I didn't know how to explain to my father that Electric wasn't one of the major comics publishers. The stories the comics contained, when we inspected them together, were both ludicrous and boring. Super Goat Man's five issues showed him rescuing old ladies from swerving trucks and kittens from lightning-struck trees, and battling dull villains like Vest Man and False Dave. The drawings were amateurish, cut-rate, antiquated. I couldn't have articulated these judgments then, of course. I only knew I disliked the comics, found them embarrassing, for myself, for Super Goat Man, and for my dad. They languished in my room, unread, and were eventually cleaned up — I mean, thrown out — by my mom.
For the next few years Super Goat Man was less than a minor curiosity to me. I didn't waste thought on him. The younger men and women who lived in the commune took him for granted, as anyone should, so far as I knew. We kids would see him in their company, moving furniture up the stoop and into the house, discarded dressers and couches and lamps they'd found on the street, or taping posters on lampposts announcing demonstrations against nuclear power or in favor of day-care centers, or weeding in the commune's pathetic front yard, which was intended as a vegetable garden but was choked not only with uninvited growth but with discarded ice-cream wrappers and soda bottles — we kids used the commune's yard as a dumping ground. It didn't occur to me that Super Goat Man was much older, really, than the commune's other occupants, that in fact they might be closer to my age than to his. However childish their behavior, the hippies all seemed as dull and remote as grown-ups to me.
It was the summer when I was thirteen that my parents allowed me to accompany them to one of the commune's potluck dinners. The noise and vibrancy of that house's sporadic celebrations were impossible to ignore on our street, and I knew my parents had attended a few earlier parties — warily, I imagined. The inhabitants of the commune were always trying to sweep their neighbors into dubious causes, and it might be a mistake to be seduced by frivolity into some sticky association. But my parents liked fun too. And had too little of it. Their best running jokes concerned the dullness of their friends' dinner parties. This midsummer evening they brought me along to see inside the life of the scandalous, anomalous house.
The house was already full, many bearded and jeweled and scruffy, reeking of patchouli and musk, others, like my parents, dressed in their hippest collarless shirts and paisley blouses, wearing their fattest beads and bracelets. The offerings, nearly all casseroles brimming with exotic gray proteins, beans and tofu and eggplant and more I couldn't name, were lined on a long side table, mostly ignored. This was a version of cocktail hour, with beer drunk from the bottle and well-rolled marijuana cigarettes. I didn't see whether my parents indulged in the latter. My mother accepted a glass of orange juice, surely spiked. I meant not to pay them any attention, so I moved for the stairs. There were partiers leaning on the banister at the first landing, and evidence of music playing in upstairs rooms, so I didn't doubt the whole house was open to wandering.
There was no music coming from the garden-facing room on the second floor, but the door was open and three figures were visible inside, seated on cushions on a mattress on the floor. A young couple, and Super Goat Man. From his bare hairy feet on the mattress, I guessed it was his room I'd entered. The walls were sparse apart from a low bookcase, on which I spotted, laid crosswise in the row of upright spines, Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, Sergei Eisenstein's Film Form / The Film Sense, and Thomas Pynchon's V. The three titles stuck in my head; I would later attempt to read each of the three at college, succeeding only with the Mailer. Beside the bookcase was a desk heaped with papers, and behind it a few black-and-white postcards had been thumbtacked to the wall. These looked less like a considered decoration than as if they'd been pinned up impulsively by a sitter at the desk. One of the postcard images I recognized as Charlie Parker, clutching a saxophone with his meaty hands. The jazzman was an idol of my father's, perhaps a symbol of his vanished youth.
The young man on the mattress was holding a book: Memories, Dreams, Reflections, by Carl Jung. Super Goat Man had evidently just pressed it on him, and had likely been extolling its virtues when I walked into the room.
“Hello,” said the young woman, her voice warm. I must have been staring, from my place in the middle of the room.
“You're Everett, aren't you?” said Super Goat Man, before I could speak.
“How'd you know my name?”
“You live on the block,” said Super Goat Man. “I've seen you running around.”
“I think we'll head down, Super Goat Man,” said the young man abruptly, tucking the book under his arm as he got up from the mattress. “Get something to eat before it's too late.”
“I want to hit the dance floor,” said the young woman.
“See you down there,” said Super Goat Man. With that the young couple were gone.
“You checking out the house?” said Super Goat Man to me once we were alone. “Casing the joint?”
“I'm looking for my friend,” I lied.
“I think some kids are hanging out in the backyard.”
“No, she went upstairs.” I wanted him to think I had a girlfriend.
“Okay, cool,” said Super Goat Man. He smiled. I suppose he was waiting for me to leave, but he didn't give any sign that I was bothering him by staying.
“Why do you live here?” I asked.
“These are my friends,” he said. “They helped me out when I lost my job.”
“You're not a superhero anymore, are you?”
Super Goat Man shrugged. “Some people felt I was being too outspoken about the war. Anyway, I wanted to accomplish things on a more local level.”
“Why don't you have a secret identity?”
“I wasn't that kind of superhero.”
“But what was your name, before?”
“Ralph Gersten.”
“What did Ralph Gersten do?”
“He was a college teacher, for a couple of years.”
“So why aren't you Ralph Gersten now?”
“Sometime around when they shot Kennedy I just realized Ralph Gersten wasn't who I was. He was a part of an old life I was holding on to. So I became Super Goat Man. I've come to understand that this is who I am, for better or worse.”
This was a bit much for me to assimilate, so I changed the subject. “Do you smoke pot?”
“Sometimes.”
“Were Mr. and Mrs. Gersten sad when you gave up your secret identity?”
“Who?”
“Your parents.”
Super Goat Man smiled. “They weren't my real parents. I was adopted.”
Suddenly I was done. “I'm going downstairs, Super Goat Man.”
“Okay, Everett,” he said. “See you down there, probably.”
I made my way downstairs, and lurked in the commune's muddy and ill-lit backyard, milling with the other teenagers and children stranded there by the throngs of frolickers — for the party was now overflowing its bounds, and we were free to steal beers from the counter and carry on our own tentative party, our own fumbling flirtations. I had no girlfriend, but I did play spin the bottle that night, crouched on the ground beneath a fig tree.
Then, near midnight, I went back inside. The living room was jammed with bodies — dancers on a parquet floor that had been revealed when the vast braided rug had been curled up against the base of the mantel. Colored Christmas lights were bunched in the corner, and some of them blinked to create a gently eerie strobe. I smelled sweat and smoke. Feeling perverse and thrilled by the kisses I'd exchanged in the mud beneath the tree, I meandered into the web of celebrants.