Читать книгу Drowning Naked in Paradise & Other Essays - David Bakish - Страница 9

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Superman

I would venture to guess that many of us old-timers, when we were young whippersnappers, imagined all the things we wanted to be when we grew up. Sure, some kids already knew what they wanted to be: doctors, lawyers, nurses, teachers, professional athletes, or just anybody rich. Some of us boys growing up in the 1940s idolized cowboys killing Indians, now so politically incorrect. Today I might root for the Indians. Cops catching hardened criminals, though we might have admired the moxie of some wily gangsters. Sharp-shooting American soldiers mowing down Japs and Nazis, clearly evil people for whom none of us would have felt any sympathy. I imagined I could be like the comic strip character, Clark Kent, a bumbling, awkward guy like me, magically transforming into the awesomely powerful flying machine known as Superman, a comic book invention of two Jewish writers, nebbishes with vivid imagination.

Well into adulthood, I had dreams that I was Superman. The catch, however, was that my dreams turned into nightmares. I would fight off two or three bad guys, but out of nowhere, they were joined by a horde of others all jumping on me. I would then try to fly off a nearby cliff but, upon launching my muscular body into the air, my red cape failed. I crashed, and all the bad guys were again on top of me. When I woke up in a cold sweat, I was relieved to be alive and once again the very ordinary Clark Kent.

In real life, my greatest skills lay in my writing ability. I dreamt I would one day write the great American novel or a work of nonfiction that the literary world would welcome and award me some measure of fame. Although that never happened, I was recognized in a very modest way for my research and books on the black American author, Richard Wright, and the popular culture singing comedian, Jimmy Durante. One was dead serious about the social problem of racism; the other was a nonpolitical master of raucous humor. Still, the image of Superman continued to have its allure.

Superman sought to protect the innocent from those who would perform evil acts. He was, for me, a one-man army when conventional forces failed. Sometimes evil appeared insidiously clever and more exciting than good, but unlike in the real world, in Superman’s world, evil forces always lost. I hoped in some small way, I could do good, even if more like Clark Kent than Superman. After all, Clark Kent was a newspaper reporter, a writer like me.