Past the massive stone breakwater that crossed the bay to the lighthouse, I joined other cyclists heading to the beach, and left them at the entrance to the state park, and rode by the Coast Guard station, its bell softly clanging, seagulls swirling out over the dunes. I followed the shoreline for a while, along a golf course and a grassy, lonely unnamed bay, and saw houses up in the hills. I found a quiet road with no markings that eventually turned to dirt, with smooth humps and soft potholes; I rode on to a parking lot with a boat ramp where the road dead-ended in a berm of sand. Two kids stood ankle-deep in tea-colored water, collecting something with a net, as a guy in surf trunks baited hooks beside his truck. A woman on the tailgate with long black hair stared at me as I leaned my bike against a guardrail and sat, my back against the sand, sipping water. I pulled off my backpack, took out my sketchbook, and attended to feelings of worthlessness.
The general shape of the truck emerged. Squinting, I delineated sand dunes to the east. Then I struggled to grasp the human figure. Do you think of the skull first or the contours of the head? When we move, all manner of compensatory things happen. The woman opened a cooler and fed the kids. I couldn’t get the trees right, then began addressing areas of light, shade, and texture. The windshield didn’t look like glass. The bay didn’t look like water. With a white-out pen I plastered over my mistakes, waiting for them to dry, blowing on them, staring out at the flat-bottomed clouds on the horizon. Before I could finish, the family packed up. The tailgate slammed. The guy walked over. He stood behind me for a minute.
“That’s why I take pictures,” he said. “It’s faster.”
“Thanks. I never thought of that.”
They drove off. I sat alone in the silence.
On Friday, during the long drive up, sitting in traffic, I’d phoned Adam, my boss, the magazine’s art director. I’d already sent him a dozen sketches, and he’d sent back two thousand emails, tweezering over every detail, nitpicking me to death until he finally approved one. I had those rough illustrations in my sketchbook, and sifted through them for the one he liked best. I had to finish that drawing, maybe later today, and get started on a full watercolor painting of Chinese factory workers.
The drawing would accompany an article about our failed wars with the Muslim world, our trillion-dollar experiment in nation building, the nightmarish lessons of history, and some other stuff. It was written by a famous crank who’d been at the magazine for decades.
The magazine had been around for 160 years, and as with other august, oldfangled publications, it required the protection of a benefactor. It had recently been bought in a fire sale by Jerry, a twenty-six-year-old who’d made a billion dollars starting a social-networking site. Jerry wanted a fresh look, a fresh feel, and had worked closely with Laura, the editor in chief, shuffling the staff, designing a new logo. They still ran pieces of straight investigative journalism, still published essays and criticism on society and the arts, but they also made room for lighter fare, satire, photo spreads of naked dudes and women in lingerie, kooky stuff, snackable content, diagrams and charts taking potshots at businessmen, movie stars, and politicians. I guess my work was part of that zany new look.
The article more generally assailed our disastrous record of regime change and our role in unleashing extremism. Adam wanted my illustration to connect a possible GOP White House with the neocon wackos hoping to get back into power to pave the Middle East. Big oil, American exceptionalism, party of war. In the sketch Adam picked to go to final, Romney rode a bomb toward Iran, Dr. Strangelove–style, dressed like a Mormon door knocker.
I could be happy working as a magazine illustrator. Cartooning, on the other hand, was lonely and difficult, and it savaged my personal life. Mainstream critics loved to talk about a new golden age of comics, and there was more money around and plenty of good work jumping the barriers, but a semiautobiographical story told in arty-farty black-and-white panels of a heterosexual white guy, contemporary daddy under stress, needed a reason for being, a plot, a hook. Whereas a magazine illustration already had a reason for being, and it failed if the number of viable interpretations rose above one. I liked that precision. I liked nailing the assignment. As an illustrator, I got paid to worry about what Adam worried about, his canned lefty politics, his prepackaged cultural commentary, his conventional ideas of what looked good. And while my salary wasn’t enough to undo the lie we were living in a house we couldn’t afford, it definitely helped. The anticipation of that monthly paycheck arriving in my bank account had become a more complacent and regulated panic, the money a modest return on a sane and expected amount of work. Anyway, making your own comics is the road to hell.
A magazine illustration is a rational, defensible complaint. Prescribed, safe, part of the conversation. It served some function in society. Exploring my failings in a comic book was something entirely different, a selfish, sadistic experiment, a cry for help. It was also an awkward and imperfect method to attach thought to action, to think through my worst impulses and hopefully cleanse my soul. I guess that was what interested me. That was what I’d given up.
I finished the drawing of the truck, overdoing it, fixing it until it was ruined. I drew my hand, with veins and tendons flexing. I drew middle-aged Batman, at low tide, with a clam rake, staring like an idiot at some women undressing, stripping down to their bikinis. I drew fat Batman on the beach as he cavorted on a blanket with those chicks. I drew a little girl and her brother, waving to Daddy and blowing kisses. And I drew Robin, in her sports bra and yoga pants, saying, “I’m gonna buy a gun and shoochoo, muthafucka!”
I looked at my phone. It had one bar. Then it had none. It said, SEARCHING FOR NETWORK, then said, NO SERVICE. You had better luck on the other side of campus, by the flagpole, toward the highway.
I met Amy one night outside Fine Arts, downwind of a cigarette, sitting in the courtyard. We talked in a soft, sideways lukewarm rain. She leaned in close and bumped my knee. Then it spread across hundreds of miles and emails and photos that blotted out reality and ruined my life.
I drew a woman, easily and quickly, arms flung to either side, on the grass, unconscious, in the middle of the infield. Beside her I drew a shorter, bearded man with glasses and checkered shorts, and who is this man but my cartoon self, my hapless and poorly imagined alter ego. I drew the baseball field, bordered on one side by the campus, the clot of buildings in the old shipyard, and on the other side by a golf course and railroad tracks and a two-lane highway.