Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

The young man on the mattress was holding a book: Memories, Dreams, Reflections , by Carl Jung. Super Goat Man had evidently just pressed it on him, and had likely been extolling its virtues when I walked into the room.

“Hello,” said the young woman, her voice warm. I must have been staring, from my place in the middle of the room.

“You're Everett, aren't you?” said Super Goat Man, before I could speak.

“How'd you know my name?”

“You live on the block,” said Super Goat Man. “I've seen you running around.”

“I think we'll head down, Super Goat Man,” said the young man abruptly, tucking the book under his arm as he got up from the mattress. “Get something to eat before it's too late.”

“I want to hit the dance floor,” said the young woman.

“See you down there,” said Super Goat Man. With that the young couple were gone.

“You checking out the house?” said Super Goat Man to me once we were alone. “Casing the joint?”

“I'm looking for my friend,” I lied.

“I think some kids are hanging out in the backyard.”

“No, she went upstairs.” I wanted him to think I had a girlfriend.

“Okay, cool,” said Super Goat Man. He smiled. I suppose he was waiting for me to leave, but he didn't give any sign that I was bothering him by staying.

“Why do you live here?” I asked.

“These are my friends,” he said. “They helped me out when I lost my job.”

“You're not a superhero anymore, are you?”

Super Goat Man shrugged. “Some people felt I was being too outspoken about the war. Anyway, I wanted to accomplish things on a more local level.”

“Why don't you have a secret identity?”

“I wasn't that kind of superhero.”

“But what was your name, before?”

“Ralph Gersten.”

“What did Ralph Gersten do?”

“He was a college teacher, for a couple of years.”

“So why aren't you Ralph Gersten now?”

“Sometime around when they shot Kennedy I just realized Ralph Gersten wasn't who I was. He was a part of an old life I was holding on to. So I became Super Goat Man. I've come to understand that this is who I am, for better or worse.”

This was a bit much for me to assimilate, so I changed the subject. “Do you smoke pot?”

“Sometimes.”

“Were Mr. and Mrs. Gersten sad when you gave up your secret identity?”

“Who?”

“Your parents.”

Super Goat Man smiled. “They weren't my real parents. I was adopted.”

Suddenly I was done. “I'm going downstairs, Super Goat Man.”

“Okay, Everett,” he said. “See you down there, probably.”

I made my way downstairs, and lurked in the commune's muddy and ill-lit backyard, milling with the other teenagers and children stranded there by the throngs of frolickers — for the party was now overflowing its bounds, and we were free to steal beers from the counter and carry on our own tentative party, our own fumbling flirtations. I had no girlfriend, but I did play spin the bottle that night, crouched on the ground beneath a fig tree.

Then, near midnight, I went back inside. The living room was jammed with bodies — dancers on a parquet floor that had been revealed when the vast braided rug had been curled up against the base of the mantel. Colored Christmas lights were bunched in the corner, and some of them blinked to create a gently eerie strobe. I smelled sweat and smoke. Feeling perverse and thrilled by the kisses I'd exchanged in the mud beneath the tree, I meandered into the web of celebrants.

Super Goat Man was there. He was dancing with my mother. She was as I'd never seen her, braceleted wrists crossed above her head, swaying to the reggae — I think it was the sound track to The Harder They Come . Super Goat Man was more dressed-up than he'd been in his room upstairs. He wore a felt brocade vest and striped pants. He danced in tiny little steps, almost as though losing and regaining his balance, his arms loose at his sides, fingers snapping. Mostly he moved his head to the beat, shaking it back and forth as if saying no-no-no, no-no-no . He shook his head at my mother's dancing, as if he couldn't approve of the way she was moving, but couldn't quit paying attention either.

My father? He was seated on the rolled-up rug, his back against the mantel, elbows on his knees, dangling with forefinger and thumb a nearly empty paper cup of red wine. Like me, he was watching my mom and Super Goat Man. It didn't look as if it bothered him at all.

MY JUNIOR year at Corcoran College, in Corcoran, New Hampshire, Super Goat Man was brought in to fill the Walt Whitman Chair in the Humanities. This was 1981, the dawn of Reagan. The chair was required to offer one course; Super Goat Man's was listed in the catalogue as Dissidence and Desire: Marginal Heroics in American Life 1955–1975. The reading included Frantz Fanon, Roland Barthes, and Timothy Leary. It was typical of Corcoran that it would choose that particular moment to recuperate a figure associated with sixties protest, to enshrine what had once been at the vigorous center of the culture in the harmless pantheon of academia. It was Super Goat Man's first teaching job since the fifties. The commune on our street had shut down at some point in my high-school years, and I don't know where Super Goat Man had been in the intervening time. I certainly hadn't thought about him since departing for college.

He'd gained a little weight, but was otherwise unchanged. I first spotted him moving across the Commons lawn on a September afternoon, one with the scent of fallen and fermenting crab apples on the breeze. It was one of those rare, sweet days on either side of the long New Hampshire winter, when a school year was either falsely fresh before its plunge into bleak December, or exhausted and ready to give way to summer. Super Goat Man wore a forest green corduroy suit and a wide salmon tie, but his feet were still bare. A couple of Corcoran girls trailed alongside him. He had a book open as he walked — perhaps he was reading them a poem.

The college had assigned Super Goat Man one of the dormitory apartments — a suite of rooms built into Sweeney House, one of the student residences. That is to say, he lived on the edge of the vast commons lawn, and we students felt his watchful presence much as I had in Cobble Hill, on our street. I didn't take Super Goat Man's class, which was mostly full of freshmen, and of those renegade history and rhetoric majors who'd been seduced by French strains of philosophy and literary theory. I fancied myself a classics scholar then — though I'd soon divert into a major in history — and wasn't curious about contemporary political theory, even if I'd believed Super Goat Man to be a superior teacher, which I didn't. I wasn't certain he had nothing to offer the Corcoran students, but whatever it might be it wasn't summed up by the title of his class.

I did, however, participate in one of the late-night salons in the living room of Sweeney House. Super Goat Man had begun appearing there casually, showing up after a few students had occupied the couches, and had lit a fire or opened a bottle of red wine. Increasingly his presence was relied upon; soon it was a given that he was the center of an unnamed tradition. Though Corcoran College was then in the throes of a wave of glamorous eighties-style binge parties, and cocaine had begun to infiltrate our sanctum in the New Hampshire woods as if we were all denizens of Andy Warhol's Factory, the Sweeney House salons were a throwback to another, earlier temperature of college socializing. Bearded art students who disdained dancing in favor of bull sessions, Woolfian-Plathian girls in long antique dresses, and lonely gay virgins of both genders — these were the types who found their way to Sweeney to sit at Super Goat Man's feet. There were also, from what I observed, a handful of quiet superhero comic-book fans who revered Super Goat Man in that capacity and were covertly basking in his aura, ashamed to ask the sorts of questions I'd peppered him with in his room in the communal house, so long ago.