Going to New York

by Oliver Markus Malloy

  I figured that sounds like a good idea right about now. So I took that cloth ball, walked up to the biggest jock in class, who had thrown it at me, and shoved it in his face as hard as I could. He flipped out and tried to beat the shit out of me. He was a lot bigger than me, but I held my own and managed to wrestle him to the ground and hold him down in a headlock. I was scared, because I knew if the teacher for the next class didn't show up soon, I was gonna get my ass kicked bad.

  The jock was screaming for his buddies to help him get me off him, but they actually stayed out of it and laughed. They told him that he started it by throwing the cloth ball at me even though I asked him not to. When the teacher finally came, he separated us. The jock gave me some dirty looks during class, but afterwards he came over to me and we shook hands. He said that he respected that I stood up to him and that we were cool.

  After that little incident, nobody at that school ever picked another fight with me and I got along great with everybody. Apparently the things you learn from prison movies really do have real world applications. Who knew?

  My third and last fight in high school also happened during one of those five minute breaks between classes. We were all standing in a narrow hallway in front of the chemistry lab, waiting for the teacher to get there and unlock the door. We were all bored, so a bunch of the halfwitted knuckle-draggers in my class started to shove each other against the walls and other students.

  When I was born, I had a hole in my heart. The oxygen-poor blood in one half of my heart mixed with the oxygen-rich blood in the other half. So there wasn't enough oxygen in the blood that was circulating through my body, and my lips and fingernails were blue. Some doctors told my parents I would die, unless I get surgery to close the hole. Other doctors told my parents that a baby cannot survive that kind of heart surgery, so if they put me under the knife, I would probably die from that. So my parents took their chances with the less invasive option, and decided not to put me through surgery. The hole finally closed on its own.

  After that my heart still went out of rhythm sometimes, for no good reason. From one second to the next, it just shifts into overdrive and starts pounding like crazy, like I just ran a marathon. Even when I'm sitting perfectly still. It can happen after I drink soda that has a lot of caffeine, or I eat chocolate. Or it can happen if someone shoves me.

  So while we were all standing in that hallway, waiting for the teacher to get there, I told the knuckle-draggers not to shove me, because of my heart. Of course that only made them want to do it more. You'd think I'd have figured out by then that telling a teenager not to do something always has the opposite effect.

  Anyway, some guy shoved me against the wall as hard as he could, for laughs. So I grabbed him, turned him around so he would face the opposite wall, and shoved him, as hard as I could, face first against that wall. I broke his skull by accident. He had to go to the hospital. I was suspended for a week. Luckily the other kids vouched for me and told the principal that I didn't start it and that I specifically told the other kid not to shove me because of my heart. After that, once again, nobody ever messed with me again.

  But let's get back to Jeff and Donna. So here we were, standing on the sidewalk in New York, and this guy took a swing at me. I'm six feet tall and not exactly scrawny. Although I don't ever start a fight, I can defend myself, if I have to. And Jeff was a lot shorter than me, and he was really just a little wet noodle. That fight was over in less than ten seconds. Somehow I grabbed him, knocked him to the ground with a leg sweep, and sat on his chest with his head between my knees. I had no idea what I was doing, but I sure looked good while doing it.

  I grabbed his hair with one hand and made a fist with my other hand and was about to bash his face in, while screaming at him that I was gonna beat the shit out of him. He got really scared and backed down. It's not like he had much of a choice. Since he didn't try to fight back any more at that point, I didn't punch him in the face and got off his chest.

  He got up and walked back in the house without saying another word. My adrenaline was pumping like crazy. What a bizarre night this was! Like I said, I lived a pretty sheltered, well-mannered, calm life as a teenager in Germany. Especially after my dad had died and my mother had married my stepdad. The most exciting thing that might happen on any given day was that the grocery store at the corner had a new milkshake flavor. I definitely wasn't used to having sex with a married woman in New York and then getting into a street fight with her husband.

  Donna followed Jeff into the house and they had a talk. He told her that he would file for divorce and move out as soon as he finds a different place to live.

  So he was still there for the next 2 weeks, while I was visiting Donna in New York. I stayed at a hotel a few miles away, but Donna never wanted to go there. It took me a few years until I realized she had agoraphobia. Anyway, while I was there, we hung out all day every day and had sex every night. At first we did it in the car, in the same dark corner we had done it that first night. But that got old after a few days.

  So then we had sex in the park near her house at night. Right in the middle of the lawn. Until a police cruiser drove through the park and put their spotlight on us. Luckily we weren't doing anything at that moment, but we were about to. Donna wasn't wearing any pants or panties, and while we were squinting into the police lights, and they told us to stand up, she asked me if her T-shirt looked like a dress. It didn't. But I said it did. The cops didn't arrest us. So it was all good.

  During the second week, we just brazenly hung out at her house, and we had sex there while Jeff was at work. It was really strange. Even when he came home from work, I was still there, and Donna and I sat on the living room couch, watching TV, while he was hiding in his room, fixing a VCR or something. Occasionally he walked through the living room, right past us, without saying a word, to go to the bathroom. I kept expecting him to storm into the living room one day and pick another fight with me, or pull a gun on me or something, but he never did.

  Donna told me that after the fight, Jeff had a lot of respect for me, because I didn't beat him to a pulp, although I could have. Suddenly I had street cred in New York, because I let him get up without hitting him back, after he suckerpunched me.

  Eventually I had to fly back to Germany. But after that first trip I was hooked, and I kept flying back to New York every couple of days. Jeff did move out after a few days, so then Donna and I were able to just hang out at her place whenever I came over. No more crazy sex romps in the park.

  All these transatlantic flights were getting pretty expensive, and then my mom and stepdad had figured out that I was constantly on the phone with America, so they wouldn't let me use the phone at the house anymore. At that point I had to keep going to phone booths to talk to Donna. It couldn't go on like this. Especially after I caught pneumonia and almost died.

  So I decided to move to New York and live with Donna, instead of going to college to become a special ed teacher in Germany. My parents flipped out. They thought I was throwing my life away.

  HOW TO BE A REALLY BAD CARTOONIST

  "Do not correct a fool, or he will hate you. Correct a wise man, and he will appreciate you."

  Proverb

  Every time I flew to New York, I came with a tourist visa, which allowed me to stay in the US for three months each time. After those three months were up, I had to leave the country for at least one day, or I'd be an illegal immigrant.

  After I completed my mandatory civil service in Germany, I had no reason to fly back anymore. But after I stayed with Donna for almost three months, my visa was about to expire, and if I got caught overstaying my legal welcome, I could be deported and banned from re-entering the States.

  So something needed to be done. I figured the easiest thing would be, if I fly back to Germany for a few days and come right back. Then I'd have a fresh three month tourist visa. But Donna was afraid I wouldn't come back, so she didn't want me to go. She told me if I fly back to Germany, for even just
one day, it's over.

  But what else could we do? She suggested we get married, because once I'm married to a US citizen, I could apply for a green card and they wouldn't be able to deport me, no matter how long the paperwork would take.

  Even though we had known each other for well over a year at this point, we had only lived together for about 3 months, and I really didn't want to get married so quickly. I was only 20. I told her I wasn't ready to get married, and flew back to Germany. I told her I'd be back soon, but she was so upset, she said she never wanted to talk to me again. We didn't talk to each other for two weeks or so. I was miserable. I kept trying to call her from Germany, but she wouldn't answer. I wrote her a letter. Finally she called me, and asked me to come back.

  When I arrived in New York the next day, I saw that she had fresh scars on her wrists. She had tried to kill herself after I left. Now she tried to trivialize it and said that she was only playing around and accidentally cut deeper than she meant to.

  I felt so bad for her, I agreed to marry her. And it really didn't seem like such a terrible idea. We did love each other, and hey, if it didn't work out, I could always get a divorce later.

  But in the meantime, every nice day together would be a gift that nobody could ever take away from me afterwards. And how fucking awesome is it that some little computer geek from Germany is marrying this hot woman in New York? I felt like one of those two kids in that 80s movie Weird Science, who created the perfect woman on their computer and then brought her to life.

  A few days later, on February 6th 1993, Donna and I ended up getting married. In the living room. By now the money I had made producing video games was running out. I needed to find a job, but while my green card application was being processed, I was technically an illegal alien fresh off the banana boat. Legally I was not allowed to work, because I didn't even have a social security card yet.

  In school, I had always drawn silly little pictures, cartoons and comics, to pass the time when I got bored. Donna knew I could draw pretty well, so she asked me to draw her a picture of a knight fighting a dragon. It came out pretty good, and she suggested that I should try to make a living drawing cartoons or comics.

  That seemed like a pretty cool idea. After all, if Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny can make billions of dollars, I should be able to make at least a little bit of money with my own cartoons. It was worth a shot. I had no idea at the time how tough it is to break into that business.

  I drew a batch of ten single panel gag cartoons, similar to Gary Larson's The Far Side. Since everything in Europe is a lot more liberal than in the States, they have a much darker, edgier sense of humor as well. I was used to the uncensored cartoons in German humor magazines like Titanic, which often included nudity and very bad taste, like graphic dead baby jokes. Not the kind of stuff any American magazine or newspaper would ever publish.

  I sent my first batch of cartoons to King Features Syndicate, the largest distributor of newspaper comics. They supply thousands of papers across the country with daily comic strips. I was so oblivious, I had no idea how remote my chances were of actually selling a cartoon to King Features. It's kinda like a kid writing a movie script with crayons and then sending it to Universal Studios, hoping to get a movie deal. It just doesn't happen.

  And then it happened anyway. King Features bought one of the cartoons from the very first batch of cartoons I ever drew and published it in thousands of newspapers. I thought, "Hey, that was easy. Fame and fortune, here I come!"

  It wasn't until a few months later, that I found out how lucky I had been. It was almost like winning the lottery. I was told that every year, over 3000 new artists submit their cartoons to King Features, hoping to make a sale and get their cartoons syndicated in thousands of newspapers. And from what I was told, only about three or four new artists get lucky each year. And here I was, selling a cartoon to King Features at my very first try. Woah!

  I figured, making a living as a cartoonist would be a piece of cake. But after that first lucky sale, I didn't sell anything for a while, because my sense of humor was just way too dark for American magazines. It took me a while to understand the different sense of humor in America.

  In the meantime I had also submitted a manuscript for a cartoon book to a German comic publishing house. The editor there wrote me a personalized rejection letter and politely explained that my cartoons were amateurish crap. He told me that a pretty famous German cartoonist, who had dozens of books published, just so happened to be living in New York at the time as well. He gave me that famous cartoonist's phone number and suggested I give him a call and get some professional advice from him.

  Mr. Famous Cartoonist Guy was nice enough to meet up with me at his house. He looked at my German cartoon book manuscript and told me the same thing the editor at the publishing house had told me: "Kid, this is crap." Then he gave me a lot of good tips that really did improve my work a lot. He knew I wasn't making enough money as freelance cartoonist to survive, so he told me about a German language newspaper on 72nd Street in Manhattan, which was always looking for people in New York who could speak German.

  I met the head honcho at that newspaper and he hired me on the spot. He asked me if I knew how to use the desktop publishing software they were using at the newspaper. I lied and said that I did. I figured since I had grown up around computers, I should be able to learn the software on the fly. I was right. From one day to the next, I had a job in the graphic department of a newspaper in New York.

  The boss liked my work and made me art director after just two or three weeks. I got to put some of my cartoons in the paper each week, and my boss told me he had always dreamed of being a book publisher, not just a newspaper publisher. He was just looking for the right kind of manuscript for his first book release. I told him I had a manuscript for a cartoon book ready to go. I really didn't. The book was going to be published in America, so my crappy German cartoon manuscript was useless. But I figured if he bites, I'd wing it and quickly throw together a bunch of new cartoons for a book.

  He went for it. So now I had to come up with about 100 cartoons in a matter of a week. I drew cartoons every waking minute at home. Those hastily drawn cartoons were shit. Well, each new cartoon was a little bit better than the one before, but honestly, the book was crap. But now I had my first book published. Yayy! I felt like a real artist. I felt like I should be wearing black turtleneck sweaters and a beret.

  Working at a newspaper is very stressful, and it wasn't really what I wanted to do, so I quit and decided to live off my book earnings and my cartoon sales as freelance artist. Well, there were no book earnings. I think I sold like three copies of that book. (By the way, thank you for buying THIS book. You rock.)

  MY FRIEND THE ESCAPED MENTAL PATIENT

  "Insane people are always sure that they are fine. It is only the sane people who are willing to admit that they are crazy."

  Nora Ephron

  After a few weeks of pretending to be a freelance artist, I had to admit to myself that I wasn't actually making any money. I really shouldn't have quit my day job as art director at that newspaper. So I needed to find a new job. Not that easy.

  Donna's brother's father-in-law Lou owned a limousine service. Well, that's what he called it, but it was really just a bunch of guys driving their own shitty cars. There were no actual limos. It was a typical New York ghetto cab service.

  There are two different types of taxis in New York City. The yellow cabs that everyone knows don't have radios, but the drivers are allowed to pick up people on the street. Limousines are not yellow, and the drivers have two way radios to communicate with a dispatcher, but they are not allowed to pick up people on the street.

  Lou was always looking for drivers, so if I had a car, I could start working for him right away. But I didn't have a car. Donna's uncle Rick had an old junk car rotting in his backyard. He said I could have it for free. He was probably happy to finally get rid of that wreck. The transmission was slipping, the seats we
re ripped, the ceiling in the car looked like it had cancer, and the body was so eaten up by rust, that there were holes in the floor in front of the backseat.

  People sitting on the backseat could look down and see the asphalt through the holes between their feet. It was an old red Dodge. Rick jokingly called it the Red Baron. I called it the Flintstone mobile, because I felt if I kick down hard enough, my feet would be on the street, and then I could use my feet to move the car, just like Fred Flintstone.

  As an added bonus, the muffler was broken. So the exhaust fumes were coming through the holes in the floor. The car was basically a rolling gas chamber. I inhaled so much carbon monoxide, I'm sure I lost quite a few brain cells, while driving around in that death trap.

  If I remember correctly, I was a New York cab driver for about two years. Maybe a little less. I drew cartoons during the day and drove at night, from 6 pm until 2 am. A lot of crazy stuff happened during those two years.

  There used to be a show on HBO, called Taxi Cab Confessions. The cab was equipped with hidden cameras, and the driver worked for the show. The people who got into the car had no idea that they were being filmed. They said and did such crazy stuff, I was sure that show was just as fake as wrestling. I figured these crazy people couldn't possibly be real. It had to be staged. Well, once I drove a cab myself, I realized that that show really had been real. You really do meet a lot of crazy people when you drive a cab.