by Carson, Tom
True, he did go through a mildly rebellious phase, during which he lurked about in blue jeans, white T-shirt and red windbreaker to an oddly John Philip Sousa-esque effect—while swigging milk directly from the bottle, an animalistic sight no doubt deliberately calculated to arouse more true horror in aging parental bosoms than would stealing strangers’ cars or knifing unknown West Side Puerto Ricans. Later—at least on his summer vacation, since at Andover they probably wouldn’t have permitted it—he grew a touchingly wispy goatee, went constantly about in a mangy sweatshirt, and began reading oddly titled books, often shaped like bathroom tiles, whose contents I was no longer invited to peruse in his wake. But I understood that he was simply asserting a separate identity for himself. In any case, throughout his adolescence, he and I had only one serious confrontation, the circumstances behind which will take some going into.
Sometime in the early Fifties, at no one’s behest that I knew of, the paper boy had started chucking something new in the general direction of the Fifth Avenue pile’s front door. To my quickly furtive bemusement, as I unwrapped the first bundle, I saw that it was, of all things, a comic book—one whose attention-compelling rubric had never so much as grazed my experience before. The next day, another turned up, featuring a different set of joyous thugs but under the same general banner. And so on, making about a dozen different titles in all until a second installment of the first one I’d seen was delivered, at which point the whole cycle began over again. As months and then years went by, if one adventure was retired, another would soon replace it.
Their provenance remained a mystery. But in what may have been an early sign of second childhood, I soon grew addicted to them—and stayed so for well over a decade, while they kept on plopping out of nowhere onto our massive stoop. Even after my son led me to take my first tottering steps into the realm of literature, the comic books retained a viselike grip on a Yukon-sized portion of my medulla oblongata.
For one thing, they were lavishly produced, with both a slickness and an aggregate thickness of pages that satisfied my once again boyish thumb and forefinger; for whatever reason, a great deal of money had plainly been sunk into contriving this new world of wonders and garden of delights. The drawing, in bold color, was splendidly vivid, the writing dynamic, and the storylines far-fetched, extravagant, and utterly irresistible—cunningly catering to callow fantasies of power and guile whose expression one might well have found repugnant if not actively dangerous in real life, but which could be gobbled up in perfect safety in a context of such blatant make-believe.
Unfortunately, I no longer own a single copy, having burnt the lot to please my son after our confrontation. But I did save one mid-Sixties editorial newsletter, which may give you some of the original flavor if I can find and you can see it in this fading light.
Two-Fisted U.S. Adventures:
What’s Next, Straight from the Uncle’s Mouth
At ease, down boy, and hello sailor, which oughta cover pretty much every last mother-loviri one of you Two-Fisted devotees and sons of guns out therefrom Bounding, Maine to Fifty; Cal.—at least the ones in uniform, or else who wish they were. And what it means is “Lissen up, “because this is your Unka Sam behind the bullhorn, ready to give you the straight skivvy on what’s gonna be hurtling into your long-suffering mailbox over the next couple ‘a weeks. Buckle up, chow down, and joke if you got ‘em, boys—the reading lamp is lit, the fan mail’s in thefantail, and we all know it ain’t over till the paper tiger roars. Here comes what you’ve been waiting for—Sam’s inside scoop on what’s next:
First off, shavetails, better hit the deck, because we’ve got a brand-new Two-Fisted series coming screaming out of the sky into your ever-lovin’ lap. That’s right, it’s just what you’ve been begging for—Alsop: Bird of Prey. You all remember cigar-chompin’ Joe was the newspaper columnist whose ability to turn himself into a hawk spitting bullets at will gave S/Sgt. Barry Sadler much-needed cover to get outta Laos in one piece awhile back (Barry the Singing Killer, ish #17). Now our gee-eyed Joe’s getting his own comic, and all we can say is “Heads up!!!” In Bird of Prey’s action-packed debut ish, afinky squad of missile-toting Chicoms teaches Joe in a big hurry how to fly with just one wing—and if we need to tell you which one, then maybe it’s time your Unka hired himself some new illustrators. Just kidding, Norm, LeRoy, Grandma! Meanwhile, as this guy named Joe revs his claws for takeoff, all we can tell him is that it’s a jungle out there—and Brother!! he knows that already.
As for Joe’s old foxhole buddy S/Sgt. Sadler himself, in the last Barry the Singing Killer (#19: “What Rhymes with Agent Orange, Sergeant?”) we shipped him up-country on a pacification mission right after “The Ballad of the Green Berets” started duking it out with the peaceniks all over the Stateside music charts. Well, right now the Crewcut One’s wondering if he’ll ever get a chance to spend those ASCAP royalties on leave in Saigon’s Hootchy-Kootchy Town, because a chopper’s just dropped him on the spot in Hir Tu Long Hamlet, Nidipindamuc District, Gwaynow Province, Republic of South Vietnam, and the word for that spot is H-O-T. If you’ve ever wondered how you’d do holding off a horde of crazed Charlies with a blazing M-16 in one hand while roughing out the lyrics to your next hit single (“The A-Team”) with the other, then bite down hard on that grenade ring, because this is Sadler like you’ve never seen him before. Two pages in, he’s already been tied to a chair by his old Asiatic nemesis Domino—yup, the beautiful, unscrupulous, slant-eye Mata Hari who tried to talk the Sarge into putting his beret on backward in Singing Killer #12 (“Mekong, You Kong”), and who first turned up battling Allen, Eleanor, and Foster way back in ish #6 of The Fantastic Family (“Why, Mr. Dulles—I Call This One Quemoy, and I Call That One Matsu”). And you know what, gang? Get ready to salute sitting down, because we haven’t even given away any of the really good stuff—and that’s a promise, Soldier!
And now just give your Unka Sam a second to get this telescope turned around and aimed out West and back about a hundred years, because I’m lookin’ for somebody, and I bet you know who. Well, gitcher cotton-pickin’ hands off and lemme look awready, pardnerlYep, I think I spot him. That ten-gallon white hat, those chaps, that glistening straight shooter in its holster; them black horn-rims—well, hang me from the Mojave’s highest tree if it ain’t The Marshal of Tombstone, coming over the rise just past that bleached cow skull and those cowering Washington redskins. Last month, we left the Sheriff riding hard out of O’Keeffe, N.M., where he’d found every last inhabitant dead (“The Village of Poisoned Water,” ish #4). Now he’s galloping South on Eternal Vigilance to get help rounding up a posse from Sheriff Bull Connor; who all you readers in our Dixie market met in ish #13 (“Selma Birthright? Nevuh!”) of our Two-Fisted Puts the White Back in the Old Red, White, and Blue regional anthology. Unless you’re a stranger to these parts, you know there’s rough riding ahead—and if you can keep the sand out of your eyes as the bullets fly, look for the whole story in ish #5 (“Barry? Lyndon”).
Sounds good, right? Well, don’t think old Unka is finished with you yet. Uh-uh. We’ve saved the best for last.
That’s right, gang. This is it. The Big One. The comic you’ll be putting the squeeze on your pillow and your parents both until you get. You’ve been begging us for years, so now we’ve broken down and done our best by … the “Origins” issue of JACK EGAN, CIA!!
* * *
February 19, 1945. His boots still wet but his M-l Garand already blazing, a 17-year-old Marine inches his determined way up a black, shell-plowed, blood-soaked beach on Iwo Jima. As a Nip machine gun pounds and his best friends from boot camp drop around him, he’s thinking desperately: “Maybe we can beat this enemy—but what about the next one? And the next? And the NEXT?”
You’ve seen CIA man Jack Egan in action in Guatemala (#3: “Well, When We Overthrow One, It Stays Overthrown, Paco—That’s the Difference”). You’ve watched him banging his fist in frustration as his Brigade 2506 buddies get dragge
d down by a giant claw rising up out of the Caribbean (#il: “Dr. Castro and His Monstrous Mechanical Island”). You’ve seen him dodge French traffic and plastique bombs in a Paris where the O.A.S. wants de Gaulle dead, de Gaulle wants the O.A.S. kaput, and one tough, f ast-thinking Yank has to figure out how to play both ends against the middle to keep an independent Algeria from going communist (#14 “Parlez-Vous Freedom, Mon General?”). And, yes, you’ve seen him in Nam (#7, “It’s a Dirty Job, and These Frog Eaters Can’t Do It”; #12, “Marvin the ARVN”; #15, “Flight of the Phoenix Program”). You’ve even seen him court his wife, the beautiful U.S. embassy consular officer Shirley Smith of Winston-Salem, N.C. (#8, “This World’s No Place for a Woman, Baby—So Let Me Take You Home”). But until now, you’ve never seen…
The Way It All Began. And trust your Unka Sam—YOU AREN’T EVER GOING TO FORGET IT, SON.
In fact—this is rumpled, rheumy Thurston resuming the narrative, returning like Mac Arthur or a radish—the “Origins” issue of Jack Egan’s exploits was the comic in residence on my lap the day my son confronted me. Next to the library in the Fifth Avenue pile was a den stacked high with turn-of-the-century board games for boys that, after rediscovering a key to the place, I was mildly surprised my own long-dead pater had found time for: Philippine Insurrection, Leathernecks in Nicaragua, Canal. Over the years, I had refashioned this room, which no one else ever entered, into nothing less than a private shrine devoted to Two-Fisted U.S. Adventures. Every issue that I’d ever smuggled upstairs from, the stoop was bagged in plastic and carefully filed on shelves, and a framed baker’s half-dozen of the most corpuscle-rousing covers splashed the mahogany walls above the leather armchair I had moved in there.
It had become a sort of metastatic annex to the actual library, and I occasionally felt a twinge of guilt when a sudden flaring of nostrils and gulp in the chest would tell me that my path was taking me to the side door instead of proceeding straight on. Once I was ensconced within, however, I couldn’t deny that the pleasures I found here were of a more robust type than the attenuated if genuine joys of the other universe to which my son had introduced me—but which had, after all, belonged to him first. In this room, by contrast, one felt rather like donning a smoking jacket, even though one had always been a nicotine teetotaler.
Although, to my knowledge, he had never before set foot in my cubby, I felt no surprise on looking up to see my boy in its doorway, holding a volume of Yeats whose pages played Leda to his index finger’s swan. Nor did his face reveal any at the sight of my lurid treasure trove. Instead, after a moment, he merely asked: “You’re reading about Jack Egan, aren’t you, Papa?”
“Why, yes.” My chest felt a sudden cresting of delight at the thought that mine need no longer be a solitary vice—for I did know it was a vice; still, the solitude was what had made it so. “Do you know who he is—have you read these?”
“Over and over.” My son looked indecisive for a moment. “I hate him,” he said unexpectedly.
“Hate him!” I chortled. “That’s ridiculous. They’re only comic books, and Jack Egan’s a hero—my favorite, in fact. Why, just look, son, here he is, not much more than a boy—not much older than you, in fact—bayoneting a Jap machine gunner in the foothills of Mount Suribachi. Those others in the background are carrying a flag, you see?”
Wincing, my son turned away from the explosive panels I had held up for his benefit. “Maybe it’s easier for me to hate him than to ask myself why a hero would do hateful things,” he said, suddenly sounding like the lad he was.
“Easiest of all would be not to read his adventures, wouldn’t you say? If he isn’t to your taste, there’s always Pogo … or television, I suppose.”
My boy’s gaze at his father combined affection, hesitation, stubbornness, and doubt in quantities that altered with each blink, as if he were seeking precisely the right formula for the unpleasant news he felt obliged to impart. Then his mouth came to a decision.
“Papa—the people in your comics aren’t made up,” he said.
Bucking merrily backward in my armchair, dexter hand to ascoted gorge and mate to knee for a brisk slap, I roared with laughter. “What!? You might as well tell me that I am. Or is your next announcement going to be that intrepid Jack Egan of the CIA is your real father, and I—your loving, doting Dad, who can flaunt bills from Andover, the dentist, the Gotham Book Mart, and EA.O. Schwarz to prove it—am indeed fiction?”
He had no direct answer to that sally, which I had rather enjoyed. (I rather hoped Sally had, too.) Laying Yeats aside, he crouched in front of my armchair. His voice was even, but his face was odd: “It’s not only him,” he said, putting his own hand on the knee I’d just smacked. “All of them, Papa—they’re all real. All those things in your comic books are really happening.”
“If that’s so—and I’m only going along because this seems to matter to you, absurd as the whole notion is—then why haven’t I been reading about them in the newspaper?”
“When was the last time you saw one of those delivered here?” my son asked.
Well, that did give me pause. On reflection, it did seem to have been a while—since the very first day that Two-Fisted U.S. Adventures had shown up at my door, in what I now realized was their stead. I had simply assumed that the good old Times and WSJ were still arriving at the house and drifting about unread, as actually reading either had never had much to do with the quality of the reassurance they provided.
Still, the whole thing struck me as fantastic. “Frankly, all this strikes me as fantastic,” I said. “Who’d go to all this trouble just for me?”
My son looked nonplussed—though not for the reason I was expecting, it turned out. “Oh, it’s not just you,” he finally explained. “Thousands and thousands of these go out to everyone like you. To your whole class, in fact.”
“From Groton?” I gasped. “There were only a couple of hundred of us, my boy, and that was before the fellow with the scythe got to work.”
“No, no. I mean, most of them probably do get the comics, but it’s everybody with your kind of money. All the people so high on the ladder that they haven’t had a clue for years who’s actually running things or how, since they can take it for granted—accurately enough—that it’s all for their benefit anyway.”
“I suppose next you’ll be telling me that all those nonsensical war films and assassinations on television are real, too,” I said, perhaps somewhat huffily. “For all that a hambone like that Cronkite fellow would have been laughed off the stage in my youth—as would poor Vladimir Huntley and Estragon Brinkley, for that matter.”
“I’m afraid so, Dad,” my son said gently. “Whoever is doing this apparently didn’t worry about TV. They knew that everyone your age wouldn’t believe anything on the tube was real.”
“But do you know why they’re doing it?” I asked. “I mean, what are the comics for—to amuse us? Believe me, that was one thing we could always manage on our own, without too many casualties except among the servants.”
“It’s so you won’t be completely uninformed about what’s going on, but won’t take any of it seriously If you hear someone talking about any of it, and even if you join in, you’ll think it’s all just hobbies and conversation pieces.”
Although I still couldn’t credit what my son was telling me, its import had nonetheless begun to sink in. “But my God,” I cried, looking up at my neatly bagged and filed shelves in a daze. “My God, if everything in there is true—all of it, from VJ Day on—then this is a nightmare, what we’re living through.”
“ ‘A nightmare from which I am trying to awake,’ you could say,” my boy cheerfully agreed, audibly quoting some author unknown to Dad.
A new thought now struck me smartly across the face, as if in challenge to a duel. Briefly, as I shook my head, I thought this slap was advising the old self never to speak of any but trivial matters again, which I found oddly soothing. Instead, it made me say this, although Alger’s name had not passe
d my lips in many years:
“I used to know Alger Hiss, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well"—I was groping among unfamiliarities-”the truth is, my boy, in all this time I’ve never known if he actually did this country of ours real harm. Try as one might, it was hard to see much menace in that pumpkin. One’s thoughts would drift to Halloween, Linus’s vigil and so forth, and picture Alger as some sort of pin-striped trick-or-treater—for all that virtually unlimited treats apparently didn’t dissuade him from secretly smashing eggs on one’s car and writing rude words in soap on one’s mirror.”
“Perfect penmanship, though,” my son proposed—mockingly? Defensively? I hardly knew.
“But all the same—and much as it pains me to say so—there isn’t much question that he was indifferent to the possibility of placing this country at risk, at a time when one had put him in a position of trust. If he’d been a bank teller, all sorts of people who swear by Alger’s innocence would have been calling for his head. And for that,” I said, surprised by my own conviction, “he jolly well should have been penalized—for all that even some of your mother’s Newport friends developed a temporary but noticeable stammer when they electrocuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, presumably on the theory that two more Jews wouldn’t matter much to anybody, while giving my fellow AngloSaxon a mild five-year prison term on a perjury rap.”
“Well?” my son said.