J. Lennon - The Funnies

And so I was, as etiquette demanded, perpetually poor. I made money from odd jobs; Amanda put food on the table with a coffee shop shift and the faux-primitive jewelry-making business she’d begun to supplement her painting. I worried about things like excessive long-distance phone calls and sudden rent increases. I panicked regularly about the car (justifiably, it turned out). These little stresses kept uneasy company with the minor scrapes and contusions of my relationship with Amanda. Consequently our lives were not romantic. We were mildly unhappy. We had very little sex.

Of course it was easy to blame money, easy to slaver over the thought of a giant inheritance that would free us from humiliating employment and let us concentrate on what really mattered: our work, our relationship. But, as you can see, I was beginning to wonder what kind of life might come from total immersion in those two things, neither of which I appeared to be very good at.

All the same, it is a rare man who is immune to the American Dream, and I was not that man. Thus, I banished, with a deftness only possible after long experience, all thoughts of fabulous wealth from my mind. If there was one thing all my siblings agreed on when we were children, it was that low expectations were always appropriate, in any situation.

* * *

That night I found an extra key to the studio in the junk drawer at the corner of our kitchen, and went out for a look around. I turned on the lights and found a scene utterly familiar, yet peculiarly changed: the objects that had been so mysteriously charged for the young me were now dispiritingly inert and literal. The flat files, after art school, were no more exceptional than a chest of drawers; the pencils and pens seemed so mundane that for a moment I could not picture my father using them. The room was long and thin like a chicken coop; you could have parallel parked three cars comfortably inside. At the very back was a makeshift kitchen: a mini-fridge and a coffee maker, several half-drunk bottles of liquor and a glittering stonehenge of glasses balanced on a card table. A bookshelf was filled from top to bottom with spiral notebooks. I knew that these were filled with rough pencil drawings for the Family Funnies. My father eschewed the hardbound sketchbooks favored by some artists; he found them pretentious.

Elsewhere was a small iron safe, nearly buried under a stack of magazines ( National Geographic, American Cartoonist, Playboy ). I tugged on the handle. It was locked. I made a mental note to try cracking it. There was a filing cabinet filled with accounting papers, correspondence, and newspaper and magazine articles, and a huge bulletin board covered exclusively with FF drawings sent to my father by admiring children. I spent long minutes staring at the board, and remembered feeling intense jealousy at it as a child, even recalled vandalizing an earlier version of it with a felt-tipped marker. I wasn’t punished. Dad just put up new ones.

And there was the drawing board, the one he was said to have died at. It was an adjustable architect’s drafting table, tilted at a twenty-degree angle. Someone had taken the papers away and wiped it perfectly clean, save for the years-old scratches and faded ink stains.

I pulled open a flat file drawer at random and found an unfinished cartoon. It was, like almost all my father’s cartoons, a single large frame. It took place in the kitchen. My mother was standing, cooking something in a skillet, and a child was behind her, pointing at the stove. My mother’s face, though distorted as all our faces were (my father drew our heads as elongated ovals, for some reason tilted on their sides, so that it looked like we were all carrying watermelons on our shoulders), bore a sleepy impatience as familiar to me as my own reflection.

But the child was unfinished, only an outline without a head or clothes, and the cartoon had no caption. What, I wondered, could it have been about? And why did he abandon it? The background — a cleaner, less quirky version of our kitchen — was fully drawn. Perhaps he couldn’t decide on a child. Or maybe that weirdly accurate expression on my mother’s face was too much for him to set loose in the papers. Where did he draw the line with Mom? What was too true to print?

I was closing the studio door behind me when I got a funny feeling, like I had left something inside. I opened the door and switched the lights back on. What was it? I rubbed my eyes over every flat surface. Keys? A wallet?

I found myself back at the bulletin board. The drawings were mostly awful: awkward and disproportionate in ways even cartoon characters shouldn’t be. There was our family with Superman flying overhead, a picture of Lindy/Rose wearing, for some reason, an Indian headdress.

But one was almost exactly right, so right that I thought at first that my father had drawn it himself. It was a picture of the whole family, pre-me, pre-Bitty, playing tug-of-war, Mom and Lindy on one side, Dad and Bobby on the other. The girls were winning. It was done very professionally in ink, and the background of trees and grass was very much in my father’s minimal style. Even the mud puddle in the middle of the two groups had something of his line to it — that slapdash, abbreviated naturalism so effortless it melts from the page — and the situation — the tug-of-war — was peculiarly appropriate, though my father never drew anything like it, to my knowledge.

When I looked at the signature, I knew it was what I had been looking for. It read, in a surprisingly mature slanted script, “Kenny Dorn, age 15.”

Neither Pierce nor I was in any mood for wrestling our father’s Caddy to Trenton for the reading of the will, so I called Bobby for a ride. Samantha answered and said he and Nancy had already gone, leaving her behind with a neighbor. “I wanted to go,” she complained. “Uncle Pierce said I could sit with him.” Next I tried Bitty at her place in Frenchtown. I got Mike Maas.

“Hi,” I said. “Mike. This is Bitty’s brother Tim.”

Mike Maas cleared his throat. “Yeah, hey.”

“Listen, is she around?”

“She’s in the bathroom,” he said. He had a phlegmy voice that sounded much older than it was. For a moment I entertained the notion that I had dialed the wrong number, and the middle-aged stranger on the other end was playing along, deadpan.

“Well, I don’t really need to talk to her. I’m just wondering if you guys could swing by for Pierce and me on your way to the reading. Of the will.”

“It’s not exactly on the way,” said Mike Maas.

I said nothing. This was something Amanda had taught me. When you asked somebody for a favor, and that person said something that strongly resembled no but was not quite no, you just waited silently until that person broke down and said yes.

“But, you know,” he said, “no problem.”

“Oh, great. See you around eight-thirty, then.” I hung up. Already I didn’t like Mike Maas very much. I wondered briefly why my sister had married him, then decided that I didn’t know my sister well enough to reckon such a thing. This realization saddened me and I thought that maybe it could somehow be set right, somehow we could get to be friends. With a heavy heart I went down the hall to find Pierce.

The previous night, I had turned in as soon as I returned from the studio. I remembered tiptoeing through the house, so as not to wake the many guests I assumed were staying there too. But it had become clear, in the groggy minutes after my travel alarm went off in the morning, that there was nobody around but Pierce and me. Rose and Andrew must have gone back to New York, and dropped my mother off at the home; no cousins or uncles or aunts appeared to have come at all. The house felt weirdly desolate, and in my childhood bed, cluttered with the ghosts of every nightmare I’d ever had, I did too.