The Road Narrows As You Go (20 page)

She considered a threat a strip that was too similar to hers, in style, content, character types, and how recently it was launched, and so on— there were only so many spots in the newspaper. If an editor had one spot come open and it was going to a cute animal comic to shore up the
Peanuts
fans who wanted more, then Wendy had to make sure
Strays
was funnier, had more interesting drawings, and captured the times better than the rest.

Gordo
posed no threat, there was no threat from
Wright Angles
or
Ben Swift—
well-drawn family strips in the mode of
For Better or Worse
weren't going for all the merchandising she was.
Inside Woody Allen—
a strip that looked like a Johnny Hart comic but was almost entirely about sex, had limited, college-wide appeal.
Eek & Meek
was a funny animal-people strip about loafers that had lasted close to two decades. It was more accessible than
Bloom County
, less mechanical than
Garfield
, not as anachronistic or offensive as so many other legacy strips; it cleaved the same path as Wendy's, acting subversive using animals, and not exactly derivative of Schulz but still well within the shadow of
Peanuts
. There weren't the cute
kids, but slacker hippies and beatnik mice instead. But it was unlikely that
Eek & Meek
would become a sensation with the kids again after fifteen years. Howie Schneider was someone to learn from. Not a threat.

So for the time being, she had no major threats beyond
Bloom County
, which received critical acclaim and sold millions of treasuries however few actual newspapers subscribed to it
. Strays
was in hundreds more papers, but Opus the penguin plush stuffed toys sold in comparable numbers to her dog Buck or rabbit Francis toys (Murphy the cat toys were her third best selling). Snoopy and Garfield outsold them all.

Garfield
was constantly on her mind. The omnipotent cat. She read it second after
Peanuts
. The antithesis of
Peanuts
in spirit. The two strips couldn't be more different in their sense of humour or appear together in more papers.
Garfield
was in some ways the vain mirror of
Peanuts
, an image of
Peanuts
stripped of its pretense.
Garfield
was greedy.
Peanuts
seemed to accept collaborations with business, whereas
Garfield
clearly was a business. The cat was a machine, a die-cut machine of its own likeness, stamped out every day, repeated endlessly, producing timeless, cynical jokes about the ego. A tribute to laziness of the Roman variety, with slaves. Laziness was an ironic theme for a strip that was maniacally perfect in every detail, that required so much work to make right. And in light of the mass-production of
Garfield
merchandise, there was no lack of industry behind the scenes. The cat was self-centred and lazy, and
Garfield
the strip was self-centred and tireless. Garfield hated everything Snoopy stood for. Snoopy was outgoing and a charmer, a lover, a hero, a dancer, a poet, friend to small things, considerate of his family, respectful of Charlie Brown. Garfield had none of that. Side to side with
Peanuts
,
Garfield
was its inferior. The drawings were better in
Peanuts
, but drawings aside,
Peanuts
was the unrivalled behemoth in commercial ubiquity. Not only was
Peanuts
in the most papers of any strip, but the little folks were everywhere on everything. Snoopy was up there next to Mickey, Bugs, and Popeye in the upper pantheon of product placement. And in less
than a decade, so was
Garfield
. That's what fascinated her—how quickly Garfield found his place as a legacy strip. She hoped Buck and/or Murphy might one day be added to that list of legacy strips clogging newspapers and thrift stores far and wide. Not art, product—
Garfield
was the anthropomorphized fatcat company president or CEO with a self-entitled air of indifference to those he subjugates.
Garfield
was a metaphor, the strip was America.

Wendy sometimes felt that
Garfield
exposed all cartoonists as frauds after a fast buck and nothing else. Even the absurd world of
Garfield
was more patently mechanical, a wind-up toy world like a cuckoo clock. The drawings were rigorously consistent, panel to panel, strip after strip, the lines were flawless. The stoned eggs of Garfield's eyes with the lids mostly shut, his face-to-body proportions, the cat was drawn with the architectural accuracy of a cathedral, with every sign of human touch polished out. The dishes of Garfield's forward-tilted ears were shaded with the same number of black forks every time, three. The shoulders and back arches followed the draftsman's golden mean. The three stripes on the tip of the tail echoed the ears.

I'm not good enough, I'm in fact quite awful, the opposite of
Garfield
.
Garfield
scares Snoopy. The anti-Snoopy. There is a beautifulness to Garfield's plastic, immaculate, and synthetic permanence. The fakeness of the whole project of
Garfield
. I kind of love it.

Garfield
appeared in well over a thousand papers worldwide, and the anthologies were monster bestsellers in the millions. In the winter of eighty-two, Wendy's comic strip had three hundred and seventy-eight North American papers and counting. By the same time in eighty-four, she was in almost a thousand. The kids got keen on her strip, teens thought it was subversive, college kids collected her treasuries, and parents enjoyed the pangs of guilt Wendy's lost pets struck in their hearts. Buck reminded the elderly readers of Charlie Chaplin's tramp and Murphy of Buster Keaton's stoneface. The rabbit reminded them of W.C. Fields.

When I die I hope this doesn't flash before my eyes
, says Buck the dog as he bites dirt after drinking too much tonic at the flat tire.

Francis the rabbit comes hopping up to Sam the snake in one strip and says,
Lend me ten bucks, willya, it's Father's Day tomorrow
.

I only have seven
, hisses Sam.

No problem! You can owe me two bucks.

Home is the smell I inhale for
, says Buck in another strip.
If I can just smell home one more time …

We remember the day Gabby woke her up early one morning from a deep, grinding sleep to scold her over the phone for the punchline
Up your nose
. Need she remind Wendy she was already behind schedule and now this? It's a simple two-panel daily, and in the first panel Buck and Murphy are on a fence and Buck asks Murphy,
Where would you go in a time machine?
And Murphy answers,
Up your nose
. Explain how that makes any sense?

Wendy even laughed again to hear her own joke.

Editors won't accept
Up your nose
, Wendy. Readers in the Bible belt will complain it's too euphemistic for the funny pages.

Is that a word?

So she rewrote the joke to read,
I'd go back in time to before you asked that question and kick you off the fence
.

Don't worry, I love your style, but you give printers a headache. Remember, this has to be shrunk down to the size of a bookspine. Just so I can defend it to the guys upstairs, what's funny about
today's
strip? How many trips to the hamper did you make before you drew
this
one?

Francis says,
I'm a bunny from the land of bilk and money
?

Yeah, what's funny about that? Listen, Wendy, editors are looking for new strips to tide them over while
Doonesbury
's on repeats. Come out with some sensational stuff this year and you'll be set for life. Just think about it.

She would rip open fan mail forwarded to her from her syndicate.

Another smalltown American child's favourite strip was
Strays
, there was no bigger fan in the universe, and willing to adopt Buck into a good home. She flung the letter in our direction and asked one of us to write the kid back a doodle-filled letter for her to autograph. Aren't there any letters from a Dr. Pazder today? she would ask.

On bad days, if Wendy was tapped for
Strays
jokes, she drew what came naturally to her outside comics: watercolours and gouaches of backdrops for
Oklahoma!
,
Miss Liberty
,
Dracula
,
White Christmas
, and other plays. Growing up she had watched her mother work as a stage manager for dozens of productions. Wendy could sketch these set designs from muscle memory. After losing a day of work distracted by painting, she occasionally fooled herself into thinking she was on to something and considered showing them to Justine Witlaw as a
body of work
, see what she had to say. But she never got up the nerve.

Oh, I get art all right
, says Murphy in one strip.
But I don't think art gets me.

Looking out upon the corrugated city with all the homes laid out like pastry cakes in a dessert tray up and down the hills and valleys of our great peninsula. Lit by store signs and neon advertisements and billboard commercials, skies flush with plastic lemon, lime, orange, watermelon regularly washed in the thick suds of a Pacific fog.

STRAYS

15

You found Justine Witlaw's art gallery off Pine Street west of Chinatown, up a flight of stairs over a tailor's shop open seven days a week that did full suits and gowns and alterations within the hour. Justine's welllighted white plaster cube was open to the public Thursdays to Sundays, noon until four and otherwise for appointments. She represented eleven artists, including Jonjay. The focus was the Bay Area's contribution to the avant-garde, which Justine Witlaw sold to major American institutions. Twenty-seven-year-old Ferzetti's anti-objects were meant to attract the interests of the Guggenheim and MoMA. Nobody in San Francisco would buy O'Connell's blue squares until they heard Witlaw had sold ten to hang in the lobby of Bank of America's head office. The National Portrait Gallery in D.C. borrowed one of Klein-Regge's feminist videos for an exhibition with catalogue. Justine lent two Monelles to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a commission from the Seattle Art Gallery for a permanent installation in the mezzanine. Jonjay's work was in the collection of the Austin University Library and the investment bank Hexen Diamond Mistral.

It was a Friday afternoon and the space was empty except for us and the art.
This May Be My Last Path
—the title of the current show was labelled in black vinyl letters on a pimply white wall above the name in bigger letters: David Lelio Ferzetti.

Ferzetti made plinths. A dozen of his most recent four- and five-foot rectangular white plinths carved in ivory took up the gallery floor. The surface of each plinth was a cavity filled in with silver and gold, to the effect of making tall teeth of his plinths. The fillings were the sculptures. The walls were empty. There wasn't much else to see except a price book with numbers in the low four figures, red dots stuck to half the titles.

It was Wendy who had the idea to bring Mark Bread and his portfolio along with them when they went to pick up what Jonjay was owed. Jonjay went behind the counter to fetch Justine. Moments later she came out into the gallery as if it were a ballroom. Arms spread wide, she flung herself across the hardwood to embrace Wendy in a cold, indifferent hug, and how wonderful it was to see her. The two hardly knew each other. Met once or twice. She was hamming for Jonjay. Justine never smiled. More to the point, nothing was funny. Her tastes ran to the Mandarin. She was taller than Wendy and possessed of a natural and enviable atrabilious elegance, weighed not more than a hundred pounds all dressed, even if she kept on the costume jewellery, the charm bracelets, the scarab bead Egyptian goddess bib necklace spread across the bare ribs of her décolletage, and the chunky gold-plated interlocking C's of her Chanel beltbuckle displayed in the bowl of her pelvis. The sharp blades of her hips jut out at her sides but there seemed to be no legs inside the flowing pleated pants of her peacock one-piece Kaisik Wong jumper. Justine Witlaw, wispy as she was, could fill a room.

She was most pleased to meet Mark Bread, another artist. She muted a yawn. And do you draw cutie animals, too? Justine laughed mirthlessly and took Wendy by the arm and told them all to follow her into the back room, sit, have an aperitif and catch up. A bottle of champagne popped
open on her by accident moments ago and we might as well share it with her. Did someone bring pot by any chance? You're your hair, Wendy. Where had Jonjay
been
all this time? Had to cancel your solo show last year, you flake. When should they reschedule? Soon, Justine hoped. He'd need to make new work since she sold the four pieces from the flat files in the back room. No matter, last year was great for Republicans but terrible for the art market.

Mark had two joints. He lit the first and handed it to Justine. She smoked and flipped through the pages of sfumato in the portfolio Mark had laid on the glass coffee table in front of her.