Ostrich-Holed

It’s 9:30 on a Friday night and a lot of people I bet are doing something semicool like riding motorcycles or having sex but how many of them are doing something insanely cool like attempting to draw an ostrich? Just the one. Just me.

You’d think an ostrich would be easy—long swooping idiot neck with a little ball on top for a head and a football body, like it’s already a cartoon—but I just can’t get it right. I’ve got six different Google image search tabs open and I spent most of yesterday at the Woodland Park Zoo doing “research” (sketching in my notebook while taking surreptitious hits from a thermos filled with Four Roses) and I’ve been filling up page after page with the little fuckers in my off-brand open-source Photoshopesque program all day since I woke up. My apartment is completely dark except for the blue glow of my tablet screen, which I’m scratching all over with the stylus like a maniac. It’s loud. My headphones are powerless against the deep thrumming bass from the bar downstairs, which I can feel snaking up through my legs clear to the base of my skull like one of those pink massage chairs at the state fair.

It’s nice out though. Warm for once. I’ve got all the windows open and the sky is doing that thing where it looks like someone’s smeared black crayon all over a purple sheet of construction paper. I can smell the food trucks and hear the Ballard Nights Marching Band winding through the neighborhood. The trombones are going wild so I turn off my music and listen as the drunks coming out of King Joey’s cheer and holler at the band.

Then I get back to my ostrich. I can’t get the face right, for starters. So far it’s looking like a mutated giraffe or some wildly messed-up dinosaur. I’ve got an entire Moleskine filled with shitty ostriches from the zoo yesterday but they’re no help at all.

BTW, people seem surprised when they hear I’m a cartoonist. As far as anyone has an idea in their head of what one looks like, I guess I don’t match it—I look more like a disgraced exorcist, or an eye doctor who’s in a punk band on the weekends, or an XL goth Nancy Drew. I have this webcomic with about forty readers. It’s been nearly a decade, hundreds of comics, and I still can’t crack forty-one. But I just keep doing it.

One time a therapist told me that I commit to my non-career as a cartoonist so hard because I simply cannot commit to other things. Like say for instance a girflfriendboyfriend situation. Or even getting a small pet such as a lizard or what have you. Like I am allergic to sticking to living things but will grimly stick to nonliving things until the Earth shrugs off its atmosphere and turns back into a cool rock.

I can’t really afford therapy anymore but I think about that sometimes.

For a while I was doing some illustrations for a magazine but they got bought by a big corporation who then laid off everyone but kept the magazine name for a website that now sells some kind of cryptocurrency that’s branded like those old Carl’s Jr. commercials where bikini babes eat a hamburger, sexually.

I’ve already got the comic idea sketched out in thumbnails, even though I can’t get the ostriches right just yet:

Panel One: Two ostriches chilling by a tree, looking bored. One ostrich says, “I just want to do something surprising. I’m tired of being pigeonholed.”

Panel Two: That same ostrich continues: “Or is ‘surprise’ a foolish goal in art? Will the pursuit of the unexpected for its own sake lead me toward the shocking, the obscene, the non-sequitur? Is ‘surprise’ more of an effect, a neutral medium only useful in support of some actual artistic or political message? Is my desire to merely surprise my audience proof that I’m not a real artist?”

Panel Three: Zoom out to reveal the ostriches are caged in a cramped zoo exhibit, with some rich-looking children pointing at them and yelling, “PUT YOUR HEADS UNDER THE GROUND, YOU FUCKS.”

Panel Four: One of the other children screams, “WE HAVE SEEN IT ON THE INTERNET AND DESIRE TO HAVE OUR EXPECTATIONS MET. THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF ENTERTAINMENT.”

Panel Five: The children stare silently, and the ostriches do nothing. No text.

Panel Six: The second ostrich finally speaks. He says, “Ha ha you mean ostrich-holed.”

End of comic. Sucks, but it’s all I’ve got.

It’s after 10 now and although I’d rather smash my head in the fridge than brave the crowds downstairs, I’m out of alcohol and I’m thinking a beer or two might help loosen up my brain and/or help me sleep. Which yes is a super healthy attitude to take toward alcohol. But I really want to get this comic posted tonight or tomorrow. Got to keep that SEO fresh. And I don’t have work in the morning for once.

So I pull some pants on and squeeze out through my door, which sticks on the uneven floor and doesn’t open all the way, and jog down the rickety-ass stairs to King Joey’s.

The stairwell leads to the bar’s side door over by the bathrooms. It’s predictably dim and loud. Everything—the walls, floor, booths, even the skee-ball machine—is covered with dark wood that eats up the light so you can’t see shit. It’s like someone’s colored all the linework a dull sepia and overlaid it with a deep mahogany at like 70% opacity.

There are two bars, one outside and one in. Margaret’s working the front bar. She nods at me, her long tattooed neck craning over a sea of people. “Piano Man” just started playing on the retro-looking-but-actually-brand-new jukebox so of course half the room is just losing their shit and singing along. The ever-diminishing crowd of old-timers (you can tell them by their grizzled abundance of actual non-designer workwear) are smoking outside by the back bar and frowning at the influx of tech douchebags (vests, soft shoes that look like slippers) into their holy sanctum. It looks like the beginnings of some weak-ass street fight from a musical.

As I push past the bathrooms, some dude in a gray cardigan sidles up beside me, and here’s where things get interesting: He slips my wallet out of my pocket, so quick I almost miss it. And I’m pretty sure he’s got a knife—there’s an odd glint in his other hand. He looks pretty mean, with these big chunky eyebrows scribbled on with a thick technical drawing pen, maybe a Copic Multiliner 0.5 or even 0.7 mm.

So what do I do? I gasp. I mean I try not to but I am actually gasping. Have you ever full-on gasped in real life? It’s a trip. I feel like a scandalized Edwardian housewife. So anyway here I am gasping away like an idiot when my new acquaintance snags all my hard-earned cartoonist money (ten dollars). He’s quick about the wallet but not nearly subtle enough, and when he sees me notice, he moves the maybe-knife toward me.

Something scrapes apart in me. Something unbuckles.

He makes a wide low jab at me beneath the crowd with the glinting thing. I grab his wrist and spin him around until he’s facing the bathroom door. With my other hand I give his upper back a quick push, smashing his face into the door with enough force to stun him (but not enough, probably, to do any permanent damage). Nobody hears the sharp crack of his head hitting the wood over Billy Joel’s voice, and since I’m now between him and the crowd, nobody notices when I push the door open with the dude’s face and maneuver him into the thankfully empty bathroom, snagging my wallet from his hand and whispering “Sorry” as he groans and slides all the way down to the wrecked faux-linoleum so slowly that I can almost see the word SCREEEEE in big block capitals following along behind him on the wall. I fold up his knife and stick it in my pocket because honestly? It’s pretty nice, this little serrated Damascus steel thing with some Celtic-looking shit engraved onto the blade.

If you think I’m going to call the cops, you’re insane. So some idiot tried to rob me. He had a fair shot and I wish him all the best. He probably won’t bother me again and I doubt he’ll ever come back to King Joey’s—no doubt because he’ll assume I’ve called the cops when he wakes up. Also fuck the cops.

But I’m not nearly enough of a badass not to be stunned and emptied-out by this little tussle so I just stand there in the dim bathroom for a sec, buzzing slightly. I let my systems shut down for a while. Not sure what else I could’ve done this time, but regardless, violence always gives me this sick shaky feeling in my legs like someone’s sketched my outlines with a wildly unsteady hand and a leaky fountain pen, all these splotches and jagged angles.

That’s when I see it: The dude has an ostrich tattoo on the inside of his wrist, which is currently flopped beneath the sink in a puddle of liquid with a color I can only describe as “dirty bumblebee.” I bend down and peer closer at the tattoo.

It’s a cartoon and it’s really well done. So far the ostriches I’ve been drawing upstairs have looked remarkably like feathery dicks with legs, but this guy’s tattoo helps me see what I’ve been missing: An ostrich’s head is like 60% mouth. But I’ve been thinking beak and so I’ve just ended up drawing weird stretched-out ducks. I see now that I need to think of it like a wide human mouth instead, like it’s got an actual expression, and huge eyes with lush, delicate eyelashes: a mascara commercial. I snap a quick picture on my phone.

I silently thank the guy for trying to burgle me, check his breathing and pulse to make sure he’s relatively okay, and wade through the crowd to the bar.

When I finally make it to the front, Margaret already has a beer waiting. “Pale from that new place on 49th,” she says as I squeeze in and take an exploratory sip.

I give Margaret a thumbs-up like a huge fucking idiot. “Busy night,” I croak semi-interrogatively.

“Careful,” she says. “Deb says there’s a pickpocket around here somewhere.”

I grin and take out my notebook.