J. Lennon - The Funnies

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I talked one of the cars — Nancy’s, as it happened — out of Bobby. He seemed extremely reluctant to lend it to me, though I swore I wouldn’t get drunk and promised to be back before midnight. He sighed heavily before handing over the keys. “You understand I will lose major points for this,” he said, and I pictured Nancy sitting up in bed, her face slathered with cosmetic mud, briskly erasing marks from Bobby’s column in a tiny spiral notebook. He told me I didn’t need the house key, as I was to use the electric garage door opener to stow the car, and he told me that the opener made a lot of noise and would probably wake all of them up.

“I could leave it outside.”

“No, no, I’d rather have peace of mind than a good night’s sleep.”

It was a perfectly normal car, a small white sedan with a neat pile of prenatal care pamphlets stacked on the passenger seat. I made several mistakes finding my way back to the hotel, and by the time I arrived it was ten, two hours from my curfew. The beer I had drunk at Bobby’s, combined with the palpable tension of his house, had whet my appetite for a cold drink, and I bellied up to the bar without surveying the crowd. I ordered something dark and bitter. Off to the right was a microphone and an elaborate rack of synthesizers, set up under dim colored lights on a small carpeted stage. The words “Midnight Angel” scrolled ominously across a sequined banner.

When the bartender brought my beer I fished in my wallet for money, only to find a five-dollar bill slipped across the bar before me like a bribe. I turned and saw a fuzzy-eyed Sybil Schimmelpfennig, and behind her a tall, serious-looking guy I’d never seen before, standing with his arms crossed.

“Timmy Mix!” said Sybil. She was still wearing her name tag: Hello my name is SYBIL. “You made it!”

“Couldn’t miss it,” I said. “Thanks for the beer.”

She reached across me, took her change and tried to tuck it into her black-pen pocket, but a few of the coins missed and fell on the floor. She didn’t seem to notice. “Hey, have you met Lowell?”

“I don’t think so.” I extended my hand to the man. “Tim Mix.”

“Lowell Jackson.”

“You draw ‘Bottle Caps,’ right?”

“Yep.”

“Bottle Caps” was the comics’ page’s only black strip: all the major characters were black. So was Lowell. It was a good strip, your basic family-living-an-ordinary-and-sometimes-zany-life kind of strip, though it had not spawned the kind of merchandising mini-empire that, say, “Whiskers” or even FF had. There was an edge to it, a barely concealed anxiety that made the standard suburban, capitalist-advocacy strips like mine look slightly foolish. I told Jackson I admired his work and he nodded slowly, as if we were agreeing on a movie or restaurant we both liked.

“So you’re the new man,” he said.

It took me a minute. “Oh! Oh, yeah. Another couple of months, actually.”

“You didn’t do today’s, then.”

“That’s a posthumous one from my dad.”

He nodded again. “Spooky.”

“Indeed.”

Sybil was gone, off talking to a chubby middle-aged man. She laughed hysterically at something he said, bending over and clutching her stomach, and the man smiled, looking unsure of what was so funny.

“So how do you know Sybil?” Lowell asked me.

“Just met her. At the conference.”

“You think she’s good-looking?”

I looked across the bar at her. “Sure, she’s okay,” I said.

“She keeps saying she’s ugly and fat. That girl is not fat.”

“No.” I took a sip of beer. It tasted good, thick and sharp like carbonated coffee. I wanted to change the subject. “So what got you into cartooning?”

He pressed me with a long, suspicious look. “What, because a black guy isn’t supposed to be a cartoonist?”

“Well, no, not exactly…”

“We do read the papers, you know.”

“Oh, of course, I just…”

He suddenly looked at his watch and then out the door, into the hotel lobby. “I gotta see a man about a horse,” he said, and was gone. I watched him as he left, talked into a pay phone for a few minutes and headed for the door.

“Mix! Tim Mix!” I felt a hand clap my shoulder, hard enough to make me stumble. It was attached to a telephone-booth-shaped man in his sixties whom I’d never before seen. He looked like a retired sportscaster, with his large gold watch and a puffy red face that seemed to have had a few dents knocked out of it. “You’re the spittin’ image of your old man, Godblessisoul.”

“Oh! Really? Well…”

“You know who I am? Last time you saw me you were a little shaver!”

“Ah, I can’t say I do.”

“‘Course, I might not’ve recognized you if it weren’t for that name tag.” He pointed. In fact, I was still wearing my conference name tag and apparently had been wearing it all through dinner at Bobby’s. It struck me as extremely odd that no one had mentioned it. Then I got a funny feeling that this might be the sort of person to poke me in the face while I was looking at my shirt, and I quickly raised my head.

“I’m sorry, I just…”

“Les Parr! ‘Nuts and Bolts,’ second-longest running strip drawn by the same fella in the history of comics, thanks to that Kearns, goddam him!”

“Wow,” I said. “I’ve read your strip my whole life.”

He laughed. “Thanks, thanks,” he said, though it wasn’t a compliment. “Nuts and Bolts” was set in a garage in some rural backwater. All sorts of colorful country folk stumbled in and out of it each day with their dented pickup trucks and cobbled-together farm machines, and engaged Cappy, the plucky mechanic full of folk wisdom, in slangy conversation. Occasionally they all headed for the hills in search of earthy adventure, like discovering a moonshine still or shooting squirrels for stew. The humor, such as it was, depended heavily on the readers’ conviction that the country was quaint and inherently funny. Apparently many people believed this, because the strip had hung on since 1945, when Cappy came back from the war. “Art’s Kids” was said to have begun publication a few scant weeks before “Nuts and Bolts,” and I had heard this was Leslie Parr’s pet subject.

He grabbed my arm just below the elbow and leaned close, reeking of aftershave. I adjusted my estimation of his age to a particularly hale early seventies. “Your pop was a great man. A great man.”

I made a little room between us by sipping my drink. “Hey, thanks.”

“It’s got class, that Family Funnies. Not like a couple strips I could name.”

“Well, I’m really enjoying work—”

He let go my arm, leaving a hand-shaped cool spot of sweat in its wake, and formed the hand into the shape of a pistol, which he brandished before me. “You know ‘N and B’ really got started a year before Kearns? Had a little strip in a small-town paper in Northern California. Called ‘The Shoehorn Gang.’ Wasn’t strictly ‘N and B’ but it was, whaddyacallit, its spiritual cousin.” From Parr’s mouth, the words “spiritual cousin” fell like lead weights at our feet. “Just because it doesn’t have the same name, those ninnies disqualify it. Of course, Kearns’s got ‘em wrapped around his little toe. Old man doesn’t even draw the damned thing anymore.”

“He doesn’t?”

“He’s a quivering fogy!” Parr produced a drink, something clear that magnified his fingers through the glass, and downed it in a single swig. “Can barely hold a pen!”

“So who does it?”

He leaned back, gesturing in the air with his beefy arm, as if it were the entire world supporting the great fraud that was Art Kearns and “Art’s Kids.” “Minions! Flunkies! Whatever! Living out there on that bogus ranch of his, nodding his little white head.” He reached out to the bar — what seemed an impossible distance — and slammed down the empty glass. “You and me, kid. Nothing to worry about there. We‘re the real thing.”