The Myth of Wile E

Credentials

After we came back from San Francisco as a family, Daddy resumed his search for Prospects, but without much luck. He wanted a career in the arts, though the closest he'd gotten so far was working as an assistant to a school photographer. Daddy spent a lot of time handing out plastic combs and rearranging fake-nature backdrops. This was not the kind of fulfilling career he'd had in mind.

Everyone told Daddy that in order to get Prospects, what he needed were Credentials. And that's why Daddy decided to attend art correspondence school.

Six months later Daddy graduated cum laude with a major in drawing profiles of pirates and teddy bears. And whether it was due to the Credentials or not, he soon made inroads in the art world, drawing caricatures of tourists in front of Hollywood landmarks.

Every morning when I took the bus to go to school, Daddy would take a bus—well, two or three buses—and go to work at one of several locations. My favorite was Venice Beach. I always looked forward to Take Your Kid to Work Day, because Daddy's office building was the Venice boardwalk, and his break room was the beach. I liked to talk with his coworkers, whose occupations included juggling, playing bongo drums, making necklaces out of shells, and being a Living Statue (though talking to that guy was very one-sided). Another nice thing about Daddy's workplace was the fact that most of his clientele were on vacation, so they never yelled that the service was too slow or demanded to speak to a supervisor. They did sometimes point out that all of Daddy's caricatures looked a lot like pirates and teddy bears—but that had been his major, after all.

Every night Daddy would take over the kitchen table with his sketch pad, and he would pre-draw all of the background landmarks, so he'd only have to draw the actual caricatures on the spot. Over and over again he would draw cartoon versions of the Hollywood Sign, or the Santa Monica Pier, or the Capitol Records Building, or Mann's Chinese Theater, or the Wilshire/Rodeo Drive intersection (where the teddy bear-esque tourists would be drawn with fur coats and shopping bags, looking like Winnie-the-Pooh's rich relations).

For a while, Daddy let Dougie help draw the backdrops. After all, Dougie had always liked to draw, and he was a whiz at the sort of exact-copying techniques taught in art correspondence school. Dougie's drawings looked like photographs. Dougie had a great talent for exact-copying—but, unfortunately, not so much for caricature. When he helped Daddy draw Hollywood landmarks, Dougie made sure to include everything he saw: graffiti on the Chinese theater, drunks and punks urinating on the Walk of Fame, "ladies of the night" looking smeared and askew the morning after, bums sleeping on Rodeo Drive. (Back in those days, Hollywood was filled with what Mama referred to as "characters.")

After getting fired from background drawing, Dougie went around calling Daddy "Phyllis Stein" for three weeks. Who knows what that was about.