J. Lennon - The Funnies

At quarter to six, I drew something I liked. It was a phone that had been knocked off a table. The cradle was tipped up onto its back, and the receiver was flung far away, the cord stretched out taut at an oblique angle to it. Somehow — and I wasn’t pretending to myself that it was anything more than an accident — the drawing was both funny and sad. I chuckled and set it aside.

But after that, the remaining fifteen minutes stretched out ahead of me like hours. I rubbed my eyes and switched off the lamp. I would quit early, just this once.

Each day, Wurster and I worked on a different inanimate object. This made me uneasy. If a week went by in which I didn’t draw a single Family Funnies character, it was, I couldn’t help but think, a week wasted. I made the mistake of telling Wurster this. “First I have to make you into a cartoonist,” he said, in the kind of voice an obsessive-compulsive might use to potty-train a child. “In general. You must acquire competence, don’t you see that?”

Tuesday we drew tables, Wednesday, chairs and sofas. Sofas in particular gave me trouble. There was a certain lunatic puffiness to them that, properly done, could make them look both buoyant and massive at once; my sofas only looked flabby and lopsided, like jelly donuts. In my drawings I stacked telephones on chairs and chairs on sofas, occasionally happening upon a kind of weak whimsy, but mostly producing labored junk. Still, most of them were passable to the untrained eye. I could do an interior background for most strips without too much difficulty, if I had to.

The Sunoco station left messages on the answering machine both Monday and Tuesday. Pierce never answered the phone, and this was working to my advantage regarding the car, which I had yet to make a decision on.

But when they called on Wednesday afternoon, I had just returned from my session with Wurster and was next to the phone when it rang. It was a princess phone, and when I picked it up, I felt a mild distaste for its clammy arch against my palm.

“Bobby Mix?”

“That’s my brother. He’s not here.”

“Look, we’ve had this car for practically a week now, okay?” It was her, the Sunoco woman. There was a whiff of threat to her voice, as if I might soon find myself hog-tied in the trunk as the car glacially rusted at the bottom of the river. “So is somebody gonna pick it up, or are we gonna fix it, or what?”

“Oh, that’s my car,” I said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called you back. I’ve been really busy…”

“Yeah, well it’s not like the mall here, we don’t have the kind of room where we can have extra cars just lying around. So what are you gonna do about it?”

I knotted the phone cord, then pulled it apart. The connection crackled. “Don’t fix it,” I said. “I’ll just junk it.”

“Well, get it outta here, then.”

“Okay, okay. Look, do you know where I can take it? A junkyard or something? Can I pay you to tow it?” The fifty dollars I’d taken from my dad was down to ten now, and I’d had fourteen with me from before.

She told me they knew where to take it, and that I should come and clean it out, if that’s what I was going to do. I looked at my watch. My practice session was going to have to start late. I hung up, ran my aching hand under cold water for a few minutes, wiped off my face and started for the door. Then the phone rang again.

“This is Eugene, from the garage,” a man said. “You’re junking this thing?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll give you two hundred bucks for it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll strip it, then tow the rest to the junkyard for you. How’s that?”

“Great,” I said.

By two o’clock I had the two hundred in my pocket and a cardboard box of Amanda’s things rattling in the trunk of the Cadillac. It felt good to be free of the car, finally, but now that I had gone ahead with selling it I wasn’t sure what I should do with the money. In the end, I put a hundred in an envelope and sent it to West Philly. I’d explain over the phone.

That evening I drew sofas, sofas, sofas. Once, when I got bored, I tried to draw Bitty sitting on one and ruined the entire thing.

* * *

Thursday afternoon I drove to New York and parked on the street about ten blocks from Delicious Duck House. It was hot out, but I kept cool walking in the shade of the tall buildings. The neighborhood was kind of a Microchinatown, just two blocks long, and great smells swirled around me as I passed the restaurants’ doorways.

Delicious Duck was the skinniest restaurant I had ever seen. It was wide enough to accommodate only one long row of tables jammed up against the south wall; the maximum seating for any of them was three people. This row stretched all the way to the back of the place, which, once my eyes adjusted to the dim, proved to be another entrance, an entire city block away. The kitchen was in a room off this long hallway. I loved it. I found Susan munching a fortune cookie at a table near the kitchen doors.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I like watching them come in and out.”

“That’s okay.” I took the seat across from her, so close our knees nearly touched, and gestured at the cookie. “Where’d you get that already?”

“The people before me left it.” She held out the fortune to me. It read, You may soon be dealing from a full deck .

“Is it working yet?” I said.

“As soon as we’ve eaten.”

Susan ordered a few things for both of us without asking me what I wanted. This came as a relief. I didn’t want to make any decisions. When the waiter was gone, we looked frankly at each other for a minute. I noticed the thickness of her glasses — a quarter inch, at least. The idea of glasses always scared me. What if you lost them, and then had to drive somewhere? What if they fell off at a huge rock concert, and then you had to find the car? Like the rest of the Mix organization (save for Dad, who wrecked his sight with close work), I had 20/20 vision. I said, “How bad is your eyesight?”

“Oh, four hundred something,” she said, blushing. The blush was comprehensive, wrapping around her head like a wet pink washcloth. It vanished quickly and left a barely perceptible glow.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be silly.” She took off her glasses and rubbed them clean on her blouse, a businesslike navy silk thing that clung to her shoulders and upper arms and breasts. Her face, without the glasses, invited touch, the way a tennis ball invites picking up. If she had been crying, I would have wiped away her tears. But of course she was doing no such thing.

“So,” she said, replacing the glasses. “How are things with Wurster?”

“Weird,” I said. I told her about the frigid house, the pages of telephones and furniture. She nodded, knowingly.

“Uh-huh. Heard about it before. He knows what he’s doing.”

“So how does he know my father?”

“You don’t know that?” she asked. Her eyes widened, as if to take in the fullness of my ignorance.

“No.”

“He inked the TV special. The main characters and all that, the animated parts. Your father wouldn’t accept the usual team of animators, so Wurster said he’d do it alone. It came in way late but under budget. You’ve never heard this?”

“Never.”

She nodded. “He took your dad, uh, seriously.” Another blush. “Sorry. Not that he shouldn’t be…”

“No, no,” I said. “I know it’s fluff.”

“But he thinks your dad was some kind of genius. The drawings, I suppose.” She watched a waiter hurry from the kitchen balancing huge platters of steaming food. It made me hungry. With a demure throat-clearing that portended a white lie, she said, “I can see that, I think. Maybe.”