J. Lennon - The Funnies

“I understand,” I said.

To my surprise, he stuck out his hand to be shook. It was an ironic gesture, accompanied by a pompous fake smirk, but his grip on my fingers was strong and honest. “It was good meeting you, Mix. I thought I’d have to hate everybody.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“Let me know how things go,” he said.

“You’ll see me in the funny papers.”

He made a face. “Shit, Mix, I can’t read that trash. Drop me a note or something.”

“Yeah, sure,” I said, but we didn’t exchange addresses or telephone numbers. He didn’t say goodbye either, only made a little pistol with his hand, cocked his thumb and shot me right between the eyes.

* * *

The line to see Kearns was nearly fifty yards long, but I got in it anyway. People seemed to be holding things for Kearns to sign or draw on. Was it possible that there was no paper for the cartoonist?

“They ran out,” someone told me. “He keeps making mistakes and starting over.”

“So, do you have anything…extra? You could give me?”

His name tag read STEVE GOPP, WASHINGTON POST. “Nah, I just got these two.” He held up a couple of magazine subscription cards, one with a grease stain on the corner. “One of ‘em’s for my kid.”

I scanned the floor for dropped programs or dinner napkins. My own program had somehow gotten away from me. The line, which had seemed stuck, was moving now, and as I came closer to the table I set to the task of persuading myself that asking for autographs was crass and demeaning, and a handshake and pleased-ta-meetcha would be sufficient. Then I remembered I had some paper with me after all.

“Now, you look familiar,” Kearns said to me, smiling. His right eye was milky with growths and it was a wonder to me that he could see at all.

“I’m Tim Mix,” I said. “Maybe you knew my father Carl. He drew the Family Funnies.”

“Nah, that ain’t it. You look like my granddaughter’s boyfriend. You ride a motorcycle?”

“No, sir.”

He nodded slowly. “Kill yourself on one of them things. So,” he said. “Whatcha got for me?”

I pulled the envelope out of my pocket and set it on the table in front of him. He turned it over and read the address. “To your sweetie?”

“Kind of.”

“Well, we’ll give you a little something for luck here.” He brought his felt-tipped marker to the envelope and began to draw. His hand shook, teetering at the very edge of his control. When lines appeared, they did so in a rhythmic fuzz, like pipe cleaners bent into shapes by a child. For some time, I waited for the patterns to become recognizable, then finally gave up. Eventually Kearns handed the envelope back to me.

“There you go,” he said. “Little shaky, but it’s the real McCoy.”

“Hey, thanks,” I said.

We shook hands. It was like grabbing a branch. “No problem,” he told me. “Whatever you got yourself into with that girl, this oughta straighten it out.”

* * *

Out in the hall, I studied the marks on my letter, trying to decode them. A continuous line, a blobby, smeared amorphism, a hieroglyph at the bottom that might have been a signature. I wondered who, exactly, was drawing “Art’s Kids.” Had the inkers taken over? Did Kearns even write the gags? The drawing might have been of Dogberry, or of Greta or Funny Hans or Derrie-Do or any other “Art’s Kids” characters. Or it might have been the Empire State Building or Richard Nixon.

I surprised myself with my enormous and inexplicable affection for Art Kearns, which was springing up inside me like a kiddie pool filling with water from a hose. I stood very still and let my mood improve. When I felt like a human again, I unpinned my name tag and threw it in the trash, then brought the letter to the front desk to be mailed.

Pierce had something on his mind. The Caddy’s windows were closed and the air conditioning on, and no music played on the radio. When I shut the door he said nothing, so I said “Hey,” and Pierce said “Hey.”

He pulled away from the hotel parking lot. “How’s Gillian?” I said.

“Oh, you know.”

“Not really.”

He didn’t seem to hear, only grunted and nodded at the sound of my voice.

To fill the time, I played back every disappointing and humiliating event of the past week in my mind, with special attention to the precarious blown moments on the sidewalk outside the movie theater with Susan, and my ignominious retreat from the conference. I thought about the way Susan wobbled from side to side, waiting for me, possibly, to stop her with an arm curled around her waist or an offered hand; the fat man’s bushy eyebrows, their blurry meeting place over his knurly red nose. I got myself pretty worked up. I stared at the door, wondering what it would be like to open it and fling myself out onto the pavement, if I would tumble under the Caddy and be pulverized by its wheels, or if I’d spend the rest of the day at the hospital having road gravel pulled out from under my skin by a knock-kneed intern with a pair of sterilized tweezers. I was beginning to shift myself toward the center of the car when Pierce said, “What if it’s some sort of trap?”

“What?” For a second I thought he was talking about the car door.

“What if he’s laid a trap for me?”

“Who?”

He was frowning the panicked, spasmodic frown of a child about to cry. “Dad.”

“Dad?” I said. “Why would Dad lay a trap for you?”

“The key,” he said. “It’s in a warehouse, right? In Philadelphia. What if it’s some kind of trap? It could be a bomb, or like you know those corporate guys who set up a kind of pulley system so that when they intercom their secretary and tell her to come in, she opens the door and it trips a wire that’s attached to a shotgun and boom, suicide. Something like that.”

For the briefest of moments, this scenario seemed perfectly plausible, and I lost myself long enough in it to delay speaking. Then I said, “Um, Pierce, that’s ridiculous.”

“Oh, is it?”

“Why would Dad want you dead?”

“He hates my guts.”

“Hated,” I said. “And he didn’t, really.” Though there was precious little evidence for that. Pierce extended his arms against the wheel and pushed his head into the seat, as if buffeted by massive g-forces.

I said, “If he hated you so much, he wouldn’t have left you the house, or any money to live on.”

He seemed to consider this. I thought he was going to speak, but he didn’t, not for a long time. He stared at the road, driving with enormous concentration, his lips pressed together and his chin creased. Finally he said, “You know what I was just thinking?”

“No,” I said, with a certitude intended to reassure.

“I was thinking how weird my life is. Compared to other people’s.”

“How so?”

“Well, you know what people are always after. Like, success, I guess. Jobs and love and getting famous and getting elected. And I was just thinking how much I’d like to have those things as goals. I mean, I don’t care so much about actually getting them, you know. I just want them to be goals.”

I had missed something. “So why aren’t they?” I asked him.

He sighed, and I knew that I’d let him down. “Never fucking mind.”

“No! No, I’m sorry, I just don’t understand.”

He spoke with bitter intensity, straining to mask his emotions. “I don’t get to have those kinds of goals. I get to try to get out of bed in the morning, and half the time I don’t. I try to have a conversation. If I get up, I think, okay, I’m not going to smoke so many cigarettes today, and I’m going to have a conversation, and it’s going to last something like ten minutes. I try to open the door to my bedroom. Mostly I can do that, if I’ve gotten out of bed, and that’s pretty great, a thing I can be successful at almost every time I try it.” He wiped off his face, which had begun to shine. “Yesterday I dropped you off and today I picked you up, and in between I went to my girlfriend’s. I mean, do you know what that’s like, being able to do that?” His hands were shaking now, and he held the wheel more tightly, and then his arms were shaking.