J. Lennon - The Funnies

“I know,” she said, sighing dramatically. She tapped an imaginary wristwatch. “You have to go.”

“Sorry.” We stood inches apart, her arms crossed, mine hanging limp at my sides. Finally I reached up and rubbed her shoulders. It was a lame gesture, but she let herself be placated. I managed a smile, then went to the bedroom to pack up some more of my clothes.

There was a smell the two of us made living in the same place, and it was here now, where we’d slept. I could remember what her life smelled like without me: coffee, paint and houseplants, with a whiff of bleach from somewhere. We’d met at a party in art school, got drunk, fooled around, and didn’t see each other again for five years, when we did exactly the same thing. The second time it stuck. Everything from then on in was opportunistic: around the time I was kicked out of my building, her absentee roommate, who’d gone to France to pick grapes and never returned, made it official. My temporary stay stretched into years. Our two cars turned into one. Our smells commingled.

And I noticed this because the night before, the place smelled like her again, just her. I might have been gone a year, for all my nose knew.

Packed, I lingered in the bedroom, watching a dog eat garbage in the alley through the narrow rear window. It was time to go, but I was having trouble: she would be out there, waiting with my parting kiss, and though I had practically become one, I didn’t want to feel like a guest.

In the American West, if you want to go someplace, there’s only one way to get there. That’s what I brought away from the irritating, rainsoaked road trip I took with Amanda one summer through Montana and Idaho. All our shortcuts, inferred from the road atlas, turned out to be long, muddy mistakes.

But there’s something to be said for that kind of simplicity: if you want to go, you just do it. You don’t worry about the route. This is not the case in New Jersey, where all roads lead everywhere, and route mapping is not simply a skill necessary for efficient travel, but a kind of aesthetic category, ripe for pseudo-intellectual cogitation and debate.

To get to Brad Wurster’s studio, I could take Route 95 North from Philly past Trenton, then take 1 North to New Brunswick. Or get off 95 around Bordentown and take 130 to New Brunswick. There was, of course, the New Jersey Turnpike, or scenic 27 through Princeton and Kingston. I could even, given enough time to waste, go back through Riverbank, get on county 518 in Lambertville, and tool at about thirty-five miles an hour all the way to Kendall Park, just a short hop to my destination. Each route had, of course, its elegant little perks, which I knew well from my many bored high-speed drives in high school: the Mister Icee outside Franklin Park, the driving range at Cranbury, the water slide by Penns Neck, on a road otherwise choked with car dealerships and strip malls. But it was all a game, really; it was five-thirty in the morning, I was already late, and I would have to take the turnpike.

I listened to talk radio on the way. A guy named Manny was unleashing an ill-informed and redundant invective against the current gubernatorial administration, and the show’s host tried vainly to uh-huh him back to planet Earth. I couldn’t remember the governor’s party affiliation; she was one of those Democrats who love the rich, or a Republican with a short haircut, crouched in some ideological foxhole in the no-man’s-land of waffledom. Manny was insisting that she had had numerous extramarital affairs while a member of the state senate. The host, a smooth-voiced baritone named Bill, said, “Well, Manny, I haven’t heard those allegations myself.”

“Every last word’s true! I got a source at the Star-Ledger…”

“You see, I’m wondering, Manny, if that issue is even relevant to our discussion. I mean, we are talking about the Clean Water Bill here. And besides, let the innocent among us cast the first stone, or whatever.”

“Hah?”

“I mean, are you willing to say you’ve never fooled around yourself?”

“I ain’t governor of New Jersey, Bill!”

New Brunswick was not yet fully awake at seven, which was when I pulled into town. I followed the directions Brad Wurster had given me, but they depended heavily on specific landmarks, one of which — a McDonald’s with an elaborate glassed-in playground — I happened to have missed. I found myself in the parking lot of a shopping center that was home to a supermarket, a stereo store and a cellular phone shop, rifling through the phone book for a city map. I located myself on Chemical Road, near the edge of town, and found that Wurster’s house was clear on the other side, in a skein of whorled suburban streets marked Parkside Village. I tore the map out, feeling terrible for it but promising myself to put it back later, and picked my halting way through town.

Parkside Village was not what I expected. It appeared to have been named after a predictably sterile planned community, but encompassed a much larger area that included Wurster’s neighborhood, a low, dark collection of run-down ranch-style houses with fenced yards. Most of the grass here was dead, done in by broad shade trees. The ambient temperature dropped by ten degrees, and in the excessive comfort of the Caddy, I felt like I was still in bed, floating under cool white sheets.

I pulled into Wurster’s driveway at quarter to eight, popped the trunk, grabbed my drawings and jogged to the house. Giant pines stood in the yard, trimmed down to the trunk to a height of six feet. The door Wurster had described on the phone — the one with the devil painted on it — could hardly be called a front door, though it stood on the front wall; it was situated far off to the right and had what appeared, through its frosted window, to be a sagging metal bookcase pushed up against it on the inside. The devil himself was badly faded and crudely done, I assumed by a previous owner. His smile, an attempt at the customary maleficence, made him look like a dipsomaniacal birthday party clown. Warped, cracked clapboards showed through the house’s begrimed red paint. I found the back entrance, as instructed, and knocked on a screen door fitted uncomfortably into its frame, as if it had come from a different house entirely. “Hello?”

Brad Wurster appeared instantly out of the darkness, like a television screen just switched on, and glared at me. “Late. Not a good sign, Tim,” he said. His in-person voice was a vaguely authoritative muck and matched his appearance: hard, grim features set in a wide, flat face; dumpy clothes too heavy for the weather; slim, tall, muscular body. He looked like a Marine gone to seed on a deserted tropical island. The door swung open and rattled against the house, and even without the bugstained screen between it and me, the interior looked impossibly black and bone-chillingly cold. I stepped inside.

“Air conditioning?” I asked.

“Nope.” My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark, though I could see light glowing faintly through dirty windows around the room. They all had bars on them.

“This way.”

I followed him down a narrow hallway, goose pimples exploding along my arms and legs. Several cats of various colors dashed past in the opposite direction. Wurster led me into a windowless room illuminated by a long fluorescent daylight-spectrum lamp. The quality of light gave the room a crisply surreal presence, and lent Wurster himself the mien of a bowler-hatted Magritte businessman, practiced and peculiar. Beneath the lamp was a long drawing board, scrubbed white and uncluttered by any papers.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a small wooden stool, the kind you spun to raise and lower. I gave it a spin and sat down. Already I was uncomfortable. I was wearing shorts, so my ankles had grown cold in the chilly air, and the seat’s several long cracks pinched the skin on my thighs. I wriggled around like a schoolboy.