The Road Narrows As You Go (29 page)

So cool, said Patrick. How much more do you need?

I want all the dailies, all the Sundays, for
every
comic ever. That is
the dream
, Bill said, and towards that goal he said he already had most, including many of the critical works like
Nemo
,
Popeye
,
Mickey Mouse
,
Prince Valiant
,
Gasoline Alley
,
Dick Tracy
, and
Krazy Kat
. I keep a master list and strike them off one by one. But
Annie
, Bill Blackbeard said and tapped his nose. I want to claim I have all of Harold Gray's run on
Orphan Annie
but the truth is I'm missing a few damn weeks of one storyline, this continuity featuring this fantastic villain by the name of Mr. Chizzler, a shady conman who pretends to be a music manager to exploit Annie's singing talents.

I read that story. It must have been at the Victoria public library when I was a kid, Wendy chewed her lip. I mean, this was when I was on
vacation
there … from where I
am
from, Cleveland. It's in their old newspaper collection. I used to read all the old newspapers for their funnies. That's what I did, even when I was on vacation … go to the library.

The
whole
story? Are you sure?

No, but I
think
so. Dozens and dozens and dozens of strips.

I'm going to give them a call. I will, I will, said Bill wagging his head so excitedly his glasses slid down the bridge of his nose. I will
right now
. I'm serious. This would be the end to a very lengthy search, Wendy.

He asked if he could leave them alone for a moment while he looked up the number and made the call What did I tell you? Patrick said. Blackbeard loves comics.

No kidding. What an a-
ma
-zing collection. Wendy touched an original George McManus Blackbeard kept inside acid-free cardboardbacked plastic. Do you think I could take it out of the plastic for a second and
feel
it?

Go ahead, Smooth Patrick told her. Your hands are clean, aren't they?

No, she said and pulled the bristol from its protective casing.

Sixty years later, the artist's lines of ink stood up as though the paper were a thin sheet of glass. In his
Bringing Up Father
, McManus brought that classical illustration style to the funny pages, a graceful fairy tale line that was simply beautiful.

My lineage is pure vaudeville puppetry, Wendy said. Mickey, Krazy Kat, Dot and Dash, Snoopy and Woodstock, and a lot of Mutt and Jeff, Popeye, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of loafy Shmoos in between.

She didn't care what he said next, she kissed him on the mouth. You're so stupid you're beautiful, she said and kissed him again. You're stupiful, she said, kissing him more. Patrick's eyes rolled white. You know you taste like oranges, like Tang, she said. As soon as she got Patrick hard, she straddled him, snaked off his belt, unzipped his pants, and went down on him. She did not hold back. Oh good gosh, he shuddered and instead of coming, pulled his cock out of her mouth and swung it around erect in the air, bobbling around as if a small blind man lost his cane, or the cane lost the blind man.

Where, where? she whispered. She didn't take her legwarmers off.

The floor, the floor the fucking floor, Patrick said and she stared transfixedly at his cock swaggering around pink and glistening.

There's not enough time! she giggled. Once her back was flat on the floor of the San Francisco Academy of Comic Art's archives and her legs were up and spread as far as they could go apart, Smoothie Smooth Patrick plunged. His prick pressed so deep into her she could feel his balls clapping her ass. Meanwhile her head kept knocking the bottom of the
Thimble Theatre
flat file so the drawers kept jerking out, an inch here, an inch there. And as much as she enjoyed what he was doing—kissing her neck and ably gliding in and out of her—the drawers of the flat file really started to worry her.

Smoothie, she whispered and tapped him on the shoulder. Smoothie.

Fuck, Wendy, you're so awesome, Wendy. You don't know how long I wanted this.

Hot damn, you're a genius! she heard Bill Blackbeard shout from the top of the staircase. You were right, you were right, hoo-wee! How did you know? They can
give
me the papers, too. My god, girl, you just completed my
Little Orphan
— Hello? Where did you both go? Now what in the fuck— Holy shit,
you two
, what in the fuck are you doing fucking—? Oh no! Watch out!

In the lurch, a flat file tipped. Bill Blackbeard felt he must trip over Wendy and Smooth Patrick in his dive to stop the steel drawers containing irreplaceable Popeye strips from crushing them.

Goddamn, I wish I could say this was the first time I'd caught kids fucking in my office, but it ain't. Blackbeard turned to face the other direction.

Patrick pulled his pants on as fast as possible, then stuffed his underwear into his pocket. Still doing up his fly, he hobbled over to Blackbeard's side and whispered in his ear, Look, man, thanks for being cool. Sorry about this but I've been trying to get with Wendy for like three years. You gotta understand I had to take this opportunity.
She
kissed
me
.

Blackbeard clapped him on the face. Haven't you kids heard? Sex carries this plague. I hope you're …

Wendy was still on her hands and knees behind a six-foot stack of bound newspapers, looking for her left legwarmer after it had somehow gotten shucked off in the action. She peeked around the newspapers, then stood up suddenly as if she'd tripped. She used her shirtsleeve to wipe spittle off the sides of her mouth. So uh … oh my god, shimminy bop, funny thing to ask now, but hey, just wondering what the chances are of
Strays
getting in your Smithsonian reprint?

Dear Dr. Pazder
,

Where do I begin?

19

I can't go to the desert. I got this mailout to do, said Biz Aziz. Someone can take my spot.

She split the tape sealing the top of the Purolator box. Inside were two hundred copies of the latest issue of
The Mizadventurez of Mizz Biz Aziz
, straight from the printer. She thought the full-colour cover looked good—the livid, blood-orange sunset cast over her minimalist drawing of No Manors popped off the page in front of the giant apparition of Hick Elmdales clouding the San Francisco skyline behind it, as if the smokehaze from a thousand bags of pot seeped out an open window and clung to the air over the manor in a perpetual fog. A sentient fog, funny and agoraphobic. Biz turned over the copy to inspect the back cover and then flipped open the pages to check that all the corrections she'd made on the proof had stayed corrected. At two dollars, the price per issue was no doubt steep for the kiddies, but she was no big house like Marvel or DC, she couldn't sell her comics for eighty cents, she was an artist who self-financed her work with an American Express credit card in her real name. Go on, she said, have a look. Number nine was set to hit the shelves of comic shops on
Halloween of eighty-four. She was distributed through Last Gasp, a local shop that specialized in underground comix and books full of potentially harmful matter, which copies of
Mizz Biz Aziz
invariably were. Her comics weren't always easy to ship out of the country, in fact Biz had to mail some orders herself from a PO box to avoid detection from the authorities— otherwise Canadian border guards confiscated packages going to comic shops in cities farflung as Toronto, Vancouver, and Saskatoon as often as shipments to Mogadishu or Jeddah, that's how squeamish some democratic countries' border guards were about
harmful material
.

Number nine was the second issue in a two-part story dealing with the death of Hick Elmdales. The eighth issue opens with a scene in which Biz accompanies Hick to the doctor the day he learns he's got the sarcoma skin cancer and tracks the six weeks up until Biz heard the news of his death during her performance at The Farm. Issue nine opens with the wake. The hundreds of mourners are represented by her trademark chips and fragments, cracked pieces, shards of figurative black against the white page, masklike faces and perversely rudimentary figures further dissembled by the intrusive background drawn in the same manner. The comic was riveting and dizzying, and to learn Biz's interpretation of the wake made the ends of our fingers tingle. As we flipped the pages, the sometimes inscrutable images, always beautiful and complex and perfectly executed, were eased along by the diary entries broken up into the captions at the tops and bottoms of each panel. Sometimes poetic, sometimes raw, always honest, Biz's prose was not in the exact voice Biz spoke in—her writing amplified and filled in what her body language supplied in conversation. The entire genius was present in these pages, that shapeshifting free spirit roamed these pages, these pages made our mouths go dry and our cheeks hot. The middle of the comic gave us shivers, a breathtaking splash page across the staples featuring Jonjay's return to No Manors.
The dead communicate through the living
, wrote Biz in the only caption to appear on that two-page spread. Black on white,
the drawing looked like a massive tableau in stained glass, nonexistent colours vibrating in front of our eyes in optical illusion. As we read these scenes, the same insecurities came hurtling back to us in waves of nausea. It wasn't so long ago that that feeling of homelessness, and it hit us hard a second time, of belonging temporarily, it made our stomachs sink like heavy sacks of lead into our bowels, thinking back to that night. We held our breath for minutes on end as we stared into every panel, then inhaled like swimmers about to go deepsea diving as we let ourselves be taken into her version of the wake.

At some point one of us, Patrick or Twyla, said, This issue is going to make you famous, Biz.

Biz shot us a look. I am already famous.

Wendy and Jonjay read, too. Jonjay read it once in a flash, gasping, and then he flipped back to the start and spent minutes studying each page. Slowly, carefully, Wendy absorbed the panels up and down, turning each page delicately as if it was the manual for a nuclear warhead, and shivered from time to time. She always wanted to see herself in Biz's comic, not that she ever asked to be, but hoped so and hinted it would be an honour, but we could tell she was having difficulty deciding how to feel now that it had happened.

Wendy finished reading and handed back her copy. You make us look like a pack of hungry cannibals, she said. Like California's cartoonist cult.

There's a letters section at the back for comments, Biz sniffed.

I didn't say I didn't
like
it. Gee whiz, Biz, it's amazing. But I'm weirded out to see myself eating Hick's human flesh. Makes me gag a little to see it. I like that you don't reveal it as a trick. That's disturbing.

Oh, Wendy, said Biz.

Every page is a hellacious piece of art. You're a sublime heretic, Biz.

You deserve a stat holiday in your honour.

I already have one, darling. It's called Christmas.

So when readers ask you if this is what really happened at Hick's wake,
if we all ate a piece of him, what are you going to answer? That we did? When the critics come asking, are you going to say we ate him?

I don't
do
interviews, Biz said. What's the point of interviews? All I want to say on the subject I put right there in the ish, that's it, there ain't no more. If I wanted to say more, I'd put it in the book. She crossed her legs in Jonjay's direction and flashed a wide smile at him and turned her eyelids down. He was almost on the last page again. Tell me what you think, Jonjay. You see anything missing? Did I mess up a beautiful night depicting it?

There were tears in his eyes. He wiped them away and said, You should be in the museum, Biz, you're this city's greatest artist. Cripes, this is your best issue yet. What a tribute to our friend. You
were
closer to him than I ever was. I know that.

He was referring to text in the comic that exposed some of the unspoken feelings Biz had during the wake:
He's my closest friend, mine … I burn with jealousy … Hick's darling Wendy wants to know where Jonjay's at …
, a series of captions reads on the early pages depicting the silhouetted guests arriving in droves, indistinguishable except for our narrator in the bottom right corner. We searched for ourselves in these panels showing clusters of cartoonists, even the shadows behind those shadows might be based on us.
Everyone wants to know where Jonjay's at. Everyone wants to console Wendy. Poor Wendy. But I'm the desperate one. I'm in pieces. Hick was MY best friend … None of you pretenders comes close to knowing him how I did.

In the final pages' panels, every character is more clearly defined, it's obvious (especially to us) who is who, the edges of our profiles are unobstructed, our postures traced from photographs on the lightbox, there's no background except the casket, the action surrounding the casket is clear and unambiguous. We take our turns, we accept Jonjay's offering and eat a piece of Hick, our own special piece of this great cartoonist. The last panels of the penultimate page rise above the scene and out the
windows of the manor to look down at the city. The ending is a full-page image of a radiant light surrendering to a greater cosmos.
Love made the universe …
, the caption reads.