Batman and I on the other side of the Tracks. by Kyle McBee (read my book TXT) 📖

I’m pretty much a hell raiser. Or, at least that's what people have thought of me as. When people say something "just is", I need to know why and how it got that way. I'm not really trying to cause trouble or go against the grain. Understanding things on a deeper level and from other perspectives has long been a driving force behind my actions. Looking at life on the other side of the tracks for as long as I have and I’ve not looked back to see why until recently. One day, thumbing through an old comic book, the secret origin of my outlook began to emerge.

Browsing the pages of Batman: The Killing Joke By Alan Moore, a sense of nostalgia creeps through the shadows of my mind. I’ve had this book since I was about seven years old. One particular reading proved to be a crossroads for me, but we’ll get to that. Today, I stumble upon this bubble of dialogue. Batman has just cornered the Joker after he’s executed some of the most heinous crimes in comics history. The Batman, wearied, pleads, "… Maybe this is our last chance to sort this whole bloody mess out. …I don't know what it was that bent your life out of shape, but who knows? Maybe I've been there too. Maybe I can help. …. You needn't be out there on the edge anymore. You needn't be alone. “The words, like some sort of potion, take me back to a sequence of events in my youth…


When I was young, for the most part I was the only child on my street. It was, especially before my sister was born, a very solitary childhood. It might have stunted certain elements of my social growth, but not many. I was loud, rambunctious, smart, and funny. I craved attention when it was available. I'd sit at tables with the adults at family gatherings, listening to adult concerns. I would watch the evening news. Otherwise, I was on my own.
I wasn't a particularly unhappy child despite my solitude. Instead of sorrow, I built a wonderful world in my head. I was given plenty of toys to play with, and materials for drawing and writing. The comics my mother brought home from the shop she worked at taught me how to read at an early age. I loved the primary colors of the heroes' tights, the concrete black and white of their right and wrong battles, the epic struggles and the amazing fantasy of it all. The simplistic morality of comics reinforced my loose Christian upbringing, and galvanized my early childhood worldview.

The world of comic books in their "golden" and "silver' age in particular, was a fairly simple world. The "golden" age referred to the era of the 1930s through the ‘50s, when many mainstay characters were conceived; Batman, Superman, Captain America. The "silver" age comprised the 1960s and ‘70s, and although titles such as "The Uncanny X-men" were veiled social metaphors (in the case of X-men, the civil rights struggle); an essential innocence remained in the narration. Comics were considered kid's stuff. They instilled basic moral values: don't cheat, steal, or hurt people. The evil were always punished, and you could always tell who the good guys were.  They could really inspire an active child's imagination.
Inspired by the moral adventures of these tales, I would create these most wonderful stories. My toys and drawing became the pawns in a histrionic tale that would sometimes take weeks to unfold. I would set up these moral dramas: dioramas of play sets, legos, action figures, and whatever I could find, all so good could triumph over evil. My folks would tell me to clean up my toys and I'd try to bargain that there was an important battle taking place. "Hostages may die, mom! I can't put the toys away until they save the day."

My days went on like this. My happy, overactive imagination was always inventing new heroes and villains on paper; new soap operas for my toys to live out. This insular period of my life was probably my happiest. My black and white, good versus evil world view was about to take a nosedive into reality.
So I was mostly alone as a kid. Well, there was Tommy.
(I turn back a page of The Killing Joke. The Joker has captured, and is about to torture Commissioner Gordon): " …I give you: the average man. Physically unremarkable, it instead possesses a deformed set of values… note the club-footed social conscience and the withered optimism. It's certainly not for the squeamish, is it? Most repulsive of all, are its frail and useless notions of order and sanity. If too much weight is placed upon them... they snap. How does it live, I hear you ask? …I'm afraid the sad answer is, "Not very well". Faced with the inescapable fact that human existence is mad, …one in eight of them crack up and go stark slavering buggo! Who can blame them? In a world as psychotic as this... any other response would be crazy!"

Tommy, even at six and seven was a juvenile delinquent in the works. Tommy came from the other side of the tracks. The boy was already stealing things from playmates’ houses at a very young age. He was a scrapper. He talked a lot rougher. His clothes were always a little dirty, dusty and worn without grace. He wore big coke bottle glasses and had a grin too big for his face. Tommy was, in some strange way, innocent and guilty all at once. This kid was a hodge-podge mixture of hand me downs, five finger discounts, and spare parts.
Tommy didn't have a fair shake in life. He was raised by grumpy, resentful grandparents. They never said a kind word about him. They’d go out searching for him at sunset (if they were feeling motivated). When they found him, they'd yank him in the car by his ear, shrieking obscenities. His parents were bizarre, irresponsible, and distant. They were always floating in and out of his life, usually evoking pain whenever they were around him. They were perfect examples of underachievement: Greasy, fast food stained clothes, nicotine yellowed fingers, portly, ill-mannered, and poorly groomed people. They couldn't be bothered to raise a child; they were too busy watching T.V.
His sister, who died before he was born, was often a subject of ridicule in school.

He was told by his foolish parents before he was even in school, before he could even process the information properly. He made the mistake of telling a classmate, who was too young to be sensitive to that kind of thing. He was consistently picked on in the schoolyard. His glasses, his clothes, anything he seemed to do made him a target. Sometimes, he'd get to be the bully, but usually he was the loser. He never fit in, and didn't even know how. He was already broken and misshapen by kindergarten.

Tommy started riding his bicycle over to my house (a very long distance for someone so young) every now and again. I'd guide us through adventures in my realm of super heroes, some from the pages of comic books, some like our team "Power House" from my head. Sometimes, he'd come over very upset from something at home, crying. Sometimes he'd ride over on the lam from some kids on his side of the neighborhood. Tommy was always safe in my black and white- good and evil universe. It was my sanctum- it was his sanctuary from a world of moral grays and nondescript peril and trauma.

After some time with the kid from the other side of the tracks, and more exposure to the cruelty of children, the facade of my "Bruce Wayne" world view began to erode. Wrong and right become more amorphous around people like Tommy. By all standards, Tommy was not a "good" kid. He was ill-mannered, short tempered, foul mouthed, a poor performer in school, and petty thief. Tommy wasn't however a villain. He suffered from myriad abuses and neglect, was disciplined too harshly, he was abandoned rather than given guidance. Tommy, when in a reassuring, loving environment was harmless, gentle, and playful. Was Tommy to blame for his defective moral compass?
For a long time, Tommy and I were friends on the playground and in the backyard. I shared with him my comic book collection, giving him duplicate copies and old ones I didn't want to read anymore. It may have been one of the few kindnesses he received from a peer. Tommy never caused trouble for me or my home like we had heard around the neighborhood. We’d sit together on the school bus. His stop was right before mine on the way home, and we’d plan that day’s adventure, or talk about this month’s comic books. It was our golden age.

One day Tommy decided he needed to go home, real early, and very abruptly. I was a little perplexed, but I waved goodbye as he pedaled away on his beat up little Huffy bike. It was then that I saw one of my toys dangling from his back pocket. When we met up on the playground the next day, a confrontation developed. I made fun of him, called him terrible names. I made fun of the tragedy of his sister's passing. There was even some pushing and shoving, and all for a toy. The look in his eyes that day spoke volumes. The heroes were dead. Evil had triumphed that day. I had shown Tommy a world of black and white where even he could be a hero. I didn’t know that it also meant even I could become a villain. The contrasts were bleeding together, and the world was becoming a lie.

For the first time we sat apart on the way home from school. I felt tremendous guilt the entire bus ride home.
It took many weeks, maybe even months, but Tommy and I eventually made amends. There was a bitter phase of warfare. Throwing stones, fighting, and cold glares from across the lunch room characterized what was once a warm camaraderie. We had shifted from Batman and Robin to Batman and the Joker.
(Meanwhile, in The Killing Joke, the Batman has cornered the Joker. Despite the horrendous nature of his crimes, Batman has tried to reach out to his nemesis):”… You needn't be out there on the edge anymore. You needn't be alone. We don't have to kill each other. What do you say?" A beautifully illustrated Batman reaches his hand out to his rival.
The two stand together, shivering in the rain, and the joker responds, "See, there were these two guys in a lunatic asylum...and one night, one night they decide they don't like living in an asylum any more. They decide they're going to escape! So, like, they get up onto the roof and there, just across this narrow gap, they see the rooftops of the town, stretching away in the moonlight...stretching away to freedom. Now, the first guy, he jumps right across with no problem. But his friend, his friend daren’t make the leap. Y'see...y'see, he's afraid of falling. So then, the first guy has an idea...He says 'Hey! I have my flashlight with me! I'll shine it across the gap between the buildings. You can walk along the beam and join me!' B-but the second guy just shakes his head. He suh-says... he says 'What do you think I am? Crazy? You'd turn it off when I was half way across!'"The two rivals laugh, they laugh together…

One day,