The collect call came from Prescott mid-afternoon. John Jonik, one of our best friends from Philadelphia, had been winding through these western Arizona byways in one of his ramshackle VW Squarebacks. He keeps several of the same model in his Fishtown backyard and like a mad organ transplanter, replacing parts from his scavenged jalopies to the one most likely to survive his next trip. Each version was more Frankensteinian. This one was grey with blue fenders and I couldn’t tell if it was the same VW or a new hybrid.

“The VW has lost its farfignewton,” said our artist/cartoonist friend, “and I can’t find any farfignewtons near enough to feed it.”

We offered to fetch him, but he insisted he could hobble on down I-17 to Phoenix along the shoulder. I told him we’d hold dinner.

“We’ve also got The Life of Brian and The Black Robe for your viewing pleasure.”

“Two religious movies,” quipped John. “Save The Black Robe for me. I haven’t seen it.”

We had left Philadelphia that August and seriously missed our frequent backyard barbecues and winter night scrabble games with John and other friends while watching the tugboats glide up the Delaware, a roaring fire at our backs. Our friends came to call the house, which was built in 1752, Café 752, it’s address on Queen Village’s Front Street. I owned two cheese and gourmet food shops and was a pastry chef, so I often brought home what wasn’t salable and turned it into meals for our family and frequent visitors. Food turned up without much fuss and visitors often popped in with drinks.

John was one of our favorite scrabble mates. The quips turned up as frequently as the food and drink. Once, when the news came over the radio that a rabbinical convening approved pig valves surgically inserted in hearts “to save a life,” John didn’t skip a heartbeat. “Oink vey,” he blurted.

Now living in a Central Phoenix HOA townhome community, I warned my neighbors that a dusty, coughing vehicle would chug into our driveway to recuperate for a few days. But just as nothing can prepare you for the stunning majesty of the Grand Canyon, nothing can prepare you for the comedic decrepitude of one of John’s near wrecks.

The fenders don’t match, paint is virtual, the seat springs poke into your butt cheeks like the spikes of an Iron Maiden. And he says he’s not religious. 

I wouldn’t ride in that car without a goalie’s mask. A wicked thorn branch, a souvenir from the arroyo John slept in the night before, decorated the dash sliding ritually with each turn. No seatbelts either.

At sunset, the VW gnashed its way into our carport announcing his arrival with a teeth shattering screech on the blacktop. The refrain of Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life was just ending. Looking on the bright side with that oddity in our carport and watching The Black Robe with Jonik made for an interesting evening. The movie is a gaunt epic about Huron, Iroquois and Europeans slaughtering and converting one another. The car, if you could still call it that, looked like it had been caught in the middle of their war. Wary neighbors inspected it from a distance as if they feared it would explode.

John took a hot shower and a cold beer. I forget in which order. I served John a platter as we watched the opening credits. These were the days you had to return a video the next day or pay extra. He plowed into a hill of my black bean and Myers rum casserole and curried chicken salad, using the warm flour tortillas as a kind of backhoe. Even though a Chocolate Stout cake I’d made in his honor sat waiting on the counter, John foraged in my fridge for anything I’d forgotten to offer, eliminating the need for me to clean out any outdated stuff the next day. Thus restored, his snappy remarks about hometown events and the exploits of his journey back from Mexico amused us.

The next morning we breakfasted on cake, John and I saw Arthur off to teach his classes at ASU. We all noted the VW was rejecting some of its donor organs. Even as Arthur’s car pulled out, John’s muffler fell with a clang. Arthur waved cheerily at me, his window down, “Have fun.”

As if on cue, that’s when things began to go wrong. John decided his first order of business was to clean the car out so he dragged a Navajo rug creased with black grease onto our patio. I offered to help clean it. I ran inside to grab my degreaser, but by the time I got outside, John stood mutely holding the water faucet. It had come off in in his hand. Water gushed from the unchecked valve. We placed buckets to catch it until we could stanch the flow. John searched in the shed for the main valve and shut it off. We were both soaking wet, but I went inside to call a plumber.

Disconsolate, John sat drying out on our patio chairs. Not hard in Phoenix. It took minutes. Once I dried off, I went in for iced tea and we waited under the shade of the umbrella for the plumber. John brightened some when I told him the faucet had always annoyed me, dripping and squirting me when I watered my garden or hosed down the bricks which always looked like a haboob had just moved through.

He tried to help by carrying in the water containers we had filled so we could keep the toilet tanks full. Impressed, I helped him place several containers in both of our bathtubs. Even if the plumber didn’t arrive that day, we had at least six flushes.

We had bottled water for cooking and drinking so we each went about our day. John disappeared for hours scavenging Phoenix for parts to bring the VW up to speed.

The plumber showed up by five, took one look, muttered something about those old water return shuttles, added a new faucet knob, and closed it all off with some copper soldering. He turned on the main valve, checked the flow, pronounced it fixed handed me the bill.

John returned, triumphant with parts I had no name for, and I went in to make drinks and dinner. But John went ashen again when he tried to rinse a glass and nothing came out of the tap. We checked all the faucets. Nothing from any of our indoor taps. The only water source was now our outdoor hose. I called the plumber, but he said he couldn’t come again until the next day. We ordered pizza.

The next morning John was even more despondent. He had tirelessly kept our toilet tanks filled but I convinced him to leave our second-floor bath alone. Watching him run up and down those stairs with those heavy pails tired me. “We’ll all just use the first floor, John. Knock it off.”

The plumbing company sent a new man who knew his stuff. He showed us how the old return valve shuttle operated. “Thing’s seen it’s day,” he said to John’s relief. The new guy replaced the whole system and checked everything inside out before leaving and handing me a new bill.

“Okay John, everything’s better than ever. We have all new plumbing. Some things work out for the best,” I said, hoping platitudes would assuage his guilt.

But John insisted on heading out. The organs he’d found got the VW purring like a cheetah. “Gotta get out while the getting’s good and before I do any more damage.” I packed him some lunch and waved goodbye as the VW belched out of the driveway. The cheetah must have eaten something that disagreed with it.

A little later, I walked into the kitchen only to take a flyer on a puddled floor. Landing on the back of my head, I looked up at water dripping from the ceiling. Dazed and drenched, I ran upstairs looking for the source. As my bare feet squished through the soaked bath rug, I found the toilet tank overflowing. I flushed it and ran downstairs again. This time I had the plumber’s direct number. I stayed near the toilet flushing it whenever the tank filled. The plumber returned in an hour. He fished around the innards of the tank.

“Yep,” he said, pulling off a crumbling rubber ring. “When your toilet was out of operation, this got dried out, maybe some grit got in. Anyhow, it wouldn’t make a seal. That’s why the tank just kept filling up and overflowing.”

Arthur came home to mops and buckets, rags and paper towels bunched in odd places. A white carpet drip dried over our patio chairs and table. Scraps of copper and pipe littered the brick. The white slipcovers on our dining room chairs bore John’s 40-weight-oil handprints.

The small lump on the back of my head throbbed. I wrestled with the aspirin bottle and grabbed an icepack, lying down as Arthur finished the cleanup. I calculated that John must be nearing Albuquerque by now and figured it would take him another week or so to get back to Philly. I hoped he’d be in one piece, even if the VW wasn’t.

The house had lost its farfignewton. It looked a lot like John’s car. He promised to call me when he made it back to Fishtown (home to Philly’s Lower Kensington neighborhood, which he called Baja Kensington.) About a week later we got his call. He had to make a pit stop for more farfignewtons in Lawrence, Kansas, and those parts got him home. By then, I figured the car was more like the Ship of Theseus with no relation to the original VW that came out of the factory. I had I restored our house to its normal state and I began writing this account of his visit.

As we moved back lock and stock to Philly in 2019, we shoved a lot of our writings into boxes. I recently found this story typewritten on sheer paper in an as yet unpacked box and have no memory of writing it, although I vividly recall the events. They leapt out like film spool in my memory as I retyped it verbatim into my laptop.

The best thing about finding this story was remembering that I met John at an art opening sometime in the 70s after I acquired a painting made for his graduation show from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. As we chatted, we found we had both grown up in Fairmount, which realtors have dubbed the Art Museum neighborhood. John later found a kindergarten class photo showing both of us at the Methodist Church which had been at the SW corner of 25^th and Brown. So, we had first met when we were about four or five years old.

When I owned the cheese shops, I often catered art openings. One year, an art curated PAFA’s student works at the Robert Wood Johnson Estate on Philadelphia’s Main Line. Each student was tasked with portraying a major local magnate’s property in whatever medium they chose. Jonik painted the smokestack at the Robert Wood Johnson factory in Conshohocken, PA with a surrealist foreground of lush greenery in oil. It was so deeply ironic none of the magnates and collectors got it. But I did. In lieu of payment for catering the show the dealer offered me my choice of two works. The pieces I chose were Clayton Anderson’s surrealist charcoal of the Dupont estate in Delaware and John’s. They are still very mysterious and beautiful to me and to all who see them on our walls.

The University of Pennsylvania Archive Collection presently holds much of Jonik’s work. I recently sent John this real-time account in case he wanted to send it to the archives. He does not recall anything at all about it. “It must have been when I was on my way to Mexico,” he said. I reminded him it was on his way back to Philly.

Schizonyms and the Satirical Humor of Cartoonist John Jonik

Jonik is still CAR-TUNING. 

John,  a nationally recognized cartoonist and artist is based in his hometown, Philadelphia, PA. His cartoons have appeared in many publications most notably The New Yorker, Playboy, National Lampoon, Cosmopolitan, Wall Street Journal, Esquire and scores of other publications. Some are posted in the above link. His new children’s book Kevin’s CLouds is just out.

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