A Perfect Childhood
Rick Holmes put down his pencil, pushed back his chair and got up from his drafting table. He then walked downstairs to the bar in his recreation room, popped the cork on a bottle of Dom Pérignon and poured himself a glass.
"To my five-thousandth strip," he said, raising his glass in the air.
There was no one else in the room; his toast was for no one's ears but his own.
For nearly fourteen years, Rick had been the creator of Denny's World, the most popular comic strip since Charles Schulz's Peanuts. Denny's World was syndicated to thousands of newspapers across the globe and spawned billions of dollars of Denny merchandise: books, tee shirts, collectible porcelain figures and all manner of toys and games. Between royalties on his comic strip, a percentage of the merchandise sold and the sale of movie and television rights to a major Hollywood studio, Rick was a very wealthy man. Even after paying alimony to his two ex-wives, he was left with more money than he could reasonably spend in his lifetime.
Had he produced any children in his two disastrous marriages, he would have invested money in their futures, but Rick was childless. In fact, he had no living relatives at all. His wonderful parents, whom he immortalized in his comic strip, had been killed in an automobile accident when he was just a child, leaving him in the care of an uncle, a baker from Maine.
It was while he was living with this uncle that Rick began drawing. When he was not in school or doing his chores, he would take a sketchpad and a handful of Venus Paradise colored pencils and walk to Lookout Point. There he would sit for hours, drawing the town below, the ships at sea and the lighthouse on a nearby island.
When Rick went to high school, he had no fondness for science or math and only a passing interest in English. He shunned sports, but for a short time, he joined the school band. However, his heart was not in music; it was in art. The teenager struggled through his academic courses, graduated from high school and, with his natural talent, was accepted to an art school where most of his classmates were looking forward to becoming famous painters, living in Paris and selling their works in upscale galleries. Nearly all of them would fade into obscurity and have to settle for careers in designing greeting cards, illustrating children's books or working for advertising agencies. Rick Holmes was the exception. Not long after graduating, he sold his first Denny's World comic strip. Now he was the most popular cartoon artist in the world.
After finishing his celebratory glass of champagne, Rick went to his den and phoned Jonelle Pomeroy, the woman he had been seeing for the past eighteen months. Jonelle was a thirty-two-year-old editor for an art magazine who lived half an hour north of Rick's Boston brownstone. She was attractive, intelligent and fun-loving. Had Rick not been burned twice before, he probably would have asked her to marry him six months earlier, but he had no intentions of ever taking that walk down the aisle again.
The phone rang three times before Jonelle answered.
"It's me," Rick said. "Why don't we go out and celebrate tonight?"
"What are we celebrating?" she asked eagerly.
"My five-thousandth comic strip," he announced proudly.
"Oh," the editor replied with thinly veiled disappointment.
"I'll pick you up in an hour, and we'll go to that French restaurant you like so much."
After a period of silence, Jonelle agreed to go with him to Chez Pierre, just as Rick had expected. It never occurred to him that she would refuse or that she might have made other plans.
* * *
The couple sat at a small table in a dimly lit corner of the room. Rick ordered a bottle of the restaurant's finest champagne.
"It's hard to believe how many people read and enjoy Denny's World," he said happily. "After all, it's nothing more than an ongoing narrative of my own childhood."
Jonelle said nothing. In all honesty, she did not care very much for the comic strip. She thought it was too sentimental, too cute and, like The Brady Bunch, was not representative of a typical American family. Had she not known Rick as well as she did, she would have thought the situations and characters he created were pure fiction. However, for the last eighteen months, the cartoonist had regaled her with stories of his loving parents, his kind and caring uncle and his perfect childhood. She had seen the framed photographs of his rather conservative father, his somewhat plain but sweet-looking mother and his jovial, overweight uncle.
"It's a damned shame that kids today don't have the kind of childhood I did," Rick continued, growing more maudlin with each glass of champagne.
It was a speech he had made on numerous occasions, and his girlfriend had grown bored with hearing it.
"My mother didn't work. She was there for me whenever I needed her. She cooked all our meals, baked three times a week, helped me with my homework ...."
"A toast to Donna Reed!" Jonelle said with sarcasm, interrupting him.
Rick was taken aback.
"That crack was rather rude, don't you think?" he asked.
"Yes, I suppose it was, but then you would know about rudeness better than I."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Jonelle emptied her champagne glass in one swallow.
"It means I'm breaking up with you."
Rick was stunned.
"Why?"
"I'm tired of being taken for granted. I'm nothing more than a convenience in your life."
"That's absurd!"
"Then why don't we get married?"
"Been there; done that—twice."
"I haven't, not even once. I'm in my thirties now. I want a husband, a home and a family, and that old biological clock is ticking. I can't waste these precious years waiting for you."
"Trust me," Rick said with a smirk. "Marriage is a vastly overrated institution."
"Is that how your parents felt?"
It was a reasonable argument, one Rick should have expected, but it left him confused nonetheless.
"I don't know—no, of course not. My mother and father loved one another very much."
"There you go!" Jonelle declared triumphantly. "Your parents had a wonderful marriage and a happy family life. There's no reason for you to assume that simply because your two marriages failed you couldn't make a success of a third."
Rick put his empty glass down on the table and adamantly insisted, "I will never marry again. Not you, not anyone."
Jonelle stood, laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table and left without a word of goodbye.
* * *
After a four-day hiatus from work during which time Rick moped around the house, drinking and feeling sorry for himself, he finally sat down at his drafting table intending to create comic strip number five thousand and one. Pencil in his right hand, he reached with his left into the open ream of paper and took out a sheet.
"What the ...?"
He stared open-mouthed at the crude comic strip someone had drawn on the page.
Who would play such a cruel trick? the artist wondered.
He looked at the open ream of paper. Three-fourths of the sheets were gone. It had probably been a couple of months since he had opened it. During that time there were dozens of people in his house who could have sneaked into his studio. The comic was probably meant to be nothing more than a joke—one in bad taste, to be sure, but a joke nonetheless. Then why did it upset him so?
"Because it insults my mother," he said aloud.
Even schoolchildren took offense when others taunted them with unflattering comments about their parents.
"My mother was a saintly woman," he cried, angrily ripping up the comic that showed her in a compromising position with a man who was clearly not his father. "There are a lot of sick people in this world," he spat. "Probably just jealous of the perfect childhood I had."
The cartoonist grabbed another sheet of paper and picked up the pencil again. Yet as hard as he tried, he could not think of an idea for the next strip. After more than an hour of fruitless attempts, he crumpled up another sheet of paper, threw it in the wastebasket and left the room.
Rick slept badly that night, haunted by nightmares he could not remember the following morning. He rose early, made himself a cup of strong coffee, sat down at his kitchen table and opened the daily newspaper. Out fell three sheets of paper that had been stuck inside it: a hot pink sheet advertising a professional carpet cleaning service, a canary yellow sheet announcing the opening of a new pizzeria and a white sheet on which was drawn another vulgar comic strip parodying Denny's World.
"This isn't funny!" Rick said aloud as he tore the offensive comic to shreds.
Later that morning he found three similar drawings hidden in the ream of paper in his office. His anger resurfaced, and once again he was unable to concentrate on his work. Eventually, he became so upset that he grabbed his car keys and went for a drive, giving in to a sudden urge to visit his childhood home, to see both the raised ranch where he once lived with his parents and the small Cape Cod his uncle had owned.
"I haven't anything to do this week," he said. "There's no reason why I can't go today. It's only two hours away. I'll just take route ...."
An icy chill crept down his spine and settled in the pit of his stomach. He had no idea how to get to either his parents' former home or his uncle's house. Even worse, Rick could not even remember the names of the towns in which they were located.
"This is ridiculous!" he cried. "I must be having some form of mental breakdown. How can I not remember the town where I was born or the name of the high school I went to?"
Shaken, Rick went into his bedroom and looked on the top shelf of his closet. Among the books, blankets and camera equipment was a large box of photographs. He took the box down, sat on the edge of his bed and went through the pictures. There were hundreds of photos, but all of them had been taken within the last ten years. There were none from his high school graduation or his prom or from the many Halloweens, birthdays, Easters and Christmases he had celebrated as a child.
With grim determination, he picked up his phone and called Jonelle.
"I thought I made it clear the other night that our relationship is over," she said when she heard his voice on the other end of the line.
"I'm not calling up to ask you out. I wanted to know if you could give me the name of your cousin's psychiatrist."
"Why?" she asked.
"I'd like to talk to him," he answered. "It's a personal matter."
* * *
Rick met with Dr. Lionel Penn the following week and told the doctor about his loss of certain memories and the disappearance of his family photos.
"The only pictures I still have of my family are the framed ones above my fireplace."
"What do you think might have happened to the missing photographs?" Dr. Penn asked.
"I'm not certain, but I have the strangest feeling that I went into my closet and took them out of the box. I honestly don't remember doing it, though."
"Why would you steal your own pictures?"
"I have no idea, but it's the only logical explanation. Doesn't it seem consistent with my sudden loss of memory?"
"It is possible," the doctor said.
"Then there's the matter of the comic strips. I find them in my office, in the mailbox, rolled up inside the newspaper. They show my parents and my uncle in very unflattering situations, some of which are downright obscene."
"And do you have any idea where they came from?"
Rick hung his head and replied, "I think I drew them, but I don't remember doing so."
"Why would you draw such things? From what you've told me, I gather you loved your parents and your uncle very much."
"I've been giving this matter a great deal of thought. I think my subconscious mind is angry at them. You see, Doctor, I was so happy when I was young, but once I became an adult, things weren't nearly as pleasant. Perhaps what I want most is to return to the happy days of my childhood, and I can't. So my mind is 'taking it out' on my loved ones. What do you think, Doc? Does that sound reasonable to you?"
"It seems plausible, but the simplest explanation is not always the correct one."
* * *
A month later Jonelle ran into Rick outside the psychiatrist's office. At first, she did not recognize her former sweetheart. He had lost close to twenty pounds, and there were dark circles beneath his eyes from lack of sleep. Hope rose in her breast. Perhaps his forlorn appearance meant he was missing her. Maybe she should give him another chance.
"You look like you could use a cup of coffee," she said, holding out the proverbial olive branch.
"I could use something a good deal stronger than that, but since it's only eleven in the morning, I'll settle for coffee."
"You look terrible," Jonelle said as they sat at The Quill and Dagger's coffee bar sipping lattes.
Rick did not deny it.
"I think I'm losing my mind," he stated matter-of-factly.
"Is that why you've been seeing a psychiatrist?"
He nodded.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Among other things, I've been finding comic strips that I don't remember drawing. At first, I thought someone else was playing a cruel joke on me, but then I started having other symptoms as well."
"Such as?"
"I can't recall specific details about my past. For instance, I can tell you everything I did on my tenth birthday. I remember every present I ever got for Christmas and every costume I wore at Halloween, yet I don't remember my mother's or father's birthdays or the name of the town I was born in. Nor can I remember the name of my uncle's bakery or the street he lived on."
"It should be easy enough to find those things out."
"You would think so, wouldn't you? I haven't been able to find any of my old papers, books or photographs. I have nothing of a personal nature from the years before I went to art school."
"If you'd like, I could help you find the answers," she offered cheerfully.
* * *
Jonelle spent the next several days at her laptop, searching public records and back issues of newspapers. What she found deeply troubled her. She took her findings not to Holmes himself, but to Lionel Penn.
"Rick is not the man he believes he is," she announced, placing a manila folder of printouts of certificates and newspaper articles in front of the psychiatrist.
Lionel quickly read through the documents and closed the file.
"I can see why he chose to forget certain aspects of his past," the psychiatrist said.
"I didn't want to show these to him without consulting you first."
"That was a wise decision. I'm not sure how he'll react when he sees this information. I'd like to be there when you give it to him, just in case he needs a sedative."
Rick arrived at Jonelle's apartment promptly at six o'clock and was surprised to see Dr. Penn there. Jonelle looked nervously at the psychiatrist as if asking, Will you tell him or shall I? The doctor took pity on the young woman and began.
"Jonelle has found some interesting information concerning your parents and the man you refer to as your uncle."
"That's wonderful!" Rick exclaimed with an uneasy smile. "I hope you found the street address of my family's house. I'd love to drive past the old place and reminisce about the good old days."
Jonelle turned her head so that her former lover could not see the tears brimming in her eyes.
"The man whose house you went to after your mother died was neither your uncle nor a baker from Maine. You ran away from the foster home in which you were placed, and he took you in and gave you food and a roof over your head. And in exchange, he forced you to ...."
"No! My uncle owned a bakery. He used to bring fresh donuts home for me every day."
"He was a filmmaker," Lionel continued gently, "specializing in child pornography."
"Liar!" Rick screamed.
"And as for your parents, your mother ...."
"... was a kindergarten teacher, but she stopped working to devote her time to raising me. My father was an insurance salesman. He coached Little League and taught Sunday school."
The psychiatrist shook his head.
"I realize how hard this is for you to accept, but you must acknowledge the truth. According to your birth certificate, your mother was never married. She probably didn't even know who your father was. She was a ...."
Rick's fist silenced any more blasphemous insults against his mother.
"Stop it, Rick!" Jonelle screamed as Lionel rubbed his jaw where the cartoonist had hit him. "What Dr. Penn said is true. Your mother was a junky and a prostitute. Those framed photographs on your fireplace mantel are pictures of strangers."
Even in his fit of anger, Rick would not strike a woman, so he ran out the door and into the night, relieved to escape the terrifying revelations inside.
When he got home, he bolted the door behind him, but he could not lock out the flood of painful memories that were assaulting his consciousness, tearing down all the innocent illusions his mind had created. In desperation, he ran to his studio. He had successfully managed to submerge the ugliness of his childhood for all those years. He was determined to do it again, to escape the awful truth and return to the Utopia of Denny's World.
Rick sat at his drafting table and reached for a new ream of paper—thank goodness the sheets all appeared to be blank. He put his pencil into the electric sharpener and began to draw, but he could no longer control his hand, or perhaps it was his brain he could not command. Whatever the case, Rick drew images of his mother and "uncle" as they really were, not how he had wanted them to be. He tried to stop drawing but was unable to. The painful memories he had submerged in his subconscious mind had to come out, and they were taking the form of a comic strip.
Three hours and nearly a hundred sheets of paper later, Rick collapsed from emotional exhaustion. He closed his weary, tear-stained eyes and slept.
* * *
After trying to reach Rick by phone, Jonelle and Dr. Penn drove to his Boston brownstone. They found the front door locked and bolted, but Jonelle still had the key to the garage door in the bottom of her purse. Once inside the garage, she entered the house and ran upstairs. When she saw Rick lying on the floor of his studio, she feared the worst.
"We shouldn't have told him the truth," she cried.
Lionel felt for a pulse.
"He's alive," the psychiatrist announced with relief. "He's just sleeping."
Rick stirred briefly and then woke up. Jonelle dropped to her knees and cradled his head in her arms.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered.
Rick's arms went around her waist.
"I'm okay," he said, hugging her tightly. "I remember everything now."
After a few minutes, Lionel helped them both to their feet.
"I don't know about you two," the psychiatrist said, "but I could use a cup of coffee right now."
As the three turned toward the kitchen, the pile of comic strips the artist had drawn earlier in the day suddenly and mysteriously ignited and burst into flames. By the time Rick got the fire extinguisher in the next room, the flames had died, leaving nothing behind but a pile of ashes.
"That's odd," Lionel said. "There's not even a scorch mark on the floor."
* * *
There was never to be strip number five thousand and one of Denny's World—at least not one drawn by Rick Holmes. After remembering his tragic past, the creator of the popular comic passed the reigns to a younger artist.
Shortly after announcing his early retirement, Rick married Jonelle Pomeroy. In the years that followed, the happy couple had two sons and a daughter and devoted their lives to giving their children the perfect childhood that the cartoonist had always dreamed of but never had.
Salem had a purr-fect childhood, although he claims his mother was sometimes too strict.
