J. Lennon - The Funnies

“You’re me,” I said.

“Yeah, yeah.” She had a slightly ironic well-I’ll-be tone that I didn’t much like.

The others giggled. They were all boys. Somebody said, “Small fucking world.”

I realized I was terribly out of place here, that the costumes had not been worth looking for, and that in finding them I had stumbled upon a hostile and unfathomable miniculture. I didn’t understand teenagers at all anymore. Where my generation had embraced irony with a taste for its novelty and its shock value with adults, these kids breathed it like pure oxygen, taking more power from it than I had ever thought possible, and crushed earnestness like it was so many soft drink cans. When they seemed sincere, they were really taking irony a step further, mocking the very concept of speaking one’s mind. What adults thought of them one way or another was of no significance. I feared them terribly. “Uh, sorry,” I said. “Wrong turn.” I ducked back under the bushes, leaving my ass exposed to any number of punting feet. Somebody snorted, and then they all did.

“Where did you go?” Susan asked when I got back to the doggie stand. When I told her, she frowned. “If this was Disneyland, they’d get fired just for taking the heads off. Did you know that? At Disneyland, that’s just cause for instant expulsion.”

“I had no idea.”

We walked around, eating. Most of the attractions were, in fact, food-related; vendors sold everything from falafel to pork rinds to chicken lo mein. One enterprising man had named his menu items — standard American stuff, burgers and fries — after characters in the strip. So far, nobody had stopped him. I thought of ordering a Coca-Cola à la Carl.

“Oh, look!” Susan said. “There’s a Timburger!”

Sure enough, there was. My burger had gouda cheese and bacon on it and cost six dollars and fifty cents.

I was beginning to feel a bit creeped out. Besides the prevailing depersonalization of myself and everyone I was related to, the place was swarming with children. Children made me uncomfortable. They had a smell, a confectionary pissiness to them, and all the self-possession of an escaped pack of zoo animals. For a moment, I had a gruesome epiphany, much like the stoned realization that a muscle, your tongue, was filling your mouth: that all around the fairgrounds, purchased food was being transformed into Kinderfleisch . It was happening now, right now, as I thought about it! I felt woozy and reached out automatically to Susan to steady myself. Her shoulder was hot and round and fit in my palm like a peach.

That’s when I saw Ken Dorn. He was standing alone just outside the fairground gate, eating what looked to be a Timburger. When he saw us he grinned with devilish self-satisfaction, as if he had engineered our nascent acquaintance for some as-yet-concealed personal gain. In retrospect it seems like he must have walked toward us, but if memory serves, we were drawn toward him, as if toward the darkened entrance to a funhouse.

“Hello, Ken,” I said, trying to preempt him. He was still grinning.

“Timmy,” he said, “Susan.”

“What are you doing here?” Susan asked him flatly.

“Oh, just surrounding myself with the trappings, you know.”

She looked at me. “You two know each other?”

“We met at the wake.”

“Oh, right.” She bit her lip.

“How’s the drawing going, Tim?” Dorn asked me. In his tone was something of the teens I had earlier encountered.

“Better, better. Harder than I thought.”

“Yes, it’s actual work, isn’t it.”

We stared at one another, me attempting to figure him out, to exhume his motives, whatever they might be; him seeming to know everything about me there was to know. I finally looked away, back at the fairgrounds.

“You’re getting along with your new artist, I trust?” I heard him ask Susan.

“Swimmingly, thanks.”

Suddenly I was tired. Maybe it was the heat, but part of it must have been Dorn. I didn’t have it in me for a conversation with him; he begged a profusion of second guesses I didn’t feel like making. He droned at Susan and Susan droned back, and I stood with my hands in my pockets and my eyes half-shut until they stopped.

* * *

Susan pulled her car into our driveway. “Well,” she said.

“Well.”

“Nice day, huh?”

“Very. Do you have a place to stay?”

She shrugged. “I can find a motel.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “Stay at our place.” I quickly added, “I can sleep on the couch. You take my bed.”

“Oh, I couldn’t.”

“Or my father’s.”

She grimaced, and it was decided.

Inside, I knocked on Pierce’s door, while Susan shut herself in my bedroom. “Pierce,” I said. “Are you up?”

“I am lying down,” came the measured reply.

“My editor’s staying over. I’m taking the couch.”

“Your who?”

“Susan, from the syndicate?”

A long pause. “Oh, okay.” He sounded better, in possession of some rudimentary grip. I hadn’t seen him all week, and from my own observations and evidence from the bathroom, deduced that he hadn’t bathed or showered during that time.

“We were at FunnyFest all day,” I said. Silence. “It wasn’t too bad, you know. In fact it was silly. The mayor almost drowned.”

Pierce said nothing, and I regretted saying anything. Then he said, “I don’t think any of that is silly.”

“Whatever you say,” I said automatically.

“That’s what I say,” said my brother.

In the morning I woke determined to spend some time with my mother. I lay on the couch, still groggy, working out the logistics. Susan could go off to FunnyFest alone, I supposed, and I could take the Caddy to the nursing home; maybe I’d bring Mom down to Washington Crossing, if they’d let me. This seemed like a plausible scheme, and afforded me the momentum to get up and rummage through the fridge for picnic elements. What I found was less food than archived material, so I pulled on the dishwashing gloves and began deaccessioning, lobbing each fungal mass into the trash bag until there were only unopened condiments left, inertly maturing in their glass cloisters. I sponged down the shelves, put on some pants and headed for the South Side Market, five or so blocks up the street. Their prices were insane, geared toward shoppers who would rather pay four dollars a pound for butter than wait in a checkout line with poor people, but I was driven, and charged it all to a crusty old credit card. I came back to the sound of the shower — Susan, I supposed, was up — and bustled around the kitchen making sandwiches and fresh iced tea.

The bathroom door opened, and footsteps came toward me down the hall. “Sleep well?” I called out.

It was Pierce standing there, his cheeks scrubbed raw and sunken like ruined vegetables. His voice came out quiet and cracked. “Fine, I guess.” He eyed the sandwiches.

“Do you want one?” I said.

He nodded. I took a sandwich out of its plastic bag and handed it to him. He took a little bite off the corner, then began tearing off huge chunks with his front teeth, as if he had just chased and killed it on the savanna. I watched him while I made another sandwich.

“Another?” I said. He swallowed the last bite, then shook his head no, so I bagged the fresh sandwich too. I gathered together my makeshift lunch and put it in a paper grocery sack, then slid it into the austere recesses of the fridge.

“Have you been eating?” I asked him.

“Mostly raisins.”

“Just raisins?”

He shrugged. “Other dried fruits, too.” He put one gently shaking hand on his stomach. Already his cheeks looked a little fuller, though that might have been my imagination. “Other things seemed poisoned, somehow. I’m a little worried about the sandwich.”