Mat Johnson - Loving Day

“So, you’re publishing on your own. That’s brave,” I tell my neighbor as I watch our sole potential customer of the last five minutes waddle away. It’s the truth. If I was going to risk further financial ruin it would be for something more than comic books. Installation art. Found-object sculpture. Or language poetry; that would be a rewarding way to fall into the pit of poverty. This guy, he looks vaguely familiar too. Not in a way that I know him. He just looks real Philly. His beard: perfectly straight-edged an inch above his jawline and dyed a deep black, its hair shooting long past his chin in a salute to Islam and anything else that scares white people. I want to get on an outbound plane back to Wales just looking at him. But I nod, smile, shake his hand, give it a snap, and listen respectfully as he tells me his name is Mandingo, which I assume means his mother really named him something like Maurice or Monty.

“Look at us, over here. Only brothers in the room,” he tells me after fifteen minutes. I look up, pleasantly surprised I’ve been elevated to brother status. I’ve gotten two sketches done. Both doodles for free, done in autograph books, drawn slowly to keep these warm bodies in front of the table, to prove it’s safe for paying customers to enter into our neighborhood. “You know that ain’t a mistake. You know what that’s about. It’s all good, though. It’s all good.”

And that it is. Here I agree with Mandingo wholeheartedly. In failure, there was this mercy. No crowds means an early exit. The small blessing of obscurity.

“We’ve been color-coded,” I tell him. The guys at the Caucasian table, I haven’t seen them since their crowd obscured them in adoration. They’re white guys and there are a lot of white guys here who want to appreciate them. Black, yellow, and brown ones too.

“That’s right. You damn near white and it don’t even matter. See, when you’re doing work that threatens the preconceived notions of the white power system, they get real nervous. They get real scared. That’s why my book would never fit into that world. They couldn’t handle it.”

“I’m sorry, what’s your book about?” I ask. All his promotional material is facing out; I can’t even see the cover of the glossies on the table for the glare. Mandingo looks a little hurt that I don’t already know his oeuvre, but he nods it off.

“It’s called Aphrodite ,” I think I hear him say, and he reaches to get me one. “Aphrodite,” I repeat, approvingly.

“No,” he says, pointing to the cover. “Afro-Dike-Y.” And there Afro-Dike-Y is in all her glossy glory.

“Why do you separate the y at the end?” is all I can think to ask, and because I really think people would get the reference even if it was connected, but then I notice that the little fabric she is wearing is actually shaped like a Y. Sort of a cross between a thong and a leotard. The fabric physics of the two-dimensional world. It’s genius.

“It’s ten dollars,” Mandingo says, a bit nervously, as he stares at Issue 2 in my hands. I look back at him.

“Ten dollars?” I ask, in a tone that inadvertently reveals that ten dollars is a significant percentage of my current net worth. My dad left me a little money, but I won’t get access to those accounts for weeks.

“Printing costs,” he explains, as I give him his first sale of the day.

—

I’m going to burn my fucking house down . This thought relaxes me as panic rises. This thought worked last night, let me close my eyes despite the break-in. Everything’s going to be okay. Because I’m going to burn my fucking house down and get rich. And I’m going to give Becks her money, with interest. I checked — it’s insured for a fortune more than whatever I could clear after paying for all the repairs. I’ll get the money and run to Costa Rica or Iceland and live off that shit forever. It’s foolish and a desperate plan, but I accept that I am a foolish and desperate individual, so it’s perfect. I’m going to find a way to burn the damned thing down that makes it look like an accident. You have to be a big man to admit total failure, and I’m just tall enough. Hey, let’s face it, this life sucks. It is not going to get much better. I have no future to look forward to so I might as well indulge in the present. My path led into a briar patch barely worth detangling from, but that doesn’t mean I have to walk the road my father paved for me either. I’m going to burn it down and move to maybe Tahiti or anyplace else I can live off the earnings till I die of something soft like diabetes from too much fresh fruit.

I get up and walk around the table, take a look, compliment Mandingo on anything I can see of merit in his art, but that isn’t much. Mostly I smile and nod. I’m not trying to look down on his skills, but he’s just not good. The pain is because I know I’m not either. And I’m older. Competence isn’t enough. It would be great to be good at something. No, I would like to be great, to be great at something: public or personal, major or minor, I don’t really care at this point. Mandingo stands up and helps spread out his pamphlet comics so that they can be witnessed in all their glory, and I see he has on some kind of wrestler’s belt. I think this is for the special occasion, for this day. Some of the crowd are dressed even more flamboyantly. But even the most freakish who do dare to flutter closer to this dark corner can see the ineptitude and disperse again. An old Jewish guy comes to my table for a minute and picks up my graphic novel from the pile I’ve arranged. He looks at the cover, then he looks at me, then repeats this back-and-forth gesture for a while. “You’re him,” he says. It’s not a question. He doesn’t even open the book, he just holds it up to a teenage girl behind him, a granddaughter clearly, and says, “This is him.” She nods, but demonstratively averts her eyes from mine the moment I look up at her.

This girl with her grandpa, she lingers in front of my table, she has my book. She looks, like, sixteen and wears a tight T-shirt and shorts that manage to do no more than cover the place where her tan legs meet her torso. Looking at her, I know I am an old man, because all I have the urge to do is wrap her in a blanket until I can get her to the Gap and buy her some clothes that fit. She holds my book in front of her like a shield.

“You know, I can sign that for you,” I tell her. “If I ever go nuts, try to blow up the Statue of Liberty or something, that would make it worth something.”

She doesn’t laugh. She just puts on a smile too big for her face and then spins and stomps away from me. Off to the other end of the room, where her grandfather is watching the whole scene.

“Oh yeah, here we go. It’s showtime now.” Mandingo talks to himself, not me. He’s got a fishing box full of art supplies, and he starts pulling them out. I look up and I see a whole pack of black guys moving in, high school age mostly, some older.

“My fan base has arrived,” Mandingo says right before they do. Of course he has a fan base. The worse the artist, the better the marketing campaign. There’s four of them, and Mandingo knows each by their first name. I hear them talking, and the intimacy of their knowledge of each other’s lives is surprising. Turns out they follow one another on Twitter. They blow 140-character kisses at each other all day. These guys, they ask me a lot of questions. Polite, interested ones, and by the way they won’t look me in the eye I can tell they looked me up before I got here. The usual questions come: when did you start, what’s your favorite thing to draw, what book would you most like to be assigned to. Then this one lands:

“How come you ain’t got more positive dark-skinned characters in your work?” one of them asks me. He asks it three times, too. The first time, I hear it, but it’s barely audible, just above the din of the room, just low enough that I can ignore it, which I do. I can feel the dread building, but I swallow it for later consumption. About fifteen seconds later the question comes louder, but I keep staring down at the charcoal in my hands, drawing. This time, it’s clear I’m ignoring the asker, that I’m not trying to play these race games, having reached my quota for the hour. Mandingo, for his part, offers to show the crew some of his new work, the pencils for his next issue of Afro-Dike-Y . Apparently, she is fighting a villain named Brickhouse, who from appearances seems to have been driven criminally insane by elephantiasis of the boobies. Some of the guys, distracted or flinching from confrontation, move closer to Mandingo’s side of the table and oooh . But not this kid. He just asks the same damn thing all over again, so loud that even silence would be an answer to him.