The Road Narrows As You Go (18 page)

I'm just a freeloader, Twyla said with tears welling up in her eyes. I've been here nine months and everyone I show my portfolio to rejects me.

You know what Hick said when I showed up on his doorstep with all my belongings in a Samsonite hardshell? said Wendy. Nothing, he didn't say a word, because he didn't even notice me for three days. That's how many others were here when I arrived. Talk about a commune. Hick never asked for a dime. All he wanted was for us to keep him company at the longtable. This cartoon is something I've always dreamed of. I don't care if this ever gets bought by a network. Okay, I do care. For sure I want to sell it to a network, of course I do. I want us to make a really amazing cartoon that will get picked up and become a classic. I don't want to sell an idea to strangers and have them make it without my input. This is my chance to do a big project all on my own.

So in our off-hours we gravitated to Rachael's room to tinker with
flip-it drawings, or painting onto transparent cells. We began to learn the difference between keyframes and the in-betweens. If we felt especially confident maybe we'd shoot a few seconds of Buck walking through the stop-motion rig. A sixteen-frame walk was the most basic principle of animation, and if we couldn't get that right, we couldn't move forward with the rest. And we couldn't get that right. Our early attempts resembled nothing like realistic locomotion, even for a bipedal dog it was more of a juddering levitation across the patch of desiccated scenery. But over time and with practice our walk started to look natural. Buck's feet landed on solid ground, he had a consistent bounce that we later developed into more of a swagger, then used the bounce as our starting point for when we moved on to making the rabbit Francis walk. We started drawing eight frames of motion a second and that was a mistake so we moved up to sixteen frames. Sixteen separate drawings for every second meant more than twenty-one thousand drawings were needed for the entire cartoon. Hundreds and hundreds of prep sketches and full-colour concept art and failed test runs and revisions to storyline went into every picture that made the final cut. The amount of work was intimidating. Not only were we drawing, we also washed the 35 mm film in our own developing baths in the darkroom Hick had set up in a cavity, and spooled the results through a film projector to critique the results of our efforts with Wendy present as our producer, director, artist, landlord, roommate.

Televisions distracted us. Plugged into all kinds of extension cords and power bars were television sets spanning decades of technological progress in cathode ray tube resolution, size, display. Jonjay found a lot of them on his scavenger hunts through the city's alleys. Not one television encased in its own wood-veneer credenza with shelves, but three. Wendy had a problem—whenever she saw an abandoned TV on the sidewalk she had to bring it home with her like a stray. We arrived at No Manors after Hick—when Wendy, Biz Aziz, and a rotating league of underage and worndown cartoonists held down the fort. Televisions, lots of televisions
all going simultaneously on different channels or in choirs—this furnace of sitcoms and dramas, game shows and sports. Mental agents of the new microphone. Personalities ruled. Networks shunted faces across the screen. The TV had no other story except the microphone. The story was
you talk
.
Welcome to Sally Jessy Raphael—today: Satanism in America. Our guests are from San Francisco. Tell the world our millions of viewers what you think!
Repressed memories of genitals being touched? Ask Anton LaVey. Apparently there were Satanists in our preschools perverting our children out of their senses. Children and teenagers were coming to police with extraordinary memories. Unless you asked the Satanists in San Francisco who said it was against their beliefs to force anyone to do anything without permission. Satanists were for self-discovery and against child exploitation.
But that's not what the courts were seeing.
Everybody at the manor read
Michelle Remembers
—Hick's hexed hospital copy was on the longtable in front of us opened to page six—
What had been revealed in the Saturday session … not distressing enough to explain why these memories had been so thoroughly blocked—they had been totally buried
. The doctor co-author, who discovered that memories hide inside us, helped put in jail the McCuans and the Kniffens, parents in Kern County accused of satanically abusing toddlers, thanks to his unique therapeutic techniques on the child victims. The California raisin talking about faith and fortitude and the zero option. Reaganomics. The Iron Curtain. Nuclear Armageddon. AIDS. AIDS and Reaganomics, Reaganomics and AIDS. AIDS life, AIDS social life, AIDS parties, AIDS funerals, AIDS coffee, AIDS nights, AIDS days. Reaganomics news about the deregulation of the financial market and the privatization of the prison-industrial complex. In the spring, the president went before the National Rifle Association and said,
Well, it is a nasty truth, but those who seek to inflict harm are not fazed by gun-control laws. I happen to know this from personal experience … Hardcore criminals use guns. And locking them up, the hardcore criminals up, and throwing away the key is the best gun-control law we could ever
have.
It was hard to argue with the only president to ever live through an assassination attempt.

Hundreds of thousands of guns on the streets of San Francisco. Guns were poems to crazy people. Whatever the murder rate was, it was always never higher. Heat. Rounds going off in the night without echo, hemming-hawing police sirens and whirring ambulances on the streets of San Francisco, helicopters overhead. On Bernal Hill we could literally point to the familiar unmarked grey CIA Gulfstreams flying overhead— Looky, said Jonjay, it's the CIA's daily drop—the only airplanes landing and taking off regularly from the docks on the SF Bay, with what Jonjay suspected were shipments of untraceable cash and guns, and coming back delivering bricks of white cocaine straight from the rebel Contras who stole it out of Nicaragua. Unloaded at Hunter's Point and Protrero Hill docks by stevedores who knew the score. Tons of untrammelled Central American coke got shipped all points north, south, and east, as well as mixed right here in SF apartments. Uncut Nicaraguan cocaine was being percolated into a soul-destroyingly potent crack rock sold to basehead junkies in Protrero and Hunter's Point, the Tenderloin and Mission District.

Most of the time Wendy didn't pay attention to the news of Contras, the assassination of Ninoy Aquino Jr., or the crack murders and Lebanese terrorists, she didn't care to notice who was killing more people in El Salvador, the right or the left, as much as she wanted to stay abreast of daily news and current events, she preferred for inspiration to skip straight to the funny pages in the paper, or to watch
Dallas
,
Charlie Brown
specials, and other primetime programs. Now that they were available on VHS, she told the rental stores she wanted to own her favourite movies by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, cassettes that cost her eighty or ninety dollars a pop. She had thousands of dollars' worth of old movies, a whole bookshelf in the manor of movies in big plastic VHS boxes she watched to get ideas for jokes.

After the break, the
Hart Files
. And today's trivia, can you name these three celebrities, born today? The answers, when
Entertainment Tonight
returns.

That
is easy, said Smooth Patrick, who was drawing sketches for sequences in the animation.

Jonjay tested the manor with trivia games. Best original comic strip by a former assistant.

The Mischiefs
by Vaughn Staedtler, said Biz Aziz, he was former assistant of Al Andriola on
Kerry Drake
.

First comic strips by the creators of classic comic strips.

Mark:
Charlie Chaplin
by Elzie Segar of
Thimble Theatre
, Popeye's creator.

Comic strip artists who also work in superhero comics.

Patrick: Frank Frazetta, ghosting for Al Capp on
Li'l Abner
.

Comic strip writers who are also novelists.

Rachael: Dashiell Hammett,
Agent X-9
.

Comedians who also write gags for comic strips.

Patrick: Woody Allen.

Comedians who have comic strips.

Mark: Woody Allen.

What's that clicking sound?

My teeth, my damn teeth grind unbeknownst to their owner, said Wendy and stretched her mouth open wide.

If you don't see a dentist, we said, they might all fall out.

My hell is the dentist's office, said Wendy.

You want your teeth to fall out? Jonjay said. Falsies? Your jaw caves in and you lose your chin when you wear dentures.

We got used to Hick's body odour. Those of us who had never met him knew him. We smoked him. The weed simply reeked of harsh sweat. Biz stamped her joint out in the ashtray on the coffee table, picked up one of the joints we rolled freshly for her and lit it.

You need to book a three-hour appointment at Gilligan's dentist office, said Patrick.

It feels like there's little Gilligans trying to burrow their way out of my temples, Wendy told us.

Gilligan's cult, said Jonjay.

Gilligan's Vatican, said Biz.

Wendy took a big pull on the joint Biz passed her and then she passed it to one of us and we pulled, saw stars, and laughed about it. One sure way to unlock the persistent grinding at the gate of her jaw was
men
, she confessed.

She wrote a letter to Dr. Pazder, eminent psychologist in the burgeoning study of repressed-memory syndrome, that she had us proofread.

Dear Dr. Pazder, M.D.
,

Hello, my name is Wendy Ashbubble, and I am a young woman in my twenties also born in Victoria, the same city as you and Michelle Smith, your most famous patient and now your lovemate. Presently I reside in San Francisco where I am a professional illustrator and cartoonist with a degree of financial success that affords me a lifetime of security and some luxury. And like Miss Smith, I too have suffered from strange vivid and constantly recurring dreams ever since my childhood. That's why I hope to make an appointment with you at your earliest convenience. It was only after reading your memoir of what Miss Smith discovered about her past under hypnosis that I have come to believe these strange things about my life might possibly true.

And so on. In this and subsequent letters to Pazder, she alluded to a father figure of some renown, but didn't out and out say Reagan, said nothing of Hick Elmdales's wake either, because she was so certain that the
strange ceremonial aspects Pazder might like to hear about weren't real. Pazder never wrote her back.

What should I do about my teeth grinding? she asked her business manager when he called from his Motorola. Frank would call from his Hexen office in San Jose about once a season, with a gentlemanly report on what was what. She could always hear more phones going off in the background and men screaming
shitbag
at each other and frantic demands.

Your teeth? What's the matter with your teeth? I know world-class dentists right here in the Bay who can take care of you.

Sounds like you're calling from a war.

I am. One big civil war fought over the phone, Frank said. Hey listen, I just got off the phone with my guy at this national real estate company. I work with them on securitized mortgages, and anyway, they can use your characters for promotions and advertising, what do you think? Worth about fifteen thousand to you.

Sure, sure, okay, sounds like a deal, she said and did a quick mental tally of what he'd accomplished for her. Toiletries, knick-knacks, patties, cakes, creams, ices, plastics, clothes—all within the span of three years, Frank got her characters plastered everywhere. Every laundromat franchise and hotel chain in America that showed off her characters in brochures and signage paid Frank for the privilege. In the early eighties
Strays
was so popular, Wendy opened parades in towns she'd never heard of whose populace were so devoted to her strip there was a statue of Buck erected in a local park. Cleveland's free weekly entertainment newspaper ran her picture on the cover surrounded by her characters and the headline
Cleveland's Own Stray Wows America
.

Wendy took up the kitchen nook at the opposite end of the longtable from Hick's bedroom, and we spread out around on either side of her. Over a matter of minutes she pencilled Buck's head on a piece of scrap paper. That
started her workday. Then came a body, and a shovel, so for something to do he dug a pit, actually it turned out to be a grave. She listened to funk records Mark flipped on the turntable and the murmur of Biz Aziz singing along in the dining room as she sketched and laid out pages for an issue of her memoir. Patrick Poedouce all of a sudden with his latest idea for a strip—set in a gold rush town—practically inspired by Wendy's drawing. Letting Buck take life in her hands. This was her method of distracted idea generation. She could be on the phone with Gabby or anyone and doing this. Now Buck was digging a grave in a cemetery. She drew another Buck beside the first, this time lower in the grave and with more earth piled next to him. She drew a bat who bore a striking resemblance to Ignatz, the mouse in
Krazy Kat
, flapping his black wings over Buck's head. As she started to ink the sketch, she lost her pencil (in her hair). She still didn't know what the joke was going to be. She found a new pen, a Pentel nib. She liked the idea that Buck might get a job as a gravedigger. That suited a dog who could always be counted on to see the good side. But she didn't know the punchline yet. So she made a few more sketches of a panel with a priest and mourners. This one panel took at least five sketches, and each sketch improved on one or two things—first she brought the priest into detail, a kind of Jim Rockford in a frock, so then she had to work out the mourners, they all had to become individuals, a widower, a louche fashion-conscious daughter and her husband, an old frumpy friend, and as soon as she found characters, the next sketch retained their essence but pulled back on the rest of the detail so your eye would focus on Buck, seated at the bottom right corner with the shovel over his shoulder. And she still didn't know what the punchline was going to be.