It is natural, I think my Gentle Reader will agree, for any dad to want to be his kids’ hero. And, of course, when dad is a nerd, he has all too much source material to draw on, in cultivating this conceit.
It will not surprise anyone that I have, from a young age, wondered what sort of superhero I might turn out to be. And I flash back to my seventh Halloween, when my mom made me a Batman costume, sewing it from scratch. She picked up on this choice from my adoration of the original Batman TV series – the one with that zesty duo, Adam West and Burt Ward – which had me constantly imagining myself vanquishing the supervillains of Gotham.
No nerd ever truly surrenders those imaginings, no matter what they tell you.
Now, I’m well into my parenting years (my oldest is approaching middle age himself), so you can imagine that I’ve now had literal decades to wonder what sort of Caped Crusader I would be.
I could handle a literal man-cave. I’m not exactly a spelunker, but every time I’ve been in a cave – Mammoth in Kentucky, Marengo in Indiana, etc. - I’ve immediately set about picturing where the Batmobile will be parked, where the Bat-Computer will sit, the placement of the giant penny and the dinosaur, and so forth. I never went in for the Batpoles, which might strike my reader as odd, but the truth is that it always seemed a bit self-indulgent. It makes one wonder if the real Batman actually longs to be a fireman, and that would just be disappointing.
Many Bat-qualifications, I’ve always figured, would come easily to me. For better or worse, I have been immersed in the world of computers from a young age, and so the high-tech side of Batman is right in my wheelhouse. I was an engineer for almost a decade, and it suited me, I think. Bat-Computer? Check.
Then there’s the whole Utility Belt thing, the gadgetry of caped crusading – the wonderful toys, as Jack Nicholson expressed it (see page ***). I can picture myself designing, building and testing the grappling hook gun. Cooking up gas capsules. Inventing Bat-Sonar. Utility Belt? Check.
Then we get to the actual, you know, leaping and jumping and gliding. The modern Batman doesn’t just swing around like a Spider-Man knock-off; his cape goes taut and he swoops down into Gotham’s canyons like a bird of prey.9 Could I handle that?
Well, I did a stint in ROTC in college, and we did a lot of daredevil stuff that certainly had a Dark Knight feel to it. My buddy Joe and I joined the Rangers training cadre at the university, which meant that we were the cadets who learned the daredevil stuff first, then taught the other cadets. This included rappelling, which was quite exciting; we would spend our Saturday mornings on the cliffs at Lock Nine, south of Lexington, flying down ropes from great heights, and it was easy to imagine I was dropping from Wayne Tower, intent on reaching Crime Alley to stop some heinous tragedy.
The ROTC reality wasn’t nearly so brave-and-bold. The high point was when some beautiful sorority pledge, auditing ROTC for an easy A, would freeze up halfway down the cliff, and Captain Greg would send me down next to her to help her down: Don’t worry, miss! I’ve got you! Hold on tight, now!
This exercise was at its most Bat-like when we did the Aussie – the Australian Rappel – which amounts to running down the cliff, face-first. That’s serious Caped Crusader stuff!
Then we get to the World’s Greatest Detective thing. If the ROTC thing is really a weak conceit (which it certainly is), the Batman-as-supersleuth is even more so.
Don’t get me wrong; abnormal psychology is also in my wheelhouse, just as formally as computer science (I have two behavioral science degrees). So I think I can say I get the whole battle-of-wits thing with the twisted minds of Gotham’s rogue’s gallery.
But it’s the actual detective thing that seems to elude me. Don’t think I haven’t tried! As a kid, I gave it literally hundreds of trial runs – but as sure as I would declare that it was Colonel Mustard in the Library with the Wrench, it would turn out to be Miss Scarlett in the Conservatory with the Lead Pipe.
I chalk this up to my ADD, which causes me to miss things. More evidence of this deficiency has piled on in more recent field tests, playing Escape Room with friends who expect me to be the one to get us out, only to find that I’m considerably slower on the uptake than most.
But the real deal-breaker in my Batman aspirations has been... Linda Blair.
My Fundamentalist parents would never in a million years have let me see any R-rated movie in 1973, let alone The Exorcist; but in 1979, my first year of ROTC, my buddy Joe and I and some other Rangers went to see it at the university’s student cinema.
I spent most of the movie peering through my hands, on the edge of doing my own Linda Blair impersonation. I have a weak stomach, it seems, in horror and consummate evil in a human face.
Can you imagine me, then, staring at the Joker’s sick, twisted grin? The hideous grotesquerie of Two-Face? The rotted flesh of Solomon Grundy?
Hurling doesn’t count as a superpower.
No, the role of Caped Crusader is forever beyond me, despite all my dorky fantasies; I have some of the intellectual qualifications, I think, but I lack that harsh gritty determination, the icy stare with which he meets the evils of Gotham’s cesspool villainy head-on. I may have a flair for Bat-tech, but I just don’t possess a Bat-constitution.
So I’ve set my sites on a more reasonable role model:
Plastic Man...
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