doozyville

We had a good life in Rolling Meadows, so I don’t understand why Monica and her girlfriends wanted to build a homeless shelter in our town.

I learned about it through Facebook. On a sweltering Saturday afternoon, after mowing the lawn, I slipped back inside our air-conditioned house and dropped myself on the couch with my phone. 

Monica’s Facebook essay came midway through a flame war between our neighbours. They were fighting over whether the city council should renovate a plaza or build our first homeless shelter. 

Rory Birch, the mayor of Rolling Meadows, had proposed to spend a little more than four million dollars renovating the plaza in front of city hall. The fountain—a heron, wings spread—no longer worked. Four million dollars would get the heron spitting water again and lush up our sunblasted town square. 

I thought it was a good idea. Monica did not. 

She sided with Sue Carrell, who used to lead one of the women’s organizations back before she and her husband divorced. I don’t know much about her, but I did vote for her the one time she ran as a school board trustee. Monica vouched for her. 

Sue had written an open letter to Mayor Birch saying the city’s priorities were misplaced. Rather than spending all that money on the town square, Sue said the council should build a homeless shelter down by the lake. Dozens of my neighbours, some of whose names I recognized from Facebook, agreed. So did Monica. Sue’s letter went like this:

We have it so good in Rolling Meadows that I don’t even think we know how good we have it. Our town is peaceful and well-kept, and it’s a credit to Mayor Birch for all that he’s done. I don’t want to take that away from him. But I also think that we should be more open. When you read how crowded some of the homeless shelters are in cities RIGHT NEXT TO OURS, you have to wonder what it will take for us to pitch in. Others don’t have it as good as we have it. Is it fair? Spending four million dollars (!) on a garden and a fountain seems so wasteful. Can’t we give a little more of what we have? 

The Rolling Meadows Messenger, a weekly packed with flyers, ran a story about the dispute. They quoted Monica’s essay. She printed the story from the internet and put it on the fridge. 

She even started talking about running for a seat on town council. 

~     

Like most people in Rolling Meadows, I never paid attention to local politics. I voted, paid my taxes, and sometimes read the Messenger. I also worked from home and took care of the kids after school. Outside of coaching hockey for ten years—and the half-acre we owned outright—I had no real connection to our tidy little town on the lake. If it wasn’t for the signs I saw on a few lawns on my drive to the grocery store (CHANGE STARTS WITH US!) and Monica, of course, I wouldn’t have known about the lobbying efforts to bring a homeless shelter to Rolling Meadows. 

The only event about the shelter I attended happened on a Tuesday night. Monica, along with other proponents, cheered as Sue Carrell, the Caesar of the moment, delivered a fiery speech at the four-hour-long council meeting. I phased in and out of consciousness for most of the speeches, but Sue’s resonated. After she spoke, for a moment, a brief moment, I had the sense that the people collected in the half-empty council chambers might rise up and kill Mayor Birch if he didn’t agree to fund the homeless shelter. How else could “we grow as a community” if we didn’t, Sue asked. (Didn’t fund the shelter, I mean.) 

Mayor Birch sensed it too. Before the council took a vote on whether to fund the homeless shelter, he stood up, dropped his glasses on his desk, and sighed into the microphone. 

“I love this town, it’s been my home my entire life, but I quit,” he said. “Do whatever you like.” 

Council voted. The motion to fund the homeless shelter passed. The crowd cheered. I got swept up in the applause, energized by the feeling that something big had happened. 

We fought for what was right. And this time, the good guys won.

~     

I was probably the most famous person living in Rolling Meadows, although nobody who passed me on the street would have recognized me as anything other than the guy who took a monstrous sheepdog for a walk twice a day. Fifteen years ago, I landed a syndication deal for Grooster, a daily comic strip featuring a rooster who wins the lottery and finds himself living among the nouveau riche. The running joke was that Grooster struggled more with being rich than with living as a rooster in a human world. 

I made good money. Not enough to build my own studio or buy a cattle ranch, but enough to pay off a mortgage on a century home in Rolling Meadows. My problem, as a man in his middle years, was that I had grown tired of Grooster. I had run out of good ideas about a decade before. I felt trapped inside the tiny boxes of Grooster’s existence, and I didn’t think the joke was funny anymore. So, to save myself from boredom, I came up with a new strip called Doozyville, about a town where everybody is crazy. It had an ensemble of characters and plenty of space for me to trudge through the absurdities I seemed to encounter in my real life. 

I sent Len, my agent, a complete proposal for Doozyville, something that should have been unnecessary since I was a productive, reliable cartoonist. The funniest comic was a single-panel cartoon. The camera looks through the bars of a prison window. On the single mattress lies a prisoner dressed in stripes. A big, satisfied smile lifts the corners of his mouth. Inside the thought balloon hanging over his head read the words: “Me time.”

I thought it was a riot. This was what people wanted with their morning coffee. Not Grooster asking his waiter which spoon he’s supposed to use to eat his soft-boiled egg. 

Len tried to sell Doozyville. Nobody wanted it. The newspaper market was dying, and free comics existed in abundance on the internet. 

“Unless something big happens, Grooster is your only real chance in this industry,” Len told me over the phone on a Monday night. “You’re making a good living. I suggest you ride it to the end.”

I said I would, and I did, but Doozyville stuck in my mind. I promised myself I’d keep drawing it. Maybe there was a book there. A movie. Maybe something more. 

~  

Rory Birch retired, sold his investment business, and relocated to a gated community in Florida. Sue Carrell was elected mayor in a landslide.

A year later, the town published the plans for the homeless shelter. After “consultations with the community” (when did they do that?), the town had decided to locate the homeless shelter downtown, right on Hartford Avenue—a five-minute walk across the rolling hills of Meadows Park to our home. So far as I could tell from the article, the decision was final. As one of his last acts as mayor, the departing Mayor Birch had made it so. 

I tried Monica at work. No answer. I didn’t bother leaving a message. It was the end of the quarter, and she wouldn’t have had time to call me back anyway. The kids came home from school. We played catch in the backyard and went to the park. I heated a frozen lasagna, fed and bathed the kids, and put them to bed. Monica tumbled through the door at close to ten.

“I’m so tired,” she began. “I wouldn’t have been so late if Frank hadn’t—”

“Did you see where they are putting the homeless shelter?” I said. “Why are they putting it there?”

Monica dumped her jacket on the chair by the door. It slumped to the floor. 

“Sue thought it was a good location,” she said. 

“Sue!”

“What’s the problem?”

“It was supposed to be by the lake!” 

“There is plenty of space around here.”

“They should build it over at the railyards. Nobody likes it there.”

She let out a long sigh and went upstairs to change. She didn’t come down. I found her in bed, her makeup smearing the pillowcase.

~     

I had a studio in the third bedroom of our home. From there, the morning light fell just right, and in the afternoon, I could see clear across Meadows Park to the lake. I worked in the mornings, usually finishing the day’s strip by lunch. I dedicated my afternoons to answering emails, keeping house, and watching the kids.     

Over the next two years, I watched the homeless shelter rise among the lacy clusters of willow trees ringing Meadows Park. The shelter stood five stories tall. The original plans called for a modest two-story building, something like a cross between a hospital and a Motel 6, but when the story about a feisty band of suburbanites wanting to open their community to homeless people hit the national news, the federal government pitched in a few million more to add a rehab facility. The morning sunlight glistened off the silver sheets of glass. 

I walked around the construction site as it went up. I saw other guys from around the neighbourhood surveying the same corner, one eye locked on the monstrosity lifting from the pavement behind a banner that read FUTURE HOME OF THE ROLLING MEADOWS WELCOME CENTER: “YOU’RE HOME NOW.” 

Enough politicians to fill a prison attended the opening. Mayor Carrell held giant golden scissors. Her smile stretched as long as the ribbon she was cutting.  

I sipped orange-ade and toured the inside of The Welcome Center. I have to say I was impressed. The space looked built for superstar college football players: a sleek locker room with semi-private showers; a sizeable lounge with a ping pong table; a decent-sized study area where the men (this facility was for men only) could learn to read and write with volunteers from the Y; several floors of bachelor apartments neatly appointed with a bed, a desk, and a chair; an industrial sized kitchen; and other wonders, like a Japanese maple, a patio with interlocking stones, two gas barbecues, and a fountain. 

The brochure that went around featured Ted, the first resident, and his story. I liked Ted. I met him on the tour. He had grown up middle class, worked a sales job, and fell into drugs after seeing his infant son and wife die in a car accident. His salt-and-pepper jaw and wise, sad eyes made him look older than he was. 

The Welcome Center existed for people like Ted. I listened to him give a short speech at the opening and thought, “I’d like to help him.” On the way out, I shook Ted’s hand and wished him well. I really did. 

As I stripped to my underwear for bed that night, I said to Monica, “This is going to help guys like Ted.”

“That’s what it’s all about,” she said. 

~     

For a while, it was easy to forget about The Welcome Center. A cold winter landed. School was cancelled ten times because of snow. When it wasn’t snowing, the air was an ice cube. You couldn’t move. 

But spring—spring blushed rosily. I drew my pages in the morning and walked all afternoon. In late April, while walking through Meadows Park, right at the little stone bridge, a guy I’d never seen before told me to eat myself. I actually stopped, unsure if I had heard him correctly. 

“You want me to what?” I asked. 

Then I got a good look at him. His pupils were dilated wide enough to swallow the moon. 

In the following weeks, I saw more men wandering the park. They shambled along, their brains eaten by whatever they were shooting into their arms. Over the weeks, the corner of Lewis and Hartford, where The Welcome Center stood, decayed like a tooth. It started with a bit of graffiti, some trash barfing out the mouth of a garbage can, and men—all zombies—standing around the corner and staggering up and down Hartford. They weren’t doing anything wrong. They weren’t criminals. But they were… there. 

Elton Li, a guy who used to coach hockey with me, crashed into my cart at the grocery store. After exchanging apologies, we stood in line together.     

“You know,” Elton said, “I sometimes can’t decide if the world around me is changing or if I’m just getting old.” 

I followed his gaze. A resident of The Welcome Center was circulating the checkout lines asking for change. 

Elton smiled at me, wondering if I might talk about what he really wanted to talk about. 

“I’m pretty sure you’re just getting old,” I said. We both laughed, paid for our groceries, and waved goodbye.

~     

By midsummer, the first tent sprang up in Meadows Park—a baby blue pup tent under a willow tree. Almost cute. Others followed. By September, the park looked like a campsite at the end of the world. Garbage piled up around the cans. A tattered couch appeared at the center of the park, out of nowhere, followed by a busted flatscreen TV. Whenever I passed through the park—which by this point I hardly ever did—I’d see three or four men on the couch staring at the TV. What were they watching?

One evening, somebody called the police. A fight had broken out. I read about it on Facebook. The police, I read, had roughed up the men in the park. I don’t know what happened, but the loudmouths on Facebook said the cops brutalized them. 

The town council replied through a press release. I read about it on Twitter. “In light of recent events and the increasing dangers posed to the growing population now residing in Meadows Park, Council has hired several Community Safety Patrollers who will patrol the park and surrounding areas to ensure that all people concerned feel safe, secure, and welcome in their environs.”

I was sitting in the kitchen while Monica flipped stringy strips of bacon in the frying pan. 

“Council wants to hire a bunch of kids to patrol the park,” I said. “Isn’t that what the police are for?”

She opened her phone and showed me a photo of a Rolling Meadows cop. Somebody on the neighbourhood Facebook page had shared it with the neighbours. The photo showed the cop at the gym. Cords of muscle ran up and down his tattooed arms.

“He seethes with violence,” Monica said.

From where I sat, I could see the shelter through the kitchen window, see clear across the park, now shimmering bronze and gold, and the tents spreading like flood waters.

~

I couldn’t work one day. The Grooster deadline loomed, but nothing clever or even idiotic came to me. Which was unusual. Even if I couldn’t write a funny comic strip, I could usually pump out a couple panels of existential angst or cute silliness. This particular morning, I needed a walk, so I put the leash on Dixon and headed out. We got halfway across Meadows Park when I spotted what appeared to be a condom with pills inside it.

I couldn’t be sure because as soon as I saw the little bundle, Dixon had swallowed it. I tried to get him to throw it up, but he just smiled at me under his doggy beard, not sorry and not willing to puke.

At the vet’s office, I sat in the waiting room and texted obscenities to Monica while Dr. Hamish evacuated Dixon’s stomach. What if a kid had found whatever Dixon had swallowed? What are we supposed to tell the kids if our dog dies of an overdose? 

She told me in all caps—she only texts in all caps—to CALM DOWN. I tried. I counted my breaths, like a YouTube meditation guide taught me, stared into an enormous fish tank, the centerpiece of Dr. Hamish’s office, and watched an aspirator send bubbles out the smokestack of a sunken battleship.

Which one of those zombies tried to poison my dog?

I opened the idea book that I carry with me and began a foul-mouthed letter to my town councillor. I lost steam, and by the time Dr. Hamish trotted Dixon out to me, smiling stupidly, I broke my creative impasse for the day.

The scene: Grooster in a tuxedo eating dinner in a haughty dining room. At the table over, a man of old money (monocle, mutton chops) asks his wife, dressed in her finest pearls, a question he has been mulling for many, many years: “Darling, how would you feel if I reinvented myself as a blues man?”

~

A grey day. I packed a commission drawing I’d completed in a padded envelope and left the house on foot. Rain fell before I got to the end of my street. I popped my umbrella and held the envelope to my chest.

Commissions are hard work—I only do them for the money, so I procrastinate and then have to rush—and so I needed a walk to clear my head. Rain pounded on my umbrella and on all the tents lining the park.

I headed for the pharmacy on Hartford. Two zombies stood under the awning of the butcher shop, smoking what smelled like a shoelace. I discovered that Kasper’s, the butcher shop, was out of business. I didn’t go there often, but the Polish couple that ran it always said hello and smiled. I liked to putter and sample the meats and cheeses. 

Next door to the butcher shop was From Far Away, an import store. An old hippie ran it. She wore beads and kept her windows stocked with African sculptures—stuff that had been in the windows for as long as I’d lived in Rolling Meadows, stuff as old as the porcelain Elvises and Dalmatian fire hydrant statues that sat in the window of the dusty Smoke & Gift. As I passed the store, I saw the old hippie had hung a poster in her window:

I STAND WITH MY NEIGHBOURS WHO LIVE IN TENTS. NO EVICTIONS! HUMANS ARE NOT COCKROACHES!

At the pharmacy, I mailed my commission and picked up a refill on my blood pressure medication. Outside, the rain really came down.

As I stepped through exploding puddles, I thought about my work. I was struggling like I had never struggled before. I was spent. Every strip I drew felt dumb, and the prospect of being dropped from syndication felt more real than at any other point in my life.

I wondered if other artists came to the same moment that I was entering—the moment when you realize your creative potential, a nut hanging tight and firm, has loosened to the point where even letting a raw idea onto the page seemed tired and pointless. I had unconsciously made a hobby of reading biographies of the great and even mediocre artists, and most of them—most of us—start their lives as ignoramuses, sure they will set fire to the world with their art like a god hurtling a thunderbolt on a dry prairie, and stupid to the eternal power of inertia. I was dawning on the realization that I no longer cared for my work. I could not be sure if this tied directly to what I felt was a loss of my powers or if my powers were retreating because I no longer cared to compete with the greats of my field—knowing that I could not compete with them, especially now when nothing was funny, and I was comfortable enough from what I’d already earned to not have to make an attempt.

~

Nobody said anything about the mess our downtown had become. Instead, over time, everybody simply avoided going there. Rolling Meadows is a small town, a quiet town, but still big enough to disappear in. Rather than shopping for groceries downtown, I took to driving to the superstore off the highway. Like others, I skipped my afternoon coffee at Haskell’s on Hartford and bought myself a home espresso machine.

When needles appeared in the playgrounds around the downtown area, a few concerned parents took to Facebook. 

“Warning: Watch where your kids step at Marcel Park. My little one almost stepped on this. So gross.”

Under the mother’s warning was a photo of a needle. 

The first reply appeared instantly. “You can’t even begin to imagine what it is like to have needle-related problems. Think before you post.”

Another woman chirped: “Ah, sorry, but any good parent should be more concerned about the drug users dumping their needles that are all over the f-ing place. YOU think before YOU post.”

The chorus buried her. “You’re exaggerating,” they said. “Stop the dehumanization!”

After that, I didn’t see much said about needle-related problems on our Facebook group. And nothing about the hookers.

~

That did not mean the town wasn’t listening. Somehow, at some point, somewhere—I don’t know how, or when, or where—the town council acted on the needles cropping up in the gutters, parks, and parking lots by opening a safe injection site. The site opened in the

spring—surprisingly quickly—in the parking lot beside the farmer’s market. 

“It’s better than them shooting up and dying,” I read in a Facebook post that Monica had liked, “and it is a good way to collect needles. Two birds, one awesome stone.”

Our safe injection site garnered national media attention. Stuart Rattray, the shrink who ran the site, insisted that by offering a safe place for the increasing number of drug addicts settling in Rolling Meadows, counsellors (like him) could steer them to a better path. 

“What we need to understand is that it isn’t our job, as a community, to judge these people for what they are doing to themselves,” he, a man with a grey beard and grey ponytail, said to a gorgeous young reporter. “That isn’t going to help them.”

I showed the video to Monica.

“Does this guy really think drug addicts want to hang out with him and get high?” I asked.

“So?”

“Cool dad is creepy.”

“We need to do something,” she admitted. “We can’t have these people dying all over the place.”

~

Die they did. Addicts overdosed. We had a murder. Murders were not unknown in Rolling Meadows, but they were rare. Once every couple of years, somebody shot his girlfriend or poisoned her father. It happened.

This murder, and the fact that the person bled out on the stoop of the now defunct Kiddie Cuts Hair Salon, upset many. So many, in fact, that the silent anger of the town finally penetrated city hall.

Council loved it. Now they had a problem to fix—a real problem, one we could all rally behind. Mayor Sue built her re-election platform around revitalizing the downtown. Consultation followed consultation, and a plan unfolded. First, they’d revitalize the town plaza and get that fountain working—for everybody. And after that, the town would rezone Meadows Park as a mixed-use public housing development.

That brought about the worst fight of my marriage—the only one when I actually considered leaving my wife. 

I thought she’d understand. Wasn’t it clear? A housing project in the beautiful park across from our house? I didn’t need a property assessment to tell me the value of my home had plummeted. But Monica had convinced herself—or been convinced by the chorus—that with a little more compassion, a smidge more space and time, just a little more mindfulness, the invisible wall standing between our new neighbours and the luxuries we said we had would fall—come crashing down, in fact—like a burst dam and flood Rolling Meadows with that very special something everybody seemed to want but couldn’t name. 

~

A bunch of us in the neighbourhood sued the town. Our lawyers advised us to take the settlement and get the hell out of there. Not many people wanted to fight, as it turned out. We took our losses and ran. 

I loved that home of ours. Our lives were in that home. We were the first to leave Rolling Meadows, the head of the exodus, and bought a home in Valley Springs, the next town over, a little deeper into the country. It was the same town where Sue Carroll had moved to after she quit politics. I put my workspace in the sunroom off the back and dithered at my desk. 

Len called on a Tuesday morning. “It’s not good, but it’s not as bad as it could be,” he said. The syndicate planned on dropping Grooster at the end of the week. Not good. But Len knew a guy who bought the rights to dead and forgotten cartoon characters—a kind of gravedigger in a cartoon cemetery. Another cartoonist might have clung to his creation, but I figured I could make more from the gravedigger in the short-term than I would in the long-term. Ten years before, at the height of Grooster’s popularity, we’d exhausted all licensing avenues, and it didn’t amount to much. Now, without a daily strip, the chances of somebody wanting to license Grooster for a TV show or as the spokeschicken at a fast-food restaurant seemed non-existent. Plus, I didn’t care to drag around the corpse of my once-popular comic creation. I drew my last strip without any sentimentality (from me, anyways—Monica was in tears). 

A few days later, I signed away the rights, also without sentimentality. No matter how hard I tried to explode the absurdity of Grooster’s world, everything I drew felt redundant. 

~

Now retired, I spent my days much like I used to. I dithered at my desk, sometimes completing commissions but often surfing aimlessly across the web. I tried drawing Doozyville, but I found good ideas hard to come up with. (Although there is this one that I like. A mother and father sit at a filthy, cluttered kitchen table while their three kids scream and cry. The father says to the mother, “I’m in love with the idea of a clean tablecloth.” Monica thought it was too weird for anyone to get.)

When I needed to stretch my legs, I climbed into the station wagon and took Dixon for a drive. I often toured Rolling Meadows. Had I not spent much of my adult life there, I might not have recognized it. Public housing sprouted in what had been Meadows Park. One tower invited another, taller tower. An award-winning architect had connected the houses on our old street to become what is now rudely called an asylum. The fountain in the plaza flowed again, and as I stood at its edge on my last trip to Rolling Meadows, I saw, scattered in its waters, dimes, pennies, and needles.

~

Over the next ten years later, Rolling Meadows, in a never-ending rush to outpace bankruptcy, sold off parcels of land to condo developers. Old St. Stephen’s was resurrected as a nightclub. 

The coup came a year before I had my heart attack. In a push to revitalize the city (to “fulfill our DESTINY as a world-class city,” as the city’s advertising put it), the council allowed a consortium of Las Vegas casino operators to build an “entertainment hub,” complete with haunted houses, a wax museum, the world’s largest Dairy Queen, and a ten-story hotel-slash-casino, on the carcass of the mid-century suburbs that had been given over to squatters when the housing market in Rolling Meadows crashed.

I read posts from the people who couldn’t escape. Some said they liked it. With all the changes, and with all the new people (a million had descended on that gorgeous but tiny stitch of land), the city finally had a decent Thai restaurant. Others went mad. “Does anybody else remember when you could take an evening walk downtown without a hooker asking for the time?” lamented one resident.

A neighbour replied: “Can I ask why you need to be out so late? And, seriously, if you don’t like sex workers asking for the time, don’t wear a watch.”

I couldn’t stop laughing. I laughed until my heart stopped.

~

We’re old now, our kids are married off, and we, the ones who fled to Valley Springs those many years ago, are starting to die off. Cancer. Old age. Contented boredom. 

Monica keeps in touch with old neighbourhood friends through Facebook. Sue Carroll is one of them. They still talk about Rolling Meadows, and when they do, a feeling hangs in the air, heavy and sharp, like the scent of a torched forest. It is a feeling that, regardless of what residents have been through, the town did the right thing. Even though we had moved away, even if we could not see each day what we had done to Rolling Meadows, we had made Rolling Meadows more real. We had made it better.