Trivial Tales of Everyday Madness: Two Very Different Worlds 2

Robert K Hogg

It’s odd I should be thinking of Batman yesterday, along with that period.
I hadn’t known Channel Five was showing Batman Returns, today, along
with a feature length animated film – a comic on TV! - before it. (Why
can't I get this hyphon to elongate? If hyphon it is...) During a newsbreak
they said that the original Batmobile was up for sale/auction, and expected
to fetch £75000. Talk show host, all round presenter, famous wit and
narcissist Jonathan Ross paid a small fortune for Spiderman number 1. If I
was rich I’d go for that Batmobile I think; build my very own Bat Cave of
sorts to go along with it. I’d have my place kitted out like Forrest “Forrey”
Ackerman, or Ray Bradbury. But what with the ego mind, the false self,
that impostor that would keep reminding me of how I can’t afford to, or to
even indulge in such fantasies, what with my whole life being so 'out of
synch' and all, I’m obliged to recognise or acknowledge that that’s yet
another dream that will never come about.

But then I don’t really need a Batmobile. And where would I put it?
Not much good having one without the other, and if I could build a Bat
Cave, wouldn’t I need to go the whole hog, and have whole numbers of
Bat costumes as well as all the Bat gadgets? – Fad Gadgets, and start
calling myself Bruce and track down Marianne Wiley, but better still
Lynne, in order to get her to dress up as Catwoman… (My first intro to a
woman in leather was Diana Rigg as Emma Peel of The Avengers. But
Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in Batman Returns was certainly a
haunting role). Or better still, along with Bruce Wayne Manor I could build
my own Gotham City, a Dark City (Alex Proyas) more in the vein of Tim
Burton’s Batman than Adam West and Burt Ward’s, “the boy blunder” as a
villain once quipped. Being accident prone as a kid, that one cut me to the
quick. If my mother had had that kind of wit, I’d have been wrecked. And
she had her moments. A narcissistically sarcastic friend, Billy Forbes
made up for any deficiency on her part in that department. Now, through
writing, I discover I have many of the same characteristics. Well we're all
only projections of each other after all. And I like to keep myself amused.
A mild form of revenge at worst, a relatively harmless means of keeping
perspective, however wrong-minded. I never did get a mask and cape, that
I can recall; the money never materialised. Every kid should get to be
their favourite superheroes at least once.

And much as we were in the habit of nicking whatever appealed to us,

it didn’t go as far as raiding novelty shops. I went through other phases of
course, becoming fascinated with cowboys and Colt 45’s – I could practice
moves with a cousin’s toy but metal gun obsessively, watching it whirl
across the room as I tried to spin it like Billy The Kid, or how I thought he
could. I would construct a bow, and spears from canes stolen from garden
plots nearby and attach a small kitchen knife or large nails for spears. A
potentially deadly weapon. Arrows could be more problematic, and
neither were plastic bows bought cheaply much of an improvement.
Another crock. At least with the spear we could throw it as far as we could
in the back green, making sure the throwing range was clear first in case
we impaled any unfortumate soul, whther child or adult. That ended when
it smashed through a small greenhouse. It sat on end in there for months
against the panes of glass. It had taken me an inordinate effort to wrap the
tape around that nail on the end of that 'spear'.
I had grown out of plastic swords – the last one I recall was when I
was on the landing of our gran (bro's and me) downtown, but fencing –
with anything – was fantastically exciting. Crossbows, equally fascinating
if not more so, but too complex to construct in any way, except for mini
ones made from washing clips, a lollipop stick and an elastic band. A
matchstick served as the bolt. Bernie the Bolt. On the way to school once,
I had looked for a wasp on the bushes with flowers near the top of Rankine
Street, and with deadly accuracy, watched in surprise and subdued horror
as it dropped in half, feeling like a murderer.

I envied kids who had go-karts. The means or know-how was beyond
me. I'd forgotten I could probably have found a book in the library on it.
Now nostalgia books are all the rage as well as serving that practical
purpose. Knives in themselves held little interest for me, though I did
want to learn how to throw them so that they always stuck blade first as I
had seen in films – and the circus – or the circus in films, but I could rarely
do it if ever. It was clear there must be specially weighted ones. But
where to get one...? In winter I could build all variations of snowman,
rolling great balls of snow until I could barely move them. I liked the way
they picked up the snow by their own weight. One day I got too
ambitious, my artistic proclivities coming to the fore, going beyond the
variation of one ball on top of the other, to indulge in some snow sculpture
– I wanted a more slimline snowman, but I gave up after a some time-
consuming efforts when they collapsed, my hands numb with cold.

The artistic impulse could be detrimental to life and limb also. Bill
Forbes loaned me a sledge once, as he lived near Balgay Park, a smooth
grassy slope I could use it on. I had never sled before and was as exited in
anticipation as I was surprised and flattered by his generosity and trust. At
the top of the hill it wasn’t very steep, certainly nothing to concern myself
over. I lay down on it, a cheap plastic sledge – I preferred the look of
those wooden ones with the round steel rudders – and pushed myself off
with my feet, lying flat, face first. I would pick up speed. A few seconds
into it and it was a blur of speed and strands of grass and powdered snow
speeding by me as the sledge cut through the snow. Too fast to think, it
was over before I had even to contemplated the possibility of rolling off. It
seemed safer to stay on. And to have a life and momentum of its own.
Suddenly the slope levelled out before I careened into a scrimmage of
bracken, small trees and assorted rubbish, and, fortunately, no glass or
sharpe-edged metal, as I was stopped by a wall, hitting it like the
proverbial ton of bricks. As much embarrassed as shaken up by this turn
of events in case anyone had seen me and was still looking, I called it a
day and moped off in a bit of a huff. I wouldn’t be tempting fate twice.
But I always did. The sledge business was during my early teens I might
add, the self-conscious years, Another time, someone had made a rope
swing behind the railings in the grounds of our secondary school, and that
ended just as abruptly when mid swing, (and sentence) I somehow
inadvertently let go of the rope, completely losing my bearings as the
ground rushed up to meet me; so I can't even say I didn’t see it coming
when it knocked the wind out of me. AS surreal and unnerving
experience, but like watching a movie. The tree itself was on a slope. As
the Hardy boys (yes) and Mark Bulle helped lift me up from the scrub and
rubble and nettles, I felt that silly or embarrasing impulse to burst into
tears from shock and surprise but succeeded in stifling it and it passed.
This wasn't primary school any more. I was pleased about that. That and
not breaking any bones. Thankfully I was always pretty robust. I needed
to be.

My enthusiasm for the DC Comics superheroes, (which didn’t last

much longer than primary school), wasn’t really something I could share
with the girls; not that I was aware of anyway It didn’t lend itself to any
common ground for me in the way it did with Alex Roberts or Jimmy
Byres. I did get a little pocket money, or perhaps it was for school dinner
before it was free, but I would spend it on packs of Batman cards, stffing
my mouth full of the cheap chewing gum that went with them in the flat
little tabs. I liked the slightly powdery surface of it. As well as the main
photographs on the front, the backs could be made up into a larger sized
poster of sorts – or 'jigsaw'. (The novelty of jigsaws soon wore off. I
found them oddly pointless. All form over content). The excitement of
indulging myself in this make-believe world was offset by the frequent
repeats of the same card in other packs I was obliged to buy, the rarer ones
becoming increasingly difficult to acquire. It was the bitter with the sweet,
no pun intended.
It seemed obvious that adults and girls had no conception of the sense
of wonder these cheap reproductions could engender. (Wrong, no doubt;
they were probably right under my nose). It was as if they were
manufactured specifically for us, for me. In a world of relative and
unimaginative dullards, this was art and imagination. It wasn’t hip, or
ironic or 'postmodern', however much the TV series might come to be seen
as. (And there weren't only Batman cards. There was also a printing of
The Outer Limits TV series, though I didn't know anyone else who had
ever seen it. I just wish I had them now). It was matter of feeling oneself
to be more than my mother or teachers' like MacDonald ever dreamed of,
and later, simplistic-minded fools like Patton. In a world of
incomprehensible complexity and dark forces, 'evil' and murder, they,
along with the music of the period, were like a light in the darkness,
colourful and amusing, and as with music, suffused with a joy of life and
in life that adults and many other kids seemed to be unaware of. At home I
could lie on my mothers bed in a kind of trance in my mothers bedroom
when she was out, listening to Young, Gifted, and Black, playing it over
and over again. The emotions it aroused went far deeper than the simple
lyrics and melody might indicate to any casual listener. It was the same
with the Archies “Sugar Sugar.” A “bubblegum” song put together by a
session band for the specific purpose of commercial success. But to me,
sitting by the window in the front room (or living room as we called it,
after my mother) it was a like taste of heaven, a slice of nirvana. A
simultaneous, yet indefinable condensation of the emotion I felt for Lynne.
But I would be so absorbed in the music, I never methodically put them
together. Or if I ever did, the emotion would again be so diffuse I either
failed to associate with the specific object/person, or I would automatically
distance myself from such direct a association, preferring to focus on the
“distant,” and non-specific, the abstract, though paradoxically far from
vague.
It was somehow as real if not more real than the dull, life negating of
everyday existence in all its unheroic mundanity. Through it, as with her,
the thought of her, as with books and films, I could feel more intensely
alive, but in a positive sense; not in the way I might feel through fear and
uncertainty. That was somehow another me I had become aware of
through the negative influence of my mother and others. The alarming
part was it had seemed to have taken on a life of its own, as if they had
colluded in forming a false identity in me that had its own volition through
its apparent control over my emotions. They had a life of their own – or a
death – and I had little conscious control of them it seemed. Superheroes,
Batman, were a symbol of escape, where the solution to problems was
simpler. Later I would discover in the complexities of Peter Parker as
Spiderman that superheroes could also be all too human. This blurred the
line between the sense of being ineffectual, emotionally, a “loser,” and yet
still be daring, witty and amusing. An innovator. Spiderman was a
revelation. A brilliant stand-up comedian with great one-liners in an
equally brilliant costume. But the early British intro’s to Marvel – POW!
SMASH! and WHAM! were phased out then FANTASTIC! and
TERRIFIC! appeared. It was 1971 before Spiderman was back, outside of
American imports. This, shortly before David Bowie exploded onto the
scene, and for me, personifying all of these aspects. But I had experienced
it long before and even more profoundly and intensely.