You Had Me at Hero

Chapter 1-2

He understood the ways his work was important when people were in crisis, even if they weren’t always bursting with gratitude. He tried to be a team player around the center when it came to trades and whatnot—he had a life, too, and schedule flexibility was real hard to get for those who didn’t also give. And he knew he sucked d**k like a champ. For him, s*x was all in the mind, and his was consistently blown by the variety of ways it got him off to satisfy Starr.

But “hero” was a tricky word for Mark Bradford-Potts. Since his earliest memories of Superman birthday parties—and of his father forcibly forbidding Wonder Woman Halloween costumes—he’d longed to be worthy of it, striven to rise to the title. He’d worn a red cape to school into the third grade, contriving opportunities to foil his arch-nemesis The Lunch Lady’s plans to poison his classmates with soggy hot dogs and spiriting the class guinea pig into trees and drain pipes, the better to “rescue” the traumatized creature.

When he was nine years old, a neighbor’s house caught fire, and Mark rushed into the street in his pajamas to help. When he flat-out refused to get out of the way and go home, a quick-thinking father-of-three firefighter plopped a Fire Department ball cap on Mark’s head, lifted him into the cab of the nearest truck, and put him in charge of making sure no bad guys tried to drive off with it. Mark stayed awake through the night protecting the truck, and for months afterward took baths instead of showers in order not to have to remove the hat. Firefighters were the real heroes, he’d tell anyone who so much as wandered into earshot, although his mother, already with five children, two dogs, and a Simpsons-quoting parrot she’d inherited from her brother on her plate, absolutely drew the line at adopting a Dalmatian; he’d very nearly blacked out during that tantrum, until it became clear she was simply going to let him.

When the news that Mr. Claver had set the fire himself in an effort to be rid of the bodies of the wife and daughter he had hacked to pieces made its way around the neighborhood, Mark’s focus shifted to police work. For what were heroes for, if not to fight crime and clear the streets of its misguided perpetrators? Once he adopted “Not on my watch!” as his catchphrase he said little else, and he commandeered a souvenir tin-star badge emblazoned with the name David from his brother. This he carried around in a black leather wallet and tirelessly brandished in the face of any friend or family member caught in violation of any conceivable rule or law, real or imagined, until it ended up in a downtown gutter, flung from the car after a failed attempt to make a citizen’s arrest of his father for speeding through a yellow light.

That this most-revered symbol of law and order had been reduced to litter at the hands of his own father crushed Mark’s do-right spirit. He was on the verge of turning to a Life of Crime—disillusioned heroes have few other options, he understood—and had even tried smoking once, out behind the gym with a couple buddies from the other eighth-grade homeroom, when something called the World Trade Center in New York City was brought down, on live television, by flying Molotov cocktails full of people. This clinched it for Mark. Whatever else was true, however bravely New York’s firefighters and police officers and search-and-rescue dogs and everyday citizens had behaved that September, he clearly had been born into a world that needed more heroes than it had, and—skinny, pimple-pocked, and all of fourteen years old—he resolved to become one.

His little red, white, and blue heart swelled with pride to see civilian first responders hailed as heroes in the aftermath of September 11th. For a period he boasted of his own resurrected dream to become a firefighter, and he took a CPR class at a local rec center lest he be called upon to save any lives in the interim. Then a cousin—a strapping, toothsome, country cousin from his mother’s Nebraska hometown with a great big butt and a brand new baby—joined the Army, and Mark’s first glimpse of his photo, taped to the fridge one Saturday morning after the mail came, set his path in stone: he was young and bright; he was swimming and working out and getting stronger; he would become a soldier. He would serve his country with honor and pride, and see if he couldn’t save the world in the process.

After a summer spent rigidly enforcing the rules at a local pool, he’d ransacked the Army surplus store, and wouldn’t press anything against his rapidly booming body that wasn’t desert camouflage except for the two hours on Sunday he spent in his church suit. He shot from five-six to five-foot-eleven in less than a year, packed on forty-five pounds of chest and shoulders, and by the time he was sixteen he swaggered through life as if the only thing standing between the world and Peace American-Style was his eighteenth birthday.

By spring break of his junior year it was all but a done deal. The death of his cousin on his fourth day in Afghanistan served only to bolster Mark’s resolve. After school on his birthday in September, he’d enlist. He’d go ahead and graduate if they wanted him to, but he’d be in Basic by the following summer at the latest, and it couldn’t come fast enough.

His parents didn’t even flinch when he mentioned a gang of guys going up to his buddy Jeremiah’s family cabin in the mountains over spring break. Mark was the most strait-laced and responsible person either one of them had come to know—if they worried about him at all in those days, it was that he wasn’t screwing around enough for a kid his age. He hadn’t pierced his ears or dyed his hair or gotten a tattoo (that they knew about); and, except for that one time in the eighth grade, he’d never smoked—not cigarettes, not pot, not cloves in a coffee house. On weekends he drank cheap supermarket beer out of the back of Jeremiah’s truck, got buzzed but not blitzed, and occasionally brought off one or another of his willing buddies in his jeans.

He was nobody’s party animal. He certainly wasn’t any kind of King of the Keg Stand, but everybody else was doing them on the cabin deck that night, and by then Mark was actually pretty drunk, an unfamiliar and not entirely unawesome feeling. He had a core of steel and he was coordinated enough—obviously Bobby Klinkerman was tanked, but holding a guy’s legs while he chugged from a keg wasn’t exactly akin to operating heavy machinery.

There were twice as many versions of what happened next as there had been dumbass teenagers on the deck. Mark had no memory of the fall; he had no idea if it was anybody’s “fault” that he’d tipped over the railing, and what could it possibly matter if it was? What would he be, less paralyzed? He remembered clambering up onto the keg. He remembered half-gagging on a nose full of beer. He remembered waking up in hell.

He remembered that when he most needed one to swoop in and save the day, there wasn’t a hero to be found.