What I Did For Love #1: Two Cartoonists Walk Into a Bar
For years Carolita Johnson had to politely countenance accusations of sleeping her way into cartooning when it was actually the opposite: she cartooned her way into the heart of the love of her life.
This is the first in a new Oldster Magazine series called “What I Did For Love.” It takes its title from a song featured in the Broadway musical A Chorus Line. It’s also been the theme of the first two Oldster Variety Hours. Carolita Johnson performed a version of this story at the first event, in Kingston, NY on October 1st 2025. The second event will be March 4th at Joe’s Pub. Tickets are available, both in-person, and for remote live and later-streaming.
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When I first met and slept with Michael in New York in 2002, he was still dating, on and off, the woman he’d left his ex-wife for. This was fine with me because at the time, I was visiting from Paris where I’d become well-versed in the concept of The Lover. My French lovers were pleasant, unburdensome, polite and romantic, devoid of the possessiveness and/or meanness I learned to associate with American boyfriends or the “hookups” I’d heard about, which sounded like scary campfire stories. Not only was it wonderful to have a French lover, it was also quite a joy being one.
Michael and I were introduced by a friend, and had seen each other a few times over the course of a week. The night before my flight home to Paris, we took a walk, kissed as we emerged from the 50th street subway station, then stopped to kiss in doorway after doorway as we walked downtown along 8th Avenue, under a drizzling rain. We kissed sensually at length in the doorway of my train until last call, scandalizing the passengers inside. And the next morning I went to his apartment on 156th street, and we slept together for the first time, just hours before my flight.
Afterwards, we went back to Penn Station, where we repeated our sexy goodbyes. “Sorry to love you and leave you,” I said, at Track 19, “but come visit me in Paris sometime!” I was being gayly insincere. I never expected to see him again, and I didn’t mind. I tousled his hair, pulled my hand back to myself as the train doors closed, and was off to Long Island to collect my bags at my parents’ house before heading to the airport, feeling very proud of myself for creating a romantic farewell, worthy of French lovers.
At first, Michael called frequently, and even exhorted me to come back and share a giant apartment he’d found in Harlem. I just smiled and accepted this absurd proposition as flattery. Then he booked a flight to Paris for April 1st (the perfect date for cartoonists to have a lover’s tryst), but cancelled just two days before, saying he had to sign a lease, borrow money for the deposit, and move in.
It sounded very plausible, but I waited until 11pm that April Fool’s Day, in case he was pranking me. He wasn’t. But from that day on, I considered April 1st our anniversary, because it marked the first time I went out on a limb emotionally for him, endured disappointment, and forgave him. He stopped calling as often, but somehow I didn’t take it personally. Five months later, when I came back to New York for good, determined to become an artist and writer, with a lover or two, I was puzzled when Michael kept brushing off my invitations for “coffee.”
Surely he knew “coffee” meant “sex”? What older, divorced man in a loosey-goosey, on and off relationship, who had already slept with me would, in their right mind say no to having me as an easy lover on the side? Not yet familiar with the concept of “ghosting” – the term might not even have been coined yet – and perhaps grossly lacking in self-esteem deficiencies, I put the difficulty of us getting back together down to his bad time management skills.
Yes, I was blissfully unaware that I was out of my league. I was 37, freshly unemployed and living with my parents: I suppose I should have been ashamed. He was 56, and unbeknownst to me, one of the most well-known and beloved staff cartoonists at The New Yorker. Me, I was merely impressed that he could pay his rent by drawing cartoons.
When we first met, he’d asked to see my sketchbook, just assumed I had one on me – which I did – and we’d talked shop happily together about pens and pencils all night. I wanted more of that. Yeah. Someone who actually took me seriously as an artist. Who would also have sex with me. In a last-ditch attempt to get his attention, I sat down and scribbled a bunch of what I can only recall and describe as hilariously bad “cartoon-like objects,” then called him to say I needed to show him some drawings and get his advice.
It worked. I wasn’t sure what to think of the fact that he’d responded to me more readily this time as an artist than as a lover. I was certainly not insulted. But I’d intentionally made my drawings so bad as to make it plain that all I really wanted was to sleep with him again.
After looking at my drawings, he told me I should try cartooning. His apparent obliviousness was intriguing.
“Do ten cartoons a week and bring them to me. If they’re good I’ll show them to my editor,” he said, “but don’t expect to sell anything.”
Which I didn’t. I decided we were both only pretending to take me seriously as a cartoonist as a pretext to see each other without actually dating. Fine with me. I didn’t know if it was the age difference or guilt over him still seeing his ex, or both, but it obviously suited him to make our relationship about my supposed interest in cartooning. I did the cartoons as Cupid’s labor. I decided it wouldn’t kill me to bring my productivity levels up and learn to meet deadlines. Also, I was thrilled to have a critique (and, eventually, sex!) every week.
“Do ten more cartoons!” he’d say each week as we parted, “See you next week!”
I can still see him standing outside of The Strand bookstore on Broadway one Monday, next to his bicycle as I turned to head for the subway, his bright white hair floating above his head like an ectoplasm, his eyes on me behind his black, Ray-Ban “Wayferers,” his signature look. He’s wearing a grey linen suit he didn’t wear much afterwards, and the old, cracked brown leather wingtip shoes that he finally threw away thirteen years later when we moved upstate to Kingston. I’m smiling at him and he’s saying, in his gently gravelly voice, “Get to work!” Making me feel so truly happy that I laugh, and I can feel that laugh in my throat now, as I remember it. I had a lover and a mentor and a friend in him. I couldn’t ask for more.
One day, he said his editor wanted to meet me. I almost said, “You’ve really been showing him my cartoons?” But I stopped myself when I realized I’d perhaps been the only one playing the game of “let’s pretend I’m doing this for the cartooning.” Had he really believed my cartoons were good? Or had he thought he had to get me into the magazine as a quid pro quo, when he really, really hadn’t had to at all?
The truth was, I didn’t care about doing cartoons in The New Yorker. I wanted to go back to Paris, and do cartoons for a French publication. But as I caught myself, it felt as if I’d almost just lost him, then clasped him back to me.
“Oh, wow! Okay,” I said, shaking invisibly.
That week, I sold a cartoon to The New Yorker.
“Oh, you poor kid,” Michael said, as he congratulated me, “five whole weeks of suffering! It took me five years to sell a cartoon!”
I said I got the impression the magazine just needed more women cartoonists.
“What? No! That’s got nothing to do with it. If a cartoon isn’t good, it doesn’t go in the magazine. You’re good,” he said, “You’re good.”
To him, I was a cartoonist. I’d never had anyone to talk to about being an artist before who didn’t dismiss me condescendingly, and inform me how hard it is to be published, or suggest that I work in a boutique instead. I’d almost begun to believe them.
When my first cartoon ran in the magazine, old classmates began resurfacing with photographs of my cartoons they’d saved from our middle school days. My father brought out a folder of my childhood cartoons that he’d proudly saved. Maybe I’d never wanted to become a cartoonist because I’d always been one, but just didn’t know it. Michael had known.
From then on, we showed each other our weekly submissions of around ten cartoons. Long ago, we did this over coffee or at the magazine while we waited our turn with our editor. Later, technology changed the submission process, and we’d look at each other’s cartoons before faxing them, and then not long afterwards, we cc’d each other on our email submissions. Some nights Michael would email me his batch from his desk at 3am, and I’d pretend to be asleep in the next room, saving my reply for the morning, my smile glowing in the light of my iPhone.
A short video from Carolita Johnson and Michael Crawford’s wedding:
Thursdays, we’d wait for an “okay” from our editor by email, or suffer through the silence that indicated no sale that week. Whoever hit gold would treat the other to dinner out. Sometimes it was both of us, and often it was neither of us.
By the time he died in 2016, we’d loved each other for fourteen years, and lived together for the last seven of them. We used to joke that we were almost envious of ourselves. We knew we loved, in each other, many of the things others found impossible to love. Our mutual love of words and images knit our lives together. We peppered Cole Porter lyrics, or lines of Film Noir, or hardboiled detective dialogue into conversations about even the most mundane subjects. We loved hearing each other talk, and by the time we moved in together, it wasn’t uncommon for Michael to stop in the middle of a conversation and say, “We should be recording ourselves! This is great stuff!”
But for all our talk, we never talked about why I’d believed, at first, that he’d lied about showing my cartoons to our editor. I never asked if he’d felt obliged, perhaps believing he was too old for me, to pretend to have more than his desire to offer. It forever remained my favorite humble-brag: how this guy who I thought was lying just to get into my pants turned out to believe in me, while I had been a little smartass pretending to be interested in cartooning when all I wanted was to feel free to fall in love with him.
What did YOU do for love?
Check out all of Carolita Johnson’s essays for Oldster.
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You two have inspired me to finally write my what I did for love story. Thank you. At age 81, so much gratitude, so little time.
A great cartoonist and such a delightful writer on top of it all. Thanks for sharing your personal story. It made me smile first thing in the morning.