The first one went like this: in the first panel, the black man was in a chair, rubbing his stomach. His voice bubble read, “Ooo-ee, I'm hongry for some corn pone!” A small cat was rubbing itself against his legs. In the second, he was pouring some batter into a pan, and saying, “Hmm…Where dat kitty?” In the third, the corn pone was finished, steaming in its iron skillet, and the cat's head was sticking up out of it, charred and frazzled. The black man was doing what he had been doing on the dedication page: jumping in astonishment, gripping his head.

As it turned out, every single strip was like this. The black man chose a task, lost the cat, then found the cat somehow entangled in the task. “I loves the banjo,” the man said in one strip, as he strummed. “Where dat kitty?” he wondered in the second, and in the third, the cat's head had punched its way through the sounding head of the banjo and wedged itself between the strings.

I read the whole thing. The cat turned up in an automobile engine, a horse's mouth, a chicken coop, a well (“I's thirsty!”). It was awful and great simultaneously: a formal puzzle to be “solved” over and over, a clever series of means to the same worthless end. I was reminded of Wurster's grueling exercises, and how they were supposed to make a good cartoonist out of me. In a way, this had happened to my grandfather. The strip was, its over- and undertones aside, endlessly ingenious. It was also, much like the Family Funnies, utterly shallow.

For the first time in a solid week of actual work, I was reminded of what a pitiful contribution I was making to the world of creative enterprise. Who needed the Family Funnies? What kind of people enjoyed it, week after week? I could see them now, with their perfect teeth and golf-inspired clothes, gathered around the kitchen table, complacently tittering at the Sunday comics. If my grandfather was anywhere near as smart as my father, then he must have faced the same problem: do I make the comic strip something worth doing, or do I just do it? And it appeared they made the same decision.

I put the book down and pulled out the manila folder, then slid the drawings from it. For a second, I wasn't sure what I was looking at: my cartoon mother, standing, a look of consternation on her face, my father's head looming goofily over her shoulder. Then I noticed they were naked. I turned the drawing on its side. Her legs were parted slightly, his hands clamped over her breasts. Visible between her legs was the base of his penis, shaded in with a couple of quick lines. Folds of boobflesh squeezed out between his fingers, and his eyes were half-closed over a look of intense and slightly sinister desire. And her face: that irritated expression barely masked something else, an intense and embarrassed pleasure.

I turned to the next page. More of the same, this time her on top of him, and then after that a rogues' gallery of sexual poses and acts I had not ever previously imagined my parents privy to. My mother dominated each drawing, her breasts and crotch, and her pained features.

Why had he done this? Somehow his boozing and ranting and womanizing just didn't measure up to the sheer indignity of these drawings: not only was my mother forced to act out his fantasies, she was made to dislike it, and then to enjoy disliking it. It was the secret expression of my father's desires, and it was his apology for them, and it was his justification for doing it in spite of the apology.

But in the end it was him I felt truly sorry for. If drawing those pictures was a lonely act, keeping them in the safe was an act of profound desolation. It was as if he'd kept a chunk of the heart that would kill him suspended in a jar, so that he could moon over it whenever he wanted, up to the day he died.

I put the drawings back in the envelope. Then I stuffed it, along with the book, into the garbage bag.

* * *

Later, after my trips to the recycling center and the dump, I curled up on the couch and watched, for the first time in years, the Family Funnies television special. It was a Thanksgiving affair, washed in the appropriate earth tones and bright fall colors. The special first aired on a Thanksgiving Day sometime in the late seventies, and I remembered gathering in the living room with my family to watch it. Dad was drunk in protest. He had gotten louder and louder, and made increasingly less sense, as our meal progressed, and by the end the rest of us had stopped trying to carry on our own conversations around him and began to pack, like squirrels sensing the imminence of winter, as much food into our bellies as we could fit. During the special, I struggled with the sleep-inducing properties of turkey, knowing that if I fell unconscious my body would eject most of what I'd eaten. From the panicked expressions of nausea on my siblings' faces, I could tell they were doing the same thing.