For some reason, when I was a kid, I loved reading comic books, and my parents loved hiding them from me. Hiding the things I collected was a go-to punishment for them, for the bad things that I did, but comic books were an especially good joy of mine to take away.
Looking back, I think I can understand why they found the comics so maddening. After all, punishments are almost never meted out one at a time, but rather, in pairs, and, if I was grounded, say, but I still had comics, I could stay in my room for days on end if I was forced to. Once, when I was grounded, I overheard my mother talking on the phone outside my room to a friend. “Nothing is a punishment to him!” she said. “You can send him to his room, but if he has something to read, he’s fine!”
And, even if I wasn’t grounded, comic books could actually get me to leave the house, which I’m sure they must have found suspicious. I never went outside to play and get some fresh air, but I would certainly trudge a mile to the local comic store. Sometimes, I would trudge even further than a mile or even get on a bus if a certain issue was sold out at the stores closest to me. Sometimes, certain issues were so late that I would become a sad, familiar figure, walking the mile to the comic store day after day in vain, hoping that the shipment was delayed or something; had just gotten lost on the way from Marvel or DC to Freddy & Eddie’s candy store on Astoria Blvd. in Queens, where I grew up. All the while, getting some fresh air, getting some much-needed exercise.
So every now and then, suspecting, I’m sure, that I loved comics more than I loved them, my parents would hide them from me. Their most significant theft of my brother Jonathan’s and my collection was a huge haul of Daredevil, Spider-Man, the X-Men, and others — easily, hundreds of comics. I forget what sort of blowup argument with them preceded this theft, but it must have been quite something at the time. I must have done something really bad. My brother took the injustice in his usual, cool stride, but I must admit to thinking about it for much longer than the actual theft warranted, and becoming quite obsessed with finding out whatever secret location my parents had hid my comics in. This led to a grim, years-long quest in my childhood house and my older siblings’ houses and apartments that became increasingly and surprisingly dark, and led to my parents eventually installing a lock on their bedroom door.
But my parents didn’t know the half of it when it came to my love of comics. When I look back and remember how I felt about comic books, what embarrasses me the most is my relationship with one issue, in particular, of The Amazing Spider-Man. I can’t remember the issue. I don’t even remember the plot, or what supervillain Spider-Man was in contention with at the time, but there was a page of the comic in which Peter Parker was sitting on his bed and talking on the phone. And then, in one panel, he all of a sudden stood up, and was standing there in just his briefs. Ah! Just to type those words pulls me back to that time, reading that comic and happening upon that panel. I must have already been in my room. I must have been lying in my bed. I must have reread that page over and over. I think I must have wiped that panel from the face of the earth from all the turning to it I did. Even the dust from that page, that panel is probably gone. I don’t even think his face was in the panel.
Of course, you are thinking that all kids are preoccupied with sex. The shame I feel about the Spider-Man comic, though, is not the shame of being preoccupied with sex, but the shame of being preoccupied with sex’s abstraction. I mean, in the world right now there are bespectacled young men talking on phones, sitting on beds, getting up, wearing briefs. And certainly, those men have presented themselves to me, throughout my life. Ladies and gentlemen, I have had “fun” in my time — more, surely, than was my share. But real life flesh and bone is not for me. Instead, take the man, take his face away, commit him to memory, draw him on paper. Then, I’m into it.
What was it about this particular panel that did it for me so, I wonder? Recently, as an adult, I spent a few months “hanging out” with a young white fellow with glasses and who went to the gym but had a small build, so I guess one could say that Peter Parker was my “type.” And, years ago, when a big movie studio cast as Spider-Man one young Tobey Maguire — he of the hooded eyes and droopy, depressive manner — I was first in line to see it. When my Spider-Man-with-curlier-hair personal trainer at the time, whom I secretly loved, grinned down at me flirtatiously while I was upside-down in the middle of an exercise at the gym, I blushed and mumbled something about wishing I was Gwen Stacy. But I never made a move on that personal trainer, not even in the restroom of the Cock bar on Avenue A, when we were both getting high on cocaine. And my string of hookups with the young fellow with the glasses ended when he proved through repetition and verbal reinforcement that he only wanted to have actual sex. He made me see his face, if you will.
Is it weird to find a cartoon image of a person talking on the phone deeply erotic? Like, more erotic than actual sex? Is it weird to not make a move on one’s flirtatious personal trainer, even when that personal trainer is clearly indicating that it’s okay to at least try? Is it weird to turn down sex from someone who is your archetype of sexy, just because he only likes having sex? Is it weird to reject Tobey Maguire outright as even a fantasy once one has learned that he is part of what is informally known as Leonardo DiCaprio’s, ahem, “pussy posse”? The answer to all of those questions is, sadly: “yes” — but that’s just the way life is in this milieu I find myself in, this Bizarro World.
Tom Holland was cast a few years ago as the most current version of the cinematic Spider-Man movie franchise. So wiry Tom Holland is, and chipper. Still, I must say that I was surprised to see grown women on Twitter post about being relieved to Google him and find that he is of legal age. I want to love Tom-Holland-as-Spider-Man, and indeed I think he is adorable, but to imagine bedding Tom Holland is to imagine rolling over in one’s sleep in the middle of the night and breaking an irreplaceable china cup. He is just so small. Like a thing you must cradle in your hand and protect. When I saw him being knocked about by Doctor Octopus in a movie, I ground my teeth in panic. To see him disintegrate at the end of Avengers: Infinity Game — unspeakable. (Strangely, seeing Andrew Garfield knocked about makes me feel nothing).
I believe I was in my late twenties when I found out what happened to my comics. My parents, it turned out, had hidden them in the office next door to my father’s office in Brooklyn. My parents’ friend Mr. Butler’s office. A whole, separate borough away from me, the whole time. It seems such an obvious hiding place to me now — but in truth I couldn’t have ever found them, even if you had given me a map with an x for a starting place and a destination marked out for me with a flag. I was a strange child, and, for all the time I spent imaging the world of Gotham and other graphic-made worlds, I was not good at visualizing a world outside my own door. Maybe that’s the legacy of my parents’ punishment of me. By withholding the one tactic of escape I had cultivated for myself, my parents ended up producing a kid who became even more insular over time. And a kid who became much too quick to accept loss, whether loss that I brought on myself, or loss that just happened — through moves, thefts, or accidental disposal.
If I could offer the young boy who mourned those comics — and that one comic in particular — one thing, it would be an arm of comfort draped across his shoulder. Comfort over what was surely to come in his future — sex, certainly; but also still more long trudges in search of something that had yet to arrive. The lack of sex. The turning down of sex if sex is all that is being offered to you. The same comfort that we must offer to our youth, our Tom Hollands, comfort and protection. I recently did a search on Google Images to try to find that panel. But I soon learned that, whether you search on Google or in your own dark, personal memories for “Peter Parker underwear,” you must be a certain kind of person to get through the endless pages of images that open themselves up to you.
