Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [19]
The two of us met in high school. I was a student at Wellmsley, an all-male boarding school, and he was a student from a neighboring institution of the more public variety who had come through our institute of higher learning in order to steal things.
I was lying on the floor near my locker comparing tiles, moaning, and bleeding profusely after one of Wellmsley’s more exciting, semiregular, male-bonding events—one which involved some of the larger boys beating me severely about the head, groin, and torso. Theirs was a more-than-occasional act of camaraderie that centered, primarily, around the violent repositioning of my facial features, Mr. Potato Head-like, then racing off to bond further with other boys about how funny it all was. I’m not entirely sure why I always happened to be the focus of their affectionate ‘ribbing’. It was likely just a straightforward example of the stronger wolves culling out the weaker; following Darwin’s lame ideas of strengthening the pack or something. It’s the sort of thing the Nature Channel is always warning us about. Unfortunately for me, I usually watched Room Raiders on VH1.
It was at this particular low point in my adolescent struggle towards pseudo-manhood that Morgan happened to wander by with an armload of shiny, expensive-looking items of no real value. He looked down at me, saw the blood, and asked if I needed a Kleenex.
I told him I had a box in my locker if he wouldn’t mind opening it for me. I gave him the combination, and he did so, pulling several white tissues from a carton within, then dropping them near my head. As I daubed the raging flow of my life’s precious liquid, Morgan helped himself to some of the personal items he found behind my Kleenex—a pen, some cartoon character key rings, a picture of a naked girl I’d cut from one of father’s old Playboys—and slipped them into his pockets.
“Holy, shit!” he said, apparently stumbling across something of actual value in there.
“What?” I asked, almost as surprised as he was.
He pulled a plastic-covered comic from behind some of the textbooks—Incredible Hulk number 181—the first appearance of Wolverine, and right behind it—in my opinion the gold standard of modern superhero comics—Giant Sized X-Men number one by Dave Cockrum, Len Wein, and Chris Claremont—the first appearance of the current version of the X-Men, the ones who came to be the foundation for all the cartoons, toys, and movies. The total value of said comics was several thousand dollars when graded at 9.2 out of a possible 10, or higher. These were 9.8. Quite valuable and exceedingly rare at that grade level.
“Can I have these?” Morgan asked. I was surprised he even bothered to ask.
“I’m surprised you even bothered to ask.”
“Dude. I’m a fan. You don’t rip off another fan.”
He began replacing the items he’d stuffed in his pockets. He stopped short with the image of the girl from Playboy (Marianne Gravatte, October 1982. Quite a lovely girl with—I was sure if I ever met her—a darling personality to go with her large breasts), and repocketed it. Then he knelt on the tile and helped me up.
“So? Can I have ‘em?” he asked again.
“Sure,” I said. As long he wasn’t going to hit me, I felt he deserved some reward. “I’ve got more you know. Would you like to see?”
“Dude! Does Wolverine shit in the woods?”
“Not in any issue I’ve ever read.”
“He does between issues. They never show it, but he does. The guy’s an animal. He’ll crap anywhere and wipe his ass with leaves. Trust me. I wrote a fan-fic about it.”
“A what?”
“A fan-fic. Fan fiction. Online. People write all kinds of shit and post it on websites. Mostly it’s girls writing about Nightcrawler being all romantic and fucking Kitty Pryde. But some of us write Wolverine stories, and they’re cooler than the one’s that get printed. We don’t have censorship.”
“Marvel doesn’t get mad?”
“What are they gonna do? It’s the Internet! No one controls the Internet! It’s Lord of The Flies, man!”
“Wow.” I considered it, then blanched. “Lord of the Flies was kind of scary though.”
“So’s