The Road Narrows As You Go (28 page)

Rachael didn't agree. No reason to put yourself at risk of landing in the girlfriend box, she said. That's not the life for you. Every day having to look at the same man, no. Think about it—now you are free. You don't have a man, someone to betray you, cheat on you, take your money. Why commit to a man when you've got No Manors? My advice is never let a man spend more than two consecutive nights in your bed.

Gee, Twyla said. Mighty rough on love, don't you think?

No, said Rachael. Not when it comes to Wendy. And anyway, didn't San Francisco rewrite the rules on love?

Twyla snorted. Love is thicker than latex, she said. Not to mention you're being cynical about people in general, and plus don't you think doing art is a really selfish and pretentious reason to avoid sustained human contact? She was dabbing Wite-Out over Wendy's little mistakes here and there on an ambitious Sunday strip; one of Twyla's (many) jobs was corrections. She added, People always make a phony division between career and relationships as if the two are incompatible. That simplifies things to the point of intellectual absurdity.

It's not very
Strays
for her to settle down, is it? Rachael said.

Sex is not the same old hippie rock festival you can jump the fence and see for free anymore, Twyla cried out. Don't you see the hospitals are stuffed with kids dying of the incurable AIDS from fucking? We're in a plague-riddled San Francisco.

Yeah, Cheez Whiz, for love she has us, said Mark Bread and drooped his head on her shoulder so she could scratch his cheek. See, aren't I sweet?

Patrick pressed his palms to his chest and said, Hey look, hey, alls I'm talking about is single men like to have a good time, too, okay? It's not just the guys with girlfriends and wives and all that baggage who are
looking for a fast hookup. Wendy's missing out on a lot of fun because she's hung up on the idea that any semblance of eligible means automatic commitment.

Twyla threw a pen at him. I'm serious, he said.

I know you are, she said.

For a while Wendy sat back and listened with amusement as we discussed her love life. A rosy blush coloured her cheeks and neck, her eyes lit up, and she stopped drawing and listened to us analyze her. She was flattered that we paid enough attention to her comings and goings to form an opinion, and fascinated by what others saw in her that she could not see. This was more information about the blind spot she sought out in rounds of therapy. She leaned forward onto the table, put her chin in the cup of her hands, and batted her eyelashes. Forbidden fruit, she said. I don't know why but I've always wanted a bite. What is to become of me?

Nothing, except you stay you, said Rachael. You're a cartoonist. Why be anything else? Why be anything but Wendy?

Funny Jonjay not being home when you decide to have this conversation, Wendy observed, perhaps too ruefully.

Patrick pushed his chair back and brushed the pencil shavings off his lap, stood and said, Well never mind then okay anyway. Hey, Wendy, I wondered if I could borrow your car. I need to get to the Sunset. I'm hanging with Bill Blackbeard this afternoon. He asked me if I wanted to check out his archive and I was like, fuck yeah. Or if you'd like to, Wendy, obviously you could come with me.

You can borrow the car, Wendy said and uncapped a Rapidograph. I'm going to seize the page.

Cool, thanks. Yeah, Blackbeard's got plans for a tenth-anniversary reprint of the Smithsonian collection, so he's going to publish some newly discovered strips.

A new edition?

I get to take a look at the archive. Can't wait.

You know what? Wendy said. That
does
sound like fun. I
will
come with you. Hold on. I should draw something especially for Blackbeard.

Smooth, very smooth, whispered Twyla to Rachael.

Wendy drew a quick doodle and amassed a basket full of
Strays
toys, bubble gum, a pint glass, and a copy of her bestselling debut
Strays
treasury,
Go, Buck
,
Go!
—collecting the best of her strips from the past three years, published by Bantam and Scholastic.

Patrick drove so she could take pictures of the city with a Brownie for future source material. Not that she drew a lot of backgrounds but she liked to fill binders with street scenes just in case. She used b&w 400 ASA film that when developed came out grainy, washed-out greys that made for aesthetically unappealing pictures but worked for her needs.

Does his reprint plan to go right up to the present day? Wendy asked as she snapped shots of nondescript street corners.

So far's I know, said Patrick.

Gee
…
that's interesting, I wonder who he'll pick. She looked at the little drawing in the top of her basket of Buck and Francis that she'd made as a gift for Blackbeard and sighed.

Patrick shot her a look. Sheesh, Wendy.

Well, I'm allowed to hope … She turned her camera to another city skyline out the side window.

Bill Blackbeard was waiting at the door of the Spanish-style split-level he had rented with his wife on the corner of one of the numbered avenues off Taraval Street in the Sunset District. Not only did he live here, this was where he maintained an enormous archive called the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art. In the early years of microfilm, Blackbeard saw how this format treated daily comics and filed to become a 501 (c) 3 organization so libraries could send him their bound archives of original crusty old papers, otherwise going to the dump now that decades' worth had been reduced to single pocket-sized sheets of migraine-inducing x-ray microfiche. Then the Smithsonian endowed his collection, and in
seventy-seven, Blackbeard published a definitive history of newspaper comics—and now with the ten-year anniversary nearing, a revised paperback was in the early planning. Since then his comics collection might have doubled or tripled in size. He possessed over two million black-and-white and full-colour comic strips, by far the biggest collection in the world. And he lived right here in the city.

Patrick introduced Wendy, which was unnecessary since Blackbeard had been over to No Manors on plenty of occasions before the wake; the two knew each other at least peripherally and sometimes nodded to each other on the street. She assumed he knew her strip was a roaring success. Blackbeard was a tall, no longer slender man with inquisitive hands and a boneless handshake, neck popping out of an unpressed gingham shirt, a freckled face half covered by a set of big square glasses with wire frames; behind them his eyes were squinted, surrounded with the laughlines of a man who smiled for a living. What little hair was left on his head was snow white, cut short and neat and respectable. For a man of his advanced age, maybe he was sixty, he spoke in the likable drawl of a Bay Area gonzo, as if playing the peaceful alien meeting Captain Kirk and Spock for the first time, welcoming his beamed-down visitors to the sacred crypt and to sleep with his princesses no problem.

Did you bring the
stuff
? Hot dog. Okay, then, let's go
inside
, Bill said, rubbing his hands together with a conspiratorial flourish. He shut the door to the main floor where he said his wife was watching
Donahue
.

Wendy gave him the drawing she'd made and said how much of a treat this was for her to finally see the archive after hearing so much about it all these years. He scanned her doodle admiringly, thanked her and said it was wonderful, then carefully carried the picture down to his office.

He's like the Bela Lugosi of comics, Wendy whispered as Blackbeard led the way down two flights of narrow stairs. Blackbeard said this used to be a four-car garage until he had it converted to his archive and office. First he gave a tour of the archive. The overpowering scent of decomposing
paper knocked you down before you saw what a precarious place it was, a room overstuffed with thousands upon thousands of newspapers stacked nine or ten feet high. A pair of bare ceiling bulbs lit the musty former carport and made it feel more like a catacomb, as if Blackbeard's destiny was to protect a rarely seen chamber in the new library of Babel. Much of his collection of newspapers was unboxed, just giant stacks of folded papers. Some papers were stored in crates or cabinets. Only a few pillars were made of leatherbound library collections, yet most of it was labelled. Blackbeard was the first to concede it was a rather haphazard affair. All of it tottered on the brink of what felt like imminent collapse. One serious seismic tremor and the entire archive would be levelled. There were not enough shelves for all the papers still uncatalogued and not enough room for his recent acquisitions, there was almost not enough space on the concrete floor between the towering stacks to take a safe step. One wrong move along the fault line and a high pile of Hearst papers would crumble over our heads.

Patrick opened his sidebag and removed a Ziploc with a hundred dollars' worth. It's super sticky, you might let it dry out a bit, he advised.

My wife doesn't like me to
smoke
but I
love
the shit, Bill said and toggled his head happily laughing as he made the exchange. Can you roll me one or two? I want to see how you do it. I'm somewhat terrible at it. We can't smoke in here. Let's go to my office.

There he opened a window at grass level to let out the fumes and kept what he called the stuff in best condition. Patrick used the surface of a brushed-steel fireproof cabinet to crumble up a joint under Blackbeard's connoisseurial nose; eight of these cabinets filled the room, flat files loaded with pristine examples of newspaper strips and originals. Portfolios were filled. UPS boxes yet to be opened. Manila envelopes yet to be sent. Traces of an aroma she was distinctly fond of, reminded her of childhood days in the basement of the downtown public library, that vanilla scent given off by old paper disintegrating, plus stains from cigarettes and joints and
body odour. Preserved behind frames on the walls were favourite strips, original artworks, rare sketches. Cabinet and tabletops were decorated with
Annie
Beetleware shaker mugs and
Krazy Kat
tin plates and various wood figures. Every square inch of wall was dedicated to some framed piece of comic strip memorabilia.

Hey, she said and pointed to a
Strays
Sunday she'd handpainted and donated to an auction. I had no idea you bought that.

Of course I know your strip. He eyed Wendy over his glasses. Number one, your sense of humour is positively gothic. Two, you like to use four panels and that makes me happy, in an age squeezing most cartoonists down to two or three.

Well, shucks, said Wendy. I was thinking of going down to three more often.

Don't, Blackbeard said. He told her to fight the trend. Comics used to be king. I like the level of detail you deliver. Your roommate would be proud.

I miss him. I'm drawing in his shadow all day long.

Bill Blackbeard gave them a hearty tour through his many shelves of comics, stacks containing ex-library leatherbound newspapers some seventy years and older, proudly uncovering examples of
Yellow Kid
and
Buster Brown
to impress them, and as with so many other famous titles, he possessed the entire run of
Mutt & Jeff
. He hoped to get the Smithsonian to reproduce his originals at full size in his upcoming history, for he had many sketches worth sharing with readers. In these old newspapers he showed us the comics were privileged with full pages and reproduced almost to scale; some papers even had two entire pages of daily comics, near the front. And in some weekend editions each strip was given an entire page of a special section, and not only were the comics what made papers popular back then, Blackbeard said, but the size of a newspaper back then was twice what some were today. There were so many repetitively epic adventure strips and all sorts of derivative gag strips and tie-in
strips that came and went, and what struck Wendy was that she didn't recognize a single one, and yet it was clear that at one time or another each of these forgotten strips had fans who felt the way we did about
Strays
, and now that all these titles had gone by the wayside in favour of a select few whose names stood out in memory, the only thing saving them from complete oblivion was this man, Bill Blackbeard.

Make sure you check out these early
Gasoline Alley
s to understand why it's the legacy strip it is today, Blackbeard said and spread out a set. How well each frame is executed, the poetry of his line, and the sublime honesty in his treatment of his subject matter.

I'm gobsmacked, said Wendy. I gotta admit I never saw any of the old
Gasoline Alley
s until your book. She let her eyes roam over each panel of this consummate Sunday strip.

Hey, that's okay, Blackbeard said. I know the feeling—that's the whole point, to keep the history fresh. He poured her a tonic water from a beer fridge and passed a can of Old Milwaukee for Smooth Patrick.

This is place is terrific, said Wendy, pushing her glasses up her nose. She quickly exchanged her tonic for Patrick's can of beer. You saved all these characters from the brink of oblivion, she said. You're practically the patron saint of newspaper comics. I want to spend a week here reading my face off. Comics are the entirety of my existence. Without comics I don't know my name. I always hoped my comic might someday grace your archives, she said and nodded to the auctioned comic.

The only collection of its kind in existence, said Patrick.

Just because I spend my time protecting the past doesn't mean I'm not plugged into what's happening now. I told you I read your strip and I do. You're an excellent candidate for inclusion in the modern section of my Smithsonian reprint.

Wow, wow, wow, said Wendy and swooned.

My eyeballs are licking their lips, said Patrick, his nose to a picture frame. Is this original handpainted
Krazy Kat
actually signed best wishes to you?

When I was a young boy I wrote Herriman a fan letter and that's what he wrote me back.