The Road Narrows As You Go (11 page)

No, not possible—it still never occurred to Wendy that Jonjay would do something so heinous. Magic was his motive, not cruelty. The reason Jonjay thought it was a good idea to perform this sort of mad theatrical mockery of flesh after death could be found in
Michelle Remembers
—and in almost all the books on Hick's shelves. This occult sideshow was Hick's lurid fascination, as an artist, not as a practitioner. Hick wouldn't condone actual practice of superstition, but he loved the aesthetic of the decadent. You could tell just by scanning the titles and authors how interested he was in whatever tread on the meridian, and how this theme inspired his drawings and his story arcs in
Pan
. Leading a double life as an amateur demonologist stoked by the literature of this tradition gave his
Pan
its subtle subversive side. Therefore Wendy would finish the last book, benign
as all the rest, and break the fake curse—petty symptoms begone! She blew her nose for the thousandth time and coughed out a pint of slime.

And her second reason to read contradicted the first. Break the fake curse while looking for the proof this memoir offered of the existence of the supernatural occult forces she felt so strongly surrounded her growing up in that small rainy city on the island. Why else would such a picturesque little city village fill her with such unimaginable dread? For as long as she could recall—crib days even, those days were rattled, too.

Wendy didn't like being Canadian. She told people she was from Cleveland. She wanted to be a fullblooded American like the rest of us; she didn't want anything so insignificant as a birthplace to hold her back. She wanted American children to read her comics, buy her toys, and watch her cartoon on American televisions, and we were going to help her.

After a week bedridden with flaring rashes, fever flashes, shiversshakes, she said it out loud: Nope, I think I have what Hick had. That's it. I'm done for. It's that fucking memoir. You shouldn't have read it, you fools. We're all going to die. And she threw the book at the wall. I finished every last word so help me. Who's next? Wendy stumbled and pressed herself against the wall, knocking down an original Dick Tracy drawing, I have this unspeakable modern dilemma, the George Orwell disease, the gay-related plague, that's what the nurses whispered in the corridor, now we have it, too.

Rachael brought her hot lemonwater and sent her back to bed with a Valium she bought on a street corner in the Mission. Sleep, sweet friend, you'll be okay, she said and pet Wendy's hair out of her face, slicked down with a cold sweat.

Teeth grinding. Wendy developed a near-permanent jaw clench after Hick's death, and at night or when she wasn't paying attention, her molars and bicuspids would squeak and crack out of tension so loud you could hear it through the walls.

I need to see a doctor about my teeth, she told Gabby over the phone.

What about your teeth?

I grind them.

You grind. Well, yeah, sign up for our Shepherd health care plan. There's plenty of options to choose from.

Goddamn
Michelle Remembers
.

Who?

The book may be cursed, said Wendy.

No idea what you're talking about.

Sleep was no escape—it was worse. She slept heavily. When she awoke her jaw was sore. All day long she was aware of a free-floating anxiety that never left her head, a grinding like a crazy caffeine rush that made her want to shit herself from migraine pain and then go carry a sign down the street with the words
The End is Near!

We all needed help. So one day we did the horrible and grabbed the keys to her lime-green Gremlin and drove to see Dr. Dritz in 5D, who recommended blood tests for all of us. The waiting room was full of these elderly men in their mid-twenties and thirties—hair falling out, flannel jackets a size or more too big, soiled shirts, and bodies ravaged by shigellosis, pneumonia, dead veins, burnt loins, pullulating cancer scabs. The waiting room ashtrays needed to be emptied. One of these young men leaned over to Mark and said, The plague is the new black. Mark, who rarely did, laughed. While we waited we flipped through current events magazines and national newspapers—Ronald Reagan was the cowboy president who survived assassination and everyone had an observation about that but not one of the journalists wrote a word about this new fashion for dying sweeping the boys of San Francisco.

The nurse let us know that unless we heard back within twenty-four hours then our bloodwork was negative. A gloom settled over us and we flinched at the sound of the phone every time it rang.
Michelle Remembers
was put out of view. Biz wouldn't leave her studio upstairs. Wendy began to pack her few belongings and prepared for some kind of journey. Jonjay
lay on the floor beside the bejewelled tiles of the carapace of his shellacked tortoise and caressed the creature's glazed face, reminiscing. He missed the days taking Dorian, his ninety-three-year-old pet, on a slow walk through Haight-Ashbury and everyone gawking and taking pictures. That was the life, Jonjay and a ravishing tortoise. This whole manor smells like death, we need to get out of here, he said and got up from one seat and went and straddled his tortoise. Let's go, my one and only friend, giddyup. Take me back to whence I came.

When there was no doubt we were in the clear, we celebrated. Tacitly. We didn't admit how happy we were to be alive. We chalked it up to the magic Jonjay played on us, placing a spell on our palates. Patrick took a bicycle and ran a trapline from one end of the city's bars to the other, and then on to the steamrooms to burn off the alcohol and meet singles and threesomes for anonymous sex. Mark's way was to drink six cans of beer and a mickey of rye, smoke three joints, and pass out in front of the turntable for thirteen hours listening to the crackle at end of side A. Biz ate copious drugs of all rate and function and spent the weekend in the Castro village a celebrity tripping from house party to house party.

And Wendy crawled out of the fear and woke up from all that praying and sat down for the first time in a while at the longtable, and with Rachael and Twyla beside her, she got down to work on another
Strays
strip—Buck and Murphy in a round of Ping-Pong.

If all else fails, I go with Ping-Pong, she said.

We remember that one wall of the living room was dedicated to a massive collection of vinyl. Hick's bootleg funk collection alone ran up to a thousand discs. He owned all the Brill Building seven-inch singles he could get his hands on. Most of the time we spent with Biz Aziz was flipping records; she loved to listen to rare Parliament or Carole King tunes while drawing, oldies gave her ideas for stage material and heavy funk was her heart and soul. She did all her drawing at No Manors; every page of her comic memoir was completed here. It turned out Biz rented
a single room on a corner of the third floor, which she used as a kind of green room and costume department—all five hundred square feet was dedicated to her live performance persona. (No room for a drawing table there.) She was something of a drag nurse to the other queens in town who needed mending or on occasion commissioned dresses from her. In fact, Biz was our main source—once a month she dropped off a pound of marijuana she got from her boy in Oakland, for which we paid a thousand dollars. Split into ounces and dimebags, it was easily turned into ten or twelve thousand a month. This never would have happened if local cartoonists hadn't stopped by No Manors so often asking to try some, heard we had some, here's some cash. (None of us had the street smarts to survive on a corner.) This was how we sold a lot of very sweaty-smelling weed without much hassle, and we split the profits among the five of us, Biz included. Our fast-paced side business put cash in our pockets at a time when being Wendy's assistants was more of an honorific or internship than a paycheque.

While all this went on Manila Convençion parked her white VW van on the street outside for a few weeks, running an extension cord and plugging into the side of No Manors, trying desperately to woo Jonjay back onto the road with her. The iceberg lettuce megafarms beckoned to her and she threatened to leave for them almost every day, but when Jonjay didn't seem upset at this prospect, she stayed longer. Wendy had ways to keep him on the premises, asking him to do favours in Hick's memory, long overdue repairs to the place, protection against more of Disney's henchmen, money to tide her over until she could take on the lease.

For the time being, Hick's master bedroom remained preserved as he had left it, laundry hamper and its contents included.

10

STRAYS

Our first job as Wendy's assistants was to pretend to be. She wanted to impress her new business partner with a bustling team, so when Frank came over at dusk one evening for his appointment to see the animals, she walked him through her
studio
and introduced us as her factotums. He had his transparent ploy to see her again and she had her ploy to impress him—and strangely, Wendy made it sound like these two motives were at odds. She'd deflect him with a small army of professionalism.

Twyla Noon was who asked impertinent questions, and in the days
following the wake all she wanted to know was whether Wendy planned to sleep with Frank again. The answer was emphatically
no
, Wendy wasn't going to give up her social life to become some suburbanite's idea of a mistress. That was a one-time well-played mistake on a mutual whim. Besides, now that Jonjay had returned home, her infatuation with him didn't leave much room in her imagination for a married man.
That
was the answer Twyla didn't want to hear, gunning for Jonjay herself.

As we helped Wendy ink-panel borders in prep for a weekly
Strays
strip she told us the story of how she met Jonjay. This was only about two years ago, back in her hometown of Victoria after she got expelled from school. Left to her own devices, she ended up loitering downtown all week, selling off stock of her pornographic comics to the other delinquents—she was done with sex drawings for the moment, and now she drew beasts. He had hitchhiked into Canada to visit some famed occult artist-poet living in her neighbourhood whom she'd never heard of, and while he was at it, since it was the season, he was going to pick wild edible mushrooms, dry them, and sell them to connoisseurs overseas. She saw him wander into Horizone, the video arcade in the basement where she sat most days of the week and drew beasts like the peacock monster, Adramelch, the Scox, Count Bifron, and the Zozo. Meanwhile he reached the twentysecond level on Pong on one quarter. A crowd formed around him to watch in awe. Everyone's stunned face in his face. Nothing fazed him. The speed at which the pong flew at those upper levels was dizzying. Kids were awestruck. A legend was made. Wendy didn't get up from her table to spectate like the rest of them, instead she sat back and drew the whole scene—she drew the sequence in four pages, starting with this beautiful stranger and three local skids in sleeveless jean jackets watching on either side of the screen, to the moment when he passed level nineteen and a punk girl fainted. Level twenty-two, the pong shot out like a bullet and Jonjay kept the joystick rattling with it for another fifty seconds before the screen froze. The screen literally froze mid-pong. There it was. Nothing
moved. Pong or person. Everything froze. He blew up Pong. You could see for yourself that his bar was barely about to hit the pong. Computer jammed. The arcade went totally quiet, then erupted. The owner came over, took a Polaroid with Jonjay and the frozen screen, then unplugged and plugged back in Pong.

When the hubbub died down, and he got a chance, he came straight over to see her. This was how she hoped it would play out, him coming to her. Wendy the cool. Something about his no-nonsense swagger made her loins drool (her words). He said he saw her out of the corner of his eye and could tell she was drawing. What was she drawing? She showed him. He liked the pictures. He said he didn't realize she was drawing the scene. Then she brought out the demon doodles she wanted to print together as a 'zine. Those really impressed him. He thought her style was freaky and fresh and he sat down at the table in the back of the arcade next to her and took up a pen of his own. It turned out he could draw anything. I started crushing on him like one-two-three, Wendy snapped her fingers. I forgot all about money and gave him copies of my dirty comics for free, I said,
Take them, I can't look at them another second
. He made his own comic, too, he said. He took a copy out of his rucksack of
The Artist
, it was offset printed and twenty-two pages long, in full colour. Inspired by his friend Hick Elmdales,
The Artist
was Jonjay's only attempt at a comic and much too good at that. In it, the Artist was an average citizen endowed with supernatural powers by a highly evolved being the size of a cosmos, enabling him to create art out of thin air. Jonjay's drawing style was indelible, enviable, totally his own, confident, fast lines pushing and pulling the eye across the page, panels filled with bold shadows, the art was kinetic and unglued. She asked if she could keep it. He said it was his last copy of a hundred, but okay. They got to talking. She told Jonjay she was in the mood to run away—where did that come from?—she never voiced this thought until now, but listening to herself she believed it, sincerely. He told her all about all the cartoonists living in San Francisco, and about the
situation at his home, No Manors, where Disney's ghostwriter-ghostartist for
Pan
lived and everybody hung out. That sounded like the place for her.