The Funnies (29 page)

He nodded again. “Spooky.”

“Indeed.”

Sybil was gone, off talking to a chubby middle-aged man. She laughed hysterically at something he said, bending over and clutching her stomach, and the man smiled, looking unsure of what was so funny.

“So how do you know Sybil?” Lowell asked me.

“Just met her. At the conference.”

“You think she's good-looking?”

I looked across the bar at her. “Sure, she's okay,” I said.

“She keeps saying she's ugly and fat. That girl is not fat.”

“No.” I took a sip of beer. It tasted good, thick and sharp like carbonated coffee. I wanted to change the subject. “So what got you into cartooning?”

He pressed me with a long, suspicious look. “What, because a black guy isn't supposed to be a cartoonist?”

“Well, no, not exactly…”

“We do read the papers, you know.”

“Oh, of course, I just…”

He suddenly looked at his watch and then out the door, into the hotel lobby. “I gotta see a man about a horse,” he said, and was gone. I watched him as he left, talked into a pay phone for a few minutes and headed for the door.

“Mix! Tim Mix!” I felt a hand clap my shoulder, hard enough to make me stumble. It was attached to a telephone-booth-shaped man in his sixties whom I'd never before seen. He looked like a retired sportscaster, with his large gold watch and a puffy red face that seemed to have had a few dents knocked out of it. “You're the spittin' image of your old man, Godblessisoul.”

“Oh! Really? Well…”

“You know who I am? Last time you saw me you were a little shaver!”

“Ah, I can't say I do.”

“‘Course, I might not've recognized you if it weren't for that name tag.” He pointed. In fact,
I
was still wearing
my
conference name tag and apparently had been wearing it all through dinner at Bobby's. It struck me as extremely odd that no one had mentioned it. Then I got a funny feeling that this might be the sort of person to poke me in the face while I was looking at my shirt, and I quickly raised my head.

“I'm sorry, I just…”

“Les Parr! ‘Nuts and Bolts,' second-longest running strip drawn by the same fella in the history of comics, thanks to that Kearns, goddam him!”

“Wow,” I said. “I've read your strip my whole life.”

He laughed. “Thanks, thanks,” he said, though it wasn't a compliment. “Nuts and Bolts” was set in a garage in some rural backwater. All sorts of colorful country folk stumbled in and out of it each day with their dented pickup trucks and cobbled-together farm machines, and engaged Cappy, the plucky mechanic full of folk wisdom, in slangy conversation. Occasionally they all headed for the hills in search of earthy adventure, like discovering a moonshine still or shooting squirrels for stew. The humor, such as it was, depended heavily on the readers' conviction that the country was quaint and inherently funny. Apparently many people believed this, because the strip had hung on since 1945, when Cappy came back from the war. “Art's Kids” was said to have begun publication a few scant weeks before “Nuts and Bolts,” and I had heard this was Leslie Parr's pet subject.

He grabbed my arm just below the elbow and leaned close, reeking of aftershave. I adjusted my estimation of his age to a particularly hale early seventies. “Your pop was a great man. A great man.”

I made a little room between us by sipping my drink. “Hey, thanks.”

“It's got class, that Family Funnies. Not like a couple strips I could name.”

“Well, I'm really enjoying work—”

He let go my arm, leaving a hand-shaped cool spot of sweat in its wake, and formed the hand into the shape of a pistol, which he brandished before me. “You know ‘N and B' really got started a year before Kearns? Had a little strip in a small-town paper in Northern California. Called ‘The Shoehorn Gang.' Wasn't strictly ‘N and B' but it was, whaddyacallit, its spiritual cousin.” From Parr's mouth, the words “spiritual cousin” fell like lead weights at our feet. “Just because it doesn't have the same name, those ninnies disqualify it. Of course, Kearns's got ‘em wrapped around his little toe. Old man doesn't even draw the damned thing anymore.”

“He doesn't?”

“He's a quivering fogy!” Parr produced a drink, something clear that magnified his fingers through the glass, and downed it in a single swig. “Can barely hold a pen!”

“So who does it?”

He leaned back, gesturing in the air with his beefy arm, as if it were the entire world supporting the great fraud that was Art Kearns and “Art's Kids.” “Minions! Flunkies! Whatever! Living out there on that bogus ranch of his, nodding his little white head.” He reached out to the bar—what seemed an impossible distance—and slammed down the empty glass. “You and me, kid. Nothing to worry about there. We‘re the real thing.”

* * *

It was nearly midnight when the unfolding spectacle of Midnight Angel came into full bloom, like a poisonous species of daisy. “Is this on?” asked the singer without irony. She gave her tambourine a tentative shake. She had the long blotchy nose of a border collie and cheeks sunken enough to eat soup out of. Her partner, camped out behind the synthesizers, had his shaggy head tipped back and was squeezing a bottle of eye drops several inches above his face. He turned to the crowd and blinked dramatically, his mouth hanging wide open.

I was groping for the car keys when Sybil grabbed my hand and dragged me from the bar. “Igotta showya somethin',” she said. She was drunk, but seemed not to have lost her manual dexterity. We hopped into an elevator and she pushed the button for the fifth floor. I couldn't remember the hotel being so tall. As we rode, she stared at me with a detached intensity that made me feel like I was about to be dissected. I watched my reflection in the polished steel doors.

Of course I knew what was going on: a blunt, clumsy seduction. I didn't want to be a party to it, but still I followed, stumbling puppily behind her. We went to her room. She used a little magnetic credit card to open the door, then told me to follow her to the bathroom, where she began running hot water into the tub.

I thought of Lowell's question: did I think she was good-looking? Now, watching her watch me in the bathroom mirror, I thought, Yeah, Lowell, sure she is. But she was the wrong woman. Her pocket was still full of black pens. “I'm sorry,” I said, meaning it. “I can't.” And I fled.

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.

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.

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
.

“Hi.”

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.”

“Never?”

“Almost never.” She pointed to the end of the bed. “Can I sit there?”

“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.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Sort of.” She looked up suddenly. “He's your daddy.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sad?”

“Sure.”

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

“Writing a letter.”

She leaned forward. “Can I see?”

“No. It's private.”

“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?”

“They're okay. I'm getting a sister.”

I hadn't known they knew the sex. “What is her name going to be?”

“I'm going to call her Mariette.”

“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.”

“How about soon, before school?”

“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.

“Goodnight,” I said weakly.

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.