Friday Book Review: Jeffrey Koterba’s Inklings

Picture the young artist, dreaming of becoming an editorial cartoonist. He’s working hard: drawing for a weekly newspaper in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue, placing his pieces in a few small-town papers around Nebraska, constantly submitting his work to the Omaha World-Herald, only to be rejected. With encouragement from Kansas City Star cartoonist Lee Judge, at the time practically just a kid himself, our artist has started doing an occasional sports cartoon for the Star.

Until now he’s had a weird life. His loose-hinged father is, among other disturbing things, beset by nervous tics that our cartoonist has inherited. As a child, our man had a tendency to poke his pinky into gooey cracks in the floor or lick window glass on the bus. He still must exert heroic effort to keep from sticking out his tongue at inappropriate times.

A Kansas City Royal comes to his psychological rescue.

The cartoonist is in the darkroom at his little newspaper, studying the Royals’ roster, when he comes across the story of outfielder Jim Eisenreich.

After he was released by the Minnesota Twins, his contract was picked up by the Royals for one dollar. A bargain, as my father might say. What gives me pause is the mention of his tics. Although Eisenreich was a talented player, his symptoms were so bad that in Minnesota he was often booed off the field. As I read about his vocal tics and strange head and arm movements, I marvel at our similarities.

After Eisenreich’s arrival in Kansas City, the story goes on to explain, a doctor diagnosed him with Tourette’s syndrome.

Over the next few days in his darkroom, the cartoonist — Jeffrey Koterba, now full time at the World-Herald and author of the gorgeous new memoir Inklings (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 288 pages, $25), can’t stop thinking about Eisenreich.

I imagine him living in a modern, sprawling house, tootling around Kansas City’s boulevards, dining in fancy restaurants, managing his syndrome as best he can. And like Kansas City, this syndrome that plagues him seems remote. My cartoons, my signature, “Koterba,” may appear in print in Kansas City, but I exist in Omaha, struggling in my new marriage, taking care of a sick baby, paying hospital bills, making ends meet. Yet on deadline nights, when I climb into bed next to Joni with my smudged fingers, only to wake three hours later, I remind myself there was a time when I believed no woman would ever love me. To have this, at least, is nothing short of a miracle.

There are other miracles, too.