J. Lennon - The Funnies

“So what do you want here?” She swirled her pen hand in the air, pretending to draw. It was a felt-tip, which explained the characteristic fuzziness of “Sybil.” I was thrown, confused that she still assumed I wanted a drawing now that we had been established as professional equals.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “Whatever you want.”

She raised her eyebrows, making my statement seem, in retrospect, provocative. Then her hand flashed into action, squeaking across the paper like a cornered rat, leaving heads, hands, faces in its wake. She was the fastest draw I’d ever seen. She talked to me as she worked. “I’ll make you as many as you want, Tim. I love doing it. I don’t feel like a full person when I’m not drawing.” I noticed now, clipped into her breast pocket beside the star, a row of fresh black pens. “I draw in the steam on the bathroom mirror. I walk past people’s cars and draw in the dust on their doors and windows.”

“Wow,” I said.

She finished with a bizarre flourish, continuing the tangled loop-the-loops at the end of her signature right out into the air, where she swirled the pen around for several seconds before showing me the drawing. It was rough, but looked right out of the “Sybil” strip: Sybil sitting on a bar stool next to a man, both of them with outsized martini glasses in their hands. Both figures had those bubbles over their heads that indicated drunkenness: squeans.

“Whaddya think?” she said, twirling the pen between her fingers.

“Great,” I said. “Nice squeans.”

“How about you?”

I looked up, feeling the conversation veer away. “How about me what?”

“You,” she said, pointing. I inspected the drawing a second time and recognized that the man on the stool was me, getting drunk with Sybil. She had rendered me with cruel accuracy, exaggerating the thinness of my face and the obstinate rumpledness of my hair, and had given my eyes and mouth the same puzzled anxiety they were likely to betray were the scene to take place in real life. “Let’s get together in the hotel bar tonight. A lot of the other cartoonists are going to be there. Besides, we have a lot to talk about.”

“Really?”

“Our common work, for one thing.”

“Cartooning.”

She handed me the drawing, which I didn’t want. I folded it as politely as I could and put it in my pocket, while she moved her head from side to side, indicating my failure to pick up my side of the conversation. “Not just.” When I didn’t respond, she threw up her hands. “Duh,” she said. “We both draw ourselves for a living.”

“Oh! I guess that’s true.”

“Duh,” she said again, and then it was someone else’s turn to talk to her.

* * *

I figured I should call Bobby, as I needed a place to stay. I found a bank of pay phones in the hallway, right in the middle of the sci-fi conference. It seemed the science fiction people, with their outlandish outfits and elaborate imaginary personae, were having a better time than the cartoonists. They all appeared to know each other from way back, perhaps from chance interactions at far-flung intergalactic spaceports, and greeted one another with everything from solemn high-fives to glottal sputterings in invented languages. Samantha answered my call with the strangely formal “Mix residence, can I help you?”

“Samantha, it’s your uncle Tim.”

“Hi…” She dragged out the word, filling up space.

“How are you doing? No school today, right?”

“It’s summer ,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Listen, can I talk to your dad? I’m in the area and I thought I might visit.”

“Is Uncle Pierce coming?”

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Oh,” said Samantha, and the phone clunked down and I heard her call Bobby.

JerCon participants passed by as I waited, leaving the smell of makeup and sweat in their wake. Close up, they looked like they had just crawled out from under damp tarps. Presently I heard Bobby pick up the phone and clear his throat. “Hello,” he said, “this is Robert Mix, can I help you?”

“Bobby, it’s Tim.” I told him where I was and suggested we meet for dinner. “I’d love to get together with just you guys. You and Nancy and Sam.”

He thought about this awhile. “Dinner,” he said, as if eating in the evening were a quaint, antiquated custom, like wearing goggles while driving a car. “I don’t know.”

I was unable to contain myself. “Really?”

“Well. Nancy might be planning something.”

“You could ask her.”

“Hmm.”

“I’ll do the dishes.”

If he was offended by this, he made no sign. “Just a moment,” he said, and I heard a beep, and then some quiet, vapid music. I thought: Hold?!? He has hold at home? I was still sorting this out in my head when he came back on the line.

“Why don’t you eat with us?” he said, like it was his idea. “We’re having roast.”

“Great! Can you come pick me up? Pierce has the car.”

“Pick you up,” he said. “Yes, okay, sure.”

When we hung up, it occurred to me that I had planned to ask him other favors: if I could stay over, if I could perhaps borrow the car during the evening, to go back to the hotel. I was warming up to the drinks-at-the-bar idea. But I thought that Bobby might short-circuit under the strain of such difficult questions, and decided to hold off until we’d eaten. Until around eight, I was set. I consulted my conference schedule and stepped out, into the fray.

I slipped into the Red Room, where a panel discussion was already in progress. It was called “Drawing Animals.” I recognized one of the participants immediately: Kelsey Hoon. Hoon drew “Whiskers,” of course. I knew him from an American Express commercial he once did, in which he ate dinner with an animated version of his cartoon cat. The cat ate everything, including the dinners of the restaurant’s other patrons, who seemed unfazed by his presence: their expressions of alarm as he tipped their plates into his mouth gave way to the charmed smiles of the newly lobotomized. Kelsey Hoon had to pay for everyone’s meal: thank goodness for American Express. Hoon was a round little person with thick round eyeglasses and a childish affect. In another life he might have been a zealous scoutmaster, the kind of man kids love and adults fear. He was the one talking while I found an empty seat.

“Oh, no!” he said, giggling. “Certainly you must use thought bubbles! Never speech bubbles! Animals can’t talk, in the strictest sense.”

There were three other cartoonists up there, identified by little name placards. Dave Guest drew an all-animal strip called “The Island,” about a group of animals stranded on a desert island together. One of the characters was a seagull, who for some reason never flew off to find rescuers. I imagined that Dave Guest caught a lot of crap about this. Another cartoonist was named Jane Wooley. I had never heard of her. The fourth was Tyro.

Tyro was a young turk in the cartooning business. His strip, “The Emerald Forest,” was very popular in college newspapers and urban free weeklies. It had a cast of four: two self-loathing gay woodchucks who lived in a tree and often threatened each other with knives; a cute bunny who never spoke and who endured the unrelenting abuse of the woodchucks; and a sexy human waitress with a ruined face, named Naomi. Naomi worked at the café where the woodchucks and bunny hung out. The bunny was named Eldridge. Both woodchucks were named Laird.

Dave Guest said, “Now, Kelsey, that simply isn’t true. My strip is an all-animal strip, you see, and therefore the animals can speak freely to one another using voice bubbles. There is that…suspension of disbelief, you see.” Dave Guest was thin, his face dominated by a wide, gleaming forehead and a pointed chin. “Now our colleague from the dark side here is a different story…”