They made themselves at home on the lower floor of my duplex. The man-mountain stationed himself at the door as my “receptionist.” He ordered food, accepted art-supply deliveries, took in packages, dealt with Chinese food delivery boys. “You might try to slip out a fortune cookie message,” explained the Joker. “ ‘Help! I am a prisoner!’ I can’t have that!” He laughed.
He also ordered a few things from a hardware store for extra security. A large padlock kept me in the atelier during my working hours. He caulked every window in the place with that super adhesive they advertise on the late movie. That was so I couldn’t open them and yell out to passersby. He put up wire mesh over the windows so I couldn’t break them and drop out a note. He needn’t have bothered. I was too intimidated by his pal Punch to pull either stunt. In the elapsed time between such a stunt and its discovery, I could be a dead man.
I remained upstairs, working. Business as usual, going on inside. I have so few friends, and my schedule is so demanding, that my becoming cloistered had little effect on the strip. Since childhood, my closest friends have been products of my imagination, penciled and inked in by me. As I spent the hours drawing, I nearly forgot who was living downstairs. I lost myself in “Boomertown.”
Until the Joker began to make suggestions.
One evening, we had settled down to yet another Chinese delivery meal, one of the few things for which the Joker would plug the phone back in the wall. “Siddown,” he said. “It’s not poisoned . . . yet.”
Wiping the sauce of the General Tso’s chicken from his chalky face, he leaned across the dinner table at me. “I want you to put something in your little strip for me. It’s not a big deal, I don’t want it plastered all over the place. Just work it into the background.”
“What is it?”
“Some waves. You know, a cartoon representation of the open sea. And a row of figure eights. Just do it.”
“Why?”
The man-mountain stood up, knocking his chair backward.
“Just do it.”
Some nights later, another helpful hint. The Joker paused between picking up prawns with his chopsticks. “Here’s another background scene for you. Draw in some animals in cages. Next to ’em, there’s an automobile parked, with a man getting out of the car door.”
“You want me to draw practically a whole circus coming to town? But . . . ‘Boomertown’s’ an urban strip! How can I possibly work that in?”
Punch reached over and grabbed my wrist so tightly I thought it would snap off. He dragged me and threw me against the couch. He hit me in the stomach so hard I thought the barbecued prawns would come up. In the next moment, they did.
“You’re a creative genius,” said the Joker. “You’ll find a way to do it.”
I get the Gotham Gazette delivered, not only for the news. I like to see how “Boomertown” looks reproduced in an actual paper, not just in the syndicate proofs.
One story caught my attention. Two men had been murdered in town, several days apart. One named Barry Cates, the other a Jeffrey Zuckerman.
The killings bore little relation to one another. The men were dissimilar. Cates was the headwriter on a soap opera. Zuckerman was a waiter in a deli.
The only possible connection the two men had was that they had both served on a jury together. That jury sent a man known publicly as the Joker to Arkham Asylum, supposedly for life.
Was there some link between these men . . . and what the Joker was doing in my apartment?
I would daydream out the studio window, see people on the sidewalk below passing by. I didn’t dare yell out to them.
I would never have tried to make contact with them even if I weren’t a prisoner. Left to my own devices, I’d stay here among my books and my drawing board.
I’d see them all drift languidly in and out of my window’s range. Giggling young girls that I’d be too shy to ask out. Mothers leading their children by the hand as they scurry across the street. Men in tank tops bouncing a basketball on their way to the playground courts. Their infectious laughter floats up to my window. But it’s a laughter I never shared. I wasn’t good at sports or socializing. I was off in my own little world, too busy making my first attempts at drawing. What money I had I never spent on going out with girls or with friends. I saved it to buy collections of “Little Nemo” or “Little Orphan Annie.” I could never share their camaraderie if I wanted to.
I was a prisoner long before the Joker got here.
The Joker looked at the art for another daily strip. “I did what you said,” I told him. “See? There’s the desert tree and the boating dock.”
“Palmarina. Vito Palmarina,” I thought I heard the Joker say under his breath.
“I had to put a picture frame around it, make it look like it was something hanging on the character’s apartment wall. Otherwise, in ‘Boomertown,’ that would be really noticeable.”
“Noticeable?” said the Joker. “I’ll tell you what’s noticeable. What do you call this?” He held the drawing about an inch from my face as he raved. “Did I ask for bats? Did I specifically call for bats? Punch, did you hear me ask the man to draw little bat symbols as a wall-border design?”
The man-mountain grunted, rising. I was cooked. I had tried to plant a hidden picture of my own. When the strip was held upside-down, a familiar silhouette symbol could be seen, repeated over and over again, the way a sinking ship telegraphs an S.O.S.
I could not imagine where Punch’s fists had flesh on them. They felt like two massive clubs of solid bone.
How does Buz Sawyer roll with a punch, can you answer me that? How does Secret Agent X-9 withstand a blow to the jaw that approaches knocking the head off the small, thin bones of the neck? How does Dick Tracy stand the ringing in his ears afterward? How does Steve Canyon get up again to paste the bad guy with such an uppercut that it knocks the villain over a cliff? What are they made of that they can do that?
Not flesh and blood, that’s for sure.
The Gazette came. There was a story about another murder. The victim’s name was Vito Palmarina.
It struck a chord. I got out some newspaper clippings I’d hidden away on the murders of Barry Cates and Jeffrey Zuckerman. Then, I looked back on the dailies of “Boomertown” that I’d done the day before the murders were committed.
I remembered the things the Joker made me draw in.
“The open sea. And a row of figure eights.”
“Animals in cages . . . a man getting out of the car door.”
“Desert tree . . . boating dock.”
Sea. Eights. Cates.
Zoo. Car. Man. Zuckerman.
Palm. Marina. Palmarina.
I surmised that the Joker was using my strip to send secret messages to his well-hidden gang, giving them orders. They’d killed Cates, Zuckerman, and Palmarina. Over the weeks I’d been following the Joker’s directions, they killed a mother of two not six blocks from here. They murdered a Gotham U. film student on her way home from an editing session. They slit the throat of a social worker who specialized in treating people with eating disorders. They garroted a cello player in the Gotham Symphony Orchestra while he was walking his Pomeranian one night. For good measure, they strangled the dog. In each case, the gang got its instructions from “Boomertown.”
I kicked against the padlocked door of the studio, slamming against it until Punch and the Joker had to respond.
I heard the click of the key in the padlock. I confronted them with the clippings, with what I had deduced. “I know what you’re doing,” I said, “and I’m not going to do it anymore.” I was so worked up I forgot to be frightened.
“ ‘I’m not gonna doooooooo it anymore,’ ” the Joker mimicked in a playground nyah-nyah voice. “You know what you are? You’re a no-good, lousy, stinking, rotten . . .” He searched for the most despicable thing in the world he could call me. “. . . killjoy! Punch, show the man what we do to killjoys.”
I couldn’t sleep that night, for the pain
.
“Whitehall. Veronica Whitehall,” the Joker mused aloud while looking at another week’s dailies. “You think the yuppies in your cunning little continuing adventure series could do some decorating? Maybe provide us with an off-white foyer?”
“The whole strip is nothing but black-and-white,” I countered. “How can I represent the concept of white in a rebus when there’s no color in the strip?”
The Joker sat back in my leather easy chair. He’d spray-painted it purple. “Wait till the Sunday strip. That’s in living color, isn’t it? If you call that living.”
“I . . . I’m running out of some art supplies. Ink. Paper. I’m going to need another delivery soon.”
“I’ll have Punch reconnect the phone and do it for you. Just tell him what you need and I’ll . . . what’s this?” The Joker shot forward in the chair. He pointed at one panel with anger. “Look at this dialogue balloon! You’ve got this ugly little potato-head character saying, ‘But Andy, tell me, anything new?’ ” He ripped my work in half. “There’s nothing new about that trick. It’s so old its beard has a beard!
“Now there’s someone I don’t like very much. And I don’t appreciate your attempt to contact him with the initial letters of that balloon! Punch!”
The walking mountain of muscle didn’t have to do anything to scare me by now. He just had to be there. Punch held me down in the easy chair as the Joker produced a little black bag. It could have belonged to a doctor, but for the clasp: a cloisonné representation of the Joker’s face. The Jolly Roger. The label on the poison bottle.
Out came rubber tubing, a Pyrex bottle, a long, long hypodermic. I nearly fainted. “You wanted something to draw with, yes? Let’s see how dedicated you are to your craft,” the grinning man said as he tore my sleeve and swabbed my arm with alcohol. I couldn’t watch as the needle pierced my skin. The glass bottle slowly filled with a syrupy liquid. “You have to put more of yourself into the work. Try drawing with your own blood for a while. I figure about a pint will be enough for a week’s worth of strips.”
The level of liquid in the bottle rose. “Red shows up as black under the photostat cameras, doesn’t it?” The Joker laughed. He laughed until I passed out. In the nightmare I had, he was laughing still.
I speak with millions of people every day, without having to meet them, touch them, talk to them. You might think that garnering such an audience is a consolation to someone who finds it hard to make friends, but it’s not. It only reinforces my loneliness. I think I learned how to draw as a way to communicate with people I couldn’t befriend. My drawings were a way of shining a beacon, a flashlight out into the mist, searching for kindred spirits. Yet even the closest of soulmates can disappoint one another. Cartoon characters, like imaginary playmates, are always there when you need them. They never let you down the way real people do.
But I’d have given anything for real company. I needed a real friend.
The Joker let me in on a joke of the “good news-bad news” sort. The good news was, he was running out of jurors. He intended to leave my duplex soon. The bad news was, he would kill me before he departs, maybe having me draw a rebus of my own name into the strip beforehand as a final irony.
“Look on the bright side,” said the Joker. “Think how much your artwork will be worth . . . after you’re dead.”
“I can’t work tonight,” I told the grinning man as he inspected the next week’s strips.
“Awwwwwww, come on,” he said, feigning disappointment. “Don’t get depressed just because your days are numbered. America’s depending on you for a chuckle over its collective morning coffee. It’s your responsibility, your job to give it to ’em! Make ’em laugh, pal, make ’em laugh!”
“I didn’t say I won’t work. I said I can’t. The lights in the atelier have blown. I won’t be able to work on the next week’s strips in the dark. My eyes burn in the daytime as it is.”
“Well, well. Glad to see you burning the midnight oil. Your dedication is touching. Punch will reconnect the phone and get you lamps. Lots of ’em. Fluorescent lights. Hundred-watt bulbs. Even spotlights, if you want ’em. Your garret will look like a Hollywood premiere, I promise.”
“And I need ink,” I said. “Real ink this time.”
This made the Joker slap his knees. “The genuine article, black India ink. My friend, you’ll have yourself a bucketful.”
It finally happened in the night. There were stealthy footsteps, but not so stealthy that they didn’t awaken me.
I didn’t dare exhale. Was this the Joker, about to carry out his threat?
I thought I saw a moving shadow. It seemed to be a silhouette of a tall man, but there was barely no telling where the silhouette ended and the shadows began. All the lamps the Joker had brought in were blazing above me in the atelier, but not all the light in the world could have illuminated the hooded figure that crept by me in the dark.
Slowly, so as not to creak a single bedspring, I craned my head and shoulders up to look at this patch of blackness, this living inkblot, carefully wending its way through the gloom.
The shadow rose higher and grew against the farthest wall. I could see it for what it was. A mythical creature. Half man. Half bat.
It was there . . . and it was gone.
I couldn’t see anything after that. The night became a radio play, an Inner Sanctum story told in sound effects. The man-mountain woke with a grunt. He must have been having a pleasant dream about killing small animals. He made a disappointed moan over being shaken out of his reverie. He made no other sound. There was a noise like the cracking of knuckles, and I heard his unconscious body hit the floor.
This thud woke up the Joker. The shadow creature saved his wrath for the grinning man. The Joker’s voice caught in his throat as though he was surprised to encounter the Batman . . . but then, not so surprised at all.
The Joker forced a laugh. “You could at least tell me . . . how did you know where to find me?”
But there was not a word of reply, save groans of pain from the Joker, until he collapsed.
Night air wafted the sound of sirens closer and closer till I realized they were just outside the building.
I looked at my studio with new pride. Stacked atop my drawing table were all the lamps and lighting fixtures ordered from the art supply store by the Joker. Every single one in the pile was turned on, arranged to force their light out the skylight window, on whose glass I had painted the silhouette of a bat in black India ink.
It was a makeshift distress call, but it was one everybody in Gotham knew. The Bat-Signal. It had summoned a real friend for me. It had done its job, so I started to switch the lights off.
But I decided to let the light burn, bright as a victory bonfire.
Bone
Will Murray
“Oh, I’m collecting kitties and puttin’ ’em in bags,” sang the gangling green-haired man.
Few in Gotham City paid attention to the author of that singsong ditty. His pinched bone-white face, shining under a full moon, brought few comments from passersby. His full red lips were curled into a threatening sneer, but those who passed him smiled back through greasepaint and brittle plastic masks of their own and complimented him on his mask.
Only, the green-haired man wore no mask.
It was Halloween, and the Joker was stalking the streets of Gotham City, blending in with flocks of street-crossing trick or treaters.
Like them, the Clown Prince of Crime carried a bag. It was no mass-produced black-and-orange candy bag, but was a simple white laundry sack. And instead of candy, the contents of the Joker’s sack squirmed.
“Nice costume,” a man dressed in astronaut-white called in passing.
“Thanks,” said the Joker in a voice like powdered chalk, not breaking his stride. He wore a purple zoot suit over a Day-Glo orange shirt. His tie was a new affectation, a bola. The silver-mounted clasp stone was turquoise. His black hat belonged on an oatmeal box.
The Joker’s Cuban hee
ls clicked on the pavement like a joke-shop skull with chattering teeth. The left heel spat a spark as he skidded to a sudden stop at the dark maw of an alley.
Looking both ways with bloodshot eyes, the Joker slipped into the alley, whispering, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.”
The bulging sack mewed. The Joker smacked it with long fingers and the sack fell silent. But the mewing sounds continued.
The Clown Prince of Crime worried a haphazard stack of garbage can lids with a pointed purple shoe.
“Here, kitty,” he hissed.
A solitary mew emerged from a cardboard box.
The sack dropped to the ground. The Joker stepped on its mouth to keep it shut and bent over the box. He lifted it free. A triangle of moonlight brought an innocent gleam from three sets of baby-blue eyes.
“Meow?” a gray kitten asked forlornly. The others joined in.
“Ah,” the Joker cooed, harvesting him with a hand under its stomach. “You are a tempting morsel, aren’t you?” And he stuffed him into the sack. The others followed.
When he was done, the sack mouth had to be held shut by both hands. The Joker started out of the alley, his ghoul’s grin wider than before.
A fat tabby scooted around the corner, paused, and hearing the mewing from the bulging sack, gave out an anguished cry.
The Joker swept it from his path with a vicious kick.
“No room for you, you mother!” he snarled, and melted into the night, resuming his lunatic ditty under his breath.
“I’m collecting kitties and puttin’ ’em in bags. Tum-te-tum-tum.”
No trick or treaters approached the mansion of Archie Bittner. Bittner’s palatial redbrick home was set back from an elm-guarded dirt road on forty acres of land in a southwestern suburb of Gotham City. A fieldstone fence ringed its grounds, broken only by a Spanish-style wrought-iron gate marred by a big metal sign. The paint was fresh. The sign read: POSITIVELY NO TRICK OR TREATERS.
The Further Adventures of The Joker Page 12
