J. Lennon - The Funnies

RNBT was in the process of becoming MNBT. They had had a vinyl sign printed up with the new town name on it, and this hung from ropes over the illuminated sign; the lettering on the door had already been changed. I was impressed and abashed.

When I showed the safety deposit teller the key, she assured me that it was indeed one of theirs, and passed me a stack of forms. I had to sign in, as usual, but there were some other hoops, relating to my father’s death, that had to be jumped through.

“I’m not actually in charge of his money,” I said. “I don’t have power of attorney or anything.”

“Where did you get this key?” she said.

“It was left to my brother Pierce.”

She winced, as if she had some dire connection to Pierce I didn’t, and couldn’t, understand. “And why isn’t he here himself?”

“He doesn’t want to be the one to look.”

“Can’t you bring him in here with you? Then he could stand outside.”

I looked down at the half-eaten scone in my hand. “He doesn’t…like banks,” I said.

“Hmm.” She asked me for my driver’s license and social security card. She asked me what my father’s mother’s maiden name was and made me verify his address. Then I signed the forms and she opened the gate. “But keep that out of here,” she said, pointing at the scone. I set it in front of a closed teller station and followed her in.

She made me wait outside the vault while she pulled the box from it, then led me to a cramped booth containing a small desk, a pen on a chain and a reading lamp with a green glass shade. She set the box on the desk. “Let me know when you’re through,” she said, and clickety-clacked back to her window.

It was a long, narrow box, gray with sharp corners. The lid came up with a feeble creak. Inside was a small sheaf of papers and an envelope. I looked at the papers first: titles to the property and car, dental X-rays, birth certificates of Dad, Bitty and Pierce. Some low-denomination savings bonds, never cashed in and possibly forgotten.

I put these things aside and gingerly tore open the envelope. The paper was bright white, not aged in the slightest. Inside there was only another key, this one to a door lock or padlock. There was nothing else. I pulled the key out. It had the number 134 etched into one side, and on the other was a yellow sticker, half of which was rubbed mostly away by a succession of rough fingers. Only a few words were visible:

orage

lphia, PA

I looked again into the envelope: surely something else was in there. But there was no explanation, no note. I rifled through the papers, nothing. I pocketed the key, crumpled the envelope up and dropped it into the wastebasket. Then I closed the box and left the room.

“I’m done,” I told the teller. She gave me a look indicating that she was pleased to hear it. She disappeared into the vault with the box and returned with the key. Meanwhile I discovered that my scone had been disposed of. There were still a couple of crumbs there, standing out pale against the black marble counter where it had been sitting.

* * *

My assignment for the weekend was to come up with twenty-five strip-worthy gags. These would form the basis of my work for the next month and a half. During the last two weeks of my tutelage we would prepare the six dailies and one Sunday that would constitute my submission to Burn Features Syndicate, would decide my fate as a rich and goofy pop artist or pretentious loser living with his brother. I wasn’t sure, considering the two, which suited me better. By that evening I was forced to confront the fact that neither was particularly suitable, and that despite my doubts I had no other conceivable options. I wanted to sit around and discuss this with somebody, but I couldn’t see calling Susan so late at night, and incidentally making a fool of myself. So I sat quietly, fighting off sleep, and worked on the gags.

I had decided on a system while returning from the bank, and stopped in the mini-mart for a stack of 3x5 note cards, the kind without lines. I had this idea that lines would make the jokes seem less funny, a task they would likely need no help accomplishing. At home, I dug from the hall closet an old typewriter, a black war-era Smith-Corona in a battered black case that my father had used briefly in his stint as a newspaperman, and hauled it onto the kitchen counter. I sat on a wooden bar stool and rolled in card after card, tapping out every stupid gag I could think up. I didn’t worry too much about their quality, only the redundant mechanics of their production: off the stack, into the machine, think up the joke, type it out, out of the machine, onto the stack. By the time I gave up I had about forty, most of them worthless. Under the gray fluorescent kitchen light, the only one burning in the house, I thumbed through the pile. Calendar says Jan 1, Lindy says to Bitty Time to make your New Year’s revolution. Dog curled on Dot’s lap, Timmy saying It’s Mommy’s laptop! Mailman coming up walk, Bobby looking out window says If he was a girl would he be a femailman?

And those were the best of the lot. I set the finished stack next to the empty stack, pushed the typewriter back and lay my head on my arms.

For a short time around my sixth Christmas, my father went on “vacation” and “I” “took over” the strip for him. That is, my father went nowhere, and the cartoon Timmy became the in-name-only author of the strip. At first I was horrified. The drawings were artificially childlike, with arms and legs rendered as sticks, and trees and shrubs as thick brambles of scribble. But they were clearly the work of an adult: all the subtler rules of motion, of bodily line were fully articulated, and the images were laid out on the page with clarity and grace.

The gags themselves were all about my parents — child’s-eye views of the sober complexities of adult life. There was an arrogance about this I was already old enough to resent. I was not stupid, as people generally believe children to be, and already deeply suspicious of anything either of my parents did. I would never have made the kind of “cute” assumptions this series of strips — about a week’s worth — attributed to me. For example: of my father, laboring over some papers, I was to have said: Daddy has to pay his bills to Santa . As if my family would ever have bothered with the Santa Claus deception. Elsewhere, “I” drew Dad shoveling the car out of a snowbank. The caption read: Daddy loves playing in the snow .

All the same, I ended up welcoming the week’s worth of attention these strips brought me. People stopped on the street to tell me what a good little cartoonist I was, how I’d be sure to have my own strip someday. Father Loomis gave me a gift: a pen, which eventually found its way out of my room and into my father’s studio, where it was forever lost. I felt a little like a superstar, and people wrote letters to me from all over the country. Rose hated me; so did Bobby. I played exclusively with Pierce the first two weeks of January, building things out of Christmas Tinkertoys and watching television.

Until now, I hadn’t thought of that week of strips as prescient. But the connection felt all too clear: an attention-grubbing fake taking credit for something that wasn’t his own, something that itself was not worth the paper it was printed on. There was no doubt anymore; my father was a failure, and so was I. However accomplished his cartoons, his gags remained second-, even third-rate. His story, like mine, was one of squandered potential.

I slid off the stool, dragged myself to the light switch and turned it off. I was as lonely as I’d been in months.

* * *

During the night, I woke to a noise from somewhere in the house. It manifested itself in the sex dream I was having as my murky lover’s rough moans; what it really was, I understood once I had fully awoke, was the kitchen stool being pulled out from under the counter. Pierce? I thought. There was some shuffling, a click, then giggling: a pause, a giggle, a pause, a giggle. I listened to this for a minute or more, the still air screaming in my ears, until one of the giggles became a full laugh, and then I knew it wasn’t Pierce. I looked around the bedroom for something to crack him over the head with, and found only my bedside lamp, a ceramic travesty in the shape of a woman’s head bearing a fruit-filled basket. I yanked the plug from the wall and crept out into the hallway.