J. Lennon - The Funnies

No light issued from the kitchen. The giggler was in the dark. I padded as quietly as possible, the lamp heavy in my hand, raised as high above my head as I could reach. Its plug dangled down behind me and knocked against my heels.

I peeked into the kitchen to find a tiny flashlight beam illuminating a small hand and my gag cards. The hand was picking through the cards, its owner chuckling at each one before embedding it back in the pile with a delicate turn of the wrist. I knew who it was before I switched on the light.

“Ken Dorn,” I said.

“Oh, these are priceless, Timmy. Really wonderful stuff.” He flipped off the penlight and dropped it into the pocket of a leather jacket. On his head, slumped like a baked eggplant, was the kind of cap worn exclusively by robbers in cartoons. “‘If one of them’s a panty hose, why aren’t the two of them panty hoses?’ That is rich, rich!”

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Your brother’s house, Timmy.” He turned, grinning at me with pinprick eyes. “You got the strip, remember? You live in the Family Funnies now.”

“Ha, ha.” I calculated distances. The telephone was closer to him than me.

He followed my eyes to the phone, then picked it up and handed it to me. “How are you going to dial with that lamp in your hand?”

I was shaking, unnerved by my residual fear and infuriated by Dorn’s presence. He showed no sign of leaving. I put the lamp on the floor and picked up the receiver.

“All right, Timmy, all right,” he said, sliding off the stool, and I didn’t dial, a failure that I regret to this day, much as I regret not punching the high school English teacher who dragged me up in front of the classroom and gave me a humiliating and painful wedgie. “Don’t get all bent out of shape. You left your door unlocked, if you want to know.”

“That doesn’t mean you can just walk through it,” I said.

“The truth is,” he said, tapping the pile of note cards straight, “you don’t like me around because I represent your greatest fear, right?”

“Which is what?”

“That you can’t even do this strip right, even when it’s been dropped in your lap. Even though you didn’t have to work for it at all.”

I had no response. I suppose this was a fear of mine, but it was a cornflake next to the grain silo of fears I was shadowed by.

“So,” Dorn went on. “I suppose that chippie of yours has told you I’m in line for the job?”

“She found out by chance,” I said.

Dorn laughed again, the same nefarious snigger that had chilled me in the dark. “Come on, Timmy. She just didn’t want to hurt your feelings. She knew.”

He zipped up his jacket and ran his hand over his head. I said, “Get out, Dorn.”

“You got it, Timmy.” He backed up to the sliding doors and pushed one silently open. His eyes wheeled, taking in the house once more. “It turns me on just being in this place.”

And then he was gone.

* * *

I sat in bed, the fruit lady lamp plugged in and burning, and read over my cards again and again. Tomorrow I would try to do just as many. Maybe even illustrate a few in pencil, to give me something to discuss with Wurster.

Much later, as I lay still, letting my anxiety amplify every faint sound from outdoors, I let my real fears take on their full sagging shape: that, in fact, I would be good enough to do the strip, but would let myself think it was the best I could do. That Dorn had been right about Susan, that she’d lied to me to save my feelings, that our embrace in the movies was an open expression of desperation and I had been making a fool of myself on all fronts and still was. And would be, over and over, knowing all along it was what I had chosen and what I would continue to choose, despite all the available alternatives, because it was the easiest thing to do.

When Pierce came home Sunday night, I was still at the counter, sorting the gag cards into bad, awful and workable piles. I was on my third pass through, having only come up with nineteen workables, in the hope of finding a few bads I could improve. Thinking up more was out of the question: I was burned out.

I could tell Pierce was highly agitated even before he came into the circle of light cast by the kitchen lamp. He tossed his bag onto the couch in the dark of the living room and stood there, panting.

“Pierce?”

“Hey,” came his voice, weakly.

“How was your weekend?”

There was only his breathing for a moment. Then he said, “I talked to Gilly about your talk with her. I didn’t even know about it before I left the key.”

I didn’t know what I was expected to say. “Yeah. We went on the Centrifuge of Death.”

“She said she told you not to tell me anything.”

“She did,” I said. I wondered what kind of good this girl was doing my brother, an established paranoid, by hatching plots behind his back, then gushing to him about them a week later. I wondered if he knew she had been dressed up as me at the ‘Fest.

“So are you keeping it from me?”

“Of course not,” I said. “I told her I wouldn’t keep things from you.”

He stepped slowly into eyeshot. He looked tired. “She told me that too,” he said. I could see the mess this was making in his head and put down my stack of cards.

“Look, I went and examined everything very carefully. There wasn’t much. The deed, the title to the car, legal junk, pretty much like you said. There was only one odd thing.” I waited a second. “Do you want to hear it?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not so bad.”

He groaned, it seemed to me with a little irony. Okay, then, I thought, he’s doing all right. He slumped down on the stool across the counter from mine, began picking at something on the back of the typewriter and said, “Hit me.”

I felt in my pocket for the key, then set it on the counter.

“Oh, crap,” he said. He picked it up and brought it to his face, closer than perhaps was necessary. He read aloud the fragments of words once, then twice.

“What do you think?” I said.

He put down the key, rubbed his eyes with the balls of his hands. “Oh, shit, Tim, who knows.” He looked up grinning sadly. “I hate mysteries. Really I do. I hate the whole fucking past, and all the garbage everybody in our family did to each other, and everybody in other people’s families did to each other and to our family. Every time a little mystery pops up it’s like a tumor in my head, and it grows and grows until all I can think about is all the things I don’t know and all the things people are keeping from me, and the reasons they might be doing that.” He reached out and pushed the key across the counter at me. “I mean, if people are doing anything behind my back, why can’t they be doing everything?”

I picked up the key and dropped it in my shirt pocket. “That’s a heavy load.”

“No kidding.” He gestured with his head at the disappeared key. “What do you think?”

“Storage company in Philly?”

He nodded. “The family skeletons?”

“Could be.” Though our skeletons had always shunned the closet, clattering around right out in the open, like bathrobed houseguests.

Pierce picked up the note cards and read through them. He kept doing this for several minutes after I thought he would certainly stop. Finally he said, “Man, every time a new strip came out, I felt like he had stolen a little piece of my soul.”

“Like those isolated people who were afraid of cameras.”

“I hate cameras too,” Pierce said.

I gathered the cards up and put them aside. I was exhausted, too much so to talk to Pierce any longer. I got up and made sure the sliding doors were locked, though I understood there was no point in telling Pierce about Dorn’s break-in. “You know,” I said, sounding more irritated than I really was, “you’re not even in those strips. You’ve got that going for you.”