Codger’s column: Talking to Jules
Codger’s friend, Jules Feiffer, died six weeks ago, but they have continued talking, at least once a week, usually during their customary Sunday morning chats. Codger believes it’s essential to stay in touch with your besties.
Jules will invariably start the conversation by asking, “So are there any scandals on Shelter Island?”
“There’s stuff going on with the Planning Board I don’t understand,” Codger might say, “and the Democratic party seems in disarray.”
Jules laughs himself into a coughing fit over that. “The Democrats are always in disarray. Democrats like to argue among themselves over who is smarter. Republicans like to win. Under attack, they lie, deny and retaliate. Democrats want to be liked. They’re wimpy. Under attack, they defend and retreat.”
Codger will reply, “Are you really dead?”
“For now,” Jules will answer. “How’s the new dog?”
“You’re changing the subject.”
“There is no more subject. My American dream is over.”
“We have to resist,” says Codger.
“Of course,” says Jules, “I’m a cartoonist, I can buy atomic bombs. What did you have in mind?”
“Grassroots organizing, boycotts, marches. Friends of mine suggest donating to the Latino advocacy group OLA, to CAST in Southold, they run a pantry and a number of great support services. And we should get behind the promises of Superintendent Doelger and Chief Read to put the safety and welfare of Shelter Island residents ahead of any bullying by ICE. And then we could hide people. We could …Jules? … Jules?”
He was gone. But that could have happened while he was alive and they were talking on the phone. His throat would go dry and he would become exhausted. They might resume later in the day.
The chats began in 2017, when Jules and his wife, Joan Holden, moved to the Island from the Hamptons, which Jules said he found too expensive and too phony. Codger believed the expensive, but noted how Jules could suffer the phony if it came with enough celebration.
Codger had admired Jules from afar as a social and political critic since the 1960’s, particularly through his cartoons in the Village Voice, his plays, especially “Little Murders” and “A Bad Friend,” and the movie “Carnal Knowledge,” which he wrote. He didn’t get to know him well until Jules invited him for breakfast one Sunday morning in his newly built house on Emerson Lane.
Jules made the scrambled eggs, Codger the toast, almost every Sunday morning for the next five years, until Jules and Joan moved to a fine house on a hill in Richfield Springs, N.Y. near Cooperstown. The only thing Jules truly missed, said Codger, was the Shelter Island Senior Services.
Codger was nearly a decade younger than Jules (named by his mother for the writer Jules Verne) but their relationship swung wildly from geezers talking dirty to a young disciple asking questions of a wise man. The wise man tried not to be a wise guy all the time.
“Maybe my old age and fartism needs to be factored in here,” he would say, “but Republicans are not American citizens. They don’t care about their constituents or the constitution. Like the tobacco executives, they feel that killing your kids and grandkids is just the cost of doing business.”
He might sigh then. “So where did my Mr. Smith Goes to Washington idealism go? All you have to do was find and expose the vested interests and beat them. But the vested interests don’t lose so easily.
“Dr. King said the arc of history bends toward the good, but I say the arc is up for grabs and can move in directions we don’t dare think about. Like civil war. Like the American dream becoming the American con job.”
For all his pessimism, Jules was the model of hope.
He was deaf and legally blind via macular degeneration. He could barely walk a block. His heart, lungs and kidneys were on speed dial to the ambulance corps; he was frequently hospitalized.
Yet he worked every day, on the Island at a little table by the door, upstate in a splendid studio overlooking a meadow and a lake. The most recent results included an acclaimed children’s book — “Amazing Grapes” — and an as-yet-unpublished graphic memoir — “A License to Fail” — that stunned Codger with its insight and wit.
That license, which he insisted to students was critical to success, was the key to his own boldness. Get out there, fall on your butt, get up and soldier on. He credits the Army (he never went to college) with making him an angry satirist with “their lying and ethical abuse.” (
Jules died nine days before his 96th birthday, to which both old men had been looking forward. He made up for that failure to Codger by staying in touch.
