(originally published Feb. 15, 2011)
Part of me will always be an adolescent boy. The part that stands in stores, reading comic books until the proprietor yells, “Hey, this isn’t a library!” The part that giggles at dick and fart jokes. The part that sees the future as a vast, undisturbed plain at the end of Wheeling St. in suburban Aurora, long before the encroachment of warehouses and office parks. The part that holds desire like a switchblade—awkwardly, blindly, secretly.
This is the part, too, that enjoys Kevin Smith movies. At the comics convention that opens Chasing Amy, one grizzled vendor wears a ‘Fuck Marvel Comics’ t-shirt.
Marvel Comics once had a contest where readers could send in samples of their own work. One could compete in the penciling, inking, coloring, lettering or writing categories, and the winners of each would collaborate on an issue of Spider-Man.
I wasn’t familiar enough with the Spider-Man storylines to attempt writing, but lettering I thought I could do. It requires a steady hand, a ruler, a knack for identifying empty spaces in the frames where language and thought can take shape. Having only one of the three, I didn’t enter.
Besides, I had already tried making comics. In middle school, my friend Josh C. and I created a three-panel comic strip called “Froggy.” But since I was inept at drawing, Froggy was nothing more than a three-toed, ambulatory lingam. We did a traditional three-panel strip, commonly known as ‘the funnies’: set-up, build, punchline. And, being middle-schoolers, we moved quickly from existential crises regarding the inability to catch flies to dick and fart jokes.
Holden and Banky, the comic-creating duo of Chasing Amy, eventually separate, in part, because of Banky’s submerged feelings for Holden. “Some doors should never be opened,” Banky says.
Josh and I were separated by the military’s propensity to ship away families to new bases. He used to regaled me with stories of coming across his mother’s boyfriend, post flagrante delicto, walking around with his boner, howling “A-roo-ha-hoo!”
Really?
Yep, he said.
We had swim class together, and there weren’t enough stalls in the locker room to accommodate all the bashfulness. Once, as we showered, Tim S. zipped in and mooned us, but more often, a line of damp boys formed a queue in front of the only stall in the bathroom.
Josh wielded his unabashed sexuality like a matador’s cape. As I waited on the bench for the stall to open, trunks clinging and reeking of chlorine, he whipped off his shorts and slipped into his underwear. Maybe he noticed me looking. He asked, “Aren’t you changing? Ashamed of your manhood?”
Well, yes and no. Our bodies were still sprouting in unforeseen ways (some more than others). We were no longer boys, but we couldn’t claim the mantle of men—not so long as we kept subsuming and covering our desires with bluster and indifference.
Josh knocked on the stall: “Ready yet?” But I wasn’t yet ready to open that door.