“Martin, you’re not following me, you’re not being logical.”
“Isn’t good eye care logical?”
“You’re talking in non-sequiturs.”
“No, I’m not. A non-sequitur is a conclusion that doesn’t follow its known inferences. Good eye care follows eating carrots.”
“Martin, I—” The doctor was getting flushed and sweaty; Bugs Bunny was hurling carrots at his desk.
“Don’t call me ‘Martin,’ call me ‘Big Fella.’ It sends me.”
Straightening his glasses, the doctor said, “Let’s change the subject. Tell me about your parents.”
“They’re carrot-juice addicts.”
“I see. And what is that supposed to mean?”
“That they have good eyes.”
“I see. Anything else?”
“Long ears and fluffy tails.”
“I see. You think you’re a funny man, don’t you?”
“No, I think you are.”
“You nasty little shit, I’ll bet you don’t have a friend in the world.”
The room became four walls of hideous noise, and Bugs Bunny turned on me, forcing an awful kaleidoscope of half-buried memories to flash across ray brain-screen: a tall blond boy telling a group of kids “Farty Marty asked me to watch traffic with him”; Pieter and his sister Katrin rebuffing my attempt to get them to sit next to me in sixth grade.
The shrink was staring at me, smirking because I had shown myself vulnerable; and Bugs Bunny, his secret pal, was laughing along, spraying me with orange pulp. I looked around for something stainless steel, like my father’s slingshot. Seeing a brushed-steel curtain rod leaning against the back wall, I grabbed it and hacked off the stuffed rabbit’s head. The shrink was looking at me with amazement. “I’ll never talk to you again,” I said. “And no one can make me.”
4
The incident at the shrink’s office had no external repercussions — I was passed into high school without further psychiatric/scholastic abuse. The doctor knew an immovable object when he saw one.
But I felt like a malfunctioning machine; as if there were a stripped gear inside me, one that could roam my body at will, troubleshooting for ways to make me look small under stress. When I played brain-movies in class, substituting faces and bodies, boy to boy, girl to girl and cross-gender, it was like an obstacle course, sex images assailing me without rhyme or reason. The randomness, the indiscriminate power of what I was making myself see was staggering; the need that I sensed behind it felt like an oncoming tidal wave of self-loathing. I know now that I was going insane.
I was saved by a comic-book villain.
His name was the “Shroud Shifter,” and he was a recurring bad guy in “Cougarman Comix.” He was a super criminal, a jewel-thief hit man who drove a souped-up amphibious car and snarled a retarded version of Nietzsche in oversize speech balloons. Cougarman, a moralistic wimp who drove a ’59 Cadillac called the “Catmobile,” always managed to throw Shroud Shifter in jail, but he always escaped a couple of issues later.
I loved him for his car and for a supernatural ability that he possessed — one that I sensed I could realistically emulate. The car was a gleaming angularity — all brushed steel, all mean business. It had headlights that flashed a nuclear death ray that turned people to stone; instead of gas, the engine ran on human blood. The upholstery was made of tawny cat hides — the flesh of arch-enemy Cougarman’s martyred family. It had a steel hangman’s pole sticking out of the trunk. Every time Shroud Shifter claimed a victim, his vampire girl friend, Lucretia, a tall blonde with long fangs, would bite a notch in the wood.
Ridiculous trash? Admittedly. But the artwork was superb, and Shroud Shifter and Lucretia breathed a stylish, sensual evil. S.S. had a cylindrical bulge that extended almost down to the knee of his left pants leg; Lucretia’s nipples were always erect. They were a high-tech god and goddess twenty years before high tech, and they were mine.
Shroud Shifter had the ability to disguise himself without changing costume. He got it from drinking radioactive blood and from concentrating on the person he wanted to rob or kill, so that he soaked up so much of that person’s aura that he psychically resembled him and could ape his every move, anticipate his every thought.
S.S.’s ultimate goal was to achieve invisibility. That goal drove him, pushed him beyond his existing gift of psychic invisibility — being able to fit in anyplace, anywhere, anytime. Being physically invisible would give him a carte blanche ticket to take over the world.
Of course Shroud Shifter would never achieve that end — it would destroy his potential confrontations with Cougarman, and he was the comic book’s hero. But S.S. was fiction, and I was flesh, blood and brushed-steel reality. I decided to make myself invisible.
My transits of silence and brain-movies had been a good training ground. I knew my mental resources were superb, and I had cut my human needs down to the bare minimum provided by my cipher mother: room, board and a few dollars a week for incidentals. But the quiet-outsider image I had carried as a shield for so long worked against me — I had no social graces, no sense of other people as anything but objects of derision, and if I was to successfully imitate Shroud Shifter’s psychic invisibility, I would first have to learn to be ingratiating and conversant on the teenage topics that bored me: sports, dating, rock and roll. I would have to learn to talk.
And that terrified me.
I spent long hours in class, my brain-movies quashed as my ears trawled for information; in the boy’s locker room I listened to lengthy, and lengthily embellished, conversations on penis size. Once I climbed a tree outside the girls’ gym and listened to the giggles that rose above the hiss of showers. I picked up a lot of information, but was afraid to act.
So, admittedly out of cowardice, I retreated. I convinced myself that, although Shroud Shifter could get away without disguises, I couldn’t. That limited the problem to the procuring of suitable body armor.
In 1965 there were three sartorial styles favored by middle-class L.A. teenagers: surfer, greaser and collegiate. The surfers, whether they actually surfed or not, wore white Levi cords, Jack Purcell “Smiley” tennis shoes and Pendelton’s; the greasers, both gang members and pseudo “rebel” types, wore slit-bottomed khakis, Sir Guy shirts and honor farm watch caps. The collegiates favored the button-down/sweater/penny-loafer style that is still “in.” I figured that three outfits in each style would be sufficient protective coloration.
Then a fresh wave of fear hit me. I had no money for purchasing the clothes. My mother never left any cash lying around and was stingy to an extreme fault, and I was still too afraid to do what my heart most desired: break, enter and steal. Disgusted by my cautiousness, but still determined to put together a wardrobe, I seized on my mother’s three walk-in closets full of girlhood clothes she never wore.
In retrospect, I know that the scheme I concocted was undertaken out of desperate fear — a delaying tactic to put off my inevitable crash course in social dealings; but at the time it seemed the epitome of good sense. One day I ditched school and took an assortment of sharp kitchen knives into my mother’s bedroom closet. I was hacking a cape out of one of her old tweed overcoats when she came home from work early, caught me and started screaming.
I put up my hands in a placating gesture, still holding a serrated-edge steak knife. My mother screamed so loud that it seemed that her vocal cords would snap, then she managed to get out the word “animal” and pointed to my midsection. I saw that I had an erection, and dropped the knife; my mother slapped at me with clumsy open hands until the sight of blood trickling from my nose forced her to stop and run downstairs. In the course of ten seconds the woman who bore me went from cipher to arch-enemy. It felt like a homecoming.