peroration, but Sammy seemed to have lost the thread. Joe followed his cousin’s gaze along the sidewalk but saw only a pair of what looked to be British sailors lighting their cigarettes off a single shielded match.
“So …” Sammy said. “So …”
“So that is not the question,” Joe prompted.
“That’s what I’m saying.”
“Continue.”
They kept walking.
“How? is not the question. What? is not the question,” Sammy said.
“The question is why.”
“The question is why.”
“Why,” Joe repeated.
“Why is he doing it?”
“Doing what?”
“Dressing up like a monkey or an ice cube or a can of fucking corn.”
“To fight the crime, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that’s all any of these guys are doing. That’s as far as they ever go. They just … you know, it’s the right thing to do, so they do it. How interesting is that?”
“I see.”
“Only Batman, you know … see, yeah, that’s good. That’s what makes Batman good, and not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”
“What is the reason for Batman? The why?”
“His parents were killed, see? In cold blood. Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid. By a robber.”
“It’s revenge.”
“That’s interesting,” Sammy said. “See?”
“And he was driven mad.”
“Well …”
“And that’s why he puts on the bat’s clothes.”
“Actually, they don’t go so far as to say that,” Sammy said. “But I guess it’s there between the lines.”
“So, we need to figure out what is the why.”
“‘What is the why,’” Sammy agreed.
“Flattop.”
Joe looked up and saw a young man standing in front of them. He was short-waisted and plump, and his face, except for a pair of big black spectacles, was swaddled and all but invisible in an elaborate confection of scarf and hat and earflaps.
“Julius,” Sammy said. “This is Joe. Joe, this is a friend from the neighborhood, Julie Glovsky.”
Joe held out his hand. Julie studied it a moment, then extended his own small hand. He had on a black woolen greatcoat, a fur-lined leather cap with mammoth earflaps, and too-short green corduroy trousers.
“This guy’s brother is the one I told you about,” Sammy told Joe. “Making good money in comics. What are you doing here?”
Somewhere deep within his wrappings, Julie Glovsky shrugged. “I need to see my brother.”
“Isn’t that remarkable, we need to see him, too.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?” Julie Glovsky shuddered. “Only tell me fast before my nuts fall off.”
“Would that be from cold or, you know, atrophy?”
“Funny.”
“I am funny.”
“Unfortunately not in the sense of ‘humorous.’”
“Funny,” Sammy said.
“I am funny. What’s your idea?”
“Why don’t you come to work for me?”
“For you? Doing what? Selling shoestrings? We still got a box of them at my house. My mom uses them to sew up chickens.”
“Not shoelaces. My boss, you know, Sheldon Anapol?”
“How would I know him?”
“Nevertheless, he is my boss. He’s going into business with his brother-in-law, Jack Ashkenazy, who you also do not know, but who publishes Racy Science, Racy Combat, et cetera. They’re going to do comic books, see, and they’re looking for talent.”
“What?” Julie poked his tortoise face out from the shadows of its woolen shell. “Do you think they might hire me?”
“They will if I tell them to,” said Sammy. “Seeing as how I’m the art director in chief.”
Joe looked at Sammy and raised an eyebrow. Sammy shrugged.
“Joe and I, here, we’re putting together the first title right now. It’s going to be all adventure heroes. All in costumes,” he said, extemporizing now. “You know, like Superman. Batman. The Blue Beetle. That type of thing.”
“Tights, like.”
“That’s it. Tights. Masks. Big muscles. It’s going to be called Masked Man Comics,” he continued. “Joe and I’ve got the lead feature all taken care of, but we need backup stuff. Think you could come up with something?”
“Shit, Flattop, yes. You bet.”
“What about your brother?”
“Sure, he’s always looking for more work. They got him doing Romeo Rabbit for thirty dollars a week.”
“Okay, then, he’s hired, too. You’re both hired, on one condition.”
“What’s that?”
“We need a place to work,” said Sammy.
“Come on then,” said Julie. “I guess we can work at the Rathole.” He leaned toward Sammy as they started off, lowering his voice. The tall skinny kid with the big nose had fallen a few steps behind them to light a cigarette. “Who the hell is that guy?”
“This?” Sammy said. He took hold of the kid’s elbow and tugged him forward as though bringing him out onstage to take a deserved bow. He reached up to grab a handful of the kid’s hair and gave it a tug, just kind of rocking his head from side to side while holding on to his hair, grinning at him. Had Joe been a young woman, Julie Glovsky might almost have been inclined to think that Sammy was sweet on her. “This is my partner.”
SAMMY WAS THIRTEEN when his father, the Mighty Molecule, came home. The Wertz vaudeville circuit had folded that spring, a victim of Hollywood, the Depression, mismanagement, bad weather, shoddy talent, philistinism, and a number of other scourges and furies whose names Sammy’s father would invoke, with incantatory rage, in the course of the long walks they took together that summer. At one time or another he assigned blame for his sudden joblessness, with no great coherence or logic, to bankers, unions, bosses, Clark Gable, Catholics, Protestants, theater owners, sister acts, poodle acts, monkey acts, Irish tenors, English Canadians, French Canadians, and Mr. Hugo Wertz himself.
“Hell with ’em,” he would invariably finish, with a sweeping gesture that, in the dusk of a Brooklyn July, was limned by the luminous arc of his cigar. “The Molecule one day says ‘fuck you’ to the all of them.”
The free and careless use of obscenity, like the cigars, the lyrical rage, the fondness for explosive gestures, the bad grammar, and the habit of referring to himself in the third person were wonderful to Sammy; until that summer of 1935, he had possessed few memories or distinct impressions of his father. And any of the above qualities (among several others his father possessed) would, Sammy thought, have given his mother reason enough to banish the Molecule from their home for a dozen years.