Superheroes

My cat, Zoomer, is exceedingly centripetal and social. The moment I spread out my papers on the dining room table, he lies on top of them. He greets most visitors by crawling onto their laps. His favorite activity is lying in front of the fire for hours while Laurie, Natalie, and I sit near him, reading. His second favorite activity is to lie between the three of us while we’re watching a movie; he eats ice cream from our bowls while we pretend not to notice. At night, he sleeps in the crook of Natalie’s neck, his paws wrapped around her forehead. And yet if we indulge him by petting him for too long, he inevitably reacts to this overdomestication by biting or scratching us. Zoomer loves to hide behind a bookcase and swat unsuspecting passersby or lie across the bookcase, one paw hanging in the air, and look out across the room—a lion surveying the savannah, scoping antelope. He wants to convince himself and us that, thoroughly pampered though he is, at heart he’s still a killer.

From room to room he drags “his” teddy bear—what Natalie calls his girlfriend—and, despite his supposedly having been fixed years ago, dry-humps it day and night, howling with a conqueror’s fury. He’ll spend hours scratching the window at his neighborhood nemesis, Fireball, but when presented with the opportunity to confront Fireball nose-to-nose, he always settles, pseudo-disappointedly, for the safety of imprisonment. On the rare occasions when he does go outside, he hisses, terrified, at all provocations and scoots inside on the flimsiest pretext. He needs to convince himself that he’s a tough guy, but really, Zoomy’s a pussy.

         

In the movie Spider-Man, when Peter Parker gets bitten by a spider and begins turning into Spider-Man, Uncle Ben tells him, “You’re changing, and that’s normal. Just be careful who you change into, okay?” Peter’s change from dweeb to spider is explicitly analogous to his transformation from boy to man. Before he becomes Spider-Man, he wears his shirt tucked in—dork style; afterward, he wears his undershirt and shirt hanging out. He can’t be contained. Neither can his chest, which is newly ripped, and his eyesight is now 20/20. To Peter, his sexual maturation is the equivalent of stealing fire from the gods: “I feel all this power, but I don’t know what it means, or how to control it, or what I’m supposed to do with it even.” Teenage boys want to believe that the sex instinct trumps and transfigures the day-to-day world. One of the amazing things about my father is that he still believed in this transfiguration deep into his 80s.

The first time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she says to her boyfriend, Harry, that it was “incredible.” “What do you mean ‘incredible’?” he keeps asking her. The second time Spider-Man rescues M.J., she asks him, “Do I get to say thank you this time?” and, pulling up his mask past his lips, passionately kisses him, sending both of them into rain-drenched ecstasy. The script makes painfully clear that Peter’s newfound prowess is procreation or, more precisely, onanism: “He wiggles his wrist, tries to get the goop to spray out, but it doesn’t come.” All three times Spider-Man rescues M.J., they’re wrapped in a pose that looks very much like missionary sex: Spider-Man on a mission. As Peter Parker, his peter is parked; as Spider-Man, he gets to have the mythic carnival ride of sex-flight without any of the messy emotional cleanup afterward.

Spider-Man is about the concomitance of your ordinary self, which is asexual, and your Big Boy self, which is sex-driven. Virtually every male character in the film worries this division. Even the “squirrelly faced” burglar who steals the New York Wrestling Foundation’s money, and who later winds up killing Ben in a car-jacking, whispers “Thanks,” then flashes a sweet smile when Peter steps aside so he can get on an elevator. Ferocity and humility are in constant conversation and confusion. (Natalie: “This movie is about how everyone has a covered-up side. People don’t always show you the way that they are.”)

         

On a Saturday afternoon a few years ago, at Seattle’s Green Lake pool, while I swam laps, my father swam a little, then lifted a few weights, took a sauna, and dozed, which he adamantly denied, as he always does. In the locker room, a 10-year-old kid started humming to himself, at first quite quietly, the Batman theme, which my father didn’t recognize at first, but when I told him, he nodded. In less than a minute, the tune had made its way through the locker room—about a dozen pubescent boys humming the song. Some sang seriously; others joked around. Some stood on benches; others whapped their towels at one another’s asses. Some danced around buck naked; others continued getting dressed. It was surprising and mysterious and confusing and beautiful and ridiculous and thrilling, though not to my father, who finds nearly all manifestations of mass entertainment—with the important exception of sports—appalling. “Popular culture,” as he explained to me in the car on the way home, “is not real community. It’s substitute community.”

At the end of Ann Beattie’s story “The Burning House,” a husband and wife who are separating finally confront each other. She speaks first.

“I want to know if you’re coming or going.”

He takes a deep breath, lets it out, continues to lie very still.

“Everything you’ve done is commendable,” he says. “You did the right thing to go back to school. You tried to do the right thing by finding a normal friend like Marilyn. But your whole life you’ve made one mistake: you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men—if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old—I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

He takes her hand. “I’m looking down on all this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

Superman.

My father lives in Woodlake, a Bay Area condo/sports complex for senior citizens. This is a place where tough old birds come to die, but they think it’s an Olympic training camp: mineral water and Frisbees. Jacuzzi, sauna, tennis courts, weight room, bingo parlor, dance hall, jet-black parking lot, jet-propelled automobiles, white stucco apartments, ice plant growing everywhere. Ducks quack across an artificial pond. Well-preserved, sun-baked septuagenarians stroll the putting green. Grandmas in string bikinis stride from the swimming pool. Dad’s cohorts scamper around the courts, wearing tennis whites and floppy hats and state-of-the-art shoes and C sunglasses, wielding their oversized rackets like canes and butterfly nets. My father’s studio apartment is remarkable only for the sheer number of rackets, racket presses, tins of balls, shirts, shorts, sweatbands, warm-up suits, sweat socks, shoes, jocks tossed about. It isn’t an apartment filled with my father. It’s a pro shop filled with the sport of tennis.

In almost every piece he writes on his antique Remington for his Woodlake-sponsored writing class—a dozen women, a retired dentist, and my father meet with the teacher every other Wednesday—he projects himself as a balanced okaynik, Mr. Bonhomie. He’s held more than fifty jobs in journalism and public relations and social welfare, been fired from many of them, been plagued by manic depression for fifty years, been hospitalized and received electroshock therapy countless times, is a genius at loss. Lily Tomlin was thinking of my father when she said, “Language was invented because of the deep human need to complain.” He’s always thrown a stone at every dog that bites, but in one story he sagely advises his friend, “You can’t throw a stone at every dog that bites.” My father, who is the only person in the world who may have a worse sense of direction than I do, writes about another friend, “Lou can go astray in a carport. He has the worst sense of direction of any male driver in the state of California.” Time after time he lets himself off way too easily. I used to want to urge him out of this macho pose until I realized that it’s a way to cheer himself up, to avoid telling mild good-bye and good-night stories, to convince himself and us he’s still a tough guy from Brooklyn not yet ready to die.

Story after story is built on self-flattering lies: his children from his first marriage, from whom he’s estranged, didn’t attend his 95th birthday party, but now they do, bearing gifts. He’s been bald since he was 40, but now his “hair is” only “nearly gone.” My mother dies at 60 (instead of 51). Writing, for him, is a chance to gild the lily. My dad still reads voraciously and he dislikes easy sentiment in life and literature (he recently declared J. M. Coetzee’s brutal, astringent Disgrace the best novel he’s read in ten years), which is why his upbeat tone fascinates and baffles.

His voice in these stories is that of a macher, when in reality he’s obsessed with his failures and as tough as nail polish; I want him to write about weakness, about his weaknesses, but instead he quotes, approvingly, a friend, who says about women, “Remember the four F’s: find ’em, feel ’em, fuck ’em, and forget ’em.” My dad, Sam Spade.

He grew up poor with four brothers and two sisters (his mother died when he was 12 and one of his sisters died when he was 16), but nostalgia reigns: “Ah, them were the days, the good old days: the age of innocence, the summers of my vast content.” “I’ve never felt that ‘at home’ feeling about any other apartment I’ve lived in as I did about 489 New Jersey.” “Mrs. Mason was very supportive, hugging me to her bosom at times or drying my tears.”

My father and mother divorced shortly before her death 30 years ago, and they had, by common consent, an extremely bad relationship. But it’s now a “solid-as-Gibraltar marriage.” My father, asking for time off from his boss, tells him, “I was faced with a palace revolution and the three revolutionaries at home were getting ready to depose the king.” The king he wasn’t. I want him to write about forever having to polish the queen’s crown according to her ever-changing and exacting specifications. I want to ask him: What did that feel like? I want to know: What is it like inside his skin? What is it like inside that bald, ill dome? Please, Dad, I want to say: only ground-level. No aerial views or airy glibness.