And those were the best of the lot. I set the finished stack next to the empty stack, pushed the typewriter back and lay my head on my arms.
For a short time around my sixth Christmas, my father went on “vacation” and “I” “took over” the strip for him. That is, my father went nowhere, and the cartoon Timmy became the in-name-only author of the strip. At first I was horrified. The drawings were artificially childlike, with arms and legs rendered as sticks, and trees and shrubs as thick brambles of scribble. But they were clearly the work of an adult: all the subtler rules of motion, of bodily line were fully articulated, and the images were laid out on the page with clarity and grace.
The gags themselves were all about my parents — child’s-eye views of the sober complexities of adult life. There was an arrogance about this I was already old enough to resent. I was not stupid, as people generally believe children to be, and already deeply suspicious of anything either of my parents did. I would never have made the kind of “cute” assumptions this series of strips — about a week’s worth — attributed to me. For example: of my father, laboring over some papers, I was to have said: Daddy has to pay his bills to Santa. As if my family would ever have bothered with the Santa Claus deception. Elsewhere, “I” drew Dad shoveling the car out of a snowbank. The caption read: Daddy loves playing in the snow.
All the same, I ended up welcoming the week’s worth of attention these strips brought me. People stopped on the street to tell me what a good little cartoonist I was, how I’d be sure to have my own strip someday. Father Loomis gave me a gift: a pen, which eventually found its way out of my room and into my father’s studio, where it was forever lost. I felt a little like a superstar, and people wrote letters to me from all over the country. Rose hated me; so did Bobby. I played exclusively with Pierce the first two weeks of January, building things out of Christmas Tinkertoys and watching television.
Until now, I hadn’t thought of that week of strips as prescient. But the connection felt all too clear: an attention-grubbing fake taking credit for something that wasn’t his own, something that itself was not worth the paper it was printed on. There was no doubt anymore; my father was a failure, and so was I. However accomplished his cartoons, his gags remained second-, even third-rate. His story, like mine, was one of squandered potential.
I slid off the stool, dragged myself to the light switch and turned it off. I was as lonely as I’d been in months.
* * *
During the night, I woke to a noise from somewhere in the house. It manifested itself in the sex dream I was having as my murky lover’s rough moans; what it really was, I understood once I had fully awoke, was the kitchen stool being pulled out from under the counter. Pierce? I thought. There was some shuffling, a click, then giggling: a pause, a giggle, a pause, a giggle. I listened to this for a minute or more, the still air screaming in my ears, until one of the giggles became a full laugh, and then I knew it wasn’t Pierce. I looked around the bedroom for something to crack him over the head with, and found only my bedside lamp, a ceramic travesty in the shape of a woman’s head bearing a fruit-filled basket. I yanked the plug from the wall and crept out into the hallway.
No light issued from the kitchen. The giggler was in the dark. I padded as quietly as possible, the lamp heavy in my hand, raised as high above my head as I could reach. Its plug dangled down behind me and knocked against my heels.
I peeked into the kitchen to find a tiny flashlight beam illuminating a small hand and my gag cards. The hand was picking through the cards, its owner chuckling at each one before embedding it back in the pile with a delicate turn of the wrist. I knew who it was before I switched on the light.
“Ken Dorn,” I said.
“Oh, these are priceless, Timmy. Really wonderful stuff.” He flipped off the penlight and dropped it into the pocket of a leather jacket. On his head, slumped like a baked eggplant, was the kind of cap worn exclusively by robbers in cartoons. “‘If one of them’s a panty hose, why aren’t the two of them panty hoses?’ That is rich, rich!”
“What are you doing in my house?”
“Your brother’s house, Timmy.” He turned, grinning at me with pinprick eyes. “You got the strip, remember? You live in the Family Funnies now.”
“Ha, ha.” I calculated distances. The telephone was closer to him than me.
He followed my eyes to the phone, then picked it up and handed it to me. “How are you going to dial with that lamp in your hand?”
I was shaking, unnerved by my residual fear and infuriated by Dorn’s presence. He showed no sign of leaving. I put the lamp on the floor and picked up the receiver.
“All right, Timmy, all right,” he said, sliding off the stool, and I didn’t dial, a failure that I regret to this day, much as I regret not punching the high school English teacher who dragged me up in front of the classroom and gave me a humiliating and painful wedgie. “Don’t get all bent out of shape. You left your door unlocked, if you want to know.”
“That doesn’t mean you can just walk through it,” I said.
“The truth is,” he said, tapping the pile of note cards straight, “you don’t like me around because I represent your greatest fear, right?”
“Which is what?”
“That you can’t even do this strip right, even when it’s been dropped in your lap. Even though you didn’t have to work for it at all.”
I had no response. I suppose this was a fear of mine, but it was a cornflake next to the grain silo of fears I was shadowed by.
“So,” Dorn went on. “I suppose that chippie of yours has told you I’m in line for the job?”
“She found out by chance,” I said.
Dorn laughed again, the same nefarious snigger that had chilled me in the dark. “Come on, Timmy. She just didn’t want to hurt your feelings. She knew.”
He zipped up his jacket and ran his hand over his head. I said, “Get out, Dorn.”
“You got it, Timmy.” He backed up to the sliding doors and pushed one silently open. His eyes wheeled, taking in the house once more. “It turns me on just being in this place.”
And then he was gone.
* * *
I sat in bed, the fruit lady lamp plugged in and burning, and read over my cards again and again. Tomorrow I would try to do just as many. Maybe even illustrate a few in pencil, to give me something to discuss with Wurster.
Much later, as I lay still, letting my anxiety amplify every faint sound from outdoors, I let my real fears take on their full sagging shape: that, in fact, I would be good enough to do the strip, but would let myself think it was the best I could do. That Dorn had been right about Susan, that she’d lied to me to save my feelings, that our embrace in the movies was an open expression of desperation and I had been making a fool of myself on all fronts and still was. And would be, over and over, knowing all along it was what I had chosen and what I would continue to choose, despite all the available alternatives, because it was the easiest thing to do.