The Road Narrows As You Go (3 page)

Thing was, Hick was overdramatic at least once a week putting together a batch of newly inked strips to send to his syndicate. Stress made him apocalyptic. She would watch him leap out of his chair, knocking supplies astray, and run from his ongoing pages spread out on the longtable and pull at his hair and come up face to face with someone and beg,
Put me out of my misery
or
cremate me. Throw me to the curb
,
throw me off a cliff, throw me to the hounds!
He would send pencils and pens all over.
I don't
quit, I die
was something Hick said in these moments. He was prone to pent-up purple fits, it's how he survived. Smashing his own furniture. Throwing small bills out the window. Other cartoonists thought his antics were pretty funny—after all, they were the guests and this was Hick, the leaseholder. But maybe all this time he was just hypoglycemic. He would open the fridge and see no carton of chocolate milk and collapse in a heap on the kitchen floor wailing,
I can't go on!

If Jonjay isn't back in time he can be damned to eternal shame for not saying goodbye to me, Hick told her. He's like my man-muse. He should be here. I need bolstering. Where
is
he?

Instinct. It's forcing your friend to stay away so you won't let yourself go.

Palaver. Jonjay never shows up on time for anything, Hick said. Jonjay would show up late for his
own
funeral. How is it possible to be so selfish and so generous? I don't get it. I can't hate him for neglecting me. He's my best friend.

What about me?

You're my next of kin.

Oh. The person Hick admired most was his friend Jonjay. Wendy couldn't blame him. Hick said that sometimes when he lay here with nothing else to do but regret his choice of friendships he wished he'd kept in better touch with one or two of his foster parents, but no, not really. It didn't matter, by the way. Walt Disney had come to visit him in the hospital just the day before.

Yes, Disney. Wendy missed him by about an hour. Even though Disney was a notorious hypochondriac with a deep-seated aversion to hospitals and sick people, he flew up on a Thursday just to see Hick, whom he called his
dear boy
and his
beloved representative in the daily newspapers.
That fixed look of paternal pain on Disney when he crouched through the door of 5D looking for the right bed embarrassed Hick to the core. To see the frozen, almost
showbiz
idea of pity on the great man's sunshiny face, and then to watch that expression transform into something appalled the
moment he got a good look at his cartoonist. That look was far worse than pity, these sudden, abominable misgivings, Hick could practically see the regret at having made the journey. That's how Hick knew things were bad for him. The look on Disney's face.

Disney declined the chair set out for guests. He didn't remove the ill-fitting windbreaker that must've been borrowed—nor did he take off his kid gloves. In fact Hick realized Disney never touched a thing in 5D the whole time he was there, fifteen minutes tops. As the minutes passed and conversation between them faltered, Disney started to study the other sickbeds, his face shrivelled into this ugly mask of hard judgment and contempt. At one point he promised Hick emphatically that he would cover all hospital costs, and Hick wondered if a nurse or doctor had tipped Disney off that he was trading original
Pan
strips for certain medical services. Walt Disney's eyes circled the room as if to include the other sick men in his dialogue when he asked Hick if he believed in God and if Jesus was in his heart, and Hick knew what Disney was implying: Was he like the flight attendant and the screenwriter, the same kind of San Francisco lost boy? Hick was in no mood. He did not want to lie to Walt Disney. He did not want to tell Disney he loved the occult, the collision of the fairy tale and the superstitious, secret cults, the black arts, Colin Wilson and Kenneth Anger, Aleister Crowley and Yeats, read as many horror comics as family fare. That's not what Disney wanted to hear. He told Disney, Oh, I love the Bible. I read the whole book twice.

As he was about to leave, Disney turned again for one last offended look at 5D. He said, How sad, how sad, how sad, sad, sad. Sad, sad, sad.

That is the kind of sickbed story you'll laugh about as soon as you're home, Wendy told him.

I guess I do love Disney. He said to me,
You won't be forgotten.

Wendy stifled.

Ah, hell. I never cared about this sort of stuff before. I mean, my legacy, that's supposed to be … later. Cut short it's not the same, it's intensified,
that feeling of wanting one. I love stamping my strips 'Walt Disney.' Proud to. But lying here for hours and hours like I could be drawing but I'm too exhausted to and so instead I look at the holes in the ceiling boards wondering why
didn't
I do my own thing, like
you
, you know?

You still can if you want to, said Wendy. You can do anything.

Hick took a long time to catch his breath.

I thought I had forever to, he said finally. Actually life is a fragment of a fragment. And I got less than that to work with. For my life I was given a fleck off a fragment's fragment. Everything is behind me now except the vanishing point.

Don't say that. Wendy insisted he had lots left to go on his fragment, and so far he was doing better than most people his age with the
fleck of time
he'd used up. Twenty-seven, a leaseholder, renowned in his anonymity, Hick had a syndicated strip revered by his readers, beloved among his colleagues—
Pan
sets the bar unreasonably high for art and story on the funny pages (Hart), an immense talent (Schulz), a monument against the mediocre (Breathed), an ego-destroyer (Caniff), a bodhisattva of comics (Trudeau), famous as much for the forty-two-foot-long drawing table as his open door (Gould).

Don't worry about comics, Wendy said. Right now focus mind on healing body. Forget about daily gags and adventure sequences and to Disney or to not Disney.

Wendy, don't waste a breath. Look at me. Go bigger than the biggest? I failed at that. I was too modest when I should have been greedy. You deserve big disgustingly wonderful things, Wendy. You're my favourite of all the feminine persuasion.

You're my one and only fan, man.

Almost true. Wendy's syndicated comic strip,
Strays
, was less than a year old, first appearing in a couple of suburban Bay Area dailies around the time of Ronald Reagan's nomination for presidential candidate. Set in a dumpy innercity vacant lot populated by lost pets and vermin: a
cat, a dog, a rabbit, a snake, a parrot, and a raccoon single mother who meet around a flat tire for drinks, eat trash, play Ping-Pong, and try to scam each other,
Strays
was in fewer than fifty papers and none outside California. A few good laughs (Aziz), another example of funny-pages mediocrity (said Crumb on a popover), you're going to be huge (her syndicate editor, Gabrielle Scavalda). Compared to
Pan
's twenty-two hundred and twenty subscriptions, the longevity of
Strays
remained uncertain (Ashbubble).

I'm serious, Hick said. His voice was down to a wretched croak, wheezing between words. Your fragment of a fragment. What else are you doing today? Work? Are you drawing? Don't blow the afternoon and go see some dumb matinee. Do something productive.

She told Hick she did some drawing this morning, nothing so funny as this week's dumb matinee. After she left here she had a meeting up at Caffe Trieste with Gabrielle
Gabby
Scavalda, in town for a couple of nights from Manhattan.

Hick's cough lasted a minute. Then he said, That sounds good. A meeting about your comic?

I don't know. Maybe just social. Gabby's family still lives in the Bay, I guess.

Your comic strip, is that what you want to do?

Yeah, for sure, I guess that's it, like, obviously of course my strip's all I want to do, not this other stuff. Freelance beer ads and pizza coupons and cereal boxes, show posters for punks, gee whiz, it's all so disorganized and I guess you're right, it adds up to nothing much. Punk playbills pay my bills, though. I have a comp for the show at The Farm tonight but I really don't want to see people.

You should. Go. People are fun. I miss The Farm and that funny donkey covered in freeway exhaust.

Naw.

Why not? Isn't that why you ran away from Canada and became
Wendy? So you could meet interesting people and
live
and suck up the toxic American fury for the good life no matter the cost?

You
named me Wendy.

That's because you
are
Wendy. You're from a different world from the rest of us, more sedate, more mature. You leap the gap. Comics are kids stuff, all about getting rich off doodles. That
is
the goal. Buster Brown, Popeye, Garfield. Same thing. Bills? See my hospital bills? Seriously, it's like—it's like—aha-
aha
! Hick was gasping for air, had to stop short, and after a few unrecuperative breaths, shut his eyes.

She tried to rouse him. You forget you're this freaky prodigy natural DNA talent like an Einstein in the funny pages or something and, unlike your Disney strip, well, you forget my
Strays
appears in like not a single paper you or I ever heard of, farm gazettes and freebie advertisers the such, goshers, these subscriptions, not exactly boding well for
my
chance at free rein. For all I know Gabby is about to shitcan me today. I'm not as good as you, Hick, I'm not half you, I'm clumsy, my hand is, my eye is, my mind is.

A wake, he said abruptly. I'm serious. I want a wake. Promise me, he croaked. Make sure everyone with a connection to No Manors gets invited. For my sake, so I can say goodbye to my friends. Not the usual sobbing routine at a rainy graveside. Not that. When I die, he said, I want laughs. Jokes, pranks, magic tricks, and cheap gags, lots of drawing games at the longtable, okay? Make sure people remember me on some high.

Wendy wasn't sure what to say. A wake was something organized after
a death
.

Cover me if you must, I don't care, just let me come home one more time. Lay out a bleak black blanket on the table, must be something black, at the place where I always draw. Some candles for ambiance. Make sure all the curtains are closed before my body arrives. No mahogany coffin. Put me in a big wicker basket on the table there where I always draw. Light the candles. I want one last party at the manor.

3

STRAYS

Wendy had to zoom straight up the 101 from visiting Hick Elmdales's bedside in 5D to the North Beach for coffee with her editor. Gabrielle was a thirty-something intellectual of independent means with an imposing forehead, a succession of husbands, therapists, and jobs, no grey hairs in her blond. Wendy checked her face in the rearview, then flicked open the ashtray—she bought her car used off a teenager in Presidio Heights for a thousand dollars in cash—and smoked the last half of a joint as she started out of the parkade. She could barely focus
on the road, kept thinking back to Hick laid out in bed. Cursing as she whiplashed down Van Ness, damning to hell all the red lights to Broadway, all the other drivers were
stupid incompetent ignorant ogres
and
blind
. Trolley cars slowed her go up Columbus where for a dollar she bought a ticket to park in a valet garage.

That's it, she decided, after that teeth-grinding drive, she couldn't waste her time on a comic that wasn't working, no matter what Hick said. She couldn't stand the humiliation. It wasn't in her or whatnot. In her mind there was always Jonjay's counter-life to Hick's ambitions. She was just as attracted to that other kind of artist who thrived on failure and anonymity and for whom no amount of success was better than no success at all. There was grace in self-abnegation. She could sense that's what Gabby was here to tell her anyway, that
Strays
was a total bust. She tried and tried. Hearing Hick tell her she should keep trying just reminded her how far away she was from what
he
achieved daily. Hick didn't need to keep trying, he simply was. She was not. She was not good enough. She wasn't awful, but she
was
worse than mediocre. This meeting with Gabby was fortuitous, for now was the time to sever ties with the syndicate and figure out what to do with her life. Maybe move back to Canada—she actually considered that, the traffic was so bad.

Nevertheless, Wendy and her syndicate editor embraced and said how good it was to see each other again; so it was; then Wendy lined up at the counter to order a double espresso from the flirtatious barista and came back and sat down next to Gabby at a table next to the window.

Gabrielle Scavalda said she loved people-watching, why she chose the window seat. This is one of the best corners in town for people-watching, Gabby believed. Gabrielle was the kind of emotive charismatic person you can't take your eyes off, so that as she stared at the people passing by, the people passing by stared back at her. Big round wet eyes and full cheeks and a thick coat of lipstick as glossy and fresh as red ink. Gabby dressed the part of an artist, including multicoloured glasses frames and a funky
scarf, although she would be the first to admit it had been a long time, in fact not since college, that she had touched a canvas or a mound of clay. Long cream-brown hair grown out so she could pin all those curlingiron curls above her ears, then mid-conversation, let them fall loose, twist in her hands, coiling and uncoiling as she talked, then throw the whole length over one shoulder so the curls covered her full chest made fuller by an expensive bra, finally bundling all that hair back up again into a ball on top of her head. Third marriage failed on a vacation a year ago, the divorce was not finalized. It was her captivating, melancholy, and wise, freckled and shiny quality that got her hired wherever she applied. Chauvinism aside, aerobic weight-loss regimens aside, Gabby amused men, she was sure, and it made her livid. She wanted this editorship at Shepherd Media Syndicate to last, she didn't want to leave the way she'd left the
San Francisco Chronicle
, or get phased out like the time at Third Word advertising on Madison Avenue, to name a couple. This job was a fresh start for Gabby, an autonomy she dreamed of, office with a door, an imported car, modern wardrobe.