Batmen

[EU] “Childhood is idolizing Batman. Adolescence is when The Joker starts to makes sense. Adulthood is realizing Commissioner Gordon doesn’t get paid enough to deal with their shit.”

*****

It was in December of 1987; the first day I saw that light projected into the night sky. I was 9 years old, and it was raining - although that's not saying much. Rain in Gotham. Breaking news: Water wet.

I remember being so cold: and more than a little scared. Walking home through the night, gripping my mothers hand so tightly that I must have been hurting her. She gripped mine all the more tightly in return. Another closing shift. Another 8 hours sitting quietly in the little stock room at the back of the bar trying not to hear the way the customers spoke to her. Another walk through the city ignoring the whistles and the jeers. Just another Friday.

They weren't good days. People romanticize the past too much. They talk about the '80s as if they were this golden era, but honestly, things were the same then as they are now. We just didn't realize. We were too young, hadn't seen enough of the world to recognize the patterns. The cycles. The boom and bust. It never really changed.

...but that light in the sky. It was new. It was bright and alluring in the grimy city.

I asked her what it meant, and she told me that I didn't want to get mixed up in that sort of silliness. That it didn't matter. That it wouldn't help... but she never did tell me what it was. I only found that out later.

Months passed and the rumors swirled through the city like so much smoke, building, rising. Something stalked the streets at night. Something dark, and cruel, and powerful. No one had ever seen The Bat - but everyone knew someone who had. Jimmy's brother had seen it on the roof of the building opposite. It had been in the bar where Billy's dad drank beating up bad people. It looked right at Sally while she was playing in the yard one night and then flew away.

I was 10 years old when the rumors became news. It was real. The Bat. The Dark Knight. Gotham's Vengeance. All the crime and the corruption, the muggings, the shakedowns. From the back seat of Billy's dad's car we drove past the building still smouldering from last nights fire. "WE DID NOT PAY" sprayed crudely in white paint over the blackened walls - and there, right next door - the display of shiny new TVs. The news on repeat. "Batman credited with arrest of Salvatore Maroni!"

Even at 10 I knew who that was. And there he was, tied up like a hog, being dumped on the steps of the GCPD central by... Him. The bat. On TV. It was rea

Billy's dad clipped him around the ear for standing on the seat to stare at the TV. He did that sort of thing a lot. Looking back I don't think he was a bad man - just another broken one. Living on nerves, and fear, and whisky trying to take the pain of his back-breaking job away. He wanted his son to be tough. The city was cruel, and soft boys don't last here... at least that's what I tell myself. I don't want to believe he was an abusive drunk. I don't want to believe he deserved it.

We used to play in the little courtyard in the middle of Jimmy's apartment building. Really it was nothing more than a concrete pen where the ecosystem of trashcans could breed a bigger variety of rat, but it was sheltered from the rain, for the most part. The adults didn't bother us there. We'd play ball, and tag, and pull Sally's hair till she screamed. Sometimes her brother would come and yell at her and hit us with a rolled up magazine. Sometimes, when we'd been good, he'd share a few smokes with us, while we coughed and spluttered and tried to be men... but we didn't want to be men any more. We wanted to be Batmen.

As the wet spring rolled into the wetter summer we traded fog for a sticky humidity. The air was thick with the smell of leaded gasoline - that curling blue smoke of the kind you never see any more - adhering to our sweating bodies. We battled back and forth across our back alleys, and our little concrete sanctuary. Wearing paper masks and a pillowcase that Sally had dyed black - she caught hell for that - we dreamed of swinging between the skyscrapers. We were going to clean up the city when we grew up, and no one would be allowed to hit you with a rolled up magazine any more. No one would yell at you for spilling their beer and tan your hide with a belt. If they did... BAM. POW. The solution to every problem in our little world was only the swing of a fist away.

Months became years, and things didn't change. The Batman was on the TV all the time now. This or that criminal had been arrested or sent to Arkham. Another politician had been arrested for corruption - and then released. The news was full of commentary - were things actually getting worse?

The Bat kept dropping off criminals, beaten, bloody, but it didn't make any difference. Nothing really changed. Jimmy and I had long since stopped wearing our paper masks and pillowcases. We still met in the yard and threw hoops through the plastic crate we'd nailed to the building last summer but you can't really play basketball with two players. Bill and Sally... well, we never really saw Sally or Billy any more. They were always off doing... something... together. They'd drop by occasionally, but it wasn't the sam

All the news now was "Joker". Joker this. Joker that. There were so many stories it was hard to believe they were all the same man. Jimmy said it wasn't. Just a bunch of crazies all dressed up in the same outfit as an alibi. "Couldn't have been me officer. I was across town. A dozen people saw me!" Maybe he was right. It makes sense. The spirit of the 80s was fading away. That endless summer where we played ball, and snuck smokes, and dreamed of being heroes... the 90s had started with so much promise, but things don't change. I watched the Berlin wall come crashing down. Everyone told me the world would change. The Joker shot a schoolteacher in the face on live TV who had just been released from prison, cleared of being a communist spy. I guess I didn't like schoolteacher

The Soviet Union collapsed not long after, and I was told the world would change. The Joker blew up a veterans day parade full of soldiers injured in the gulf wa

The Democrats took the whitehouse in 1993 and I was told the world would change. The Joker burned Gotham city hall to the ground, with the entire corrupt staff inside it. Red. Blue. The were all bought and paid for either way. Purple and Green. Those were the real colors of politics in Gotham.

Things never changed. Not really. The world moved in circles and Gotham stayed Gotham. The Neon colors and big hair slowly replaced with ripped jeans and checked shirts... but inside were the same dead-eyed kids. The same tired single moms. The same drunk dads, just desperately trying to scrape by. Communist. Capitalist. Democrat. Republican. It didn't matter. The freaks and monsters fought over the corpse of my city, and The Batman added his bloody voice to the screaming crescendo. It didn't change anything. Maybe the Joker was right. The only thing that really made sense was anarchy. Maybe the only thing to do was to give up. Give in to the insanity of it all.

At night I tied up the phone posting on the world wide web about how wrong everyone was. The people who idolized The Batman. Idiots. I lived in Gotham. It wasn't like that. Not really. He wasn't making things better.

Sally got pregnant and married Billy. Jimmy was the best man. I didn't go to the wedding.