The Road Narrows As You Go

ALSO BY LEE HENDERSON

The Broken Record Technique

The Man Game

FOR ANU

I don't think God wants to be worshipped.

I think the only pure worship of God is by loving one another,

and I think all other forms of worship become a substitute for the love that we should show one another.

—Charles Schulz

 

Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling.

—Herman Melville

1

STRAYS

What we remember most about living in the manor on the peak of Bernal Heights was the door buzzer going off in the days and nights after comic strip artist Hick Elmdales died. For years afterwards every time we heard that buzzer, the memory echoed in our ears and reminded us of the strange connection Hick's death had to the first days of our new life. You know that sound you hear before you fall asleep, of blood whistling past your eardrum? It was the last Friday in April eighty-one, and it was our first night at No Manors.

You might not know the name Hick Elmdales, but he drew the popular
Pan
strip launched back in seventy-five to further the adventures of J.M. Barrie's characters Peter, the Lost Boys, Hook, the Darling children, signed
Walt Disney
. Hick lived and worked far, far away from the animation sweatshops in Los Angeles; he was up on top of a great hill overlooking all of San Francisco in a packratted five-bedroom on the main floor of a post-Edwardian dubbed No Manors. He ripped his motto and creed from the pages of the Old Testament and painted it on the wall over the front door as a constant reminder:
Be not forgetful to welcome strangers, for in this way some have entertained angels unawares.

Or devils. You never know. Hick's open door drew no shortage of either—in the form of drifters, downtrodden artists, jawclenching junkies, and many an adolescent runaway doodler like us without a stable home to go back to or clear prospects.

Of all the punk squats, hippie communes, and satanic covens in the Bay Area, we ended up here, at No Manors. Perched at the peak of Stoneman Street, No Manors was the highest in altitude of all the freestanding residencies on the north side of Bernal Heights, a five-storey art deco flophouse with accidental touches of Bosch and Gaudi sprouting from an Edwardian mansion built out of the original Victorian pioneer villa circa the Gold Rush. Before the hill gave way to a steep grass park and a forest of Jack Fogg trees around the microwave tower at the peak, the manor was a rather noticeable blemish or piece of history in the workingclass neighbourhood. Built as an Edwardian villa in the early nineteen hundreds and renovated in the late forties to the idea of art deco, the manor might have been the pride of the area. Now the whole exterior had been so neglected by the absentee landlord and so dicked with by tenants over the years looking for solutions to the aging edifice's damages that even a simple thing like the front entrance was nowhere to be found.

Two paid rent at No Manors, both comic strip artists. One was
dead, and the other was not home. No one knew where to find Wendy Ashbubble. The name wasn't familiar to us, and neither was her comic strip,
Strays
, but this is her story.

According to friends at The Farm, Wendy never picked up her complimentary ticket.

Where is she? asked a bearded six-foot man dressed in a fishscalesequin halter top, tight black leather short shorts, and, way down at the bottom of her long, black legs, a pair of espadrille wedges with three-inch woven wool heels. Her alias was Biz Aziz and she was a well-known drag queen who performed regularly in the Castro and Chinatown and had been on the bill the night before at The Farm singing Toni Fisher's
The Big Hurt
and
The End of the World
by Skeeter Davis. As she stood up from a beanbag chair, she fanned herself with the palm of her hand and told us to put on a fresh pot of coffee.

We happened to land at No Manors the night Hick died because we went to this all-ages show. The stage was inside an actual barn, the barn part of a hobby farm with vegetables, flowers, and a petting zoo, all situated on stolen land that sat vacant for decades next to the Cesar Chavez freeway, and it seemed everyone in the barn that night knew Hick, so when the sad news got around during a break, the whole audience and all the performers shut down and the musicians got off the stage and continued to play their instruments as we, the whole audience and the performers, walked up Bernal Hill together. No Manors sat at the dead end of Stoneman Street, right before the park on the peak.

Biz spied out the window to see who buzzed the door, then, despite some obvious doubts this time, pressed a button to let whomever it was come on in. As per those fateful letters above the door.

Quick, hide that Ziploc, I can't peg these ones, might be narco, she said and pointed to the open bag of potent marijuana hanging out on the longtable between us, a pound less a few dozen joints.

Best we could think of on short notice was under a pile of dirty clothes at the bottom of the laundry hamper in Hick's bedroom.

In came four brushcutted men who could have been brothers, with blotchy natural tans that gave their white flesh the complexion of fried perogies—they had big ingratiating smiles full of nacre teeth, middling to no chins, and short necks. Each man was squeezed into a golf shirt he had tucked neatly under a matching lint-free V-neck sweater in an offputting colour, pea soup, bisque, sulphur, puce. Pleated khaki slacks like long, brown paper grocery bags. They entered a room full of half-slumbering cartoonists in mourning who had spent the night drunk, stoned, and grieving now using each other as pillows and taking up every available bit of space.

We represent the Walt Disney company. Disney himself asked us to come on his behalf. The four strangers each passed Biz Aziz their business cards, all with the familiar embossed Cinderella castle.

How do you do?

The men brought condolences and agreed with one another that, yes, yes, yes, and yes, there was no possible explanation for Hick's untimely death except in the Lord and to that Biz Aziz almost laughed.

Là-bas
I hope you mean. So what cartoons you worked on? she asked the four representatives.

No, no, we don't do fun stuff like draw cartoons, said the heaviest-set one, whose eyes barely lifted above a squint.

How'd you meet Hick?

We never. Read his strip, though, funny and smart. We wondered if you might show us where he used to draw?

From the entrance hall you could access three of the five bedrooms and the living room, which connected to a dining room, a false study, and a kitchen with a nook, and to get from here to there you had to navigate an abundance of Victorian nooks and crannies, trick doors that led to weird void rooms, and this wall or that wall might have received a facelift or two over the years to cover up the ghosts. The walls were papered,
every inch covered over by bookcases overflowing and framed drawings and paintings, original Herrimans, a personalized Gould. A hoard of cheap comics now valued in the millions, rare art folios from the turn of the century, decadent novels and poetry, histories of the occult, a favourite subject—Hick's bookmark was stuck halfway through the bestselling memoir
Michelle Remembers
when he fell sick. Maybe the book killed him. That was Biz's theory. The men from Disney danced over hundreds of shoes and weaved around stacks of leather portfolios lining the floor, while above their heads loomed dozens of bicycles that hung from the ceiling, you could grab one down any time. Sculptures hung up there, too, and found objects cluttered the windowsills. Elsewhere on the floor was, for example, a lacquered and stuffed tortoise the size of a witch's cauldron.