J. Lennon - The Funnies

In response to the memory, or maybe to the morning’s disheartening conversations, my head began a tentative thrumming. I rooted in the kitchen drawers and turned up a bottle of fossil aspirin, the crusty old tablets half-buried in a dune of analgesic dust. A threadbare washcloth found encrusted over the tub-edge wilted under cold water. I lay back on my bed, the washcloth folded across my brow, and fell into a shallow nap, where I had a nasty dream. In it, I was driving Amanda’s Chevette, and Amanda was directing me from the passenger seat. The car was filthy inside and out, slathered with some kind of tacky black goop. It kept getting on my hands and clothes.

“Left!” Amanda screamed. “Right!”

She was steering me toward obstacles, and when I hit them, parts of the car broke or fell off. And though I was doing what I was told, she was outraged, and pummeled me with her bony fists. “You dumbfuck!” she said. Meanwhile the landscape threatened, grew darker and more treacherous with every passing second.

There were a lot of people watching me drive, healthy, happy people waving banners and flags, as if we were part of a parade. They groaned with disappointment every time we smacked against an object. What were they doing out here, in this awful place? What was I doing out here? The dream ended abruptly when Amanda steered me into the base of a huge black volcano.

I woke unrefreshed, spooked by the silence, and found myself missing the usually unnerving presence of my brother. Where did Pierce go? Who did he see? I had no idea. But I supposed the same questions could be asked about me, and the answers would be no less disappointing. The sun hung shockingly low in the sky — it was already evening. I had missed most of the day.

I went to the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water. Then I pulled Susan’s card from my pocket. BURN FEATURES SYNDICATE, INC., it read. SUSAN CALETTI, EDITOR. A telephone number.

And on the back, another number, handwritten beside a capital H. I dialed this one. After five rings, a machine answered, and I almost hung up. Then the familiar clatter of a manhandled phone.

“Hello? Hello? Hold on.” The taped message droned on a second or two, then stopped. Susan came back on, her voice syrupy with sleep. “Hello?”

“Susan?”

“Yeah, oh, hi.”

“This is Tim Mix.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m good with voices. Excuse me, I just woke up.”

“Me too. Sorry about that.”

She coughed, and I heard the whisper of fabric being adjusted. “So what’s up?”

From where I stood, I could see through the grubby sliding glass doors the entrance to my father’s studio.

I switched the phone to the other ear, the way a person does a hundred times during a long, wrenching conversation. “I’ll do it,” I said.

Friday night in Riverbank meant ice cream and miniature golf, two things that, despite my best efforts to hate them during my college-era anti-hometown period, I still loved with unnatural passion. There is no miniature golf in West Philadelphia, and never was. There was no soft serve either, not in the time I’d lived there. I set off on foot for downtown.

I had spent the afternoon avoiding my responsibilities as author of the Family Funnies. There was the studio to clean out and begin work in; there was Brad Wurster to call, to set up my lessons. I needed supplies, I supposed. It was July 10th, and I had until October 7th (three months after my father’s death) to become a cartoonist. I felt no urgency. October seemed so far away, like a description of autumn from a long, boring novel, and I couldn’t think of any reason why my task should not be absurdly easy.

As a rule, people in Riverbank rarely walked places in summer; they either sat on their porches, watching people drive by, or drove somewhere themselves. This rule of thumb applied equally to the North and South sides of town, though the cars were different. People stared as I strolled along the sidewalk, at first from deep behind stands of trees, then increasingly, the farther north I got, from crumbling cement porches with wrought-iron railings. As I walked, I could hear the river meekly yammering two blocks to my left, and ahead the dim lights of downtown glowed wanly against parked cars.

For the first time in many months, I felt good. I felt better than good, in fact — I felt terrific. I replayed my conversation with Susan in my mind. She had told me that we would meet—“Come to New York if you want,” she said, “or I’ll come there, whatever”—to discuss my progress, and the syndicate’s plans for me. We talked about interviews I would eventually have to give, and a conference I would attend in the coming months. I hadn’t done anything at all, and people were taking care of me; people had my comfort and work in mind.

No matter that it wasn’t meaningful work. It was work, one way or another, and I would find a way to like it.

Custard’s Last Stand stood at the intersection of Main and Cherry, catty-corner from the Episcopalian church. It was illuminated by massive parking-lot streetlamps, swaddled in halos of light-drunk moths, that towered over the eighteen golf holes like skyscrapers. The course was packed. I pulled open the saloon-style half-doors, ducked past the vestibule bugzapper, then got myself into line behind a hefty family of five. Bon Jovi was on the radio. I hummed along. When it was my turn, I ordered a vanilla cone dipped in quick-drying butterscotchlike goo, then carried it, along with a wad of napkins thick as a Penguin Classic, to the chain-link fence that separated the paying miniature golfers from the spectators.

The Custard’s Last Stand course was famous throughout the county for its thirty-foot plaster statues. Custer himself was central, his arm thrust into the air clutching his saber, his mouth a great black gob rendered wide, to indicate a battle cry. There was an Indian named Rain-in-the-Face, who, I learned as part of a school project, claimed to have personally cut out Custer’s heart on the battlefield at Little Bighorn. Also present was Tom Custer, Custer’s brother, who (I reported in the same project) was so badly mutilated by the Sioux that he could only be identified by the tattoo on his arm. There were other figures, but none as large as these three, so that the course seemed warped by a strange foreshortening. Custer’s legs straddled a tricky pond, over which golf balls were supposed to roll via a thin metal bridge. Tom Custer had a loop-the-loop wrapped around his legs. If you hit the loop just right, the ball rocketed straight into the cup. And Rain-in-the-Face, in a bizarre assimilation of divergent cultural icons, had a windmill sprouting from his abdomen. His skin was painted bright red, even his ankles.

I ate my ice cream on the only free bench. It was free, apparently, because the view from it was blocked almost entirely by a large cardboard broadside, lashed to the fence with twisted bits of clothesline. I peered around it for a while, watching the teenagers flirt in their shorts and basketball team T-shirts. Boys mugged, knocking against each other and stealing each other’s hats. Girls rolled their eyes and fixed their hair. Then my focus shifted abruptly and I saw what the poster said.

FunnyFest ‘98

fun*prizes*games*autographs

Don’t miss this year’s celebration! Meet Carl Mix IN PERSON!

Also, kids!!! Meet your cartoon favorites Lindy, Bobby,

Timmy and Bitty

LIVE IN PERSON!

Ride tickets on sale within — don’t forget to VOTE!

Saturday, July 25, Delaware Fairgrounds

There we were — Bobby, Rose, Bitty and I — living it up on a Ferris wheel, eating cotton candy and Italian ice, so flat-out riled that our parents could only shrug their shoulders in exasperation. Oh well! Kids!