When you’re growing up geek, you mature in violent spurts.  Sputtering like the exhaust of the rusted out shit-box you drive, adolescence convulses out of you in wet, rancid coughs.   You grow up like a cancer victim breathes three weeks to the end – frantically, failingly, all dignity lost.  The road to adulthood for dorks isn’t a winding mountain road or a long, strange trip.  It’s one bald plateau after another, each successively higher, each scaled with a rusty pogo stick.

The camouflaged catapults that boost you from one to the next invariably take you by surprise.  You find out Columbus never made it to America; that’s one.  You pick up your first Vonnegut; that’s another.  You find out Washington had slaves and Kennedy had mistresses; it happens again.  Then you read The Fountainhead and then you watch Clockwork Orange and then you recite your first Monty Python sketch and then you have your first crush on a girl, and all of a sudden you can’t remember why the hell you picked up that pogo stick in the first place.

“I was just a kid,” you say to the doe-eyed pimply faced fuck staring at you slack-jawed from the mirror.  “I don’t know how everything got so sideways.”

Who you are, what you’ve been told, why everyone hates you, and why you hate everyone is the prize at the bottom of the mile high crackerjack box you’re digging towards.  Miles of high fructose corn bullshit are between you and it, with everything you know a lie and every lie you know exposed.

You find out the hero doesn’t get the girl.  You find out the nice guy does finish last.  You find out the good deed does not go unpunished and the wicked can rest easy in this.  You enroll in the school of hard knocks and fail for not framing your answer in the form of a question.  You eat their shit and you smile; you let them piss in your pocket and ask if it’s raining.  You got the voice of a eunuch and the complexion of a twice-used tampon.

You are dealing with the realization that what they say about you is probably right.  You will never, never get laid.

Around this time, you pick up Watchmen.  They’re given to you by an older brother (always an older brother – yours or someone else’s) in individual plastic bags and a caustic description of foul retribution should any be returned in any other state.  You are told to pinch the spines while you read and to never leave one lying outside its bag.  You say, it’s just a comic book and you’ve read a million of them before.

You are told you haven’t read one like this.  You are told you will have to eat the older brother’s shit with a spoon if you forget this.

You see funny names and spandex suits.  You read names of New York intersections and Mickey Spillane melodramatic cliches.  You devour violence like a coked up Tom and Jerry cartoon and skip over romance even less realistic than the clumsy, two-dimensional approximations of your wet dreams.  Every inch of it is a superhero comic book, the kind that made you the manboy you were that day.

But nowhere were any superheroes.

For the first time in primary ink sprayed on cheap pulp, you see people who are genuinely flawed.  Not the heroic half flaws of the Peter Parkers and the Logans you had read before; not the irascible hearts of gold that are antiheroes right up until the princess needs saving.  But people who fall far short of heroic.  People that remind you less of Superman and Wonder Woman and more of your alcoholic father and your batshit grandmother.

These people have problems, problems much bigger than whether or not the cheerleader you passed the note to is going to check yes or no.  These people are broken fundamentally.  These people are raped and scarred and dead inside from the horrible things they’ve done to those they loved.  These people are comedians who aren’t funny, doctors who can’t heal and nerds who can’t get it up.

And when that final moment of truth arrives, they don’t miracle up any happy endings. They don’t pull off some magic superhuman last minute Hail Mary for humanity.  They pull off only what is possible.  They and their disgusting, unheroic flaws do the best that they can.

The world, then, makes due with that.

You read Watchmen; it happens again.  In another unbecoming kick from your exhaust, a little innocence, a little naivety unceremoniously leaves you.

You pick up the pogo stick.  You feel a little less self-conscious about how poorly you’re doing.

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