Hitchers

CHAPTER 10

I heaved a big, fat sigh and poised my pencil over the first panel. Draw something—anything—to get the ball rolling. On the heels of my epic two-strip output two days ago, I was having trouble keeping the momentum going.

I dropped my pencil onto the Bristol board and went to the window. From my apartment on the second floor of the crumbling drive-in projection/concession building I couldn’t tell what season it was. There were no trees, so no leaves, or lack thereof, to clue me in. As far as the eye could see there was only cyclone fencing, weeds, industrial sprawl, and, across Columbia Avenue, a junk yard. Grandma was getting seventy percent of the revenues from Toy Shop, but she was letting me live in the apartment—which had once been occupied by Toy Shop Village’s manager—for free. When I first took over the strip, that was a good thing because thirty percent of the revenue from a marginally popular comic strip was not much (certainly not enough to stay in the apartment Lorena and I had shared before she died). I had no idea why I was still here. With Wolfie dolls hitting the stores in a few weeks, I could buy a nice condo in Buckhead and pay cash.

Maybe my new shrink would help me figure it out.

If anyone had told me my first visit to a psychiatrist would not center around living through an attack that killed half a million people, or the drowning of my twin sister, or the horrible death of my wife, but my relationship with my mean old shithound of a grandfather, I would not have believed it.

We’d spent half an hour going over my outbursts, massaging them for significance. The first thing she’d noticed was that they had nothing to do with the anthrax attack, and that surprised her. Evidently the stuff coming up from deep inside me should be rabid, twitching terror.

She noticed that a lot of them referred to Grandpa, and asked if I had unfinished business with him. I admitted that as Toy Shop got more popular, I felt like more of a fraud for continuing it against his wishes. I told her about the argument we’d had the last time I saw him, how I’d gone to his studio clutching my demo strips, full of hope, how we’d gone back and forth, both of us getting angrier until he finally told me I was a hack.

“Just because you have someone in your family who’s an artist doesn’t make you one,” he’d said.

I’d told him he was no artist, that he trotted out the same characters in the same poses year after year, telling the same corny jokes, that the only people still reading were old ladies. That’s when he kicked me out.

I turned from the window and pondered the two original strips hanging framed over my drawing table, side-by-side: Grandpa’s last, my first.

You can tell a lot about a cartoonist from the final strip (assuming he or she knew it was the final strip). Charles Schulz’s last strip was mostly text—a polite, sincere, slightly distant note saying he wasn’t able to continue the strip, and that he appreciated his fans’ support over the years. I’d been disappointed—I wanted the characters to say goodbye, not Schulz. But it was fitting in a way, because Schulz was a stoic Midwesterner. An emotional goodbye would have been out of character.

Bill Watterson had done a better job saying goodbye to Calvin and Hobbes. Our heroes are in the woods, walking through freshly fallen snow. They climb onto their toboggan, and in the final panel Calvin says, “It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ’ol buddy… Let’s go exploring!” It says goodbye, but it’s also hopeful. And why not? Watterson wasn’t dying, only moving on.

In my grandfather’s final strip, Tina drops a Christmas ornament while unpacking a box of them. Little Joe, who’s in another aisle, calls out, “Holy smokes, Tina, more ornaments??” To which Tina replies, “No, Little Joe, less ornaments.” He’d left a Post-it attached to the strip: “A good one. Save for last.”

Grandpa’s last and my first. The end, the new beginning.

Only it hadn’t been a new beginning; not at first. Same old strip, same Little Joe and Tina. I’d even retained Little Joe’s two outdated signature exclamations—Holy smokes! and zounds!”

Readers don’t like it when you screw with their strips, Steve, my agent, had said. Comic strips are supposed to be comforting—people read them over coffee when they’re still waking up and aren’t ready for surprises.

I wandered into the kitchen, pulled open the freezer to find something for dinner. I tended to avoid TV dinners and chicken pot pies, not because I didn’t like them, but because eating them lent a certain pathetic quality to the act of eating alone. Somehow a frozen burrito or an Amy’s rice bowl didn’t carry the same stigma; they were lazy meals, but not cliches that made me feel pitiful.

Yet I was holding a chicken pot pie, considering whether to swallow my pride in exchange for something warmer and homier than a Kashi sweet and sour chicken entree, when my phone rang.

“Yeah, Finn Darby?” the person on the other end said before I had a chance to speak. The voice had a British accent, cockney-thick to the point of parody.

“Yes?” I said tentatively. It didn’t sound like a telemarketer.

“Mick Mercury calling.”

I laughed while I set the pot pie back in the freezer and closed the door. I tried running down a mental file of people who might really be on the other end of the line, but came up blank. “Mick Mercury. The rock star Mick Mercury?” Steve was my only guess. The accent was impressive.

“Yeah, that’s right. I got your number from your agent. Hope that’s okay.”

I hesitated. I didn’t want to fall for a prank; on the other hand the voice sounded an awful lot like Mick Mercury’s.

“Of course.” I sat at my kitchen table, where I’d already poured a glass of orange juice to go with whatever frozen entree I ultimately selected.

“Great, great,” he said.

I had no idea what to say, or who I was talking to, so I just sat there turning my glass.

“I’m a great fan of your work,” Mick Mercury said. “It’s art, what you’re doing with that little strip.”

“Well, thanks,” I laughed.

Every time he spoke my suspicion grew that it really was Mercury. He wasn’t super-famous any more, so it wasn’t totally inconceivable. For a while in the 1980s, though, he’d been bigger than Springsteen, bigger than U2.

I wondered if he was waiting for me to say something. What could I say? I’m a fan? Truth was, I was a fan. I had all five of his CDs. Actually, he’d probably recorded more than five, but I had the important ones he cut back in the early ’80s when he was the Bob Marley of punk/new wave.

“That’s not really why I’m calling, though,” Mercury said.

“Sure,” I said, trying to anticipate the real reason. Did he want to do a song that involved Toy Shop? I didn’t think he needed my permission for something like that.

“I’m going to tell you something that’s for your ears only, yeah?” Mick asked.

“Of course.” We celebrities have a code of silence, after all. It really was him. This was beyond surreal.

“Brilliant,” Mick said. “So I’ll just say it.” He took a big breath. “I had a heart attack on the night of the anthrax attack. I was at my flat in Buckhead.”

“Oh, wow.” I was amazed that he’d managed to keep something like that secret. “Very sorry to hear it,” I added.

“I was dead for five, six minutes before a doctor who lives down the hall resuscitated me. Just luck I had a doctor for a neighbor.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah, well, I lived too well in my younger years. My middle-aged years as well. Right into my late middle-years, actually.”

I chuckled. Mick Mercury’s struggles with alcohol and pills were well known to anyone who glanced at the tabloid headlines while waiting in line at the grocery store.

“They’re my friends, too.” Mick croaked.

I yelped in surprise. There was no mistaking that zombie baritone.

“‘Scuse me,” Mick said, as if he’d just burped. He cleared his throat. “Maybe you can guess why I’m calling? Can’t help saying things I didn’t say. If you know what I mean.”

My hand was shaking so badly I could barely grip the phone. It wasn’t only me. My mind raced with the implications. It had to be a side effect of exposure to anthrax. The hell with the doctor’s opinion, and the shrink’s. They were wrong.

“How did you know to call me?” I asked, trying not to sound paranoid.

“Funny thing: we’ve got the same neurologist. He didn’t tell me, though—it was one of the birds that works in the office.”

I could picture one of the cute young receptionists telling the rock star about me, basking in his gratitude, leaning into the pat on the shoulder he gave her.

“Is yours the same?” Mick asked. “I mean, does your voice sound like mine?”

“Yes,” I said. “I nearly dropped the phone when I heard it.”

When Mercury finally spoke, he sounded close to tears. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m so fucking relieved to hear that.”

“No, believe me, I understand.” It occurred to me that I should invite him over, to share what we knew. Why not? I opened my mouth feeling like I had when I first asked Lorena on a date. “Maybe we should get together, exchange notes? It might help us figure out what’s going on.”

“Yeah, brilliant. That’s just what I was thinking. You free right now?”

“Sure,” I said, flushing with pleasure.

Mick laughed. “Hell, what else would you be doing, yeah? You can’t go to a bloody movie without scaring the popcorn out of the rest of the audience. You know anywhere we could get good pancakes and a scotch?”

“I have three good days, then the chemo takes three, ” I croaked.