Weird new thing...
Andy Kaufman and Superman’s Phonebooth
I
In the line, he remembers he was someone else once—only briefly, mind, and this is not that man’s story. The card in his wallet allows him to drive—He sweated a mid-west winter when Ohio State Troopers took it a way one December night, when he was fleeing a burning building. He hadn’t set fires in years—he was someone else, then, remember—but he didn’t know what flags lurked behind the warrant check, the sound of old sins and gunfire whistling in the Cincinnati wind. This was in ’72, and when the card returned to him, he smiled and pulled away slowly. He paid the ticket the next day, registered to vote, as if in triumph.
II
Drunken sailors have no reasons to lie—the underlying truth of claustrophobia and lust and sea monsters splitting the water’s surface is as honest as sunshine and half as damning.
What rises beneath us is reptilian; knows only fear and hunger; changes color to stalk its prey and hide from predators. What rises beneath us is made smaller by whiskey, rough kisses too long delayed. What rises beneath us wishes desperately to be ignored.
III
He should have gone to sea, he thinks, but Ohio held him like a drunk lover’s fists. Columbus to Cincinnati to Akron, small moves to smaller and smaller lives. As a child, he dreamed of the ocean, of Aruba and Macao, shores so hot they’d scald the bottom of his feet; he dreamed of blue liquor and bluer moonlight, of women who moved like rolling tides, gentle across the shores. But he’ll haunt Ohio ‘til the day he dies, he thinks, maybe longer.
In this line outside an Akron Senior Center, mass of voter’s guides he hasn’t read in his hands, the memory of dreams bubbles like a water fountain. He remembers the spinning comic book rack of his childhood, wire-framed escape hatch, “If we don’t stop the death ray, Metropolis is doomed.” Silly ghost of flight, he thinks, silly to not want the skyline to end.
IV
Clark Kent should have stayed on the farm, helped his parents milk the cow, plowed the fields and flown at night. Instead, he stands each afternoon in a building of people looking for secrets—half in love with the idea that bob-haired brunette will rip open his shirt and find what’s underneath. There’s more danger in that than in radioactive apes or alien tyrants from outer space—the purloined letter behind thin spectacles. “I’m right here,” he thinks. “I’m standing right here. Can’t you see me?”
V
This line is a con game and this voters’ guide a bullet, and in both things, he knows of what he speaks. Never hid, as such, mostly melted away, exchanged anonymity for anonymity, maybe hid in plain sight. Worked factories and warehouses, came home and watched the television—Andy Kaufman, transforming from meek foreigner to Elvis Presley, in a blink of an eye. Andy Kaufman, wrestling women in Tennessee, and he knew that was a put on, too. It’s a game he’s good at—since that night the gun went off in his hand and bullets rained in all directions like brimstone, since someone fell and someone screamed and there was miles to go before he reached Columbus, running all night as something welled beneath him, reptilian and frightened, ready to strike.
Someone’s palmed a coin somewhere. He doesn’t know whom—he doesn’t read the papers much—but someone, somewhere, is hiding in plain sight, and he can see their outline. The papers in his hands, the ones he hasn’t read, are burning at him, scalding his palms like sunlit sand.
VI
On the Internet, no one knows you’re Andy Kaufman in a rubber Nixon mask; No one knows you’re a superhero cruising S&M sites, wishing you could be whipped so it actually hurts through invulnerable flesh; No one knows you’re a welder, a high-seas pirate, happily in love. Biding time from epiphany to pixilated epiphany, reality is Superman’s phone booth, and it is time to change.