The Lonesome Go

By Tim Lane
Published by Fantagraphics.

Buy it HERE.

I didn't know what to expect

when getting this heavy tome dropped on my doorstep via US mail last year. I really dug the detailed artwork and more-or-less filed this one away as a 'buy later' item. That day came when I had some extra cash. I thought it was going to have very detailed artwork, and hoping for an interesting story or two.

I so wanted this to match up with my rebellion-spurred inner Underground Comix artist aesthetic. This book had the goods, had the artwork, had the assured hand of the Master at work. Just no story -at least not in the conventional sense. I shrugged my shoulders and placed it back on my shelf, thinking of The Lonesome Go as maybe an interesting but long-winded scrapbook collection of Bukowski/Kerouac-ish 'loner man in search of his soul' gibberish.

I figured I'd give The Lonesome Go one more try in a review. Maybe I'd get lucky and crack the code; find out what's the engine driving this collection together. It's obvious Tim Lane must've invested something of his solitary side into these pages (each one probably took a week or so), so it was only fair to give him a second go.

I read for the second time a story that starts on page 64 of a wandering guy who ends up in San Francisco 1995. Bruno's bar in The Mission was featured, as well as sketchy acquaintances rung up on payphones with roommate-connections.

Suddenly I was struck with a new insight:

It's the story of me.

I was alone in 1991 with no friends in a crappy weird two-floor apartment in Minneapolis. It was added on to the rest of the building, one tiny cube stacked on the other, each having about 15 feet each way of room. This sucked. I would lay down on the grass in the park at midnight and look up into the night sky wondering what to do...

One Tuesday I bicycled over Shinders bookstore on Hennipen Ave to buy a San Francisco Sunday Chronicle. For eight weeks I kept buying the Chronicle, scanning the classified, reading the columns and news.

I set a date (Sept. 1992) to move there and drove cross country in an old Pontiac.

Made it to the Bay Area and stayed with a distant relative in Pleasanton. I found a job soon enough with a crew doing the framing (near Hunter's Point) for a distant (Fisherman's Wharf) high-end art gallery where they stopped working on Fridays at 3 and shared 6-packs of beer and smoked pot.

Promptly for the first four weeks in San Francisco when work ended at 5pm I drove to the Haight-Ashbury where 'Roommate Referral Services' let you look in their 3-ring binders for apartments and living situations. The job was easy to get, but a roommate connection was tough:

"We really were looking for a woman."
"Hey, not a problem. Just wanted to cross you off the list."

I kept a lined paper notebook with maybe 15-25 leads for those weeks, plus a fistful of quarters for the corner store payphone. I called and called, feeding quarters in the payphone, set up appointments, did a lot of walking. Did a lot of calling back until I found my place.

Read 'The Rat Hole Bastards'

The Rat Hole Bastards is a 4-panel weekly comic strip set in a few years before Mayfield Eight. See the origins of Slade and his notorious Banshees biker gang! NOW LIVE on Patreon!:

Buy Mayfield Eight

Mayfield Eight is a 28-page comic book set in 1974 New Mexico where a 17-year-old fry cook gets in deep trouble with a local biker gang as he helps a sleazy friend conduct a back-room drug deal.

Available in my Shopify store!

PS: Major faux pas! Last email I miss-typed the painter Eugene Delacroix's name in the subject line. That's my new term now, 'miss-typed' as opposed to misspelled (which is what I really did). Miss-typed sounds like I'm still smart, just clumsy with the keyboard :)