J. Lennon - The Funnies

Pierce didn’t turn to me. After a while he said, “I’ve always wondered if you knew and just never said anything.”

“I just figured it out.”

“Just now?”

I nodded. “You have the same ears. And something Rose said. I didn’t know what she was talking about at the time.”

“Well, now you know.” He sounded angry.

“Have you always known?”

“No. Mom told me when I was something like ten. She was drunk.” He leaned against the passenger window, and it fogged up where his breath met it. “I don’t know why she told me. Mad at Dad, I guess.”

I considered this, and his plan for bringing her home, and marveled for a moment at the power of his forgiveness, the way it sustained him. I said, “Does Mal know you know?”

“Yeah.”

Trying to reassemble our childhood from this new perspective would be futile, like unlearning a language. I gave up before I even started. “I suppose I’m the last one to find out.”

“Rose says she knew when I was born, and suspected it even before. I told Bitty. I don’t think Bobby knows. He wouldn’t want to, anyway.” I signaled and turned onto Route 29. “I don’t suppose you’ll be hating me too, now, will you?” He said this with studied nonchalance, as if he’d been practicing it for years, but I could tell he was truly scared.

I said, “Of course not.”

“Rose hates me, you know that. And Bitty…”

“Bitty doesn’t hate you,” I said.

“She doesn’t think she does,” he said. “But she does. She hasn’t said boo to me since I told her. I remember we were sitting in my bedroom and I told her, and she walked out. I thought she’d tell Dad I knew, but she didn’t. She just stopped…sistering.”

“I don’t think Bitty or Rose hates you. Especially Bitty.”

“With all due respect, Tim, I don’t think you actually know.”

“I’m sorry,” I said after a while.

“Me too.”

Getting home was like coming to an entirely new house. I saw my father, in an inkstained oxford shirt, cracking his knuckles at dinner, offering Uncle Mal another helping. I saw Pierce opening the gifts Mal gave him, always better than the ones he gave the rest of us. I saw my mother hugging Mal at the door. All of it brand new.

“I should go to the studio,” I said.

Pierce’s lips pressed themselves together. “I should go in the house.”

I opened my arms and he stepped into them, and we held each other there in the driveway. He pulled away, crying. “It would have been better if it was Mal,” he said. “With us.”

“Maybe,” I said.

Pierce shook his head. “Definitely.” And he went inside.

I couldn’t decide what to wear to my meeting with Ray Burn. It was Wednesday morning, and I had canceled my cartooning class with Wurster, in exchange for a promise to draw all day when I got back from New York. I didn’t tell him that Susan had gotten the afternoon off, faking a chronic illness and its attendant doctor’s visit, and that we planned to spend the day together.

Considering my previous wrangles with discipline, I went out to the studio every afternoon with surprising ease. I’d had to drag myself to work in the old days. It wasn’t that I was having more fun (though I’ll admit there is greater satisfaction in drawing competently than in drawing badly); it was simply that the more work I did, the more I wanted to do. I was turning into a junkie.

Part of my high, of course, was a boost in self-regard: I was beginning, at last, to feel like a cartoonist. Cartooning was making me into a visual thinker, my drawing into a sort of emotive shorthand. I was developing a taste for the self-contained. Oddly, this change didn’t seem to come entirely from my lessons with Wurster or the cartoons I studied: it was more like these things helped to uncover what was already true, but hidden, about my artistic sensibilities. I was establishing an aesthetic, something I’d never had before, even when I was trying to be an artist.

All the same, I bristled at the boundaries of my one square Family Funnies panel, and even more at the raw materials available to me inside it: not my family, not even anything remotely close to me, but a coterie of cutout shills employed to deliver flimsy one-liners. I’d been trying to think of the strip as a kind of self-limitation, like a fugue or a sonnet, but even Beethoven or Keats could not have made art out of the Family Funnies.

The irony was all too obvious: not until I had given up art for a career in schlock did I begin to feel like an artist.

My one white oxford shirt had an ink stain on the right arm, but I decided I could wear my blue blazer on top, and avoid taking it off during the interview. I put on a pair of khaki pants and polished some old wing tips I’d salvaged from my father’s closet before the big clean-out.

“Looking good,” Pierce told me when I came out to the kitchen. He was leaning over the coffee maker, watching fresh coffee drip into the pot. Over the past week he’d been much less gloomy than usual, and often was up and out of his room before I left the house. He had a jittery, anticipatory air about him, as if there was something up his sleeve. I let his statement take a few turns around my head, ran it through the sarcasm detector.

“Really?” I said.

He stood up. “Well, for you.”

“Hmm. What are you up to today?”

He shrugged. “Not much,” he said, but went on to explain that Mal was picking him up over his lunch hour, and the two of them were going to go see Mom. I was having some trouble getting used to the new genetic circumstances. Knowing now what had been hidden in plain sight for so long, I could see how Rose might stretch her already-strong biases against Pierce into a tacit exclusion of him from the family. But still I looked at Pierce and saw, at first impression, not a piece of Mal or a piece of my mother but a piece of myself. “We’re going to try and get her used to the idea of coming here. You know, talk about the neighborhood and the house and all.”

“Do you think it’s going to get through?”

He shrugged. “I dunno,” he said, and I could see that the question offended him more than a little.

I gassed up the Caddy and stopped at the Jersey Devil, a coffee shop and bakery in Titusville. It was a little out of the way, but I had a theory: I figured if I drank coffee in the car and had a pastry to soak some of it up, I wouldn’t have to pee until I was well into the Burn Syndicate’s building on West 57th. And I needed some kind of distraction on the way to the city, a drive of geometrically increasing intensity that began with shaded country roads and derelict barns and ended with traffic jams and squeegee men.

The shop was mostly empty. A grizzled maniac type hunkered over a steaming cup at the only occupied table, and a pretty girl in denim overalls was talking to the clerk. The clerk looked familiar. He had small round glasses, a fluffy head of curly hair and a large, assertive goatee. He was also dusted with flour. It took a moment, but it came to me: without the flour, he looked just like Leon Trotsky. The girl was saying, in a seductive, sugary voice, “I’m really looking forward to reading your manifesto.”

“Helpya?” he asked me brightly. The girl turned and offered a vacant, half-lidded smile, and I felt like I’d just interrupted a sexual act.

I ordered and he gave me my food in a paper sack before turning back to the girl. I had to pull myself out the door, so desperately did I want to stay and hang out with these kids. I was halfway to New York before I sorted out this feeling: it was jealousy, the kind I sometimes got when I caught a glimpse of people doing exactly what they wanted.