click for fullWhen I was three, I started loving Spiderman and wouldn't stop.
I loved Spiderman because he was broke, weird, always getting yelled at, and girls didn't like him. I could relate on all those levels, and he became an immediate favorite of mine for life. For years, two minutes was about as long as I could go without thinking about Spiderman. I pawed through every Spiderman comic I could get my hands on, tried fruitlessly to draw him on numerous occasions, and had extremely vivid dreams about him. I didn't really interact with other children much, so I had no way of knowing so many kids had this same fixation, all I knew was I wanted to eat, breathe, and sleep Spiderman and Spiderman-related merchandise.
Spiderman was also on a show I hated called "The Electric Company". The show featured weird theremin music, bizarre psychedelic effects, and the incorporation of Acid Jazz, which was like regular Jazz, but funkier (truth be told, the funk was the thing I disliked). It all sounded seedy, scary and the jazzy characters on television who liked it, always creeped me out. They wore dark sunglasses, kept their voices at a seedy level, and said things like "Heyyyyy... outta sight, man!" and "Hey cat! Gimmie some
skiiinnn, OWWW!" These were not normal people, and it seemed like Jazz cats were exactly the sorts of characters I'd always been warned might one day try to use candy to entice me into a van with no windows.
However, in addition to the funky jazz influence, The Electric Company also had Spiderman. Every day, I would suffer through the eerie sights and sounds of the show, waiting for Spidey to come on so I could finally turn it off and try to forget about Morgan Freeman, and how he seemed to be possessed by the Devil. They usually waited until towards the end of the show to have the Spiderman segment, and then when he finally did come out, HE DIDN'T SPEAK! Instead, some strange synthesized sound effects were heard, and a word bubble would appear over his head with his thoughts written inside. YOU HAD TO READ WHAT HE WAS SAYING! The only way they could have presented a less satisfying Spiderman to me, would have been if they had drawn webs on a sleeping Basset Hound, thrown on red underpants and called
him "Spiderman". Nevertheless, I watched it faithfully, and was happy to have it. Weird-no-talking-Spiderman-who-didn't-sw
ing-around-or-do-much, was better than nothing.
I insisted on being Spiderman for Halloween for two consecutive years before my Mother had to put a stop to it.At my graduation from Kindergarten, I was actually very well behaved. For the first ten minutes. Ten minutes was about as long as I could go before I started to have extremely elaborate fantasies about being Spiderman. People in the audience had to watch me make "devil horns" at them throughout the rest of the proceedings. Afterwards, my parents told me how proud they were of me, except the part where I was "being Spiderman" while the rest of my classmates were sitting quietly.
How had they noticed?At the bank with my mother, there was always a robbery in progress. I would wait until the last possible moment to swing down, crawl across the floor and web the first two robbers. Then I would kick the the last one right before he was able to finish wrestling a purse away from a sobbing old woman. Everyone loved me. When the woman behind the counter asked my mother if she wanted me to have a sucker for being good, my mother could only shake her head sadly. What
could she do? Her son wasn't "being good" at the bank. Her son had been crawling around on all fours, swinging on the velvet rope, shoving his palms around and making "Thwip! Thwip!" noises like a spastic. He had also come close to kicking a customer with one of his tiny legs.
At church, there would be an earthquake, and the giant Jesus on the cross would come swinging down towards all those poor people. I would throw myself under it, and hold it until they snapped out of it and ran, shouting "Thank you, Spiderman! Thank you!!" They would love me so much. Even if the big Jesus killed me, I would die for them. My father would hear me muttering under my breath, "I could save them. I could save them all," while I stared off into space, and hiss at me to "shut it".
Everything I got my hands on, I would examine thoroughly to assess its contribution to my superhero fantasy. A disused band-aid tin from the trash was attached to my belt everywhere I went, in hopes that I could put some Spiderman web-fluid cartridges or some other relevant items in there. Once, my father brought home magnets in the hopes that a healthy interest in physical science might distract me from my Spiderman fixation. Instead, I taped them to my hands to see if maybe I could climb the refrigerator with them.
At some point, I decided I wanted to make a giant web in our neighbor's back yard. Because I was always taking it, string was a pretty rare commodity in our house (I usually needed it so that all my action figures could swing from webs or, if I thought they were evil, become caught in them). My father, tired of never having any that wasn't already tied to the furniture, had purchased a giant spindle of cotton string. All was well in his world. All was well in my world too, because a giant spindle of string was exactly what I'd been looking for. Barbara still tells the story of coming home to find it. "I knew that you'd done it. You'd gone around every... single... tree and every single bush in the back yard. It was all kind of...webbed together."
Of the items in the Spiderman Utility Belt, I had never seen Spiderman use a watch, walkie talkie, tiny grappling hook, or handcuffs. I was a little suspicious.My Spiderman fixation finally came to a head when I decided to take it up a notch. I decided I would try to make a spiderman mask.
I started with a shirt that I couldn't wear anymore. The reason I couldn't wear it anymore, was because my torso would show through the largish holes I had cut out of the front and the back. I had two red gravestone shapes which, once sewed together, looked more like a red executioner's hood than a superhero mask. No matter, I would just tuck it inside the neck of my shirt.
The biggest problem was the eyes. In the comics, Spidey's eyes were large white shapes, but I had no idea how they worked. I'd never seen sunglasses with white lenses I could use. Luckily, there was a short-lived spiderman series on TV that I'd seen, where the eyes were made out of screen. Of COURSE! I cut the eyes out of a window screen I didn't use anymore, mainly because if I ever opened that window again, my parents would see two Spiderman-shaped eyeholes in it and I would have to live somewhere else.
One problem is that the edges of the eyes were really sharp, I know because while I was using my mom's sewing scissors to cut them out, I got a few cuts on my hands from the screen's tiny, sharp wires. I tried folding the edges a little for safety, in hopes that it would keep my face from getting scratched. I was in quite a rush, as I was only a few stitches away from having my own Spiderman mask! When it was done, I looked in the mirror and tried it on. I remember thinking it looked pretty good, although if I could see it now, I know I must have resembled a low-budget sideshow attraction.
Web shooters were a problem for me. There was an advertisement in the comics for a small squeeze-bulb that would shoot out webs "just like Spidey's". It looked like a rip-off to me, so I never ordered one. It didn't stop me from daydreaming about what it MIGHT have been like. Maybe it wasn't EXACTLY like Spiderman's webs, (I was no rube) but maybe you could still swing around by them a little before they broke. Maybe you could sorta rope up bad guys if you used a lot of the web-sauce and if they stayed still while it dried.
They sold some official Spiderman Web Shooters, but they were just suction-cup dart guns that strapped to your wrists. The darts had some thin kite string tied to the end, so that once you shot a dart at something, you were effectively tied to it. I went through about ten of those, because they had a tendency to break after about a half an hour. (Too bad I didn't just SAVE them. There's one on ebay selling for $179 right now!)
I tucked two watches off Dad's dresser into my pocket, thinking they would make good looking webshooters, and headed out. As I made my way through the living room, mom made a big show of thinking I was the REAL Spiderman, while Dad seemed more interested in the eyes, and where they had come from. It was clearly time to go out in the back yard and try out the new mask.
When I was that age, most of my days out of school were spent alone, running around in the back yard. I had a trapeze on the swingset that was unhooked on one side, which meant I could swing on it like it were a rope. I could also pretend the yard was the side of a building, and that the trees were actually flagpoles. I would jump from one flagpole to another, and once in a while I would fall, fall, fall down into the lower part of the yard and catch myself at the last possible moment. This game usually repeated until it got dark and I heard the dinner bell, or I fell asleep in the grass, and someone had to come and carry me back in the house. It was no wonder that I was such a skinny kid, as I refused to eat my parents' cooking and I rarely stopped running around the backyard.
We had a large dinner bell on the house, which could be heard throughout the neighborhood (much to our mortification in future years). I had one ring pattern and my sister had another. When I heard my ring, I dropped my webline (garden hose) and the bomb I was trying to diffuse (piece of bark) and ran on inside. I was keenly aware of my parents' ridiculous "no masks at the table" policy, so I took it off. My Mother screamed. Blood was trickling out of some of the deeper gouges in my face, while the dozens of tiny cuts made it look as if I had been caught head first in a belt sander. Two broken watches dangled from my small wrists. Once she had collected herself, I remember Mom saying, "It's a miracle he didn't blind himself."
They took the mask away and I was told not to wear it again. I kept finding it, however, and as soon as they saw my face was cut up, they knew what I'd been up to. Eventually they had to throw the thing away. I have no idea why they tried to keep it in the first place. Sideshow purposes, I can only guess.
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