* * *
I hung around afterward, listening in on people’s conversations. Kelsey Hoon’s voice was easy to pick out from the general din. It was nasal and high-pitched, like an electric drill. He was holding forth to a small coterie of admirers, which I situated myself on the edge of to listen.
“Oh yes!” he was saying. “There really is a Whiskers! He’s a good little boy, a fat little boy.” His face lit up at the mention of his cat, and the faces in the little group lit up with it, in a chain reaction of disturbing good will.
“How old is he?” someone asked.
“We’re not so sure, you know, but our vet believes fifteen. Or older!” He launched into a description of the cat’s daily activities, which in its advanced age seemed limited to sleeping, eating from a bowl and prowling senselessly around the apartment, bumping into things. Kelsey Hoon was riveted by all this, as were his admirers, but I could only appreciate it on the level of intense ironic detachment, which today I was not up to. I moved on.
I found Tyro lurking in a corner of the room, talking to a teenage girl in a halter top and torn jeans. She was nodding vigorously while he talked, which he did without altering his posture — a precarious slouch against the edge of a table — or expression. When I got closer I saw that his eyes were closed. He didn’t open them when the girl pressed a little piece of paper into his hand and slunk away, or when I walked up to him and said hello.
“Hey,” said Tyro, in a parched, uninflected voice, the kind you’d expect to hear from a gas station attendant in a backwater New Mexican town. We were standing next to the unfolded accordion “wall” between this makeshift room and the next, and I could see the motion of feet beneath it.
“I’m Tim Mix,” I said. I told him I was taking over the Family Funnies. He opened his eyes at this. They were dark and small and set far apart on his face.
“Ah,” he said. “The enemy.”
“You were the last person I expected to see at this thing.”
He hauled himself into a standing position and crossed his arms. “If I’d known you existed, I would have been expecting you, I guess.” He reached into the pocket of his jacket — wasn’t he overheated in leather? — and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, then lit one. This was probably not allowed, but he didn’t seem worried. He didn’t offer me one. “So,” he said, entering into conversation with visible emotional strain. “What brings you here?”
I told him about Burn Features and the struggle for my future. I don’t know why I wanted to do this. Something made me feel we were on the same side, though it was clear that Tyro didn’t consider anyone to be on his side. I breathlessly asked him why he had come.
He said that his syndicate — Fake Comix, Inc. — offered to send him. “Free motherfucking weekend in hell, that’s why I’m here, Tim.” He inhaled deeply on the cigarette, obviously enjoying it. “I won’t be back next time around, you can bet on that. I might not even be back tomorrow.”
“That was some debate,” I said, with more than a little irony. He didn’t catch it.
“It’s a minimalist strip. None of these assholes understands the aesthetic.”
“Oh, I do,” I said. “I was in college when you started it. It was my favorite strip.”
He frowned. “What about now?”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now. Like, the present day? Or are you too busy fucking with your bread machine to taste human pain?” He threw the cigarette down on the carpet half-smoked and ground it out with his shoe.
I could easily have been offended, but I found myself sunk into a trenchant sympathy for Tyro. The fact was, I related to him personally much better than I did to his work. “The Emerald Forest” was funny, and wasn’t like anything else, but was so aggressively and selfconsciously bleak that it came off, to anyone over the age of twenty-two, as more than a little quaint. Case in point: a recent strip consisted of sixteen panels. In the first, Laird and Laird were joylessly hunting rabbit, with Eldridge along for the trip, smiling his customary wide-eyed, drugged smile. In the second panel they shot a rabbit who looked exactly like Eldridge. In the third they skinned it, and in the fourth they set it aboil in a pot. The next eleven panels were identicaclass="underline" Eldridge watched the pot, grinning. The final panel was just like the previous eleven except that Eldridge had a fat, glistening tear hanging from his left eye.
That was it. Most of the Emerald Forest strips were just like this, so earnestly, familiarly grim that looking at Tyro’s work every week could become a form of comfort, like a manicure, or a pint of ice cream eaten in one sitting. In this way the strip was no different from the Family Funnies, which at least had as many as four or five gags going for it, as opposed to Tyro’s one.
The crack about the bread machine took the wind out of him. He slumped back against the table. We were in the same boat: about to make a buck and glad of it. I had heard rumors that there was going to be an Emerald Forest television cartoon; in it, the Lairds were said to be heterosexual and a new character was in the works, a fast-talking chipmunk with a Japanese accent. Tyro had not publicly denied this.
“No, I still like it,” I said. “Really.” I reached out and touched the arm of his leather jacket. I couldn’t feel a real arm under there. “Hey, do you know Sybil Schimmelpfennig?” I surprised myself at how fluidly the name rolled off my tongue, like a much-rehearsed line from a German opera.
“‘Sybil’ Sybil?”
“Yeah,” I said. I pulled the drawing she had made me out of my pants pocket. “She said people are going to be drinking at the hotel bar. You ought to go.”
He took the drawing and gave it a cursory look before handing it back. “I hear she’s a man-eater.”
“I kind of doubt that,” I said.
* * *
I spent the rest of the afternoon walking around, looking for Art Kearns. He was supposed to be at a debate about the thematic shift in comics after the second World War, but somebody in the Blue Room told me he had laryngitis and was roaming the Ballroom floor instead. The Ballroom was set up as a huge fair, with booth upon booth of comics dealers, merchandise hucksters and collecting freaks arranged in long rows. A few people from the sci-fi conference had wandered in, and loomed near the outer-space-related comic books, pawing over piles of rarities and obscurities tucked into acetate envelopes. I didn’t see Art Kearns anywhere, although I hadn’t seen a recent photo and was looking, mostly, for an old man wearing glasses.
Several times I thought that the experience would be a lot more fun with Susan around. She would have stories about people. We could get some food together, and probably she would pay for it. My missing her had manifested itself, thus far, only in terms of doing things — looking for people, eating, taking in the novel or unusual — and was therefore, I thought, safe. At the same time it seemed unwise to dwell on her. What difference did it make, I thought, if I was with her or by myself? I could have a good time alone.
And so I did, sort of. I polished off the final hours of the day sitting on a canvas stool next to one collector’s booth, reading. The collector had only “Art’s Kids” paraphernalia, and had apparently gone to high school with Kearns in West Lafayette, Indiana. He was a willowy, grayhaired old man with a high, mirthful laugh, and he let me flip through everything.
There was one, a full-color Sunday strip, that I read over and over. In it, Dogberry is lying on the floor, waiting to be fed. He licks his chops, scans the room just like an ordinary dog. Then, exasperated, he walks to the kitchen, opens the cupboard, takes out a can of food, opens it with an electric can opener, and dumps it into his own bowl, where he sets upon it with delighted relish. The thought bubble above him reads: “Persistent problems demand extraordinary measures.”