The Road Narrows As You Go (9 page)

In
Pan
(the last Sunday Hick delivered before he moved to 5D) the character Wendy Darling quoted freely from Shakespeare's
Cleopatra
—
Growing up can't free me from my mistakes but it does free me from childishness … tell me now, will Pan die?
and Pan, about to jump off a high cliff onto a ship of pirates as a stunt to impress her, paraphrased Mark Antony right back,
My queen gives me brave instruction!

In the case of the one paper Patrick could find that carried Wendy Ashbubble's
Strays
—the
San Jose Sentinel—
the quote was unattributed Baudelaire she read off Hick's shelf—
Science is a cheat. You know what schools don't teach?
her dog Buck wondered aloud.
The next discovery.

That's fine, fine work, best of luck to you, Charles Schultz told Wendy with a benign smile.

Hey, maybe you could give me some advice. I got an offer for some licensing and merchandising, but I worry I'm jumping the gun.

You should always worry, said Schulz as he dipped his nib in the inkpot.

The whole point of comics is merch, to nab those big bucks, said Johnny Hart. That's why we're in this slaphappy business.

Not every comic strip is here for an eternity, they reminded her, not all strips grab kids' interest and obsess collectors and become truly timelessly popular, so remember, Wendy, beggars can't be choosers, you should be happy, this is good news.

Your future is my past, Schulz told her. I remember my old worries with fondness.

It's true, said Hart glumly, your ambition makes me nostalgic.

There's no reason why every popular comic has to exploit success and inundate the world with truckloads of useless stuff nobody needs, said Biz Aziz, rolling joints to give to the needy. More product to go in the dump, more junk for rich kids to get bored over. Extraneous junk dilutes the integrity of your characters. Don't commodify your little sweethearts, Wendy.

The requests wear you down after a while, said Schulz. And you fear going broke. So many cartoonists go broke.

Hart agreed. I know better than most cartoonists how to spend money.

Junk …, said Wendy ruminatively.

The two famous strip artists regarded Biz with a fair degree of polite skepticism. The cosmetics, the beard, the long lacquered fingernails, the mourning gown. But Biz Aziz made enough money to suit all her needs selling copies of her self-published comic book memoir,
The Mizadventurez of Mizz Biz Aziz
, that she didn't concern herself with merchandise or the respect of the lowest common denominator. She was on the fifth offset issue, completing a story cycle that depicted her experience as a teenage street performer drafted to Vietnam, enlisted in the ill-fated CAT-X artist program, drawing the Christmas Offensive from behind Cambodian lines. Everything in her comic career was organized around
her predilections, very businesslike when need be but bohemian more often, and more dedicated to art than any of these syndicated commercialists (her words), drawing seven days a week, costume design, and singing disco on weekends. She was the last of a generation in the city to live by an alias for good reason: her connections weren't all clean or above board, and her income mostly went untaxed. She had no assistant to help her fill orders or keep her on deadline. What did she need merchandise for when it would only spoil her fans? This way, she told Wendy, the independent way, she was at liberty to write and draw whatever she wanted without censor, and retain the total attention of her audience. Her fans expected the character Biz Aziz to say and do whatever she wanted, for the book to stay stubbornly anti-consumerist, and nothing about the real Biz Aziz's financials would change that fact. She might rather go broke than exploit her art.

Obviously you don't listen to
this
one, said Johnny Hart. I can see for myself your comic is not part of this mad rush for the gutter that ends in total anarchy.

Typical straight whiteman floccinaucinihilipilification, spat Biz Aziz and threw a fistful of sketches at him.

Excuse me? he swatted.

Fuckin' floccinaucinihilipilification, said Biz.

Hart jumped back out of his chair and shivered when he hit the window. I'm a gag man through and through. I like jokes, that's all.

You discredit when you don't get it, said Biz. In showbiz we call that floccinaucinihilipilification.

You're one of these new punks allergic to money, Hart said.

Not money, said Biz. I'm allergic to servitude.

We saw Charles Schulz cringe away from the confrontation and began to study more closely his pens and pencils, and with great care and companionship set them up for a fresh drawing. Well, he said to Wendy, whatever you decide, good luck to you.

Thank you, Mr. Schulz.

Call me Sparky.

She turned to us. Can you believe
that
? He told me to call him Sparky. It's like a blessing. I should take this deal with Frank, shouldn't I? My problem is that it feels like I stole the watch from a dead man's wrist.

There was one sour incident around five in the morning on Sunday when Biz Aziz was flirting with Vaughn Staedtler and things were moving along well when all of a sudden Staedtler shouted a string of obscenities at his former assistants as they came into the room. His assistants were suing him for hundreds of thousands in back payment on over twenty years of work on his legacy strip,
The Mischiefs
, about a clique of delinquent teens. When the fight was over, Biz took Staedtler outside to calm down and eventually he left in a taxi and the assistants stayed. It was the same for the comic—Staedtler, now in his late sixties, was retired from
The Mischiefs
after he had lost the rights in a previous court battle to his assistants, who now carried on for the Universal Press syndicate with no decrease in subscriptions. According to them, they had done all the work for the last thirty years anyway; Staedtler hadn't touched so much as a pencil since he got back from Korea, unless it was to pick up a girl. They even forged his signature.

About six or seven on Sunday night, the front door swung open and in came Jonjay.

8

Jonjay gave off a powdered-stone smell of crushed gravel mixed with trail dust and mountain dirt and a cement quarry—sand dripped from the creases in his tattered clothes. His jacket and jeans were so frayed that it looked as if he was covered in cat hair. His own hair was long, frayed, almost white it was so blond, his tan was as black as red wine in the bottle, his mouth was cracked and dry, and his hands were so callused. Nevertheless he was gorgeous, one of the angels or demons. His blond beard hung in greasy tentacles. He wore a pair of blown-to-bits hiking boots, and his bare, blackened toes stuck out the caps as if he'd run here from Russia. He dropped a leather portfolio on the floor and big sheets of toothy watercolour paper featuring delicate drawings of gnarled little trees spilled out around him. He didn't look at anyone. He said, Where is he? Took me ten days. I'm too late, aren't I?

Ten days? He's only been— Yes, since Friday, but—. Where have you been, Jonjay? Wendy said and started to cry. He died on Friday.

Jonjay's eyes went black as they fixed on the master bedroom, and he walked straight past Wendy in a kind of zombie daze. He was suffering
from sunstroke and dehydration but we didn't know that yet. He made his way down the longtable running a hand over the surface for balance, almost as though he was blind, nodding to himself and whispering until he was in front of the entrance to the bedroom, where he paused and wondered aloud about his next step before going forward.

Bonjour
hello, came a girl's voice.

Jonjay hadn't arrived alone. With him was a girl of nineteen or twenty, also sunbleached blond and a deep summer tan for so early in the season. Her petite figure had big curves; she was swinging a set of keys around her finger distractedly. Her attitude and face were familiar—the disinterested pout, the glassy focus. She told us her name was Manila, she picked up Jonjay on the 395, three hours south of Yosemite. Thought he was a dead animal, she said. I pulled over and rolled down the window. He lifted an arm and groaned at me. I almost died.

Manila saved my life, Jonjay cried out from the darkness, and pointed back towards her as he proceeded closer to the body. Someone fix her a drink.

I told him he needs help, he needs a hospital, Manila said, but he told me he had to come straight here. He was raving. Visions of this. Someone get him electrolytes or he's going to die. What's the scene here?

She was not surprised to learn this was a wake. Not after Jonjay had told her about the intense field of psychic energy that told him to make his way home. She believed him because she believed psychic energy flowed through everything, especially her body. She was not surprised she saved Jonjay's life, since he was born under the hour of the dragon and she was a Taurus ascending. She came to the conclusion he was the one artist on earth who understood her soul.

Jonjay leaned over the wicker basket and saw the waxed skin and stitched-together lips of the boy and no, even he denied this emaciated dome was Hick's. But he fell to his bare knees, then stood again as fast, unaware he'd fainted or not wanting to be seen praying. These gruesome
almost robotic or bestial rites of grief, no one was free of this truth, a revulsion to death. We watched Jonjay's shoulders flinch with discernment at the hollowed-out face of his dear friend, white with mortuarist chalk to conceal as much as possible. It was Wendy who had put the pen and pencil in his hands resting on his chest. Yes. But just to see him now you could tell this knight's body weighed less than a small child's. A skeleton enrobed in a thin veil of powdered silk.

Jonjay embraced the body, kissed the sewn lips, then lifted himself away with a loud exhale. Actually a dryheave. Then he turned to the curtains. He tripped on a leg of the longtable as he left the master bedroom backwards in a hurry and started to speak. Candles trembled, nothing fell. He talked to Biz and then to Wendy, that is, if his monologue was directed at anybody at all, other than himself:

This one. This one used to churn his brains to make art. Hick climbed out of the mud of the Tenderloin to flip comics on their head. You read his comics. He spoke in that argot. He was no intellectual. He drew damn good pictures. And last time I saw him feels like yesterday. It was more than a year ago. Instead of time, he passes.
Soon
is not a fair promise to a best friend, I realize that now. And now. I've learned
now
doesn't exist as time.
Now
is a muscle. You can train hard of yourself to live for longer and longer periods of time in the now. Hick must have been scared to die. To contemplate an end. He never wanted to, he told me so. He believed his dependence on comics kept him young, he would live forever. It was the two of us, we salvaged the lunchroom tables and picnic benches and YMCA cafeteria tables or should I say stole to make this forty-two-foot longtable. We built this beauty. We studied all the possible inking techniques for comics. Silkscreening for covers, and printmaking techniques, and we set up the plates in the spare bedroom for twelve-colour separation just to sell T-shirts of our own design. We learned how to take pictures with fully manual cameras and do all the steps to the darkroom process to develop our pictures in a darkroom
we
built in
this
house. I was there when he bought that stop-motion camera rig for thirteen dollars off the pawnbroker across the street from Berkeley. All the editing equipment he owns I helped him find. We self-taught each other animation. Now will someone get me some paper? Will one of you find me a pen or pencil? I feel so diabolically woozy I have to sit down and make a drawing.

The guests all raised their glasses or smokes in a toast and drank, puffed, and watched as Jonjay found a place at the longtable.

Patrick snapped up a pristine Pentel black ballpoint, Rachael found a stack of bristol board, Twyla poured a tall glass of water, and Mark wellrolled two joints. Biz massaged his shoulders.

I'm beyond the brink, Jonjay said. I saw infinite horizons out there in the mountains. I spent the last three months with thousand-year-old trees. He pulled his hair and said, It's the dead I'm afraid of. The dead who are revolting. Can anything be done with the dead? What did the tribes used to do when a guru or a shaman died? Can we at least
eat
the dead?

He downed his glass of water and begged for another. Manila was right there with lemonade.

What is this? Jonjay inspected the joint in his fingers, sniffed it up and down and thought that this wasn't just the usual, it smelled distinctly of Hick's B.O. We told him the bag was hiding in the laundry hamper with his dirties.

Promise me you'll never wash those or we'll lose the last of his spirit, Jonjay said and took a plastic lighter from the table and ignited the joint and inhaled twice. Those clothes are infused with the reek of his unreal talents and it's got deep into this grass. Damn. I feel his powers already as a I smoke, can't you?

Yes, we did in fact. Hick Elmdales's presence was an unfathomable strength in the room that no one could argue with, a cloud of weedsmoke pressuring us to impress him, or the idea of him, the thought of his body there bearing down on our shoulders as we tried to stroke beauty out of a
blank page. The expiring self penetrating through scented candles almost to a rank taste.

Where have you
been
? Wendy wanted to know.

His pupils focused long enough to recognize Wendy. Was
he
angry? he asked her, and Wendy promised that no, Hick forgave him—how could you possibly know?

But I
did
know, said Jonjay, that's what's so strange. For the past three months I was trekking and bouldering alone up and down in the White Mountains drawing and painting the bristlecone pines, he said. Alone and completely lost in the dry desert mountains, contemplating the multitudes, surrounded by ancient trees. I dreamed of city streets. Some of these bristlecone pines are thousands of years old. That's why I went to see them. Then ten days ago I got a message to come back, something was the matter with Hick.