Fog blew in Saturday morning. I sat under a big white tent and drank some coffee while my chair sank into the lawn. I talked to a kid with a heavy beard in a mangled straw hat who last year for some reason we started calling Swaggamuffin.
A girl wearing a name tag passed out rosters to faculty. A guy walking behind her handed me an info packet. I sat there eating toast, looking at my notes. Other people were out there too, chatting and smoking. I said hello to a dozen familiar faces from over the years and drank several more cups. The fog burned off. A lawnmower buzzed. The sky was a flawless aquamarine blue.
I’d written a three-part lecture, on drawing techniques, brainstorming, and plotting, and also found some handouts with exercises from last year or the year before that. We supplied them with pencils, erasers, pens, nibs, brushes, and paper—100-pound acid-free Bristol board for comic applications—and a little plastic thing called the Ames Lettering Guide, which I still had no idea how to use.
We were gathered on the campus of a college you’ve never heard of, at the end of a sandy, hook-shaped peninsula, bound by the Atlantic and scenic as hell. It was my fifth straight summer running a workshop at an annual summer arts conference, and once again my class was full. The conference had begun fifteen years before as a one-day poetry festival and had grown every year in size and popularity, although the college itself had not fared as well. Over time, pieces of it had been boarded up to save money until the entire school was abandoned, then reopened in a limited capacity as a satellite of the nearest state U. The college had kept its name, which was the name of the town, which had been named after the people who’d been here since the beginning of time, who’d made peace with the English settlers, teaching them to fish and hunt, helping them slaughter neighboring tribes, before they too were wiped out by disease or dragged off and sold into slavery.
Nada Klein, with her long French braid and dark wolfish eyes, walked through the tent with her shawl dragging on the ground. She beat cancer every year, and showed up late to her own slide talks, and was widely mocked and imitated. Larry Burris was back, too. He skipped his meds one year and wore a jester’s cap to class and lit his own notes on fire, and had to spend the night in a hospital. He stood beside me now, beneath the tent flap, patiently signing a copy of his book, and handed it back to a woman who hugged him. On the faculty were many friends I’d come to know over the years as intellects, historians, wordsmiths, talented performers, storytellers with big fake teeth, addicts, drunkards, perverts, world-famous womanizers, sufferers of gout, maniacs, liars—embittered, delusional, accomplished, scared of spiders, unable to swim, loveless, and cruel. I noticed Barney Angerman, who’d won the Pulitzer for drama the year I was born, and Tabitha Portenlee, who’d written an acclaimed incest memoir; she was helping Barney through the breakfast line as he gripped her arm. This past winter the conference director had asked me to name another cartoonist I could vouch for to teach a second comics workshop, but I didn’t answer him. I worried, because of the way my career had gone, that I’d be hiring my replacement.
A little before nine I went to the Fine Arts building. Hurrying down a long hall, past students and teachers, I looked for my studio. There were classes in the annex now, landscape photography, felt making, fresco on plaster, whatever that was.
When I got there they were pulling out their stuff, giving each other the once-over. I flipped through my notes. A woman who lived in town was complaining about beach traffic. A skinny kid stared at me, wearing a sundress, mascara, and a pearl choker. A young Asian woman stared at him, clutching her pencil case. A young man in a white polo, a craggy-looking old guy, and a girl with button eyes and tiny feet were talking with affection about their dogs.
I opened the info packet and read the bios of the other teachers and guest speakers printed in the conference pamphlet. There were different levels of us, unknown nobodies and one-hit has-beens, midlist somebodies and legitimate stars. As I read, I could hear my own labored breathing. I tried to slow it down but felt worse, graying as the blood left my brain. I read my course description from who knows when.
MATTICOOK COLLEGE SUMMER ARTS CONFERENCE
CARTOONING STUDIO: SEMIAUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS
with Rich Fischer
July 18–21. Tuition: $1,500. Ages 18+. For-credit option:
$1,900.
Are you ready to take your cartooning to the next level? Start from scratch, or bring your own comic in progress to our 4-day summer intensive, and we’ll help you do just that …
A murmuring of bodies came from the hall. Fans turned slowly over us. An old galvanized ventilation system snaked around the ceiling. A thin woman stepped cautiously into the room, walked out, then came back in. Wild brown hair, sharp elbows, bony wrists, redness around her mouth, raw, wounded-looking lips, a long skirt, moccasins. Was she the kind of person to take time out of her busy life to make a fictionalized comic about herself? Apparently.
I moved across the studio, faking a slight limp in order to give my movements in flip-flops and canvas shorts a more tweedy gravitas, and adjusted the blinds. In this way I became the parent, the benign elder, with knowledge and some intangible quality of goodness that would allow my students to project onto me the power to contain their aspirations. I’d be the vessel, I’d hold their dreams, whatever. When it was quiet, I asked them to go around the room and introduce themselves.
I wasn’t a teacher. I didn’t belong here. I’d ditched my family and driven nine hours up the East Coast in Friday summer highway traffic so I could show off in front of strangers, most of whom had no talent, some of whom weren’t even nice, while I got paid almost nothing. They’d blown their hard-earned money to come to this beautiful place not to swim or sail but to sit in a room all day writing and drawing their guts out, telling themselves it was a dream come true.
I’d driven up here for the first time the summer after my only book came out. This conference was one of many good things that had come to me in those days. It was maybe the only thing left. Every time I pulled into town and saw the blinking neon lobsters, the bowling alley, the giant plastic 3-D roadside sandwich, it gave me a big feeling, reminding me of a once-limitless future.
Melanie Lenzner taught high school art in New Hampshire and went on too long, acting like it was her class, not mine. Helen Li, a biomolecular engineering student, said she didn’t want to start med school in the fall. Nick, the trans kid, said his father had thrown him out of the house and that