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 .   .   .   .  .   .  .   .  .   .           "Gullible's Travails"
 .   .   .   .  .   .  .   .  .   .
  . . .  .   .   . . .  . . .  . . .               by Schwammy


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        I’ve always found the idea of Batman compelling.  Here is a man with
 enough psychological baggage to qualify for a lifetime of therapy who spurns
 his role as a useless socialite, using it to mask his true identity--a dark
 avenger of the night, an anonymous volunteer crimefighter who nightly dons
 bondage gear to do battle with other costumed weirdos who, lacking his vast
 inheritance, devote their time and energy to stealing and other acts of
 mayhem.

        True, this hardly describes the Batman I first encountered as a
 child.  Yet I was equally drawn to that character, for reasons less readily
 explicable.  This was the Adam West Batman of the '60s TV series.

        Yet no matter which version of the character you believe in, any
 version of Robin has always struck me as cynical and artless, as in:

        "Kid sidekicks are big right now.  We should give him a kid
 sidekick."

        Thus when my cousin John and I would play Batman and Robin, wearing
 our paper masks, bath towel capes, and utility belts sewn by his mother (the
 earliest use of Velcro in my memory), it was always with the understanding
 that I got to be Batman and he had to be Robin.

        Perhaps John became resentful of being relegated to second banana and
 longed to even the score.  Perhaps he grew to relish the role to the point
 that he wanted to own it completely.  Whatever his motivation, at some point
 in our adventures, John let me in on his deep, dark bombshell of a secret.
 Apparently relying on my trusting nature and as-yet undiagnosed myopia, my
 cousin revealed that it was actually he who played Robin on the TV show.

        Of course, this assertion flew in the face of (adult) logic for at
 least three reasons:  (1) John was five years old.  (2) The adult actor
 *THWACK*ing the Joker's henchmen on our Zenith neither looked nor sounded
 even remotely like my cousin.  (3) The show was no longer being made, having
 been cancelled in 1968, a year before he was even born.

        None of which bothered me -- or even occurred to me -- at the time.
 John stuck to his story and deftly shot down my every attempt to discredit
 him:

        Me:  So why does it say "Burt Ward" instead of your name at the
             beginning of the show?
      John:  I have to use a fake name to get around the child labor laws.
        Me:  Well, how do you get to the show?
      John:  My parents drive me.
        Me:  So your parents know that you're Robin?
      John:  No, the studio's next to my school.
        Me:  Oh.  Does Batman ever let you drive the Batmobile?
      John:  Of course!  After all, I built the thing...

        And so I became the willing victim of the most ludicrous
 misinformation campaign in the history of whopperdom.  If my cousin’s intent
 was to instill envy in me, however, he couldn’t have been less successful.
 It was cool being related to a TV star.  Far from jealous, I now began to
 regard him as a role model.  He had done something in his five short years,
 while I had been content to sit back and mooch off my parents.  I believed
 my cousin was Robin for the same reason I believed in Santa Claus, The
 Easter Bunny, and the Protestant Work Ethic:  I wanted to believe.

        Of course, the glorious dream came to an end soon enough, as glorious
 dreams will.  I suppose my parents wearied quickly of hearing "There's
 John!" every afternoon as a 23-year-old ham smacked his palm with a green-
 gloved fist crying, "Catwoman, you are not a nice person!" I can imagine the
 uncomfortable sidelong glances, the telepathic arguments flashed back and
 forth over whose side I got it from as my parents grappled with this novel
 dilemma: How do you break it to your boy that his second cousin isn't really
 Robin?

        Finally my father took me aside and gently disabused me of the tall
 tale I'd held so dear to my heart.  I think I took it fairly well, though
 for a while I was angry at John for being the first person to lie to me.
 (Or was he?  The Santa lie surely must have come first.)

        Mostly, though, I was filled with a terrible sense of ennui.  After
 all, once you've had a superhero in the family, everything else smacks of
 anticlimax.

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  .           anada 188                   by Schwammy  (c)2000 anada e'zine .
      
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