J. Lennon - The Funnies

Under the hood I found the automotive cousin of a coronary: a Chernobyl of thick black motor oil steaming on every surface, burst hoses splayed across the car’s hot viscera. Gelatinous yellow goo was drooling over the crankcase like spilled custard, and onto the pavement below, where it pooled around my only pair of dress shoes. I was wearing my Sunday best: blue slacks, white shirt, blue blazer, already as sweaty as a gym suit.

Furthermore, I had to pee.

There was a burger place up around the bend, so I started walking, my bladder leadenly somersaulting deep in my gut. I’d driven this road dozens of times, the forty-five minutes back and forth from college, and thought I could remember each trip down to the last unremarkable detail, every song I’d listened to on the radio, every speed trap I’d slowed down for. The homecomings themselves — visits to my mother; half-assed, ill-fated family holidays — were lost to me, as were my unheralded returns to West Philly. How I missed the Datsun: plodding through the terrible heat, I thought I might cry. About my father’s funeral, on the other hand, I felt only deep fatigue, as if I’d already been attending it, day after day, for many years.

I relieved myself at Burger Bodega, but the pay phone was out of order, and I had to throw Dad’s funeral at the clerk to get my hands on the house phone. I thumbed through a grease-stained Yellow Pages, looking for the service station I always passed in Washington Crossing, the nearest town. Spelling’s? Spalding’s?

“You mean Sperry Auto,” the clerk told me, a rawboned, buzzardly man in a paper cap. “Except it ain’t Sperry Auto anymore. It’s Sunoco Plus.” He stood over the grill, flipping patties with robotic speed, and spoke to me through a haze of meat-scented steam. “Lucky for you I knew that, huh?”

A woman answered at Sunoco Plus, yelling yeah over something shrill and pneumatic-sounding. I told her where the car was. “I’d appreciate it if you hurried,” I said. “I’m late for a funeral.” For a moment, the noise stopped, and I could hear men laughing and the confident clanking of hand tools, the shrill sound of country music emanating from a transistor radio. If I closed my eyes I could see the radio, balanced on a dented oil drum, layered thickly with years of axle grease and cigarette smoke.

“Well, we’ll get there when we get there,” the woman said.

* * *

The tow truck, still bearing the cheerful Sperry’s insignia on the door, was driven by a crabby, tight-jawed mechanic with a handlebar mustache. He wore an orange Sunoco jumpsuit without a single stain on it. “Got Triple A?” he said, hopping onto the pavement.

“No.” I had, in fact, a perfectly preserved memory of myself dropping the membership renewal form into the trash two months before. I had gone an entire lifetime without requiring roadside assistance, and decided to spend my thirty-five dollars elsewhere.

“It’ll costya,” he told me, as if that mattered.

“Well, okay,” I said. He glared at me for a moment, then put the Chevette into neutral, backed the truck up to it, and winched the front wheels into the air. I watched this operation with what felt like a woeful, obliged expression on my face. We got in the truck and heaved onto the road, setting a pine-tree-shaped air freshener into pendulous motion where it hung from the radio knob. We listened to the news together, much as we might have if the other wasn’t there.

One of my greatest anxieties in life is the possibility of being at the mercy of a man less intelligent than me, yet highly skilled in an arena of which I have no knowledge. As anxieties go, this one is arrogant and impractical, and I am forced to deal with it often. I was unable to restrain myself from saying, “Something just popped.”

“What?”

“Something under the hood just popped.” I looked at my shoes. The yellow goo had dried, leaving light brown stains on my loafers. I reached down and touched them. Perfectly smooth.

The driver took his time answering. “Tell it to Peg,” he said finally.

The service station was much as I remembered it, but it had been painted yellow and blue, and the wooden Sperry’s sign replaced by a plastic Sunoco sign, the kind that lights up. There wasn’t much to Washington Crossing, a few narrow streets and some traffic lights. People lurched heavily by on the sidewalks. Peg was busy, so I asked to use the phone and was directed by Mr. Mustache to a pay phone around back. Beside the phone was a molded plastic chair with paint spattered on it. I ran my hand over the spots, making sure they were dry, before I sat down and called my father’s house.

“Yes?” said Bobby.

“It’s me. Tim.”

A deep and lengthy silence, the kind that conversations unwittingly fall into and die. “Where are you?”

“Wash Crossing.”

“The funeral, Tim, is in forty-five minutes.”

“I know,” I said. “I had a breakdown.”

“You mean automotive,” he said.

“Yeah.”

“And you want me to come get you.”

“Well, I guess so.”

“You guess so.” This had been a habit of my father’s: throwing your words back at you so that they sounded stupid. For a second I considered hitching back to West Philly. Then I saw myself doing it, standing on the shoulder of the road, waving down cars in my rumpled clothes.

“Yes, Bobby,” I said. “Please do that. It’s at the Sunoco.”

“There’s no Sunoco in Wash Crossing.”

“There is now.”

I stumped back into the empty office and placed myself in the path of a dust-caked oscillating fan that had been set up on a file cabinet. The dust, over time, had formed loose confederacies that shimmied precariously in the manufactured breeze. For a while I stood there with my eyes closed, cooling. When I opened them, they fell onto something at the counter: cartoon strips preserved under a sheet of scratched plexiglas. I leaned over, trying to stay in the airstream. Sure enough, there it was, the Family Funnies. My father’s comic strip. I got that familiar feeling — a kind of existential loginess mixed with an acute disappointment in the world — that I always did encountering the Family Funnies in the wild. In this one, it’s just Bobby and Rose in the car, the two oldest, with my mother and father. The hood’s up, and a mechanic’s peering at the engine, and Rose is leaning out the car window, and she’s saying, “Don’t worry, mister, my daddy can fix it!”

Rose, I thought, would probably insist she’d never say such a thing. Then I remembered with a start that I would be seeing her — and the rest of them — in about half an hour. It had to have been twenty years since we’d all been together. We were like a high school graduating class, sticking it out only as long as we had to, then fleeing into the world, diplomas in hand. I could see the five of us only as our comic strip selves: forever prepubescent, compassionate and cute, full of harmless misapprehension and mild rivalry, and immaculately compliant in the delivery of Dad’s lousy jokes. If he ever drew us as adults, he wouldn’t have enough white space on the page to put between us, enough ink to fill in all the petty resentments and knee-jerk equivocations.

I knew exactly how my father would draw himself dead, though: with wings, and a harp, and of course those blank eyeglasses that obscured all expression.

Maybe Dad conceived of it as a way to control us. In the unbreachable box of the comic strip, we could be charming and obedient, and we would stay that way, year after year. Maybe it was his own puerile self-doubt, his lack of self-control — the classic bad-dad syndrome — that made this seem like a good idea. Whatever precipitated it, the Family Funnies made him rich and famous, transformed him from Carl Mix, rotten father, into Carl Mix, middle-class hero, preeminent architect of Good Clean Fun. And it turned us, of course, into objects of public humiliation, imperfect prototypes for our gleaming, dimwitted twins, who were implicitly held up to us as model kids, as everything we were lamentably not.