Woe of Cartoons

Tony waits nervously until the sounds in the house are quiet.  Then he goes for his keys.  Often they are not there and he becomes frantic looking at them  Yet he finds them then, opens the trunk of the car, and admires the reliably stacked rows of beer cans and wine bottles.  Tony laughs a long, low conspirational laugh.  But there is no one else there.  He is completely alone with the Trunk Beer (1).

Tony takes as many beers in his hands as he can.  He can carry up to seven in his large hands.  Sometimes—usually—he drops one and it pops open and he quickly scoops up the beer and drinks the beer from the spurting stream under pressure.  Tony will often laugh then, again.   He dances his little dance  ”Bleeeeeeee!”  and acts like a whacked out drum major and marches around in circles in the drive way.  Meanwhile, Whitney, his new dog,  is hungrily watching him from the dog bed.  It has been a long time since Whitney has been fed but Whitney knows that once this process starts, Whitney stands little chance of getting fed until it is completed, which will be about 5:30 am, Pacific time.

Whitney hungrily looks on as Tony drinks trunk beer from the trunk of his Honda

Tony drinks the other beers very quickly and follows up with some pills.

_____________________

(1)  I used to think Tony kept the beer cans and wine bottles in an elaborate nautical trunk in his garage.  Several weeks ago he revealed to me that it is actually that the many beer cans and wine bottles are in the trunk of his Honda that gives them their  name.  I believe it wes Danny Hellman who first made this assignation.

On Sunday at 6:32 AM I received the following email from Tony:

Ross, Without you I would be lost. You are my best friend.

Yesterday I rang Tony up to tell him about how great Vampire D  Apocalypse is.  I loved this anime.  And, watching it, I thought of how Tony introduced me to the Aubrey/Maturin series which is the basis of “Master of Commander” with Russell Crowe  I thought how much Tony loves the heroism and the self-determination of the old sailing ships.  It occurred to me that Tony has never done a heroic character,  and that is something it would be really interesting to see.  Also, I thought this might be a way to shifting back to Tony’s promise to do Kardtrick cartoons every couple of months for the rest of his talented life.   He promised me this in order to get me to be in the documentary being done with him.  Later I reminded him about it and he couldn’t remember, but then I showed him the emails we had exchanged and he said that he “dru-got.”

Becky Thyre answered the phone.  It turned out to be one of those times when she felt like talking and we were talking about Vampire Hunter D, and also Wendy and Lucy, a film I suddenly remembered seeing last year.

“Oh yeah its about a girl and her dog, and her life sucks”

“And then she goes to Portland and she loses the dog,” said Becky.

“And then she doesn’t find it.”

“No, she finds it,” said Becky, “but then she decides to leave it with this family which has more than she can offer it.”

She said she likes this film because it was quiet, and sad, and I remarked that I love those sorts of films too.  She also stated that she liked to watch films where people had really nothing going on in their life and things were really bad, and that sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t cheated because she had never really had a time like that.

“What the HELL are you talking about!” I exclaimed.  ”Don’t you remember a former life you had in the East Village with another husband besides Tony?  Don’t you remember your mother sending your journals to your ex-husband that one time?”

Piquant conversation ensuded about my previous marriage, which Becky didn’t know about.  I was married from the ages of 30 to 33.

“Why’d you guys breakup?” she asked.

“My wife was an alcoholic, it was probably all my fault, but she was a drunk.  She was unfaithful.  I remember I began to suspect that she was having an affair with this dweeb we knew and she admitted it  I had to get her drunk to do that  When I said it didn’t matter since it was the dweeb, she said “”well there were lots of others!” .   Becky, I went into the living room and suffered for about an hour and then i came back in and said let’s get a divorce.”

“You were just over it,” said Becky.

“Yeah.  So we have a lot in common, eh?” I said.

Becky laughed  I then told her about the conversation I’d had with my mother about the drug war.  She was worried we were sending guns down there.  It ocurred to me that we should immediately legalize all drugs,  isn’t marijuana the biggest export crop of California, and we get NO TAXES on it.

This was of interest to Becky, since she lives with Tony and their two kids in Pasadena.  ”I think there is something coming up where they are going to legalize it” she said.

“Don’t you know?”  I said, “Because if you don’t, then it probably won’t pass.”

“It still might pass,” she said….

We started talking about our hillbilly backgrounds.  The whole side of my father’s family that i was freaked out by, the welfare dynasty.  When I grew up, we lived on a nice street, and my father worked every day at a BF Goodrich Chemical factory as a maintenance worker.  My mother was the ultimate house wife, insisting that, when sweeping, one needed to push the Kirby around for a solid hour to get the dirt all the way out.  On my father’s side though were some perhaps lesser beings, primarily his sister who lived with 9 kids in the government projects.  I characterized the kids as being malnutritioned, like obviously with rickets or possibly fetal alcohol syndrome, or at least that is what i thought at the time or in retrospect.  And all these nine kids seem to quickly get into relationships in their early teens and have more kids.  They wanted that Aid to Dependent Childten money.  This, I explained, was the essence of a welfare dynasty.

We had never gone over there much as kids and I was embarassed because, even though they lived only a few blocks away, I could not tell one from the other.  Also, I strongly remember that when they came over to our hosue, a large, L-shaped 3 bedroom house, one of the kids was walking around going “OH MY GOD, ALL OF THIS SPACE IS YOURS.”

And I felt very ashamed.  Now it was a giant rolling concrete ball of embrassment, like the concrete ball that rolled down the cave hole in Raiders of the Lost ark.  It was a crushing ball of shame, for having so much space, for having such great parents, and for the way we completely cut these people out of our lives.  There was little choice  They were seemingly retarded, and as I explained to Becky, they had this weird tendency not to flush the toilet.

“Were they trying to save on water?”  Becky asked brightly.  ”No,” I said, “I think the thing just didn’t flush or they couldn’t afford a plumber or there was no service for fixing it, and the father was an alcoholic who looked like Howard Hughes in his later years.  He used to scream “get down to that grocery store and get me a six-pack!”  Or at least he did the one time I can ever remember visiting there.

Tony told me on the phone, today, that he had given up drinking.  ”Except for the beers I threw up,” he said.

He told me a story about his wife, Becky, designing “Ass Pads” which would allow people to reuse towels.    I said that no truly feminine woman would re-use such a towel,  even if a man put an “Ass Pad” on before toweling off.

I told Tony that i was working on a cartoon character called “Mega Shit Bird”  based on our mutual friend.    He said, “I’m sorry, I fell asleep.”

As usual this day finds me struggling with cartoonists.

Danny Hellman claims I have been meddling in his affairs.  I have no idea what he is talking about.  But he has defriended me in facebook and yet he is constantly telling me he did a really great photoshop joke picture of Tony here, or there, and that I will never see them — but then I go to Tony’s wall and I can see them.  Danny seems to be like a fairly smart person so I think he must know I can see those posts!  What the hell?

And then there is the agreement I made with Tony Millionaire — there is a documentary being made about him and turns out, they want me to be in it.  The film-maker contacted me and said that since Tony said I write half his jokes that I’d better be in the movie (the percentage of jokes written by me for Maakies is far lower than that, I assure you)  Anyway, I decided to hold Tony up and refuse to be in the documentary unless Tony will do some Kardtrick related comics.  I know we could kick ass if we did so — the fact that Tony is so talented at drawing architecture makes it doubly appealinig.  Anyway, Tony agreed to do one Kardtrick related cartoon every 3 months for the rest of his life.  Later however, he said he “drug-ot” the agreement.  He has no idea what he promised me and I really don’t feel the need to remind him.

And thusly it continues!

Terrence Ross So, Danny, I am wondering how you see history progressing from this point in time. Don’t you want nuclear weapons to be deconstructed, for your loved ones, for your progeny, or even as Jonathan Schell wrote, “for all the heroic and wonderful deeds of the past whose bearers we now represent….”?

Why aren’t you reporting on the injuries suffered in my d0og’s double ass?