J. Lennon - The Funnies

They actually fired up the incinerator for any yokel who strolled in? I pictured Bobby sitting alone in the bleachers, his face slack and calculating, watching the curtains part and the iron doors yawn open into the flames.

* * *

Later, at the house, while everyone was enjoying wake food, I went into my father’s bedroom, shut the door behind me and called Amanda. She answered on the first ring.

“Yeah?”

“Hey,” I said.

“How are you?”

“So-so.” I told her about the crematorium, leaving out the part about my self-censuring revelations. She cooed her amazement and sympathy. “I have some unfortunate news,” I said.

“Okay.”

“The car croaked. Bobby thinks it threw a rod. There’s a mechanic in Washington Crossing looking it over.”

“My brother’s Porsche threw a rod once.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, whatever,” she said. “How are the sibs?”

“Fine.” It was a very easy conversation, like all of ours were. One of us said something and the other said something. It was comforting; we could have done it all day.

“Is there any way you can get home tonight?” she said finally.

“It doesn’t look that way.”

“I wish you would. Can you get a ride or something?”

“I should be with my family,” I said. I felt the guilty titillation of the lie in the back of my throat. “For a day or two, anyway.”

“Yeah, okay,” she said. Everything was okay with Amanda, or so she said. It wasn’t really, though: a lie for a lie.

“So I guess I should go.”

“Sure.”

“Goodnight,” I said, though it was not yet two in the afternoon. “I love you.”

Afterward, I sat on the bed, smelling the cigar-soaked air. Before me was my father’s bureau. His wallet was still sitting there, a handful of change, his wristwatch. I pulled the top drawer open. Briefs. He was the only man in the family who wore them. Pair after pair of black socks. I took a pair out, took my own shoes and socks off, put his socks on. I dug in the back of the drawer for the shoe polish I knew was there. I polished my shoes until the antifreeze marks were gone. Then I put the shoes back on, put away the polish, put on his watch and took the money — about fifty bucks — out of his wallet. I looked at myself in the tiny hand mirror he had stashed in his undershirt drawer, then pocketed that, too. I felt like I was ten years old.

The crowd outside was thick and noisy and filled with people I didn’t want to see, let alone receive condolences from. Buffet tables had been set up and covered with paper, and Nancy flitted clumsily from table to table like a bumblebee, unwrapping plates and bowls and straightening up after those who had helped themselves messily. It was a losing battle. I looked at my wrist and realized I was wearing both watches, mine and my father’s, so I took mine off and dropped it into my jacket pocket. It was mid-afternoon. I hadn’t eaten since nine.

I wasn’t three feet past the door when Salvatore Francobolli, the mayor of Riverbank, grabbed my arm in the sweet spot just above the elbow. He was a high-strung, red-faced fireplug of a man with wild tufts of gray hair above his ears, and none on top. “Timmy,” he said. He had always called us by our Family Funnies names, even once we had grown up. “Can’t tell you how sorry I am. Riverbank has lost a great man.”

I winced. “Good of you to say so.”

“So, we’re going to go ahead with FunnyFest. Early this morning I called an emergency meeting with the town council. We decided that this, of all years, was the year to go all out. Sort of a public coping, if you will. With our grief.” He was still holding tight to my arm. With his free hand, he clutched a half-eaten blob of fried dough.

I flexed my fingers, trying to recover my circulation. “Sounds good,” I said.

“You’ll be here, I trust? We’d like to get the whole Mix clan involved.”

“That’d be quite a feat.”

“So you’re coming!”

“I don’t think so. When is it?”

“Couple weeks.”

I shook my head. “I’ll be back in Philadelphia.”

Mayor Francobolli grinned in a conspiratorial way. “Ah, I think you’ll reconsider, Timmy, I do. Think about your responsibility to Riverbank.” He released my arm and the blood needled slowly back into it. “People are counting on you.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

He laughed, high and long. Heads turned. “You kill me, Timmy,” he said.

FunnyFest started about ten years ago, once news of my father’s fame reached our town. It began as a little marketing diversion dreamt up by somebody at the syndicate: convince the town to have a summer fair, complete with food stands, dunking booths, etc., and have Carl Mix show up and draw pictures for a buck a pop. The syndicate would throw in some cash, and would take a cut, as usual, of the FF product pushed over the course of the day.

But Francobolli, whose only real official function as mayor was cannonballing into the Delaware during the then-already-defunct RiverFest, sunk his hooks into FunnyFest as if to save his life. He advertised all over the state, in newspapers and on telephone poles, on television and the sides of buses. And when the day finally came, it was a blowout: thousands of people, many times the population of Riverbank, filled every parking space from Lambertville to Titusville, bought every ice cream sandwich, drank every drop of iced tea, whisked away every piece of FF merchandise within ten miles of my father’s studio. Francobolli was reelected by an unusually wide margin. The festival had been an annual tradition ever since: the fourth weekend in July, every July.

Oddly, FunnyFest seemed to be my father’s great joy in life, despite the fact that, as he grew older, he grew to hate more and more people with greater and greater intensity. Generally he spoke to nobody in town except during FunnyFest, when he became glib and effusive, shaking hands and patting shoulders like a politico. This annual appearance ensured, I suppose, that he would continue to be regarded as a charming eccentric in Riverbank, rather than the arrogant bastard people probably suspected he was.

But now, of course, he was dead. I’d always connected FunnyFest exclusively with his enthusiasm for it; as a result it seemed absurdly gratuitous to hold it ever again. Now it appeared to have been a sort of heritage festival all along, a small community’s flailing attempt to invent a history to supplant the actual one, the one in which the reeking pulp mill attracts the working class at slave wages, and they gentrify in spite of themselves.

By all means, I thought, throw yourselves a party. But I’m not going to “appear” at it.

I loaded a paper plate with food: greasy Italian sausages simmered to the color of shoe leather; steaming spinach pies in a crumbling, buttery crust; tepefied Waldorf salad. I pulled a canned beer from a cooler of half-melted ice. A table away, Bobby touched Nancy’s shoulder, then whispered something in her ear. Her face crumpled like a Dixie cup, and she glided, holding back tears, through the back door of the house. Bobby crossed his arms and resumed her vigil over the food in a more dignified manner.

“What’s up?” I said to him.

“What, what’s up?”

“Nancy. Is something wrong?”

He shot me that judging look again. “You saw her. She’s making…it isn’t good for her, behaving like that.”

I knew what he meant. She’s making a fool of herself, he was going to say. Once, he walked out of a play I was in at my high school, very loudly, while I was onstage delivering my handful of lines. My mother told me he got sick, but later he told me the truth: he couldn’t stand to watch me make a fool of myself.