The Road Narrows As You Go (27 page)

Murder in the Air!
hollered Gary Panter as he drew Reagan, guns ablaze on the lawn of the White House. A two-bit actor, now the president, amazing, said Gary. Leaping straight off the silver screen into the real world to save us all from the Reds.
Halle-lujah!
The president is pure Rozz Tox. Jokes for a third world war. He's got material for before, during, and after the riot police.
A hippie
, man, I remember when Reagan said a hippie
looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah
. Man, he gets it! That's a solid joke.

Rod Serling predicted Ronald Reagan, said Jonjay as he switched to drawing Reagan as astronaut fighting red-skinned aliens on the surface of Mars.

Hippies might be Tarzan hybrids, but Reagan is pure Muppet, said another cartoonist. I'd rather vote for Jim Henson for president than this evil Muppet.

No way, hosers, said Wendy, I love the president. He's a protector. The lifeguard watching over the public beach of the free world.

Liberals are all complaining about this and that, Gary Panter would say, but look past the Republican Party and consider the possibility this is the closest thing to Frank Zappa in the Oval Office. Ronald Reagan is using a Rozz Tox tactic to beat the Soviets.

I want to meet him one day, that's my plan, Wendy said. She didn't
need to go into the details of her paternity narrative with Panter, who knew her beliefs but was not surprised to learn Reagan was the inspiration for most of what the dog Buck says and does in her comic strip.

We all agreed Reagan was more than a president and proving to be some kind of a bionic televisual superman, a puppet to his own image, an actor playing himself who simply disappears when the spotlight's off.

Wendy not only liked Reagan; she made it clear she also liked Panter. Want to take advantage of me, Gary?

I'm kinda married. Panter giggled when she tickled him on the ribs.

A nickel for every time, she said. Can a capitalistic cartoonist take such stifling traditions as monogamous marriage seriously? Wendy pet his hand and scratched the nape of his neck.

Saul Steinberg got Mark Bread's chesterfield whenever he visited the manor from New York and Mark slept with Twyla in the spare room with
Pan
merchandise. For a few nights at a time, a long weekend for a convention or to meet with friends, Steinberg was such a gentlemen—he had the charms of a Charlie Chaplin, he taught us to cook classic downtown knishes and how Warhol made his blotter drawings, and he was playful and flirtatious, too: he painted a nude in our bathtub and another nude on the ceiling of the dining room copulating with the chandelier. He even took Wendy to the movies on a few occasions, always to see the latest fantasy or science-fiction, what he called utter trash and loved to make sketches of while squirming and laughing through. Wendy called him the Picasso of cartooning and meant it, he was doing things with a pencil she could not believe possible—that his imagination existed was a gift. And once, after an all-night drawing game at the longtable, he put his face on her neck.

Ever since your comic went big, you've matured into such a beautiful woman, he said. Steinberg said he was a loyal, neurotic husband, and always kept what he called a platonic distance from what he described as Wendy's adolescent magnetism. But that morning he took her to bed.

Dear Dr. Pazder
,

I know how busy you must be but I do hope you'll find the time to write me a reply. I ask for your help because I know you are the one doctor in the world who can uncover my repressed memories and find the truth that's in me even I don't know about …

For years, Wendy wrote letters to Dr. Pazder. She told him about her life and her career, that
Strays
was in all the papers, local, regional, and Canadian ones, too, including the
Times Colonist
in his and, she confessed,
her
hometown, Victoria, Canada. Not Cleveland. She couldn't add the
New York Times
to the list, but this year, Gabby and Frank vowed to break her strip into the country's most esteemed paper.

When the postman reached the top of Stoneman Street at his usual time in the early afternoon, humping his thick stack of letters and multiple packages addressed to Wendy, one of us would invariably set to work sorting through the mail to separate bills from cheques, solicitations from swag, fan mail from private personal correspondence. Hundreds of pieces of mail came to the manor every week. Not to mention all the envelopes with the names of long-gone tenants; even if it was addressed to Hick we stamped
Return to sender
on it. Dealing with mail took up more and more time as the years went on and
Strays
went from popular to litigious. But the one letter Wendy kept watching out for, that reply from Dr. Pazder, despite all her hopes, never arrived.

What about your other psychiatrists, no luck? we wondered from time to time.

I can't be honest with a doctor when they put their own gimmick before me, she said. I end up playing along with their shtick instead of opening up.

It got so that at least once a day we could expect a secretary in the office of Dr. So-and-so to call asking for Wendy to make a follow-up appointment after missing her last.

You're honest with us. You tell us everything, we said more than once. Why aren't we enough?

But Pazder is a professional. Hypnosis is a real thing, Wendy said. People don't dispute the ability to be put under hypnosis. I'm looking for professional treatment.

She said Pazder's hypnotic spell would make it impossible for her to bullshit him. These other doctors weren't for her—she was choosy and easily bored. Sometimes her treatment would start out promising, she would come home feeling a hundred times better about herself, but then she sensed how easy it was to please the doctor, easy to trick, too, and easy for her to manipulate the therapy, and in the end, easy to ditch. She wanted someone who could dig so deep into her that Ronald Reagan would pop out of her nostrils and mouth inside the smoke of a thought bubble fully fledged. A thought bubble long repressed down in her gut, causing all this gas and bruxism, of a memory she didn't know she had, of once meeting her father when she was just a child. That strange half dream is what she wanted a doctor to uncover.

The reason I seek help, said Wendy, rubbing her temples and jawline, is because sometimes I'm so weak, I'm limper than a shoelace, more boiled than a spaghetti noodle. I can't stand up to Paddington Bear. Winnie the Pooh could take me down. My head wants to crack open.

Ah, no sweat. You're just tired, Jonjay told her. Rest. You're way ahead of the gaggle, Wendy Ashbubble. You ran away from home to become famous in America and it worked. How many people can claim
that
? Most people this day and age don't go near the shores of liberation even with a canoe and paddle, a life preserver and a Marine at their side. A crib, a swaddle, and a soother is what most people want from life. Most people can't decide what to spray in their hair. You're street smart, Wendy. You have your eye on art, and the dollar. A lot of cartoonists don't get a cut from merch, that's big. Frank's deal is pretty good for you. Look at Kirby, he doesn't get a red cent from all the Cap and Fantastic Four and X-Men toys. Think about that.

Yeah, but I looked again and Gabby negotiated so all my royalties are in Hexen's paper bonds. I'm not seeing all that much actual cash. A few thousand a week.

Forget money. What money you get, it's yours. What you lose, let go. Keep drawing and draw for the rest of your life. Drawing's your dream, not money. Draw every day all day until your fingers crack open like piñatas. You're not afraid of success, are you?

Of course I'm afraid of success. Success is the worst. Because what if now that I've got it, I flop? Every success is kind of the same, but every failure is unique in its own terrible way. Wendy spoke as she made the hatching texture of an asphalt road on a Wednesday strip with Buck's punchline—
Favourite day of the week? Payday!
That's part of what makes comic strips so popular, their fascination with failure, she said. Failure's funny. Unrequited success. We're sympathetic
and
we enjoy the suffering of a comic character. Disasters console. A comic strip has to pick a tragedy to repeat and the cartoonist draws the same tragedy every day the same way but twists it, repeatedly twists the same tragic situation, as the character makes the same mistake over and over. Repetition of a core tragedy is the secret to a strip's success, she said. What makes it classic instead of a toss, what makes it memorable, is repetition. Repetition repeats to repeat repetition.
Krazy Kat
—every joke was the same, a mouse hits a cat in the head with a brick every day for thirty years, repetition made George Herriman the James Joyce of the funny pages—this world seldom produces writing like his, hidden inside these animal hieroglyphs. Cartooning's circularity is its formula. But look: it's not pure art, it's the sort of robotic work America celebrates. Formula
is
the American formula for success. Readers demand economy, they love it, simplicity, functionality, and consistency are all praised. Mechanical repetition for the age of mechanical reproduction— think about Bushmiller's hand in
Nancy
, there's no trace of it, panel after panel he's reproducing by hand a flawless, mechanical look so exact it's intimidating. You're so absorbed by the cartoon you feel totally separated
from the world. But at the same time a comic strip is
about
the world. Nothing can hold you back from representing the world in your comic strip. Even
if
in every sense of the world you are separate from the world, even if you are isolated from the world in mind and body, your comic strip must be fingers-deep in the world. Even Linus feared the snow falling was a nuclear winter. A cartoon
is
the world, a world on an infinite loop. The loop reflects on our world and its suspicious road going flat out to the end. For most comics hit the button every New Year's and start again, a single year goes by over and over so that Charlie Brown is not thirty years older now but the same eternal age. These characters, and mine, too, are designed like machines, to last beyond my lifetime.

For reasons we're about to lay out, we called Patrick Poedouce Smoothie. Smooth Patrick. More often than any of the rest of us, Smoothie went for the direct approach. Smoothie at a bakery sees a fetching stranger bend to consider her options.
These pastries look so delicious, don't they?
says Smoothie and then adds:
Aren't
you
supposed to be behind that glass?
She laughs and brushes her hair behind her ear.
Are you free Thursday? How about Friday, Saturday, or Sunday
? At a bus stop, a lovely young commuter sits down and removes a heel to massage her foot. Smoothie says,
I thought I was here to catch a bus, but I've been waiting my whole life for you.
But when he put a move on Wendy she rebuffed him.

At the longtable in the middle of the night after a long drawing session, Patrick said, Sometimes you're so amazing, Wendy, I want to kiss you.

Well you can't. I don't do roommates with the exception of.

And Smoothie wasn't used to rejection. It took a couple days of long walks and competitive Ping-Pong to get his head back on straight. He started to take on habits only Mark was known for, like drinking a beer with his morning shower, and drawing with his eyes closed. Steamrooms distracted him in his spare hours, where he spent entire nights, insomniac shifts in almost complete darkness in shared baths, doing drugs and
having sex under the city. He began again, this time the long game. In his Smooth-mindedness the only thing he saw in this complex ball of frazzled nerves and clenched teeth was a greater-than-average challenge. A girl with a phobia for guys like her, guys who avoided commitment. Wendy was a curious type—she squeezed every apple or orange before buying one, opened every curtain for the views, gazed at the spines of unread books on the shelves, and had to test for herself to find out what a wife saw in her husband. If she was apathetic to his good looks and repelled by his angelic, impoverished bachelordom, he would engage her with his intellect and ambition. He dropped cute anecdotes. He went as the kite-eating tree from
Peanuts
for Halloween at the age of eight and then went as the kite-eating tree again at the age of eighteen. When it came to drawing, Smoothie's best work was imitations, reproductions, impeccable memory, he could do Popeye, Pogo, Nancy and Sluggo, Buck and Murphy without hesitation, three decades of Archie iterations, Batman and so on etcetera. A natural who treated his talent too casually until recently. Now he was ambitious. When it came to wisdom, Smoothie would drop the line,
Only you die, not who you are.
He applied that line to conversations about art, comics, history, death, so many topics. And when it came to connections, he dropped names like a trail of glamorous breadcrumbs. Crumb, obviously, Kirby, Kominsky, Robbins, Barry … She wanted to know more when Smoothie told her he was good friends with one of the lead assistants to Jim Davis on
Garfield
. And having the same barber as Art Spiegelman was cool, but cutting your own hair was cooler in her opinion.

One afternoon sometime in there, maybe eighty-two or eighty-three, when Gary Panter or Saul Steinberg and another married visitor were pounding the streets with Jonjay shopping for comics, records, art supplies, we remember confronting Wendy about her predilections. It was probably Patrick who floated the bold idea that she preferred married men because they offered a lack of accountability, easy exit strategy, and emotional detachment. So for example she could pick up and drop a guy
like Frank or Doug and go along, a night here a night there, whenever she pleased and with as many more of this kind as she desired, turning a blind eye to what a single guy might offer, for instance the kind of guy who wasn't afraid to be seen in public with her.