I Cried the Day Superman Died

        I remember. I remember I cried the day Superman died. Try as I might, I just couldn’t hold it in. I mean, I hadn’t even cried at my dad’s funeral and here I was, in my mid-twenties, and reading a comic book with tears streaming down my face. You see, I grew up with Superman. The old reruns of the TV show. The movies. The comic book. You name it.

        My first contact with him was when my father took me to the neighborhood candy store and bought me my first Superman comic book. Initially, the visit to the candy store was merely to get me once again out of my mom’s hair. But the trip soon became a regular occurrence, my dad’s reluctance disappearing as soon as he discovered he could stop by the local bar on the return trip to toss back a few beers.

        He did that a lot, my dad. During some of his more colorful drinking bouts, I’d escape to the tree house in our back yard and bury myself in a Superman comic book or two. I could always find some small glimmer of hope with Superman whenever my world seemed to close in and things seemed just about hopeless – which happened quite a bit in my family.  

        I guess I should explain. About my family, that is.

* * * * *

        My grandparents on both sides had emigrated from Poland to New York during World War II. I suppose the pressures of day-to-day survival back then tended to breed a great deal of anger – with that anger redirected toward those who were nearest at hand. I suppose it was them that started the ball rolling from one generation to another in my family.

        I myself was one of three children in what I now realize was your typical textbook example of a dysfunctional family. My parents had met shortly after each of their previous marriages had failed. Unfortunately, their marriage to each other turned out to be just as broken as each of their first.

        My dad was an alcoholic, which put a lot of pressure on the rest of the family. I was around twenty-four when he eventually sobered up and was on the road to recovery. Until that point, though, he abused and terrorized the family to the point where we all feared being with him.

        Mom was a senior office worker who never really faced reality. When things became too much for her to contend with, she’d just pop another valium tablet. She was rather lazy, and most forms of labor around the house always seemed to be too boring, too dirty, or too strenuous for her to do.

        Actually, neither parent seemed to be around much for us. They seemed to put their own needs before ours, and repeatedly gave the impression of never really caring about us. No matter how hard we tried, we never seemed to do anything good enough to suit them. After a while, I guess we just gave up trying. We also ended up following in their footsteps, eventually developing substance addictions of our own. Mine started with alcohol and began when I was sixteen. Later in high school I began using marijuana. Looking back, I guess I’m just lucky I never tried anything worse.

        My senior year in high school was exceedingly rough. At that time in my life, I needed very much to be accepted, and my parents and teachers weren’t doing a very good job of it. After some failing grades, lack of money and very little emotional support from my family, I dropped out of school and entered the job market. Since one of my only real skills at that point was working on cars, I began taking on some odd jobs here and there, pumping gas and helping out in the garage.

        In this new frame of mind, I removed myself from my parents’ house and took up residence in a dilapidated old brownstone apartment building whose summit was crowned with parapets and concrete cherubs. I furnished my one-room studio with only the necessities: a benchpress my brother had left behind, a couple of folding snack tables, a cheap stereo, and a small refrigerator that I regularly kept stocked with booze – despite the fact that I was legally under the drinking age. I slept on a cot, cooked on a hot plate and fashioned a roach clip out of an old alligator clip I had in my toolbox. It was a regular Shangri-La.

        Over the course of the next six years, things grew progressively worse for me. It became next to impossible for me to hold down a job for more than five or six months at a time. In turn, my substance abuse grew worse as I went from one menial job to the next. It was a vicious cycle, with one feeding the other.

        To make matters worse, shortly thereafter, my dad discovered he had developed advanced cirrhosis of the liver and passed on.

        It was due to my father’s death, a recent layoff, and pressure in general that I began to feel totally worthless and inept. I began realizing my life was going nowhere, and wasn’t sure if I could depend on anyone for moral support. Basically, I was sinking in quicksand. I needed someone to throw me a rope and pull me out – and there wasn’t anyone. Over the course of the next few days, the drinking got worse and I took to wandering the neighborhood a lot just to get away from my depressing apartment for a while.

        It was during one of these aimless treks that I stumbled across a local comic book shop displaying a Superman poster in the window. Maybe it was a sign. I began thinking about when I was younger, how getting lost in a Superman comic book or two was one of my sole refuges from my problems and had oftentimes calmed me down when life had nearly pushed me to the brink. At least here things had a happy ending. I could always find some small glimmer of hope with Superman whenever my world seemed to close in and things seemed just about hopeless. So why not now?

        In total desperation, I entered the shop convinced all my troubles would soon disappear, just like when I was a kid. Little did I know I was in for a very rude awakening. 

        It was around that time that DC decided Superman should die. The issue proclaimed as the long-awaited final episode in the “Death of Superman” saga was just being placed on the rack. Needless to say, it was a major shock to me when I discovered their intended plans. I not only bought that issue, but the last six in the story line just to try to find out what the hell was going on.

        The walk back from the comic shop seemed longer than it had initially. My heart was pounding and my legs felt like lead as I rushed up the crumbling front steps of the brownstone. Without even thinking, I plopped down on my cot and began reading, all the while assuring myself that it had to be a dream sequence or one of those imaginary “what if” stories. 

        It wasn’t. They had really done it. They actually killed the Man of Steel.

        For a moment, a single tear trembled at the corner of my eye, waiting, hovering. And then the damn burst. Try as I might, I just couldn’t hold it in. Here I was, twenty-five years old, and reading a comic book with a torrent of tears streaming down my face. 

        To me, as long as Superman was around there was always some hope, some goodness left in the world. And now he was dead. If a guy like that had no chance in life, what chance did someone like me have at making things work? At really making a difference?

        It may have been just the booze and the pot and the depression, but I actually began doing a lot of thinking. And a lot of soul searching – drifting back through the splinters of my mind to what my life had been, what it had become. What really scared me was that things were so bad I was beginning to get suicidal. Subconsciously, I had come to the conclusion that I either had to kill myself, or disappear for good. And, consciously at least, I really didn’t care which of the two I chose. To the best of my recollection, that’s when I just up and started driving.

        I’ll never forget the color of the sky as I tore away from the curb that day. It was the color of lead, the underbelly of a sunless ocean of clouds. A rather appropriate image at the time considering the frame of mind I was in. As to where I intended to go – till this day I have no idea. All I know is that I wanted to get away from it all, from everything. I didn’t know where I was headed, and I didn’t care. Part of me didn’t care if I drove off the edge of the world. And part of me was hoping I would. If guardian angels really do exist, trust me, mine was working overtime that day.

        Eventually, I found myself entering Amagansett, Long Island. There wasn’t anything terribly unusual about the thin wisps of fog that hugged the coast, nor the calm sea that appeared outside my car window as I continued driving out towards the end of the island. But there was a kind of feeling in the air, a foreboding – almost electric – like the sensation you sometimes get just prior to a storm. 

        It was at that point that my car died. I’d fixed the radiator about a month before, but obviously my makeshift repairs hadn’t done the job. It would seem that, without the proper cash to back it up, knowledge really didn’t amount to much. My luck was holding true to form.

        Anyway, as if matters weren’t bad enough, when I popped the hood to let the car cool down I suddenly came to the wondrously perceptive realization that my bladder was about to burst. Annoyed though I was at Mother Nature’s poor timing, I decided to answer her call – especially since it didn’t look like I’d be going anywhere for a while. So I wandered off into the tall grass to relieve myself, with hopes of being bitten by a poisonous snake or something and dying on the spot.

        No such luck. I did notice an abundance of seagulls wheeling and crying overhead, and a couple of surfcasters slightly off in the distance, but, unfortunately, no venomous beasties.

        After zipping back up, I stood there for a few minutes just watching the grasses waving at the foot of the dunes and the wind pushing swells in against the beach. Sappy as it may sound, it was actually kind of picturesque, almost calming. As my eyes angled closer to the water, however, I was surprised to see a small group of people down by the shoreline, all huddled around a large dark shape on the sand. 

        Call it curiosity, or call it plain old drunken nosiness, but I decided to check it out.

        So, after glancing back for a moment at the steam pouring from my radiator, I wandered down toward the beach. What I all but stumbled onto when I reached the shore nearly sobered me up right in my tracks. There on the sand lay a beached whale. 

        I stood there in silence, mesmerized by this giant in the sand, not totally sure if I was seeing something real or if I was just drunker than usual. It was about twenty feet long, and predominantly dark grey with an almost snow-white underside. A number of deep lengthwise furrows in the skin of its throat led upwards to a somewhat triangular-shaped head that kind of reminded me of a ship’s prow. Its hide was speckled with barnacles and there was a raw place on its side where it must have worn against some rocks as it washed ashore. 

        For the most part, it laid there motionless, though an occasional movement of its tail would trace arcs in the moist sand beneath it. As I moved closer I could hear its powerful breathing, almost like the working of a bellows. And with each breath, a fine spray of water hung in the air like crystals glistening in the dull glare of an overcast sky.

        A few of the people tending to it carried a number of buckets back and forth from the shore, apparently trying to keep its skin moist with seawater. A husky man wearing a dark T-shirt muttered something about “special equipment” and thrust one of the buckets at me as he made a bee-line back towards the roadway.

        Here I was, pretty well inebriated, still semi-suicidal, and stranded out in no man’s land with a bum radiator – and these bozos expected me to play waterboy for the Montauk Whalers! I was just about to tell them where they could shove their bucket and head back to my Chevy, but for some damned, unexplained reason I felt compelled to stay. There was just something about that poor thing stranded on the beach that got to me. Before I realized the full extent of what I was doing, I was up to my knees in surf and sloshing pails of seawater back and forth.

        For the next couple of hours we did nothing but tend to that gentle giant and wait for the special rescue equipment to arrive. During that time, however, I received the education of my life from my friend in the dark shirt. Maybe it was just the bewildered look on my face, but he seemed to take a liking to me – so much so that he began to explain all about whale beachings. About how they happened way too often. About how the research foundation he worked for operated one of the largest non-profit rescue networks in the region. About how this whale was luckier than many beached whales because people who cared were there to rescue it.

        By the time the rescue mission was over, the sun was just beginning to set and the small crowd of onlookers that had formed began to break up. The whale had been carted off to receive medical care and – hopefully – eventually be released back to the sea when the vets gave it a clean bill of health. Even the loitering sea gulls were heading inland, flapping between rocks and posing on twisted pieces of driftwood. It was business as usual at the shore once again, like nothing had ever happened – at least for everyone else.

        As for me, well, my radiator had long since cooled down, but I didn’t drive off for quite some time. Instead, I just sat there at the shoreline watching dumbly as a shimmering yellow sun dropped slowly below the horizon. In a way, I felt like an idiot just sitting there. But I didn’t care.

        There was something profoundly spiritual in the experience I shared that day, and that alone had a very sobering effect on me. I was addicted. But this time, it wasn’t to a substance that could eventually destroy my life. It was to something much more profound. For possibly the first time in my life I felt connected with the rest of the natural world – like I had finally done something that really made a difference.

       It was well into the night when I finally did drive off in my car. But when I left that beach and headed off down the road, I departed feeling special, different from anyone who never dared to make such an encounter.

* * * * * *

        That was a little over twenty-four years ago. And the rare experience I had on the beach that day still will not leave me.

        A lot’s changed in my life since that night. For one thing, I stopped drinking. And I haven’t needed a joint in over twenty years. Admittedly, it took a lot of work in one of those twelve-step programs. I even ended up eventually getting my high school equivalence diploma and my mechanic’s license. Can you beat that?

        I’ve also been employed by that research foundation for the past fifteen years, fixing boat engines and helping out with their Stranding/Rescue Program. I guess they finally felt that since I’d been volunteering so much time they might as well officially put me on the payroll. Since that time, I’ve seen some amazing things out there.

        Right now, I’ve got a small house of my own just outside Montauk. My wife did most of the interior decorating, and I had to accept a lot of changes in my life, but I insisted on keeping my good ol’ benchpress – kind of an heirloom from the past. I guess some things never change. It’s not the Taj Mahal, but its home – and convenient. It’s not too far from the local comic book shop. 

        Oh, and as for Superman – they eventually did find a way to bring him back, just the way I remembered him. Just like old times. Yeah, I guess some things never change.