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If Edith saw this room she would vomit. Why did you kill her for me, F.?
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I will explain how F. got his extraordinary body. Once again I will explain it to myself. HOW JOE’S BODY BROUGHT HIM FAME INSTEAD OF SHAME: headline on the back of an American comic which we both read one afternoon when we were thirteen. We were sitting on some trunks in an unused solarium on the third floor of the orphanage, a glass-roofed room dark as any other because of the soot deposited by a badly placed chimney – we often hid here. JOE’S BODY was the concern of an ad for a muscle-building course. His triumph is traced in seven cartoon panels. Can I recall?
1. Joe is skeletal. His legs are piteous sticks. His red bathing suit is the baggy boxer type. His voluptuous girl friend is with him. Her thighs are thicker than his. The calm sea beyond contrasts with Joe’s ordeal. A man with a grand physique is humiliating him. We cannot see the torturer’s face, but the girl informs Joe that the man is a well-known local nuisance.
2. A tiny sail has appeared on the horizon. We see the bully’s face. We appreciate his beery chest. The girl friend has drawn up her knees and is wondering why she ever dated this no-assed weakling. Joe has been pulled to his feet by the bully and now must sustain a further insult.
3. The sail is gone. Some minuscule figures play ball at the edge of the sea. Seagulls appear. An anguished Joe stands beside the girl he is losing. She has put on her white sunhat and has turned her tits from him. She answers him over her right shoulder. Her body is assive and maternal, low-breasted. Somehow we have an impression of stretched muscles in her abdomen.
JOE: The big bully! I’ll get even some day.
HER: Oh, don’t let it bother you, little boy!
4. Joe’s room, or the remains of it. A cracked picture hangs askew on the green wall. A broken lamp is in motion. He is kicking a chair over. He wears a blue blazer, tie, white ducks. He clenches his fist, a clawlike articulation from a wrist thin as a bird leg. The girl friend lies in some panel of the imagination snuggling in the bully’s armpit, winking out a thousand shameful anecdotes about Joe’s body.
JOE: Darn it! I’m sick and tired of being a scarecrow! Charles Axis says he can give me a REAL body. All right! I’ll gamble a stamp and get his FREE book.
5. LATER. Could this be Joe? He flexes a whole map of jigsaw muscles before his dresser mirror.
JOE: Boy! It didn’t take Axis long to do this for me! What MUSCLES! That bully won’t shove me around again!
Is this the same red bathing suit?
6. The beach. The girl has come back. She is having a good time. Her body is relaxed and hips have appeared. Her left hand is raised in a gesture of surprised delight as her vision of Joe under goes a radical transformation. Joe has just thrown a punch which lands in an electrical blaze on the bully’s chin, knocking him off balance, knitting his eyebrows with amazed pain. Beyond we have the same white strand, the same calm sea.
JOE: What! You here again? Here’s something I owe you!
7. The girl touches Joe’s memorable biceps with her right hand. Her left shoulder and left arm are obscured by Joe’s massive chest but we know that she has shoved it down the back of his tight red bathing suit and is working with his testicles.
HER: Oh, Joe! You ARE a real man after all!
AN ATTRACTIVE GIRL SITTING ON THE SAND NEARBY: GOSH! What a build!
THE ENVIOUS MAN BESIDE HER: He’s already famous for it!
Joe stands there in silence, thumbs hooked in the front of his bathing suit, looking at his girl, who leans lasciviously against him. Four thick black words appear in the sky and they radiate spears of light. None of the characters in the panel seems aware of the celestial manifestation exploding in terrific silence above the old marine landscape. HERO OF THE BEACH is the sky’s announcement.
F. studied the ad for a long time. I wanted to get on with what we had come for, the scuffling, the dusty caresses, the comparison of hair, the beauty of facing a friend and binding two cocks in my hand, one familiar and hungry, one warm and strange, the flash along the whole length. But F.’s eyes were wet, his lips trembling as he whispered:
– Those words are always in the sky. Sometimes you can see them, like a daytime moon.
The afternoon darkened over the soot-layered glass roof. I waited silently for F.’s mood to change and I suppose I fell asleep, for I started at the sound of scissors.
– What are you clipping out there, F.?
– Charles Axis thing.
– You going to send away?
– Bet your fucking life.
– But it’s for thin guys. We’re fat.
– Shut your fucking face.
– We’re fat, F.
– Smack! Wham! Pow!
– Fat.
– Socko! Sok! Bash!
– Fat fat fat fat fat fat fat!
I lit a stolen match and we both huddled over the comic which had fallen to the floor. At the right-hand side of the ad there is an actual photo of the man who holds the title “The World’s Most Flawlessly Formed Man.” Oh! I remember! In a flawless bathing suit he stands on the clip-away coupon.
– But look at him, F., the guy’s got no hair.
– But I have hair. I have hair.
His hands are fists, his smile is Florida, he does not look serious, he doesn’t really care about us, maybe he is even a little fat.
– Just inspect this photo, F. The guy is soft in the gut.
– He’s fat, all
