Something Donna said made me realize I should be documenting the frequent dreams, waking daydreams, and unbeckoned dream-visions I’d been having almost daily and nightly, along with my recollections of astral and physical escapades to other realities. So I was in the WWU Bookstore looking for one of those blank books, hardbound like a real book but with lined paper for writing, to record my thoughts. I already had tons of spiral notebooks—I preferred stenographer’s memo pads—that I’d filled with class notes and notes from my homework readings. But I wanted something more permanent, more fitting, to set down these thoughts. Lacking any kind of apparatus such as the makeshift Betamax Jasper had connected to the Multimensional Transceiver and Dimensional Doorway to record broadcasts from other realities, or the closed-circuit recording system of my visor, buttons, and cape, I would have to record these experiences—events that largely had happened only in my mind—in longhand, like one of those apocryphal prophets who’d spent weeks in the desert starving and dehydrating their bodily organisms to induce their hallucinations. How many of these visionaries, I wondered, had perished in the desert before they could crawl back to civilization and testify on parchment, with ink made of lamp soot, to what they had experienced?
I found a nice book on sale. It had the Statue of Liberty on the cover, which reminded me of where I’d last seen my father. I also got a package of ballpoint pens—leave the iron gall ink to the old-timers, I say.
I also scored a copy of the Zane Hancock Guide to Linguistic Criticism and Hypothetical Terminology, fifth edition, in the used textbook section. It wasn’t too badly worn, but it was the size of the Manhattan Yellow Pages.
On my way to the cashier I stopped at the rack of magazines. This store also sold new comic books, but not on a spinner rack like most drug stores. Here, they were just set out on the bottom shelf of the magazine rack, below the newsweeklies. I thumbed through a few of them: grim, humorless Youthful Permutations seemed to be the latest thing in Megaheroes, other than the same tired titles they’d been publishing since the sixties—The Infinity League, Battalion Bette, Megatron Man—the latter a cybernetic rip-off of Megaton Man. The artwork was terrible—bland and lifeless—compared to the coverless comics my sister and I had kept from childhood. The same dozen plotlines had been told so many times they’d become mush: the same villains, the same routines—nothing new. If you’d read one, you’d read them all. None of the characters ever seemed to age, and their kids never grew up—their only purpose seemed to be to keep the female characters back at the headquarters because the largely male creators couldn’t imagine what else to do with them. Whoever was creating these stories—insular fanboys with no interests outside of comic books, presumably—had lost their connection, their Mojo wire, to whatever worlds in which these stories were actually supposed to be happening. The cardboard Megaheroes just seemed to be going through the motions. I had thought to pick up one or two, but I had seen it all before; I put them back.
The blank book and the Zane Hancock were already and armful; they cleaned out my cash. From across the empty campus, I dragged my purchases a few blocks home.
The next couple of days, between reading for my own classes and taking notes, I jotted down memories of other realities in my Statue of Liberty blank book. It was difficult at first remembering even fresh dreams from a few nights before, let alone details of my trip to the Forbidden Future or things I had seen through my visor months ago, but they came back to me slowly, in bits and pieces. Recalling my astral journey with Doctor Messiah and my conversation with Clarissa Too courtesy of the Multimensional Pinpointer helmet was easier, since I had already recounted those adventures verbally to people a couple of times. But my notes were fragmentary, piecemeal, like excavating an archeological dig. I wondered if this was how Grover E. Honath got his start, in fits and starts, before it seemed like his Hybridian hero, Herschel, was talking to him over his shoulder.
Often, after having blown my mind on the incomprehensible jargon of Zane Hancock, whoever he was, and the school that had compiled the compendium of Hypothetics in his name, I would fall asleep. It would be a fitful, restless sleep, filled with half-digested intellectual terminology that menaced me in a personified, demonic form. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I would awaken and write down the visions that I’d half-remembered or half-dreamt. Often, I didn’t go back to bed, but would scribble all morning, in longhand, the latest adventures of Clarissa Too, and sometimes Clarissa Three, Four, or Five—or Five Thousand—as she grappled with abstract thoughts and philosophical implications that took on monstrous forms, and mingled with the silliest, most trite clichés from junk fiction and comics. I was never sure who was going to show up in my dreams—dragons, aliens, or robots—or what alternate reality I was going to visit. All would be sorted out later.
As I got into it, the prose began to flow more easily, although I dreaded reading it back. I knew I was no literary stylist, and feared my disjointed ramblings would be completely unreadable. I figured after I’d filled the Statue of Liberty book, I would type out the best of it, if any of it were any good, into a manuscript to see what I had.
Even after the semester began and classes had started, and I was responsible for taking notes in seminars and classes, especially in Dr. Dolores Bledsoe Finch’s lectures for Intro to Urban Social Policy for which I was a teaching assistant, I found myself daydreaming of alternate realities. I would look down and realize I wasn’t taking class notes in one of my spiral-bound steno pads, but had absentmindedly pulled my Statue of Liberty book out of my bookbag and had automatically filled three more pages. After class, I’d sit in a coffee shop along Cass Avenue writing, channeling the weird events I saw in my mind’s eye. I didn’t know if I was recording actual things I had witnessed or was making things up—an eerie sensation creative writers experience all the time, I understand.
Once, I zoned out and missed a whole lecture of Dr. Finch’s, and had to beg another TA to let me copy out her notes. She was reluctant to share, and scoffed at my inattention, but I convinced her that I had taken the notes myself, only I had spilled coffee on them. I was horrified at how threadbare her notes were—she omitted quite a lot of important ideas I knew Dr. Finch would have covered. But they enough for me to reconstruct the professor’s lecture. Apparently, a part of my mind was still able to listen, even as I daydreamed of other realities. Somehow, I was able to proceed through life with this double vision—multiple vision, really, since I seemed to have internalized a wildly fluctuating Multimensional Transceiver that randomly brought me snippets of other realities, like some kind of interdimensional police band radio.
It was no wonder I had filled almost two-thirds of my Statue of Liberty blank book before the semester was a few weeks old. One night, I had left the book on the coffee table in the living room of my apartment, carelessly, because I didn’t want Avie to see it and get any ideas. The next morning, I came out of my bedroom to find Chas Bradford reading it.
“This is really good stuff, apart from the big words,” he said. “You’ve got to let me draw it. Dinosaurs, robots, space ships—and all those whacky Megahero parodies. They’re a lot more interesting than the real thing.”
“It’s not satire, you dolt,” I said, snatching the book away from him. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m visiting Avie; she wants to work up some costume designs for a theater-piece assignment in one of her dance classes.” He flipped though his sketchbook, which lay among pencils and markers on the coffee table. “It’s based on L’après-midi d’un faune de printemps something-something, or whatever.” He closed the sketchbook. “But seriously, you’ve got to let me illustrate those plot ideas. Only, why are you making stuff up?”
“They’re not made up,” I said. “At least, I don’t think I’m making them up. They’re real. They just … occur to me; I write them down. I’m not questioning them at this point. I don’t want to censor myself.”
“They’re very visual, parts of them, at least,” said Chas. “They’d make great comics.”
“Naked-lady comics, I suppose, like your European idol, Arturo.”
Chas ignored my put-down. “No, seriously. The talky parts and the introspective parts. not so much; besides, I’m not a very good letterer. But the fight scenes and the cosmic stuff would be perfect. You’re a good writer, Clarissa.”
“Thanks,” I said, sheepishly. “I’m not trying to be a writer, just …” I sat down next to him. “You really think you could draw these?”
“I could try,” he said. “I might need some more detailed description in a few places, but you with your material and my imagination …. We have collaborated before, remember.”
Over the winter, Chas had drawn unauthorized comics loosely based on my exploits as Ms. Megaton Man, only as a big-titted barbarian wench. In the end, he had substituted another girl’s prettier face—a white girl name Peggy Weir, with whom he was infatuated. “How did that turn out, anyway? Did you sell it to Hurling Scream magazine?”
“No, but I got an encouraging rejection letter from the art director. I’ve assembled quite a collection of rejection letters from various publishers. But he wants to see more. Only I’m having a little bit of writer’s block.”
Chas filled me in on what he’d been doing since he’d dropped out of what I called the Self-Important Art School, officially the East Kirby Center for Visual Studies, a name that made it sound like an optometry college.
“All they teach is advertising or fine art,” he complained. “Nothing in between. They don’t even teach figure drawing, unless you count those lumpy models they sat before us. You saw them. Not the Grecian ideal.”
No one taught cartooning or comic book art, as Chas would have wanted to pursue it, except a couple night schools on the East Coast. In the Midwest, there was only technical illustration geared toward heavy industry, or commercial illustration aimed at the even more elusive world of magazine or album art. So, he was determined to teach himself.
“I visit the Detroit Museum of Fine Art all the time, and sit in Fine Arts section of the Detroit Public Library across the street, poring over art books. There’s an open model session on the Warren Woodward campus which isn’t too bad. At least there’s no instructor to pick on you if you idealize the figures, like that crazy Mrs. Lichtig.”
Chas informed me that he washed trays at the Schnelli Deli, and still rented an apartment down on East Willis, near the medical center and my old restaurant, the Union Stripe. His roommates were aspiring filmmaker and an animator, he told me—three undiscovered geniuses wondering how to break into their respective creative fields, mostly centered on the East or West Coast, from the cultural wastelands of the Rustbelt.
“I’ve spent a fortune for photocopying and postage, sending samples with self-addressed, stamped envelopes out to publishers, to no avail.”
“Have you tried sending your samples to some of the big mainstream publishers?” I asked. “I saw some new Megahero comics at the WWU bookstore just the other day; they’re pretty dreadful, if you ask me. You’re already a better artist than any of them. More original, at least.”
“They don’t like my look—too retro,” said Chas, bitterly. “And the underground arthouse publishers don’t like my look either, because I draw muscles.”
“They don’t like your work because you can draw at all,” said Avie, who had just come up from the basement. She had been rooting around down there and had brought up a box full of costumes and props to give Chas costume ideas. “You’re not allowed to have talent and be an alternative comix artist, apparently. You draw fit figures, Chas, while all they want is haptic alley graffiti and primitive tattoos.”
“There are few ground-level publishers starting up, though,” said Chas. “I’ve been thinking of aiming my work at them if I can’t crack Hurling Scream.”
Avie marched her box into her bedroom. “I’ll be in here, trying things on.”
“Well, I better let you two get to work on Debussy,” I said. “Can’t let your faun run around buck naked.”
“How about it?” said Chas, placing his hand on my Statue of Liberty book. “Let me take some of your ideas and see what I can make of them. I’ll be sure to draw her—you—with the right-sized boobs this time. You’ll have veto power, I swear.”
“Well—”
It was tempting to see how a talented artist might visualize my text transcriptions of alternate realities. Lord knows I couldn’t draw a straight line, and although Avie could draw, she gravitated more toward still lifes, and was too busy with school anyway to draw a graphic novel. An unemployed art school dropout with time on his hands, however, seemed worth a shot.
“This doesn’t leave the house,” I said, clutching my book to my breast. “You have to jot down notes here, in your sketchbook.”
“Agreed,” said Chas. Reluctantly, I handed the book over to him.
Chas sat in the kitchen making thumbnail sketches in his sketchbook from my handwritten text while Avie paraded a series of leotards in front of him and described ideas for costumes she had in mind. When she realized Chas wasn’t paying attention to her butt and was instead engrossed in my blank book, she got miffed, but by the end of the afternoon he’d made ample sketches for both our projects.
Over the next few weeks, Chas became a fixture at our house, making sketches and copying out more of my Statue of Liberty blank book as I kept adding new dreams and stories to it. I couldn’t tell any longer if I were creating the stories out of whole cloth or merely witnessing them, or if I was keeping a diary or collaborating with a crazy cartoonist on an unpublishable comic book project. But it didn’t seem to matter; it was all creative and cool. Chas provided Avie with some cool sketches, and she channeled some of our Grandma Seedy’s seamstressing skills with a borrowed sewing machine. Those designs worked their way into the story he was drawing, and Afternoon of the Faun, which Avie played over and over again on the living room stereo while rehearsing her routine for Chas, worked its way into my dreams. But mostly, Chas came over to eat. I guess with struggling comic book artists, a meal is always in short supply.
Sometimes Chas would call me up late at night and ask me for more explanation about some plot point, or a more detailed description of some menace from an alternate reality. Needless to say, some of my visions were fairly risqué—even more risqué than my real life, which hadn’t been all that sexy lately, with grad school and all. One time I took the phone in the living room, which was on a long cord, into my bedroom and shut the door, and recounted one particularly steamy encounter. It hadn’t seemed all that erotic when I dreamt it, but now, talking about it with Chas, it made me squirm. Unconsciously, I started touching myself as words rolled off my lips.
Suddenly, I let out a loud moan. I could picture Chas on the other end of the line, sitting at his drawing board, noting and sketching all this stuff down, wondering what the hell was going on. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said, embarrassed. “I, uh, just saw a big cockroach scurrying along the floor, that’s all.”
It wasn’t too difficult for even a dense artist to figure out what had transpired—my first inadvertent experience with phone sex. Over the next few nights, we both were breathing heavy, which made things awkward the next time he came over to the house in person to work with Avie, with whom Chas long ago had had something of a fling.
“When am I going to see some finished artwork?” I asked one night, over the phone.
Chas boldly suggested I meet him for drinks at the Union Stripe, closer to his apartment, so he wouldn’t have to haul his full-sized portfolio all the way to my house. This seemed like a reasonable solution.
I ended up having to pay, of course, since Chas was broke; he didn’t even have the pages. “Why didn’t you bring them here?” I asked.
“I looked like rain, and I didn’t want to chance it,” he said. “Besides, they’re pretty dirty, some of them.” he said. He invited me back to his apartment to view his full-sized drawings.
To make a long story short, the comic art was really turning out wonderfully. Chas used lots of artistic license, of course, but he got my flat chest just right—he’d been paying attention. “Tastes change,” he said. Although he worked Avie in as a faun that looked a lot like the Wondrous Warhound, just to have a full-figured gal in there as well.
The whole set-up of “Would you like to come up and see my etchings?” had been so ham-handed and utterly charming—and I was so hard up—that I relented to Chas’s advances, and we ended up in the sack. Frankly, I was so horny for actual sex I virtually attacked him. I don’t know where his roommates where that evening—probably at some arthouse cinematic double-feature—but I made so much noise I’m sure the whole three floors of the apartment building had heard me.
As a lover, at least Chas wasn’t sexually demanding, at first. Starving artists are fairly pliable, I discovered. I just tried not to think about Chas having been with my sister Avie a year earlier, and another girl I knew, Peggy Weir, who still lived in that same apartment building, before me.
I was sliding into a physical relationship with an unpublished comic book artist who was drawing cockamamie adventures that were only happening to me in other realities. What a life!
Next: Drawing Board Booty Call [Link available 03/05/2021 10:00 AM EST]
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