My letter was finished, sealed and stamped, thanks to a booklet of self-adhesive American flags I'd found in the kitchen drawer; I left some change for the postage, feeling I'd taken enough already. Now the letter was in the pocket of my jeans, awaiting a mailbox.
After breakfast, I thanked Nancy. She nodded gravely, her eyes still luminous from the sugar high. I kissed Sam on the cheek and she accepted with grace. “Tell Uncle Pierce hi,” she said.
“You bet.”
“Tell him I love him!” This was irony, something I'd never before heard from Sam, but which seemed to fit. Nancy and Bobby didn't recognize it as such. Expressions of unease overpowered their faces.
“I will,” I said.
Bobby drove me back to the hotel. He was strangely chatty. I wondered if he was always like this mornings, before the day defeated him. “Too bad you can't come to the plant. I ought to show you around sometime.”
In fact, there was no reason I couldn't go, except that I hadn't been asked. “That would be great.”
“Show you the sterile radiating units, they're something else. Had to order them special from Switzerland. And the shredder, which actually is called the homogenizing refuse deintegrator, but we call it the shredder.”
“Yikes.”
“Oh, it's all perfectly airtight, perfectly clean. Smells like a doctor's office in there, no kidding.”
“I don't doubt it.”
“Like a trip to the doctor's,” he said, apparently to himself. We were silent for a while.
“Sorry I came in late,” I said.
He waved this off. “Barely noticed.”
“Good.”
“So, Tim. Think about what I said yesterday. About Mom.”
“You bet.”
“I know you think it's the right thing. But you're only doing it for yourself, to feel good about yourself. That's no reason to take an old lady away from the place where sheâll be safe.”
I wondered if Bobby had really looked at the nursing home. The degeneration of people's bodies, the madness, the unrelenting smell of urine. I said, “Well, that's food for thought.”
We had come to the hotel. A woman with antennae walked into the revolving door with a man in a robot suit. Bobby didn't appear to notice.
“So keep in touch,” he said.
“I will.”
We shook. “That was a great visit.”
“Sure was.”
He nodded. “Okay, right. See you, bro.”
I got out of the car, straining to come up with a response. “Right on,” I told him, and shut the door. The sound it made was quiet as a breath.
* * *
I was among the first to arrive for my panel. To my surprise, there was a name placard already in place for me, along with three others: Bennett Koch, Lynn Bismarck and Ken Dorn.
I actually did an authentic double-take. Ken Dorn? I didn't think he'd ever had his own strip before. The other people I knew of only vaguely: Koch's strip, “Pangaea,” had a lot of cute dinosaurs in it, and Bismarck's was one of those serial soap-opera things, the kind that now invariably looked like Roy Lichtenstein paintings, I forgot the name.
But Ken Dorn! I began to get a creepy feeling, like he'd been planted. I entertained the notion that he had somehow replaced me without my knowing: had I been betrayed by the Burn Syndicate's corporate honchos? Or by the woman I possibly sort of loved? I took the sealed letter from my pocket and turned it over in my hands. I felt like a fool, and thought about tearing it to pieces.
“Timmy Mix. Fancy meeting you.”
He was beginning to grow a tiny mustache and goatee, and had gotten his hair shaved closer to his head. “I'd imagine you're brimming over with insights from your training, mmm?”
“Hello, Ken,” I said, stowing the letter. “Oh, I don't know.”
“Don't know? You haven't taken any notes?” He reached into the pocket of his pants and pulled out a small stack of 3x5 note cards, fastened with a rubber band. “I've been thinking a lot about this. The issues are compelling indeed.”
“Wellâ¦I've never done anything like it before.”
“I would suppose not.”
“So what strip have you taken over?” I said, trying to sting him. He looked off into the air, though, and crossed his arms in a pose of mock contemplation.
“Oh, I've taken over the inking for a few. But I'm most interested in taking over full creative control.” He raised his eyebrows and turned to me, grinning. “Someday, that is.”
“Oh, sure,” I said, crossing my own arms. I was almost a full foot taller than Ken Dorn.
Push him over
, I thought.
“I was talking to Ray the other day, and he seemed quite impressed with my drawings. I didn't have anything prepared, of course, but it was no trouble dashing off a few sketches⦔
“Ray? Ray Burn?”
“Yes, Ray Burn. A good man, wouldn't you say, Timmy? What did you talk about the last time
you
saw him?”
I cleared my throat. Dorn leaned back and plucked from a chair a glazed donut and a cup of orange juice. “Well,” I said, “he told me I'm the sentimental favorite.”
Dorn took a large bite of donut, laughing from behind his closed lips. “So you are,” he said, chewing. “So you are.”
“Where did you get those?”
“These?” he said, holding out the donut and juice. “There was a table in the hall. Participants only!”
“Then you'll excuse me,” I said.
“Of course! See you behind the mike!”
* * *
Everyone seemed to have donuts and juice but me, and if there had been a table in the hall, it was gone now. I stood helpless among the conventioneers, squinting into various rooms. Finally I gave up and was turning to take my place in the Green Room when I saw him at last: Art Kearns.
Kearns was being escorted by a jowly middle-aged woman wearing an “Art's Kids” T-shirt. He clenched her arm with one hand and a scuffed wooden cane with the other. Both hands, along with the rest of Art Kearns, were shaking. He was a large man, even in this sad, crumpled state, still bearing the profile of the Wyoming cowboy he was said to have been before he became famous. He wore a white shirt and bolo tie, and a pair of dirty black jeans; his head was nearly bare, with a little red knoll of blotchy skin poking up through his hair. He was blinking, blinking, blinking his eyes, as if something tiny and painful was lodged under both lids.
He and the woman moved slowly, and they commanded much of the hallway's attention. A few people even set down their donuts and juice to quietly applaud. As they passed me, Kearns raised his head and his eyes met mine. He winked. I couldn't help grinning.
* * *
Ben Koch had two donuts, but didn't offer one to me. Lynn Bismarck had only juice. Dorn was finished eating. He and I sat next to each other at one end of the table, while Koch and Bismarck chatted animatedly like college freshmen, obviously falling for one another.
“Oh, you're from Ohio too! Which town?”
“Sandusky.”
“Oh, you're kidding me. I have an aunt in Sandusky.”
“Really!”
“Ida Loos.”
“Well, I'll just have to ask my mother if she knows her. Do you get back much?”
“Not much.”
“Well, we'll have to go together sometime!”
“Why not?”
Dorn was oblivious to them, transfixed upon his notes. I tried to peek at them, but his handwriting was indecipherable: thin lines of what looked like chocolate ice cream sprinkles. Several times he laughed privately or raised his eyebrows. I watched the room fill up and wondered if Tyro would come, until I remembered he was drawing and signing in the Blue Room. It was difficult to imagine him doing such a thing.
Koch had the gavel. He whacked it happily on the table, paused a moment to giggle with Lynn, then announced in a loud voice, “Welcome, everyone, to âTaking Over the Old Strips.'” People clapped. He introduced Lynn and her strip, then Ken Dorn, “who has helped produce some of our finest work for over fifteen years.” Dorn nodded. “And at my left,” Koch said, “is, I believe, Tim Mix, who you all know as Timmy in the Family Funnies. Let's give him a hand.”
People clapped, harder than they did for Dorn. I raised my hand, scanning the crowd for a familiar face. Thus distracted, I stopped waving a few seconds too late.
“Now,” said Koch, “let me introduce our topic.” He went on at length about the cartoonist's responsibility to his legacy, that perhaps an inherited strip is at best shared with the deceased. He pointed up the need to be honest about making people laugh. “Or cry,” he said. “Emotions are serious business. People depend on their funnies. So. There you have it. Does anyone have a question?”
A man stood up in the audience. “I have a question for Tim Mix,” he said.
Koch leaned over the table and shot me a smug smile. “Tim?”
“Uh, sure,” I said. “Go on.” My meek voice boomed out across the crowd and I pulled back a little from the mike and cleared my throat.
“What's it like, drawing yourself? Is it, you know, weird?”
“Uh, not really. I don't think of it as me, really. Timmy's just, you know, a kid. I'm, uh, an adult.”
A ragged laugh went up. I didn't understand why.
“Mr. Mix?” somebody asked. “Did your father train you?”
“No. No, he didn't. I'mâ¦I'm still learning, actually.”
A brief mumble, like a spattering of rain. Then I watched as a large man hauled himself to his feet in the fifth row, pulling up his overalls as if he were about to go out and slop the hogs. His arm pistoned into the air. Ben Koch pointed the gavel at him.
“Tim,” the man said, “now you know there's a cartoonists' union, isn't there? Are you a member of it?”
Silence.
Cartoonists' union?
“Uh, no,” I said, “not yet. But I'm not actually going to start the strip until⦔
“And isn't it true your father was never a union man? If I got it right, a few people weren't exactly disappointed your old man, ah, wasn't able to make it to this weekend's festivities.”
My head began a mild, plaintive ache. Voices simmered up across the room, and the man's voice carried over them. “A lot of people here would rather see a union man take over, see, especially since your dad wasn't particularly known for hiring from the union. Or from anywhere at all, for that matter. He was, whadyacallit, an outsider, wouldn't you say?”
“Well, uhâ¦I suppose he was kind of⦔
“Sir, sir,” came Dorn's voice from beside me, “ladies and gentlemen, please. Let's not gang up on our young man, yes? I'm sure Tim has considered all these important issues, haven't you, Tim?” He laid his hand on my shoulder and patted, gently.
“Sure. I⦔
“I think we ought to take this opportunityâa great classic's change of handsâto discuss what must be done, what we must do, to perpetuate the great tradition of the funnies.” A dull snap as the rubber band came off his stack of note cards. “Let us consider the Family Funnies' place in the canon of daily strips, namely, its role in establishing and solidifying those values the American family holds dear⦔
And he was off, dodging and parrying probing questions in my defense, explaining how the Family Funnies was written and why it was written that way, and what he would doâin the unlikely event he would draw itâto keep its feet planted firmly on virtuous ground. It was a crock of shit, but I was dead in my seat, all resolve evaporated. The large man was gone, slipped away in the commotion. Lynn and Ben whispered sweet nothings to each other, their snacks left unfinished. And Ken Dorn held the floor, a self-taught expert on my comic strip.
* * *
When it was all over, I bummed a cigarette and found a back door to slither out through. I wondered what I thought I was doing, why I had thrown away a perfectly reasonable, if imperfect, life to act out this elaborate failure. The cigarette tasted awful, as a cigarette does when employed as a side dish to a generous helping of self-pity.
It didn't take me long to spy Dorn lurking next to a dumpster at the other end of the building, handing something to the large man from the Green Room. They finished their transaction and parted. The man got into a pickup truck, and Dorn ducked back into the hotel through a green steel door.
I stubbed out my cigarette underfoot, sick of myself, and slunk back inside.
The Kearns event was a buffet dinner, keynote speech and drawing/signing, to be held in the Grand Ballroom down the hall. It wasn't to start until four-thirty, and I was hungry beyond description. The morning's cold cereal had rushed through me like an electric pulse, leaving behind a dry, slightly scorched taste in my mouth and a yawning gulf in my stomach, though I realized that part of this was probably from making a fool of myselfâof being made a fool ofâin the Green Room. I set off in search of food, taking a detour at the men's room in the lobby.
Inside, I realized I wasn't alone. This is always obvious in a public restroom. In gangster movies, people often hide from the hit men by standing on toilet seats in lavatory stalls, but to me, such scenes are highly implausible. Every surface in a restroom reflects and amplifies sound. Air currents shift at a human body's slightest motion. In this case, a specific smell tipped me off: the dank, vegetative odor of pot. I ignored it and picked a stall, sat down and did my business, trying to minimize the noise. I got out and washed my hands.
In the mirror I could see a pair of black boots and the cuffs of black jeans, motionless under a stall door. I took a gamble.
“Tyro?”
“Hello, Mix.”
There were no paper towels. I forewent the hot air dryer and wiped my hands on my pants. “How's it going?”
“It's fucked,” he said. “Want a joint?”
Why not? “Sure,” I said.
There was a rustle, then a fat white cigarette rolled across the floor at me, shedding marijuana like a molting pigeon. A lighter followed it, clattering across the tiles. I picked them both up and sat in the stall adjoining Tyro, where I committed my misdemeanor. It had been years since I'd hung out with anyone who smoked. I felt like a greaser.