Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (9 page)

Brainstorming exciting scenarios and lurid episodes for our online audience while bonding through comics collecting made for a fast and lasting relationship through our early teenage years. But eventually I grew out of all that owing to the fact that I had traveled to England, seen some of the world, debatably matured, and most comics were really terrible. My stories became more complex and sexually frustrated, like me I suppose, and the life lessons to be learned from mainstream superhero comics never really seemed to apply in the real world (as opposed to the ‘Real World,’ where the life lessons of comics gave Judd Winick lasting employment).

No woman was ever likely to discover that I was secretly cool and heroic; spandex only looked good on people who worked out constantly, and very few people felt comfortable around those who wore it anyway; when anyone was bitten by any member of the arachnid family, fever, swelling, and bed rest were not followed by the ability to climb walls, leap tall buildings, and trap thieves in webs just like flies. It was more likely followed by vomiting.

Morgan, however, as recently as last week, still secretly hoped that his mother would one day sit him down and tell him how she had, years ago, discovered his infant body in a crashed rocket ship, that he was really born on the planet Kryp-Lor (his own, made-up world of superheroes that had nothing whatsoever to do with Superman’s home planet of Kryp
ton
), and that by eating unusual combinations of spinach, B-vitamins, and Ginko Biloba, he would soon be able to knock over buildings with bad people in them. Like the White House.

When his mother did eventually sit him down one day for an important talk, he was horrified when she started discussing penises, vaginas, and ‘when a man
truly
loves a woman’. Parents take note: These things are better left learned in the street. Hearing them from someone you never want to imagine naked and doing them can cause fever, nausea, and even death in extreme cases. I was up with Morgan very late that night, paper bags at the ready. He didn’t eat for days.

Somehow, in spite of our differences, we remained friends, possibly because no one else liked us. We got together for ‘hi-octane, big-screen’ movies, lunches, and talked often about what he would do if
he
had as much money as
I
did. Occasionally, he would drag me to a comic book convention, and we would arrange to meet some of the real people behind the online screen-names, hoping and praying that they were attractive females who wanted to have sex.

With us.

They weren’t. They were usually just average people—mostly male—many of whom apparently spent all their free time between reading fan-fic, working on elaborately detailed costumes which they would then wear every waking moment of the convention, talking only as the characters would talk, and behaving only the way the characters would behave. It was an odd, disconcerting experience, and I was all set to spend my evenings with Morgan ridiculing the folks doing it when he showed up as Archangel, complete with overlarge metallic wings, blue face paint, and yellow hair.

“Anyone seen Psylocke?” he asked me.

“Morgan, what…”

“Warren,” he said rather sternly. Then wandered off without another word.

It was a lot like the first time I learned Mimsi was gay. Suddenly you’re no longer allowed to be a homophobe because you’re faced with it being someone you know and care for. Their sexuality may still make you a bit uncomfortable, but from now on you’ll keep it to yourself, learn to understand, and be supportive of the one you love. Or, in Morgan’s case, at least someone you like hanging out with.

Ironically, Morgan claimed to have spent the next three days trying to get under the blue body-paint of a ‘hottie in a Nightcrawler suit’. But on the final evening of the convention, when she at last relented—likely because nothing better than Morgan had come along—
he
couldn’t get past the idea that Nightcrawler was a guy, even though it was a woman portraying him, Peter Pan-like.

Somehow, even after it was apparently quite obvious that she was genuinely a woman once he’d gotten her costume off, and she was mostly naked right down to her painted, blue skin, he believed that by her pretending to be a guy, his being attracted to ‘Kurt’ called his own sexuality into question. Why it should make a difference once she was mostly naked and willing I honestly don’t know, but Morgan has attained a level of homophobia that clearly sets a new standard for the term.

Amazingly, our friendship had survived all this, and Morgan had—in his own way—been as good a friend as he was capable of being. Which wasn’t much, but I was, obviously, not picky.

“You should write fan-fic again,” he said as we prepared to climb into our cars and head home for the night.

“Nah,” I sighed. “I’ve said all I had to say about superheroes and their intimate sex lives.”

“But you were so good.”

He was genuinely complimenting me, and I was touched by his sincerity, if not his judgment.

“Thanks,” I said appreciatively. “But no.”

“We could make another movie. I could be Archangel. The real Archangel, not that wimpy guy from X-Men three. People would love it!”

Not likely. Morgan and I had wasted a lot of our time, first studying how to make movies, and then, ostensibly, making them. Unfortunately for us, no one else wanted to be in them, and there’s only so much drama you can get from watching a guy wander around by himself picking things up and putting them back down again.

It’s a sad day when you realize Ed Wood, or Doris Wishman may actually have had more talent than you.

“Maybe,” I said, not meaning it.

“You just gotta do it,” Morgan said. “You can’t care what people think.”

He stared at me for a long time, waiting. Then, in a last, supreme effort to be honestly supportive, he told me, “Just because a couple of assholes online said you sucked, doesn’t mean you do.”

I said nothing. We’d had this debate before and there was no winning it. Not for Morgan anyway.

Morgan dejectedly got into his little, beat-up Toyota, I got into my recently detailed BMW, and we drove off in very opposite directions.

I pulled my car onto Vale Place and passed through the gates at number 1. The familiar feel of gravel crunching under my wheels as I approached the oaken entry doors told me I was home. Safe. Warm. Grandfatherless. I could hump all the water bottles I wanted to here and no one would complain. Except perhaps the Sparkletts man, but he could be paid for his silence.

I live in a very exclusive neighborhood known as Epsoms Roads in a house with more rooms than cells in my body. It often amuses me to think that I could be thoroughly dismembered, every piece of me hidden in a different room, a separate part of the house, and it would take specialized CSI people years to find them all and put me back together again.

Yes, I have a dark side. Who doesn’t?

As I stood in my foyer surrounded by all the opulence; lavish furnishings, very expensive first issues of exceedingly rare comics, and original art lining the walls at regular intervals, I, once again felt eternally grateful to whatever fluke of genetics had made me very rich.

And, as you might imagine, I wanted to stay rich. I would go to the comics convention. Something completely asexual and uninteresting. Let someone else examine Ms. Nuckeby and her nonclothing. My odds were far better never seeing her again and hoping they hired someone who would have less luck with controlling his urges than I’d had. Having seen Ms. Nuckeby, I knew that to be damn near impossible for anyone; anyone interested in women that is. And his foregone failings would forever cement my position as voyeur du jour at Wopplesdown Struts, purveyors of fine briefs. But…what if they hired a gay man? Or—God forbid—a straight
woman
? Promoted Agrapanthila? Moved Mervin over from men’s underwear? Ms. Nuckeby wouldn’t have near the same effect on them that she had on me.

Damn. I needed a drink. And those Frezee-Pacs I’d bought. “Woodruff?” I called.

Woodruff is my butler. His job is to wait on my every need, and he does so reasonably well, mostly because I have very few needs. He’s a little long in years and not the best manservant around. In fact, if it were anyone but me employing him, he’d likely be dead in a ditch by now at their hand.

“WOODRUFF?”

Nothing. He might be sleeping in a corner somewhere. He had a habit of doing that—stopping and dropping off—sometimes in the middle of a sentence.

“Mister Wopplesdown, your bath is—zzzzzzzzzzz…”

One got used to it.

I opened my evening paper hoping to forget my woes by focusing on someone else’s and tossed my coat onto a nearby divan from the eighteenth century, but which held a discarded coat as well as anything made in the
seventeenth
century—damn those snooty, seventeenth-century people.

I noticed in the headlines that there was something of worldaltering political significance going on in some other part of the globe and promptly skipped past it to the sports and comics sections. Those annoying political things take up a vast amount of valuable newspaper space that would be better left to athletics, funnies, and crossword puzzles if you ask me.

I was still trying to figure out the latest Opus cartoon, and confused as to why I never found it funny, when Woodruff wandered in carrying my evening drink with the shirttail of his tuxedo hanging out. As I took the offered libation, I found myself wondering if
he
had enjoyed his own adventure with a water bottle today as well. I folded away Opus and made a mental note to set it on fire later (something not to be filed under ‘Things To Promptly Forget’).

“Woodruff? How are you this evening?”

“Still breathing, sir.”

“Glad to hear it. Listen. I’m going out of town tomorrow and staying through the weekend at least. Could I trouble you to pack me a bag, please?”

There was a momentary pause as Woodruff stared at me blankly.

“You
could
trouble me,” he said hopefully.

“Yes,” I said more pointedly. “I could.”

“Sooo…” he said, giving up rather quickly I thought. “…a week? That’s a good deal of luggage, sir.”