“Mr. Mix?” somebody asked. “Did your father train you?”
“No. No, he didn’t. I’m…I’m still learning, actually.”
A brief mumble, like a spattering of rain. Then I watched as a large man hauled himself to his feet in the fifth row, pulling up his overalls as if he were about to go out and slop the hogs. His arm pistoned into the air. Ben Koch pointed the gavel at him.
“Tim,” the man said, “now you know there’s a cartoonists’ union, isn’t there? Are you a member of it?”
Silence. Cartoonists’ union? “Uh, no,” I said, “not yet. But I’m not actually going to start the strip until…”
“And isn’t it true your father was never a union man? If I got it right, a few people weren’t exactly disappointed your old man, ah, wasn’t able to make it to this weekend’s festivities.”
My head began a mild, plaintive ache. Voices simmered up across the room, and the man’s voice carried over them. “A lot of people here would rather see a union man take over, see, especially since your dad wasn’t particularly known for hiring from the union. Or from anywhere at all, for that matter. He was, whadyacallit, an outsider, wouldn’t you say?”
“Well, uh…I suppose he was kind of…”
“Sir, sir,” came Dorn’s voice from beside me, “ladies and gentlemen, please. Let’s not gang up on our young man, yes? I’m sure Tim has considered all these important issues, haven’t you, Tim?” He laid his hand on my shoulder and patted, gently.
“Sure. I…”
“I think we ought to take this opportunity — a great classic’s change of hands — to discuss what must be done, what we must do, to perpetuate the great tradition of the funnies.” A dull snap as the rubber band came off his stack of note cards. “Let us consider the Family Funnies’ place in the canon of daily strips, namely, its role in establishing and solidifying those values the American family holds dear…”
And he was off, dodging and parrying probing questions in my defense, explaining how the Family Funnies was written and why it was written that way, and what he would do — in the unlikely event he would draw it — to keep its feet planted firmly on virtuous ground. It was a crock of shit, but I was dead in my seat, all resolve evaporated. The large man was gone, slipped away in the commotion. Lynn and Ben whispered sweet nothings to each other, their snacks left unfinished. And Ken Dorn held the floor, a self-taught expert on my comic strip.
* * *
When it was all over, I bummed a cigarette and found a back door to slither out through. I wondered what I thought I was doing, why I had thrown away a perfectly reasonable, if imperfect, life to act out this elaborate failure. The cigarette tasted awful, as a cigarette does when employed as a side dish to a generous helping of self-pity.
It didn’t take me long to spy Dorn lurking next to a dumpster at the other end of the building, handing something to the large man from the Green Room. They finished their transaction and parted. The man got into a pickup truck, and Dorn ducked back into the hotel through a green steel door.
I stubbed out my cigarette underfoot, sick of myself, and slunk back inside.
twenty-six
The Kearns event was a buffet dinner, keynote speech and drawing/signing, to be held in the Grand Ballroom down the hall. It wasn’t to start until four-thirty, and I was hungry beyond description. The morning’s cold cereal had rushed through me like an electric pulse, leaving behind a dry, slightly scorched taste in my mouth and a yawning gulf in my stomach, though I realized that part of this was probably from making a fool of myself — of being made a fool of — in the Green Room. I set off in search of food, taking a detour at the men’s room in the lobby.
Inside, I realized I wasn’t alone. This is always obvious in a public restroom. In gangster movies, people often hide from the hit men by standing on toilet seats in lavatory stalls, but to me, such scenes are highly implausible. Every surface in a restroom reflects and amplifies sound. Air currents shift at a human body’s slightest motion. In this case, a specific smell tipped me off: the dank, vegetative odor of pot. I ignored it and picked a stall, sat down and did my business, trying to minimize the noise. I got out and washed my hands.
In the mirror I could see a pair of black boots and the cuffs of black jeans, motionless under a stall door. I took a gamble.
“Tyro?”
“Hello, Mix.”
There were no paper towels. I forewent the hot air dryer and wiped my hands on my pants. “How’s it going?”
“It’s fucked,” he said. “Want a joint?”
Why not? “Sure,” I said.
There was a rustle, then a fat white cigarette rolled across the floor at me, shedding marijuana like a molting pigeon. A lighter followed it, clattering across the tiles. I picked them both up and sat in the stall adjoining Tyro, where I committed my misdemeanor. It had been years since I’d hung out with anyone who smoked. I felt like a greaser.
“I got humiliated today,” I said, passing the lighter under the dividing wall.
“It’s got around.”
“Already?”
“Sybil told me.” I heard a deep breath. “She’s pissed at you, buddy.”
“We had a little misunderstanding.”
“Let me guess. She tried hustling you and you wimped out.”
“Sort of,” I said. “Maybe it was a mistake.” I could feel the unsent letter crackling in my back pocket. I considered flushing it down the toilet.
There was a long pause before he said, surprising me, “I like her, but she’s too depressed for me. Women read my strip and they think I’ll wanna sit around quoting Nietszche with ‘em.”
“You don’t?”
“Hell, no.” After a minute, he added, quietly, “It’s an aesthetic, not a Weltanschauung.”
I smoked awhile in silence, waiting for the pot to take effect. I concentrated, vigilant for changes in my mood. It wasn’t until I was thoroughly fed up that I realized I wasn’t fed up at all anymore, and the stall suddenly seemed like a perfectly reasonable place to be, with the walls verdant and mildly reflective and a pool of clear water beneath me. I said, “I think I’m falling for this girl.”
“Not Sybil.”
“Not Sybil.”
“So what are you doing here?”
“Being a dick,” I said, stunning myself with my crassness. I scrambled to soften it. “I guess.”
He coughed. “Want to get something to eat?”
I dropped the end of the cigarette into the toilet. “You bet,” I said.
* * *
We got microwaved burritos at the Kwik Stop adjoining the hotel, and ate them out on the curb. I couldn’t fill myself fast enough, and ended up going in for another. Tyro watched people walking in and out of the store and made up secret obsessions for them. “Ass freak,” he said. “Angora goatfucker.” I put my head in my hands and watched spilled gasoline trace prismatic amoebas in a puddle of water.
“So Mix,” Tyro said. “Why are you doing this shit?”
“Cartooning?”
“No, animal sacrifice.”
I didn’t want to talk about it. “Hard to say,” I said.
“Is it the money?”
Of course that was part of it, but if money was all I ever wanted, I would probably have it already. The truth was that my life was fine, and could have stayed fine indefinitely, but I didn’t want fine, I wanted great. So I had to change something. But I had no guiding ambition, and in my fumbling for one seemed to have traded fine for pathetic. I was feeling like I could spend years just trying to get things back to fine again. I wouldn’t have said this to Tyro even if I could, at that moment, have formed the complex sentences necessary to do so. All I said was, “Not really.”