Today You Are A Man

Abstract

Superman on Batman. The weight of them bound together. Sharp smells of yellow and blue ink, cold aluminum shelving, cardboard dust. Flaking spines repeat amazing amazing amazing. Higher up, Will Eisner's thick digests of tenement stories trace his grandparents' bent backs and Yiddish rants in scrolling lines of brown on white. Green Jell-O alien fingers probe some space-blonde's inflated tits. Peter breathes them in, these particles of floating worlds. Today you are a man. He's so hopeless only a spider can save him, and not the one who told Wilbur's farmer to keep kosher. Bedtime stories from before he was the horse in the Purim play, every year. Bending over in the stockroom, he hoists another box of SHAZAMl, his body big but flabby at thirteen. The way he bends over to talk to his father, or rather to listen, one word to Nathan's clever dozen. In a comic book, Nathan would be the red-headed scientist who convinced Congress to build a Mars launch out of rubber bands. He would persuade Steve Trevor to stick around and look pretty though Wonder Woman would never, ever marry him, and by the way, just because she disappears at odd hours and you found star-spangled underwear in the hamper, there's no evidence that she's living a double life. Peter realizes he's too interested in what happens to Steve. He wants to be one of the chosen ones. He works hard and doesn't sit back here all day reading while his boss Jonas smokes another joint at the cash register, his chair tilted back against a wall layered with drawings of dragon fangs and lightning-bolt fists. Laconic, lean Gary Jonas is his father's friend, but he acts like Peter will amount to something. Enough to dress him up as the Jolly Green Giant in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, with Jonas and his friends as the Fruit of the Loom guys. Peter's parents are open-minded, except his mother, but soon she won't count anymore. Three hundred copies of Popeye. Underneath them the good stuff, the wide-eyed, round-assed elfin girls, which Peter doesn't look at. Bending over in the stockroom.