Wednesday November 18, 2009

Track #4: Bad Badger, illustrated

I was recently at an event where I happened to notice an acquaintance’s tattoo. I didn’t know him well—it’s no surprise I hadn’t noticed it before—but on his forearm was the phrase, “Sous les pavés la plage.”

I don’t speak French, but I recognized this as a slogan from the May 1968 Paris riots—France’s equivalent of that year’s Chicago Democratic Convention—when French students hurled cobblestones at police and proclaimed, “Beneath the cobblestones, the beach,” a sentiment so French it would make Rousseau blush. I heard it once at a lecture on Foucault (but of course) and have always rated it as one of the all-time great rallying cries. Still, it’s relatively obscure. I asked my acquaintance about it and announced that I knew what it meant—like I had just won a radio call-in contest. Has was not French. He had never even been to France. Instead, he had come across it by accident, like I had, and he said no one else had ever recognized it before. We were both pleased with ourselves. It was a small, beautiful moment.

This is the opposite of what happens to Jones, the protagonist of “The Adventures of Bad Badger”—track #4 of Cassingle—who gets a tattoo of a cartoon character who then disappears from the culture immediately and forever. Around the time this was published, my friend Charlotte drew Bad Badger based on the story’s specifications. As the story says:

The strip’s protagonist looked like you’d expect a cartoon badger to look. Imagine a mouse; then imagine Mickey Mouse. Note the mental processes in between, perform them on a badger (the crude etching in the deluxe color second edition of Webster’s New Twentieth Century Unabridged Dictionary, or any comparable work, will serve), and you have the basic idea. Bad Badger was otherwise unremarkable. His dark glasses were reminiscent of Steve Dallas and his dangling cigarette was pure Andy Capp.

And here is her rendering.

This was my first published story. It appeared in McSweeney’s #3 a little more than 10 years ago. It was supposed to appear in McSweeney’s #2, but it got bumped, and I sent a lot of cutesy, McSweeneysish notes to Dave Eggers, trying to find out its fate. I would be embarrassed by them now. We spoke on the phone a couple of times, and he told me he was working on a book, which turned out to be a very big book a few months later. He encouraged me to expand the story—I did not—and he convinced me to change the last line. Originally that line was, “Do you want to see my tattoo?” I’ve never found anyone who didn’t think he was right.

Tomorrow: How my wife, who is lovely, inspired a story about someone who is awful. Don’t forget to download Cassingle—it’s free as an e-book or pdf—which includes “The Adventures of Bad Badger” and four other stories.