The Cartoon Cult Kalena Tamura

The Cartoon Cult

WORDS Kalena Tamura

ILLUSTRATION Leslie Young

I was fifteen and shivering in my pleated mini skirt, my knees knocking together from the cold as I wrapped myself in his oversized denim jacket. Facing the sea, I watched as the waves rose up to their tips as if to touch the sky, only to crash back down over and over again. I sat, exhausted, as it dawned on me how the moon only loves the ocean at night.

It was two in the morning, my sobriety returning in a painful, head-pounding fashion, and all I wanted was to escape the cold and shroud myself in a blanket of unconsciousness. Harley was still preaching in the same enthusiastic manner, his purple fur knee-length coat making him appear as if he’d been pulled out of a bad ‘70s sitcom. He was speaking to Steve, one of the homeless people living under the Hermosa Beach pier that he had recently befriended.

“And that’s when it hit me man. I mean it just makes sense,” Harley said, his voice booming with enthusiasm. “I am the reincarnation of Gandhi. When I told the cats at school, they all called me whack. But I feel a connection, something way deeper than this life. Besides, why shouldn’t I be the reincarnation of Gandhi? What’s stopping me?”

Later that night, I sat in the car silently, flinching more than usual at Harley’s reckless driving. “Babe, you have to listen to this. It’s the most incredible jam in the history of jams,” he said turning up the volume. He thrashed his head in time with the beat. The car swerved with each distinct whip. The bulged moon hung, bloated in the sky. The road opened up before us, trees on either side bleeding into the night. “You said that last week about that Rolling Stones song,” I shouted over the music.

“Nah trust me, it’s all about the funk now. I’m tellin ya, it’s like I have a whole new perspective on life.” I clung to my seat as I watched the speedometer creep past 80, feeling the screech of the tires reverberate within my bones. His arms were tense, the pronounced whites of his knuckles sharply contrasting against the black leather of the steering wheel. “Things are gonna be different from now on. Just you wait and see,” he said to himself, eyes blazing, “Just you wait and see.” My stomach was churning and I thought I might be sick.

I fell in love with Harley Hart my sophomore year of high school. At the time, however, he was a senior and half of Hermosa High was already in love with him, as well as more than a few of the female faculty. He was an actor, naturally, due to his charismatic persona and fluid ability to erase himself and fully embody any character with ease. But aside from Harley’s gift for theater, his piercing green eyes and effortlessly shaggy pitch-black hair, he also had an incredible way with people. He possessed a magnetism that had the power to ensnare anyone, choking you with his charm until your head was drowning in riptides and your lungs were turning blue.

He surrounded himself with a crowd of artists, musicians, and a few rogue druggies. They were the most motley group of individuals that walked around campus carrying guitars and dressing outlandishly retro. Their extreme exclusivity made them a marvel at Hermosa High, yet it was Harley as their unspoken ringleader that elevated their status from dirty hippies to enticing outcasts.

That February, Harley and I were cast as the two leads in the spring musical, Next to Normal. We spent hours together practicing lines and he drove me home from rehearsal in his beat up cherry red 1979 Chevy. He read me his poetry in the ripped up back seat of that pathetic hunk of scrap metal that smelled of cigarettes, wet dog and Fireball. I started wearing ripped tights and stole over-sized flannels from the dust-ridden back corner of my dad’s closet. I started smoking and I kept smoking until it didn’t make me cough anymore, until I grew to like the taste of ash in my throat and ash in my chest, the taste of ash on Harley’s tongue in the backseat. Eventually, I molded myself to fit into the fascinating world of Harley Hart, one that was saturated in rebellious eccentricity.

“I feel like I never see you anymore,” my friend Abby said to me in the hall once while passing. “But I suppose you don’t have time for us, now that you’ve joined the acid cult,” she sneered, her words were dripping in disgust and envy and perhaps pity, I thought, as if it wasn’t all the same.

At first it was interesting, simply observing a world that was so intensely different from the innocence of my own. As the closest one to sober, they often asked me to jot down things that they would do or say throughout the night to use as inspiration for their art the next morning as they poured coffee into their veins and swallowed Advil to cure the pounding hammer slamming the insides of their brains. Most of it was nonsense. One Saturday night we were all smoking at Valley Park. I was lying with my head in Harley’s lap, twiddling grass blades between my fingers as one of Harley’s followers, Whirley, was so high he couldn’t speak except to repeat the same two sentences over and over again: “Augustus Gloop is my president. All hail Gloop.” The next morning while Harley was in the kitchen cooking eggs in his underwear, I told Whirley about his Willy Wonka related epiphany from the night before.

“Gloop?” He asked surprised, “Really?”

“I dig it, man,” Harley said peering his head in through the kitchen entryway. “If there’s one brother who’s got it all figured out, it’s Augustus Gloop.” Whirley immediately picked up his guitar and wrote a song called “The Electric Gloop Riot.” It sucked.

When Harley Hart cracked, it wasn’t a slow splintering. It was a rapid shatter, and it consumed him. He stopped sleeping and began tripping for three days at a time. His poetry became manic, his manner completely unrecognizable. He wore flaming leather pants to class with enormous fur coats, adopting the persona and voice of an existential jazz-age pimp, listening to no one and preaching to everyone. Harley Hart had always been different in that he should have been born in a different era. Yet suddenly he was an outrageous cartoon, as if he was from another world, as if he thought himself to be a God.

The day we all became completely disillusioned by Harley was the day he gave a speech before drama class one Tuesday morning in the auditorium. He sauntered up to the front of the room and waited for complete silence. Before him sat a crowd of ravenous, judgmental eyes, all feasting off the peculiarity of The Harley Hart Show.

He stepped forward to the microphone as my teacher held back along the side of the room, curious like the rest of us, to see what his next enormous revelation would be.

“It has come to my recent discovery,” Harley paused, taking a deep breath “that I am the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.”

Harley Hart’s come up was a spectacle, his peak a phenomenon. His come down, on the other hand, was altogether and uncharacteristically unextraordinary. As the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, Harley’s comedic preaching morphed into jarring sermons, his points often bizarre and irrational, attacking and aggressive. People grew disinterested and stopped providing Harley with the attention he so craved, which only spurred greater acts of desperation disguised as nonsense. The Harley Hart Show became a program we all no longer wished to watch. We turned our heads and shielded our eyes out of courtesy, or shame or both. His disintegrating state was palpable, permeating from his body and pervading the surrounding air, diseased.

No longer a source for entertainment or curiosity, Harley Hart faded into oblivion. The last I heard, he had dropped out of his acting program in New York. He could be doing great things by now, I suppose, like we all once thought he might. He could be anywhere doing anything; more likely, he could be in the middle of nowhere doing nothing. As always, the elusive nature of Harley Hart forever remains a mystery.