The Funnies (31 page)

“I got humiliated today,” I said, passing the lighter under the dividing wall.

“It's got around.”

“Already?”

“Sybil told me.” I heard a deep breath. “She's pissed at you, buddy.”

“We had a little misunderstanding.”

“Let me guess. She tried hustling you and you wimped out.”

“Sort of,” I said. “Maybe it was a mistake.” I could feel the unsent letter crackling in my back pocket. I considered flushing it down the toilet.

There was a long pause before he said, surprising me, “I like her, but she's too depressed for me. Women read my strip and they think I'll wanna sit around quoting Nietszche with ‘em.”

“You don't?”

“Hell, no.” After a minute, he added, quietly, “It's an aesthetic, not a
Weltanschauung.”

I smoked awhile in silence, waiting for the pot to take effect. I concentrated, vigilant for changes in my mood. It wasn't until I was thoroughly fed up that I realized I wasn't fed up at all anymore, and the stall suddenly seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to be, with the walls verdant and mildly reflective and a pool of clear water beneath me. I said, “I think I'm falling for this girl.”

“Not Sybil.”

“Not Sybil.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Being a dick,” I said, stunning myself with my crassness. I scrambled to soften it. “I guess.”

He coughed. “Want to get something to eat?”

I dropped the end of the cigarette into the toilet. “You bet,” I said.

* * *

We got microwaved burritos at the Kwik Stop adjoining the hotel, and ate them out on the curb. I couldn't fill myself fast enough, and ended up going in for another. Tyro watched people walking in and out of the store and made up secret obsessions for them. “Ass freak,” he said. “Angora goatfucker.” I put my head in my hands and watched spilled gasoline trace prismatic amoebas in a puddle of water.

“So Mix,” Tyro said. “Why are you doing this shit?”

“Cartooning?”

“No, animal sacrifice.”

I didn't want to talk about it. “Hard to say,” I said.

“Is it the money?”

Of course that was part of it, but if money was all I ever wanted, I would probably have it already. The truth was that my life was fine, and could have stayed fine indefinitely, but I didn't want fine, I wanted great. So I had to change something. But I had no guiding ambition, and in my fumbling for one seemed to have traded fine for pathetic. I was feeling like I could spend years just trying to get things back to fine again. I wouldn't have said this to Tyro even if I could, at that moment, have formed the complex sentences necessary to do so. All I said was, “Not really.”

“So why? Why are you so interested in the Family Funnies?”

“It's my family,” I said.

“You're telling me that strip is more interesting than the genuine article?”

“There is no genuine article.” This had the ring of gloomy, fatalistic truth to me.

Tyro shook his head. “Bullshit,” he said.

* * *

We went to the buffet together. I was still hungry, even after the burritos, and loaded my plate with Italian sausage and pierogies, which anywhere else in the world but New Jersey would have been an unacceptable contradiction. We sat at a table with some Fans, who didn't talk to us. Many of them wore Dogberry T-shirts, with Kearns's looping signature under the drawing.

“I hear he still has horses on the ranch.”

“Is that so? Does he ride?”

“Oh, I'd imagine he must. Wouldn't you?”

“Well, naturally.”

I watched Tyro eat. His exterior calm was astonishing, though it was clear this was not his natural, primeval state: under the table his feet twitched to an obsessive internal rhythm, and he fussed at his jeans and shirt surreptitiously, not out of vanity, it seemed, but of minor yet irrepressible discomfort. I could guess at his childhood: pure nerd until his junior year in high school, when suddenly he became bony and dangerous, a sexual beacon to girls who months before would have had nothing to do with him—cheerleaders, honor students. It made him wary of people who expected things from him. He ignored the Fans and absorbed himself in his food until Kearns was introduced by, of all people, Leslie Parr.

Parr stood massively on the plywood stage, hunched over the lectern like an Army colonel preparing to outline battle plans with his quirt. What he said about Kearns probably looked respectful enough on paper—some saccharine blather about the strip's immeasurable influence and timeless appeal—but his voice reeked so strongly of contempt that I half-expected riot. Nobody else seemed to notice, though.

“Of course, I could stand up here yammering all day, give y'all time to polish off that chicken tertrazzini or whatever you got there”—polite laughter—“but you wanna see the genuine article, and lucky for you we got ‘im right here, the mangy old goat of the funny papers, Art Kearns!”

Thundering applause, from all quarters including mine. My cogitations on the curb, which already in the glum aftermath of artificial stimulants seemed no more or less significant than a low-wattage light being switched on in a musty attic full of junk, had no effect on my slavish devotion to Kearns, whom I still considered tack-sharp and dignified, even in his weakened state. His progress to the lectern was prolonged and excruciating, and the applause flagged and reinvigorated several times before he finally arrived, supported by his assistant. She took a moment to steady him before the mike, then sat down upstage on a folding chair.

“Well thanks,” said Kearns, his voice thin and crusty as an old piece of wire, and everyone clapped again. Tyro picked up a sausage with his fingers and chomped off a thumb-sized chunk.

“It's a real honor, speaking to you here. I've been in this business a long time. Longer'n you can imagine. And I've drawn a lot of strips, for sure. But it's all ‘cause of you all that ‘Art's Kids' is still popular. ‘Smuch as it was fifty years ago.” His oratory trickled out over the crowd like a leak in a cellar wall. All his sentences were of uniform length. I looked around me and found people eating quietly, cleaning off their eyeglasses or squinting earnestly at Kearns, as if in an effort to see the words better. I waited for the introduction to stop and his speech, per se, to begin. But minutes passed, and pretty soon he stopped talking, and after a pause that lingered a beat or two too long, everyone caught on that this had been his speech, it was over, and it was time to start clapping. So they did. Kearns turned from the lectern and his assistant leapt to her feet to support him, and together they walked off, to further applause.

Les Parr was quick to retake the mike. “All right!” he screamed, as if it had not been Kearns on stage at all, but Elvis Presley. His grin was less celebratory than triumphal, and he pointed at Kearns's receding form with what looked, from where I was sitting, like open mockery. “Y'all finish eating, and Art's gonna move over to this table here”—he pointed to where some people were unfolding a buffet table, stage right—“and draw y'all some pictures, okay? All right, let's give the old boy one more hand!”

More clapping, weaker this time. Kearns, who had nearly made it to his seat, half-turned and accepted it, nodding. And then the noise retreated into scabrous mumbled conversation and giggling. Tyro held up his empty plate and nodded his head at it.

“Seconds?” he said.

* * *

Afterward, I wanted to wait and meet Kearns. Tyro would have none of it. “I'm history,” he said. “More than thirty-six hours in Jersey gives me the willies.”

“I understand,” I said.

To my surprise, he stuck out his hand to be shook. It was an ironic gesture, accompanied by a pompous fake smirk, but his grip on my fingers was strong and honest. “It was good meeting you, Mix. I thought I'd have to hate everybody.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“Let me know how things go,” he said.

“You'll see me in the funny papers.”

He made a face. “Shit, Mix, I can't read that trash. Drop me a note or something.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, but we didn't exchange addresses or telephone numbers. He didn't say goodbye either, only made a little pistol with his hand, cocked his thumb and shot me right between the eyes.

* * *

The line to see Kearns was nearly fifty yards long, but I got in it anyway. People seemed to be holding things for Kearns to sign or draw on. Was it possible that there was no paper for the cartoonist?

“They ran out,” someone told me. “He keeps making mistakes and starting over.”

“So, do you have anything…extra? You could give me?”

His name tag read
STEVE
GOPP,
WASHINGTON
POST
. “Nah, I just got these two.” He held up a couple of magazine subscription cards, one with a grease stain on the corner. “One of ‘em's for my kid.”

I scanned the floor for dropped programs or dinner napkins. My own program had somehow gotten away from me. The line, which had seemed stuck, was moving now, and as I came closer to the table I set to the task of persuading myself that asking for autographs was crass and demeaning, and a handshake and pleased-ta-meetcha would be sufficient. Then I remembered I had some paper with me after all.

“Now, you look familiar,” Kearns said to me, smiling. His right eye was milky with growths and it was a wonder to me that he could see at all.

“I'm Tim Mix,” I said. “Maybe you knew my father Carl. He drew the Family Funnies.”

“Nah, that ain't it. You look like my granddaughter's boyfriend. You ride a motorcycle?”

“No, sir.”

He nodded slowly. “Kill yourself on one of them things. So,” he said. “Whatcha got for me?”

I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and set it on the table in front of him. He turned it over and read the address. “To your sweetie?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, we'll give you a little something for luck here.” He brought his felt-tipped marker to the envelope and began to draw. His hand shook, teetering at the very edge of his control. When lines appeared, they did so in a rhythmic fuzz, like pipe cleaners bent into shapes by a child. For some time, I waited for the patterns to become recognizable, then finally gave up. Eventually Kearns handed the envelope back to me.

“There you go,” he said. “Little shaky, but it's the real McCoy.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said.

We shook hands. It was like grabbing a branch. “No problem,” he told me. “Whatever you got yourself into with that girl, this oughta straighten it out.”

* * *

Out in the hall, I studied the marks on my letter, trying to decode them. A continuous line, a blobby, smeared amorphism, a hieroglyph at the bottom that might have been a signature. I wondered who, exactly, was drawing “Art's Kids.” Had the inkers taken over? Did Kearns even write the gags? The drawing might have been of Dogberry, or of Greta or Funny Hans or Derrie-Do or any other “Art's Kids” characters. Or it might have been the Empire State Building or Richard Nixon.

I surprised myself with my enormous and inexplicable affection for Art Kearns, which was springing up inside me like a kiddie pool filling with water from a hose. I stood very still and let my mood improve. When I felt like a human again, I unpinned my name tag and threw it in the trash, then brought the letter to the front desk to be mailed.

Pierce had something on his mind. The Caddy's windows were closed and the air conditioning on, and no music played on the radio. When I shut the door he said nothing, so I said “Hey,” and Pierce said “Hey.”

He pulled away from the hotel parking lot. “How's Gillian?” I said.

“Oh, you know.”

“Not really.”

He didn't seem to hear, only grunted and nodded at the sound of my voice.

To fill the time, I played back every disappointing and humiliating event of the past week in my mind, with special attention to the precarious blown moments on the sidewalk outside the movie theater with Susan, and my ignominious retreat from the conference. I thought about the way Susan wobbled from side to side, waiting for me, possibly, to stop her with an arm curled around her waist or an offered hand; the fat man's bushy eyebrows, their blurry meeting place over his knurly red nose. I got myself pretty worked up. I stared at the door, wondering what it would be like to open it and fling myself out onto the pavement, if I would tumble under the Caddy and be pulverized by its wheels, or if I'd spend the rest of the day at the hospital having road gravel pulled out from under my skin by a knock-kneed intern with a pair of sterilized tweezers. I was beginning to shift myself toward the center of the car when Pierce said, “What if it's some sort of trap?”

“What?” For a second I thought he was talking about the car door.

“What if he's laid a trap for me?”

“Who?”

He was frowning the panicked, spasmodic frown of a child about to cry. “Dad.”

“Dad?” I said. “Why would Dad lay a trap for you?”

“The key,” he said. “It's in a warehouse, right? In Philadelphia. What if it's some kind of trap? It could be a bomb, or like you know those corporate guys who set up a kind of pulley system so that when they intercom their secretary and tell her to come in, she opens the door and it trips a wire that's attached to a shotgun and boom, suicide. Something like that.”

For the briefest of moments, this scenario seemed perfectly plausible, and I lost myself long enough in it to delay speaking. Then I said, “Um, Pierce, that's ridiculous.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Why would Dad want you dead?”

“He hates my guts.”

“Hated,” I said. “And he didn't, really.” Though there was precious little evidence for that. Pierce extended his arms against the wheel and pushed his head into the seat, as if buffeted by massive g-forces.