Jonathan Lethem - Men and Cartoons

The evening I sat in, Super Goat Man had dragged his phonograph out from his apartment and set it up in the living room so that he could play Lenny Bruce records for his acolytes. Super Goat Man had five or six of the records. He spoke intermittently, his voice unhurried and reflective, explaining the context of the famous comedian's arrests and courtroom battles before dropping the needle on a given track. After a while conversation drifted to other subjects. Cross talk arose, though whenever Super Goat Man began to speak in his undemonstrative way all chatter fell deferentially silent. Then Super Goat Man went into his apartment and brought out an Ornette Coleman LP.

“You know a bit about jazz, don't you, Everett?” It was the first time he'd addressed me directly. I hadn't known he'd recognized me.

“A thing or two, I guess.”

“Everett's father was the one who turned me on to Rahsaan Roland Kirk,” Super Goat Man told a teenager I recognized, a bespectacled sophomore who'd impressively talked his way into a classics seminar that was meant for upperclassmen. “I always thought that stuff was too gimmicky, but I'd never really listened.”

I tried to imagine when Super Goat Man and my dad had spent so much time together. It was almost impossible to picture, but Super Goat Man didn't have any reason to be lying about it. It was one of the first times I was forced to consider the possibility that my parents had social lives — that they had lives.

“Does your father write about jazz?” the sophomore asked me, wide-eyed. I suppose he'd misunderstood Super Goat Man's remark. There were plenty of famous — or at least interesting — fathers at Corcoran College, but mine wasn't one of them.

“My father works for New York State,” I said. “Department of Housing and Urban Development. Well, he just lost his job, in fact.”

“He's a good five-card-stud player too,” said Super Goat Man. “Cleaned me out a few times, I don't mind saying.”

“Oh yeah, my dad's a real supervillain,” I said with the heaviest sarcasm I could muster. I was embarrassed to think of my father sucking up to Super Goat Man, as he surely had during their long evenings together, whoever had taken the bulk of the chips.

Then the squeaky jazz began playing, and Super Goat Man, though seated in one of the dormitory's ratty armchairs, closed his eyes and began shaking his head as if transported back to the commune's dance floor, or perhaps to some even earlier time. I studied his face. The tufts around his ears and throat were graying. I puzzled over his actual age. Had Super Goat Man once spent decades frozen in a block of ice, like Captain America? If Ralph Gersten had been a college teacher in the fifties, he was probably older than my dad.

Eight months later the campus was green again. The term was almost finished, all of us nearly freed to summer, when it happened: the incident at the Campanile. A Saturday, late in a balmy night of revels, the Commons lawn full of small groups crossing from dorm to dorm, cruising at the parties which still flared like bonfires in the landscape of the campus. Many of us yet owed papers, others would have to sit in a final class the following Monday, but the mood was one of expulsive release from our labors. It was nearly three in the morning when Rudy Krugerrand and Seth Brummell, two of the wealthiest and most widely reviled frat boys at Corcoran, scaled the Campanile tower and began bellowing.

I was among those awake and near enough by to be drawn by the commotion, into the small crowd at the dark base of the Campanile tower. When I first gazed up at Rudy and Seth I was confused by what I saw: Were there four figures spotlit against the clock beneath the bells? And where were the campus authorities? It was as though this night had been officially ceded to some bacchanalian imperative.

That spring a sculpture student had, as his thesis project, decorated the Commons with oversize office supplies — a stapler in the dimensions of a limousine, a log painted as a number two pencil, and a pile of facsimile paper clips each the height of a human being, fashioned out of plastic piping and silver paint. I suppose the work was derivative of Claes Oldenburg, but the result made an impressive spectacle. It was two of the paper-clip sculptures that Rudy Krugerrand and Seth Brummell had managed to attach to their belts like mannequin dance partners and drag with them out onto the ledge of the Campanile clock, where they stood now, six stories from the ground. On the precipice at the clockface, their faces uplit in the floodlights, Rudy and Seth were almost like players in the climax of some Gothic silent-film drama, but they didn't have the poise or imagination to know it. They were only college pranksters, reelingly drunk, Seth with a three-quarters empty bottle of Jack Daniels still in his hand, and at first it was hard to make out what they were shouting. We on the ground predictably shouted “Jump!” back at them, knowing they loved themselves too dearly ever to consider it.

Then Rudy Krugerrand's slurred voice rose out above the din — or perhaps it was only that I picked it out of the din for the first time. “Calling Super Goat Man! Calling Super Goat Man!” He shouted this until his voice broke hoarse. “This looks like a job for Super Goat Man! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

“What's going on?” I asked a student beside me.

He shrugged. “I guess they're calling out Super Goat Man. They want to see if he can get them down from the ledge.”

“What do you mean?”

“They want to see him use his powers.”

From the clock tower Seth Brummell screamed now, in a girlish falsetto: “Oh, Super Goat Man, where are you?”

A stirring had begun in the crowd, which had grown by now to a hundred or more. A murmuring. Super Goat Man's name was planted like a seed. Under the guise of concern for Rudy and Seth, but certainly with a shiver of voyeuristic anticipation, some had begun to speak of going to the Sweeney House apartment, to see if Super Goat Man could be located. There was a hint of outrage: Why wasn't he here already? What kind of Super Goat Man was he, anyway?

Now a group of fifteen or twenty broke out and streamed down the hill, toward Sweeney House. Others trailed after them, myself included. I hid in this crowd, feeling like an observer, though I suppose I was as complicit as anyone. Were we only curious, or a part of a mob? It seemed, anyway, that we were under the direction of Rudy and Seth.

“That's right,” mocked Rudy. “Only Super Goat Man can save us now!”

Those who'd led the charge hammered on Super Goat Man's apartment door for a good few minutes before getting a result. Bold enough to have woken him, they inched backward at the sight of him on his threshold, dressed only in a flowery silk kimono, blinking groggily at the faces arrayed on the hill. Then someone stepped forward and took his arm, pointed him toward the Campanile. Any conversation was drowned in murmurs, and by the sound of sirens, now belatedly pulling up at the base of the tower. Super Goat Man shook his head sorrowfully, but he began to trek up the hill to the Commons, toward the Campanile. We all fell in around and behind him, emboldened at marching to the beat of a superhero's step, feeling the pulse of the script it now appeared would be played out, ignoring the fact that it had been written by Rudy and Seth and Jack Daniels. Super Goat Man's kimono fluttered slightly, not quite a cape. He tightened the sash, and strode, rubbing at his eyes with balled fists.

This success only seemed to enrage Rudy and Seth, who writhed and scorned from atop their perch. “Baaahh, baaahh, Super Goat Man!” they roared. “What's the matter with your goaty senses? Smoke too much dope tonight? Fuck you, Super Goat Man!” Seth lifted his giant paper clip above his head, to shake it like a fake strongman's prop dumbbell.