There was something fishy about this man all around; if you looked through the window of the big aquarium at Marineland and spotted him lazing along with the carp and manta rays you’d have thought he was at home, except for the matching argyle sweater and socks. I guess he wanted something in him to match, his eyes certainly didn’t, one was dramatically blackened. Our conversation went like this:
“How’re you at dialogue, kid?”
“I use it all the time.”
“We’ll start again. How are you at dialogue?”
“I keep up my end.”
“Suppose you had to keep up both ends.”
“I’d keep them up and play them both against the middle and have one hand free to write some dialogue for you. That’s a sample.”
“That’s a sample. Tell you what to do with that sample. You go make up some more, then take that one and chew it and swallow it before the cops get their hands on it. You’ll have ptomaine for a few days but that’s better than the electric chair. You think you could tell a whole quick-moving story in dialogue, say 15, 20 lines at the most?”
“If spoken by people with 15 or 20 things to say, sure.”
“I see you’re a wiseass but I’ll tell you, we could have some use for a wiseass. We specialize in fumy stuff around here and maybe with a lot of coaching a hotshot joker like you could come up with a tickle line or two. You acquainted with the Tijuana Bibles?”
“I’ve heard a lot goes on in those border towns but not much that calls for religious reference works.”
“These bibles they don’t use, they make, and fast as they come off the presses they go over the border.”
“Oh. You’re in bibles on the manufacturing end. Well, I could be very useful to you there, I’m not familiar with the Tijuana Bibles but I’ve read a lot of others and if you want some more bibles written I’m your man. I’ve made a study of how to get in the right frame of mind to write messianic copy, you think yourself into the position of the Pied Piper, say, or a white hunter, or the soldier who walks point in a patrol, any frontrunner type, then you think a halo around your haircut and start looking upward more than sideways or over your shoulder, and pretty soon some real leadership prose starts—”
“Put the stopper in, kid, you could sprain your tonsils. I’ll explain it to you, Tijuana Bible’s a nickname for a certain type funnies, like so.”
The thing he took from his desk drawer to pass across was a comic book, in full color, on paper that upped five or six grades could have been used for Kleenex. All the characters, I saw as I leafed through, were known American ones, but their words as captured in the balloons oven their heads were all in Spanish, more, they’d all lost their clothes, every last button and string, and were heel-kickingly happy about it, judging from the shrapnel they all were generating—ripples, shimmers, shooting stars, pows, bams and exclamation points, judging further from the interpersonal antics they were engaged in with all portions of their bared anatomies. These carefree cutups didn’t have any problem relating to others, they were relating in every way the epidermis allows, variously coupling, tripleting, communing, nosing, mouthing, fingering, backbending, splitting, three-decker-sandwiching. Moon Mullins was ringmaster for a tightly interwoven daisy chain that Dagwood was working hard to unravel. (Thanatos forever trying to undo Eros’s best work, where will it end.) Mickey Mouse had had a knockdown fight with Minnie Mouse. He’d decided to cut all troublemaking females out of his life and go it on his own. Just now he was exploring the insertive possibilities in a slab of Swiss cheese while over on the far side, unknown to him, Minnie was energetically reaping the benefits of his probes. The Katzenjammer Kids were here revealing themselves as powerhouse-jammers. The object of their ramrod affections was none other than Little Orphan Annie. Aided and abetted by a slavering Daddy Warbucks, they were using that diminutive Brillo-haired lady as a human pincushion, entering her at every passageway as though to make the point, long before Sartre, about there being no exits. I took no pleasure in what was being done to that little slip of a girl though I’d always thought she was too big for her britches (now missing) and needed to be taken down a few pegs for her protofascist leanings.
“—by the carload down there,” the man was saying. “The art work’s right on the nose, sure, they draw fine, but where they fall down is with the continuity, see, the talk give and take, their dialogue writers don’t cut the mustard—”
“I’ve often wondered about that.”
“About what?”
“Why any mustard should be cut. Most mustard, if you cut it it’s back in one piece the second you take your knife out, so I don’t—”
“You’re a smartski. You’re a button buster, no doubt about it. All right, here’s where a weisenheimer like you could come in. We take over the drawings but leave the Spanishy crap out of the balloons and fill in our own lines in English. We need people to write the lines. Bright young fellows who can turn a phrase without it saying ouch. We can pay for the words pretty good because we get all this art work for free, we lift it from these thieving Mexes so we come out way ahead on the graphics end. You by any chance read Spanish, kid?”
It happened I did, and said so. I’d taken Spanish in high school and applied myself a lot more than I did later in college to engineering drafting. He handed me another comic book, this one with the Spanish balloons intact.
“Here you got a Tijuana original we’re right now in process of knocking off. Study the human situation, the dramatic setup, then read the dogass words those chumps put in and you’ll see our problem.” I studied the human situation. This was a full-page drawing he’d opened the book to, one featuring Popeye the Sailor Man and his girlfriend Olive Oil. They, too, had separated themselves from their clothes and were respectively, balls naked and pudendum naked. (Will Wimlib’s study of the sexism permeating our language be complete without a close look into the circumstance that we have all sorts of lively terms for male nudity but none, none at all, for female?) Popeye had insinuated himself into Olive Oil from the rear. His footloose organ was exiting from her mouth to the tune of maybe two feet worth. She looked slack-jawed and crosseyed, understandably; he was puffing absorbedly on his corncob. The exchange they were having went:
POPEYE: Don’t you worry about me running short, little cactus flower, in case you need a few more feet I got plenty to spare, I just ate two whole cans of spinach.
OLIVE OYL: You might run through another yard or so if it’s not too much trouble, my heart, that should be enough to mop the floor with where you spilled all that spinach juice, you’re sure a sloppy eater.
I thought that was damn good writing, if a little wordy, considering the limited possibilities. The text was not prurient and I found it to have redeeming social value. It didn’t capitalize in an obvious way on the setup. It didn’t try to put any icing on the already rich cake. It showed an original turn of mind, a free-wheeling imagination ready to work against the given materials, which takes courage. I couldn’t see how these lines could be improved on but the man for some reason was not satisfied.
“Well, sonny boy, let’s see what you can do,” he now said. “Take this page. As you see it’s a proof of the same drawing but with the balloons blank. O.K., you fill them in. Give us some lines that grow out of this interesting situation and sort of round out the visual picture, tell some kind of a little story. Here’s a pencil. Don’t rush, I got all afternoon, we’d rather have it right than Tuesday.”
My plot mind had retired to the old soldier’s home. My knack for snappy dialogue was out on some street-corner selling apples. After several false starts this was the best I could think of to write in those balloons:
POPEYE: Where do you stand on a third term for Franklin D. Roosevelt?
OLIVE OYL: Is that with one “o” or two, I never seem to remember.
The man