Matthew Klam - Who is Rich?

Rebecca had in mind a moment inside an ambulance, her younger self in a paramedic’s uniform, leaning heavily over an old man, working to restart his heart, failing to, panic setting in. Sarah wanted to do something light and fun about her job in a bookstore. Brandon, in the white polo, made notes on his first gay pride weekend, bleaching his hair, snorting amyl nitrate, realizing, in the end, If you’ve seen one drag queen, you’ve seen ten thousand. They had four days to turn their thumbnails into finished pencil drawings, which they’d then ink and letter, scan and reproduce, and present to the world by Tuesday afternoon, in time for open studio.

I asked if anyone needed help. Mel fumbled with her pencil sharpener. I heard crickets chirping in Sarah’s empty head. Then I walked to the back of the room and looked at the floor. I heard pencils and paper, the steady breathing of humans at work. I stood behind the printing press, my hands on the wheel, like a sea captain trying to get on course.

By the time we took a break, other classes had also made their way outside to the picnic tables in the courtyard. A breeze as light as champagne bubbles swept over us from the bay. Sailboats dotted its sparkling waters. I felt relieved. I’d been nervous before class, and almost puked at breakfast. That first lecture always unhinged me, but I’d gotten through it.

But there was something else not right, and it took me a second to figure out what it was: Angel Solito, walking out of Fine Arts, squinting into the sun, coming toward me. He wore a navy blue hooded sweatshirt with long white strings. His arms hung down at his sides, and he wore eyeglasses. I said something, and he reached out a hand. His face was bumpy, as if a rash was trying to come through from underneath, and his hair had been slept on or pushed up into a ridge.

I couldn’t tell if he had any clue who I was, but I knew an editor of a British anthology who knew him. I said her name, like I didn’t care either way, and sternly congratulated him on his book.

“Uh-huh.”

He was the cartoonist who Carl, the director, had hired. Solito was young enough to be my son, if I’d had a son at fourteen, and on closer inspection the whites of his eyes were laced with red threads and his head tipped forward as if he had horns. Maybe he’d been heading to the big black plastic coffee urn on the picnic table behind me and I’d gotten in his way. Maybe he didn’t care, and just needed to vent, and would’ve talked this way to anybody. He shook his head and said, “Man, it’s been crazy,” and told me how exhausted he was, how he ran out of money two days ago and was waiting for a check from his publisher. As soon as the conference ended, he’d be hitting the road again.

“The book rolls out overseas, in Sweden and Denmark—”

At some point I realized he was confiding, I was being confided in, and I guess I appreciated that.

“—then the big rollout in Europe, at the end of the summer, beginning of fall—”

Chewing his lower lip, blinking at me, talking about some French fellowship, oblivious, harassed, as if French people had been calling all night and he hated to disappoint them, as a woman appeared at his side, with flyaway hair and skin so fair she was glowing, hugging his book to her chest.

“I’m so tired, man, I haven’t done any work in, like, months—”

As another young woman walked past us in pigtails, then stopped short when she realized it was him.

“—new idea for a book but I need to get into a quiet place, and hopefully kind of erupt—”

“Sure, of course.”

“You’ve been living the life for, like, ten years!” he said, taking a step toward the picnic table and his waiting fans. “You gotta tell me what it’s like. That’s why we gotta hang out!”

“Absolutely!” Fuck you.

He gave me a tired wave, a polite smile, almost sad, and I gave him a reassuring nod.

Tell you what it’s like, Angel. I sold ten thousand books in the last six years. He sold a hundred thousand copies in hardback in three months and foreign rights in thirty-eight countries. That’s, like, a million bucks in royalties. The woman in pigtails hesitated, but the blond one had her book ready and jumped.

I’d seen his work somewhere, maybe I saw an excerpt in some anthology, or maybe his publisher sent me a galley, or I might’ve seen it in a bookstore, in a stack on a table in front, and stood over it for however many hours it took to read the thing from start to finish, before stumbling back out into daylight, shivering and mumbling to myself, groping my way out the door.

Ran out of money. That fucker!

Angel Solito traveled from Guatemala to California, mostly on foot, mostly alone, eleven years old, walked a continent to find his parents, and finally did but never found the American dream. His story was rendered in clear bold lines, with faces delicately hatched, with big heads and a ferocious expressiveness. Reviews of his work had been universally frothy. In the days after I read it I had strange moments, traveling to some breathy place, almost happy, imagining that it was my book, my story, that I’d walked three thousand miles to find my parents, four and a half feet tall, eighty pounds, and alone.

He stood by the picnic table as more bodies surrounded him. He had caramel skin and shiny black hair. I felt the thrill of being him, like they were digging me, thanking me. I’d dreamed of the big time, and here it was, so beautiful, so real! Then I remembered that I didn’t get robbed by soldiers and chased by wolves. I didn’t crawl across the Sonoran Desert. Where I came from, eleven-year-olds could barely make their own beds.

I grew up in a middle-class suburb with good public schools an hour north of the G.W. Bridge, under a stand of white pine trees in an old house with wavy wooden floors and a loose banister. Walking thousands of miles to find my family would’ve been unnecessary. My brother lived across the hall. My father sold life insurance and other tax-dodging instruments from a skyscraper in New York City. My mom taught music to fourth, fifth, and sixth graders, in an attempt to make up for her own artistic failures. We lacked for nothing in that house except talent.

Back in the studio, a dozen people sat bowed, bent over their desks—doing what? Trying to pump life into a poorly realized, made-up world. Brandon didn’t know where to put his word balloons, and Rebecca needed a beveled edge, and Sang-Keun couldn’t figure out how to draw a cowboy hat.

“It’s round but curved,” I said, leaning over his shoulder. “Like a Pringle potato chip. A disk intersecting an ovoid.”

What did he see as my hand flew across the page? Several cowboy hats, spilling out of a pencil. Did he notice how each one was unique and expressive, reflecting the life of its owner? Did he note the skill or understand how hard I worked to make something difficult look effortless?

He touched the collar of his T-shirt, staring at the drawing as I moved to the next desk. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t care. I showed Sarah how to turn on the light box, and walked to the sinks and looked out the window, and tried my best to stay out of the way as a new generation of artists pounded at the gates of American graphic literature.

After class I cut across the lawn with a girl who wore cat-eye glasses and had small, pointy teeth, and a man with clay dust all over him, whacking it off his clothes, and Vishnu, who kept bumping into me.

“Professor,” he said, “in an interview you said male cartoonists are derivative whereas women are all original. Isn’t that kind of sexist?”

“I think I said guys have to shake off Batman comics. Women don’t have that as much.”