I had decided on a system while returning from the bank, and stopped in the mini-mart for a stack of 3x5 note cards, the kind without lines. I had this idea that lines would make the jokes seem less funny, a task they would likely need no help accomplishing. At home, I dug from the hall closet an old typewriter, a black war-era Smith-Corona in a battered black case that my father had used briefly in his stint as a newspaperman, and hauled it onto the kitchen counter. I sat on a wooden bar stool and rolled in card after card, tapping out every stupid gag I could think up. I didn't worry too much about their quality, only the redundant mechanics of their production: off the stack, into the machine, think up the joke, type it out, out of the machine, onto the stack. By the time I gave up I had about forty, most of them worthless. Under the gray fluorescent kitchen light, the only one burning in the house, I thumbed through the pile.
Calendar says Jan 1, Lindy says to Bitty Time to make your New Year's revolution. Dog curled on Dot's lap, Timmy saying It's Mommy's laptop! Mailman coming up walk, Bobby looking out window says If he was a girl would he be a femailman?
And those were the best of the lot. I set the finished stack next to the empty stack, pushed the typewriter back and lay my head on my arms.
For a short time around my sixth Christmas, my father went on “vacation” and “I” “took over” the strip for him. That is, my father went nowhere, and the cartoon Timmy became the in-name-only author of the strip. At first I was horrified. The drawings were artificially childlike, with arms and legs rendered as sticks, and trees and shrubs as thick brambles of scribble. But they were clearly the work of an adult: all the subtler rules of motion, of bodily line were fully articulated, and the images were laid out on the page with clarity and grace.
The gags themselves were all about my parentsâchild's-eye views of the sober complexities of adult life. There was an arrogance about this I was already old enough to resent. I was not stupid, as people generally believe children to be, and already deeply suspicious of anything either of my parents did. I would never have made the kind of “cute” assumptions this series of stripsâabout a week's worthâattributed to me. For example: of my father, laboring over some papers, I was to have said:
Daddy has to pay his bills to Santa
. As if my family would ever have bothered with the Santa Claus deception. Elsewhere, “I” drew Dad shoveling the car out of a snowbank. The caption read:
Daddy loves playing in the snow
.
All the same, I ended up welcoming the week's worth of attention these strips brought me. People stopped on the street to tell me what a good little cartoonist I was, how I'd be sure to have my own strip someday. Father Loomis gave me a gift: a pen, which eventually found its way out of my room and into my father's studio, where it was forever lost. I felt a little like a superstar, and people wrote letters to me from all over the country. Rose hated me; so did Bobby. I played exclusively with Pierce the first two weeks of January, building things out of Christmas Tinkertoys and watching television.
Until now, I hadn't thought of that week of strips as prescient. But the connection felt all too clear: an attention-grubbing fake taking credit for something that wasn't his own, something that itself was not worth the paper it was printed on. There was no doubt anymore; my father was a failure, and so was I. However accomplished his cartoons, his gags remained second-, even third-rate. His story, like mine, was one of squandered potential.
I slid off the stool, dragged myself to the light switch and turned it off. I was as lonely as I'd been in months.
* * *
During the night, I woke to a noise from somewhere in the house. It manifested itself in the sex dream I was having as my murky lover's rough moans; what it really was, I understood once I had fully awoke, was the kitchen stool being pulled out from under the counter. Pierce? I thought. There was some shuffling, a click, then giggling: a pause, a giggle, a pause, a giggle. I listened to this for a minute or more, the still air screaming in my ears, until one of the giggles became a full laugh, and then I knew it wasn't Pierce. I looked around the bedroom for something to crack him over the head with, and found only my bedside lamp, a ceramic travesty in the shape of a woman's head bearing a fruit-filled basket. I yanked the plug from the wall and crept out into the hallway.
No light issued from the kitchen. The giggler was in the dark. I padded as quietly as possible, the lamp heavy in my hand, raised as high above my head as I could reach. Its plug dangled down behind me and knocked against my heels.
I peeked into the kitchen to find a tiny flashlight beam illuminating a small hand and my gag cards. The hand was picking through the cards, its owner chuckling at each one before embedding it back in the pile with a delicate turn of the wrist. I knew who it was before I switched on the light.
“Ken Dorn,” I said.
“Oh, these are priceless, Timmy. Really wonderful stuff.” He flipped off the penlight and dropped it into the pocket of a leather jacket. On his head, slumped like a baked eggplant, was the kind of cap worn exclusively by robbers in cartoons. “âIf one of them's a panty hose, why aren't the two of them panty hoses?' That is rich, rich!”
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Your brother's house, Timmy.” He turned, grinning at me with pinprick eyes. “You got the strip, remember? You live in the Family Funnies now.”
“Ha, ha.” I calculated distances. The telephone was closer to him than me.
He followed my eyes to the phone, then picked it up and handed it to me. “How are you going to dial with that lamp in your hand?”
I was shaking, unnerved by my residual fear and infuriated by Dorn's presence. He showed no sign of leaving. I put the lamp on the floor and picked up the receiver.
“All right, Timmy, all right,” he said, sliding off the stool, and I didn't dial, a failure that I regret to this day, much as I regret not punching the high school English teacher who dragged me up in front of the classroom and gave me a humiliating and painful wedgie. “Don't get all bent out of shape. You left your door unlocked, if you want to know.”
“That doesn't mean you can just walk through it,” I said.
“The truth is,” he said, tapping the pile of note cards straight, “you don't like me around because I represent your greatest fear, right?”
“Which is what?”
“That you can't even do this strip right, even when it's been dropped in your lap. Even though you didn't have to work for it at all.”
I had no response. I suppose this was a fear of mine, but it was a cornflake next to the grain silo of fears I was shadowed by.
“So,” Dorn went on. “I suppose that chippie of yours has told you I'm in line for the job?”
“She found out by chance,” I said.
Dorn laughed again, the same nefarious snigger that had chilled me in the dark. “Come on, Timmy. She just didn't want to hurt your feelings. She knew.”
He zipped up his jacket and ran his hand over his head. I said, “Get out, Dorn.”
“You got it, Timmy.” He backed up to the sliding doors and pushed one silently open. His eyes wheeled, taking in the house once more. “It turns me on just being in this place.”
And then he was gone.
* * *
I sat in bed, the fruit lady lamp plugged in and burning, and read over my cards again and again. Tomorrow I would try to do just as many. Maybe even illustrate a few in pencil, to give me something to discuss with Wurster.
Much later, as I lay still, letting my anxiety amplify every faint sound from outdoors, I let my real fears take on their full sagging shape: that, in fact, I
would be
good enough to do the strip, but would let myself think it was the best I could do. That Dorn had been right about Susan, that she'd lied to me to save my feelings, that our embrace in the movies was an open expression of desperation and I had been making a fool of myself on all fronts and still was. And would be, over and over, knowing all along it was what I had chosen and what I would continue to choose, despite all the available alternatives, because it was the easiest thing to do.
When Pierce came home Sunday night, I was still at the counter, sorting the gag cards into bad, awful and workable piles. I was on my third pass through, having only come up with nineteen workables, in the hope of finding a few bads I could improve. Thinking up more was out of the question: I was burned out.
I could tell Pierce was highly agitated even before he came into the circle of light cast by the kitchen lamp. He tossed his bag onto the couch in the dark of the living room and stood there, panting.
“Pierce?”
“Hey,” came his voice, weakly.
“How was your weekend?”
There was only his breathing for a moment. Then he said, “I talked to Gilly about your talk with her. I didn't even know about it before I left the key.”
I didn't know what I was expected to say. “Yeah. We went on the Centrifuge of Death.”
“She said she told you not to tell me anything.”
“She did,” I said. I wondered what kind of good this girl was doing my brother, an established paranoid, by hatching plots behind his back, then gushing to him about them a week later. I wondered if he knew she had been dressed up as me at the âFest.
“So are you keeping it from me?”
“Of course not,” I said. “I told her I wouldn't keep things from you.”
He stepped slowly into eyeshot. He looked tired. “She told me that too,” he said. I could see the mess this was making in his head and put down my stack of cards.
“Look, I went and examined everything very carefully. There wasn't much. The deed, the title to the car, legal junk, pretty much like you said. There was only one odd thing.” I waited a second. “Do you want to hear it?”
“I don't know.”
“It's not so bad.”
He groaned, it seemed to me with a little irony. Okay, then, I thought, he's doing all right. He slumped down on the stool across the counter from mine, began picking at something on the back of the typewriter and said, “Hit me.”
I felt in my pocket for the key, then set it on the counter.
“Oh, crap,” he said. He picked it up and brought it to his face, closer than perhaps was necessary. He read aloud the fragments of words once, then twice.
“What do you think?” I said.
He put down the key, rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands. “Oh, shit, Tim, who knows.” He looked up grinning sadly. “I hate mysteries. Really I do. I hate the whole fucking past, and all the garbage everybody in our family did to each other, and everybody in other people's families did to each other and to our family. Every time a little mystery pops up it's like a tumor in my head, and it grows and grows until all I can think about is all the things I don't know and all the things people are keeping from me, and the reasons they might be doing that.” He reached out and pushed the key across the counter at me. “I mean, if people are doing anything behind my back, why can't they be doing everything?”
I picked up the key and dropped it in my shirt pocket. “That's a heavy load.”
“No kidding.” He gestured with his head at the disappeared key. “What
do you
think?”
“Storage company in Philly?”
He nodded. “The family skeletons?”
“Could be.” Though our skeletons had always shunned the closet, clattering around right out in the open, like bathrobed houseguests.
Pierce picked up the note cards and read through them. He kept doing this for several minutes after I thought he would certainly stop. Finally he said, “Man, every time a new strip came out, I felt like he had stolen a little piece of my soul.”
“Like those isolated people who were afraid of cameras.”
“I hate cameras too,” Pierce said.
I gathered the cards up and put them aside. I was exhausted, too much so to talk to Pierce any longer. I got up and made sure the sliding doors were locked, though I understood there was no point in telling Pierce about Dorn's break-in. “You know,” I said, sounding more irritated than I really was, “you're not even in those strips. You've got that going for you.”
Pierce slid off his stool and headed down the hall. “You're not looking hard enough,” he said. “I'm in every one of them.”
* * *
I did a lot that week, though the main thing I did was not call Susan. She didn't call me, either. But it seemed that the burden of calling had fallen to me, and though, reviewing the weekend's events, I could find no concrete reason I should bear it, I took it upon myself anyway. Perhaps it was just my natural predilection for guilt, and if so, then I deserved it. Unfortunately this same tendency was also at work in my relationship with Amanda: though our breakup was a long time coming, I still felt compelled to prolong it, so that I would keep on feeling bad. This is why, after spending a lonely and grueling Thursday evening drafting cartoons for Wurster, I called her instead of Susan.
I half-expected, half-hoped to find the apartment embroiled in a raucous, libidinous party, which in the reeking bog of my imagination would leak out the telephone earpiece like corn syrup and relieve me of my obligation to be unhappy. Instead, she answered on the first ring, and the room behind her yawned into an aural emptiness that made the dank house seem crowded by comparison. Before I'd even said hello I was struggling to contain the guilt.
“It's me,” I said, as sprightly as I could muster.
“Yes, hi.”
I could hear the vigorous dabs of a paintbrush against canvas. Nonetheless I asked what she was doing.
“Working.”
“Is it going okay?”
“Yeah, better than usual.”
There was a long pause after this, a challenge to me to say something worthwhile. I was not up to it, and said, “So, what's up?”