J. Lennon - The Funnies

“Avoiding that?” I offered lamely.

“Don’t be a poop.”

The bridge was several hundred feet from the bandstand, to the south of the fairgrounds. The crowd surged: across the open field, between the food vendors, who proffered their stuff weakly in our direction as we passed, between the giant maples to Bridge Street. We were not allowed to join the mayor on the bridge, for fear of its collapse. The rent-a-cops created a theoretical barricade by blocking us with their bodies. The crowd feinted, retreated, then finally gave in.

“I sort of wanted to see it go down,” Susan said.

A rescue team had been assembled: there was an ambulance, its lights flashing ominously, parked in the grass, and down by the water, two medics with a stretcher and a couple of guys wearing swim fins, flapping the fins at each other and laughing. Meanwhile, the stripped-down mayor had reached the center of the bridge, where he peered over the edge at the rushing water, still high from spring rain, and at the concrete abutments that held the bridge up. He shuffled over a few feet. The men in suits were with him, and briefly I amused myself with the image of them joining in the leap, but they both stood far from the railing, where they stared at their shoes. One was holding a stepladder.

The mayor raised his hand in the air, casting a hush over us. “Ladies and gentlemen!” There was no microphone, and he was forced to scream. He motioned to the stepladder man, who unfolded the stepladder and positioned it against the railing. The mayor climbed it, and stood, tall for once in his life, on the steel railing of the bridge. I could see, at the far end in Pennsylvania, a few people hanging around, marginally interested in the peculiar spectacle of our town. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he repeated. “Let the Funnies begin!” And with that, buoyed by the infectious cheer of the massed burghers, he leapt, his baggy swim shorts billowing around his pus-white thighs, and plunged into the Delaware.

And this time, even I cheered. Why not? Already a few wiry, nervous types, mostly adolescents, were scrambling down the bank on the south side of the bridge to watch him surface. I felt the mob edging that way, even as their screams died away. We followed. Susan’s hand found my arm in the crowd. Her skin was warm, and it was difficult to tell where she left off and I began; I felt larger, as if now, attached as I was to my editor, I had new and joyful access to a strange and exciting world.

Then I noticed that the cheers had died away. I was standing on a riverbank with several hundred people, all silent. What was the problem?

The problem was that the mayor had not surfaced. The rescue guys calmed their flippers. The ambulance lights, which for some reason had never turned off, lent the scene a weird, done-deal air, as if the mayor’s body had already been dragged, bloated and ashen, from the muddy water.

We watched and waited. Someone somewhere began to cry. And then, at last, Mayor Francobolli burst from the water laughing. He laughed and laughed, sweeping downstream like a sodden log, and the cheers erupted again, mine along with them, and the divers dove in and ferried him to the shore. And still he laughed, staggering up the bank, his chest dark with wet hair and his flabby arms triumphantly cleaving the air.

It was easy to forget that this entire hullabaloo was about my father. Most people already had, I guess. For a moment I wished I could be a Fan of the Strip, so that I could have as good a time as everybody else.

We were beginning to feel the logy halfheartedness that comes over weary people on hot days, so we found a tree near the entrance to the fairgrounds to take a breather. The next big event in the field wasn’t scheduled to take place until two, and the crowd made its way toward the rides. More people were arriving now, staggering past us through the gates, sweaty after the trek from their cars. A clot quickly formed at the ticket booths.

“I suppose we’ll need tickets,” I said.

Susan unzipped the butt pack cinched around her waist and produced a thick fistful of ride and game tickets.

“Where’d you get them?” I said, impressed.

“Custard’s Last Stand,” she said. “You know the place I’m talking about?”

“Know it? It’s the site of my unsupervised self-upbringing.”

“Cool,” she said. “I also voted for the new town name.”

“No kidding! You don’t even live here.”

She shrugged. “No one asked. I voted for Mixville.”

“I’m flattered.”

“Hmmph. Maybe it was a vote for your father.”

“He’s probably snorting in his grave.”

While Susan leaned, sighing and shut-eyed, against the tree, I took a moment to give her a long look. Her ankles were very close to me, not ten inches. They were heavy and dotted with razor stubble. She had funny knees, with an anatomically mysterious swirl to them, like the surface of a cinnamon bun. Her thighs were thick, her cutoffs cool- and comfortable-looking on her, and her arms, poking out of her T-shirt, were freckled and hazy with fine brown hairs. She was the kind of person somebody’s mother might call solid, who wore her glasses so close to her face that they seemed to have grown on it. I felt compelled to put my head in her lap, but didn’t.

“You’re looking at me.”

“What? No I’m not.”

She took off her sunglasses and squinted at me. “That’s okay. There’s nothing else under here to look at.”

“I wasn’t,” I protested, weakly.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “I thought you lived with a girlfriend.”

“Used to. I’m about to move out.” How did she know this? I decided Bobby or Bitty must have gotten to her first.

“Ah.” She cleaned off the sunglasses with a corner of the shirt and shot me an appraising look. “I’ll tell you my story if you tell me yours.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough.” I found myself strangely excited at the prospect, and remembered my college days, and the girls who dumped me, and the other girls I spilled my guts to, who someday later would also dump me. It seems in description like a vicious circle, but I kind of liked it: a steady rhythm of disappointment and elation I could rely on. In retrospect it was pathetic, and there was something in Susan’s question that made me think she knew all about it, that she could see right through me to the essential shallowness of my heart. I proceeded with caution.

I gave her the short form, the one without the sex on the couch and the sad, empty cartoons. It felt strange, composing the story from the actual events of life. I’d never attempted to talk about Amanda; I hadn’t the need nor the audience. I pushed gently at the sore spot in me, and it hurt enough for me to turn away as I talked. My eyes fell onto the Ferris wheel. It jerked forward as the seats filled. In the gondolas, people waved their arms in the air, pretending fearlessness.

When I stopped, Susan fell silent for a time, and I imagined that she too was looking at the Ferris wheel, which now gained momentum and began to turn with what, after the gradual admission of passengers, seemed a harrowing speed. But when I looked at her, she had her sunglasses folded in her shirt pocket and was gazing off toward the river, down where the mayor had been fished out. She said, “It was about six months ago for me. My fiancé, actually. Getting married was all his idea. I wasn’t at all sure if he was the right guy, even a right guy, but I figured, hey, I was over thirty, a little, and I’d passed a pretty doable three years with him, two shacked up, and maybe falling in love was not at all like you hear it is, and was mostly just what had happened to us, which wasn’t much.” Her eyes refocused and fell on me. “You still want to hear this?”