The Funnies (12 page)

“Hah?”

“I mean, are you willing to say you've never fooled around yourself?”

“I ain't governor of New Jersey, Bill!”

New Brunswick was not yet fully awake at seven, which was when I pulled into town. I followed the directions Brad Wurster had given me, but they depended heavily on specific landmarks, one of which—a McDonald's with an elaborate glassed-in playground—I happened to have missed. I found myself in the parking lot of a shopping center that was home to a supermarket, a stereo store and a cellular phone shop, rifling through the phone book for a city map. I located myself on Chemical Road, near the edge of town, and found that Wurster's house was clear on the other side, in a skein of whorled suburban streets marked Parkside Village. I tore the map out, feeling terrible for it but promising myself to put it back later, and picked my halting way through town.

Parkside Village was not what I expected. It appeared to have been named after a predictably sterile planned community, but encompassed a much larger area that included Wurster's neighborhood, a low, dark collection of run-down ranch-style houses with fenced yards. Most of the grass here was dead, done in by broad shade trees. The ambient temperature dropped by ten degrees, and in the excessive comfort of the Caddy, I felt like I was still in bed, floating under cool white sheets.

I pulled into Wurster's driveway at quarter to eight, popped the trunk, grabbed my drawings and jogged to the house. Giant pines stood in the yard, trimmed down to the trunk to a height of six feet. The door Wurster had described on the phone—the one with the devil painted on it—could hardly be called a front door, though it stood on the front wall; it was situated far off to the right and had what appeared, through its frosted window, to be a sagging metal bookcase pushed up against it on the inside. The devil himself was badly faded and crudely done, I assumed by a previous owner. His smile, an attempt at the customary maleficence, made him look like a dipsomaniacal birthday party clown. Warped, cracked clapboards showed through the house's begrimed red paint. I found the back entrance, as instructed, and knocked on a screen door fitted uncomfortably into its frame, as if it had come from a different house entirely. “Hello?”

Brad Wurster appeared instantly out of the darkness, like a television screen just switched on, and glared at me. “Late. Not a good sign, Tim,” he said. His in-person voice was a vaguely authoritative muck and matched his appearance: hard, grim features set in a wide, flat face; dumpy clothes too heavy for the weather; slim, tall, muscular body. He looked like a Marine gone to seed on a deserted tropical island. The door swung open and rattled against the house, and even without the bugstained screen between it and me, the interior looked impossibly black and bone-chillingly cold. I stepped inside.

“Air conditioning?” I asked.

“Nope.” My eyes had not yet adjusted to the dark, though I could see light glowing faintly through dirty windows around the room. They all had bars on them.

“This way.”

I followed him down a narrow hallway, goose pimples exploding along my arms and legs. Several cats of various colors dashed past in the opposite direction. Wurster led me into a windowless room illuminated by a long fluorescent daylight-spectrum lamp. The quality of light gave the room a crisply surreal presence, and lent Wurster himself the mien of a bowler-hatted Magritte businessman, practiced and peculiar. Beneath the lamp was a long drawing board, scrubbed white and uncluttered by any papers.

“Have a seat,” he said, gesturing toward a small wooden stool, the kind you spun to raise and lower. I gave it a spin and sat down. Already I was uncomfortable. I was wearing shorts, so my ankles had grown cold in the chilly air, and the seat's several long cracks pinched the skin on my thighs. I wriggled around like a schoolboy.

“Let's see ‘em,” said Wurster, holding out his hand. I unzipped the portfolio and handed him the sheaf of drawings.

He spread them on the drafting table and examined each in total silence for over a minute. I sat there for nearly half an hour, watching what few charming touches I thought I'd managed wither under his gaze. Finally he handed them back, the tendons of his head straining against the skin.

“These are terrible. You don't understand cartooning.”

My embarrassment blossomed into offense. Understand cartooning? “What do you mean by that?” I said.

“You don't know the first thing about it. You're trying to make these people look like people. Cartoon characters don't look like people. The Yellow Kid did not look like a person. Dick Tracy does not look like a person. Cartoon characters are deformed freaks we are convinced are like us. You try drawing like this”—he waved his hand at my sketches, lying askew in my lap—“and people aren't going to believe it for a minute.” He shook his head.

“So where does that leave us?” I made sure the anger was clear in my voice. I wondered what my father had paid him to do this. I wondered, in fact, how my father knew him at all.

“Square one,” said Wurster. He handed me a sheaf of sketch paper—the same I had done my own drawings on—and a pencil. “Today we're going to draw telephones.”

“Telephones?”

“That is, we're not going to try to accurately represent a telephone on paper. We are going to distill the comic essence of a telephone into a drawing. We are going to do a caricature of a telephone. Is this getting through to you?”

“Sort of.”

Wurster lunged up off his stool and stalked out of the room. I thought for a moment that he had already given up on me. What did he expect? I had never done any of this before. I was about to go find him when he returned clutching a telephone—two, actually—their cords dangling behind them along the floorboards. He sat down again and slammed the phones onto the drawing board. “Which one is better?” he said.

“Better?”

“Yeah. Which of these phones is the better one.”

One was a black rotary, the kind with a heavy cradle and a thick bludgeon of a receiver. The other was a pink princess phone, with pushbuttons. I pointed to the black one.

“I like that one better.”

“Why?”

Why? “I don't know. It's just…I don't know.”

“When was the last time you saw a princess phone in the comics?”

“Never, I guess.”

“You guess. I'll tell you the last time I saw one. A couple of months ago in ‘Sybil.' That comic strip is a piece of shit.” He laid one hand on each phone. “This one,” he said, lifting the black phone, “is funny. And this one is pathetic.” And he flung the princess phone out the door, where it dinged against the hall wall. I heard the frenzied toenail clicks of a fleeing cat. “Now. I want you to tell me why this is funny.”

I stared at the phone a long time. I knew, intuitively, that it was funny, or at least more funny than the princess phone, but how could I qualify such a feeling? I decided that I must answer this question correctly, or I might fail at everything, my lessons, the strip, my inheritance. Something stirred in my chest—anxiety, I thought—but when it rose through my throat and escaped, it did so as a slightly maniacal chortle. Wurster's eyebrows arched, much like a cartoon character's.

“Well?” he said.

“It looks like a little guy. A little blocky mouse guy or something.” I pointed. “The receiver looks like a couple of ears.” I fired off an involuntary giggle.

“So what are you saying about it, generally speaking?”

“It's got a personality. The other one's just a plastic blob.”

“So…”

I wasn't catching on. “So what?”

“If it's got a personality,” Wurster said, “we can make fun of it.” He pushed the phone aside and produced a piece of paper and pencil. In seconds, a fully rendered, undeniably hilarious, living phone had appeared on the page. I laughed out loud. It was suspended inches above a shining coffee table, tilted slightly, and cast an amorphous smear of a shadow; the receiver hung above it, rotated slightly toward the frame. The cord between them jittered in the air like an earthworm.

“That's great!” I said.

“What's it doing?”

“What's it doing? It's ringing.”

“How do you know? There's no boldface ‘ringggg' hanging over it. There are no hites, no agitrons, no briffits.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hites and agitrons indicate movement.” He made marks on the page: some quick parallel lines, trailing a flying baseball; some little eyelash curves, around a goofy-looking guy's head. “Hites mean some thing's going in a certain direction, opposite the lines. Agitrons indicate shaking, or a back-and-forth motion. This is a briffit.” He drew a little cloud, behind the hites. “Sometimes objects, particularly those moving quickly in a linear way, leave briffits. But none of these are necessary. Humor lies primarily in implication. Everything about the phone I just drew is implied—its movement, its noise. If I added agitrons to it”—he drew in a couple of them—“it isn't as funny anymore.”

He was right. To my amazement, the drawing was mostly ruined.

“I want you to understand that most cartoonists are stupid and lazy.” He said this with a half-yawn, as if he were sick and tired of its being true. “Take ‘Whiskers,' for instance. I inked that one for years. It's the worst kind of shit. All the jokes are having-a-bad-day garbage about dating and dieting, and the main character's a fucking cat.” He drew, with amazing speed, the chubby and insipid Whiskers, his eyes as big as oranges. “And the visual stuff is cheap and unimaginative. Big goofy eyes, huge toothy shit-eating grins, pies in the face. I hate it.”

“What about the Family Funnies?” I said. “I never thought of it as being any better than ‘Whiskers.'”

“The jokes suck,” Brad Wurster said, looking into my eyes. “But the drawings are masterpieces of efficiency. Your father was terribly misunderstood.”

“I see.”

He shot me a doleful frown. I suddenly felt bad.

“Tim,” he said. “I don't think you do.”

* * *

We drew telephones from eight-thirty until noon, nonstop. For two hours, every single drawing—at least seventy-five of them—was horrible. I either filled in too much detail or not enough, over-personified or didn't at all. Wurster was patient with me, more than I would have expected, and by eleven o'clock he was taking my hand in his and drawing with it, drawing perfect, outrageous telephones, so that I could feel, he said, what it was like. By the end I was exhausted. My hand felt like I had been whapping it against a wall all morning. Wurster walked me to the door and into the sunlight, where my skin gulped the warm air, and told me never to show up late again. “This is not supposed to be fun,” he said. “It's work. Your father knew that.”

“I don't think you knew my father very well,” I told him, zipping up my portfolio and heaving it into the Caddy. “Not as well as you think you do.”

“That's probably true,” he said. He was standing on his porch, arms crossed, looking every inch a prison warden. “But neither did you.” He turned and opened the door, then paused a moment and turned back to me. “Dress more warmly next time. It's hard to draw when your muscles are stiff.”

“Okay.”

He nodded. “Okay, then.” And went inside.

That afternoon I ate lunch in the studio and drew phones. It wasn't fun at all. I took a little break and cleaned the place out a bit—let some air in through the door and cracked open the windows, which hadn't been open, apparently, in some time.

At quarter to six, I drew something I liked. It was a phone that had been knocked off a table. The cradle was tipped up onto its back, and the receiver was flung far away, the cord stretched out taut at an oblique angle to it. Somehow—and I wasn't pretending to myself that it was anything more than an accident—the drawing was both funny and sad. I chuckled and set it aside.

But after that, the remaining fifteen minutes stretched out ahead of me like hours. I rubbed my eyes and switched off the lamp. I would quit early, just this once.

Each day, Wurster and I worked on a different inanimate object. This made me uneasy. If a week went by in which I didn't draw a single Family Funnies character, it was, I couldn't help but think, a week wasted. I made the mistake of telling Wurster this. “First I have to make you into a cartoonist,” he said, in the kind of voice an obsessive-compulsive might use to potty-train a child. “In general. You must acquire competence, don't you see that?”

Tuesday we drew tables, Wednesday, chairs and sofas. Sofas in particular gave me trouble. There was a certain lunatic puffiness to them that, properly done, could make them look both buoyant and massive at once; my sofas only looked flabby and lopsided, like jelly donuts. In my drawings I stacked telephones on chairs and chairs on sofas, occasionally happening upon a kind of weak whimsy, but mostly producing labored junk. Still, most of them were passable to the untrained eye. I could do an interior background for most strips without too much difficulty, if I had to.

The Sunoco station left messages on the answering machine both Monday and Tuesday. Pierce never answered the phone, and this was working to my advantage regarding the car, which I had yet to make a decision on.

But when they called on Wednesday afternoon, I had just returned from my session with Wurster and was next to the phone when it rang. It was a princess phone, and when I picked it up, I felt a mild distaste for its clammy arch against my palm.

“Bobby Mix?”

“That's my brother. He's not here.”

“Look, we've had this car for practically a week now, okay?” It was her, the Sunoco woman. There was a whiff of threat to her voice, as if I might soon find myself hog-tied in the trunk as the car glacially rusted at the bottom of the river. “So is somebody gonna pick it up, or are we gonna fix it, or what?”