If my life was a comic book...

If my life were a comic book, I have to admit that the first
half would be rather boring. No space craft crashing into the
cornfields of some Midwestern state. No parents murdered in a
dark alley right in front of me. No being bit by a radioactive
spider right around the time I started growing pubic hairs.
I was a regular American kid. I asked a lot of questions
and did a lot of stupid things. Shit happened all the time.
There would be panels of a boy sitting in a school yard, his
back to a brick wall, a paperback book in his hands, reading.
Boys and girls would run by him, screaming and yelling, all
dressed in identical uniforms for this was a Catholic School and
uniformity is key to a happy religion. The boys would be playing
wall ball. If you have no clue what it is then let me tell you
all about this goddamn nasty game! You and a line of boys stand
15 feet away from a wall. One boy holds a rubber ball the size
of a small fist. When he screams "GO!" you all run to the wall
and back as fast as you can. While he, on the other hand,
bounces the ball against the wall. If he catches the ball before
you get back to the starting line he can peg you if you are left
running. It's the pegging that fucking sucks! Not because if
you get hit you're out, it's getting hit by the little ball -- it
hurts like a fucker! The ball leaves bruises, welts and tears
and often leads to fist fights that you loose and end up lying on
the ground bleeding from the lip.
The boy is not playing wall ball. Instead, he's reading,
peacefully, completely lost in his book. Not far away the girls
would be doing cartwheels, their plaid skirts falling down over
their heads as their legs turned over in the air. Most of the
girls wear gym shorts under the skirts, but a few, the more
daring ones, know that the boy looks up from time to time to
watch them, wear only pink panties.
Perhaps the first half of my life as a comic book would
include some of my fantasies. Many an hour passed during mass
where I was bored out of my head and my imagination would often
take me to faraway lands of fantasy and the macabre. Imagine the
cry of the Catholic church as they read the scenes where I dreamt
of the giant Jesus statue a monstrous life-like man made of
stone so pale it looked like flesh, hanging on a giant cross in
the front of our church as it climbed down from the cross,
moving awkwardly in that clay-animation fashion like the monsters
from Clash of the Titans, grabbing parishioners, and biting their
heads off! And I, only a boy, but possessing of some superior
intellect would stop him with one of the nails that had held him
to the cross, throwing it like a javelin into his chest where he
split apart like he was stone again!
The comic book would definitely have to include scenes of
high school angst and the awkward moments with members of the
opposite sex? Those Moments of confused words and the fumbling
of the nuances of language. Scenes where sex was offered to me
by a girl I was dating but I had no idea. I didn't understand
the veiled desires hidden within her words. There would be
incidences of betrayal between friends and bittersweet parts
while I lay asleep near the woman that I loved yet never did I
have the balls to go to her and tell her how I pined for her in
such a perfect and innocent way and how I really wanted to fuck
her brains out. I possessed the language of sex, at least in my
head but, it seemed, not the ability to translate it into action.
The sex scenes would come later when I grew older and more
brazen. Women walked in and out of my life and I embraced them.
There could be x-rated scenes of passion and intriguing pages of
arguments fought for the dumbest fucking reasons. Read the
flourish of a new relationships and the bitter end as it crashed
upon rocky shores as ships cast about in a mad sea. The
narrative would sail toward the mid-twenties and land me, here
in Chicago, where I moved two years ago to have a new life, new
women, and writing.