Hero (5 page)

What the hell was he talking about, he didn't think I could be on the team anymore?! Did I just have my hands amputated and nobody told me? Of course I could still play on the team.

"Maybe you'd be more comfortable on the junior squad."

I tried to get this straight in my head. He wanted me to go play with a bunch of kids in junior high because I have a seizure disorder?

"It's really a matter of priorities, the safety of the school, your health," he rattled on. "Insurance premiums, liability issues ..."

And suddenly it all made sense. Why he'd been giving me the silent treatment at practice, why he wouldn't look at me anymore. I'd known all along, but I just didn't want to admit it. He'd heard what that little Gary Coleman twerp had said about me outside the gym after the game, and now he didn't want me around. I made him uncomfortable.

"Because I'm different?" I wanted to hear him say it.

He finally looked at me, and I could see something right behind his eyes. It wasn't a look of disappointment. It was a look of disgust.

"Because you're different." He bit down on a potato chip.

I touched the dead branch of the potted plant on his desk. I fiddled with its brown leaves while I thought about what I should say. I was fuming, burning inside out with anger. I wanted to tell him that I didn't deserve this. I considered begging him to let me stay on the team so I could still play. Then I considered telling him he could take his JV squad and shove it up his—

But then I saw something that told me exactly what I was going to say. As Coach reached for another chip, I noticed that from the depths of his chest a dark, black glow emanated, a murky wave. I can't explain how I knew what it meant, but it was as natural an understanding as you have when you pull your hand away from scalding hot water.

A strange thought occurred to me. A voice in my head said I could reach out and touch the thick, murky darkness and shape it in my hands and roll it like a lump of Play-Doh until it dissolved into my palms. My hands felt hot, seething. But I didn't reach out and touch the darkness. That same voice in my head

told me it was too much for me to handle, that it would hurt me. So I didn't go near him. Instead I put my hands in my pockets and stood up.

"If you don't go get a cardiogram soon," I said, "you're going to die." I stopped at the door on my way out and added, "You probably won't even make it to next season."

I glanced at the potted plant—now with three healthy branches—and I slammed the door behind me as I left.

I came home early and stood in the hallway and watched the sun go down outside. Walking upstairs, taking off my jacket, or grabbing a snack required too much effort. I didn't have to work and I wasn't supposed to be at the learning center, so there was nothing to unglue my feet from the floor. My head throbbed, and I wanted to sleep for a million years until there was nothing left to worry about.

Finally I went to Dad's desk bureau, crowded with bills and insurance paperwork, and unplugged the laptop. I took his real estate homework off the top of the computer, and brought it up to my room to check my e-mail. Maybe I'd get a head start on that history paper, too.

Instead I went straight for the porn.

I had strict rules about looking at porn. First off, I wasn't allowed to think about suicide after I looked at it. Years ago, when I'd first figured out I was a sucker for a nice hairy chest, I thought for sure I'd have to kill myself before I was eighteen. The closer I got to eighteen the more I had to rethink that solution.

Second, there couldn't be anyone in the house when I did it. The last thing I needed was to get caught jerking off to an oiled muscle stud. A few years ago, when our class took a field trip to Washington, Rich Roberson was caught beating off to a men's exercise magazine. He had some lame excuse about how the magazine was left under the bed, and he was just doubled over with stomach cramps or something, but then he came to school after a weeklong absence with bruises all over his face, his arm in a cast, and an awkward limp. He told everyone he had been in a car accident, but people had spotted his family's cars and there was no sign of any damage. A few weeks later, his family sent him away to boarding school and moved out of town.

Third rule: it had to be clean. No horses, no pets, no scat, and absolutely no kids. I never understood the fascination with young hairless boys anyway. I wanted someone big and broad and hairy, a real man like you used to see in magazines and on TV from the late 70s. Mechanics, plumbers, lifeguards, and cowboys with dirty hands.

And lastly, the site had to be worthwhile, otherwise my imagination was always better. One of the sites I most frequently visited was the Hero Fantasy Worship Web site. I don't know anyone who turns my crank more than Uberman, and it's not just the body. Honest. The guy is the paragon of everything a man should aspire to be—the perfect hero. Superstrength, the power of flight, invincibility—all the A-level superpowers. But his strength of character was just so damn perfect, too. Always saying the right thing on the news after a big fight, never too busy to thank his fans. Hell, the man even found time after saving the world to help small pets in various forms of distress. Perfect skin, a great smile with impossibly bright, but not horsey, teeth, and strong, chiseled features. Okay, so his body was also amazing, but I noticed the details others might overlook. For instance, his legs were as big as his upper body, in perfect proportion. I always laugh when I see some muscle guy at the gym who bench-presses some ungodly sum of weight, and then when he hops up from the bench, you see that he's teetering on top of skinny legs, like a Smithfield ham walking on toothpicks. I'd never seen him up close, only briefly, flying through the sky with the rest of the League, but from what I'd seen on TV, his muscular proportions were the same as the drawn, impossibly buff version of him in his comic book.

Once I'd even bought a poster of Uberman to put on my wall. It was a rebellious phase, during my first year of high school. I was at a comic book convention at the Radisson and saw this poster of Uberman, shirtless but still wearing his cape. He had impressive nipples spread across his perfectly built, massive chest. I deliberately left my bag of comic books by a magazine stand so that once all my friends had left to wait at the bus stop, I could run back inside and buy the poster without anyone seeing me.

I don't know what the hell I was thinking. Like I could come home and nail Uberman on the ceiling above my bed. The poster wasn't taboo just because of the sexual implications, either. Anything about people with superpowers was forbidden in my house. We couldn't even talk about them. There was this one time when I was just a kid and I'd first joined the basket¬ball team and Clayton Camp came over to play.

We'd shot baskets in the driveway with the hoop my dad had just hung above the garage. When we got bored, Clayton ran inside and pulled some action figures out of his overnight bag. All superheroes. All superpowered.

"I'll be Uberman, you can be Right Wing." He handed me my action figure. Superpowered heroes were bad enough, but Right Wing was outright treason.

"I don't know if that's such a good idea," I replied. I glanced over at my father hosing down lime in the yard. He stopped by the bushes to chop a garter snake in half with a shovel. He disappeared into the backyard to dispose of the remains.

"C'mon, it'll be fun. We can blow up some people or something. I've got firecrackers." He pulled some low-grade fireworks out of his bag.

We played at the foot of the driveway, near the gutter and behind the bushes, so no one could see us. We used the figurines to simulate our own battle sequence, and with Clayton at the helm, there was a lot of death and destruction.

He went for a firecracker to blow up some of his sister's old Barbies.

"Why don't you use the flare instead?" I cut my eyes toward the yard; I couldn't see Dad. "Something not so . . . loud."

"Good idea," he said. "We'll torch her hair."

Somehow Uberman and Right Wing, despite their combined superspeed, let Barbie's head melt to an expressionless clump of hair and plastic under the heat of the flare.

Clayton reached for the pack of firecrackers and then lit a match.

"Look out, it's Frankie Flamethrower! He's going to finish her off!" Clayton shouted.

"Clayton, don't light the—" I reached for the firecrackers, but he'd already lit a fuse before I got the words out.

He held the firecrackers high in the air away from me and pushed me to the ground.

The wick had almost burned down to the cracker, and I could see in a split second it would explode the entire pack in Clayton's hand. A flicker of panic sparked in his eyes when he looked to his hand and saw how quickly the wicks were burning down.

"Throw it!" I yelled. "Throw it!"

But he was too scared to do anything, like the firecrackers were stuck to his hand with glue. He was frozen.

And a forceful stream of warer blasted the fireworks out of his hand and almost knocked him off his feet.

I looked up and saw Dad standing across the yard with the garden hose—gun. He marched over toward us spraying water nonstop from the hose. He never let the stream off of the fire¬works until he was certain that there wasn't a spark left. Then he turned the stream of water on the action figures and blasted them into the gutter.

"My heroes!" Clayton watched the force of the water wash them down the gutter.

Clayton slipped in the mud as he struggled to get up. He was crying, still scared, and humiliated. My dad reached out his hand to help him up.

Clayton pushed my father away and ran inside crying. I stared at the muddy handprint on my father's work shirt, and then I picked up the soggy firecrackers to throw in the garbage. That was the last time Clayton came over.

So it didn't seem like such a good idea to put up a poster of a superhero—shirtless or not. I ended up throwing the poster away in a Dumpster behind the Food Lion, but that didn't mean I couldn't go online every now and again to sneak a look.

The Web site promised a host of treats for subscribers, but I wasn't stupid enough to give them a credit card number. My dad had been through enough scandal to last a lifetime, and he didn't need to add gay Internet porn to the list next time he went in to get his hard drive upgraded. Which is why I was super careful to wipe the history of all prior sites before I gave the computer back. I cruised around the "free tour" section, which I'd only been through about one hundred times. The last page had this shot of Uberman, totally naked except for the "JOIN NOW!" strategically placed over his manhood. Most people would feel shortchanged, which I'm sure was the intended effect, and sign up immediately to see what he had underneath that icon. Still, I knew better than to pay for it. Plus, the picture would be totally bogus; it would be Uberman's head superimposed on some other guy's body anyway. I could tell because the nipples were nowhere near as big as they'd been on the poster. Like I said, my imagination was always better, and that picture, with all it suggested, was more than enough for me.

To help fall asleep at night I used to make up scenarios about Uberman. This was a favorite: He'd pick me up from a game after school and drive me home, and we'd be totally in love, and I'd lay my head in his lap as he drove. I'd look up at him, and he'd look back down at me and smile, the corners of his full lips turning up ever so slightly, until he couldn't help but pull over to the side of the road and kiss me.

Another favorite: Uberman rescues me from some terrifying situation where I'd valiantly defended a group of innocent bystanders—kindergartners, physically challenged kindergartners—against one of his arch nemesis hell-bent on the destruction of innocents. Uberman would swoop in right as I dove in front of the death beam to save the children, and in an instant he'd block the beam and kick the supervillain's ass. And I'd knock out the henchman, who had miraculously crawled over to the death ray and was about to push the self-destruct button. Such an act of valor would elicit a personal invitation back to Uberman's pad, where we'd exchange coy pleasantries about our favorite movies, bond over our favorite music, and then he'd whisper words meant only for me right before he'd take me in his perfectly tanned hands and—

"Thorn! Where's my computer?" Dad called out. His voice was close, he couldn't be far down the hall. God, he was stealthy when he wanted to be. I hadn't even heard him come home.

I fumbled to pull my pants up.

"Thom, I have my real estate class tonight! I need the com¬puter! "

I struggled to pull up my pant leg and tried to smack the power button at the same time. The result wasn't pretty. I tripped over the DSL line and tumbled over onto my face. I heard a nauseating crunch when the laptop bounced off my bed and landed on the hardwood floor, a few inches away from the soft, cushioned throw rug.

Dad knocked and opened the door in one quick gesture.

"Jeez, Thom, what are you doing in here?"

The good news was that I'd fallen on my front, so you couldn't tell my pants were undone. But the bad news was I saw Dad look over at the open laptop. That was it, my life was over.

I looked over my shoulder and saw a blank screen.

"Thom, I've told you a million times not to use the computer on the floor. Someone might step on it."

"Sorry."

He paused and looked around the room suspiciously.

"You okay?"

I thought about that kid who'd been hit by the car earlier, how his rib had made the same crunching noise as the computer.

"I'm fine. Really."

"I put that lasagna in the oven for you. I know it's leftovers, but it's always better a few days later anyway." He fiddled with some change in his pocket. "I should be back from class before you go to bed."

"Okay," I said. You can go now.

He stood for a minute and looked around the room. I knew he was apologizing for a shitty dinner; I knew he wished he could afford a steak dinner for us every night; I knew he was ashamed his only hope to get out of that shitty factory job was the real estate class at the Learning Annex every third Tuesday of the month. I wanted to tell him I didn't care about any of that, it didn't matter to me what the hell he did for a living, and I wasn't even that hungry anyway. I wanted to tell him I was going through all these changes and some of them scared me, and I really just needed to hear him tell me that everything was going to be okay. But I didn't say a word, because more than anything, I wanted him to leave so I could zip my pants up and fix the computer.