A Memory of Lago Vista, or, The Cartoonist, the Bomb-Rider, and the Hoot

By: Charlie E. A. Lincoln IV

(a spectral palimpsest in seven or maybe eight or more fragmented notions plus recursive footnote(s), possibly infinite, depending on your own tragic epistemological commitments)

It is not raining in Lago Vista, Texas. It never was. It probably never will be. But it felt like it was raining, once. On the inside, that is. Which is maybe more relevant than the weather anyway, if you’re the kind of person who suspects that memory is more of an internal monsoon than a trustworthy flashback.

2.

Bill Hanna. Yes. That Hanna. Of Hanna Barbera. Of Tom and Jerry. Of the origin of slapstick-televised-post-WWII-Anglo-American cartoon logic that formed the invisible lattice of your brainstem if you were born after the atom bomb but before TikTok. He used to have a house with a porch. This porch looked out over Lake Travis, which is a body of water so calm and so blue and so complicit in the illusion of stasis that you might be forgiven for believing time itself could be seduced into idling there.

3.

My father. Esquire. Friend. Mid-to-late-century Texan trust-bonded-adjacent consigliere to the animating demiurges of twentieth-century American celluloid zoetrope capitalism. He was Bill’s attorney. That this fact is a fact in the archival sense, not the emotional or metaphysical one, may be less interesting than the way it echoes in the hallways of your memory like a coin rolling toward the center of an empty amphitheater.

4.

I was a child. Or playing the part of one. Which is to say, under ten. Possibly eight. Maybe six. Always surrounded by people who had names that sounded like citations in a bibliography. Names which decades later would become hyperlinks in blue font in footnotes you will never click. They were the sort of people who are themselves Wikipedia pages now. They floated through the rooms of Bill’s house like ghosts who had not realized they were still alive. They drank fizzy water and laughed the way only people who have survived multiple financial bubbles and presidential administrations can laugh.

5.

Every time. Every time. We visited. Doctor Strangelove was on the television. Not just on in the background. Not playing softly like ambient irony. It was on like a ceremony. A sacrament. A recursive invocation. We would walk in and there would be Peter Sellers. Multiplying himself into figures of state-sanctioned absurdity. And the bomb. The bomb was always about to fall. Slim Pickens like a cowboy Christ descending from the cross of Cold War logic. Riding the bomb not to save us but to explain. Via gesture. That salvation was maybe never the point to begin with.

6.

I remember laughing. He laughed too. Bill Hanna. The man whose characters chased each other forever and never aged. He laughed with me at the black and white apocalypse. He was old. I was young. There was an almost perfect symmetry in the way we both found it all such a hoot. Yes. A hoot. That is the word. Not funny. Not hilarious. A hoot. That kind of laughter that implies the world is already over and so you might as well giggle before the credits roll.

7.

He asked me once what cartoons I liked. I told him Scooby Doo. Which felt honest but not quite noble. I added The Flintstones. Which felt strategic. I hesitated about Tom and Jerry. Which felt dangerous. How do you tell a man who invented the archetype of animated violence that you preferred the mystery-solving dog with the speech impediment and chronic munchies. But Bill. Saintly. Or maybe just beyond caring. Smiled. He took it in stride. In grace. Like a cartoon anvil falling slowly from the sky.

8.

Bill Hanna was kind to me. This may be the most radical thing about this memory. Not the celebrity. Not the cartoons. Not even the bomb. Kindness is the real avant garde now. Kindness is the thing that does not sell. Does not scale. Cannot be quantified into a data point. He was kind and then he was gone. The porch remained. The laughter remained. And Doctor Strangelove. I swear. Might still be playing there. Over the lake. Somewhere between the air and the screen and whatever remains of the self when it tries to remember a hoot.

Footnote 1: There is no climax. Only a recursive spiral of significance collapsing under the weight of its own self awareness. You have reached the end. Or not. You may scroll back up to confirm that none of this ever actually happened. And yet it all did. Like cartoons. Like childhood. Like Texas. Like Bill.

© Charles Edward Andrew Lincoln IV