J. Lennon - The Funnies

“I got humiliated today,” I said, passing the lighter under the dividing wall.

“It’s got around.”

“Already?”

“Sybil told me.” I heard a deep breath. “She’s pissed at you, buddy.”

“We had a little misunderstanding.”

“Let me guess. She tried hustling you and you wimped out.”

“Sort of,” I said. “Maybe it was a mistake.” I could feel the unsent letter crackling in my back pocket. I considered flushing it down the toilet.

There was a long pause before he said, surprising me, “I like her, but she’s too depressed for me. Women read my strip and they think I’ll wanna sit around quoting Nietszche with ‘em.”

“You don’t?”

“Hell, no.” After a minute, he added, quietly, “It’s an aesthetic, not a Weltanschauung.”

I smoked awhile in silence, waiting for the pot to take effect. I concentrated, vigilant for changes in my mood. It wasn’t until I was thoroughly fed up that I realized I wasn’t fed up at all anymore, and the stall suddenly seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to be, with the walls verdant and mildly reflective and a pool of clear water beneath me. I said, “I think I’m falling for this girl.”

“Not Sybil.”

“Not Sybil.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“Being a dick,” I said, stunning myself with my crassness. I scrambled to soften it. “I guess.”

He coughed. “Want to get something to eat?”

I dropped the end of the cigarette into the toilet. “You bet,” I said.

* * *

We got microwaved burritos at the Kwik Stop adjoining the hotel, and ate them out on the curb. I couldn’t fill myself fast enough, and ended up going in for another. Tyro watched people walking in and out of the store and made up secret obsessions for them. “Ass freak,” he said. “Angora goatfucker.” I put my head in my hands and watched spilled gasoline trace prismatic amoebas in a puddle of water.

“So Mix,” Tyro said. “Why are you doing this shit?”

“Cartooning?”

“No, animal sacrifice.”

I didn’t want to talk about it. “Hard to say,” I said.

“Is it the money?”

Of course that was part of it, but if money was all I ever wanted, I would probably have it already. The truth was that my life was fine, and could have stayed fine indefinitely, but I didn’t want fine, I wanted great. So I had to change something. But I had no guiding ambition, and in my fumbling for one seemed to have traded fine for pathetic. I was feeling like I could spend years just trying to get things back to fine again. I wouldn’t have said this to Tyro even if I could, at that moment, have formed the complex sentences necessary to do so. All I said was, “Not really.”

“So why? Why are you so interested in the Family Funnies?”

“It’s my family,” I said.

“You’re telling me that strip is more interesting than the genuine article?”

“There is no genuine article.” This had the ring of gloomy, fatalistic truth to me.

Tyro shook his head. “Bullshit,” he said.

* * *

We went to the buffet together. I was still hungry, even after the burritos, and loaded my plate with Italian sausage and pierogies, which anywhere else in the world but New Jersey would have been an unacceptable contradiction. We sat at a table with some Fans, who didn’t talk to us. Many of them wore Dogberry T-shirts, with Kearns’s looping signature under the drawing.

“I hear he still has horses on the ranch.”

“Is that so? Does he ride?”

“Oh, I’d imagine he must. Wouldn’t you?”

“Well, naturally.”

I watched Tyro eat. His exterior calm was astonishing, though it was clear this was not his natural, primeval state: under the table his feet twitched to an obsessive internal rhythm, and he fussed at his jeans and shirt surreptitiously, not out of vanity, it seemed, but of minor yet irrepressible discomfort. I could guess at his childhood: pure nerd until his junior year in high school, when suddenly he became bony and dangerous, a sexual beacon to girls who months before would have had nothing to do with him — cheerleaders, honor students. It made him wary of people who expected things from him. He ignored the Fans and absorbed himself in his food until Kearns was introduced by, of all people, Leslie Parr.

Parr stood massively on the plywood stage, hunched over the lectern like an Army colonel preparing to outline battle plans with his quirt. What he said about Kearns probably looked respectful enough on paper — some saccharine blather about the strip’s immeasurable influence and timeless appeal — but his voice reeked so strongly of contempt that I half-expected riot. Nobody else seemed to notice, though.

“Of course, I could stand up here yammering all day, give y’all time to polish off that chicken tertrazzini or whatever you got there”—polite laughter—“but you wanna see the genuine article, and lucky for you we got ‘im right here, the mangy old goat of the funny papers, Art Kearns!”

Thundering applause, from all quarters including mine. My cogitations on the curb, which already in the glum aftermath of artificial stimulants seemed no more or less significant than a low-wattage light being switched on in a musty attic full of junk, had no effect on my slavish devotion to Kearns, whom I still considered tack-sharp and dignified, even in his weakened state. His progress to the lectern was prolonged and excruciating, and the applause flagged and reinvigorated several times before he finally arrived, supported by his assistant. She took a moment to steady him before the mike, then sat down upstage on a folding chair.

“Well thanks,” said Kearns, his voice thin and crusty as an old piece of wire, and everyone clapped again. Tyro picked up a sausage with his fingers and chomped off a thumb-sized chunk.

“It’s a real honor, speaking to you here. I’ve been in this business a long time. Longer’n you can imagine. And I’ve drawn a lot of strips, for sure. But it’s all ‘cause of you all that ‘Art’s Kids’ is still popular. ‘Smuch as it was fifty years ago.” His oratory trickled out over the crowd like a leak in a cellar wall. All his sentences were of uniform length. I looked around me and found people eating quietly, cleaning off their eyeglasses or squinting earnestly at Kearns, as if in an effort to see the words better. I waited for the introduction to stop and his speech, per se, to begin. But minutes passed, and pretty soon he stopped talking, and after a pause that lingered a beat or two too long, everyone caught on that this had been his speech, it was over, and it was time to start clapping. So they did. Kearns turned from the lectern and his assistant leapt to her feet to support him, and together they walked off, to further applause.

Les Parr was quick to retake the mike. “All right!” he screamed, as if it had not been Kearns on stage at all, but Elvis Presley. His grin was less celebratory than triumphal, and he pointed at Kearns’s receding form with what looked, from where I was sitting, like open mockery. “Y’all finish eating, and Art’s gonna move over to this table here”—he pointed to where some people were unfolding a buffet table, stage right—“and draw y’all some pictures, okay? All right, let’s give the old boy one more hand!”

More clapping, weaker this time. Kearns, who had nearly made it to his seat, half-turned and accepted it, nodding. And then the noise retreated into scabrous mumbled conversation and giggling. Tyro held up his empty plate and nodded his head at it.

“Seconds?” he said.

* * *

Afterward, I wanted to wait and meet Kearns. Tyro would have none of it. “I’m history,” he said. “More than thirty-six hours in Jersey gives me the willies.”