Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

Matthew visited me once at Yale, junior year. I lived in a suite with a roommate, and I was embarrassed to have Matthew stay there. He and I were beginning to look different. He was sunburned and wiry and seemed quite a bit older. He was still dressed like a boy but he looked like a man. At Yale we all dressed like men but looked like boys, except for a few who were working on beer stomachs.

Matthew was back temporarily from Thailand, where, he explained excitedly, he'd gotten involved with a charismatic drug lord named Khan Shah. Khan Shah was more powerful than the government, Matthew said, and was trying to legitimize his rule by making poppy cultivation legal. He was a man of the people. Matthew was learning to speak Thai so he could translate Khan Shah's manifestos.

This didn't sound like Zen to me, and I told Matthew so. He laughed.

“Are you doing what you want to do?” he asked me suddenly.

That question didn't compute for me at the time. Matthew was making me very, very nervous. I could still admire him, but I didn't want him in my life.

Cracking old jokes for cover, I hustled him back down to New York with excuses about a girlfriend's demands and a paper I had to write. He spent just one night.

That was the last I saw of him for eight years. Except for postcards. Here's one from a few years back. The front shows Elton John, in spangled glasses. In Matthew's hand on the back it says “Vacant Lot/Living Chemist.” No return address. The postmark is Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I ONLY had an hour's warning. He got my number from information, he explained on the phone. I gave him the address. An hour later he knocked on my door.

He wobbled slightly. “I parked in the green zone,” he said.

“That's fine, it's two hours.” I stared. He was still tall and bony, but his face was fleshy and red. I immediately wondered if I looked as bad, if I'd lost as much.

“Here,” he said. “I brought you this.”

It was a rock, fist-sized, gray with veins of white. I took it.

“Thanks,” I said, checking the irony in my voice. I didn't know whether I was supposed to think it was mainly funny or mainly profound that he'd brought me a rock.

If it was high school there would have been a punch line. He would have led me out to the curb to see the trunkload of identical rocks in his car.

Ten years later, that kind of follow-through was gone. Matthew's gestures were shrouded and gnomic. Trees falling in forests.

“Come in,” I said.

“I saw the Piggly Wiggly when I parked,” he said. “I thought I'd get some beer.”

It was two in the afternoon. “Okay,” I said.

A few minutes later he was back in the doorway with a rustling paper bag. He unloaded a six-pack of Sierra Nevada into my fridge and opened a tall aluminum canister of Japanese beer to drink right away. We poured it into two glasses. I wrote off getting anything accomplished that afternoon.

He leaned back and smiled at me, but his eyes were nervous. “Nice place,” he said.

“It's a place where I can get work done,” I said, feeling weirdly defensive.

“I see your stuff whenever I can,” he said earnestly. “My parents clip them for me.”

I draw a one-page comic called Planet Big Zero , for a free music magazine produced by a record-store chain. Once a month my characters, Dr. Fahrenheit and Sniveling Toon (and their little dog, Louie Louie), have a stupid adventure and review a new CD by a major rock act.

Somewhere in there you might detect the dying heartbeat of Toscanini's glasses. It's a living, anyway. Better than a living recently, since a cable video channel bought rights to develop Planet into a weekly animated feature, and hired me to do scripts and storyboards.

“I didn't realize your folks were into rock journalism,” I said.

“My parents are really proud of you,” Matthew said, working diligently on his beer. He wasn't being sarcastic. There was nothing challenging left in his persona, except what I projected.

He told me his story. Since Santa Fe he'd been in Peru, taking pictures of plinths and other ancient structures. He talked a lot about “sites.” The term covered a sculpture in Texas made of upended Cadillacs half buried in the desert, stone rings in Tibet, a circular graveyard in Paris, and Wall Street skyscrapers. He'd shot hundreds of rolls of film. None of it was developed. He was trying to get funding to create a CD-ROM. In the tales he told there were ghosts, mostly women, scurrying out of the frame. An expatriate Englishwoman he'd lived with in Mexico City who'd thrown him out. A female journalist who'd been his collaborator, then disappeared with his only photos of an Inca burial site that had since been destroyed. And the bitch in the Florida Keys just now who'd stolen his camera after a shared three-day drunk.

I live in Connecticut, an hour out of the city if there's no traffic. Matthew had driven up to see me in his parents' car. He was in New York trying to convince his parents to cash out ten thousand dollars in zero coupon bonds they were holding in his name, presumably for when he married and bought a house. He was willing to take a hit on early-withdrawal penalties, so that he could use what remained to fund his return to Peru.

He'd become some combination of an artist with the temperament, but no art, and Thor Heyerdahl without a raft.

The Japanese canister was empty. Matthew went into the kitchen for the first of the Sierras, unapologetically. He wasn't drinking like he was on a tear, or wanted to be. It was as though the beer was a practical necessity, like he needed it for ballast.

“If you don't want to drive back down tonight you can stay in the garage,” I told him. “It's set up as a guest room. You can pee in the sink in there. I'll give you a key to the house so you can shower or whatever.”

“That's great,” he said. His look was humble and piercing, both. “You know, it's really amazing to see you again.”

I sort of flinched. “The same,” I said.

“It's amazing how little has changed after all this time.”

I wasn't aware of that being the case, in any sense at all. But I nodded.

That night we got on a roll in safe territory, talking about high school. The Water Fountain Trick. The Literary Excuse Me. Mother Communication Hates You. Falling Down Jesus Park. Toscanini's Glasses. Then, fueled by beer, I told him a bit about my life, my short marriage, the novel I couldn't sell, the years of legal proofreading. Matthew drank and listened. He listened well.

Then he started telling me about his idea for a screenplay we were going to write together. “Has there ever been a thriller set in Antarctica?” he asked, eyes burning.

“ Ice Station Zebra ,” I said. “Rock Hudson's in it. It's really bad. Listen, I'm bushed.”

He slept in. I was working at my desk for hours before I heard him go in through the kitchen, up to the bathroom for a shower. The water ran for almost twenty minutes. I'm not sure, but I think he must have come out while I was on the phone with my Hollywood agent.

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another. Those histories have a breadth, an unspoken ease, that others, even siblings or ex-wives, just can't match. My Hollywood agent is about my age, and when I talk to him I feel he knows who I am, because he helped make me who I am. We're a conspiracy, and a much more reliable one than most.

Some time after I'd hung up the phone, I became aware of Matthew standing in the doorway of my office. “Did you hear me talking to you?” he said.

“Uh, no.”

His eyes were ringed and dark. He didn't speak.