J. Lennon - The Funnies

Pierce slid off his stool and headed down the hall. “You’re not looking hard enough,” he said. “I’m in every one of them.”

* * *

I did a lot that week, though the main thing I did was not call Susan. She didn’t call me, either. But it seemed that the burden of calling had fallen to me, and though, reviewing the weekend’s events, I could find no concrete reason I should bear it, I took it upon myself anyway. Perhaps it was just my natural predilection for guilt, and if so, then I deserved it. Unfortunately this same tendency was also at work in my relationship with Amanda: though our breakup was a long time coming, I still felt compelled to prolong it, so that I would keep on feeling bad. This is why, after spending a lonely and grueling Thursday evening drafting cartoons for Wurster, I called her instead of Susan.

I half-expected, half-hoped to find the apartment embroiled in a raucous, libidinous party, which in the reeking bog of my imagination would leak out the telephone earpiece like corn syrup and relieve me of my obligation to be unhappy. Instead, she answered on the first ring, and the room behind her yawned into an aural emptiness that made the dank house seem crowded by comparison. Before I’d even said hello I was struggling to contain the guilt.

“It’s me,” I said, as sprightly as I could muster.

“Yes, hi.”

I could hear the vigorous dabs of a paintbrush against canvas. Nonetheless I asked what she was doing.

“Working.”

“Is it going okay?”

“Yeah, better than usual.”

There was a long pause after this, a challenge to me to say something worthwhile. I was not up to it, and said, “So, what’s up?”

“Um, Tim, did you just call to chitchat? Because you might remember that you dumped me, and now I’m trying to use all the free time to do something useful.”

“Jeez,” I said, already sounding like a seventh grader. “Sorry to be wasting your time.”

“Used to be it wasn’t a waste of time, because I could pretend it was an investment in my emotional future.” Dab dab dab. “But now…”

“I get the idea.”

“So have you anything important to discuss?”

I marveled at this arch construction: have you anything? Something new, tossed at me to show what I was missing. And in this state, I missed it. “I guess not. I only wanted to talk.”

“Let me guess. You have a new girlfriend, and she doesn’t fit quite perfectly into the little abscess in your heart where I used to sit.”

“Fuck you, no!”

“What then?”

I sighed, stammered, already admitting defeat deep down, already chastising myself for this foolish phone call, which in the long run would only make things worse. “Okay, nothing,” I said finally. “I guess I was thinking we could be friends.”

“Ah,” she said, “Just Friends.”

“Never mind, then,” I said.

“I shan’t.” And that was that.

Shan’t?

* * *

I finally called Susan at her office after my Friday session. My fingers were so cramped from inking and re-inking the same strip over and over that I could barely hit the tiny buttons, and I dialed the wrong number once before I reached her.

“Susan!” I said.

“Hello?” A long pause. So much for never-forgetting-a-voice.

“It’s Tim Mix.”

“Oh, hi.”

“I’m calling about the conference, and to see how you’re…”

“It’s at the Bridgewater Holiday Inn,” she said, “do you know where that is?”

“Well, I know how to get to Bridgewater.”

“Okay. Well, you go…” And she gave me unnecessarily detailed instructions, which I dutifully jotted down on the crusty block of Post-It notes that had been left by the phone. I decided to flow with the cold currents, and so earnestly parroted the traffic lights and street names and rights and lefts, tossing in an uh-huh here and there in the hope that cordiality could be jump-started.

“So…” I said, when she was through, “are you thinking you’re going to be there, maybe?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “No, I have obligations with other clients this weekend.”

“Oh.”

“Look,” she said breezily, “I want to apologize about last weekend. That was terribly inappropriate. I hope we can put it behind us, you know, and work together civilly.”

“You make it sound like we were in a fist fight,” I said.

“You could say that.” A long pause while that sunk in. “Look, Tim, I think that with us both coming off bad relationships and all, the last thing we need is a…a thing, clogging up the gears.” Her voice was sick with the confrontation, however minor. “Don’t you think?”

“I guess.”

“So you’re on a panel Sunday. ‘Taking Over the Old Strips.’ It’s at eleven in the morning, and they said you’d find the room on the general schedule…”

“A panel? What do I do on a panel?”

“I dunno. You sit and talk with other cartoonists in front of a bunch of people, I suppose.”

“Ah.”

“Well…”

I felt the call slipping away from me — had I had a grip on it to begin with? — and said quickly, “So, do you have time for lunch? In New York?”

A sigh. “I really can’t today, Tim, I’m sorry.”

I imagined myself as a kind of Promethean figure, doomed to sit on a high peak, enduring brusque phone calls from women I have offended, every day for eternity. My crime? Bringing bathos to the mortals. “Okay,” I said, taking my medicine with a whimper.

* * *

Working in the evening, I heard a car pull up into the driveway, and its door open and close. I peeked out and saw the back half of a big, brown, unfamiliar sedan. Then I heard Pierce’s voice, the sound of the screen door, and silence.

Dorn had made me paranoid. I was dying to know who had come. On the other hand I didn’t want Pierce thinking I was spying. I decided to wait it out and spy later, when the visitor was leaving.

I was drafting a word-mispronunciation gag. Lindy was sitting on the floor among some messily stacked books, and Timmy was standing nearby, talking to someone outside the panel (another common weirdness of FF Wurster and I had isolated during the week). Timmy was pointing to Lindy and saying, “Bobby likes strawberries and Bitty likes blueberries, but Lindy likes liberries!”

The crisp, inarguable stupidity of this delighted me. Certainly it could pass as an original FF strip, and I figured that, if I got it right, it would be included in the final packet I submitted to the syndicate. I might even bring it to Ray Burn, if Susan still felt like setting up a meeting between us. I did several pencil roughs of the cartoon, which differed mostly in terms of placement: should Lindy be sitting on a couch or chair, or should I stick with the floor? Should Timmy be in the foreground, thus larger than Lindy, or at the same depth? I tried all the combinations, and found that Lindy on the floor, Timmy in the foreground worked best. I sketched this out three or four times, doing my best to make Timmy simply look closer, instead of unusually large. One of them looked okay, though it took me a while to figure out why: a stray line coming off Lindy’s hair seemed to form a vague corner in the room, implying spatial depth. I filled in the rest of this line and added converging floor lines, and suddenly the perspective all made sense. Excited, I got out the thick paper and Wolff B. Then there was a knock on the door.

I jumped, bashing both knees against the underside of the desk. “Come in.”

The door opened and in walked Uncle Mal. He was dressed, incongruously, in a pair of cutoff jeans and a loose, short-sleeved button-down shirt, and his sham black hair was mussed on the left, possibly from driving with the window open. His goofball smile was the most honest thing I’d seen all week. “I thought I’d come out and check on you,” he said. “I’ve visited half your family today.”