J. Lennon - The Funnies

But live? In person? Could Francobolli have actually scheduled us into the ‘Fest, or would we be portrayed by actors? For a moment I considered actually going, to see what form the impending debacle would take.

I finished my cone and went back into the restaurant. The line was gone now, and a few families and cooing couples leaned across tables toward one another, talking loudly. I asked about ride tickets at the counter.

“Fifty cents a pop,” a kid told me.

“That’s cheap,” I said.

“Yeah, well it takes like ten to ride the friggin’ bumper cars.”

“Oh,” I said. “What’s this about voting?”

“Jussec.” The kid bent over and rummaged beneath the counter. When he surfaced, he was holding a printed postcard.

I took it. “Thanks,” I said.

When I got outside I looked at the postcard under the golf-course lights. It showed a cartoon of Timmy — of me —sitting on my father’s shoulders, holding a magic marker the size of my arm. We were facing a tall printed sign attached to a pole, and the sign said RIVERBANK. There was a big black X markered over the word.

With growing horror, I flipped the card over. It read:

VOTE!! for your favorite NEW NAME for Riverbank, New Jersey!

I WANT Riverbank changed to:

() Funnyville

() Mixville

() Familytown

() Funnytown

Pick one, affix stamp, and drop in a mailbox! It’s that easy!

The mailing address was “Name Change Headquarters,” with a P.O. box in City Hall. I couldn’t help noticing that there was no box you could check if you didn’t want the name changed at all.

The ice cream, which had felt so good going down, was beginning to churn stickily around in my stomach, and I felt a mild and time-honored nausea. My hands were gummed with drippings. I shoved the postcard into my pocket and started walking home.

* * *

Pierce had not come back, so I made my way into a dark house. There were no messages on the answering machine. I would, at some point, have to call Amanda with my new plans, but after considering the telephone for a few minutes decided that I wouldn’t do it now.

If I was going to be a cartoonist, I thought, I would have to start acting like one.

In my bedroom, I took the key that Mal had given me from its envelope and slipped it onto my key chain. There wasn’t much on there: my copy of the mailbox key in Philadelphia, the two keys to the apartment and a thick aluminum bottle opener from a state-run liquor store on Market Street. I dropped the keys into my pocket and headed for the studio.

There was a smell to the place I hadn’t noticed before, a sort of dry, cigary bite in the air. I walked to the back and picked a bottle from the forest of booze on the table, then poured a few fingers of rotgut into a drinking glass. It was a “Whiskers” glass from a fast food tie-in of many years before; the cartoon cat glared with famous apathy from behind half-lidded eyes. The liquor lapped at the fringes of Whiskers’s smug smile. I pried open the mini-fridge, which had lain untouched for days. There was a tiny freezer in it, with a tray of rimy ice cubes the size of dice; I plunked a handful of these into the glass and went to the drafting table, where I sat down on my father’s orthopedic office chair for the first time. I switched on the overhead lamp, and its light flooded the drawing surface, making explicit the hints of scratches and stains that covered it. Immediately I wondered where to put my drink, then almost as quickly found the answer — a wooden stool at shoulder level, the seat discolored with water stains.

Poor Dad, I thought.

Everything I needed was within reach. Paper was in a low flat file to my right, inkwells on a card table to my left, pens in a plastic Philadelphia Eagles cup stuck into a crude hole on the drawing board. I helped myself to the paper: it was thick and had a shiny finish. Final draft stuff, I thought, so I rooted for something else, and found it, a thinner, rougher sketch paper. I pulled a pencil from the cup and stuck it into a nearby sharpener. It ground itself pointy with a cheerless wheeze. A few preliminary strokes produced a dark, clear line; some gentle brushings left a nice shading.

It had been years since I’d actually handled art supplies — my work had taken on such workmanlike redundance that I had little use for the finer tools of my trade. Now I felt nostalgic, as the lines unrolled themselves under my hand. I was doing something small and precise. I was a lefty, like my father, and as I sketched — nothing in particular, the crook of the desk lamp, the edge of a table — I automatically tilted the paper clockwise forty-five degrees, to avoid smearing. I wondered if my father did this too. I tried, without success, to remember what he looked like while working.

After a few idle minutes I rolled the chair back to the large flat file in search of a cartoon to copy. I opened a drawer at random.

What I came up with was a fairly recent one, which I remembered from the Inquirer funny pages; it was a daily strip with a handwritten caption, apparently an early draft, as the figures were a little less refined than they usually were in the paper. Like all my father’s originals, it was about three times the size of a printed strip.

In it, Lindy and I were standing with our mother. It looked like Lindy was being reprimanded, possibly for something she had said to me, and she had her arms crossed and a defiant pout on her eight-year-old face. My mother’s finger was extended in the classic scolding-mother manner, and she had her mouth open. The caption, between quotes, read: “It’s not what’s on the outside of a person that counts, but what’s on the inside.” And the visual punchline of the panel was what hung in a thought bubble above my head, which I contemplated with a precocious stroke on an incipient goatee: the outline of Lindy’s bare body, filled not with her external features but with her skeleton.

Ha-ha, I got it. But looking at it now, from my father’s point of view, it seemed a weird kind of auto-voyeurism, an unsavory peek into the reeking roil of his subconscious. In effect it was less an opportunity for a joke (misunderstandings of the spoken word were a common topic in the Family Funnies) than an elaborate contrivance designed to allow my father to draw my sister’s innards.

Not that her innards had anything to do with documented human anatomy. For one thing, she only had about six ribs. Her femurs were no longer than her humeri. And her skull, elongated as it had to be to fit the established FF head shape, looked less like a human bone than it did the fossilized remains of a Cenozoic-era forerunner of the horse.

There were a few conclusions that could be reached from this cartoon. One, of course, was that my father had drawn it without thinking at all, that he had simply trotted out a cartoon to fit the crappy yuk he had dreamed up. Knowing my father, I didn’t buy this for a second. Another possibility was that he suffered odd morbid obsessions that occasionally made it onto paper. This seemed likely in fact, given the strip’s often bizarre traffic with the deceased. We were always waxing maudlin about dead relatives in the strip, particularly grandparents, and these would materialize in the air above us in billowing empyrean robes through which big fluffy wings invariably poked. There was also a running joke about an endomorphic spook who haunted the house, leaving chaos in his wake and leaving us kids to take the blame. Ghosts filled entire pews at church. Cemeteries were as busy as train stations. Seeing my sister’s deformed childhood skeleton threw me for a loop, and I groaned inwardly at the sudden thought of muscles and blood vessels tangled among my own bones, dark and wet inside me like centuries-old plumbing.