The Funnies (17 page)

It was with considerable relief that we received the good news: Dad liked the special. The plot was silly, really—the Thanksgiving turkey is stolen, an angel appears to Bobby in church, our dead dog Puddles saves the day—but Dad snorted and cackled at his own jokes, repeating them at top volume in a slurred voice and spilling liquor in wide wet arcs all over the living room floor.

There could have been no clearer evidence of our real family's divergence from the one we were watching on TV. While the FF Mom bustled about in her apron and heels, making preparations for the big feast, the actual Mom was slumped glowering in an armchair, rhythmically clenching and unclenching the fingers of one hand and rubbing her temple with the other. The more frenetic and demented things became on the screen, the gloomier they got in the living room, until my father's laughs turned to sobs, and we were all sent to bed. I stayed awake a long time, plugging my ears with my fingers and trying to remember each and every scene of the Peanuts special, which came on next and which I was missing for the first time ever.

Tonight, however, I attempted to focus on the bizarre animation of Brad Wurster. In one sense, the special was much like others of its time: cheesy animation, with fewer drawings per second, and backgrounds that, for simplicity's sake, didn't move at all. But in another sense it was strangely accomplished. Wurster had taken the limitations imposed on him by the special's budget and created a subtly disorienting, visually arresting semi-masterpiece. I turned the sound down to blot out the context and watched the images move in slow motion.

Wurster seemed to break an obvious rule of animation, which was that all parts of a character's body, if moving, should be doing so at once. Instead, he moved about half of a character's body in one frame and the other half in the next, so that it possessed, at full speed, a strange unbalancedness that complemented perfectly the situation on the screen. Bobby, when he gazed up at the altar and saw the friendly angel, seemed to sway, barely perceptibly, in the pew; his eyes closed one at a time and opened the same way. My mother, nonplussed at the turkey's disappearance, looked like her head was about to bobble right off her shoulders. It was as if the actors portaying my family had been replaced by passionate but unpracticed Eastern European understudies. I stared transfixed until I got too hungry to go on, then I turned off the set and walked downtown, still dazed, in the day's last light.

Custard's Last Stand was curiously lethargic, as if the throng had just received some mildly bad news. People engaged in measured conversations. Teenagers hatched plots in subdued groups. I got into line and quickly grew bored waiting, and so scanned the customers in front of me to see who was slowing things up. That's when I noticed somebody familiar. A short man with a guarded posture, like he feared sudden arrest by rogue cops. I waited until he was given his food, then watched him turn around.

It was Ken Dorn. I tried to remember where he said he was from. Hadn't he come some distance to attend the funeral? What, then, was he doing standing, as he was now, at the big window in Custard's Last Stand, watching kids play golf? I studied him as I waited for my hot dog. Rain-in-the-Face, in a neat trick of perspective, seemed ready to plunge his giant wooden axe into Ken's head.

Dorn stiffened, as if he knew he was being watched. Maybe he did. I averted my eyes before he had a chance to turn, and when I accepted my food from the cashier I made sure not to look directly at him. If his presence had something to do with me, I didn't want him to know I knew he was here. But I could see him at the corner of my eye, watching.

That night, I fell into a strange and intense sort of concentration. I sat in the studio for hours, drawing, oblivious of the time, of the room around me, of the place where the pencil met the paper: it was more like a single entity, part me, part comic strip, part pencil and paper, that created images by subtly changing itself. And as the night wore on, I began to feel
myself
changing, as if at first I'd failed to absorb Wurster's training, which had only now found my muscles, where it guided them from character to character, from prop to prop, each more refined than the last, each more convincing.

But that's as far as it went. My heart still wasn't in it, even if my body was. Still, I felt as happy as I'd been all day—no great feat, admittedly—because, for a change, I was getting somewhere.

Wurster liked my new drawings, or at least didn't find them particularly offensive, and we spent the week immersing ourselves in the work, poring over the FF Treasury and making lists of images, situations and combinations of characters that were likely to pop up in Family Funnies cartoons. I worked on a few minor characters, like Father Loomis, the neighbors and Puddles the dog. We discovered that Puddles was always drawn in profile, always sitting (even when the strip was about him, as when the family was leaving for a trip and he was sad, or the family was returning from one, and he was happy)—an unexpected shortcut, and one less thing we would have to worry about. I let myself be consumed by the strip, despite my considerable misgivings, feeling the kind of fullness a condemned man does after his sumptuous last meal.

I mentioned to Wurster that I had watched the Thanksgiving special. His face darkened.

“I think it's great,” I said. “Your animation is unreal. Have you done any since then?”

He waited a long time before saying, “They stifled me at every turn,” and beyond that he wouldn't talk about it.

Wednesday night I called Susan, thinking I would return to New York for lunch. I had found that, while working, I got excited thinking about it; the trip, the connection to Burn Features and the free meal were the only things I had to look forward to all week long. She wasn't home, so I left her a message and went back to work, with instructions for Pierce to come fetch me if she called.

Pierce, true to form, had slipped into a funk. He had returned from his weekend trip looking haggard and paranoid, and when he walked into the house he seemed surprised to find me there, as if all that had gone on were a delusional nightmare he thought he'd rid himself of. He spent most of the week indoors, in his bedroom, and I didn't dare ask how his visit had been, let alone who this mystery lover was or what she did with her time.

Meanwhile I had decided to do something with my mother over the weekend—possibly even get her out of the home, if she was feeling well enough, and bring her someplace nice, perhaps Washington Crossing Park, for a picnic lunch. I tried talking to her on the phone, but without my face there to remind her, she repeatedly forgot who I was and segued spontaneously into conversations with other people. I found myself playing the part of her late sister, my grandfather and (apparently) a maladroit plumber who must once have given her a bum deal: “No, ma'am,” I assured her in a mushmouthed plumber's voice, “of course we'll pay for the water damage.”

Susan called back around sundown, which was coming noticeably earlier in the day. I heard the phone ringing through the open doors of the house and studio, and when Pierce didn't come to fetch me, I went in, curious. Pierce was nowhere in sight but the receiver was lying on its side on the countertop. I picked it up and listened.

“Hello? Hello?”

“Susan!”

“Oh, hi,” she said. “You called.”

“Yep. Lunch tomorrow?”

“Actually, I was thinking,” she said. “Since I'm going to see you Saturday, why don't we bag it this week?”

“Like, a bag lunch.”

“No, like let's cancel.”

“Where are we going to see each other Saturday?”

There was a brief silence. “Uh, FunnyFest?”

“Oh,” I said. “That's right.”

“You forgot?”

“Just for a minute.”

She cleared her throat. “I don't want to butt in, you know. But I think you ought to go. People are probably very sad about your father. They're kind of expecting you.”

I thought about the mayor's gleeful wheedling at the wake. “I don't like this, Susan.”

“You won't have to do anything, you know. Just sort of be around.”

“Nobody even knows who I am.”

“Sure they do. Look,” she said, “let me chaperone you. I'll buy the food.”

“Well, if you put it that way, sure,” I said.

* * *

Susan parked at the house Saturday morning. She was wearing sunglasses, a pair of cutoffs and a white T-shirt. “You look different in your civvies,” I said. She did. She looked festive, vaguely sporting, if not athletic. She stepped through the front door.

“Nice digs,” she told me. We stood before each other, unsure of what to do, of what our tenuous business relationship demanded. In the end I stuck out my hand and we shook. Susan snorted. “Well,” she said.

“Well.”

“I've never seen the studio.”

“Really?” I had pictured her and my father enjoying gin and tonics in the doorway, with a fan trained on them.

“Really,” she said. She looked around. “Where's your brother?”

“I guess in his room.”

“Ah.”

We went out to the studio and I showed her around. She paused before the drafting table and ran her hand over it, and peered into the open, empty safe. “It's so small.”

“Well, you know. It was just him.”

She nodded, then took off her sunglasses. We looked at each other. “So are you having fun?” she said.

“Fun? No, not exactly.” I told her about the week's work.

“You think you'll be ready?”

I shrugged. “I don't know anything.”

We walked to town. It was ten o'clock, time for the mayor's opening speech, though I was nearly certain he would start late. When we arrived at the dusty town park alongside the fairgrounds, the bandstand was empty and a few people were milling around, eating fried dough out of paper napkins. Around us, in a huge ring, the food vendors were lighting up the charcoal for the first wave of meals. Children stood patiently with their parents, waiting to be titillated. Family Funnies shirts were being staple-gunned to plywood planks, and coffee mugs hung on brass hooks. I spied several rent-a-cops loitering near the food, and beyond the park, at the river's edge, the fairgrounds were knotted with mechanical rides: a Ferris wheel, something that looked like a tilt-a-whirl.

Susan and I walked to the fried dough stand, the only one that seemed to be doing business this early. We ordered two pieces each. Susan, as promised, paid.

“Hey, he oughta be paying, right?” demanded the dough fryer. He turned to me. “You oughta be paying for this pretty lady.”

I tried to chuckle, a rasping, malformed sound that had to be metamorphosed into a cough. “Could I get a receipt?” Susan asked.

“What, are you kidding?”

Next to the booth, I listened to a young family talking to a rent-a-cop. “What do you mean, he's dead?” the mother was saying. “We came all the way from goddam Greenwich, Connecticut for this!”

The vendor scribbled something on a piece of waxed paper with a magic marker and gave it to Susan. “Thanks,” she said, but he didn't say anything back. We wandered to the center of the circle, where no one else was standing, and waited.

“I have a bad feeling about all this,” I said.

“Don't be a sourpuss.” Her mouth was white with powdered sugar, and I reached across the space between us to wipe it off. Her face felt cool. Suddenly this seemed wildly inappropriate, but she only thanked me. “Though it'll just get all dusty again.”

“This is true.”

“Why have we come out here, by the way?” she said. “Shouldn't we be under some trees?”

I shrugged. “I guess so.” But I lingered. I didn't want to sit near the rent-a-cops. Once, briefly, when I was about four, I had a thing about rules. I became convinced they were all false. It wasn't a rebellion, just an obsession. I don't know what led me to believe it—probably something I'd seen on television—but for at least a week, I went around breaking every rule I could remember having been given: I scribbled on the walls in crayon, I stuck a butter knife into an electrical socket (it didn't go in all the way), I ran through the house and built forts out of the furniture. Bobby and Rose spent the week giving me disapproving glances, but I kept thinking: you guys haven't figured it out yet! You're missing your real life!

It all ended when I shucked off my mother's hand at a crosswalk and charged into traffic, nearly causing a pileup. A beat cop (the only one I have ever seen in Riverbank) saw what I had done and, to my amazement, arrested me, handcuffs and everything. The handcuffs didn't quite fit, so all the way to the station—and we walked, right down Main Street—I held tight to them, so that nobody would think I was trying to escape. The cop led my mother and me to a holding cell and made me step inside. I asked for a tissue for my freely running nose, but the cop told me, “You don't get tissues in prison. You have to trade your cigarettes for them.”

I cried, “I don't have any cigarettes!” then fell to the ground sobbing.

At that point my mother had had enough and rescued me. She told the cop off right there in the station, and he must certainly have realized he'd gone too far, because he stood with his head hung and took it, then let us leave. For a long time, I believed my mother was commanding and invincible—a long shot from Dad, with his droopy grin and arbitrary regulations. Mom was my hero. What struck me most about this memory was that, until now, I had completely forgotten not only the incident, but my years of awed respect for my mother. It seemed like a lot to forget, and I wondered what else I had forgotten.

Susan must have noticed my reverie, because we didn't move to the shade, only stood there in the gathering heat while people massed for Mayor Francobolli's dedication. I could see him now at the foot of the bandstand in his suit, leaning slightly back to compensate for his paunch. He was talking to some official-looking men I didn't know. Why a suit? I wondered. He'd only have to shed it to jump into the river for the big kickoff, a tradition that had made the crossover from the old festival.