The Road Narrows As You Go (59 page)

As a result of Frank's conviction all licensing and merchandising rights to
Strays
reverted to Shepherd Media, and instead of shelving the strip, the syndicate continued to reap its profits. Not all papers cancelled, though most did, in outrage. Maybe a third stayed on to see what would happen. Hiring a new artist-writer to take over proved to be difficult and perhaps unwise, so Shepherd sold reprints at a cut rate to the willing newspapers. In a quick switcheroo, instead of new ones, the first
Strays
strips from eighty-one started to reappear the week after Wendy got out of prison. The syndicate renewed the contract with Lupercal so toys kept coming off the production line and going into stores that would stock them. If there was demand, they would handle it. As per her contract, Wendy still received a cut. Gabrielle Scavalda was demoted to travelling salesman. On the road up and down the Eastern Seaboard six days out of seven, five weeks out of six, Gabby took to driving with a bottle of Gatorade between her legs, cut in half with vodka, and wasted most of the nineties selling
Loch & Quay
and other gag-a-day strips to satellite papers.

We didn't hear from Wendy the day she was released from prison, and we didn't hear from her in the days after that either. She didn't try to contact us and we didn't know if she wanted us to look her up. We sensed she was ashamed. We thought she must be depressed since we were so very depressed. But we didn't know where she was. Visiting Frank, perhaps? Well, she could be anywhere. Then one foggy afternoon after a few months went by, she left a message on the answering machine when nobody was
home that said she had to sell the manor and her house next door, and was sorry to say we'd have to leave. She said she missed us and wished us all well but she felt it was
better this way
. It was as if we were all in a relationship and she was breaking up with us over the phone. Either way, we didn't leave. We were after all freeloaders, and it was our habit to overstay our welcome. After this many years rent-free, we were ready to test Wendy's bluff.

Sooner than expected, a moving truck climbed Stoneman Street. It took the movers two days to pack everything into boxes, everything except for us and the forty-two-foot longtable. And the laundry hamper, which Patrick Poedouce kept.

Without further notice our time at No Manors was over. An advertisement went out in the classifieds for people interested in the lease on a five-bedroom quincunx-shaped main-floor suite in a dilapidated five-storey Edwardian in Bernal Heights.

Frank Fleecen and his insider trading racket, his conspiratorial hostile takeovers, greenmailing corporations, fake options and bogus instruments, his duplicitous mortgage hypothecations, his help balkanizing Central America, his responsibility for the collapse of the savings and loans—all that tainted Wendy, too, for she had opted to fall in love with this pariah.

But
her
story sold. We all cashed in. Our memories were not our own property. Memory was a hotel room we destroyed for entertainment purposes. If we felt strapped, memories of the manor were as good as a bank account. We told producers we had animated the never-aired
Strays
special. This cartoon was lore in the television industry of the nineties. Nobody came forward with a copy and ABC made the mistake of trashing theirs—that was the first thing that made the cartoon so valuable and legendary. We capitalized on that fact whenever we had to. And whatever details or memorabilia we could muster to sweeten the deal on our side were sure to increase our payment at the end. We sold Wendy's life story as if it was our own, piece by piece, and always with the same focus on the flesh, the crime, the drugs, sex, the cartoon.

Producers sought us out for our legitimately dirty eighties experiences, to transmute our memories into new entertainment. We were asked to look for inspiration no further than under our own fingernails. They all asked for the same thing: a wake, or at least a fresh take on urban cannibalism. They wanted the longtable. They wanted the laundry hamper. They just said, Give us some more of
issue nine
.

We lived at the manor at the time of Hick's death, took part in the wake, we were there when Jonjay disappeared, and we saw Wendy's success turn into a love affair that ended in headline news. Squatting at the manor all those years witnessing so much financed our futures. When things in life looked dire and as though all hope had come to an end for us, a new horizon opened up. This new world we entered into was eager for us to convert our life into fodder. We converted what we saw and did into latter-day careers. The flesh-eating, the deaths, the pounds upon pounds of dope, Death Valley's sailing stones, intimations of insider trading, and Wendy's downfall—this all became our bread and butter. If ever we were strapped, we could find work simply by mentioning to editors that we had lived at No Manors.

As the decades passed, comix readers traded gossip about the creation of the summer Christmas special that never got aired. The manor, the forty-two-foot longtable, who made what piece of art along the way, this had all become lore. The fans shared the legends and in doing so, circulated our names. Opinions on Rachael's musical adaptation of No Manors would appear in tributes to
Pan
. If you loved comics history then you hunted far and wide until you tracked down the rare copies of
The Mizadventurez of Mizz Biz Aziz
, and the rarest of all, number nine, where you could read all about Hick's wake. Number ten was almost as rare, and featured Jonjay's return to the manor and Biz's love affair with Vaughn Staedtler prior to his death.

Issue eleven also featured a one-page, nine-panel subplot of us slaving away on the
Strays
special. The only panel in the whole issue to show
Wendy was the frame in the centre of this page. She's surrounded by us and her own talk bubbles, asking questions and wanting updates, and then telling us she must go, her
business manager
is calling.

And Biz clearly showed time was not measured in minutes or days for us. We drank time in coffee cups. We smoked time. We drew out the years in reams. Counting up thousands upon thousands of drawings like a cult that had fallen under the sway of the most oblivious leader. The passion to please Wendy blinded us to any other audience. It was as though she had hired us back in eighty-one to mow her lawn, and we'd said okay, and taken her money, and without a plan, each of us had sat down at a different spot in her yard willynilly and got to work using nail scissors to cut each blade one at a time. Trying to make sure all the blades got cut to an even length. Frame by frame, drawing this animation, laying down a technique, only to find it didn't match up at all with what the others were doing. Everyone's approach was so different. We had no other choice but to mindmeld them all into something horrendous and hopefully beautiful.

Issue eleven of Biz's comix ends the series. The trials and tribs of producing/directing big-production drag shows on a dental-floss budget— coupled with backstage dramas, fan mayhem, post-Nam insomnia nightmares, daymares, regrets, guilt, anger, her friendship with Hick, her love affair with Vaughn—got to her. She published a four-hundred-page hardcover edition of the entire series with Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's imprint at Pantheon in ninety-two with back-cover blurbs from Kathy Acker and Divine. She won a special citation from Pulitzer in ninety-three for
groundbreaking art and literature
. A twenty-city book tour across America made her a sensation, and she was the subject of a fifteen-thousand-word profile in the
New York Times Magazine
. After a disastrous panic attack at the San Diego Comic-Con, Biz once again removed herself from public view. The rumour was that Justine Witlaw found Biz Aziz in the Twomps, where she had gone to live with her son. A son conceived the week in seventy-one that Funkadelic released their album
Maggot Brain
,
and now, fifteen years later, apparently her son aka Murder Dubz was heir to the throne of slain drug kingpin Felix the Cat, and if the stories were true, Biz had a room in his safehouse where she continued to draw but never published.

It was Patrick Poedouce who confirmed the rumour. When his apartment's front door was kicked off its hinges and his place ransacked, his eye blackened, and all that was taken was Hick's laundry hamper, rather than quail in fear in a corner, Patrick went out the next day to find who stole it. He didn't know where to start and his mind turned to Biz Aziz and this garret she was said to have in the house of a drug kingpin in South Oakland. When he finally found the place, a derelict Victorian in between two abandoned stucco postwar bungalows in a treeless neighbourhood, Biz Aziz said she wasn't surprised to see him. She introduced Patrick to her son and they happily returned Hick's laundry hamper to him. Then Biz showed Patrick what she'd been working on—a hundred and seventy pages long, it was called
Murder'z Diary
and depicted life in the Twomps from the point of view of her son, the extraordinarily ruthless crack dealer, amphetamine dealer, marijuana monopolist, and so on, using real quotes. Patrick persuaded her to let him show a copy around to publishers, and in 2001, Fantagraphics published
Murder'z Diary
with no promotional tour or interviews. Reviewers tended to praise the graphic novel for the same reasons they condemned the milieu from which the comic came, for the crack epidemic was dramatic and tragic and by this time deeply embedded in the American consciousness.

Collectors perennially traded
Strays
merchandise at San Diego Comic-Con and other conventions and through new & used comic stores. You knew it was a
Strays
original because it bore the Lupercal trademark imprinted on the bottom. That's around the time we started to consider what we had lying around that we could put up for sale to make a bit of extra money. The thing we knew had the most value was in those film canisters, our
cartoon special. But after more than ten years, we didn't know who had the film. We hoped it was in Wendy's hands. But we didn't know. No one heard from her.

One night around three in the morning in the year 2002, surrounded by bottles of anti-retroviral medication, reams of paper, and drawing supplies, Mark Bread was lying in bed surfing eBay in the room he now rented on the third floor of No Manors for twenty dollars a week when he happened to see this:

Strays Summer Christmas Special—this is the real deal, folks. The complete 22-minute unreleased STRAYS animated cartoon ABC cancelled a DAY before the premiere. DVD, all regions. Excellent quality transfer off original VHS dub from reels. $30 per copy + Shipping.

The seller had original Peter Pan and Hook drawings signed by Hick Elmdales and other unheard-of
Pan
memorabilia posted for auction, as well as
Mizadventurez
issues, including issue one (only a hundred copies were printed) and issue nine. More dead giveaways, Mark thought, in the postings for
Strays
merch,
Medusa
issues, original art from
Loch & Quay
, not to mention
The Mischiefs
out-of-print books.

Whered u git this!? Mark e-mailed—right after he clicked to order a copy of the bootleg DVD.

It's me, Wendy, she wrote back a few minutes later.

OMG where r u fuck!?

Soon after the launch of YouTube in oh-five,
The Strays Summer Christmas Special
was posted in three segments. Within two days, a hundred and fifty thousand people had watched it. A million views within a year. Irwin Gerund saw a clip posted on a blog he pilfered jokes from and wrote a squib on his
ShepherdMedia.com
entertainment blog, and all the Shepherd Media papers picked up the post in print and online with links to YouTube. A million more watched.

41

Carrying Essa's baby girl blanketed and asleep in the same kind of cardboard box the California Institution for Women used to store her belongings, Wendy waited under a hot sun outside the gates for her taxi to arrive. This time she wouldn't be going back into Chino, the closest suburb, where she'd been sleeping in a fifties roadside motel while the paperwork settled guardianship. Blue sky above her, and the faintest quiffs of cloud over the peaks of the mountains along the distant horizon—the air across Wendy's face sparkled with desert dust. Now that all the paperwork was signed and baby Essa Mole Deattur Auer was in her hands, Wendy had half a mind to go back to the manor and start a new drawing, pick up right where she left off—really, she was that close to coming home. After all, it was only August; two months ago she thought she was going to win the Reuben and watch her cartoon premiere on network television.

Straight to LAX, she told the driver. The baby woke up in the cab and wept redfaced and shaking until Wendy figured out she was hungry for a bottle of formula. At the airport she bought a one-way ticket for a coach
seat to Canada. The flight to Victoria was mired by turbulence and the customs official took a long time deciding. But once through, that little city she grew up in was still there on the foot of the big island off the west coast, yes, smack where she left the city six years before. All the same people, every house, the roofshingles, not a dog missing, not even very many new books on the shelves in the library.

Before Essa was captain of her high school's volleyball team, before she auditioned for an all-girls' college production of
Death of a Salesman
, even before she skinned her knees or learned to crawl, when she was still a baby with a round tummy and inexplicable needs, but so simple they seemed obvious and yet impossible to fathom, cyclical needs, and desperate: Was she hungry? Was she tired? Was she gassy? No? Then was she in need of a diaper change? Oh my god, maybe she
was
hungry? The rash, the wrinkles on her face, the diaper's elastic imprinted in the thighs, it exhausted Wendy with worry, thrust into motherhood. Baby Essa depended on the tenderness and affection Wendy supplied. Every squirm and squawk for love. Growing was her purpose. Wendy would rather harm come to her than the baby. Essa's babyface was more beautiful, soft, and better smelling than anything Wendy had ever seen or could imagine on this earth.