I, Superhero!! :. Mike McMullen
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and down the coast as the weather changes. However, a closer reading reveals she’s just thirty-eight, so maybe calling her the migrant worker of superheroes is slightly more accurate.
Speaking of retirees, a little further down the pages is the Queen of Hearts, from Jackson, Michigan, who looks to be at least late fifties, and that’s my Southern politeness coming through. I skim over her blurb and initially think it says she “frequently does volunteer work in her community as well as assaulting local children,” and I think, Well good Lord, woman. You just can’t do that. Turns out it actually says “assisting local charities.” My bad. Sorry, Ms. of Hearts.
And then there’s Shadow Hare, who says, “It was the best of times and the worst of times. I’ve stopped many evil doers…such as drug dealers, muggers, rapists, and crazy hobos with pipes.”
Sooo freakin’ awesome. Between the Dickens quote and the image of crazy hobos—the old kind, who hopped trains and wore greasy old fedoras and chewed unlit, half-smoked cigars—coming at the “vicious looking yet named for a rabbit” superhero with lead pipes, I want to giggle and giggle like a two-year-old at the tickle factory until I fall off the Pilates ball I use as a desk chair.
After catching my breath, I look over the galaxy of RLSHs and notice one common thread (two, if you count abject lunacy): none of them have any, you know, superpowers. Some claim to have special psychic facilities or the ability to talk to animals or plants, but really, if they’re anything, they’re mostly low-level Option 6s (Batman). It seems, not only does it not take a rocket scientist to be a superhero, it doesn’t take superpowers or even, in some cases, a modicum of physical prowess.
Score.
That really takes a lot of the pressure off. Of course, that means I’ll still have to exercise because, powers or not, the current fat state of my ass isn’t going to play in skintight spandex unless I call myself The Supersizer or Fatty Fantastico or something of that ilk.*
But before I go through all that trouble, I have to ask, is there even a point to my becoming a superhero anymore, when I can’t be the first, the innovator, the man or superman as the case may be? Is there a point to becoming one of the very proud, very ridiculous, proudly ridiculous and/or ridiculously proud people who, daily and with benevolence aforethought, leave their homes to fight the scum of society with nothing between them and the criminal element but a layer of red spandex, an overblown sense of justice, and a grappling hook? Why join the ranks of those who spend long, lonely nights on patrol, saving potential assault victims, thwarting mugging attempts, foiling bank robberies, and queering, dare I say it, plots (it’s so reassuring to me to know that things still get queered and foiled. You have no idea), when I can just stay home and watch reruns of Project Runway? Not that I watch Project Runway.
I take a break to get a cookie, turn on the TV, and think about whether to pursue my ten-minute-old dream of superherodom, when I hear a familiar screeching upstairs. The baby’s up from his nap and mommy’s at the store, so I pause Iron Chef and head upstairs to the nursery. My Spidey sense starts tingling just outside the door, warning me I’m about to face a dirty diaper of epic proportions. I shove the rest of the cookie into my mouth to preserve it from being tainted by the odor, lift the collar of my T-shirt over my nose, and head in.
I get the little one, you can call him “Biscuit,” and give him a big good afternoon hug before flopping him down on the changing table. I open the diaper and have to swallow the chunk of cookie in my mouth to force the vomit back down. At this point one thing is abundantly clear: feeding a fourteen-month-old fish sticks at every meal for a week, no matter how much he likes them, was a grievous strategic error. It’s what I would imagine a fishing boat would smell like if the entire crew had died of dysentery and drifted a few weeks before being found. If fatherhood can be compared to a war, this diaper is Normandy, and like all traumatized soldiers, I know I’ll be having flashbacks of this changing until I die, jumping under a table and covering my nose every time a Huggies commercial comes on. I stuff the offending diaper into the airtight, diaper-eating trash can, say a quick prayer of thanks for its odor-stopping ability, and take the Biscuit downstairs with me.
I turn on his favorite show, one with puppets playing kid-friendly pseudorock songs, and get him his traditional postnap Graham cracker and box of apple juice. He climbs onto my lap, and I watch him while he watches the TV. I was never that into kids before I had one of my own. It’s amazing how parenthood changes you. I just stare at him, watching the way his eyes crinkle up when he smiles at something on the show, the way his six teeth—four on top, two on bottom—crunch down on the cracker, and the way he searches for the straw with his mouth and tongue without taking his eyes off the puppets on TV.
Then it hits me. This is the reason. This is why I need to be a hero. Do it for the Biscuit. I realize most dads are kinda their sons’ “default hero,” but in my case, I think I’m going to have to do a little more to earn it than most. For you to understand why, I should tell you a little about where I come from.
I was born and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas, a town that has since been declared “The Most Average Town in America,” which should tell you volumes about me in and of itself. The designation didn’t surprise anyone who lived there, merely confirmed our universal yet unspoken suspicions. Our first clue something wasn’t right with the town was a 1978 Texas Monthly article about the “worst jobs in Texas” that ranked being a resident of Wichita Falls sixth, just after handling dead animals.* Also, there were no actual waterfalls in Wichita Falls. The city leaders corrected this after a massive fund-raising campaign to pay for installing fake ones, making it the Pam Anderson of midsized northern Texas towns.
I was also born into a long line of, if not outright heroic, at least god-awful tough men. My grandfather, who was so tough they actually called him “Tuffy,” wrestled professionally in the 1920s. He went by the nom de spandex The Dragon of the Mat, making him the first official superhero in my family.
PHOTO COURTESY BILL AND SYLVIA MCMULLEN
One Tough Mother
After Tuffy died, my grandmother married Al, a World War II veteran. This alone makes him a hero in my book, and it should make him one in yours as well, unless you’re some kinda pinko comm’nist sympathizer or something.
My dad was in the navy during Vietnam and then served as a police officer, earning two gold stars on the big heroism wall chart for those of you keeping score at home. My grandfather Tuffy was a rough and tough man in addition to being a hero of one stripe or another, as were my dad and other grandfather. I mean, Tuffy’s been dead for fifty years, but he’s probably still tougher than you.
PHOTO COURTESY BILL AND SYLVIA MCMULLEN
Then came me. My apple fell a ways from the tree. In fact, the tree is on a steep hill, and my apple fell, rolled down, and landed in a creek that carried it off to be eaten eventually by beavers somewhere downstream.
As a child, for instance, I threatened to call Child Protective Services because I didn’t want to help my dad with a roofing job. As a teenager, I skipped out on athletics to compete for awards for drawing pictures and decorating cakes (I don’t want to brag, but I was the first person to win two first-place ribbons at one Faith Baptist Church youth group bake off). As an adult, I have avoided sports, hard work, confrontation, and community service like they’re the four horsemen. Combine the social compassion of Marie Antoinette with the “Okay! Okay! I give up!” of the rest of France, and you’ll have a good handle on my disposition.
The worst of it is my self-centeredness. I don’t mean in a vain, preening-in-the-mirror kinda way, but in an “I’d reeeeally like to go down to the mission today and help them serve lunch, but I’m really tired/my back hurts/there’s a new episode of Batman: The Animated Series on this morning” kinda way. I know, deep down, that I should volunteer; it’s just that, like a lot of people, I get so caught up in what’s going on in my tiny corner of the world that I get lost in it. That’s