Men and Cartoons Men and Cartoons Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem

Author:Jonathan Lethem [Lethem, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Contemporary
ISBN: 9780307276964
Goodreads: 7989097
Publisher: Vintage Books USA
Published: 2002-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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