Most every Tuesday, a crew of cartoonists face the harrowing task of presenting their weekly batches of gags to this magazine for judgment. Afterward, they’re ready for comfort food, preferably at the French stalwart Pergola des Artistes, on West Forty-sixth Street, which they’ve patronized for fifteen years or so.
On a recent afternoon, they had a crasher: the film director Gus Van Sant. Van Sant’s latest movie, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot,” is an adaptation of a darkly funny memoir by the late cartoonist John Callahan—played in the movie by Joaquin Phoenix—who, in a drunk-driving accident at the age of twenty-one, became a quadriplegic.
In his memoir, published in 1989, Callahan refers to Sam Gross—a founding member of the Pergola gang—as the “grandaddy of the sick cartoon.”
“What about Gahan Wilson, though?” another regular, Sidney Harris, wondered, at lunch.
“He isn’t really sick,” Gross said.
“He didn’t do amputation,” Harris conceded.
“Looking at Callahan’s stuff, I thought about ‘frogs’ legs,’ ” Marisa Acocella said, referring to a Gross cartoon in which a couple at a bistro, seated near a sign that reads “Try our frogs’ legs,” stare at a frog amputee as he forlornly rolls from the kitchen on a little cart.
“Callahan once told me this story,” Gross chimed in. “He was waiting for the light in his electric wheelchair, and some evangelical comes along and goes, ‘Boy, boy—believe in Jesus and get up and walk!’ And John looks at him and says, ‘I have five thousand dollars invested in this chair!’ ”
As is often the case among self-identified underdogs, talk turned to the Mets. Van Sant finally arrived, after a detour to the wrong Pergola. He wore a tan Levi’s jacket over a “Los Angeles” T-shirt and studied a menu through reading glasses with orange-tinted lenses. He ordered a meatball sandwich.
Harris asked, “What prompted you to make a movie about Callahan?”
“It was originally Robin Williams’s idea,” Van Sant replied, quietly. “He wanted to play John. I think as a gift for his friend Christopher Reeve, he wanted to play a quadriplegic.”
Gross recalled meeting Callahan: “He freaked out that I was able to get away with as much shit as I was able to get away with.”
“You did a book of cartoons about Nazis,” Acocella noted. (Title: “We Have Ways of Making You Laugh.”) Gross said that he’d got more flack for a book of Teddy-bear gags. (“Love Me, Love My Teddy Bear.”) “Teddy-bear people don’t think Teddy bears are funny.”
“The first cartoon Callahan published in the school newspaper”—at Portland State University—“was somebody begging on the street, with a sign around his neck that read ‘I am blind and black but not musical,’ ” Van Sant said. “If he figured something was off limits, he’d probably do it.” Other Callahan cartoons feature the Anorexic Café (“Now Closed 24 Hours a Day”) and a man in a wheelchair composing a poem titled “Quadriplegia”: “Roses are red, and begonias are thick, I can feel my hands, but I can’t feel my dick.” In the movie, Callahan says, proudly, “Christians, queers, teachers, foreign nationals, janitors, lab rats all find me offensive.”
“If you opened up the comments sections on our cartoons, I feel like there would be death threats,” Farley Katz hypothesized.
“I drew some cartoons, but I never submitted them,” Van Sant said. “I was under twelve. I had a series called ‘Hugo the Gardener.’ ” He noticed that Jason Chatfield was drawing on the butcher paper near his plate, and exclaimed, “Oh, you can draw on the table!” Chatfield put the finishing touches on a portrait of Gross. (Felipe Galindo’s review: “Looks like Fidel Castro.”)
Van Sant resumed reminiscing about Callahan. “I have tapes of John drawing in bed,” he said. “He would listen to Sister Paula, a transgender evangelical preacher in Portland, who’d have callers talking about the tragedies in their lives and how Jesus saved them. And he would listen to the stories and go, ‘Oh, my God! The trailer burned down! The cows died!’ He would sort of be making fun, but also secretly he was living the tragedy that Sister Paula was hearing about.”
Gross pulled out a few of his cartoons.
“Oh, wow. Oh, wow,” Van Sant said. “This looks like a Callahan.”
Which was his favorite?
“I think the cross-vaulting one,” he said. (Christ pole-vaults, with a cross for a pole.)
“CrossFit,” Chatfield said, to groans.
Van Sant passed his phone around, so the cartoonists could admire a painting he’d made of an impish man near a googly-eyed bush. “It’s kind of funny,” he said. ♦
