The Road Narrows As You Go (53 page)

Zederbaum nudged TK Watson out of his own office chair and sat down. From this new position he once more said, No. Too stimulating, said Zederbaum. You're a lovely girl, but this cartoon is downright indecent.

Times change, think about it, kids still love some zip, said Wendy. Maybe we should plug it into the VCR again and give it a second look?

The cartoon does
not fit
CBS at this time, TK Watson said more diplomatically.

You know what fits CBS? Wendy stood up to leave.
Third place
, she said.

Two hours on the freeway later she was in the lobby of NBC, drenched in sweat. The VHS copy of the Christmas special rejected by two networks was clutched in Rachael's white knuckles. Above our heads, a giant backlit vinyl version of the NBC peacock. Underneath it in polished copper letters was a quote attributed to Emily Dickinson:
I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

Already I like this network more.
Fuck
ABC. Fuck CBS in the nose. Those networks are a waste. Here's the one for me, goddamn it.

The receptionist recognized Wendy instantly and said he was a big
big
fan of
Strays
. He asked for an autograph and a drawing of Francis before he invited her to go up for her meeting on the eighth and penultimate floor, where Mr. Patterson was waiting for her.

And if you bump into anyone who tells you anything remotely
fishy
, the receptionist added, make sure to ask if they work for Letterman.

She took the elevator up to eight, where there was another receptionist.

Can you direct me to Mr. Patterson's office, please?

Mr.
Patterson? Sorry, Mr. Patterson doesn't work here anymore. He was fired this morning.

… Do you work for Letterman?

Dah … uh … The guy leaped from the receptionist's chair and ran away down the hall.

Peter Patterson's office as Head of Children's Programming at NBC was twice the size of his colleague TK Watson's over at CBS, and Patterson was half the age of his colleague if not a third or fifth. He had a funny haircut, wore a wrinkly gingham shirt and stained khakis, and his collie slept under his desk.

Patterson told her, Listen, I want this cartoon for our network. A
summer
Christmas special? Oh my god,
perfect
. NBC is the home for this kind of craziness. My son is
nineteen
, he drapes himself in anything that's got
your comic
on it. Francis, right? He loves that feisty rabbit. Let me bring in Hank Lazarus, the prez, so he can put the final rubber stamp on this.

Patterson called in his boss. Wait until you see this.

Lazarus was a younger, plumper Patterson who positioned himself in the office in such a way that he took up the most amount of floor surface possible. He wore a Duran Duran concert T-shirt under a white blazer offset by a pattern of interlocking pink triangles. His creased white parachute pants were Gucci. His shoes fashioned from the skin of Komodo dragons.

No, said Lazarus. Show it to HBO. Are you like nuts or something? Didn't you see the
Challenger
? Oh my god. Not the fucking time. To be honest, I find the concept offensive. You can't mess with Christmas. Not this year. Absolutely not.

Patterson's eyebrow arched and he shrugged at Wendy behind his boss's back. There's no arguing with disaster.

We were sunk when word got back to us that the big three had passed on our Christmas cartoon. There was no way to talk about the rejection, so there was nothing to say. No Manors went silent. Patrick got out the newspapers and looked for a place to live on his own. Rachael hid in her room and recorded her eighth seven-inch single as Aluminum Uvula and booked a live show at the Broadway opening for Zetetic and Big Black (that ended in police and teargas). Mark, who was alcoholic so it didn't matter to him what happened, put every penny he got towards Old Milwaukee. And Twyla devised multiple strategies to save the Christmas special, including direct-to-video and other sensible and not so sensible options (bribes). Of all of us, Twyla was the least depressed by the rejection. It might have helped that Blair Slobodchikoff wanted her to move
in with him, and that Marvel hired her on a get-to-know basis to pencil a
Fantastic Four
spinoff miniseries about the superhero Medusa at a hundred dollars a page, written by Roy Thomas, inked by Terry Austin.

Nothing for us to do but wait until Wendy made up her mind. She didn't need to say it for us to think it was
our fault
the cartoon wasn't suitable for the major networks. But Wendy had handed this project to us knowing full well we had no idea how to make a cartoon and weren't part of a Disney system that could control our impulses. It was her fault it was our fault the cartoon was a flop.

Obviously she approached Piper Shepherd after the first round of networks passed, to see if he would distribute. Shepherd Media wasn't in the business of new properties, Piper explained; his specialty was syndicated repeats of network shows for all his regional cable affiliates.
Replicant Fitness
was a success, true, but actually that was a Shepherd Productions property pitched to networks and bought by NBC, and rebroadcast on Shepherd Media's Bay Area affiliate. He promised Wendy he'd buy the repeat rights if she got a deal, but as a businessman, Piper didn't approve of the salaries and budgets it took to operate a network studio. He left the upfront risks to others.

In a way, Wendy, this is good for you, I mean to get into some fights, to do a bit of ducking and swinging to gain approval outside Shepherd Media.

Oh, I know from fights, said Wendy. I've been fighting to be me ever since I was born.

You could hear a pencil hit paper at No Manors. You could hear the pipes gurgle and drain when a bachelor in a room upstairs used the shared toilet, that's how quiet it was at No Manors.

One day Biz came down from her suite on the third floor with a surprise to cheer us up—a garbage bag filled with so much weed it was stretched out like a beach ball. She dropped it on the dining
room's section of the longtable and stepped back to let us get in close and inspect.

Where did you get this? Patrick wanted to know of the astonishing amount as Mark set about rolling Phillies and Zig-Zags.

My Twomps hookup got a hella fresh hookup, was all Biz said and even that was too much. The news that week covered the funeral for South Oakland's drug kingpin, Felix the Cat, who caught a bullet in a roadside gunfight, leading to retaliations and a power vacuum.

How much do we owe you? Rachael asked.

Same as always, said Biz.

She stayed for one bowl and said she would come down later for more and do some drawing. Right now she was hanging out in her suite with the drag queens Lil Morphine Annie, Pelvis Restless, and Princess Strawberry DeAqueduct tailoring costumes and makeup for their next show at the Freight and Salvage—
La 628-E8
, based on the roadtrip memoir of Octave Mirbeau. We did notice the fact her face was made up in blazing theatricality but didn't see a need to ask why she had sequins and rhinestones decorating her cheeks and eyelids, purple and green streaks across her eyes, and cheekbones self-spray-painted in one of her vanity mirrors. But she was dressed casually in a Mickey Mouse tubetop and hot pants and thongs and had no wig on. After getting high she took the stairs back up to her room and left us to find a way to fit all this weed into Hick's laundry hamper.

It was perhaps only mere days after readers had finally digested the scandal of issue nine when Biz Aziz delivered another bombshell. In eighty-six, she published issue ten of her ongoing memoir, a thirty-two-page comic that combined diarylike narration captions with scenes from her relationship with the now deceased Vaughn Staedtler. No one outside their inner circle knew they were together in the last years of his life or that Vaughn's predilections ran the gamut (he was estranged from his three children). Over the years the occasional tabloid or letter to the
editor mentioned his arrests in the fifties for two kidnappings, a female minor (his first cousin), and in the sixties for possession of drugs (an ounce of booger sugar) and a nineteen-year-old male catalogue model who had not called his parents for a month. The comic showed the progress of their relationship from friends to lovers to soulmates. There was a scene of Vaughn and Biz in the lowest reaches of a downtown steamroom seduced by Michel Foucault. A scene of them on the highway in one of Vaughn's sports cars, passing vineyards, going over a bridge, through a tunnel, to a remote and quiet beach for a picnic. Another scene in a two-seater with the top down, but this time chased by six high school jocks drunk in a pickup truck swinging baseball bats and yelling obscenities at them. Vaughn flipped them the finger—
Fuck you, squares!
—and squealed white-rim tires around a corner, parked in an alley, and waited for the truckful of jocks to pass them and disappear before they reversed out again. Here's where a speech bubble over Biz read,
Damnit, Vaughn
.

And in the next panel, over Vaughn, a speech bubble read,
I love you, too
.

Response came fast in letters and articles in fanzines and periodicals and ranged from straight homophobic to strangely misguided to reverential and laudatory. There was a comic critic on Berkeley college radio who didn't believe a word of it and praised Biz for her twisted satirical and fictional take on so-called memoir comix, a genre much in need of some bending. A writer for
The Komics Kwarterly
was convinced the relationship in issue ten must be a fiction, but was equally convinced that it was a fact when Jonjay cannibalized Hick Elmdales in issue nine. A much-quoted letter was originally published in
The Comics Journal
from an anonymous reader who claimed to know for a fact issues nine and ten were all true. The author claimed to have lived in the same building as Biz for four years and witnessed it all first-hand.

*

Since their spat on the phone the previous year, Wendy and Gabrielle Scavalda hadn't spoken much—coolly conducting business through Rachael, who fielded all calls to the manor and replied to messages on the machine. Gabby never dialed Wendy's private Motorola number. She used to revel in her role as Manhattan intermediary between her West Coast artist and the man in charge of licences and merchandising. But Frank and Wendy as a live-in couple put Gabby on the outside. She felt uncomfortable calling either one of them unless it was about something big. She quite naturally felt they were plotting against her. Instead of being the fulcrum between two poles, her role was more dissociated than ever from both the creative process and the business decisions. When we took her calls, her comments were abrupt, perfunctory, and retired from the task of influence.

In the week before Valentine's Day, Wendy took some cheques down to deposit at Solus First National and withdraw some cash while at it to spend on romantic trifles for Frank. She stood in line for the next available teller dreaming of a cheeseburger from Clown Alley across the street.

Wendy Ashbubble? the voice behind her almost pleaded.

Even before turning around she recognized SEC agent Chris Quiltain. Her teeth bit down on the image of his face that day in Chambers Diner in Manhattan, and in the coat-room at Vaughn's funeral. Today he looked the same but even more minionlike, if possible, as if someone had scribbled all over his features with a red correction pencil
no, no, no, no
. He still preferred corduroy suits. She was trapped. The only thing she could do was wait for a teller or run.

Can I speak with you?

How long have you been following me? she said. What's going on?

You come here often? To the bank?

Your pickup lines need some serious work.

So you haven't made a lot of deposits and wire transfers in the last two or three days?
You're spying again. I don't know what you're creeping me for. Now you have access to my bank account or something? I don't even know what a wire transfer is.

Just asking, he said. A big dip in the market, that's all. Lots of movement.

That's Frank's business. Ask
him
. Only market I know's the super. I don't follow the ups and downs. Besides, I thought you nabbed that guy Kravis.

The queue advanced a person or two.

We know you're in with Frank. This is your last chance, Wendy, to save yourself. You might be a willing accomplice or an ignorant dupe, I don't know. Either way we can cut a deal. Come work with me and the DA. Meet me. Let's talk it over. I'll lay out the evidence for you.

Did you stake out the bank or follow me here? What else? My phone? My home? My studio? This is very disturbing to me. I'm skittish on a good day. Fess up, Chris. If you can be on the level with me, I might trust you.

… I can't divulge— Just ask your teller for a complete transaction record for your account for the past month. Not the redacted version you get in the mail. Make sure you ask. Gotta go, he said and gave her his business card, scissored his legs over the velvet rope, and walked out of the bank in two more steps.

Next, said the teller.

I need to speak with Doug Chimney, she said.

A moment later the manager of Solus First National minced out onto the floor to meet her at the gate and led her back into his private office. Once they were alone she let loose.

What did you tell them?

Nothing, I—, nothing. Chimney guided her in and circled the desk to find his chair, which he stood half behind, as if to shield himself from her questions. He didn't offer a drink.

I thought we had something sweet going on, Doug, she said and
instead of sitting in the usual chair she stepped round behind his desk to join him there.

We did. I mean, we do.

You're hooked, aren't you? They got you? When did Quiltain approach you? I mean, how recently?

He didn't, said Chimney, who was blushing and glistening with sweat. She was walking her fingers up the length of his necktie to the piggy flesh under his chin.