The Road Narrows As You Go (8 page)

Ernie Bushmiller was present throughout the entire weekend, he sat drawing fences and sidewalks and fire hydrants for fun and listened happily to the others talk fear of Soviet willpower in Europe, fear of American arrogance in Central America. Libyan terrorists. Jewish homeland. Iranian hijackers. The draft dodgers up in Canada. The bald, rosy-cheeked, liverspotted creator of
Nancy
, still nimble with his fingers and quick-witted though he abstained from political jabber, Ernie Bushmiller was shaped like a bouncing rubber ball wearing suspenders with little hands that extended out and could draw amazingly well—and that's what he wanted to talk about, drawing. A drawing was the soul of all art. Bushmiller was drawing pictures of neighbourhood fences and passing them to us to complete the picture with figures and talk balloons. His fences weren't Berlin Walls, they were barriers between childhood and adulthood, or between the imagination and its prey, easily climbed over, spied through, vandalized, and whitewashed. Bushmiller believed in the power of the pen. Talent erodes if not used, he said as he scribbled. The imagination shrivelled if not stretched.

Another senior cartoonist stepped up—it might have been
Beetle Bailey
's Mort Walker—and argued talent was steady, it was skill and technique that eroded if not applied. But ideas gathered ideas, patience intensified the imagination, and the force of a passion strengthened all the forces in one's life, work begat work, and only in very unusual cases, some would argue, did talent split the atom of talent. Look around, said Walker, and Ernie Bushmiller scanned the room as if waiting for that spark he believed in to make this wake a fireworks.

In the living room, the
Bloom County
artist Berkeley Breathed spat
and howled at the news on the TV screen, There's scaffolding over the Statue of Liberty, for crissakes! America is one big plastic-surgery disaster. Who am I talking to?

Art Spiegelman sat on the staircase below Bill Blackbeard, the local comics historian. Spiegelman balanced an ashtray on top of a row of books that ran up the stairs and the two friends shared a pack of Parliaments and talked about Hick, death, the chances of Armageddon. It's a nightmarish game of chicken that's been looming over my entire life, said Blackbeard. My parents had a bomb shelter. And I wish I had a bomb shelter.

Spiegelman scratched at his face and neck, then lit a third cigarette. Now we know how naive we were to think there was any shelter.

Patrick Poedouce said he figured if Brezhnev dropped a bomb on this house, a cartoonist could get any job he wanted.

Biz Aziz held her hand over her mouth as she retreated from the master bedroom. She had just gone to visit him. There were tears in her eyes she had to stroke away. Trembling, she sat down next to us and said, Oh he's so small, so small, like a branch. He used to be like two-fifty. One of those guys with fat genes, or hormones, you know. He was big even when I first knew him on Geary Street, he used to sell drawings off the sidewalk, practically lived on dollar hamburgers and fifty-cent pancakes. This would be like seventy-five, seventy-four maybe. I earned next to nothing back then, Biz said, but Hick earned nothing at all. Drawing comics saved us both, that's all there is to it. I was sure with my luck I was going to be the one who goes young, man. How angry I was as a teenager getting into aimless trouble, then luck gets me drafted to Vietnam, which turns out to be Cambodia, and the army takes away my weapon and gives me a pad of paper and some pencils instead, damn. I thought it would be me laid out there.

There he was at the far end of the table, shrouded in black cloth and charcoal shadows.

The deceased lay to rest in a handwoven Peruvian basket placed on top of the longtable in his bedroom. Green candleflames shone around him emitting no discernible light. The longtable in effect ended early at the open double doors to his bedroom, with the final feet of its length dedicated to him, for private visitations. Waiting for some sign from the afterlife, a moth's dance of greeting, an intoxicating fragrance, a sequence of sentient lights, any kind of clue from beyond the pale that Hick knew his friends were here. This was where he had worked and slept and where he was going to spend his last weekend in the manor. They had made his room up for the occasion. Before his body arrived, Biz Aziz saw to it everything in the master bedroom was decorated in blacks, black candles burning green, black lace, black drapes pulled across the bay window overlooking the city, and not another word about Disney's men to spoil the atmosphere. Dark black funk music accompanied the look. Periodically we raided the laundry hamper in an attempt to keep enough joints rolled to satisfy the mourners. Getting high until their eyes barely opened and drawing until their fingers cramped up was how many of them outwardly grieved. The teetotallers couldn't blame the rest for succumbing, and anyway all of us were doodling diabolical scenes.

What did he die of? guests wanted to know, but Wendy had no definitive answer. The doctors had told her he died of a combination of pneumonia, dysentery, arthritis, inflammation, cancer, and so on. That such a young man could rack up such an extensive list of illnesses was inexplicable enough, but that in the past six months more than a dozen young men had died this same way was something of a frightening mystery.

All of Wendy's stuff was at the other end of the longtable, in the kitchen nook, in a bay window that faced south towards the suburbs. The kitchen was a bright place and Wendy worked at night.

She rubbed her eyes. I'm afraid to go near that mucilaginous sludgepile of dirty dishes in the sink …, she said. She shook her head, pulled her bottom lip, and looked out the window. The neighbours are hardcore
Evangelicals with two children under the age of ten, they must wonder what the fuck's going on. God, I feel like I'm about to throw up out of my eyes. My gut is spazzing on me. My brain is glue. I am so broken. I can't believe he's dead.

All right enough monkey business, let's get these dishes spotless for Wendy, said Rachael and slapped Twyla on the knee, pulled Mark by the ear to the sink. We can do this, Wendy, we can help you.

Filth does not know it is filth, said Mark Bread as he cracked a tall can of beer and slurped at it, looking at the dishes submerged under an oily murk in the twin sinks. There was paintbrushes and plastic easels in there, too.

Get those hands dirty, said Rachael and snapped her fingers at Patrick. That was one of Rachael's many talents, we soon learned; she could always organize and lead us when we felt incoherent and apathetic—she pointed us in a direction. When we finished up at the sink—and you can believe it took all four of us—we felt ready for hell itself and asked for more. Wendy laughed and said that was plenty for now, invited us to sit down again in four spare chairs at the longtable and gave us stacks of paper and aimed us at some pens and pencils and said she would join us once a few more depressing phone calls got made.

It's time to draw, she said. Go ahead.

It might have been Charles Schulz we sat down next to at the longtable, Cathy Guisewite or Dik Browne, another winner of the Reuben Award, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter. These legendary cartoonists were seated next to the most ignoble amateurs that night, us, and career or not, we all passed the time playing drawing games. Nudged in the ribs by Spain Rodriguez. C'mon, c'mon, he said, join in. We shrugged him off the first round, saying we weren't good enough for anything but washing up.

Games are kind of a tradition with big parties at the longtable, Wendy said. You must join in.

In every round of a drawing game you had five minutes to complete
your picture, the majority decided a winner and the all-out loser, who relinquished a chair to a new player. The winner invented the next challenge. One would shout out:

Draw an animal you've never drawn before.

Then another cartoonist would say: Draw a spaceship with no wings.

Draw your worst idea for a superhero.

Draw a whole fairy tale—in one minute.

Draw a barouche, a calash, or a landau.

Draw a wise man on a mountain.

Draw an emergency room situation.

Draw a ziggurat, xenodochium, or schloss.

Draw a plague doctor.

Draw weightlifting monsters.

Draw Ping, Pang, and Pong from
Turandot
.

Using your opposite hand, draw a man playing piano.

Draw a pirate in Hick's style with your eyes closed.

Draw a horse race upside down.

Draw sex from memory.

Draw soldiers from World War One versus soldiers from the Cimbrian War.

Draw a caveman and a Neanderthal and a merchant marine.

Draw a scene from the life of Aleister Crowley.

Draw a dinosaur with landscape.

Draw a family of tourists with landscape using your wrong hand.

Draw an SF boho in the style of Fontaine Fox.

Draw a scene from
Hamlet
in the style of George Herriman.

Draw the San Francisco skyline in the style of Lyonel Feininger.

Draw your panic.

Draw yourself as you will look in fifty years.

Draw a Kama Sutra position performed by Shaggy and Velma.

Draw Ronald Reagan with your eyes closed.

Games preoccupied us for hours and hours over the course of the two-night wake, and so time passed almost without an appearance. Coffee kept eyes dilated all the way until Monday morning. Coffee, hot night in a cup, making our hearts race like ink on paper, we drank it for life.

Casual interrogation was another game. Questions about process, this need to know about each other's tools, as they doodled and drank and reminisced. Not for all. Not for us. This line of questioning was intended to expose, in full, the contents of each other's toolkit. There was a collector's-fetish fascination with how others did the same thing. Lay black ink on white paper, should be simple, but only in your dreams was it ever.

What type of pen? Brush or nib? What brand of nib, what size, what shape, what brand of brush, what sizes? Of all the blacks out there to choose from, what inks were favoured, what brand of watercolour was the one, what kind of paper did you go for, was the paper coated, what was its bond weight? What size did they draw their panels, and did they use a lightbox, did they trace? Did they have assistants and what were the assistants used for?

Some had invented ways to get a certain look, say, for instance, the rays of the cosmos, snowy days, rainy nights, shadows on brick, or intricate patterns on fabric. Nobody worked with quite the same set of tools, there was so much available.

What pen do you use?

The 914 Radio Esterbrook.

Name a brand, it was here. Hick had tried them all. An armoury of pens. To complement the mason jars full of brushes and pens and pencils there were hundreds of small plastic canisters to fill with diluted ink for doing washes. There were tons of flimsy watercolour palettes caked with a rainbow of paint sediment. Kneadable rubber erasers in various states of decay. T-squares, French curves, and the rest of the drafting tool family were here and ready.

Pelikan M400 14C for lettering.

Visconti black. Parker red. Holbein blue.

Yasutomo ink, swear by it. Nothing's blacker.

Hold on, let me write that down.

And an abundance of blank paper. Reams of old yellowing paper Hicks had picked up at flea markets that smelled of vanilla. Unsealed boxes of handmade watercolour paper he mailordered for on impulse. Thousands of sheets of heavy-duty bristol boards. Arches paper. Canson brand.

Take a piece of bristol that's as smooth as glass and lay some carbonbased black inks on it: sticks to the paper and dried so perfectly it looked already like print.

Reeves watercolours. A tray a week, a month.

Grumbacher brushes. Grumbacher pastels. Grumbacher.

The infamous Falcon pen from Bink Wells & Co. So smooth.

With the right tools, the right brands, the right materials, the right table, talent had no choice but to skyrocket. The right pen or brush matched up with the ideal ink on the perfect paper could turn mediocrity into mastery overnight. Could the tricks of Alex Toth be taught? Yes. His photographic eye for detail, no. But his advice to go with fixed-width nibs for borders and for lettering, okay, that we would try to remember. Why all these dirty bristleless toothbrushes on the longtable? For scrapes, washes, and blood spatter. What's that you're doing? Trimming hairs off sable brushes with a razor. The confidences of Wally Wood, were they worth considering? Wally's eyes swam in his head. His neck was wet with sweat, soaking the collar of his shirt. He told us the best thing that ever happened to comic book artists was the Xerox machine. Three, he said. He owned three.

Alex Toth got up from his chair next to Wendy's and threw his pens down, lifted his arms and scratched the air as if fighting for oxygen. Use them all! Tools be damned! Don't be a hostage to your toolkit! To Wendy's delight, he pushed himself away from the longtable, disgusted with this
all-around obsession with pens. Grab a fucking Sharpie and get to work! He marched to the kitchen, shouting out, Bullshit and you know it! A drawing starts with a pencil and scrap paper!

I can't draw
Peanuts
without my tools, said Charles Schulz. That Esterbrook works for me. I'm afraid to leave my comfort zone. I guess that's why they call it a comfort zone.

Patrick took a bicycle off the ceiling and rode down the hill and bought a half a dozen Sunday newspapers so that everyone could look over the full-colour funny pages and compare colour prints from one to the other. It happened to be a Sunday of quotes by chance. With
Peanuts
on the front page of the
USA Today
pullout, Charlie Brown quoted Proverbs to Snoopy:
How long, you loafer, will you lie there? How long until you rise from your sleep
? and Snoopy answered with a different verse,
A good man cares if his beast is hungry
. Then over in Johnny Hart's
B.C.
a charred Neanderthal recited from Luke at the mouth of a smouldering cave. Cathy was on a blind date with an actor who had memorized the lines of both characters from
Th
e
Odd Couple
—Augh!