The Road Narrows As You Go by Lee Henderson

syndicated commercialists (her words), drawing seven days a week, costume design, and singing disco on weekends. She was the last of a generation in the city to live by an alias for good reason: her connections weren’t all clean or above board, and her income mostly went untaxed. She had no assistant to help her fill orders or keep her on deadline. What did she need merchandise for when it would only spoil her fans? This way, she told Wendy, the independent way, she was at liberty to write and draw whatever she wanted without censor, and retain the total attention of her audience. Her fans expected the character Biz Aziz to say and do whatever she wanted, for the book to stay stubbornly anti-consumerist, and nothing about the real Biz Aziz’s financials would change that fact. She might rather go broke than exploit her art.
    Obviously you don’t listen to this one, said Johnny Hart. I can see for myself your comic is not part of this mad rush for the gutter that ends in total anarchy.
    Typical straight whiteman floccinaucinihilipilification, spat Biz Aziz and threw a fistful of sketches at him.
    Excuse me? he swatted.
    Fuckin’ floccinaucinihilipilification, said Biz.
    Hart jumped back out of his chair and shivered when he hit the window. I’m a gag man through and through. I like jokes, that’s all.
    You discredit when you don’t get it, said Biz. In showbiz we call that floccinaucinihilipilification.
    You’re one of these new punks allergic to money, Hart said.
    Not money, said Biz. I’m allergic to servitude.
    We saw Charles Schulz cringe away from the confrontation and began to study more closely his pens and pencils, and with great care and companionship set them up for a fresh drawing. Well, he said to Wendy, whatever you decide, good luck to you.
    Thank you, Mr. Schulz.
    Call me Sparky.
    She turned to us. Can you believe that ? He told me to call him Sparky. It’s like a blessing. I should take this deal with Frank, shouldn’t I? My problem is that it feels like I stole the watch from a dead man’s wrist.
    There was one sour incident around five in the morning on Sunday when Biz Aziz was flirting with Vaughn Staedtler and things were moving along well when all of a sudden Staedtler shouted a string of obscenities at his former assistants as they came into the room. His assistants were suing him for hundreds of thousands in back payment on over twenty years of work on his legacy strip, The Mischiefs , about a clique of delinquent teens. When the fight was over, Biz took Staedtler outside to calm down and eventually he left in a taxi and the assistants stayed. It was the same for the comic—Staedtler, now in his late sixties, was retired from The Mischiefs after he had lost the rights in a previous court battle to his assistants, who now carried on for the Universal Press syndicate with no decrease in subscriptions. According to them, they had done all the work for the last thirty years anyway; Staedtler hadn’t touched so much as a pencil since he got back from Korea, unless it was to pick up a girl. They even forged his signature.
    About six or seven on Sunday night, the front door swung open and in came Jonjay.

8
    Jonjay gave off a powdered-stone smell of crushed gravel mixed with trail dust and mountain dirt and a cement quarry—sand dripped from the creases in his tattered clothes. His jacket and jeans were so frayed that it looked as if he was covered in cat hair. His own hair was long, frayed, almost white it was so blond, his tan was as black as red wine in the bottle, his mouth was cracked and dry, and his hands were so callused. Nevertheless he was gorgeous, one of the angels or demons. His blond beard hung in greasy tentacles. He wore a pair of blown-to-bits hiking boots, and his bare, blackened toes stuck out the caps as if he’d run here from Russia. He dropped a leather portfolio on the floor and big sheets of toothy watercolour paper