The Road Narrows As You Go (48 page)

Dear Dr. Pazder
,

You won't believe what happened to me … I was in New York for the Macy's Parade and …

30

We didn't complete the massive landscape painting of the
Strays
environs on celluloid as soon as we had promised Wendy over the phone. That was in a brief moment of delusional optimism. Our excitement about
the new idea
cast a spell that made us think the painting would be a snap to finish. The tracking shot we envisioned proved more difficult than our enthusiasm had anticipated. The problem was using the original character animations, and it took us months to accept that we needed to redraw everything. But Wendy didn't fulfill her promise, either: she didn't come home right away, so she didn't have to watch us scrap finished work. Now it was her turn to vanish.

Rather than fly straight home to us from New York and observe our progress on the
Strays
Christmas special, Frank hired two ace pilots and the couple travelled to destinations in Central America where Lupercal LLC had factories and then jetted across the Atlantic to Europe and etcetera, whereabouts together they holidayed for a further three months into the new year. She wrote us with boasts of snorkelling under the blue plastic sky off the sugar-white beaches of the Cayman Islands pictured
on the postcards. Sex in mosquito-infested resorts, on a private jet, in the ocean under stars. Industrial cities in Panama, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. Stops in Belize, Antigua, and Barbuda, the Caymans, the Virgins, all to meet in private with bank managers, factory managers, and the like. She was taking advantage. He was here to espouse the profitmaking beauty of the well-packaged high-yield bond, the power of the leverage buyout, and the future of trade between the nations. Capital must be fluid. Leverage empowers. Fucking nightly. She got over the popped balloons. Laugh it off. The parade seemed long ago when she was in Basel, her first time in Europe, where she visited art galleries full of paintings and sculptures by the dead while Frank met key managers of the Bank for International Settlements. Bombay, Hong Kong, and Taipei, havens for complex deposits. Hotels where she doodled and faxed. They jetted to Moscow.

This is all fine and dandy, said Wendy, but when do we go home and meet the president?

Soon, soon enough, just a few more stops, said Frank.

The coffee was so hot in Turkey it scorched all the glands in her throat. Turks and Caicos Islands, Nauru, Malta, Alderney, Andorra, and Zug. Liechtenstein. Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland— he brokered deals to lend money at interest and deposited money in each. He passed on more and more business to Gabby for translations of
Strays
in foreign newspapers. He contracted the regional use of
Strays
to the underdogs in profitable industries like the ones he invested in back in America. She tried the coffee.

Somewhere in the skies over Europe, Frank explained his rationale for the trip. If and when America's economy loses energy, I need other markets to keep the debt-financing rolling. Same goes for
Strays
. You come close to saturating America, you need other nations to keep the dream afloat.

You're the richest man I ever met, said Wendy.

Me, too, said Frank.

Because of Jonjay's formula?

In part due to, yes, said Frank. You like to dwell on that. Why? What about my skills in this endeavour of ours, don't they matter?

What is it to you, all this money?

Money is my business. The material stuff can come and go. But wealth itself I like. And you see, every door on earth opens to the money.

You think money's the key to life?

No, but I happen to want a lot of it while I'm alive. I'm glad you seem to have gotten over what happened at the parade. It's a thing that happens.

Her hips did some bellydance moves. She said, I love how it feels to be naked in the aisles of an airplane.

Some of the strip gags she faxed us while away featured Buck and Murphy on a vacation, too. A remedy for what Murphy calls
the yips and yowls of too much city livin'
. Buck thinks a vacation
is the perfect way to empty our brains
. Instead of a vacation, they get lost, and the new and unfamiliar streets all of a sudden turn threatening when they consider the possibility of never seeing their friends at the vacant lot again. Panic sets in big-time for Murphy. Buck's in complete denial. They are together but they feel alone. The city seems to expand under their feet the more intently they search. This sequence went on for a harrowing six weeks.
Lost upon lost!
Buck slaps his paws over his eyes when he finally accepts the facts—there's no hope of ever finding their vacant lot in this superdense metropolis. Six weeks was an eternity in the life of a gradeschool reader of the funny pages, and this displacement was too much for young fans to bear. The letters to the editor were dominated by children imploring the newspapers to help the characters find their vacant lot. The strip was never so popular. A hundred new papers bought subscriptions as the story picked up steam. In fact we completed enough strips for the adventure to take seven weeks, but at the last moment, Gabby convinced her to cut a week from the storyline after she started hearing from numerous city editors who were fielding calls
and letters from parents saying
Strays
wasn't funny anymore. When their kids open the papers in the morning to learn the cat and dog haven't found the vacant lot yet, it made them cry over breakfast and not want to go to school, rather stay home than risk getting lost. Crying kids convinced her.

She wired us five grand to buy a new Xerox machine—we blew the old one up—and two hundred dollars' worth of ink cartridges. With this we enlarged, shrank, and duplicated her characters and laid them on the lightbox to trace. All the details had to be imitated flawlessly or Gabby would call and complain, then send back strips for redraws. Tracing Xeroxes of her old strips was how we peanut-butter-and-jammed together a solution to meet her deadline of six strips a week including the doublesized Sunday colour.

Cartoonists stopped in to No Manors with the frequency of a bus stop during the first half of the eighties, and if they hadn't been there for it, they invariably asked us what we remembered from the weekend of Hick's wake. But not everyone had heard the rumour that Jonjay compelled us all to eat a part of the body, so we never knew how to reply. In eighty-five, though, all the cartoonists knew because of Biz's comic, and we even started to get phone calls from local editors and entrepreneurs. They didn't want to talk about
Strays
.

So? Is it true?

What
it
?

You know,
it
, they prodded. They got around to the reason for the call: Can you do us a spot illustration of
it
at the wake for an article we've commissioned? We've got a journalist to write about comics in San Francisco.

No can do, we would say. Too squeamish.

Pay is five hundred.

When's it due?

Can you create a cannibal-theme silkscreen poster for our Walpurgis Night Concert Festival? Budget's two hundred.

A hundred to do an illo of Hick Elmdales and Biz Aziz for the Arts section of the
Chronicle
?

When Gabby Scavalda called from Manhattan to settle a glitch in the strip, Patrick tried to pin her down. Tell me the straight dope, Gabby. What's my problem? All I get is weird slapdash freelance work. Why won't the big syndicates pick me up?

Patrick's dew-dapped dreams of his own successful newspaper strip had all but evaporated after years of harsh rejections. His latest foray—
White Collar
, about a polar bear employed as a middle-manager for a large corporation of penguins, had been turned down by every syndicate. He was ready to pack it in.

If there was anything Gabby liked more than permission to give the straight dope, we never saw it. She'd looked at some of Patrick's pitches over the years out of courtesy and had an idea what was going wrong.

Gabby told him, You'll never get in the papers if you give up. I can't speak for another editor but here's why I might pass if I was looking for a new strip and saw your work. First, it's very professional. You're a pro. You know what you're doing. So I look closely. You have excellent handling of your line weight. Thin lines spread out beautifully around bends and turns, and there's nice shadows. But so what? This is the funny pages. Your character designs are fundamentally flawed—there's nothing likable about how you draw them. They're derivative. And there's nothing fluid about your panels. The movement is all over the place. Editors get migraines from strips with bad flow. Everything looks stagnant or composed willynilly. Your own ideas aren't original, that's the biggest problem. The gags don't work. The humour is overweened. The funny is not funny. Your writing's not up to snuff. Your characters need depth. Here's the upshot, Patrick: you're better as an inker. You're an astounding inker. Maybe you should find a partner who can come up with the ideas and scripts and can pencil the panels for you to ink.

Dejected by the stumble, meanwhile Patrick took care of most of the
buzzes at the door that were cartoonists and other types of artists looking to buy a dime or a quarter of the inspiring shit that we kept replenishing in the laundry hamper, which still reeked something special. Its properties remained untested no matter how many we turned on to it and now swore by it.

One time a syndicate called for Patrick. This was not one of the big five syndicates. Rather, this was Impetigo, based out of Milwaukee, whose business focused on the free weekly underground newspapers the other syndicates overlooked. Impetigo—with quote attributed to Wally Wood for a slogan:
Sex, Violence, and Horror
—had illustrators, sex columnists, saucy horoscopes, and the like to fill out the arts and entertainment listings—they syndicated underground comix full of twisted scenarios and frustrating anti-punchlines. The comix editor wanted to know if Patrick would be interested in doing a
Life in Hell
–style comic strip about cannibals and the devil. You know, the editor said, as a kind of wink to
issue nine
.

What a blow to learn industry as far down the ladder as the Impetigo Syndicate had heard about his rejections. Patrick agreed to prep a strip even though the money was worse than what Wendy paid.

That's to say, on top of the animated
Strays
summer Christmas special perpetually due, we agreed to do freelance on the side. It was all for editors and designers who wanted the same thing: Make sure
it
's in there. And if they didn't want a literal representation of that night, they wanted the mood. And they wanted the credibility of our names. Our ambition made us say yes to most everything (except Impetigo), even when we ended up working for free (Mark would say yes to anything, he was so dipso by then). Like Frank's plans overseas, we prepared for a potential future when we might not have the luxury of being assistants on
Strays
and freeloading at No Manors.

The more work that piled up, the more we divvied it up among the four of us. Twyla pencilled the comic strip. Mark pencilled client
work. Patrick inked both. Rachael ran the show. When there was time for the summer Christmas cartoon, Mark pencilled keyframes and Twyla drew in-betweens. Patrick did most of the inking and painting onto the final sheets of celluloid. He and Twyla shot most of the stop-motion cinematography.

Our idea for the cartoon was to mix and match every animation technique in the book. Traditional cel animation interrupted by puppetry segments. Clay stop-motion animation. Mummenschanz-style mask theatre.

On an episode of
Entertainment Tonight
around this time, correspondent Leonard Maltin took viewers behind the scenes with Hollywood's most famous creature-makers, the special-effects guys who made the monsters. Creator of the creatures in
Sinbad
and
Clash of the Titans
and more, Ray Harryhausen showed Maltin how he used a basic stop-motion technique to bring to life his skeleton army, deathmatch dinosaurs, rampaging cyclopses, and royal snakemen. Harryhausen followed one rule:
If you want to draw a dog, first you have to be that dog
. He filmed himself acting as his monsters, then used a reel of his own mime as a frame-by-frame reference when he moved his models bit by bit in front of the stop-motion camera.

So that's what we did. We acted out every scene in the cartoon and filmed it. By eighty-four, not only did we have ten minutes of animation, we had a complete live action version we'd shot on a camcorder with us as actors.

So, while Wendy bounced from nation to nation on her sexful adventure with Frank Fleecen, our days got hairy bananas busy. There was no leisurely freeloading for us. The question was, how to get more work done? Sleep fewer hours. Sleep in shifts. Cycle through jobs. Eat more and darker chocolate. Skip showers and baths for days. Fuck it, let the hair grow on our faces and legs. Heat frozen fish, chicken, or whatever else goes nice with ketchup, guacamole. More coffee, more shrooms, more
bud. Draw until our hands looked like pencils and our noses doubled for erasers. Coffee all night. Forget to put the garbage out or clean the toilets. Like in a horror movie, we decided to split up, divvying chores, more deadlines. Put the summer Christmas special on the backburner,
again
.

31

In February of eighty-five, Justine Witlaw went ahead with an exhibition of Jonjay's artwork.

I waited for half a fucking decade. I'm not waiting around forever. What else is there to do? she said. She promised to deposit his half of sales in a trust account to accrue interest during his absence. If he ever made a withdrawal from there, that was another matter.

Titled after a line Jonjay wrote on the back of a bristlecone pine study:
From a History of the Secret Origins of the Universe
. Justine showed ten of the most beautiful examples of Jonjay's rubbings of the sailing stones' trails, in large white wood frames and displayed in a snaking wave along one white wall of her gallery. On the wall perpendicular was a selection of his White Mountain series, watercolours of the cliffs and bristlecone pine trees. Across from the rubbings, she had her interns reproduce all the Death Valley traces at one one-hundredth of the actual size to fit them together onto a print (one of five, unsigned) to be studied for their shapes' strange similarity to the branches of the bristlecone pines. On another wall was a drawing on plaster of a pi-perfect circle
Jonjay had drawn freehand one night on the wall at Justine's apartment in Russian Hill. She had the piece of plaster cut out of her rental and carefully framed, then the room replastered (at a cost of well nigh five thousand). Next to the circle on plaster was photodocumentation of the inverted pentagram in the other circle he'd painted freehand, on the door to Wendy's lime-green Gremlin's carport, and of the pentagram's redo by the Evangelical boy next door.