What passed for fun—antic, falling-down, roll-on-the-floor fun—was what we did to draw our attention away from our misuse and abuse of our freedom. I spent much of my freedom behaving like a zombie, in my room staring into space for what might have been hours, making the rounds of bars where I repeated my scripted lines, acted out familiar plots, enjoyed my boredom with edgy and envy-laden comrades. What if one of us at the bar made it to the big time and left the others behind?
Hard-ons, guilt, and self-loathing played out against a raucous barroom laugh track. Carefree cocksmen wannabes grinding out a good time as we wondered why more barhopping pretty girls didn’t notice how much fun we were and sashay over to meet us. Mike Stern and Terry Carmichael were handsome, charming make-out men who teamed together like a hit squad, picking up college and working girls with no effort and consummate ease. Seeing them in action made me want to become their best friend. Mike was a tall, blond graphic designer, Jewish and sweet and not particularly bright. Terry was a medium-sized, brown-skinned African American actor, smart and sly with a high-wattage smile that few Smith, Sarah Lawrence, Radcliffe, Barnard, or Bennington girls could resist. By some extraordinary stroke of luck, they let me in as their friend. As such, I found myself in an apprenticeship for my future cartoon character Bernard Mergendeiler, the luckless-with-women nebbish that I would introduce to Village Voice readers some three and a half years later.
Mike and Terry liked me because I was funny. They took me on as their jester and entourage as we made the rounds of bars and coffeehouses. We listened or half listened to jazz and folk, talking our way through Miles and Mingus and the Clancy Brothers, as they gave me a tutorial on making out.
Village Voice, July 16, 1958
The girls they collected along the way they took home to do things that made me crazy to imagine. Before that went the buildup, the conversational foreplay, talk of movies and theater and books and where did you grow up and do you read Salinger? Mailer? The talk was a come-on to help the girl past the introductory awkward moments, past the point where we were strangers. To draw her in with high-spirited conviviality: we were so interesting, the most fun group of guys she had met in a long time. And the one she inevitably went home with was the one not making the jokes and most of the repartee. I was a parody of Cyrano, laying down the witty, arty, quasi-literary, semicultured soundtrack that put one Roxanne after another in the mood to get laid by Mike or Terry. My payoff was that, after the third or fourth tryst, when one or the other dumped the girl, it was I, their hanger-on, whom she sought out for counsel. What happened? she needed to know. What could be done about it? What we did about it was go to bed. And that was how I started getting laid. As a substitute. These desirable and confused young women worked their way down through something akin to a baseball farm system in reverse. They started out in the major leagues and ended up with a kid sent in as a replacement who could barely play the game. By the time Mike and Terry had finished with them, they saw themselves as second stringers with damaged self-esteem. They needed comforting from someone harmless. So we did fine.
Others might have found the position I played humiliating, but I saw it as exploiting my limitations. I would never have gotten to know these beautiful and interesting young women on my own. I lacked the sexiness, the aggressiveness, and the charm that made girls want to sleep with me, as opposed to my own special kind of charm that made them want to be my friend. The girls who succumbed to Mike and Terry never would have noticed me if I had approached them without Mike or Terry. In any case, I was much too shy to have met them on my own, to go over to a girl at a bar or a party and begin a conversation. I was incapable of beginning conversations—with men or women. If the woman I found myself with didn’t pick a topic that I could respond to, there would be no conversation—or acquaintance or relationship or sex or marriage or children. Nothing would have developed in my life if it had been left for me to lead with an opening line. I lacked an opening line. Not ever had I been able to come up with one. Without an opening line, I couldn’t be the one to start things off, which was one reason I had to get famous. Once you’re famous, you don’t need an opening line. And more often than not, the girl will know who you are. She will start off impressed. The opening line became her problem. Ha!
I didn’t mind having to resort to fame in order for women to find me sexy. One has to deal with the material at hand. If fame was what was required for me to lure women into bed, then that was a price I was more than willing to pay.
But in the fifties I was this gawky, blond, slightly stooped, nice-enough-looking (some found me cute), boyish young man. Definitely not stud material to Vassar, Radcliffe, Barnard, Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, NYU, or, for that matter, Hunter, City, Brooklyn, or Queens College girls. So I hunkered down with Mike and Terry in coffeehouses and bars as they flipped through their well-worked-over little black address books checking for names of sexy girls who might date me.
One was a modern dancer named Jill. Terry called her from the bar we were in. Mike had dated her too. She was an NYU student, a senior. She had a paper to write for class but we were only a few blocks away, she’d come over to say hello.
Village Voice, November 27, 1957
Hello, indeed. Jill stayed on and on in the bar, delighted not to be writing her paper, getting high on white wine. Terry was the one she did most of her talking to, even when she was answering my questions. I forgave her. I was willing to forgive her anything. I thought she was about the sexiest girl I had ever sat down with at the same table. She didn’t say much to me, she wasn’t that much of a talker, but every time she did talk, she lit up my spirits so that I had to order another drink: spirits to quench my spirits.
She was dark, regally sensuous, with heavy-lidded, daunting gray eyes under thick eyebrows set in a narrow Modigliani-ish face. Her lips stared at me like bull’s-eyes. She was a little shorter than I, but her posture was so much straighter that when we got up to leave an hour later, she had to lean over to give me a good-bye peck on the cheek. And to remind me that we had a date.
Terry, the maître d’ of relationships, had bounced over to me her invitation for him to accompany her to a modern-dance concert, an apparently effortless maneuver that made it seem like it wasn’t a date at all—I was just filling an empty theater seat next to her.
And so began my life in dance. Not that I was that interested in dance. It was the commentary in regard to dance, the interpretation of what Jill and I were about to see, interspersed with Jill’s cryptic whispers as she tried to educate me: dance’s surface and hidden meanings, its symbols and metaphors, and (not that she cared to admit it) its pretensions.
It was the pretension and not the dance that drove me to draw dancers just a few years after Jill and I broke up. Increasingly, I found the differences between how people behaved and their self-serving rationales amusing—as well as irritating, sometimes enraging—and almost never endearing, except for the dances Jill escorted me to.
The dances took place in little theaters and studios in the Village in and around NYU, where Jill and her friends studied and performed. And in the way things happened in the somnolent, repressive atmosphere of the Eisenhower-McCarthy years, their leaps, falls, crawls, contortions, writhing, and high-profile anguish (emulating silent-movie acting) established the first tentative, flat-footed beachhead toward a counterculture.
Dance recitals followed certain fixed rules. The first rule was that the solo dancer or, if it was an ensemble, the lead did not dance out on stage, nor did she walk out. She trudged out, hair in a ponytail, barefoot in black leotards. She entered like a heavily shod workman slouched against the elements, stooped under the weight of the message she was burdened to deliver.
The second rule was that the little talk she gave was to be spoken in a soft, self-conscious, barely audible stammer. The third rule was that her explanation had value only if it was hard to understand.
She stood onstage, immobile, almost incoherent, letting her hands do t
he talking. Dancers’ hands are instruments of beauty, ten fingers splayed, no two quite in unison, darting, swooping, fluttering in a hand dance that was often more impressive than the dance that followed.
Now, having set the scene, having put the dancer onstage, having described how she looked, how she moved, how her fingers moved, it seems to me that you have every right to hear a version of what she said. But while I remember all the other stuff in detail, I can’t recall anything of what was said. Forty-five years of cartooning Dances to Spring and Summer and Autumn (and an occasional Winter) has blotted out authentic dancer-speak from my mind.
The first “Dance to Spring,” Village Voice, March 27, 1957
A DANCE TO SPRING
Jill was the first girl to sleep over in my first apartment in my first bed. The sex we had was not my first time, but it might as well have been. The young woman I had sex with first was a Smith girl whom I inherited from Mike and/or Terry, and she was so mad at being relegated to the likes of me that she took me to bed in order to get even. She got even in her parents’ bedroom in their apartment on Central Park West.
She was taken aback by the degree of my passion, my inexperience, my clumsiness, and my gratitude, not to mention my thwarted attempt to build this episode into something more—what did we call it in those days?—oh yes, a relationship. For five minutes I thought I was in love. In another three or four minutes we both understood that neither of us had anything to say to the other. The only word spoken that night that meant what we said was good-bye. One of us pretended regret. She didn’t bother.
It puzzled me that the girls I liked to talk to, the ones who liked to talk to me, the girls with whom I had confidences to share, books and plays and movies to critique, politics to discuss, were not the girls I wanted to go to bed with. They had become friends. Sex and friendship were counterintuitive. How could you lay a friend?
Sex was to be sought with a great-looking girl whom I wasn’t that sure I liked, who wasn’t sure she liked me, although the signals we exchanged were so confusing, how could we tell? Sex was with a girl with whom I didn’t share much in common except for a lack of trust, which increased desire. Sex was with a girl who changed the subject just when I was in the middle of a good story, who laughed at the wrong things at the wrong times. She kept me waiting for as long as half an hour on street corners and didn’t apologize once she showed up. A girl like that—if she had good legs and great boobs—her, I could die for.
Village Voice, January 21, 1963
Jill and I had very little to say to each other, but it took three months to find out. So we got in a lot of sex. By our fourth date, we were going steady. I convinced myself that I was almost in love with her. In the places we hung out, we appeared to be a couple. That meant a lot to me.
Remember, this was all new. Except for movies, I had no model on which to base my behavior. I took as semigospel tips on flirtation and romance as provided by Hepburn and Tracy, Powell and Loy. Gable and Turner, gods and goddesses up on a silver screen. Instead of sex (no sex in the fifties), they had fast talk and quips. Hang around long enough with a sexy woman, kid her mercilessly, and put up with her put-downs, and by the fifth or sixth date, love happened.
Did I believe it? No, but I had no other guideposts. With Mike and Terry, I abstained from talking about sex in anything but generalities. I didn’t want them to know how little I knew—and how little effort I made to learn. Finding out about sex was like looking up chimera in the dictionary. Theoretically it could have been done, but I loathed homework.
Further, I loathed putting my sexual ignorance on display, even if I was the only witness. I had no doubt that I was dumber about sex than most other men my age. But I didn’t want to think about it. Or learn any more, except on the job. I didn’t need any more excuses for self-loathing. Beating myself up was a favorite indoor sport. Alone in my apartment, I walked around for minutes shouting, “Schmuck! Asshole! Idiot! Go fuck yourself! Die, you cocksucker, die!”
This brought my Ukrainian next-door neighbor into action. She pounded the wall on her side in response to my rant. If I had my script, so did she. As I shouted at myself, “Asshole! Schmuck! Drop dead, motherfucker!” she repeated into the wall contrapuntally. “Vot do you vant from me?”
HACKWORK
When sex wasn’t on my mind, I worked on cartoons. Then, too, there were my forays into the job market. Rent in the fifties was minuscule, but the landlords still expected their money on the first day of the month. I couldn’t wait around to get famous, I had to look for work. I didn’t like it, but there was nothing I could do about it.
I found intermittent jobs in art studios that I looked up in the classifieds or found in want ads in the New York Times. I was dispatched to the bull pen, assigned to illustrate spots for annual reports and come up with art ideas for slide presentations to relieve the tedium of charts and graphs. I was supposed to create decorative leisure moments for the eye, intended to be noticed but not laughed at, little spots that looked amusing but were not. The art directors at the two houses where I stayed the longest, Chart-makers and Transfilm, were in their forties, harried but affable. They would give me a subject, a size, and a notion of what was expected. I’d sit myself down in the bull pen, my drawing table surrounded by three or four other drawing tables with three or four other, more experienced illustrators doing the more grown-up jobs—charts and graphs, logos, technical drawings, diagrams. Older men, World War II veterans with families. Serious. I was hired because I wasn’t serious. A moderately talented, inexperienced kid who would do what he was told.
And in the first weeks on the job, I did my best. Given a topic and sometimes a rough sketch, I designed and drew three or four pieces of finished art in pen and ink and let the art director choose among them. In the beginning, I played the good boy, but my restraint was not to last. After about a month I began to insert ideas of my own among the three or four sketches. All of the drawings but one followed my essentially humorless instructions. But in the fourth I went my own way. And it was only a matter of time before that way prevailed.
And this was how I established myself at these small art studios. The smart-assery that I had learned to suppress outside my circle, the wise-guy attitude that didn’t go down well with authority, emerged in these spot drawings as clever, good-humored, just-funny-enough pokes in the eye.
I carefully restrained my zaniness to acceptable limits. I drew in a variety of styles stolen from cartoonists and illustrators I admired: the simple diagrammatic elegance of Roy Doty (whose ads were then appearing everywhere), the expressionistic power of Robert Osborn, whose line I most coveted for my own.
I was told on all of these jobs, at the time I was hired, that I was expected to not be unique. On the contrary, everyone who worked in the bull pen was expected to do interchangeable artwork, undistinguished and indistinguishable. I was not hired to draw attention to myself. I was cautioned repeatedly that it would be looked upon unkindly if I tried to break away from the pack. So I drew attention to myself and broke away from the pack. And the clients loved it.
A light line, a hint of wit, an appearance of cheekiness on the page—it didn’t take much to make hash of the pretense that we were indistinguishable. If we were all ducks in a row, clients visiting the office began to inquire, “Which one is the funny duck?” I, alone, was singled out and introduced to clients and complimented on my sense of humor. Where did I get my ideas? they asked. And I, twenty-three or twenty-four, looking no older than seventeen, grinned, shuffled, self-effaced, and talked about the considerable help I got from my fellow artists in the bull pen, most of whom were amused, thank God, by the attention I was getting. It wasn’t in their makeup to be envious of me, to see me as competition or a threat. Our context was America in the fifties, our principal ideology was conformity. My colleagues were men whose ambition it was to be ducks in a row. Their collective anonymity amounted to their dream come true. Their ambition wasn’t about a career in art; it was abou
t a bigger house, a sailboat, golf, early—very early—retirement. They saw the attention I was getting as an example of office whimsy; it offset the usual monotony that they took for granted as a condition of employment. So, rather than a threat, I was perceived as this strange and amiable nutcase, hired for comic relief, who gave them a chuckle while they did the men’s work.
It was unfortunate that, once having attained the status of “privileged character,” I lacked the character not to abuse my privileges. I started coming to the office late and leaving early. Larry LePeer, my boss, who supervised the entire department of which the spot artists’ bull pen was merely one section, called me in for a warning. Larry was in his midforties, a pleasant, paternal adult who, from my first days at Chartmakers, had been one of my main supports. So how could I not take advantage of him?
Larry pointed out my record of latenesses, three or four times a week, scandalous, really. What reason could I possibly have for coming in so late? Was there a problem at home? Larry liked me, he had taken me under his wing, he wanted a reasonable explanation, an excuse, an apology.
Now, I liked Larry, I really did. I appreciated all that he had done for me, hiring me with little experience for the job, letting me go out on a limb with work that parted from the accepted norm. But though he may have been a nice guy, he was, nonetheless, the enemy. He was in a position of authority. My sister Mimi might not have succeeded in making a Communist out of me, but the theory of class warfare that she had programmed me for had stuck. I saw Larry on one side of the fence; I was on the other. Therefore, even though he broached the subject in the kindliest manner, I saw it as my right, practically my duty, to mislead him.
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