Crazy Love You (14 page)

“But it's not
real
,” I said. “It doesn't
exist
.”

Dragons and Hobbits, elves, flying reindeer, Oz, Narnia, the Shire, castles and princesses, warlocks, witches—all the cool stuff was pretend, made up. You couldn't go to any of those places, couldn't be touched by any of those things except in the pages of a book, or in your own imagination. You couldn't
be
anyplace but the dull, ugly, boring real world. I guess that was my coming-of-age—as a kid and as a writer and artist. I didn't like the world the way it was, with all its disappointing truths. I liked it better inside a book, or in a world I'd created myself.

“Poor Ian,” she said. She walked over to me and wrapped me up. “You're too young to be so serious.”

My mother and I had continued until we came to a cluster of tilted gravestones, almost hidden among the leaves of grass. She bent down to one and moved the grass aside. She let out a little sigh and moved to the next, a tilted Celtic cross.

“It's sad, isn't it?”

I came up close behind her, peered over her shoulder. We moved from grave to grave, looking at names and dates.

They were all children.

•  •  •

“No,” I told my father that night. “I've never been here.”

He must have heard my voice raise a defensive octave, but he only gave a quick nod. After a moment, he said, “Your mother used to come here. I didn't want her to, but she did.”

He walked over toward the graves.

“She thought I was being superstitious, not wanting her to be here when we were trying to have a baby. There were three miscarriages, Ian.”

“What's a miscarriage?”

“Uh,” he said. He wiped at his eyes, then ran a hand over the crown of his head. He wasn't crying, but he was as close as a man like him could get. “When a woman loses the baby she's carrying. It doesn't get born.”

I didn't totally understand what he meant at the time. How did someone
lose
a baby? I knew she'd wanted another child; she was always talking about a brother or sister for me, oblivious to the fact that I didn't want one at all.

I followed my father, even though I didn't want to. Something pulled me along after him, trailing the beam of his flashlight. I always thought of him as big and powerful. But there in the woods, he looked small.

The Whispers grew louder, a kind of rushing through the leaves. I didn't know why he had brought me out there, and I wanted to go home. But not home as it was then. Home as it used to be, with my mom in the kitchen and Ella in her crib, and the lights on, and everything clean and warm and right.

I looked around for Priss, expecting her to step out of the trees. Then I could show her to my father. And he could ask her about the fire. He could ask her the questions that I didn't dare. But she wasn't there. That was the thing about Priss. She was never there when you needed her to be. She never got you out of trouble, only into it. But I wouldn't figure that out until much later.

My father knelt down beside one of the headstones that stood askew like gray, rotting teeth. I hung back. I had cried back on that day with my mother, cried for all the lost little children. I don't know what she had been thinking, letting me see and understand what those headstones were. Maybe she'd been so surprised by her discovery that she hadn't thought to protect me from the idea that children, children just like me, might die. The thought had stayed with me, terrifying me in the night.

“Come over here, son.”

“I don't want to,” I said.

“Did your mother tell you about the little girl she thought she saw out here?”

I shook my head. She hadn't. If she'd ever seen a girl, she hadn't mentioned it to me. I could tell he didn't believe me.

“Your mother is  . . . not  . . . well,” he said. There were these long pauses in his sentences, as if he were searching for words, a way to say something without actually saying it. Like:
Your mom's a nutcase, kid. She's a crazy woman who saw people out in the woods. Don't be like her.
He drew in another deep breath, bowed his chin toward his chest.

“She hasn't been well for  . . . a while. I wish I'd  . . . understood that better, acted to help her more quickly—helped her at all. I wasn't there for her when she needed me—in the way she needed.”

Kneeling there, he rested his hands on the gravestone, looked as though he might pull it from the earth.

“Her thoughts, her ideas about certain things—they aren't reliable.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“When she lost those babies, one after the other—it undid her a little.” He wasn't talking to me. He was talking to himself, to the woods, to anyone who would listen. “She was sick with grief. I think her mind started playing tricks on her.”

“But then she had Ella,” I offered. The words died between us, though.

“It wasn't  . . . enough,” he said. “To fix what was broken. I should have seen it. Maybe I didn't want to see it.”

I stood there watching, seeing him as I hadn't ever seen him before. He was a stranger.

“I'm trying to tell you that there's no one out here. There's no little girl. Look.”

I moved in closer to him and followed the beam of his flashlight. The stone was worn down, the letters and numbers barely visible. I leaned in close and read what I saw there.

Fatboy is headed home from Molly's place. It's late but he takes the subway from her Brooklyn Heights brownstone.

He descends the gray, filthy stairway past graffiti-covered walls and onto the platform. Here the lights flicker, and water drips from unseen leaky pipes. He watches a rat skitter across the tracks as he sinks onto a bench to wait for the train. He dozes in his seat, and in his dreams, wraiths move through the shadows on the tracks.

Fatboy's New York City is different from the real, prettified, gentrified, heavily policed, cleaned-up millennial New York City. Fatboy's New York City is a towering, twisted dystopia of deserted streets and abandoned buildings, blinking streetlights, and crumbling concrete walls. The shadows are thick with bad characters, and the sky is persistent gunmetal. The images are gray scale, with flashes of bright color—neon signs, and flame-red fire hydrants, the copper wire of Priss's hair, the hot pink of her high-heeled shoes.

Suddenly he is startled awake to find himself surrounded by a gang of thugs. They loom tall, with gold teeth and blank eyes. Fatboy snaps to, and looks at the men around him. He is not afraid yet.

“I don't have much,” he says. Just another mugging in the city. He empties one pocket, pulling out two wrinkled twenties, bright green and yellow. They lie on his outstretched palm. “Forty bucks and a dime bag.”

In his other palm, he holds out a small bag of weed. One of the men uses a black-gloved hand to knock it all to the concrete platform.

“Hey,” says Fatboy. He rises to standing, his face flushing fuchsia with anger. “What the fuck?”

Once upon a time, Priss would show up and start kicking ass. But not tonight. Fatboy has told his avenger, his protector, that he doesn't need her anymore. Part of him believes that she'll come anyway. But the platform is empty except for his assailants. Fatboy is on his own. I can do this, he tells himself. I can take these guys.

When they move in on him, though, he doesn't stand a chance. He puts up a fight—feels a momentary rush of power and confidence. He gets a few blows in. But ultimately he takes a beating, blows turning his face purple and red. The thugs fold in on him, their wide backs filling the panel until Fatboy disappears into the blackness.

When Fatboy comes around, he's lying on the subway tracks—the bright white moon of a headlight blazing in the tunnel ahead of him. He tries to pull himself up, but he's hurt bad. As he struggles, a lightning bolt of pain rockets down his back into his leg. He looks down and discovers that his leg is twisted in an ugly, unnatural way—a hideous blue-and-red zigzag against the silver of the tracks. He lets out a desperate cry of pain and fear, but the station is deserted and the train is coming on fast.

He's sweating, weeping now, thinking about Molly and all the things he's not going to be able to do with her now—their wedding, their honeymoon, the family they both wanted to start right away. He calls her name, a wail of despair.

The world around him is shaking, roaring with the approach of the train. He can't hear anything else. A rat he saw earlier skitters over his leg. He manages to roll over, starts clawing his way off the tracks. The horn on the approaching train begins to blare in panic. The conductor sees him, but she can't stop the train. Fatboy knows that. It's over. He's going to die here tonight. He's about to close his eyes and accept his fate. But then, she's there. Priss, standing in the shadows.

“Don't just lie there, you pussy.”

She grabs him hard and starts to pull. He screams in pain. But then he digs deep, pushes himself. And they roll to the side, just as the train rushes past, never stopping or slowing.

They lie together, panting.

“Priss,” he says. “Thank you.”

She strokes his head and then wraps her arms around him.

“You still need me. You know that, don't you?”

•  •  •

At my drafting table, I stared at the page in front of me, reading what I'd put down. It wasn't at all what I had intended to write. The words floated in front of me, swimming before my tired eyes.

I had wanted a scene where Fatboy proved to himself that he could survive the bad, cold world without Priss. More than that, I wanted something to happen that proved to him that the world itself wasn't as big and scary as he imagined it to be. Instead, I wound up with another event that spiraled out of his control, where Priss had to step in to save the day.

I bit back the rise of frustration and anger, a desire to tear the pages from my notebook and fling them into the trash. I felt like a child, being forced to do something I didn't want to do. Why had I not written what I sat down to write? After all, was I not the boss here? Were these not my hands, my words, my images? Who was calling the shots in my subconscious—me or Priss?

I turned the page in the notebook, determined to write another version of the scene, but draft after draft, when it came time for Fatboy to fight and win, it didn't happen. I simply was unable to put the words down, couldn't see the pictures in my mind. The late night turned into the wee hours, turned into dawn. Finally, spent and exhausted, I abandoned the drafts—the pages, the sketches lying flat and accusatory on the table. The truth was, I didn't see Fatboy as the master of his circumstances. What did that say about me?

Megan didn't like the loft. She wanted us to get our own place, something that we bought and decorated together. Binky and Julia wanted to help, which made me a little uncomfortable. They were
so
tied into Megan and what was going on with her. Was that normal? I didn't know. I'd never had a normal family.

Initially, I'd agreed to moving. But the morning after my stunning narrative failures, I found myself floating the suggestion that I keep the Tribeca place as my studio. This idea was
not
met with a warm reception.

“Keep it?” she asked with a tilt of her head. She had a forkful of egg headed toward her mouth and it paused midair. The apartment was washed with light, the
Times
spread out around us—her with the Arts and Leisure section, me scanning the Week in Review. Patsy Cline was singing “Crazy” from one of Megan's playlists streaming to my Bluetooth speaker. She'd arrived earlier and made breakfast for us.

Wedding plans were in full swing. It had just been a little over a week since I proposed and already we had a date (six months away), a plan to do it on the beach at Binky and Julia's, a caterer, and a growing guest list. Did these things always go so fast? I thought people were generally engaged for a year or more. I mean, not that I was getting cold feet or anything.

“So I can work,” I said. The words felt bumpy in my mouth, as though I knew they shouldn't be uttered but swallowed. “Fewer distractions.”

She looked around the loft, as if considering it.

“The rent on this place is six thousand a month. Can we handle that in addition to a mortgage?”

I shrugged. “I don't know.”

In case you think I was being a typical guy, looking to keep some vestige of my male freedom, was having a fantasy of someplace to party with the boys or bring home the occasional fan girl, that wasn't it. The loft had actually meant something significant to me when I first moved in. It was the symbol of my success, a big “fuck you” to the Mikey Beeches of the world—all the people who had taunted me, bullied me, accused me, and judged me. I had overcome obstacles, worked hard, and made my life what I wanted it to be. I had reasons, real reasons, to make a mess out of my life, but I hadn't. I used my art, my talent, to lift myself up out of the mire of my childhood. I was proud of that.

Few graphic novelists reach the level of financial success I had achieved at a young age. Most people spend years drawing, writing, flogging their work at comic book conventions across the country, sending their work to agents and publishers, never breaking into the big leagues. I went to work for Marvel out of school, thanks to the help of one of my professors who got my foot in a door that would never have opened for me otherwise. I was talented, sure. But there are lots of talented people who never get a break like I got.

I spent a few years as a colorist working on the art team for the comic
X-Factor
, gaining tons of experience, learning all about the industry, meeting deadlines, working with a team. And in my off-hours I wrote
Fatboy and Priss
.