J. Lennon - The Funnies

Now? I wanted to say. Shouldn’t we bow our heads or something? Say a prayer? Susan and Gilly stood side by side, several feet behind Pierce, and Susan put a tentative arm around Gilly, in a big-sisterly way. Gilly seemed to appreciate it. For the first time since I’d met her, she actually seemed uneasy, and I was glad that Pierce wasn’t looking at her. “Sure,” I told him, and held out my hand. He put the key into it.

The lock resisted for a second, then gave, and I threw all my weight into unlatching it. The hook groaned in its eye. Then it was open. I turned around: Pierce had stepped back and was holding hands with a newly composed Gilly. “I’m gonna do it,” I said.

“Okay.”

The handle was cool and rough with rust, and I adjusted the position of my fingers, less for a better grip than for the sheer physicality of it, the pleasure in the sensation. I can’t describe how happy I was at that moment, so deeply involved in this adventure with these three people; I felt like I could spend every waking moment with them for the rest of my life, and be perfectly satisfied.

The door rumbled up without the least resistance, practically pulling itself after the first few feet. This was the first indication that my father had spent a lot of time in here, but while this was occurring to me I looked up and saw what was inside, illuminated by the scummy daylight.

“Wow,” Susan said.

I couldn’t help the first thought that came to me, which is that this thing he had made, this monstrous piece of what I instantly recognized as installation art, was bad . Of course my second thought was that the first thought was terribly unfair, but in that brief moment of cruel judgment I saw what a fool I’d been to take on the strip, and how obvious it was that my father knew this all along, and knew I would fall for it too. He must have known I wouldn’t let him change my life, no matter how much changing it needed, unless he was dead, and far out of range for flinging I-told-you-so’s.

Although this thing he’d made, this awful thing was telling me so. It was also apologizing, in ragged, gasping breaths. We walked in, our footsteps seeming to echo this sad fact: Sorry , they seemed to say, sorry, sorry, I’m so sorry .

What we saw first were the sloppy fifteen-foot-high Family Funnies figures painted on the walls: Mom, Bitty and me on one side; Bobby, Lindy and Puddles on the other. And on the back wall, my father himself, with two new additions to the FF cast: Mal and Pierce.

Mal and Dad stood on opposite sides of Pierce, each with an arm around him: the son’s two fathers. Mal was rendered with a doting, fatherly air, while my father had done himself with his usual world-weariness, bent, in a neat trick of perspective, out over the floor of the storeroom. Pierce, on the other hand, was a clumsy creation at best, with a cherubic, glowing face that he had never possessed and never would. He had the same ears as Mal, and was wearing a T-shirt Pierce used to have and that I had forgotten, which read, in bubbly black Jersey-Shore-iron-on letters, BLAME MY PARENTS.

There was more to it than just the walls, of course. We walked around the room like baffled souls thrown into purgatory, sifting through the rest, amazed that it could all have existed and been brought here, to become a part of this. At the foot of each painted character was a brand-new red metal wagon filled with junk: things my father had collected over the years that had been ours or had something to do with us. In my own wagon I found every report card I’d ever gotten, including the ones from college, which I couldn’t remember ever sending home; all my medical records up to the age of eighteen; drawings I had made, presents I had gotten my parents for Christmas, clothes I had worn as a baby. And my penciled blueprint, blurred by the years and fuzzy at the folds, my drug-induced blueprint of our cartoon house, with all the superimposed rooms and imaginary spaces. I unfolded it gently, going easy on the creases, as if it were a map to buried treasure: the fading lines were palpable under my fingers, drawn with such vehemence they tore through in places. I could not recall the passionate anger that made them.

I went through Mal’s wagon too. My father had filled it with things of my mother’s — a tarnished silver barrette; a shot glass; a summer blouse, the fabric worn thin. There was a manila envelope containing black and white photographs of my mother and Mal, twenty, thirty years ago, walking through a park I couldn’t identify, holding hands. The pictures were grainy and out-of-focus, and had the candid tawdriness of paid reconnaissance. There were other photos too, washed-out color snapshots my father had certainly taken, of my mother with Pierce: at the shore, holding him by his toddler hands above the roiling surf; in front of our high school, a mortarboard for him, a corsage for her. And dozens more, none that I had ever seen, none that had ever made it into the family albums. The spy pictures upset me, but these were truly shocking. How long had he hoarded them, intending someday to symbolically cede my mother to Mal? For all the misogynist presumption of the gesture, what truly amazed me was the endurance of his self-loathing: he had known for so long that he was no good, and never left the very people who reminded him of it.

It was Pierce’s wagon that was strangest, though; he had the expected childhood relics, but his pile was comprised mostly of unfamiliar, unexplained objects. A corncob pipe, for instance, and a linen napkin stained with blood. The four of us gathered silently around him, picking through these things and spreading them out on the floor. A flashlight. A shoehorn. A deck of handmade playing cards, drawn hastily in pencil and cut out of yellow lined paper. Ice tongs.

“I sort of remember these,” Pierce said, picking up the tongs. It was the first thing any of us had said. “I found these in somebody’s garbage. He took them away from me.”

“What about the napkin?” Gilly asked him.

Pierce stared at it for a long time. Something was happening to his face, but he kept it in check. “I don’t know about that,” he said finally, and we didn’t ask him about anything more.

Eventually, the three of us moved away and looked over the rest of it. There was a cartoon of our house executed in masking tape on the storeroom floor, and a lot of old bicycles — I recognized them from years before — hanging from the ceiling on ropes. The wall space between the characters was papered with fan mail to my father, adoring letters from children requesting drawings and signatures. I read a few, but mostly they were drearily similar, like kindergarten art projects. Pierce didn’t get up, only worked his quiet way through his wagon, greeting each object with long, earnest concentration, like an anthropologist trying to decode the messages of the past. Which was what Pierce was doing, except the past was his own, of course, and not any of our business. We met up outside and waited for him, shivering a little in the cold, watching cars pass on Girard Avenue.

It seemed like hours. When he finally came out, he got into the back of the car without saying a thing, and Gilly got in next to him.

“Drive?” I said to Susan. She took the keys. All the silent way home, we held hands, listening to the sound the wheels made on the road and the even, exhausted breathing of Gilly and Pierce in the back.

My comic strip is called “The Family Facts.” Susan, who despite her bad experiences with the Burn Syndicate remains my editor, is trying to get actual newspapers to run it. She is more optimistic about its prospects than I am. It’s not that it’s bad: it’s just true, or at least true to my memory, which of course doesn’t make it all that much truer than the Family Funnies itself. There is something funny about a family that falls apart, or almost does; I’m certain of it. But there is a family out there named Mix that doesn’t fall apart, and Ken Dorn is its patriarch, and I wonder, Susan’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, if people might prefer Ken’s version of events.