My Heroes & Me

I've always had heroes. As far back as I can remember. At less than four years old I owned a special shirt, blue with red and white stripes. It was my Popeye shirt. I wore it to a frazzle, until there was nothing left of it but blue striped rags and threads. Without saying a word my mother threw it in the bin of rags she accumulated for my father, who used them in the Building, the laboratory at the base of our driveway where my Papa invented machines for measuring thickness and color. When I next saw my shirt I hardly recognized it, its fibers soaked with a muddy gray mixture of solvent and metal dust. I might never have spoken to my mother again, except that I needed her to draw those fat triangular S's onto my T-shirts so I could jump off tree limbs and play Superman—another hero of mine.

We're talking early nineteen-sixties here. Kennedy had just been inaugurated, sworn in hatless on a sunny, cold winter's day. Kruschev had already pounded his shoe and threatened to bury us. In school we practiced our "duck and cover" drills, with me as eager to protect Jill B. from nuclear fallout as Wesley Conklin was eager to have me look up her skirt (she sat at the desk in front of mine) and give him a full report, something I refused to do—though I liked Jill's skirts, peacock blue paisleys that were the perfect foil for her flaming strawberry blond curls.

There was in the air that we breathed a sense of premonition and doom that was its own kind of nuclear fallout. My friends and I would sit on top of Cheese Hill, a limestone cliff overlooking one of the town's many abandoned or converted hat factories. We called it Cheese Hill because the limestone broke off in pale, crumbly, cheesy chunks—like the parmesan cheese my father would bring home to my mother from New York City. There we'd sit, banging our P. F. Flyers into the limestone, debating how long it would take for us to die, and by what exact means. Wesley C. claimed that we would melt from inside out, our bodies turning to water balloons that would finally burst. Chucky S. said our organs would deep fry inside us like ˆgalumkesˆ or chicken livers. Lenny P. said we'd die in layers, with the dead layers falling off one by one, like the skin of a rotten onion.

Out of this radioactive sense of gloom and doom grew the need for heroes. More than ever we needed Supermen to come to our rescue. But to be rescued wasn't good enough. Being rescued was for sissies and girls. The thing to be was the rescuer. At the local swim hole, a two-acre pond dug out of the landlocked wilderness and trimmed with beach sand (officially called Meckhauer Park but for obvious reasons dubbed Muckhauer), I wished nothing more than for Jill B. to drown so I could save her and in the process save myself from being totally inconsequential to her. True, I wasn't much of a swimmer, but I would rise to the occasion—if only she'd give me a chance. I'd search for her golden hair among the throngs, and keep an eye on her every time she splashed into the water, hoping that at long last she would snag a leg on some algae.

Among the many frustrations of boyhood is a near total lack of heroic opportunities. Either the circumstances don't present themselves, or they have to be manufactured—as was the case with Robin Lee Graham, the boy who, as a sweet sixteenth birthday present to himself, sailed around the world alone in a 24-foot fiberglass sloop, and whose story we all devoured in that summer's National Geographic.

But there we were, stuck on dry land in Bethel, Connecticut, with the chimneys of crumbling hat factories the closest things to lighthouses. For a pubescent boy the only way out was sheer fantasy. So I put on my Popeye shirt. And when that turned into a rag, and as the big 'S' faded from my T-shirt, I turned to other heroes. With television they weren't hard to find. To be a hero you needed the right clothes. A leather jacket let you be Steve McQueen in ˆThe Great Escape,ˆ or Colonel Hogan of ˆHogan's Heroes.ˆ For James West a tight brocade vest and cowboy boots would do.

I remember my first pair of cowboy boots—black and tight and pointy enough to jam into a tailpipe. My parents bought them for me at Buster Brown. The store had a merry-go-round in it. The sides came up to my calves and were filigreed with colored stitches and whirls. The heels cut in at a sharp angle and were high enough to make me feel something like tall. The smell of the leather was itself heroic. I wore the boots under my straight-legged Lee's, with a matching wide black belt hung with brass loops serving no purpose but to hook my thumbs into when I felt like it. Into belted jeans I tucked my denim cowboy shirt, with double pockets and steel buttons. Over the denim shirt I wore one of several brocade vests that I had gotten my mother to sew for me.

Those brocade vests—I have to tell you about those.