The Mysteries of the Faceless King, page 21
“Things got rapidly weirder after that, but I didn’t care, because Joe was hot. He was turning in great stuff. Before long I gave him his own book, Saint Toad’s Cracked Chimes, and by the time the third issue was out and the returns were in on the first, I knew we had a hit. If he had discovered the secret of success by picking up pennies on the street, well, all I could say was more power to him.
“It’s hard for me to think of any scene in what was left of his life that didn’t have a penny in it. I mean, he found them everywhere. In a dark alley, during a blackout, for God’s sake, he stopped, bent over, and said, ‘Ah, here we go!’
“That summer we went to a comic art convention in Boston. The two of us shared the taxi from the train station to the hotel, and sure enough, there was a penny on the floor in front of him. He held it up to the window, doing his best Harpo act, and true to character, whipped out an oversized magnifying glass and began to scrutinize the coin minutely.
“‘What do you expect to find on it, the secret of the ages?’ I asked.
“‘Something like that, Jimbo.’
“Joe was a big success with the fans. He could be a real charmer when he wanted to be. But he got a lot of odd looks, always bending over to pick up pennies. There were a lot of jokes about how badly I paid my artists, that they had to scrounge change to stay alive. And once, in the middle of a panel discussion, all the microphones went dead. Joe calmly unscrewed the top of his, shook it, and a penny dropped onto the tabletop. He gave the audience his trademarked grin, and there was nervous laughter, as if most people didn’t get the joke.
“‘There’s a fortune written on it,’ he told them. ‘It says: You will find true love and get laid.’
“That got a laugh, and you know, the prediction came true, at least in part. There was a groupie in the audience, who used Joe’s shtick to bait him...literally. She laid out a trail of pennies, up a flight of stairs, along a corridor, and under the door of her room. The door was unlocked. And that, to make a steamy story short, is how Joe Eisenberg lost his virginity, at the age of twenty-seven. Because the gods had revealed that he would, he told me afterward.
“‘I’m sure glad I picked up that penny,’ he said.
“I think he used his silliness to hide social awkwardness. And somewhere along the line, all this very much ceased to be amusing.
“He found I don’t know how many pennies during the remainder of the convention, and on the train ride back. The way he pounced on them told me that the totally overdone gag was turning into a mania. It was a wonder he didn’t walk right into people. He was always scanning the floor, looking for pennies.
“‘Awwright! Enough of this!’ I told him in my best Graham Chapmanas-a-British-Army-officer voice. This has got to stop. It’s getting silly.’
“‘I only wish it were, Jimbo,’ he said softly, then turned to stare out the train window.
“It was early November when he came into my office one evening late with a stack of new artwork. Things were going badly for me by then, for all Joe’s stuff sold better than anything else I had. The mid-seventies were bad times for undergrounds. Sex and obscenity had lost a good deal of their novelty, and the Moron Majority was after us. Head shops were closing, and with them went much of the distribution. Books that had sold seventy-five thousand copies five years previously were now lucky to do twenty thousand. And so I was living in that dingy office above the record store on South Street. My suburban apartment, and my wife Carol, had gone in the course of belt-tightening.
“I was working late with some bills, and Joe knew I’d be there.
“He had a key and he just came in. I hardly glanced up.
“Just as he stepped through the door, my Selectric jammed and began making a hideous rattle.
“Somehow he was expecting it. Joe dropped his artwork on a chair and ran to my desk, leaning over my shoulder, reaching into my typewriter with the longest pair of tweezers I have ever laid eyes on, and extracted—you don’t have to guess—a shiny, new, goddamn penny from the innards of my typewriter. As soon as he did, the machine reverted to a contented hum.
“Out came the magnifying glass again. I knew better than to expect an explanation.
“‘This is great!’ he said in something that was almost a tone of reverential awe. ‘The pattern is complete. I have all the answers now.’
“Without another word, he left, not bothering to even discuss the artwork. But, as I said, I was pretty used to his, ah, eccentricities by now. So I just got up and looked at the art myself.
“And in a minute, I’d forgotten my troubles, how weird Joe was getting, and everything. The stuff was brilliant. It was the first of that final sequence of the Saint Toad strips, in which the warty sage sets out on his pilgrimage to find the Meaning of Life in the Land of Reversible Cups. I was laughing aloud. It was a breakthrough, which put Joe on a level with the immortal R. Crumb, or even a notch above.
“‘Wow,’ I said to myself. ‘Mister Natural, move over.’
“It was part of a sustained burst of creativity on Joe’s part. I didn’t see him much after that. He sent his stuff in by Federal Express. There was enough there to keep Saint Toad going for several years, weird, metaphysical stuff, all full of dooms and prophecies—and some of his predictions were just uncanny, as things turned out. You know, about the World Series and Comet Kohoutek and the president’s brain.
“There were pennies in every panel. It became a trademark, a game; to see where he had hidden them. Even in the Fantastic Voyage parody sequence, where the hero sails a tiny submarine up his own asshole, if you look very closely, there’s an Indian-head cent lodged in the pancreas.
“It was completely impossible for me to think of Joe Eisenberg without thinking of pennies, and vice-versa. ‘My God,’ I told myself. ‘He must have buckets of them by now.’
“By the time the following January came around, the sales of Joe’s work were all that was keeping my operation afloat. So you can understand my alarm when I tried to call him one day and got a recorded message saying his phone had been disconnected.
“It was a mistake, I told myself. Or maybe he had just forgotten to pay the bill. I sent him a letter, certified, so he’d have to come to the door and sign for it.
“The letter was returned, undeliverable.
“There was another Joe Eisenberg shtick that came to mind: mock-childish eagerness over the question, Can we panic now? Huh? Huh? Can we?
“Yes, I thought. We can panic now.
“I decided to pay him a visit. It was raining that evening as I walked to the train station. I couldn’t help but think of the night when the penny-mania had all begun. Joe no doubt would have called it a sign from the gods, a meaningful symmetry or something.
“There was a discarded newspaper on the seat beside me as the train pulled out of Thirtieth Street and headed for the suburbs. I glanced at the familiar scenes for a while, then picked up the paper. It was a back section, and there, under a snide headline, was a piece about a ‘local character,’ the Penny Man, who spent whole days wandering the streets after loose change, the bulging pockets of his old overcoat jangling. For all there was no photo and no names were mentioned, I knew it was Joe.
“‘Oh. shit,’ I muttered to myself, crumpling the newspaper. ‘Oh shit...’
“Joe lived on one of the few sleazy side streets in the posh Main Line town of Bryn Mawr, in an upstairs apartment over a drugstore. I went up the back stairs—wooden stairs outside the building—and tapped gently on his door. No answer. I peered through the glass. The apartment was dark. It was just my luck. Maybe he was out picking up pennies again, hoping to find the secret of the universe that way—in my state of mind, I didn’t doubt he could actually do it—or else the pennies had revealed that he should move without telling me. I was ready to believe anything.
“Then I heard slow, shuffling footsteps, a metallic clang, and the sound of coins pouring onto the floor, followed by incoherent obscenities. But I knew that tired, almost sobbing voice.
“He opened the door, then lunged for my feet. I jumped back, startled. He picked up a penny off the mat, looked at it, then put it in his pocket and turned to go back inside.
“‘Not yet,’ he said to himself. ‘A little more time.’
“He made to shut the door, as if he hadn’t noticed me at all. ‘Joe, aren’t you going to ask me in?’
“‘Uh, hello, Jim,’ he said, a little disoriented.
“I got a good look at him then, and I hardly recognized him. Now you’ll recall that there were still a lot of hippies then, and squalor hadn’t totally fallen into disfavor yet—but Joe had gone beyond acceptable limits. It was a cold, damp winter night, and there he was barefoot, wearing old jeans with both knees out, and a bathrobe held shut with safety pins. He hadn’t shaved in at least a week, and he smelled like he hadn’t bathed in twice that. And he was haggard, his face pale and sunken, his eyes bloodshot, his gaze wild and distracted. Like a crazy man’s. Like the look you see on bag people, when they sit for hours in a corner somewhere, staring into nothing.
“‘How are you, Joe?’
“‘Jimbo, I’m...I knew you would come by eventually. I suppose you deserve an explanation. Come in.’
“I followed him silently along an unlighted corridor, stepping over boxes and piles of papers. His studio was a mess, paint chipping from the walls, trash in cardboard boxes heaped in corners, orange peels on the floor. Something moved behind the boxes. Maybe it was a cat, maybe not.
“I wondered how he could work here. The only window looked out on a brick wall. The overhead light apparently didn’t work, so the only illumination came from a small lamp he’d clamped onto his drawing table.
“I waded forward, careful not to step on any artwork, and looked at the drawing on the table. It was a rough pencil sketch of the opening spread for what turned out to be the final issue of Saint Toad, the scene where they sacrifice Little Nell to Odin. I was selfishly relieved to see that, for all Joe Eisenberg might be going mad, his creative powers were not failing. His stuff would continue to sell comic books.
“Still Joe didn’t say anything. I turned away from the table, and began to scan the bookshelves, reading titles as best I could in the gloom. You know, you can tell a lot about someone by what is on their bookshelves. Joe was full of surprises. Oh, there were lots of comics, and the hardcover reprints of the E.C. classics, but also lots of classics in the literary sense. He had most of the Elizabethans, and even Latin and Greek writers. And there were scholarly books on religion, folklore, magic, that sort of thing. I could only make out a few titles: Franz Cumont books on Roman paganism, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the Joshi transla¬tion of Al Azif, and a few more. Not what you’d expect for the average cartoonist. Of course Joe wasn’t the average cartoonist, and his strips were fantastically erudite sometimes.
“‘Jim,’ he said at last, ‘you are probably wondering...’
“‘You could say that.’
“‘I’ll bet you have.’ Then he bent over and I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. All along one wall was a row of buckets, and they were indeed filled with pennies. He picked up a handful of them, and let them dribble through his fingers. ‘See a penny, pick it up, all the day you’ll have good luck. Do you know what the next verse is, Jimbo?’
“‘No, but I think you’re going to tell me.’
“‘See a penny; leave it lay; death will claim you that same day. I learned that from the Penny Elves. That’s one of the many things they told me.’
“‘The what kind of elves?’
“‘Penny Elves, Jim. Like tooth fairies who have been promoted, only they’re not good enough to work for Santa Claus. I used to think it was the old gods, and that was a grand and serene and beautiful way to look at it—the Olympian powers exiled, forgotten, reduced to communicating to the few mortals who still acknowledge them by penny-divination. There’s a certain pathos in the idea. But it isn’t true. It’s all the work of these loser elves. They resent the job. They want the prestige of being in the employ of the Big Claus, but they know they haven’t made the grade. So they put us humans through the paces, just to make us look ridiculous. They bait the trap with real knowledge, real predictions, and lead us on.’
“He said all this with such conviction, such passive, yet intense resignation that the effect was scary. I can’t put it any other way.
“‘Is this...like the Spooch Theory, Joe?’
“Suddenly he was angry. I had never seen him angry before. He threw the remaining pennies down hard, and started shooing me toward the door.
“‘Forget it, Jimbo. You keep asking me if I can be serious. Well you can’t. That’s pretty obvious. You won’t understand. Don’t worry about your goddamn artwork. You’ll get it on time. What you need to worry about is What are you going to do when this starts happening to you? Huh, Jimbo? What?’
“He slammed the door in my face. I stood there for a minute at the top of the stairs, stunned, and then I headed for the Bryn Mawr train station. There was nothing I could do. I had never felt so helpless in all my life. Joe had no family that I knew of, and I couldn’t very well spend $75 an hour—even if I had it—explaining to a shrink that I had this friend who was suffering from extraordinary delusions. What was left? Call up the police and tell them Joe was behaving irrationally? There are lots of irrational people in our society, and nobody cares a bit about them. You see them in every big city, sleeping on vents.
“So I caught the last train back into Philly and did nothing. I was disturbed to notice that there was an unusual amount of loose change on the floor of the train car I was riding in. Nobody stooped to pick any of it up.
“Joe Eisenberg was as good as his word. He remained punctual until the end. His work came in on time, as brilliant and wonderful as ever. Somewhere in the deep recesses of his tangled mind, genius still remained; I don’t use the word lightly. Genius...
“My own behavior in the following couple of months was selfish, even shameful. That whole scene had been a cry for help from a very disturbed individual, but I tried to put him out of my mind. He was an adult, I told myself, his own responsibility. I was his publisher, not his daddy.
“Mostly I retreated into my work. When I’d started out publishing undergrounds, it was a lark, a mixture of joking and idealism, a way of showing what we called the Establishment in those days that the true spirit of freaky America had not been stifled. I never imagined that it would become a desperate, grinding business frequently interrupted by messages from the sponsor—that is to say, the landlord—who swore he would turn me and mine out on the sidewalk if the rent was late one more time. Then there were the artists. I managed to pay some of them, some of the time. I felt bad about that.
“But Joe never complained. He was faithful till the end.
“The end came on the last evening of April, Walpurgisnacht. I suppose that figured. I had been out most of the day, trying to find a secondhand typewriter to replace my Selectric, which had rattled and gurgled its last. When I got back to the office-cum¬-apartment, there was a package between the inner and outer doors, with no markings at all, save a single word scribbled on the back in magic marker: GOODBYE.
“I recognized Joe’s handwriting, of course. I hurried inside and slit open the package. Several pennies fell out, onto the carpet. The package contained artwork, another, the final installment of Saint Toad’s Cracked Chimes, beginning with the sacrifice scene I’d seen on his drawing table during my visit. Well fine, I thought. He’s delivering them himself now.
“Then the phone rang. It was the printer, who wasn’t going to print the next Zipperhead unless I paid him for the jobs he’d done on the previous four. As soon as I got myself out of that one, another artist called and threatened to go on strike if I didn’t pay him what I owed him.
“One thing followed another, and I didn’t manage to even think of Joe again until quite late that night. It must have been around eleven when I noticed that one of the coins on the rug was much larger than the others. I picked it up. It wasn’t an American penny, but a very old, large-sized British one, with Queen Victoria on the front.
“On the back were the words: WATCH THIS SPACE FOR FURTHER DEVELOPMENTS.
“I dropped it with a yelp, as if it were red hot. I was sure I was seeing things, going a bit mad myself. The coin lay on the rug at my feet, the message fading in and out: WATCH...WATCH... WATCH...”Then the phone rang one more time. I assumed it was another creditor. It’s never too late at night when people are after you for money.
“‘Hello!’ I snarled.
“It was Joe. He sounded exhausted, his voice cracking as he spoke. I think he had been crying.
“‘Jim,’ he said. ‘You’ve been good to me, as good as anyone. I think you ought to know. It’s too late to do anything for me, but I ought to tell you the truth.’
“There was a long pause, as if he couldn’t bring himself to speak.
“‘What is it, Joe,’ I asked him gently. ‘You can tell me.’
“‘It isn’t elves. There are no such things as Penny Elves.’
“I hoped that somehow Joe had snapped out of it, had become sane again. But he didn’t sound any saner. If anything, he sounded worse.
“‘It’s devils,’ he said. ‘Devils right out of Hell. A special sub-division of them. They work for Mammon, the demon of avarice, and they lead people to damnation through, well... money. I made a pact with them, Jim. I did it before I knew who they really were. It all started as a game, picking up pennies, tying them in to coincidences, pretending they were omens and prophecies. But then, somehow, I discovered that they really worked. Forbidden knowledge, Jim. That’s what it was. They told me...all sorts of things...wonderful, terrible. I made a deal. I wanted to be good, Jim. I wanted to be the best, so I made a deal, and I learned how to read the signs more closely than ever before. That’s where my inspiration came from, Saint Toad, all the rest. Made in Hell. You know what they say about me ¬being devilishly funny.’
“‘No, Joe,’ I said. ‘This is crapola. It’s you. You’re a genius. It comes out of your head. You didn’t get it off the back of any stupid penny.’
