Anada 188

eZine lover (@eZine)

Published in 

Anada

 · 5 years ago

  

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 .   .   .   .  .   .  .   .  .   .           "Gullible's Travails" 
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  . . .  .   .   . . .  . . .  . . .               by Schwammy 

 
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        I’ve always found the idea of Batman compelling.  Here is a man with 
 enough psychological baggage to qualify for a lifetime of therapy who spurns 
 his role as a useless socialite, using it to mask his true identity--a dark 
 avenger of the night, an anonymous volunteer crimefighter who nightly dons 
 bondage gear to do battle with other costumed weirdos who, lacking his vast 
 inheritance, devote their time and energy to stealing and other acts of 
 mayhem. 

        True, this hardly describes the Batman I first encountered as a 
 child.  Yet I was equally drawn to that character, for reasons less readily 
 explicable.  This was the Adam West Batman of the '60s TV series. 

        Yet no matter which version of the character you believe in, any 
 version of Robin has always struck me as cynical and artless, as in: 

        "Kid sidekicks are big right now.  We should give him a kid 
 sidekick." 

        Thus when my cousin John and I would play Batman and Robin, wearing 
 our paper masks, bath towel capes, and utility belts sewn by his mother (the 
 earliest use of Velcro in my memory), it was always with the understanding 
 that I got to be Batman and he had to be Robin. 

        Perhaps John became resentful of being relegated to second banana and 
 longed to even the score.  Perhaps he grew to relish the role to the point 
 that he wanted to own it completely.  Whatever his motivation, at some point 
 in our adventures, John let me in on his deep, dark bombshell of a secret. 
 Apparently relying on my trusting nature and as-yet undiagnosed myopia, my 
 cousin revealed that it was actually he who played Robin on the TV show. 

        Of course, this assertion flew in the face of (adult) logic for at 
 least three reasons:  (1) John was five years old.  (2) The adult actor 
 *THWACK*ing the Joker's henchmen on our Zenith neither looked nor sounded 
 even remotely like my cousin.  (3) The show was no longer being made, having 
 been cancelled in 1968, a year before he was even born. 

        None of which bothered me -- or even occurred to me -- at the time. 
 John stuck to his story and deftly shot down my every attempt to discredit 
 him: 

        Me:  So why does it say "Burt Ward" instead of your name at the 
             beginning of the show? 
      John:  I have to use a fake name to get around the child labor laws. 
        Me:  Well, how do you get to the show? 
      John:  My parents drive me. 
        Me:  So your parents know that you're Robin? 
      John:  No, the studio's next to my school. 
        Me:  Oh.  Does Batman ever let you drive the Batmobile? 
      John:  Of course!  After all, I built the thing... 

        And so I became the willing victim of the most ludicrous 
 misinformation campaign in the history of whopperdom.  If my cousin’s intent 
 was to instill envy in me, however, he couldn’t have been less successful. 
 It was cool being related to a TV star.  Far from jealous, I now began to 
 regard him as a role model.  He had done something in his five short years, 
 while I had been content to sit back and mooch off my parents.  I believed 
 my cousin was Robin for the same reason I believed in Santa Claus, The 
 Easter Bunny, and the Protestant Work Ethic:  I wanted to believe. 

        Of course, the glorious dream came to an end soon enough, as glorious 
 dreams will.  I suppose my parents wearied quickly of hearing "There's 
 John!" every afternoon as a 23-year-old ham smacked his palm with a green- 
 gloved fist crying, "Catwoman, you are not a nice person!" I can imagine the 
 uncomfortable sidelong glances, the telepathic arguments flashed back and 
 forth over whose side I got it from as my parents grappled with this novel 
 dilemma: How do you break it to your boy that his second cousin isn't really 
 Robin? 

        Finally my father took me aside and gently disabused me of the tall 
 tale I'd held so dear to my heart.  I think I took it fairly well, though 
 for a while I was angry at John for being the first person to lie to me. 
 (Or was he?  The Santa lie surely must have come first.) 

        Mostly, though, I was filled with a terrible sense of ennui.  After 
 all, once you've had a superhero in the family, everything else smacks of 
 anticlimax. 

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  .           anada 188                   by Schwammy  (c)2000 anada e'zine . 
       
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