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Us kids had a lot of heroes, right super smart, strong, and good-looking ones, too; but when we horsed around and acted them out, they werent always the same ones all the time, you see. The same hero every day would become boring, dull as a week of Sundays, and just the same old cold crap.
Sometimes our hero would be Flash Gordon. You remember him, dont you? He was that guy who blasted off through the airglow and into black space with a lot of good ear-splitting noise to his red and white rocket and made old Ming the Merciless, who lived way out where the planets lined up to dance, cry uncle, and a lot more.
Other times our hero would be that sharp western galoot, Gene Autry, whod be just riding along easy, not bouncing at all on that silver mine he called a saddle. Hed do all his riding and roping on Champion, or his singing, or his shooting up a lead storm. When the white smoke blew out of bad guy territory, thered be bad hombres dancing around, goofy-like, holding and rubbing their gun hand where Gened shot their hogleg away with his old .44. He never killed anybody or any critter dead, you know, but right was always right when Gene was back in the saddle, again.
Once in a while, our hero would be a guy right out of Africa.
He'd be that jungle guy with long hair, muscles all over his shiny body, even between his ears, who wore a short, critter-skin skirt. You know, Tarzan, who swung on vines and rescued women and animals with no amount of trouble at all. He'd give a great, blood-curdling, yodeling yell, put a long, sharp toadsticker in his mouth, if he had to, and swoop down and get a good hefty purchase on any good-looking woman that happened to be waltzing around or lost in his green jungle. Then he'd swing back with her to his nest high in the tree tops and let Cheetah look her over to see if she was a keeper, I figure.
A few times even the Shadow would be our hero, whod become invisible and capture bad guys with his silver .45s, laughing all the time while he did it, and always knew what lurked in mens hearts just before the commercial, when Margo Lane had to leave to sell a gunny sack of Blue Coal. . . .
But of all the heroes I ever had, Huck Finn was my all-time favorite. I hope to God he still is when Im grown up. . . .
You remember Huck, dont you? He was in a book written by that white-haired, rope-smoking guy who had for a name what youd find when youd heaved a measuring rope over the larboard side of a steamboat, pulled the rope up, and hollered, so everybody could hear without putting a tin horn in their left ear, Mark Twain! or something that sounded like that. Well, in that book Twain had Huck say that you wouldnt know about him (Huck) unless youd read another book about him, which was also written by that same guy with the measuring-rope, hollering-out moniker.
But if you hadnt read that other book for some reason or other, shucks, it didnt matter, because Huck was kind enough to say himself that it didnt amount to much when things shook down and sifted out. Youd get to know him as you read along. And when you got to the stopping word of the book, youd have a pretty good understanding of him, most of the people around him, and of the hard times he lived in. . . .
I'm not very big or very old, just a small kid. And skinny since I've never yet wintered up fat. Mother said that when I was a baby I had double pneumonia and scarlet fever all in a bunch and came as near as anybody living could possibly come to an out-and-out dying dead and heading toward the Lutheran cemetery out in the hill country where they planted people so they could sprout up later for the coming resurrection.
So because of my old body-sickness and close shave with dying dead, I was working day and night, and most Sundays, on catching up on growing up. Some people on my hill, where I tried to live, and down in quarry town, where I often shadowed my old man, said that my biggest trouble, however, was that I was awful ocean wet behind the ears about life and people. Moreover, dumb as a prairie fencepost. . . .
What I ask then is, if you decide to put up with me and what I might know and come to know about life and people, and if you aren't put off by what you know about me so far, and if you agree to ride shotgun with me as we walk along in the yellow snow and in the blowing winds coming down from the North Pole, go down my hill, through quarry town, down past The Bucket of Blood, and up the hill to Grandma Thoras golden-colored home and will stick with me to that last important word in my story, you might admit that I didnt just come to town on a Iowa farmer's loaded pumpkin wagon and took a header on the red cobblestone street. Instead, you might allow that Ive seen a hell of a lot, been in some messed-up, crappy thing or two, and that I know how it is being a kid in a small quarry town built at the rough edge of the world, trying to live with an old man who came damn close to killing dead Mother, my sister, and me on a Christmas day.
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