J. Lennon - The Funnies

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The Burn Syndicate occupied the nineteenth floor of a building that, beyond all probability, I had been in before. There was an art gallery on the fourth floor I had once had a piece in. This was probably the high point of my career as an installation artist. The show was called “Garbage, Garbage, Garbage,” and the piece I’d shown was, by necessity, only a small chunk of a larger work. It consisted of a metal trash can lid with rotten things hanging off the bottom of it, and was called “Detritus, Risen.” The show went on for three days before the gallery was shut down due to fire code violations.

I was early for the meeting, so I stopped in for old times’ sake. On display was a series of “drawings” by a woman I’d not heard of. I had some trouble finding them. All I could see were the walls, each painted a metallic dark gray. Nothing hung on them. Then I realized that the walls were the drawings: she had apparently taken a pencil — lots of pencils, I supposed — and covered every inch of wall space with graphite and fixative. I took a postcard on the way out and put it in my jacket pocket. It was a white index card “drawn” on in the same way.

On the nineteenth floor, I peed, then waited on a long leather couch in a lushly carpeted room that could have comfortably housed a chamber orchestra and several parked cars. Some distance away, a receptionist sat behind a wide mahogany desk. She kept glancing at her watch, then looking up at me. At about ten minutes past ten, she picked up her phone and spoke to somebody, but I was too far away to hear. She hung up, came to the couch and said, “Mr. Burn will be with you shortly. Would you like a Perrier?” I told her I would and she vanished through a smoked glass door, and returned with a bottle of Perrier, a bottle opener, a cocktail napkin and a small wooden table. She opened the bottle for me, set it on the table and returned to her desk.

I didn’t particularly like Perrier, but I stuck to protocol and drank some anyway. It was a testament to both the decadence and puissance of the beverage industry that water could be altered so that it made you belch. After a time, someone came out for me. “Mr. Mix?” he said.

“Yes.” It was a young man, some kind of intern or temp, with a round face and thin brown hair. He was wearing a golf shirt, untucked from a pair of jeans, and white tennis shoes.

“Follow me,” he said. I got up, grabbed my portfolio and raised the Perrier bottle to the receptionist as I passed, grinning. She wasn’t watching.

The temp led me through a labyrinth of cubicles, past offices with their doors slightly ajar. I looked carefully for Susan, who I thought would surely find me before the meeting, but she failed to materialize.

Eventually the temp and I arrived at a corner office, a cavernous chamber with oaken paneling and purple carpet and windows twice as tall as I was. “Wow,” I said.

“Yep,” the temp said proudly, sitting down behind a huge desk.

I blinked at him. Suddenly it occurred to me that he wasn’t young at all, was in his forties and just looked young owing to his childish face, his sneakers. I stood there like a fool, clutching my portfolio across my chest.

“You’re…”

“Raymond Burn. Niceta meetcha. Have a seat!”

I lowered myself into a leather armchair, looking around for a place to put the Perrier. I opted for the floor. “Uh, well! Thanks! For seeing me!” I said, wondering if the windows opened and, if so, whether I should fling myself out one. Why hadn’t he introduced himself already? Why didn’t he shake my hand? Why didn’t I shake his? I sprung back to my feet and leaned across the desk, my hand extended. The postcard I’d gotten downstairs slipped from my pocket and fell onto the desk, so I retracted my hand, grabbed it, stuck it back into my pocket, held the pocket shut with my portfolio and re-extended the hand to where Burn’s was waiting impatiently. We shook.

“Love your dad’s work,” he said. “Love it! You could say I’m a Fan.” He gave the shook hand a surreptitious glance, then wiped it with a handkerchief.

“Well,” I said. I sat down again. “Me too.”

“You better be, heh-heh. Tim, I was just talking to Ken Dorn the other day. You know Ken?”

“A little.”

“Ken was saying he didn’t think you had the stuff to draw the Family Funnies. Now, don’t get me wrong,” he said, holding up his empty palms. “We’re committed to you, Tim. You’ve got the legacy, you see. But I just wanted to know if maybe you had any interest in responding to that statement of Ken’s, whaddya think, Tim?”

I set down my portfolio and noticed two enormous dark handprints on my knees. Where had they come from? I looked down at my hands: black, as if I’d been delivering newspapers all morning.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I have a response to that. Uh, I just want to say that I can do it, sir. I mean, I want to do it, and I’m the right man, uh, for the job…and…” I picked up the portfolio again. “And I think my portfolio will speak for itself, sir.” I lifted the heavy thing over the edge of the desk and set it down, open end first, before Ray Burn. “I think perhaps you should take them out yourself, sir, owing to the fact that my hands…I don’t know what happened…seem to be very dirty suddenly…”

He peered over the portfolio at my hands, which I was holding out to him. “Yeah, you got yourself a little mess there, heh-heh.”

It wasn’t just my hands and pants, of course; it was my white shirt, too, the inside of my jacket. The postcard had fallen out of my pocket again and onto my lap, and I understood now that it was the culprit. I picked it up. The penciled side was half rubbed off: it hadn’t been fixed on there after all. I could see the artist’s name, scrawled in thick black magic marker, hazy beneath the worn parts. “Maybe…” I said. “Maybe you should go ahead and give those a look, sir. While I go clean myself up a little.”

He was already sliding the cartoons from the portfolio. “Sure, sure,” he said, distracted. I jumped to my feet and headed out of the office at a brisk jog. The maze confounded me. Which way around the desks? It took me several minutes to get back to the lobby. Once in the restroom, I dropped the postcard into the trash and looked at myself in the mirror. A disaster. Not just my clothes and hands but my face, my neck…how had I touched myself in so many places so quickly?

I washed my hands with liquid soap from the dispenser, then wet a crumpled ball of paper towels and used them to dab at the huge stains on my shirt and pants. The towels grew dark, but the stains didn’t seem to diminish; on the contrary, they spread, losing definition, and my chest and thighs became soaked with dirty water. I took off my jacket before attempting to clean it, then decided to just leave it off, despite the inkstain on the arm. I checked myself in the mirror. I looked like I’d been splashed by a dozen cabs.

Back in the office, though, Ray Burn was laughing. The sound was so shocking, so unself-conscious, that I considered backing out into the hallway until he was finished. Laughing! This was something, I realized, that had been missing: an audience. I stood paralyzed in the doorway, listening to him.

“Mix!” he said. He pounded his desk. It made a sound like a bank vault door crashing open. “This is a gas!”

“It is?”

“‘Liberries!’ That’s it exactly! What a killer!” He moved another drawing to the top of the pile. “And how ‘bout this—‘If Puddles doesn’t use a fork, how come we have to?’ Tim, this is brilliant!”

“Thanks!” I said.

“It’s like you’re the reinfuckingcarnation of your old man, pardon the French. You got that same sense of humor. That’s what a good strip really needs! A sense of humor!”