Men and Cartoons

Planet Big Zero

MY HOUSE IS PROTECTED FROM THE STREET by a wooden fence six feet high, so solidly built that it's practically a wall. You can't look through it. The fence gate swings open smoothly, an inch from the paved walkway, without sticking or wobbling. Returning home a few days ago, I stepped up and pushed the gate open, as I always do, without breaking my stride. This day the gate bumped hard against something on the other side.

Annoyed, I pushed harder, and stepped through the space I'd wedged open. Lying on the walkway, rubbing his head, was a bum. I'd whacked him on the top of his skull with the gate. After a confused moment I grasped the situation: he'd ducked in from the street, then stretched out to warm in the sun in the first place he found. I live next door to a supermarket. He was probably napping after a meal of salvage from the dumpster in the alley. I knew that bums sometimes slept the night in the alley, though they always kept out of sight.

He wasn't knocked out. He made a sort of rasping, moaning sound and rolled onto his side.

Then we had the strangest conversation.

“You okay?” I said, defensively gruff.

“Yeah,” he said. He was bald on top, so I could see that there wasn't a gash.

“That's a hell of a place to be,” I said, justifying myself.

He said something I couldn't quite make out. It sounded like, “Every place has its price.”

“What?”

“That's the price of this place.” Or something. I was already walking away, toward my door. I'd seen that he was both unharmed and harmless.

“Well, take care of yourself,” I said.

“Don't worry about me,” he said.

Then I went inside, and for the briefest moment, tried to think about what had happened. I just hit a man in the head with a big piece of wood, I told myself. A part of me insisted that it was a notable event, something disturbing, something extreme. I'd certainly never done anything like it before.

But that part of me lost out. My attention just slid away. I literally couldn't keep my mind on it.

I mention this because of the light it sheds on what happened with Matthew.

WHEN MATTHEW and I were in high school we had a running joke that I think epitomized our sense of humor. Our school featured special programs for musically talented students. For that reason, or for no reason at all, there was a bust of Toscanini in the middle of the main hall of the building. It was a dingy bronze, slightly larger than life-size. Toscanini gazed out with a stolid, heroic air, his thick oxidized hair flowing back in the sculptor's imaginary breeze. He could have been a general, or a football coach, but a plaque on the pillar informed us that it was in fact Toscanini. It was typical of Matthew and me that we even noticed the sculpture. I doubt if any of the other students could have confirmed its existence if we'd mentioned it to them. We never did.

The joke was exclusively between us and some unseen janitor or security guard. Every week or so for a whole term, on our way out of the building after our last class, Matthew and I would hurriedly tape a pair of eyeglass frames, crudely fashioned from torn notebook paper and scotch tape, across Toscanini's glaring eyes. The glasses were never there when we returned in the morning. They were probably torn away within minutes, but that didn't matter to us. The sight of the paper glasses on the bronze was funny, but only initially was it the point of the joke.

The real point was saying it, again and again. “Toscanini's glasses.” As though those glasses were a landmark, the one certainty in an uncertain universe. Whatever subject was at hand, the glasses were the comparison we'd reach for first. “What didn't you understand? It was as clear as Toscanini's glasses.” Or “Cool, man, like Toscanini's glasses.” Or “No more urgent than, say, Toscanini's glasses.” If one of us forgot what he was going to say, the other would gently suggest, “Something about Toscanini's glasses?”

It was a joke about futility, and at the same time a joke about will, and subjectivity. If we filibustered the glasses into existence between us did it matter that the paper-and-tape glasses didn't persist? Worlds seemed to hang in the balance of that unspoken question, and in a way they did. Our worlds. The glasses stood for our own paper-thin new sensibilities, thrust against the bronze of the adult world. Were we viable? Did we have to convince others, or was it enough just to convince ourselves?

The question was made immediate by our careers as students. Did it matter that you were smarter than your English teacher if she could fail you for cutting class to smoke pot in the park? Matthew and I gave her that chance, and she took it. When college-application time rolled around, the costs were suddenly apparent. You couldn't get into an Ivy League school on the strength of private jokes.

Actually, I did. For the essay section of my Yale application I drew a ten-page comic, of the soul-searching, R. Crumb variety. It took me three weeks, and it was by far the most sustained effort I'd made in the four years of high school, or in my life to that point. I remember Matthew calling me at home during those weeks, wanting to know what was wrong. I couldn't explain.

The comic led to an unusual interview with a Yale scout. The first question he asked was what my favorite single book was. I said Travels in Arabia Deserta, which I'd never read. He looked taken aback. “That's my favorite book,” he said. “I didn't realize anyone your age was reading it.” “Yeah, well,” I said. “I'm an autodidact.” I hoped that would account for my grades. I don't know if it did, but I had the scout eating out of my hand after the lucky coincidence. Fortunately he didn't ask me what I liked about Arabia Deserta.

Matthew got into Reed. I helped him get the application out, in one desperate night before the deadline. Reed is one of those colleges where they don't give grades, where you can major in things like harmonica or earth sculpture. It's in the Pacific Northwest, far from New York, which probably would have been good for him. But he didn't go. He convinced his parents that he needed a year abroad before he could decide what to do. Sending him to college would have cost about the same, so they went for it. He and his marijuana fumes were out of the house either way.

Matthew was talking about becoming a Zen monk a lot at that time, and he even carried around an Alan Watts book called The Wisdom of Insecurity for a while. I'm sure he thought our pranks were a form of native Zen. An example: We took an 8-by-11 sheet of clear Mylar to the Xerox shop and asked for a copy. The clerk indulged us. The result was a photograph of the inside of the machine, of course, but Matthew insisted on calling it “a copy of nothing.” Just like one hand clapping, see? He cared nothing about Buddhism, needless to say. If there had been such a thing as a Dada monk he would have wanted to become that. But Zen it was, so he went to Asia.

Matthew visited me once at Yale, junior year. I lived in a suite with a roommate, and I was embarrassed to have Matthew stay there. He and I were beginning to look different. He was sunburned and wiry and seemed quite a bit older. He was still dressed like a boy but he looked like a man. At Yale we all dressed like men but looked like boys, except for a few who were working on beer stomachs.

Matthew was back temporarily from Thailand, where, he explained excitedly, he'd gotten involved with a charismatic drug lord named Khan Shah. Khan Shah was more powerful than the government, Matthew said, and was trying to legitimize his rule by making poppy cultivation legal. He was a man of the people. Matthew was learning to speak Thai so he could translate Khan Shah's manifestos.

This didn't sound like Zen to me, and I told Matthew so. He laughed.

“Are you doing what you want to do?” he asked me suddenly.

That question didn't compute for me at the time. Matthew was making me very, very nervous. I could still admire him, but I didn't want him in my life.

Cracking old jokes for cover, I hustled him back down to New York with excuses about a girlfriend's demands and a paper I had to write. He spent just one night.

That was the last I saw of him for eight years. Except for postcards. Here's one from a few years back. The front shows Elton John, in spangled glasses. In Matthew's hand on the back it says “Vacant Lot/Living Chemist.” No return address. The postmark is Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I ONLY had an hour's warning. He got my number from information, he explained on the phone. I gave him the address. An hour later he knocked on my door.

He wobbled slightly. “I parked in the green zone,” he said.

“That's fine, it's two hours.” I stared. He was still tall and bony, but his face was fleshy and red. I immediately wondered if I looked as bad, if I'd lost as much.

“Here,” he said. “I brought you this.”

It was a rock, fist-sized, gray with veins of white. I took it.

“Thanks,” I said, checking the irony in my voice. I didn't know whether I was supposed to think it was mainly funny or mainly profound that he'd brought me a rock.

If it was high school there would have been a punch line. He would have led me out to the curb to see the trunkload of identical rocks in his car.

Ten years later, that kind of follow-through was gone. Matthew's gestures were shrouded and gnomic. Trees falling in forests.

“Come in,” I said.

“I saw the Piggly Wiggly when I parked,” he said. “I thought I'd get some beer.”

It was two in the afternoon. “Okay,” I said.

A few minutes later he was back in the doorway with a rustling paper bag. He unloaded a six-pack of Sierra Nevada into my fridge and opened a tall aluminum canister of Japanese beer to drink right away. We poured it into two glasses. I wrote off getting anything accomplished that afternoon.

He leaned back and smiled at me, but his eyes were nervous. “Nice place,” he said.

“It's a place where I can get work done,” I said, feeling weirdly defensive.

“I see your stuff whenever I can,” he said earnestly. “My parents clip them for me.”

I draw a one-page comic called Planet Big Zero, for a free music magazine produced by a record-store chain. Once a month my characters, Dr. Fahrenheit and Sniveling Toon (and their little dog, Louie Louie), have a stupid adventure and review a new CD by a major rock act.

Somewhere in there you might detect the dying heartbeat of Toscanini's glasses. It's a living, anyway. Better than a living recently, since a cable video channel bought rights to develop Planet into a weekly animated feature, and hired me to do scripts and storyboards.

“I didn't realize your folks were into rock journalism,” I said.

“My parents are really proud of you,” Matthew said, working diligently on his beer. He wasn't being sarcastic. There was nothing challenging left in his persona, except what I projected.

He told me his story. Since Santa Fe he'd been in Peru, taking pictures of plinths and other ancient structures. He talked a lot about “sites.” The term covered a sculpture in Texas made of upended Cadillacs half buried in the desert, stone rings in Tibet, a circular graveyard in Paris, and Wall Street skyscrapers. He'd shot hundreds of rolls of film. None of it was developed. He was trying to get funding to create a CD-ROM. In the tales he told there were ghosts, mostly women, scurrying out of the frame. An expatriate Englishwoman he'd lived with in Mexico City who'd thrown him out. A female journalist who'd been his collaborator, then disappeared with his only photos of an Inca burial site that had since been destroyed. And the bitch in the Florida Keys just now who'd stolen his camera after a shared three-day drunk.

I live in Connecticut, an hour out of the city if there's no traffic. Matthew had driven up to see me in his parents' car. He was in New York trying to convince his parents to cash out ten thousand dollars in zero coupon bonds they were holding in his name, presumably for when he married and bought a house. He was willing to take a hit on early-withdrawal penalties, so that he could use what remained to fund his return to Peru.

He'd become some combination of an artist with the temperament, but no art, and Thor Heyerdahl without a raft.

The Japanese canister was empty. Matthew went into the kitchen for the first of the Sierras, unapologetically. He wasn't drinking like he was on a tear, or wanted to be. It was as though the beer was a practical necessity, like he needed it for ballast.

“If you don't want to drive back down tonight you can stay in the garage,” I told him. “It's set up as a guest room. You can pee in the sink in there. I'll give you a key to the house so you can shower or whatever.”

“That's great,” he said. His look was humble and piercing, both. “You know, it's really amazing to see you again.”

I sort of flinched. “The same,” I said.

“It's amazing how little has changed after all this time.”

I wasn't aware of that being the case, in any sense at all. But I nodded.

That night we got on a roll in safe territory, talking about high school. The Water Fountain Trick. The Literary Excuse Me. Mother Communication Hates You. Falling Down Jesus Park. Toscanini's Glasses. Then, fueled by beer, I told him a bit about my life, my short marriage, the novel I couldn't sell, the years of legal proofreading. Matthew drank and listened. He listened well.

Then he started telling me about his idea for a screenplay we were going to write together. “Has there ever been a thriller set in Antarctica?” he asked, eyes burning.

“Ice Station Zebra,” I said. “Rock Hudson's in it. It's really bad. Listen, I'm bushed.”

He slept in. I was working at my desk for hours before I heard him go in through the kitchen, up to the bathroom for a shower. The water ran for almost twenty minutes. I'm not sure, but I think he must have come out while I was on the phone with my Hollywood agent.

As I get older I find that the friendships that are the most certain, ultimately, are the ones where you and the other person have made substantial amounts of money for one another. Those histories have a breadth, an unspoken ease, that others, even siblings or ex-wives, just can't match. My Hollywood agent is about my age, and when I talk to him I feel he knows who I am, because he helped make me who I am. We're a conspiracy, and a much more reliable one than most.

Some time after I'd hung up the phone, I became aware of Matthew standing in the doorway of my office. “Did you hear me talking to you?” he said.

“Uh, no.”

His eyes were ringed and dark. He didn't speak.

“There's coffee in the kitchen,” I said. “It's still hot.”

When he returned with the coffee he came all the way into the room and stood in front of me. He seemed disconcerted.

“I think I'll go check out that old foundry today,” he said. “There's some wrecked equipment I always wanted to take pictures of.”

“No camera,” I reminded him.

“Well, I guess I'll just go look at it.”

Ruins, I thought. Wrecks, shambles, margins. Zen junk.

“That's fine, I'll be here,” I said. “I have some stuff to do. We can go out for dinner tonight.”

“We could cook something,” he began. I could see him grasping, trying to frame some larger question.

“I'd like to take you out,” I said — magnanimity being one of the most effective ways of ending conversations. I was thinking of my work. I had to get back to harnessing our high-school sensibility to the task of selling compact discs.

HE WAS back at five, with another bag from the Piggly Wiggly. Inside was a full six-pack, and another one full of empties. He'd been out all day looking at sites and drinking beer from a paper bag. He put the empties on the porch and the six in the fridge, like an obedient dog moving slippers to the bedroom.

I'd arranged for us to meet a couple of friends for dinner. A science-fiction writer who does scenarios for interactive video games, and a screenwriter. We all have the same Hollywood agent, which is how we met. I figured the screenwriter could sober Matthew up about his script ideas. I didn't want to eat dinner with Matthew alone anyway.

We met for drinks first. By the time we got to the restaurant Matthew was lagging behind, already so invisible that the maître d' said, “Table for three?”

He barely spoke during dinner. At the end of the night we parted at my driveway, me to my front door, Matthew to the garage.

“Well, good night,” I said.

He stopped. “You know, I realize I don't have everything quite together,” he said.

“You've got a lot of interesting projects going,” I said.

“I'm not asking you for anything.” He glared, just briefly.

“Of course not.”

“I feel strange around you,” he said. “I can't explain.” He looked at his hands, held them up against the light of the moon.

“You're just getting used to the way I am now,” I said. “I've changed.”

“No, it's me,” he said.

“Get some sleep,” I said.

I didn't see him in the morning, just heard the shower running, and the door to the refrigerator opening and closing.

ABOUT A week later, I hit on the idea of putting Matthew into Planet Big Zero as a character. It was a way of assuaging my own guilt, and of compartmentalizing the experience of seeing him again. I guess I also wanted to establish the connection between our old wide-open, searching form of humor and my current smug, essentially closed form.

As I drew Matthew into the panels it occurred to me that I was casting him into a prison by publishing him in the cartoon. Then I realized how silly that was. If he was in a prison he was there already, and the cartoon had nothing to do with it. He'd be delighted to see himself. I imagined showing it to him. Then I realized I wouldn't. Anyway, I finished the cartoon, and FedExed it to my editor.

Who hated it. “What's that guy doing there?” he said on the phone.

“He's a new character,” I said.

“He's not funny,” said the editor. “Can you take him out?”

“You want me to take him out?”

“He's not intrinsic to any of the scenes,” said my editor. “He's just standing around.”

THAT WAS two months ago. The point is, it wasn't until just the other day, when I hit the sleeping bum on the head with the gate, that I really gave any thought to the way things turned out. So much of what we do is automatic, so much of life becomes invisible. For instance, I've been buying six-packs and putting them in the fridge, but it isn't me drinking them. The empties pile up on the porch. I always forget to bring them out to the curb on recycling day. Sometimes the bums prowl around for bottles and do my work for me. I think somebody somewhere gives them a nickel apiece for them — another invisible operation, among so many.

Matthew's parents' car got towed after two weeks. It must have had ten or fifteen tickets pinned under the wiper. The authorities are pretty vigilant about that around here. As for Matthew, he's still in the garage. But he's been rendered completely transparent, unless, I suppose, you happen to be wearing Toscanini's glasses.