He could draw like an angel, that man. I would have given my soul to be able to draw like him when I was a kid, or even, for that matter, after I'd had more training than he'd ever had in his life. You stuck a pencil in Uncle Benny's hand, and he would conjure a world for you, name it and Uncle Benny would draw it. It was he who first got me hooked, the sweet old pusher whispering to the innocent kid, Hey, Jimbo, want to try this? Guiding my hand along the page at first, showing me how to copy things from the newspaper comic strips, easy stuff at first like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, all clear sharp heavy lines, and then into the more complicated stuff from Abby an' Slats, or Prince Valiant. I did a marvelous copy of the Viking with the red beard who used to be in Prince Valiant, what was his name? I colored his beard the same color it was in the paper, and I also did one of Val himself swinging that mighty singing sword of his against a man with a helmet that looked something like an upended garbage pail. Uncle Benny said the perspective was off, but he praised the drawing anyway. I used to have a terrible handwriting in those days, so I would ask Uncle Benny to sign all my work for me, J. R. Driscoll, which was James Randolph Driscoll, the Randolph being in honor of my grandfather, who died when I was only four months old. Uncle Benny would sign each of my drawings in the lower right-hand corner, J. R. Driscoll, and then outline the signature with a narrow box that had a very heavy line on the bottom and on the right-hand side, so that it looked as if it were throwing a shadow on the page. I colored that guy's beard with crayon, what the hell was his name?
Pop wasn't much help in the art department, except in terms of criticism, You made his nose too long, or Whoever saw a dog with a tail like that? But he was very proud of the work I did, and always asked me to bring it out whenever any of his cronies from Gimbel's stopped by. He was an upholsterer, my father, and he used to work for Gimbel's, an uneducated man who nonetheless taught himself to play the piano and who studied the dictionary night after night, taking it a page at a time and learning new words which he would spring on all of us while we sat at dinner in the big dining room overlooking the Hudson. "Do you know what a dimissory letter is?" or "What is the meaning of equitation?" or "What is the difference between geminate and germinate?" I remember one night especially because he gave us a word which became the basis for a game we later played. He said, "Use the word caruncle in a sentence," and I said, "Caruncle Benny have some more mashed potatoes?" and Pop almost died laughing, though my mother didn't think it was funny at all. In fact, I doubt if she even got it. But Pop invented the game called Caruncle, and we used to play it two or three nights a week, the three of us sitting on the brown sofa near the old Chickering, while my mother sat in the wing chair tatting; she used to make these antimacassars which she gave to everyone at Christmas, and which always looked faded and dirty when you put them on the furniture. The game Caruncle had no real rules and we played it by ear each time, the way my father played the piano. The idea was to give a word which the next person would then define incorrectly. For example, if my father used the word "disseminate," my uncle might have defined it by saying, "When you disseminate, it means you make a distinction," and then I would say, "No, that's discriminate," and my father would say, "No, discriminate is when you burn your garbage," and Uncle Benny would say, "No, that's incinerate," and I would say, "No, incinerate is when you hint at something," and Pop would say, "No, that's insinuate," and Uncle Benny would say, "No, insinuate is meat on Friday," and we would always end up laughing. Another word game we — played was called Progression and was a variation of Ghost, except that the idea here was to make a new word on each turn by adding a letter to the word we already had. Pop might start with the word "man," and Uncle Benny would add a letter and change it to "mane," and then I would make it "mange," and Pop would make it "manger" and Uncle Benny would make it "manager," and so on. Or I might start with "rid" and Pop would make it "dire," and Uncle Benny would make it "rived" and I would make it "divers" and Pop would make it "diverse," the idea being to reach ten letters which was the highest score and which hardly anyone ever got. My mother never played any of these word games with us. She had an Irish brogue and was ashamed of it.
When I was about twelve years old, I made up the comic strip called The Cat. It was a direct steal from Batman. My character was a very wealthy socialite named Jim Dirkson, which name I arrived at by transposing the letters of my own name and substituting a letter here and there. The Cat was dedicated to fighting crime and evil. He wore a black costume just like Batman's, except that his face mask had whiskers on it. Uncle Benny helped me lay out the panels, and he also did all the lettering in the balloons. It was in full color, though I used Mongol pencils instead of ink. I did forty-eight panels, which I figured was enough for about twelve days, and I asked Pop if he thought I should try sending it around to the newspapers. He said, "Sure, why not? It's an excellent comic," but I never did submit it because I didn't think it was good enough. Besides, I felt funny about Uncle Benny having done all the lettering. I didn't know at the time that a lot of comic strip artists hire people just to do their lettering for them. After I saw Pinocchio, I decided I would make an animated movie, even though I didn't have either a camera or the faintest understanding of single-frame photography. I created all these characters freely stolen from the film, including one called Swat Fly, who was based on Jiminy Cricket and who even carried an umbrella the way he did. But I also had a two-headed giant named Galoppo, whom Walt Disney had never even dreamt of. The two heads were constantly arguing with each other. I borrowed Pop's old Remington and began typing up the outline of the movie, starting in this tiny star-washed village (like the village in Pinocchio) and showing Swat Fly walking down the cobblestoned street and searching for the shop of a poor-but-honest butcher named Ham. Well. I got through six pages of it, single-spaced, but nothing seemed to be happening, so I gave it up. Uncle Benny liked the sketches I'd made of the characters, however, and only casually hinted that they were somewhat derivative. "That's when you make fun of something," I said, and Pop immediately said, "No, that's derisive," and Uncle Benny said, "No, derisive are on either side of Manhattan Island."
Uncle Benny drank a lot. My mother used to call him "a disgosting drunk." He was Pop's brother, and he slept in the end bedroom, next to my room. He worked in a pool parlor, and once, he took me there and ran off a whole rack for me, and then taught me how to hold the cue and how to put English on a ball, and he taught me a trick shot with which I later won a lot of money, making bets in the Army; I never forgot that shot he taught me. He also taught me geometry when I was flunking it at Music and Art. Numbers always threw me, I never was good at arithmetic. When I started geometry, there was suddenly more than numbers to cope with; there were angles and curves and Given this, Prove that, and I got hopelessly lost in the first three weeks. Uncle Benny stepped in, telling me he had once won a medal in math, and then proceeding to drill me every night, going over each formula again and again, "There, now wasn't that easy, Jimbo?" painstakingly working through every problem until he was certain I understood completely. I used to wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and see triangles and circles floating in the air, equilateral has three sixty-degree angles and three equal sides, isosceles has two equal sides, circumference equals πr2. I ended up with a 90 on the Regents exam, thanks to Uncle Benny's persistence. He gave me a Bulova watch when I graduated from Music and Art. Engraved on the case was the inscription "To a geometrid genus," which was an inside joke based on Caruncle, "from your loving Uncle Benny."