9 P in Seattle, Washington. My mother was from the Philippines. She came to this country when she was 21 years old and her English was marginal. It was so marginal that when she took an Alka Seltzer she though it was a giant aspirin. She moved to Richland Center, my father went off to the service, and my grandmother had a hard time explaining what this Filipino woman was doing in her state. While she was carrying me, she made a vow that she was going to yell at this woman who is my grandmother and so she practiced with the English primer “See Spot Run.” She finally worked this out and was able to tell her to go to hell and then we went to Seattle. I lived in a house that had five Filipino families and the only people that could speak English were me and my dad. My dad bowled quite a bit at this point. My grandmother pretty much raised us. She smoked cigarettes with the lighted end in her mouth, which she won’t do in front of white people. I’ve tried to bring my friends over, thinking this would make me very popular but she just refused to do it. This woman can slip a lighted cigarette out of her mouth and back in as soon as a white person is around. I didn't want people coming over after a while when I started catching on how odd my house was. Filipino people don’t spank their children but they throw things at them. Grandma would throw her slipper at us. It was like the cruise missile—you could run around the corner and it would still kick your butt. We had all this strange spooky food in the refrigerator. My family was so sweet they tried to find an appealing English name to give it when people came over. Their first was midnite meat, because it was dark. Then they had some stuff called pogocom which is pink fish condiment. It’s like little fish with their eyeballs staring up against the glass. It smelled so bad you cannot imagine and my brother and I would use it as a weapon against each other. If he would oversleep I would go into the room and put it by the bed and just open the lid and walk out. That was just to give you the flavor of how I grew up, and the smell, too, I guess. I never wanted to be a cartoonist even for 15 seconds. The first thing I wanted to be was the man from U.N.C.L.E. because Mattel had come out with these briefcases one Christmas. I lived in a poor neighborhood and we didn’t know what a briefcase was. These looked like regular briefcases except they would turn into guns and cameras. Everyone got one on Christmas and we'd all walk to the the bushes with our briefcases. Then I thought I was going to become a hula dancer. I took hula dancing lessons two days a week for six years. Mainly because of the coconut bras you could wear. My brother also enjoyed them. I was pretty devoted to that until it kind of hit me that if you had pale skin and red hair it just was not going to work out as a career. Then there was a big soul explosion in my neighborhood and everybody decided what they truly wanted in their heart was to be a pimp. Nobody knew what pimps were, we just knew they had good cars, really good clothes, and they walked really cool. We used to practice this walk so we would be pimping. We wore these kind of socks called pimp socks that were these nylon sheer things with stripes. You get them at Chubby and Tubbies men's shop, but you can’t get your pimp socks at a place called Chubby and Tubbies so we had to call it C&T’s Men’s Shop. Then I decided fashion modeling was definitely where I was headed because when you’re about 10 everybody’s body looked about the same. The sky was the limit, you could be anything. All I wanted to do was to go to J. Jacob’s fashion store?We would just go there thinking that was how you became a fashion model: You go to a fashion store and by osmosis you became one. I had girlfriends who had the same feeling and it got to the point where we were not allowed in J. Jacob’s. When I was in the seventh grade I was really good at calling up to win prizes on the radio. I was gifted. I won our Thanksgiving turkey for four years. One of the prizes—I would call up no matter what the prize—was a soundtrack to “Hair.” Now, there were no hippies in my neighborhood. There were but four white people in my neighborhood, so I got this sound track, put it on, and said these are my people. So I set out trying to find out where the hippies were in Seattle and found out they went to the university. Now, I didn’t know there was a University in Seattle so I thought I would go there to see the hippies and bond with them to become one. I asked the bus driver to take us to the university and he said university village and I said yeah, not knowing it was a shopping mall. I got off in the shopping mall and there were white people but they weren’t my people. Then “Hair” came to Seattle. “Hair” kind of set me back when they did that nude scene. I’d babysat lots of kids and seen them with their diapers off and I’d seen my brother, but, still, it set me back. After that I wanted to go to college because I knew a mind was a terrible thing to waste. I’d seen those commercials. I went to college because I wanted to meet more people, and that’s where I met people from New York. If you’ve never met people from New York it can be a real disturbing experience. After that I felt that I was a budget or economy kind of person. I realized that my whole job was to get people to believe that I actually was from New York and the way I did that was by getting as depressed as I could and wearing black. In college people believe that depression is sexually attractive. All I did for a long time was try to win the depression contest. Then I met this really nice guy, a hippie man, and I got really excited and we got our own place. Then he left me for this blonde with fingernail polish, makeup, and shaved legs. I felt really bad so I started drawing comic strips. I was a fine artist with a capital F and didn’t want anyone to know I was a cartoonist so I called them charms with words. A friend of mine saw them, sent them to a local newspaper and they started printing them. I thought this would seriously cut down on my boyfriends, which is why my strip is called Ernie Pook's Comics, because I didn’t want anyone to know. All I drew were cactuses who were trying to get women to sleep with them but they all had Filipino accents because “Roots” had just come out. I dropped them off at this newspaper office and the woman there said they were the most racist cartoons she had ever seen in her life. She was the kind of woman whose hair looks like a roast. Right at that time a guy who hated her—he had control of one section of the newspaper—saw she hated this stuff, looked at it and said, I’ll print it. He hadn’t even read the stuff. It had nothing to do with me. Then a couple of years later the phone rang early in the morning and it was an Esquire editor. I almost hung up because I thought this was a joke. He said they were going to have cartoons for the first time in four years and they’d like me to send them some stuff. My first thought, because I don’t read newspapers very often, is that a federal law was passed so that they always had to consider a woman for any job. I sent him some stuff and he called me back after a couple of weeks and said you're the one we want if you can make two compromises. We only have two small problems with your work, your writing and your drawing. Now, I’ve never let integrity stand in the way of anything, so I said no problem. I wrote this book Naked Ladies, Naked Ladies, Naked Ladies. I’m going to read some stuff from that for you. When I was about five years old my cousin who THE was the same age came running around the corner from the back of the house and said did I want to see a boner. I didn’t know what a boner was but I knew it was probably pretty good from the way he was running, so I said yes and he said “OK! HURRY!” So we went pounding down the side of the house into the back yard, him in front yelling “WAIT UP YOU GUYS!” What it was was Vernie laying on the ground with everyone pushing in a circle around him, and then Marty who was the Boss of Everyone says OK and Vernie pulls his dinger out and Marty says “On Your Mark, Get Set, GO!” and everyone starts going “Naked Ladies Naked Ladies Naked Ladies” and then I saw it. It did not disturb me. I had seen a lot of naked ladies in Playboys, which I loved. My dad had millions of them. Billions. Jil- lions. And every kid I knew would look at them. We made a club called THE MONSTER CLUB DO NOT ENTER under the porch. We had a magnifying glass, lighter fluid, matches and magazines. It was dark down there and there was a lot of dirt and it 18 Clinton St. Quarterly—Winter, 1988-89
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