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Remembering Clay Geerdes
Photographic Chronicler of Comix
Underground
Clay Geerdes, one-time college
English teacher and sometime cartoonist, spent the last quarter century around
San Francisco Bay as a freelance street reporter and photo-journalist, covering
the hip scene. But it was as champion
of creative self-expression and passionate promoter of cartooning that he made
his mark in the history of comics.
I'd known Clay for over fifteen
years before we met, face-to-face. We'd
corresponded and argued, fought and made up. So in the ways the count, we were old friends by the time I found myself
in San Francisco in the fall of 1995 and rang him up and arranged to meet for
lunch.
"You know the Warner Brothers
Store on Market?" Clay asked. "I'll meet you there."
So I walked over to the Warner
Brothers Store at the appointed hour, and there he was, wearing trade-mark
black and a grin to go with the twinkle in his eye.
"These are my pals," he
said, gesturing around him at Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat, Tweetie
Bird, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam. "I grew up with these guys."
And then, as we walked out of the
store past an alcove of animation cels for sale, came the ever-present Geerdes
Reality Check: "These are
phonies," he said. "They make
these cels to peddle to fans, but the real cels--the ones they use to make the
films--those are never for sale."
That was Clay in a nutshell. Part romantic, part cynical realist. And all maverick, a maverick with a mission.
Clay was born in Sioux City, Iowa,
but grew to maturity in Lincoln, Nebraska, where his family moved when he was
about five. He joined the Navy in 1954,
and after a few years cruising the Pacific with ports of call in the Orient and
Australia, he was stationed at Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. When his enlistment ran out in 1958, he
entered San Francisco State College, where he finished work on his Master's
degree in 1963.
He began work on a Ph.D. at the
University of California at Berkeley, and although he finished his
dissertation, he did not complete the course work before the need to earn a
living loomed larger than academic objectives. He started teaching English at Fresno State College 1965-68 and
continued at Sonoma State College 1968-70.
Caught up in the Free Speech
Movement of October 1964, Clay soon lost interest in doctoral programs because
they no longer seemed relevant. In
1965, he was living in San Francisco a couple blocks up Ashbury Street from its
famed intersection with Haight Street, and during the next two years, he
witnessed first-hand the street theater that flourished in the neighborhood,
making Haight-Ashbury a Mecca for flower children, particularly in that storied
summer of 1967.
The Human Be-In staged in Golden
Gate Park near the Haight on January 14 that year was, Clay said, "an
important event in my life. For the
first time I realized how many people were involved in what everyone felt was a
movement toward a new life style."
At FSC, he brought the street into
his classroom to stimulate student discussions. They talked about hippies, psychedelic drugs, pop art, beat
poetry and rock music. Clay resisted
the collegiate compulsion to segregate knowledge by departments. "I was interested in all kinds of things
that overlapped the disciplines," he wrote, "--art, music, poetry,
happenings, drama, literature, history. I wanted to desegregate, to link up."
At rural Sonoma, Clay's
free-wheeling style was even more in tune with the student body. "My Fresno acidheads saved up their
acid and grass for weekend parties," he noted, "but the heads in my
Sonoma classes were stoned all the time."
Submerged for most of his adult life
in a drug-using milieu, Clay himself didn't smoke or drink in those halcyon
days of yore, and although he smoked a joint once in a while, he was, he said,
"not interested in experimenting with my consciousness. I was happy with my thought processes the
way they were. I could not understand
why people would deliberately fog themselves up, go out of their way to get
into states I considered negative or silly."
By 1969, the student revolt against
the materialism of mainstream culture and the war in Vietnam was in full
swing. Clay was confronted in the
classroom by students who were mostly terribly uninterested in getting an
education in a world where that education seemed absurdly divorced from
reality. Clay himself felt alienated
from professorial life. Instead of
writing articles for academic journals, he had started in 1968 reporting on the
student revolution for the Los Angeles Free Press (FREEP) and various
underground newspapers.
He had found his niche. "I was born to be a daily
reporter," he once wrote. "I
wasn't destined to survive in organized education. I was a de-conditioner, not a conditioner. I wanted my students to think things out for
themselves, not to follow."
Henceforth, Clay would make his way
in the world as a street reporter and photo-journalist.
Much of his reporting for
undergrounds was done for little or no remuneration. "At the time, I felt I was contributing to a mass movement
for social change," Clay wrote, "to the fall of a corrupt system and
its replacement by a more egalitarian and just one."
At the same time, he could see a
fallacy in radical revolution: "I
used to laugh at the SDS revolutionaries and their pipe dreams. My question was always, Then what? So the government is overthrown and
capitalism goes into the trash can. Then what? How do people live in
a smashed state? If you take over, you
have to be ready to run things. Someone
has to know how to operate the complex traffic system at the airport."
He worked both sides of the Bay,
roaming the neighborhoods in Berkeley and North Beach, prowling boutiques and
novelty shops, delis and coffeehouses, searching out news of the counterculture
demi-monde and of other havens of night music. He secured a monthly column in Coast magazine and contributed regularly
to the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Phoenix, Adam, Knight, Oui, Hustler,
and other hip publications. He
contributed photo stories on nightclub personalities like Carol Doda, the woman
who introduced silicone boobs and topless dancing to North Beach in 1964, and
others.
"So many scenes going on at
once," he wrote. "I ran
myself ragged in those days. I took
several rolls of film a day and when I got back to the room late at night, I
souped the negs and hung them up, wrote my copy on the old portable Underwood
that had gotten me through college, then picked out the shots I liked and
printed them. I always had everything
stamped and ready to mail the next morning."
Clay's street roving acquired a
different focus in late 1970 when he met underground cartoonists Roger Brand,
Justin Green, and Joel Beck. He started
writing about underground comix.
His interest in cartooning was
lifelong, albeit muted for a couple decades. As a kid, he had copied Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Donald Duck and
other funny animal characters from comic books. "I got a great deal of satisfaction from cartooning, but I
seldom drew the realistic characters that required a study of anatomy," he
wrote.
As a teenager, Clay had achieved a
dubious national distribution with his cartoons. After graduating from high school in Lincoln, Nebraska, he had
worked for a time for Western Electric, where his job was nailing the tops on
packing cases that contained selectors and connectors for telephone
systems. "The work was slow, and I
got into the habit of drawing cartoons on the cases to make the guys I worked
with laugh," he said. "I got
a kick out of the fact that Western Electric was distributing my gags all over
the country without knowing it."
The emerging underground comix scene
in San Francisco rekindled Clay's interest in cartooning, and he began
promoting comix in articles for FREEP and other publications. When the Berkeley Comic Art Shop opened on Telegraph
Avenue in the fall of 1972, Clay quickly made friends of the owners, John
Barrett, Bud Plant, John Campbell, and Bob Beerbohm. And when the quartet started talking about staging a comics
convention in Berkeley, Clay persuaded them to make it an underground comix
convention. He handled all the
publicity for the "world's first underground comix convention,"
recruited such guests as Michelle Urry from Playboy and Gilbert Shelton and
other underground cartoonists, organized panel presentations, and arranged for
a film screening.
The success of the Con, which was
held April 22-24, 1973, at U.C. in Berkeley, inspired Clay to other
efforts. He sold a three-day seminar on
the Contemporary American Comic Book, which he taught at the U.C. extension in
San Francisco in July 1974. The
following January, he staged "Comics in America Day" at U.C. in
Berkeley; and he organized and financed "Underground ‘76" there April
30-May 2, 1976.
"What happened behind the
scenes?" Clay asked, rhetorically. "Many underground artists who had never met one another got
together for the first time. Books came
together. Friendships. Paul Mavrides met Gilbert Shelton as a
result of one of my cons, and some years later, he was drawing the Freak
Brothers. Rand Holmes met the Bay Area
artists and publishers for the first time. The women cartoonists got together for the first time at the 1973
con. The idea for a women's panel was
mine, not a woman's. I suggested it to
Trina Robbins and got Shelby Sampson, Roberta Gregory, Joyce Farmer, and Lyn
Chevli, all of whom were on my mailing list and learned about the con from me,
to sit on the panel."
Another of Clay's efforts inspired
by the success of the 1973 Con was his newsletter, Comix World. It is Comix World and the "Newave"
of minicomics that Clay fostered with the newsletter that earns him a place in
the history books.
The newsletter grew out of a series
of articles Clay did for FREEP; in October 1973, he launched the first
issue. And he kept it going for 22
years--sometimes weekly, occasionally monthly, most often every other week--a
running commentary on comics as they happened, history on the fly. Subscriptions were $10 for 48 issues. By 1980, it was being mailed to every state
in the Union and fourteen countries, including Australia.
Ostensibly about underground comix,
the newsletter was actually about a good deal more than that. It was Clay's forum. And it was an open forum--any subject that
caught his eye or raised his ire might be discussed in its pages. Even regular newsstand comic books and comic
strips. And movies. One issue was devoted entirely to coverage
of the Hooker's Ball. In short, the
whole world of cartooning and popular culture as viewed through the sometimes
jaundiced vision of Clay Geerdes.
Each issue was a single 8 1/2 x
11" sheet, printed on both sides. The page layout was strictly utilitarian: typewritten text meandered in a continuous, unindented stream through
islands of illustrations--panels clipped from comix, covers of minis, and an
occasional photograph. Every issue was
larded with plugs for comix--prices, titles, mailing addresses, short
(occasionally longer) reviews. He
mailed the issues out once a month, two to an envelope.
Clay saw the newsletter as a
catalyst in those days--"bringing cartoonists together, keeping publishers
and cartoonists abreast of what was happening in the underground comix, hyping
the comix and spreading them around in the other scenes of which I was a
part." Like Johnny Appleseed, Clay
dropped copies of comix here and there as he roamed his beats around the Bay,
and he introduced cartoonists to each other and told them of publishing
opportunities he'd heard about.
In his commentaries, Clay was
opinionated and (like all of us) sometimes wrong, but he was never vague, never
wishy washy. And he was always
energizing.
"My seminal writing experience
occurred during the zenith of Haight-Ashbury in the mid-sixties," he wrote
once in explanation of his approach. "The new writing style of the time was subjective, not
objective. A writer wrote about the
world as it moved him. He didn't stand
in a corner paring his fingernails like Joyce's ideal writer; rather, he went
and sat on the floor in the back room of the Psychedelic Shop and rapped with
the people who were flowing into the Haight every day in search of free acid
and a liberated social and sexual lifestyle. He stood as I often did on the corner of Haight and Masonic and enjoyed
the various conversational styles of people like Pigpen (electric pianist and
organist for the Grateful Dead--he died with he was 27), Chocolate George
(Hell's Angel, also dead), and Janis (also dead). It was my style in those days to put it all in, all the images
and the conversational fragments, the contrasts between the cowboys and the
flower children and the hippies and the radicals."
His writing reminded me of Henry
Miller's straight-ahead style; and I liked them both.
"There are a lot of opinionated
people in this world, and I am one of them," he wrote. "I pay for the privilege. It's my newsletter and my money. Comix World exists because I got very little
satisfaction out of writing for other people's magazines and papers." He enjoyed getting feedback, and he didn't
get any of it from other publications he contributed to. Not enough anyway. But he did with his newsletter.
Ever outspoken and never pulling his
punches, Clay could be devastatingly brief in rendering a verdict. About a clutch of 1982 movies, Clay offered
the following: "Someone asked me
if I saw Blade Runner. Unfortunately. A sordid piece of
decadence filled with second-hand ideas and depressing images. Brutal and misogynistic. A celebration of ultra-violence which ends
with the State's butcher riding off into the sunset with an android. A footnote to Clockwork Orange and Escape
from New York. Why doesn't someone tell
the assholes that make garbage like this that we don't want to see a hero who
is really a villain and we don't want to see women brutally killed and we don't
want to watch Harrison Ford get his fingers broken. Blade Runner is for you people who have the
no-future-I-ain't-gonna- make-it-to-thirty-so-why- not-just-fuck-kill-
and-die-early syndrome. The Road Warrior
is in the same bag. A sleazy rip-off of
Spain's ideas in Subvert 3. If you
judge the value of a movie by the number of decapitations, then Conan is right
up your grommet. Racist sleaze and
gore. The only film from this summer
crop that retains any human values is Star Trek II. It's hippies and straights in space, the villain is too weak and
Kirk too smart, but it has its moments."
He reported occasionally on
conversations he'd had with such stellar figures as Harvey Kurtzman (who Clay
had seduced into appearing at "Underground `76"): "Remember those turgid subliminal
erotic dramas in Fox and Fiction House mags? Sheena and Bob? Or GI Jane? Best of all, Skygirl. I always loved the way Skygirl (who was a
waitress in a cafe at an airfield) managed to get her clothes nearly blown off
on every accidental flight she took. She was great. Kurtzman and I
were talking about those formulas a couple years ago, and he admitted swiping a
lot from Sally the Sleuth and from Skygirl when he and Elder got into Annie
Fanny in 1962."
About sexy female models at
comicons: "Sybil Danning, a model
who appeared on the cover of last December's Oui, was signing copies of the mag
and posters at a table. For $2, people
could pose with her and get the polaroid shot signed. Now, are the folks back home going to believe that you could
score someone like Sybil at a comic con? Sure, why not? Blondes in
half-unzipped black leather jumpsuits fall all over me everywhere I go. California is like that."
About Disney's famed Snow
White: "Am I the only person who
sees that Snow White betrayed the guys who loved her and took care of her by
running off with a rich flake on a white horse? That she was saved by a group of working men only to run off with
an imperialist?"
Through it all, Clay's high opinion
of cartooning shone like a beacon, particularly underground cartoonists: "All of the underground comix made it a
point to attack the hypocrisy and moral prudery of the Establishment," he
wrote, "to gross out the straights, the business cult, the nine-to-fivers,
the hapless adults who had to work to make the money to pay for the excesses of
their runaway kids who were hanging out smoking pot in Haight Ashbury or
Tompkins Park."
Another time: "The comic artist of our time is still
the ultimate social rebel, the one who debunks and defuses the ad-hype and brainwash
and outrages the uptight by drawing what `shouldn't be drawn.' He not only thinks what is taboo; he draws
it. So does she."
Clay could work up a fine rage about
the way cartoonists were treated in the so-called "art world": "I started commercial art in college
and got turned off totally by the assholes teaching in the department--you
know, those prissy dabblers who always have something negative to say if you
draw a cartoon. A lot of my friends
have made the rounds of the galleries and gotten shit on by those fine-art
assholes. It's a totally corrupt scene
out here from Sutter Street to Laguna Beach (where the big art show is every
summer). If you do comics, they look at
you like a pigeon just shat on their ascot. Most cartoonists I know can draw so much better than those scenery
people it isn't funny."
In the late 1970s, Clay began
promoting minicomics. This was the
"Newave," Clay's "Comix Wave." These were mostly self-published 8-page booklets. You published yourself a minicomic by printing
your comics on both sides of an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet, then folding it twice
and trimming off the top to create 8 separate pages, each measuring roughly
4x5". In the emerging age of
photocopying, everyone could be a publisher at ten cents a copy or less.
Clay's contribution to the movement
was to act as cheerleader nonpareil and publisher for new cartoonists who may
not have access to the technology. He
urged neophyte cartoonists to send him cartoons--individual gag panels or
multipanel comic strips, drawn 5x7", which he then cobbled together under
anthology titles like Babyfat, Fried Brains, Bad Girl Art and so on, laying out
the individual 5x7" contributions on his 8-page format and reducing them
in the photocopier as he punched out a press run. He sold them for 50 cents and a first-class stamp. And he gave a lot of them away, too; good
publicity for the cartoonists.
Contributing artists received
publicity in Comix World (which Clay re-titled Comix Wave after awhile) and
copies of the minicomic. Clay also
advertised the minicomics produced by others in the newsletter.
No one got rich by any means. Clay hoped only to sell enough of one title
to pay for the printing of the next one. "Perpetual art," he called it.
Like any experienced cartoonist, Clay
knew that the best way for his minicomic cartoonists to learn their craft was
by seeing their work in print; and they learned something about the commercial
side of publishing comics by dealing with him.
"I operated the miniseries the
same way I had run my college classes," he wrote. "No one was rejected. Ideas were accepted and put out there for
others to deal with. The kid who did a
minicomic just for the hell of it would drop out of the game in his own
time. Why should I discourage
him?"
He was the ideal missionary
editor-publisher. As comics critic Dale
Luciano once wrote, "Geerdes extends to the young cartoonists who appear
in his publications an attitude of unconditional positive regard."
Clay published virtually everything
he was sent. (But not pornography;
sexual stuff, yes--but only if it was funny.)
"The whole idea," he told
Luciano," is to publish someone who has decided he does something that is
ready to publish. That is not for me to
decide, but for the artist or cartoonist. If it's total crapola, others will tell him, and he will learn from the
experience. If I just send it back with
a nasty note, he learns nothing, and his cartooning impulse is repressed. I want to help people who contact me to gain
confidence in themselves and their ability to venture out into the public
world."
In minicomics, Clay the maverick
idealist found his niche. They
represented the ultimate in freedom of expression, in unfettered creative
enterprise.
"Complete freedom of expression
is costly," Clay wrote, "because the mainstream rejects it and holds
out for a sanitized product. Depending
upon the reader, the newaves are sexist, racist, heterosexist, homophobic,
leftist, right wing fascist, agist, and too many other ists, isms, and ologies
to list here. I still feel that art
should be free from any restraint. I
may cringe at some of the fantasies I see on MTV or in the pages of
contemporary comic books, but I would rather see it all out there than live in
a society where it is repressed as in Bradbury's Farenheit 415."
In pursuit of this passion, Clay
published over 40 digest-sized magazines, a Newave Guide, and 300-400
minis. Said Luciano: "Geerdes clearly deserves credit for
playing the most instrumental role in launching and ballyhooing the wave of
self-published comix which began in the 1970s."
As he lurked the shadowy nightowl
streets of North Beach and Berkeley, Clay developed a keen sense of
history. Among other things, his
appreciation for history led him to donate a complete collection of Comix
World/Wave to the University of Iowa and to ask Gary Usher to index the
collection. The run of the newsletter
provides a week-by-week history of the most prolific period in publishing
underground comix.
At the time he started the
newsletter, Clay also began a journal in which he kept track of new comix. He regularly visited the Print Mint
warehouse in Berkeley and Last Gasp in San Francisco, jotting down the titles
of comix as they surfaced. And he
talked regularly (and sometimes at length) with underground cartoonists and
publishers, who filled him in on the earlier developments in the medium. As a result of the knowledge he accumulated,
Clay could wax eloquently sarcastic about so-called histories of comics and
comix.
"Comic book scholarship is in
its infancy and I can safely say that most of the books extant are seriously
inaccurate, many distorting history, others ignoring it, most unaware of
it. While anyone would accept the
absurdity of a monograph about William Faulkner with references only to
secondary sources, it is the rule rather than the exception to see articles
about comic books which contain no primary references at all! The damage already done is serious and will
not be corrected easily--if ever."
His favorite example of misapprehended
history concerned the dating of Zap Comix No. 1. Don Donahue, the publisher
of record, asserted in the Introduction to The Apex Treasury of Underground
Comics that Zap Comix No. 1 was
published in 1967. But that, Clay
demonstrated, was clearly wrong. "The cover and guts for the comic were printed by Charles Plymell,
a poet and publisher of Last Times,
on February 24, 1968, and the books were folded and stapled on the floor of
Crumb's apartment in Haight-Ashbury. . . . The first Zap comic book appeared
in the Haight-Ashbury on the street on February 25, 1968."
Donahue simply forgot, Clay
said. And he and others have been
mislead by the date on the artwork. Crumb drew the material that appeared in the first issue of Zap in the
fall of 1967. And he wrote
"1967" on some of the art, thereby leading Donahue (who should have
had a better memory of the occasion because he and Crumb and some friends
folded and stapled the first issue themselves on the floor of Crumb's
apartment) and everyone else astray. But real historians, Clay maintained, would have got the facts
right. They would have consulted
records rather than relying on tricky memories alone.
Clay's historical antenna were
always up--and not always just about comics. Once I wrote him about a book I'd read by the ghost writer who did the
earliest Hardy Boys books. Clay came
back with fire in his prose: "Don't know what book you read, but the guy is a liar if he said he
wrote the first ten Hardy Boys books. Edward Stratemeyer always wrote the first three himself; all of his
series. Every one."
Clay was prickly and
self-reliant. "You see," he
told me once, "I can't get along with people. You have a way of fitting in. I have none of that mellowness in my make-up. If someone fucks with me, I never deal with them again. It's cost me, I know, because writing for
other people is always compromise, but that's how I've lived my life. I never compromised with anyone when I was
teaching either. I saw the brownosers
hang in and get their tenure and spend their lives babysitting those teenaged
assholes in the valley, and all I can say from here is that they got what they
deserved and thank God I was refused tenure and had to do something more
interesting with my life."
Clay folded Comix World/Wave in
mid-1995. After 22 years putting it
out, he found he'd lost interest. The
new generation of comics didn't appeal to him, he said. Typically, he wouldn't compromise with his
feelings, so he could no longer write about them.
There was more to it than that, I
think. Bob Rita, a co-founder of the
Print Mint, died of a heart attack in February 1995. It was as if an era had passed. And, of course, so it had.
When he wrote me, Clay sometimes
mentioned his sense of malaise about comics. Somehow he related his feelings to the untimely deaths of so many of the
underground cartoonists, people he'd known and whose work he'd admired. He catalogued the death knell: "Cheech Wizard Vaughn Bode died in 1975
of strangulation caused by an auto-erotic device he was using. Willy Murphy (Flammed-out Funnies) died of pneumonia, March 2, 1976. Dealer McDope David Sheridan died of cancer,
March 28, 1982. He was a heavy smoker
of nicotine and marijuana. Rory
Bogeyman Hayes died of an overdose of pills in 1983, possibly suicide. Greg Irons went to Thailand to study tatoo
art and was run down by a bus in 1984. Roger Brand died of kidney failure brought on by alcoholism, November
30, 1985. Dori Seda died of pneumonia
shortly after a traffic accident, February 2, 1988."
But the feeling of malaise had other
origins, I think. Clay wasn't feeling
well himself. In the summer of 1995, he
began to feel weak and tired much of the time. He thought it was simply a symptom of age. Unbeknownst to him, it was cancer.
By early 1996, he felt pain in the
abdomen. That summer, he detected a
lump. In October, he finally went in to
get checked. It was colon cancer. The tumor and a foot of intestine were
removed, and Clay went home to recover.
But the cancer had metastasized to
his liver, and that condition required treatment. Clay, never conventional about anything I ever knew about, wasn't
going to be conventional about his cancer treatment either.
Earlier in the year, he'd commented
to me about Gil Kane's ordeal with cancer: "The bastards almost killed Kane," he wrote. "What the medico-cancer business does
for people is to offer nothing but surgery and chemo which make the last few
years of life painful and unbearable. I've known too many people to have been killed by this system. If I get the disease, I am going to use
alternatives to fight it and die in my own way."
And that's what he did.
In November 1996, Clay checked in to
a clinic in Mexico and submitted himself to an alternative treatment that
involved ingesting quantities of vitamin supplements and having his teeth
removed because of the metal fillings that allegedly promoted the growth of
small tumors in his liver. He wrote
about aspects of his experience later with his usual flair for both narrative
detail and the human comedy:
"I had two [teeth extraction]
sessions. Both scenes of high
comedy. Peter Sellers would have loved
it. I am flat on my back in the chair
and the dentist is shooting me up with enough novocaine to stone an elephant;
meanwhile, his gorgeous dark-haired nurse is watching the show while both
listen to pop Mexican songs on the sound system. As my molars pop out and onto the tray, they are discussing the
singers. It's all in Spanish, but I
have spoken that language since I was a boy working at the Cornhusker Hotel in
Lincoln, so I understand nearly everything they are saying and realize the
absurdity of it all. I am losing my
teeth while these folks are chatting about pop music and fashion. She's defending the pop music preferred by
her generation while he, in his early forties, admits to liking some of it but
finds too many of the song lyrics dirty. Through all of this, I am aware of a flirtatious undercurrent between
them."
Miraculously, as soon as the last of
the metal-filled teeth were removed, Clay reported that the pain in his liver
subsided--disappeared--immediately. He
returned to Berkeley.
On January 21, 1997, Clay sent me a
180-page document entitled The Incredible
Rabbit Reference Book. He affixed a note: “Hi, Bob— Here’s a copy of one of
my long term projects. Hope you enjoy it. I’ve had a pretty good week. Holding
up. Best, Clay.” Turns out we both had a thing for rabbits—my signature, his
research passion. “Don’t ask me why,” he said in the Preface. He’d been working
on the project for at least six years. He had developed a fascination for
rabbits and hares. “Hares and rabbits are, of course, anatomically different,
and they act in a very different manner,” he wrote. “The hare lives in a form
above ground and does not burrow, while the rabbit burrows and lives in a
warren beneath the earth. The hare is wild and nobody’s pet; the rabbit is as
domesticated as a beagle.” Beyond the Preface came the list—in alphabetical
order, of all the famous rabbits and bunnies of children’s literature, animated
cartoons, and comic books. The tome,
Clay promised, was “for the lagomorphically inclined, a lepomorphic glossary
for the curious, a compendium of who did what with the image of rabbit and hare
and when the stories or art took place.” The significance of many of the items
listed is amplified with paragraphs quoting the reference to the beastie or
explaining the background. Here’s “Harvey,” for instance, which, after telling
us that “Harvey is a 6 ½-foot invisible white rabbit [actually, a pukka], the
companion of Elwood P. Dowd,” refers
the curious to “Chase, Mary,” where we encounter a summary of the plot of her
play, accompanied by Clay’s speculations about her inspiration: “Chase got the
idea of invisibility from the movie sequels to Henry George Wells’ ‘Invisible
Man.’” Nothing alarming there. But at the entry for “Baker, Carroll,” we learn
that the actress was terrified of the Easter Bunny. Or was it the character she
was playing, Baby Doll, who was terrified? Hard to say. But more about rabbits
than anyone could make reasonable use of in the normal course of a day.
For awhile, Clay reported gaining in
strength and maintaining his weight, both encouraging signs. He felt good about what he'd done and had no
regrets whatsoever. But he was scarcely
back to normal, and in May, he wrote that he was sleeping most of the
time. I didn't hear from him
again. He died at 1:30 a.m. on July 8,
1997. It was a Tuesday. He was at home in Berkeley with his
long-time friend and companion, Clara Felix. He died quietly: "He just
stopped breathing," Clara told me. He wasn't afraid; he wasn't uneasy; he wasn't in pain particularly. He'd had his 63rd birthday in May,
surrounded by friends and family.
He'd sent me a 270-page book of his
essays and short stories, mostly autobiographical, from which I have
constructed this biographical account. On the frontispiece is a photograph of Clay, sitting at a piano and
looking over his shoulder at me, a grin on his face and a twinkle in his eye.
In his last years, he'd returned to
his piano with a genuine passion. "What I like is playing my piano," he wrote me. "I spend a couple of hours a day
working out. Mostly ragtime music. I am a fan of Joplin and play all his stuff
quite well these days. I'm still not
letter perfect, but I struggle. I
always regret not working on my scales more as a kid, but my dad couldn't
handle it. He was bad enough when I
just went over my lessons."
Looking at him there in that
photograph, I can almost hear him talking about comix, extolling them: "I have to laugh again as I remember
seeing people standing in the comic store on Telegraph, laughing their asses
off over Crumb's Big Ass Comics. I could hear them saying, 'This is really
disgusting!' More laughter, then, 'This
is really gross!' followed by more laughter. That's the pleasure and the paradox of comix."
Clay wrote me a note next to his
photograph: “May you live long and prosper.” And then: “Write me a nice obit,
old buddy.”
And so I did. Rest in peace, pal.
I’ll miss you.
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