EVERY SUPERBOY NEEDS HIS LEX LUTHOR

I had a dream a few night ago where I was filling out an application, and somewhere after emergency contacts was a blank reserved for my archenemy. I remember being slightly concerned in the dream why the people reading this application wanted to know who my archenemy was, but I quickly became anxious at the question itself: who was my archenemy? I’ve certainly used the term before to describe a great number of people, from the head of the high school guidance department who was my last boss to the pretentious poet/artist I went to high school with sometime in the last century. But those weren’t archenemies. They were foils, rivals. To truly be an archenemy, by definition, they would’ve had to have been my best friend in the whole world. That’s what an archenemy is: someone you hate with the same passion that you used to love them with.

People who are only familiar with the films or cartoons or comics might not realize that Superman and Lex Luthor had a relationship prior to Metropolis. When they were boys, they both lived in Smallville, and there, Lil’ Lex and Lil’ Kal El were best friends. (It’s my understanding this is similar to their relationship on the Smallville TV series.) Lex even developed a cure for Kryptonite, such was his friendship with Superboy. But when Lex’s lab catches fire, and Superboy uses his super-breath to extinguish the flames, he destroys Lex’s experiment and knocks chemicals onto Lex’s head, causing the permanent baldness that has become Luthor’s trademark. Convinced that Superboy purposely tried to ruin the experiment and cause his baldness out of jealousy, Lex turns on his friend, and swears to get revenge. Cue 70 years of rivalry.

So who, under this criterion, would be my archenemy?

I grew up on Auburn Street in Whitman, Massachusetts, a busy little street in a decidedly unbusy little town. As a toddler, I was able to entertain myself for countless hours, running around my backyard, pretending wiffleball bats were swords, old ropes were tentacles, and tiny kittens were frightening manticores. It was an idyllic life, one that probably worried my parents, and while I would sometimes play with my cousin or the children of my parents’ friends when they came over, there were no children in the neighborhood for me to play with, nor did I have any desire to seek any out. They would have to come to me.

And when I was five years old, our next door neighbors moved out and the Joyce family moved in. They had two daughters, Jennifer and Katie, and I don’t remember the first time I met them, but I can say I had, we were in each other’s backyards every afternoon. Jennifer was my age, and Katie was my sister’s, so we each had gained a playmate in one move.

A popular cartoon and action figure when I was young was He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, in which a fey prince and his cowardly giant tiger would be magically transformed into the fur underpants wearing barbarian He-Man and Battle Cat (although why He-Man was never recognized as being Prince Adam, but the tiger needed to wear a mask to protect its identity is beyond me.) And while I certainly loved the traditional superheroes of Superman, Spiderman, and the Hulk, I had a pretty singular preoccupation with He-Man while play-acting in my backyard. And even then, as a small boy, I knew that I needed a nemesis to really complete the experience. Jennifer fit the bill perfectly.

Which is to say that she was another person, and was willing to play with me. There was nothing particularly villainous about her. She was pretty, as far as I was concerned, and she had a certain bit of sophistication, relatively speaking. Video does exist of us playing which more or less contradicts this, but I remember her speaking with a slight upper class British accent, not unlike Gregory from Yardale in the South Park movie. (“Come, Wendy, let’s frolick in the underbrush! I have a 4.0 grade point average!”) She probably set mold for all the other erudite but snooty women I would later become involved with. Joy, I am looking at you.

But despite this level of snootery and sophistication, she was willing to play Masters of the Universe with me. But she didn’t want to be Skeletor or Beast Man, or even Evil-Lyn. (I was not so concerned with gender issues that I felt she needed to play a female character; in fact, Evil-Lyn, the at that time sole evil female character, was probably seventh on my list of villains for Jennifer to portray.) Instead she wanted to be She-Ra, He-Man’s newly revealed super-powered cousin. Which left me with little choice but to play the villain.

I didn’t really mind. I was pretty good at it--I seemed to relish the opportunity to be fiendish and evil, which is the main reason why I don’t drink alcohol or take drugs. Because I believe somewhere deep inside of me is a Skeletor waiting to come out. You can witness this, if you want, because there exists video of me putting Jennifer in a headlock, sticking my plastic sword against her chest, and dragging her across my backyard, cackling maniacally. My girlfriend watched it and wanted to know who was filming this, and why they weren’t stopping me. “It was just playing,” I explained. “I wasn’t really trying to hurt her.”

A small stream separated our two backyards, and the friendship between my sister Sarah and I and the two Joyce sisters was so great that my father built a small little bridge across the water, so that we could pass between each other’s backyards freely. Looking back upon it now, there is something so powerful and resonant about thinking about that tiny bridge, and how easily we crossed it, time and again.

When I started school, my mother sent me over to the Joyce’s in the morning to wait for the school bus. They had a giant golden retriever which had no fear of me, nor a respect for my personal boundaries, and I can trace my general dislike of dogs to the overzealous affection of Sandy upon my tiny boy body. The Joyce girls were also fans of Nickelodeon, the children’s TV network, and watched it constantly. I was not familiar with the network--we might not have had cable at that point--but based on my experience watching it over the Joyces’, I would think of it as the “Lassie” channel. These two girls loved the “Lassie” show so much. I couldn’t stand it. It was in black ‘n white, it had ridiculous plots, and it starred a goddamn dog. I don’t think I could’ve thought of a more boring show if I tried. But I was raised to be polite, so each morning before school, I would sit down in the Joyces’ basement with Jennifer and Katie and watched a golden retriever rescue the residents of the dumbest town ever.

I mention this detail to highlight the fact that I spent every school morning, and every school afternoon at Jennifer’s house. Afterschool we would play out back, weather permitting, and when it was cold or rainy we would sit inside and watch “Lassie.” So, while I would befriend Andy Greenlaw in first grade until we got in a fight over his refusal to let me play with his Inspector Gadget doll, and Wyatt Dowling in second, and then Mike Finley in third grade, if I was to be honest, I would have to say that my best friend growing up was Jennifer Joyce. I spent every day with her, and even though it was a matter of convenience for my mother, to have me watched by the family next door while she was at work, the truth remains: I played with Jennifer Joyce and I liked it.

I even had my first sexual pangs (though I didn’t know what they were) in the Joyce’s backyard, dragging Jennifer like a caveman back to the giant rock that sat at the edge of their woods. I don’t remember exactly what we were playing, but I can remember the strange and foreign feeling of having a girl’s body so close to mine and realizing at some animalistic level that the two were different.

Where does the story go from here? In the summer of 1987, they dug up Auburn Street to put in town sewerage, and I remember the summer being a hot one, the air filled with rock dust and the sound and smell of jackhammers. For what seemed like a long period of time to an eight year old boy, there was a large pile of gravel in front of my house, and Jennifer and I, despite probably several warnings from our mothers, were playing on it.

I can remember climbing up the giant rock pile, and sliding down, and getting my hands dirty, and getting rocks in my shoes and emptying them out. I don’t remember what we were playing, or if there was even a structure to the play, or if it was simply just “Here’s a giant pile of rocks, let’s go!” All I remember is that as I was on the opposite side of the gravel hill, I heard Jennifer yell out “Ow!” She started to cry and was running home before I even was able to get around the pile to see what was going on.

And here is where I learned about female betrayal: about ten minutes later, my mother called out the kitchen window to me. I came inside and she shook her finger at me and told me that I was grounded, no comic books, no television. How could I have thrown rocks at poor little Jennifer Joyce?

Except I hadn’t. I hadn’t thrown a rock at anything, living or non-living, boy or girl. I hadn’t thrown anything at Jennifer Joyce, but here I was, sitting inside on a summer’s day, found guilty and sentenced before I even had a chance to understand the crime I was charged with. Mrs. Joyce had called my mother, told her Jennifer had come home crying because awful, mean Ryan had thrown rocks at her head. Bring in the firing squad.

I couldn’t comprehend why Jennifer would lie like that? Had something else caused the rocks to strike her, a passing car or an errant jackhammer? Why would she assume it was me? And if nothing had struck her--which eventually became my preferred theory, that she was making the whole thing up--why did she lie about it? Why did she want to ruin my life?

It might seem a bit melodramatic to say that an afternoon’s groundation led me to hold a lifelong grudge against the girl, but one has to remember that I was eight years old, and it was summer, and an afternoon without being able to play outside, or read comics, or watch TV might as have been a hundred years in solitary confinement. And one also has to remember, if one can, how much betrayal stings when you are a child. Before we have opportunity to get used to it. Before we come to expect it.

So that was it. The following fall, my sister was also going to school, and my mother needed to find a real babysitter for us, and we began getting dropped off with a woman on the other side of town, and I never went over the Joyces’ again.
They still came over on occasion, usually for birthday parties, and the sting of betrayal, sharp as rocks against my face, affected my memory, and I pretended that I had always hated Jennifer Joyce, and that I always would. We had never been friends, and any mention of our previous friendship would have been enough to send me into a fit of raging denial. It was a reaction akin to a scorned lover. I changed the locks, burned her picture. She never meant anything to me at all. Don’t ever say her name in front of me. She meant nothing at all.

My family had some fun with this idea, and I was teased a lot by my mother and stepfather about Jennifer Joyce. They enjoyed my violent reaction to any suggestion of a possible future romance between Jennifer and me. Don’t you understand? I would say. She’s my worst enemy.

The last night I slept in the house I grew up in before my family moved away, Jennifer and her sister spent the night. Their parents must’ve needed to go out of town for the night for some reason, and my mother offered to let them sleep over. They spent the entire time with my sisters, while I sat alone in my room, as sick as if they had brought kryptonite into the house. I couldn’t believe it. My own worst enemy, under my own roof! I moved the East Bridgewater a few days later, and although my father moved into the street on Auburn Street (meaning I would never be totally free from her) it wasn’t too long after that the bridge was damaged during a particularly heavy rain, and my father removed it so that nobody would be hurt trying to cross it.

It would be five years before I was able to get my revenge on Jennifer Joyce. We ended up both attending PCC, the summer academic program I proudly teach at today, in the summer of 1994, and she befriended Janine, one of the girls from my school. Janine came and talked to me, in that confidential way that barely teenaged girls have of confessing the love of others. Jennifer liked me, Janine told me. She thought I was cute. Maybe she had always liked me, I thought. Maybe that explained the whole thing.

I managed to avoid Jennifer the rest of the summer, and I met a girl of my own that managed to preoccupy me so that I forgot all about what Janine had told me. But that fall, at our Homecoming dance, Janine signed Jennifer in. Jennifer came up to talk to me, and I, in a measure of cruelty I can’t even pretend to defend, ran away comically, like Mike Meyers from Lara Flynn Boyle in Wayne’s World. I must’ve thought it was funny. I know I definitely thought it was fitting. Tell my mom I threw rocks at you, will you? Let me humiliate you in a crowded room full of strangers. I was still punishing a fifteen year old girl for a tiny little lie she had told when she was eight years old.

I have always thought of myself as Superboy in this particular situation. I was the one who was wronged by her jealousy, or her wickedness. I always wanted to be the hero. But when push came to shove, I was always willing to be the villain. And so while I have told the story many times about the girl next door who was my worst enemy, I have also held a grudge against her for something she did over twenty years ago, something so insignificantly small it ruined my summer for an afternoon and a friendship for a lifetime. I have always thought of myself as Superboy in this particular situation. Now I’m not so sure.