The Road Narrows As You Go (49 page)

A salon-style, loosely diamond-shaped cluster of small framed pictures completed the first of Justine Witlaw's two white cubes dedicated to Jonjay's doings. This salon was of ephemera. The coracles at sea Jonjay painted with a palette of rotting vegetables. All the absent-minded sketches he had made over the years while watching TV in between the bigger, more mysterious projects that delayed this show. His forays into comix. His sketches for the logo of Ruthvah ~ For Men.

In an adjoining cube, nine televisions and nine VCRs displayed late-night babble from Jonjay's library of ninety-nine VHS cassettes. Titled
Icing Sugar, 1981–82
, the setup showed Jonjay's curatorial of subliminally cheap late-night pawn shop commercials, hair-raising talkshow interviews, surreal newscast footage. At around the half-hour mark, all nine screens would show footage of the giant pile of mysterious white powder blocking traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge. Footage of the event, snippets of commentary, clips showing the mini-crash in the stock market as a result of the mysterious white powder, and his recordings of the public announcement of the scientific results. There was no mention of his—or our—involvement in the incident.

Another cassette contained a ninety-minute edit of his indoor mountain climb of No Manors, from the basement to the attic and down again, titled
No Mountain
.

In the centre of the gallery, a piece called
JNJY
—three arcade games
flashed Jonjay's astounding high scores on Pong, Pac-Man, and Donkey-Kong, which visitors to the gallery were invited to try to beat.

Opening night, it was Mark Bread and Biz Aziz who got all the attention normally reserved for the artist. Justine guided her clients to us by saying that we had lived with the missing artist. Mark is my artist, Justine said, and you all know of Biz Aziz. Everyone did seem to know Biz, perhaps through her performances, and now also for the storyline of issue nine. Old Russian Hill retirees, the blue-chip collectors, they all wanted Mark to tell them—
what did
it
taste like?
Again, Mark ended the evening locked in the broom closet heaving red wine, beer, and cheese into a mop bucket. Justine pulled Biz Aziz aside and said, I don't know why it's taken me so long to ask, but could I show some of your artwork? I think I could do a lovely job presenting them here, that is, if you're willing to sell.

Don't curse me, Justine, said Biz through downcast eyes.

I won't.

You can't put some crazy hex on me.

No hex, Justine said. I promise. What kind of hex?

Don't ask. I'm impervious anyway. Got my own hex. Hex curses hex.

Justine pressed her hand to her heart. Justine assured her: The art work, the hard work, the work, that's what my gallery is about. Original works from your comics on the wall—, she spread her fingers out as she envisioned, —and mannequins on plinths wearing your costumes.

Irwin Gerund, covering Jonjay's exhibition for Shepherd Media's entertainment segment on the six o'clock news, said the show was the one
San Franciscans have been waiting years to see. And does not disappoint. Not only is the artist missing, adding mystery to these exquisite works, but the range of materials is breathtaking. Video, found art, watercolours, pencil, ink, and even graphite rubbings of the desert floor …

STRAYS

Every weekday morning while Wendy was away, we tuned in with millions of others to Shepherd Media's
Replicant Fitness
to watch host Manila Convençion do android aerobics. We called this inspiration.

Manila's body strained realism. Fairy-tale proportions. Instead of narrating her own moves, Manila silently followed the guidance of a disembodied, erotically husky female computer voice saying
And a-one, and a-two, and a-three
… Manila was backed up by three more superfit women also dressed as replicants: extreme makeup, skidpunk hairdos shaved and shorn in weird ways and dyed weird colours, fishscale sequins on top, fake-anaconda-skin bikinis, fishnet and spandex bodysuits, clear plastic jackets, all four replicants stretching in sync to Donna Summer's
I Feel Love
, Herbie Hancock's
Rockit
, George Clinton's
Atomic Dog
,
Planet Rock
by Afrika Bambaataa. The four replicants did erotic android aerobics reminiscent of both private dancers and break-dancers, juking on their backs, jerking on their stomachs, humping to the side, bumping to the back, stretching calf muscles, stretching thigh muscles, working those glutes, working those glutes some more, and back on their backs, glutes, thighs, glutes, abs—another hard workout on another foggy night in the middle of a busy street in NeoTokyo, surrounded by electronic geishas and courtesans, security robots, blackmarket crimelords, motley convicts, patrolled from above by flying police spinners. Sparing expense, Shepherd Media bought the shell of the muggy, nocturnal city street used in
Blade
Runner
for backdrop. Rain occasionally wetted their clothes. We didn't necessarily follow along with the routines.

When
Replicant Fitness
was over at noon, it actually felt dirty, as if we had all masturbated together. The steamrooms were out of the question now. So many people around us had died of AIDS, sex itself was becoming a turn-off. Aerobic eroticism was enough. We split up to double up: Twyla ground the coffee beans for Mark to brew a pot while Patrick and Rachael cycled downhill to the coffee shop without a name to collect any faxes from Wendy—it housed the unofficial
Strays
fax machine—and buy four more espressos to drink cold after lunch's coffee.

The coffee shop had no name, no signage, but was special at the time, for it had a massive iron roaster right on the premises, a huge thing imported on a train from Guatemala. We went there for the espresso. It was conveniently located right down the hill on Mission Street. When we wanted more than the coffee at home, this was where we went. Wendy had found the place. She liked to go there because there were lots of giant handmade wood tables, great for drawing on, and big enough to fit a group of seven. A longtable away from the longtable, she would say. Plus the unpredictable customers all made perfect subjects for sketches during the hyperactive upswing on the fierce caffeine. A lot of her ideas came from sketches done at that coffee shop without a name.

We were on our third pot of homemade coffee by the time the nightly news came on, when we heard President Reagan confess he never drank coffee at lunch.
I find it keeps me awake for the afternoon
. Old man.

Here at the manor there was no cut-off hour. Noon, midnight, what's the difference? Four A.M. was as good a time as P.M. to brew a pot. We drank cup after cup of sunlight. How many hundreds of pots did it take to animate the
Strays
Christmas special?

32

Wendy returned to the manor in the middle of April or May—perhaps as late as June of eighty-five. She carried with her three identical pieces of wine-coloured Louis Vuitton box luggage in small, medium, and large, inside of which were designer clothes, pounds of books and comics, and more work for us. Yes, Rachael, take a good look at the handwritten list of contracts she'd signed with businesses overseas in regional and foreign merchandise deals, reproductions, licences, and the one she was most proud of: to design the interior mural of the U.S.A. cultural pavilion at the eighty-eight Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada.

We're going to need more freeloaders.

How's that Christmas special coming along? she asked us.

No thanks to you, said Twyla and turned her back and almost started to cry.

What's the matter?

We blamed Wendy for our failure on that front. Instead of hiring professionals, as sane people must have at some point advised her to do, she spent at least a hundred thousand dollars of her own money to let
us dawdle over this dream of hers. The hours we clocked, the years gone by—compare that to what we'd accomplished—ten minutes?

We decided to show her what we had done.

Rachael set up the movie screen in the spare bedroom. Patrick massaged her feet. Mark rolled joints. The ambiance was set.

Out of the twenty-two minutes of screentime her script had to fit into, we now had about ten. We had lost six minutes trying to figure out how to include this massive celluloid background and then gained back three minutes in less than a month of work. We showed her the new beginning with the sweeping, three-minute tracking shot. Then we spooled in a few of the scenelets that would go in between the regular action. The cartoon opens with Buck walking alone, drawn in a style that's flatter than Disney but his movements have the same Disney smoothness. Before the first commercial break there's a pan across the lot to meet up with Murphy and all of a sudden the style switches rudely—as a joke—to Hanna-Barbera's low-budget corner-cutting roughness. That's what Murphy says when he pulls at his fur and comes up penniless—
time to start cutting corners
. When viewers return from commercials, they don't return to the same style at all. Instead they get a pixelated black-and-white MacPainted version of Francis the rabbit delivering a speech. It turns out to be the image on a television set. Clay next—for a dream sequence Nicki the parrot has we sculpted the entire cast and made a 3D set. Felt puppets and a set made of painted cardboard for another interruption. Us in costumes stop-motion. We even did that. There was always an excuse for these jumpcuts and unsmooth transitions. The transitions from technique to technique, though not seamless, didn't need to be to function, and we thought the whole thing had a rhythm that held it all together as a piece. Kids these days watched rock videos on MTV, we thought, and were savvy to our leapfrog from clay to paper, chalk to salt, wireframe models to computer animation. Or so we hoped.

Amazing. I love it. It's beyond weird so I'm in love. Wow. Keep going.

She seemed distracted.

I think you all deserve coconut Nanaimo bars, she said and opened the lid of a white pastry box in which a dozen of these confections lay in layered slabs waiting for us to eat.

More than two minutes a year, she said as she helped herself to one. That's
not bad
considering cartoons are
hard work
. And you taught yourselves the art. Can't rush goodness. What's happening is way insaner than I scripted. That tracking shot is worth the delay. But now we need to press on the gas. You've got all the pieces, friends. The backgrounds are ready. The character breakdowns. In-betweens is all that's needed here. Paint some colours on cells, away you go. It's wind behind you from here on out, pals.

We ate the coconut Nanaimo bars, and one by one, as the sugar high kicked in, sat down at the longtable to draw.

Meanwhile Wendy and Frank set about manipulating the minds of the Evangelicals who lived next door. Without explicitly saying so, the intention this time around was to persuade the family to part with their home, sell the only home the husband had ever lived in, it turned out, through casual smalltalk investigation—his name was Peter Jesus Bernal. Peter Jesus claimed his Bernal ancestors had staked this hill two hundred years or so ago in the Lord's name. He loved this hill no matter how much it's changed since.

It was Wendy's idea to approach Anton LaVey with a request. For the next week or so, LaVey and two of his mistresses lived in Twyla's room at the manor. Twyla slept in Wendy's bed and Wendy stayed all the way out in San Jose with Frank at his suburban home.

Whenever the family left the home, Anton LaVey and mistresses would present themselves conspicuously doing satanic things like wearing pagan symbols over black clothes and caressing each other publicly and so on.

Hail Satan, I'm your new neighbour, my name is Anton LaVey. I'm in the process of moving the Church of Satan into this building next door to you. I hope you and your children will attend some of our public sermons. I'll be sure to leave our literature in your mailslot. But in the meantime, it's wonderful to meet you. If there's anything the church can do to help, let me know. Hail Satan.

Frank came by one day and said he was scouting properties and lowballed them. The counteroffer Peter Jesus made was so meek and pitifully afraid Frank shook on it without doing more damage. He and Wendy took possession in September. Frank moved to the city. No Manors became her studio and she lived next door.

We still paid no rent. In a sense we were captives to her goodwill.

On a good day Wendy took us all out for lunch at the coffee shop without a name, where the specialty was to put the potato chips right into the sandwich. Also she wanted to sketch the handsome bean roaster, a neo-hippie of some sort with broad shoulders and a ropy white ponytail hanging down his back half the way to his narrow hips.

Where
is
the bean roaster? said Twyla, craning her neck. A trip to the unnamed coffee shop isn't the same without a sighting. But he's
so old
to think of as a sex object, she said as she peeled away the tomato that was sogging the potato chips in her sandwich. Aren't you turned
off
by the yicky white ponytail?