I refined as I went along. The photograph part of the cartoon grew more and more realistic, but also more obscure. Sometimes it took a while for the viewer to even comprehend what was shown there. For example, a cigarette butt stuck into a partially eaten doughnut, but I’d gone in so close that seconds went by before you’d figured out what they were. Apparently that became part of the fun of the new “Paper Clip”—people would first decipher the snapshot, then go on to the caption.
Sometimes the two figures would be placed on the same side of the picture, sometimes behind it with only their heads showing, sometimes moving in or out of the frame. They dangled from strings like grade school angels, or sat in seats with their backs to us and looked at the photograph as if it were a movie. They rowed by the picture, jogged across the top and bottom, shot arrows at each other across its face. But always the same format—the two dissimilar figures, the ever more realistic but mysterious photo “between” them.
I thought of Mrs. O’Hara and her “detective of the soul” often because after drawing the new strip some months, I realized what I was trying to do was address some of the cosmic, albeit small, questions she’d wanted her detective to answer. Not that I had solutions, but it was clear from the reactions and letters I was receiving that my work was on target more often than not.
That is who I am. Yes, “Paper Clip” took me right into adulthood, slight celebrity status, and a comfortable life. As a cartoonist, you learn to cut to the bone of language. If three words say it better or funnier than four, great, use three. It would be easy to indulge myself here and ramble on about my various years, but there is really only one important time and that began the day I met Lily and Lincoln Aaron. So I will stop now and fast-forward the story of my life twice: Once to my thirty-eighth year then to my forty-fifth.
Picture a man walking toward the door of the Los Angeles County Museum. He has thick black hair cut short, wears trendy eyeglasses with blue frames, is dressed in weekend clothes—khaki pants, old gray sweater, expensive running shoes. Comfortable and colorless, it is his uniform when he works at home. You think you might have seen him before. You have, because there have been some magazine articles about him. But it is his work that has made him known, not his face or personality. He thinks he has the face of a high school science teacher or a knowledgeable stereo salesman.
It was three weeks after his, my thirty-eighth birthday. I had a great job, some money, no girlfriend but that didn’t bother me so much. In retrospect it was a time in my life when I was calm and on top of things. I would like to have been married and had children to take to the museum, I would like to have had “Paper Clip” syndicated in more newspapers than it was. But it was certainly possible for both to happen. In retrospect it was a time when the only things I desired from life were not only possible but quite probable.
I saw the Aarons almost as soon as I entered the building. Because her back was to me, my first impression was that the two were brother and sister. Both short, both in jeans and T-shirts. Maybe five foot two or three, Lily was taller than the boy but not by much. Her hair was swept up in a girl’s ponytail. They were arguing. She was louder than she knew because her voice, very feminine and adult, carried clear across the lobby to where I was.
“No. First the museum, then lunch.”
“But I’m hungry.”
“That’s too bad. You had your chance before.”
Although she turned then and I saw she was attractive, I already had an unpleasant image of her: one of those pretentious, superficial women who drag their kids around to “culchah” and force their noses into it like a puppy’s into its own shit. I turned away and walked into the exhibition.
I have a nasty, sometimes gothic imagination. Perhaps those are a couple of the requirements needed to be a cartoonist. Whatever, that imagination carried a picture of bitch mother and hungry child around the museum with me that afternoon. I couldn’t shake the whine in the boy’s voice or the woman’s closed eyes when she loudly told him tough luck. Why not just buy him a hot dog, let him wolf it down in five minutes as kids invariably do, and then go to the show? I was no expert, but had had a few girlfriends with children and I’d gotten along pretty well with them. In several cases, better than with their mamas. In my experience, you played a kid like a fish once you have it hooked. Let it run with the line a ways, then reel it slowly back in. You know you’ve got control; the trick is to finesse the fish into thinking it does.
I had been looking forward to this show for a long time. The title was “Xanadu” and the subject was visionary cities. There were works by artists, architects, designers… There were even some by cartoonists like Dave McKean, Massimo Iosa Ghini, and me. I’d been invited to the opening a couple of nights before, but at openings you don’t get to look at the work. People push you out into a crowd of beaming piranhas and oglers trying to play it cool but also show off their new dresses, or cut or deal, or sidle up to a movie star. I liked to amble, take notes, and not talk to anyone.
“Hey, Max Fischer! ‘Paper Clip,’ right?”
Blank-faced, I turned toward the voice. A young couple stood there smiling.
“Hi. How are you?”
“Fine. I don’t want to bother you, Max. Only wanted to tell you how much we love your strip. Read every one of them. And we saw your piece here. Terrific! Right, honey?” He looked at his wife, who nodded vigorously.
“Well, thank you very much. That’s kind of you.”
“It’s nothing. Thanks for all you’ve given us!” Both gave shy waves and walked off.
How nice. I stood there watching them disappear into the crowd. “Paper Clip” came so easily that part of me was always vaguely ashamed at my good fortune. Other people worked so hard at what they did but received so little in return. Not to mention those born damned, afflicted, handicapped. Why had my bread fallen butter side up so many years?
Thinking about this when I should’ve been smiling over the compliment, I came out of my haze on hearing a child’s voice say, “You know what really scares me, Mom? Thin statues.”
I took a pen out of my pocket and wrote “thin statues” on the palm of my hand, knowing I’d have to use the phrase somewhere in the strip in the future. What would his mom reply to it?
“I know exactly what you mean.”
That was enough to make me turn around. Bitch mother and her hungry boy. She saw I was looking at them and directed her next sentence at me.
“Thin statues and thin people. Never trust a thin person. They’re either vain or on the run.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
She scratched her head. “Because this isn’t a thin society. We put such a premium on it because we’ve been told to, but then we turn around and enjoy our fat: fat homes, fat meals, fat wardrobes. What kind of car do you buy when you’re rich? Rolls-Royce. A small house? Nope. No matter how little money you have, the point is to buy as big as you can afford. Why’s that? Because deep in our hearts, we love fat. People come into the restaurant where I work and pretend to like nouvelle cuisine, but they don’t. You can see when they look at the bill that they feel cheated having to pay so much for such small servings. That’s all nouvelle cuisine is anyway—a clever new way of cheating a customer out of their money’s worth. Give ‘em a couple of spears of asparagus, artistically arranged, and you can charge more than if you gave them five. Jesus Christ, I talk too much.
“I’m Lily Aaron, and this is my son Lincoln.”