Growing up I was poor, or at least I looked poor and felt poor which amounts to the same thing, but I was also resourceful. Before I was six I had recreated a scaled version of Bedrock out of cardboard and clay. I had houses and fences and cars and some of the office buildings even had working cardboard elevators. Now it’s true, I cheated a little. I reused some of my designs and made multiple versions of some houses.

I also grew up slowly. From what I know now, I was really onto something. I was in no particular hurry to grow up. So when I was 11, it surprised no one that I spent weeks making my Halloween costume. I was Ultiman, resplendent in my flesh-colored stockings under my 70s blue short shorts and my faded threadbare orange towel my grandma had sewn onto a cheap shirt. I even designed my own logo. It was an orange lowercase “u” on the right hand side of a blue circle. I spent days designing that logo. And constructing the badge with some felt I stole from school. I didn’t just cut out and glue the u on top of a circle of blue felt, no. I cut out two circles. The blue one was a little larger than the orange one. With the blue felt circle, I carefully cut out the “u” then pasted the blue over top of the orange so the orange showed through. Then I had grandma help me sew the badge on my shirt.

It’s funny how little boys are. It’s funny what a funny little boy I was. I said no one was surprised that I was so keen on creating a super ego for myself. That’s true. But, I remember people were a little concerned. My father, more than usual, avoided talking about it or thinking about it. My mother made funny faces at me. My older brother, much more direct, called me names. And a young farmhand who worked for my dad spoke to me very seriously, in a tone reserved mainly for doctors delivering bad news. He told me my age which I knew very well and said that sooner or later, hopefully sooner, I would have to grow up.

But I didn’t want to. And I wouldn’t. Not just yet. And I went to my room, just then, and wrote out a whole background story to Ultiman which blended Wonder Woman and Superman and a little bit of the X-Men, though I didn’t know who they were. I was not, like Superman, an alien. I was born, Ultiman was born, with my powers. Which I had to hide for fear of persecution. All of the good I did had to be kept secret. But it wasn’t so terribly difficult keeping it secret since nobody paid much attention to me. The overlooked, the invisible, can do much good, and much evil; nobody notices. I had a gallery of nemeses, as well. All terribly dull and practical villains; the biggest villain of all, after all, being mediocrity.

Funny that men, that boys, love the alter ego archetype. Funny that the boy wants to be tough and strong and virile and free and heroic. Funny that the archetype requires him to do all of this in secret. And those boys grow up to be lawyers, accountants, bankers, doctors, orderlies. Maybe some join the army or the police. Maybe some love their wives and maybe some hit them.

But at 11, there was none of that. There was just me: Ultiman. Not just a costume, an identity. I practiced how fast I could change. We had ropes in the barn. I would hurry home from school where I was regular slovenly good-at-everything, goody-twoshoes Silas and rush out to the barn where I would change, no transform, no become, and I would, in the privacy of my fantasies, and I would swing and kick and jump and run. I would champion.

When I wore the costume for Halloween, when I became Ultiman for everyone to see, nobody cared. I would knock on the door and when they opened the door I wanted strangers to see Ultiman and be awed. But, and I remember this well, all they saw was a poor kid perhaps too tall, perhaps too old, in short shorts with a threadbare towel sewed on to the back of a shirt. I didn’t fetch much candy that year; I went home early.

SS