It reminds me of when I was working at a boat parts factory in Bellingham, Washington, and among that good group of people, people who absolutely deserved better than their lot — I’m talking, like, Karl Marx weeping into his demitasse kind of deserving — I stepped out of character and likely out of a depression to ask a friendly guy who seemed fairly well educated if he wanted to grab a beer and talk about books. Or something like that.
He declined with the usual smokescreen of male jokiness and fake bonhomie, probably thinking it was a gay come-on, which would have made me far more interesting than I actually was. Sadly, I thought his girlfriend might have hit it off with the woman I was living with at the time, as they were both studying to be high school teachers.
It’s tough to realize you’re a misfit, and possibly antisocial. “But,” to quote Fred Flintstone, “knowing it is half the battle!” And for the armchair psychologists out there, here’s a question: Is it not in fact freeing? And given the way society has gone, maybe even heroic.
College is traditionally where lifelong bonds develop, but the two friends I made working on The Round Table, the campus rag at Beloit, might as well be on the moon — one having disappeared into communications for a venture capital firm, the other into insanity, and can you tell the difference?
I am still friends, however, with a guy I’ve known since kindergarten and who similarly, somehow, some way, found himself living back here in Sag Harbor, or in my case its bucolic suburb, Noyac, after half a lifetime away. We have next to nothing in common anymore — my third child is soon to ship out to college; he’s determinedly single — but I hear from him regularly, and I might say happily, about comic books, because that’s what’s left.
In the latest, just Monday night, he informed me of the death of one of the legends of our Marvel Comics-dominated childhood, Gerry Conway. He was among the talented few who took over scripting duties for Stan Lee in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and so much the better, given Lee’s now-well-documented charlatanism, credit-taking, and abuse of artists.
Conway made comics more adult, co-inventing characters like the Punisher, the mercenary who’s lately become a minor cultural phenomenon, and writing some of Marvel’s most consequential storylines, like the murder of Gwen Stacy, the love of Peter Parker’s life, in The Amazing Spider-Man.
So, we’ll get a beer and talk it over and raise a glass to the departed. For the second time in my life, I’m looking forward to it.