By the age of ten, Alan Wesson was the National Handball Champion of the United States. He also stood to inherit Wesson Oil, which his grandfather founded in 1926. Although he accomplished a handful of other achievements as well—including climbing Yosemite’s Half-Dome, earning a brown belt in jujitsu, and having the innate ability to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics—he only ever bragged about them to Spencer and me.
“Write some hieroglyphics then,” I demanded, when he boasted the latter.
Spencer shoved a sketch pad and a whittled-down pencil into Alan’s hands. We watched intently as Alan began carefully inscribing a series of lines and curlicues across the pad. By the time he had gotten to the end of the page, I had blocked out the activity of the playground, forgotten even that we were still at school. When he finished, he signed his name beneath it as if it were a work of art.
“Well, what’s it say?” I asked.
I could see in Spencer’s face the same fevered curiosity.
“It says, ‘Let it be known to all who can read this that Jeff Tannen and Spencer Mooney are the stupidest mother fuckers I’ve ever known.’”
Although Alan rarely revealed his lies, on occasion he would shame us with the truth, just to rub our naiveté in our faces.
That may have been the reason Spencer and I frequently ridiculed him. Or maybe it was because we picked on Alan mercilessly that he constantly lied to us. Either way, he spent long recesses alone while Spencer and I did nothing but talk about what a loser he was.
“He’s such a lying sack of shit,” I said, situating myself at the top of the jungle gym.
“I wonder if his name really is Alan Wesson,” Spencer said, from a few rungs down.
We watched Alan walk around the playground all recess long. He began wherever we ousted him—which in this case was near our classroom—cut across the baseball diamond, hugged the chain link fence, passed through the tennis courts, and crossed the expansive blacktop before doing it all again. He walked with his hands in his pockets, head down, hardly watching where he was going. There must have been times when he was genuinely sad, but for the most part he put on the routine just to make me and Spencer feel sorry for him.
“Why are you guys so mean to my brother?” Alan’s older sister asked us one day.
I didn’t understand the question. Did she not know her brother was a compulsive liar?
“Why can’t you treat him with a little respect?”
I was really confused then. Alan and his sister didn’t respect each other at all. In fact, on the days when we weren’t making fun of each other, we usually made fun of Alan’s sister.
Needless to say, Alan’s sister ended up hurting his case more than helping it. We ignored Alan for the rest of the week after her attempt to shame us into forgiving her brother.
The following Monday, when the three of us were back together—as if nothing had happened the previous week—Alan told us he had recited the entire book of Leviticus to his Sunday school class. I don’t know if it was because deep down we wanted to believe some of the things Alan told us or because we felt bad about exiling him, but we didn’t raise our usual objections to his claim.
“What about you, Spencer? What did you do at church?”
Alan and I knew that Spencer had different beliefs than we did. Spencer must have known that Alan was setting some kind of trap.
“You know. We prayed and stuff.”
“What did you learn about?”
Spencer had mumbled his first response. This time, he spoke without actually opening his mouth.
“Joseph Smith.”
“Who the hell is that?” Alan asked.
“He started our church,” Spencer said, with a little more conviction than before.
“You mean he just made up a church?”
“No,” Spencer said, his cheeks flushing red. “God told him to write a book that made up for all the lies in the bible.”
“You guys made up your own bible?”
This was one of those statements that forced a third party to take sides.
On one side was Spencer. We had been best friends for over a year, since the beginning of fourth grade, and had much more in common than Alan and I did. We greedily collected comic books as if each one was worth its weight in gold. Aside from showing each other up by securing rare issues and finding new titles, we both were pretty good artists. Often times when we ditched Alan, we would lean up against the wall of our classroom and sketch super heroes. We did this, in part, because we enjoyed creating new costumes and imagining new powers, but we also did it because we knew it would make Alan—who didn’t draw at all—feel that much more like an outcast.
On the other side of the argument was Alan. He had begun hanging out with me and Spencer at the beginning of the year. While we didn’t have a lot in common—aside from our religious beliefs—he did have a point about Spencer’s church. If Joseph Smith made up his own bible and started a church, his lies were worse than Alan’s.
At this point in the conversation, Spencer was livid.
“We did not make up our own bible! We read the Book of Mormon and the bible, you dipshit!”
Alan halfheartedly suppressed a grin as he glanced at me. I could tell he was waiting for me to join him in berating Spencer.
“You think we made up our bible too? To hell with you!” Spencer said, forcing me to side with Alan. With that, he stormed away, cursing Alan more than me, but secretly cursing his religion more than Alan.
“Well that got rid of him,” Alan said.
I wanted to tell Alan that he was an asshole for saying those things about Spencer’s church, but I didn’t want to piss off the one friend I had left.
Sensing that I was unhappy with my new alliance, Alan said something that he knew would gain my loyalty.
“I didn’t want Spencer to know, but I have two comic books in my backpack. Wanna see them?”
At that point in my life, I would have gotten into a car with a convicted child molester if he had even one comic book I had never seen before.
“What do you have?” I asked, instantly forgetting about Spencer, his church, and the year we had spent together comparing comic book collections and drawings.
Like a zombie tracking the scent of blood, I followed Alan to his backpack, which was stacked on top of several others in front of our classroom. When Alan pulled the comic books out of the bag—unveiling them like the Holy Grail—sunlight reflected off the slick covers, making them appear more sacred than anyone’s bible.
I had never read any issues of either title, which made them that much more enticing. He had The Master of Kung Fu #74 and Defenders #135. I would have given just about anything to get my hands on those comic books.
“You know, I don’t really want these,” Alan said, holding them close. “Maybe I could trade you for something?”
My mind reeled. The situation had just gone from good to ideal. I thought I might only have the rest of recess to peruse the comic books, but now there was the possibility of taking them home and poring over every beautifully written, block-lettered line of dialogue, every stylistically rendered picture of the heroes in action.
“I have three dollars and fifty cents. I’ll buy them from you.”
“They’re worth more than that,” Alan said coolly.
“I’ll give you my lunch every day for a week.”
Alan shook his head.
He turned down at least six other equally desperate offers.
“What do you want then?”
“I don’t know. One thing I’ve always wanted was a diary.”
A few weeks prior to that, my parents had bought me a small, hard covered journal that had a lock on it. When I first got it, I wrote a few entries in it about my friends, my teacher, and the girl I had a crush on at the time. I paraded it around school so that other kids would be jealous of my diary and wonder at the secrets it contained. It had been at least a week since I had written in it and, because the novelty had worn off, I was more than willing to part with it for the comic books.
“Here you go,” I said, digging under the other backpacks to retrieve the diary from my own bag. “I wrote in some of the pages, but you can just rip those out.”
“Thanks,” he said, grinning almost as hard as I was.
I immediately plopped down and began flipping through the pages of the comic books. I didn’t even notice that Alan had slipped away until the bell rang and I found myself sitting in front of the classroom alone.
The next day, Spencer warily approached me and Alan at recess. When neither of us said anything about his religion, he assumed all was well and joined in the conversation we were having about Penny Albright, a girl in the classroom next to ours.
“She’s a dog,” I said.
“She’s uglier than a dog,” Spencer added, testing the waters.
“That’s funny,” Alan said, looking at me. “I thought you liked her.”
“No way!”
“That’s what it says in your diary.” Alan pulled the hardbound book from his back pocket. He then retrieved the small, brass key from his front pocket and unlocked it.
“’Penny is prettiest girl at school,’” he read. “’One day I caught her watching me while I played soccer. I dribbled the ball around three players on the other team and scored a goal. I could tell by the way she looked at me that she knew I scored the goal for her.’”
Spencer laughed at the passage, his face turning a deeper shade of red than it had the previous day. Alan, too, got a kick out of my writing, though I could tell this was the fourth or fifth time that he had read it.
“What else does it say?” Spencer asked, curious to know what I had been keeping from him those couple of weeks that I carried the diary with me everywhere.
“Wanna hear what it says about you?” Alan asked.
He didn’t wait for Spencer’s reply.
“‘Spencer may have more comic books than me, but I’m a way better artist. For one thing he doesn’t know how to draw hands. All of his characters look like they have tentacles coming out of their wrists. What’s even worse than that is the way he bites his fingernails and chews on his pencils. His spit smells like a dirty diaper and he gets it on everything.’”
Spencer’s amusement turned into indignation.
“You aren’t half the artist I am,” he said, ignoring the comment I made about his spit, which I thought was much more offensive than what I said about his drawing.
“Spencer, I didn’t mean it,” I began.
“Yes, you did. I know you think your superheroes are better, but they’re not. You can only draw them in one pose.”
As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t defend myself against Spencer’s accusation. I almost always drew my superheroes facing forward, as if they were in a police lineup. Any time I attempted to make them fly, run, or smash something, their body parts came out lopsided. It would be a while still before I learned about perspective.
As I abandoned my so-called friends—seeing no other option but to flee—I noticed a glimmer of satisfaction in Alan’s eye. He had set me up. What made me angriest wasn’t the fact that he had duped me into handing over my private thoughts, but that after all the times he had lied to me, I was still stupid enough to trust him.
The next day I caught up with Alan and Spencer as they headed out to recess. We went through the unspoken ritual of pretending like nothing had happened the previous day. As we headed toward the jungle gym, from where we would watch the activity of the playground while inventing new cuss words and cracking jokes about Alan’s sister, Alan said, “Yesterday when I was walking home from school I saw a huge ditch in the field by my house.”
Spencer glanced at me and rolled his eyes.
“Inside the ditch was a red hot meteorite the size of a basketball.”
Between me and Spencer, I was usually the one to call Alan on his lies. For a moment I thought about doing just that, but then I had a different idea.
“Oh, yeah? Well, when I was walking home from school yesterday I saved someone’s life,” I said, trying my best to sound convincing. “Some guy was lying under a car in his driveway, changing the oil when one of the jacks gave out. I heard the tires slam on the concrete and the guy started screaming. The car fell right on his chest. I didn’t know what to do at first, but then I threw my bag down and grabbed on to the bumper. I lifted the car just high enough and just long enough for the guy to crawl out from underneath it. Although he probably had a couple of broken ribs, he invited me in for cookies and milk to thank me for saving his life.”
Spencer and, especially, Alan stared at me like I had just sprouted horns. I thought Alan was going to call me a liar, but he didn’t.
“That’s amazing!” he said.
“What kind of cookies did he give you?” Spencer asked, licking his lips.
In the critical seconds that followed my story, I went from thinking that Spencer and Alan were going to turn on me to thinking they were going to raise me up on their shoulders and parade me around the playground. For the rest of that recess they treated me like I really was a hero. And, in a way, I felt like I had done a good deed. Maybe it wasn’t the dramatic rescue I had invented to entertain my friends, but it did protect Alan from several recesses of scorn and ridicule.
Later, when Spencer and I sat by our classroom doodling while Alan told us a long-winded tale about herding cattle with his dad in Chowchilla, Spencer suddenly looked up from his sketch pad and asked, “So where are the comic books Alan gave you?”
Alan watched on, interested to hear my response.
“He didn’t give me any comic books. You can’t trust anything Alan says.”
And for the first time, Alan told the truth—by not saying anything at all.
Despite Jeff Tannen's less-than-desirable experience with trading private possessions for comic books, he is still a superhero junkie. In fact, he credits comic books for his love of fiction. Aside from writing about times when he was duped by his childhood friends, Jeff also publishes short fiction and magic realism, which can be found in journals like 42Opus, Eclectica, Cezanne's Carrot, and Carve Magazine. He is currently working on a science fiction novel titled The Rite of Spirals.