Thith map doethn’t make any thenthe, even by Toon thtandardth.”
“After a few turns—” Max began.
“It becometh a methth of impenetrable lineth, yeth,” Daffy interrupted. “Can you thtart at the beginning, pleathe? Give me thome contextht. Tell me how it all got thtarted.”
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Max said plaintively. “There wasn’t a door and then there was.”
Daffy simply raised his eyebrows pointedly at him. That seemed to be enough. Max took a deep, steadying breath and began properly. “I…never really wanted to be in showbiz. Not like my dad was. It’s only a little bit that I could never compete with the old man, that I’d always be ‘the son of Goofy’, and maybe a little that I would never be able to get a role that wasn’t…well, like he’d had. Mostly, though, it was that I didn’t actually enjoy it all that much. I mean, Goof Troop wasn’t fiction, except that they scripted a few interactions between Dad and Pete, made up the backstory for them, and obviously Spoonerville wasn’t in Ohio, it was a suburb of Toon Town. But the show—having a camera following you around almost all the time when you’re going through the awkward years, it sucks. Thank Walt, Dad listened to me when he asked me what I wanted for Christmas and I said to not do the show anymore. I think they were considering a show that starred the Petes instead, but PJ—my best friend, Peter P. Pete Junior—begged his dad, too, and, you know, for whatever other issues Pete had, he was a pretty decent dad when it counted. A Goofy Movie was real, more or less, and so was An Extremely Goofy Movie four years later, but…well, they were kind of dramatizations rather than in real time, based on Dad’s recollections and the news reports.
“I never told Dad that I hated doing them. Partly I hated the fame, partly I hated the brutal set work—it was better when we did the first one because I was still under eighteen, so there were rules about how long I could be on set and how many days I could work in a row, but the second one was awful—and I wasn’t experienced enough to know how to deal with directors. Dad was there to advocate for me as best he could, but…Dad wasn’t a kid when he started in films, you know? I actually don’t know if Dad ever was a kid. You know, not a lot of Toons…they’re mostly adults, and even the ones that are kids mostly stay kids. PJ and Bobby and the Duck triplets and I are the only ones I’ve ever seen actually…age, and the Ducks didn’t age that much, all things considered. They keep rebooting, too, so…anyway, you get the idea. Dad didn’t realize what a toll it was taking on me, I don’t think. And he loved being in the spotlight again. He’d spent so long playing second banana to Mickey and Donald, it had been ages since he got a starring role, but the contract for the movies specified I had to be there, because they were meant to cap off the show. So I put up with it for him.
“After that, though, I was done. Dad understood, or at least he said he understood, and then he got the chance to be in that video game—that was such a big deal for him, you have no idea. And since he’d just graduated with his college degree, he threw himself into his work. I stayed in college, did my skateboarding—yeah, that was real, too—studied, and eventually graduated in 2004. Dad, uh…Dad was kind of surprised when he found out I’d actually graduated with a business degree, instead of one in Theater or Communications or anything like that, but he said he was proud of me, no matter what. I believed him, too. My dad is a great guy, and I know he loves me. I know it.
“All the same, I, uh—I knew I couldn’t stay. Dad had moved back to Toon Town after I went to college, and he’d started running the speedway the year before I graduated. He asked me if I’d like to come in with him as a partner, but…I couldn’t. In the first place, one of the things he’d emphasized when we started making the movies was that we were costars and colleagues and coworkers on set and family off set, and we had to keep those separate, but if we were running a business together I knew it would be a lot harder, because I would have to bring some things home and even if I got my own place it would still strain things. In the second place, I—I didn’t want to spend my whole life being Goofy’s son. Not because I don’t love him. I do. I’m proud to be his son, and I wouldn’t change it for the world. But there’s an—an expectation in Toon Town when you’re related to a star, you know? The Duck triplets are stars in their own right, and they’ve gone back and forth from their Uncle Donald to their Uncle Scrooge, so they’re not so much tied to that. And they like it. But me, I don’t—I just wanted to be me, and I wanted to be me quietly. Living in Toon Town I would never be able to get away from the spotlight, whether I wanted it or not. So I—actually took a job as a junior manager at the Ink and Paint Club, at least for a little while. It was sort of going downhill fast, so I knew it was only going to be temporary, but I figured having something on my resume other than valet at the House of Mouse might help me out getting a job outside of Toon Town.
“It was Brad—Bradley Uppercrust III—who told me about the job, actually. He, uh, it’s not like we stayed in touch—he really was that much of a jerk—but his father was a shareholder in the Ink and Paint Club, and he came along for a meeting right before they made the decision to close and saw me struggling after my boss with an armful of files. He made some snide remark about wasting my potential and how pathetic it would be when I lost my job, and he made a comment about a skate park that was looking for a manager. But then he added that it was in London, and he laughed, along with his cronies. Obviously he thought there was no way someone like me, whose father was so painfully square and had even just been a low level employee, could afford a trip to the United Kingdom.” Max actually managed a thin smile at that. “Bradley didn’t watch movies with Toons in them, you see. They were too crass for his taste. He had no idea who my father was. Not that I was going to ask him for money, but…I mean, Dad didn’t act for the money, he always said, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have it. And even though the Coogan Act only requires fifteen percent of a minor’s earnings be saved, and even that wasn’t a law until 2003, Dad put all of mine in a trust and never touched it once. I had plenty, is what I’m getting at. So I sent in my application. I didn’t expect much, but apparently my degree, combined with my experience at the Ink and Paint Club—as basic as it was—plus my actual skateboarding pedigree, gave me an advantage, and I got the job as the manager at the Botley Bowl Skatepark, beginning January of 2005.
“Dad was originally going to come with me to help me move, but they unexpectedly announced they were going to start the motion capture for Kingdom Hearts II and he had to go to Japan for that instead—I mean, they had a studio in Los Angeles, but it wasn’t doing that game—so I did it on my own. It wasn’t so bad, actually. I flew in, spent a night in London—I’d originally thought I was going to end up in a hotel, but it turned out Dad had got a line to the Rabbits—he and Roger knew and respected each other from the old days—and they insisted I stay with them for a couple days. They even helped me move out to Oxford. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. It’s about an hour outside of London, maybe a little bit further by train; it’s more known for academia than for athletics, honestly, but it’s not bad. Anyway, I found a flat out there, got moved in, and took up my position at Botley Bowl. There’s been a small skate park that was just the one bowl since 1991, but just before Bradley saw the thing about the job, they built a bigger, more elaborate indoor structure. The bowl is free, but the indoor park charges admission, and that’s what I was there to run.
“There aren’t as many days off in running a skate park as you might expect, so I usually don’t go home for the holidays. Didn’t. Dad came out to visit me a couple of times, but, well, about a year after I moved out there they started up a preschool show he’s got a recurring role in, and—I guess you’ve never done work for preschoolers, have you? Well, little kids, really little ones, don’t understand holidays, so there are a lot fewer breaks in those seasons. And when they did get breaks, they were usually filming something else. I think I’ve only seen him a couple of times since I moved out, but it’s—it was okay. We kept in touch, you know? Letters every week, a call once a month—that was hard to coordinate at first, I mean, there’s a seven hour time difference between here and California, but it turns out Black Lion is closed on Mondays, so I could call him after I got off work Sunday nights and know he wouldn’t be on set, and it didn’t matter how late we talked because I didn’t have to get up early the next morning. It wasn’t the same as having him there, but it was okay. I kept in touch with PJ as best I could, but, well, he’s not in showbiz either, and his schedule is a lot more restrictive, so it’s mostly been letters. I was the best man at his wedding about five years ago, but that was the last time I saw him.
“I…didn’t realize I was in a rut. Not really. Not until I did get a call about…two months ago, maybe, from a number I didn’t recognize, but it was a Toon Town exchange, so I answered. It was PJ, first time I’d heard his voice in five years, and he sounded excited and scared all at once. He had…kind of a lot of news. First of all, his wife had finally finished everything necessary to, uh, become his husband instead. Second, they’d just found out they were going to be parents—his sister was pregnant and didn’t want kids, so they were going to adopt the baby once it was born. He wanted me to be the godfather. And while we were being excited about that, he accidentally let slip that he’d just lost his job. He’d been teaching at our junior high, and…well, it was a little more, uh, traditional than he thought. They said they didn’t have a problem with rebooted Toons, you know, but if he wasn’t rebooting the relationship, too, they didn’t want the kids exposed to that. Like, what year is it, man? He said he was okay, that he still had some of his money from his acting days, but I know his dad did the bare minimum under the Coogan Act, and he didn’t have top billing, so it wasn’t going to be much to begin with. I offered to let them move in with me, and PJ was all for it. He started asking about bedrooms, about the schools, about all that sort of thing.
“I…lied. I admit that. The thing is, I was still living in that original flat in Oxford—one bedroom, one bath, one combined sitting room and kitchen—and I hadn’t really done anything with the place either. But I told PJ I had a three bedroom house, great school district, easy walking distance from the shops, the whole nine yards. He said it sounded great. Meanwhile I was frantically searching real estate listings, looking for something that matched up with what I’d said. Turned out there was one that fit the bill perfectly. Most real estate in Oxford is kind of expensive and this was no exception, but heck, I could afford it, right? I hadn’t exactly spent much of my earnings from the acting days, except to get to London in the first place, so I figured, what the hey. Once I got off the phone with PJ, I went on the website and made an appointment to view the house the following Monday.
“The house was on a street called Hill Top Road, kind of off by itself. There are lot of really impressive houses on the road, and maybe the walking distance wasn’t as great as I pretended it was, but it wasn’t terrible. I’d managed to snag pretty much the last available appointment to see the house, at around ten in the morning, so I woke up, had my breakfast, and put on my best suit. I practiced talking a few times to make sure I wouldn’t let out a laugh at the wrong time, then set off to meet the real estate agent. The whole way up the street, I found myself imagining our life here—sitting on the porch with PJ and his husband, playing in the yard with my godkid, maybe even convincing Dad to come out for the holidays more often. It was…it was a good imagining, and I was in a really good frame of mind when I got to the house and rang the bell.
“The door opened. I assumed that who was standing there was the last person who’d seen the house, and I apologized and said I thought my appointment was for ten. The response was that it was, and that I was right on time, and that I must be Max and I should come in. I asked if this was some kind of joke. See, I knew the name of my real estate agent who was supposed to show this house, and I may be a pretty liberal guy, but I knew that whatever this guy at the door’s name was, it was not Helen Richardson.
“He smiled…at least I think it was a smile. It…look.” Max took a deep breath. “I might be a Toon, but I didn’t…grow up around Toons. Not to that extent. I don’t necessarily know all the rules about Toon behavior. And I’ve been in Oxford for long enough that I’m a lot more familiar with the human world than the Toon one. But that smile was way, way bigger than should have fit on his face. He was a bird, and…his head was one color and his body was another, but even now, I can’t actually tell you what those colors were. I remember his beak, though. It wasn’t like a normal bird’s beak. It was bone. Old, weathered bone, like a human bone, and it was sharp. I can’t swear there wasn’t blood on it, but I can’t swear there was, either. Anyway, he said that Ms. Richardson had been unexpectedly called away, but he knew the house perfectly well and could show me what I was looking for. Then he laughed. It sounded familiar, but also…not, weird and a little unsettling, honestly. And again he said to come in, and we could begin. Maybe it was stupid, but…I figured, well, a Toon’s gotta work, you know? So I went in.
“I…I don’t remember much about the tour, honestly. I remember he showed me everything I was looking for, and the house was…perfect. But I would swear he never spoke. Not once, the entire time. Still, somehow I…knew what he was getting at. We were almost done and I was about ready to make an offer when I noticed a door. It’s…it’s not that there was anything unusual about it, except for two things. One was that it was yellow, a color that was so out of place in the house of neutrals that I couldn’t not notice it. And the other was that, I will swear on Walt’s crypt, it was not there before. We’d passed through this room three times, it was the main room in the house, and I would have seen it if it had been there before. I know I would have. I couldn’t possibly have missed it.