Tonight, however, I attempted to focus on the bizarre animation of Brad Wurster. In one sense, the special was much like others of its time: cheesy animation, with fewer drawings per second, and backgrounds that, for simplicity’s sake, didn’t move at all. But in another sense it was strangely accomplished. Wurster had taken the limitations imposed on him by the special’s budget and created a subtly disorienting, visually arresting semi-masterpiece. I turned the sound down to blot out the context and watched the images move in slow motion.
Wurster seemed to break an obvious rule of animation, which was that all parts of a character’s body, if moving, should be doing so at once. Instead, he moved about half of a character’s body in one frame and the other half in the next, so that it possessed, at full speed, a strange unbalancedness that complemented perfectly the situation on the screen. Bobby, when he gazed up at the altar and saw the friendly angel, seemed to sway, barely perceptibly, in the pew; his eyes closed one at a time and opened the same way. My mother, nonplussed at the turkey’s disappearance, looked like her head was about to bobble right off her shoulders. It was as if the actors portaying my family had been replaced by passionate but unpracticed Eastern European understudies. I stared transfixed until I got too hungry to go on, then I turned off the set and walked downtown, still dazed, in the day’s last light.
Custard’s Last Stand was curiously lethargic, as if the throng had just received some mildly bad news. People engaged in measured conversations. Teenagers hatched plots in subdued groups. I got into line and quickly grew bored waiting, and so scanned the customers in front of me to see who was slowing things up. That’s when I noticed somebody familiar. A short man with a guarded posture, like he feared sudden arrest by rogue cops. I waited until he was given his food, then watched him turn around.
It was Ken Dorn. I tried to remember where he said he was from. Hadn’t he come some distance to attend the funeral? What, then, was he doing standing, as he was now, at the big window in Custard’s Last Stand, watching kids play golf? I studied him as I waited for my hot dog. Rain-in-the-Face, in a neat trick of perspective, seemed ready to plunge his giant wooden axe into Ken’s head.
Dorn stiffened, as if he knew he was being watched. Maybe he did. I averted my eyes before he had a chance to turn, and when I accepted my food from the cashier I made sure not to look directly at him. If his presence had something to do with me, I didn’t want him to know I knew he was here. But I could see him at the corner of my eye, watching.
That night, I fell into a strange and intense sort of concentration. I sat in the studio for hours, drawing, oblivious of the time, of the room around me, of the place where the pencil met the paper: it was more like a single entity, part me, part comic strip, part pencil and paper, that created images by subtly changing itself. And as the night wore on, I began to feel myself changing, as if at first I’d failed to absorb Wurster’s training, which had only now found my muscles, where it guided them from character to character, from prop to prop, each more refined than the last, each more convincing.
But that’s as far as it went. My heart still wasn’t in it, even if my body was. Still, I felt as happy as I’d been all day — no great feat, admittedly — because, for a change, I was getting somewhere.
fifteen
Wurster liked my new drawings, or at least didn’t find them particularly offensive, and we spent the week immersing ourselves in the work, poring over the FF Treasury and making lists of images, situations and combinations of characters that were likely to pop up in Family Funnies cartoons. I worked on a few minor characters, like Father Loomis, the neighbors and Puddles the dog. We discovered that Puddles was always drawn in profile, always sitting (even when the strip was about him, as when the family was leaving for a trip and he was sad, or the family was returning from one, and he was happy) — an unexpected shortcut, and one less thing we would have to worry about. I let myself be consumed by the strip, despite my considerable misgivings, feeling the kind of fullness a condemned man does after his sumptuous last meal.
I mentioned to Wurster that I had watched the Thanksgiving special. His face darkened.
“I think it’s great,” I said. “Your animation is unreal. Have you done any since then?”
He waited a long time before saying, “They stifled me at every turn,” and beyond that he wouldn’t talk about it.
Wednesday night I called Susan, thinking I would return to New York for lunch. I had found that, while working, I got excited thinking about it; the trip, the connection to Burn Features and the free meal were the only things I had to look forward to all week long. She wasn’t home, so I left her a message and went back to work, with instructions for Pierce to come fetch me if she called.
Pierce, true to form, had slipped into a funk. He had returned from his weekend trip looking haggard and paranoid, and when he walked into the house he seemed surprised to find me there, as if all that had gone on were a delusional nightmare he thought he’d rid himself of. He spent most of the week indoors, in his bedroom, and I didn’t dare ask how his visit had been, let alone who this mystery lover was or what she did with her time.
Meanwhile I had decided to do something with my mother over the weekend — possibly even get her out of the home, if she was feeling well enough, and bring her someplace nice, perhaps Washington Crossing Park, for a picnic lunch. I tried talking to her on the phone, but without my face there to remind her, she repeatedly forgot who I was and segued spontaneously into conversations with other people. I found myself playing the part of her late sister, my grandfather and (apparently) a maladroit plumber who must once have given her a bum deaclass="underline" “No, ma’am,” I assured her in a mushmouthed plumber’s voice, “of course we’ll pay for the water damage.”
Susan called back around sundown, which was coming noticeably earlier in the day. I heard the phone ringing through the open doors of the house and studio, and when Pierce didn’t come to fetch me, I went in, curious. Pierce was nowhere in sight but the receiver was lying on its side on the countertop. I picked it up and listened.
“Hello? Hello?”
“Susan!”
“Oh, hi,” she said. “You called.”
“Yep. Lunch tomorrow?”
“Actually, I was thinking,” she said. “Since I’m going to see you Saturday, why don’t we bag it this week?”
“Like, a bag lunch.”
“No, like let’s cancel.”
“Where are we going to see each other Saturday?”
There was a brief silence. “Uh, FunnyFest?”
“Oh,” I said. “That’s right.”
“You forgot?”
“Just for a minute.”
She cleared her throat. “I don’t want to butt in, you know. But I think you ought to go. People are probably very sad about your father. They’re kind of expecting you.”
I thought about the mayor’s gleeful wheedling at the wake. “I don’t like this, Susan.”
“You won’t have to do anything, you know. Just sort of be around.”
“Nobody even knows who I am.”
“Sure they do. Look,” she said, “let me chaperone you. I’ll buy the food.”
“Well, if you put it that way, sure,” I said.