Tag: books

You had Pumping Iron sprawled on your desk like a sacred text while the Canyon High freshmen trickled into Mrs. Hanson’s English Literature class, each one a fidgeting, hormonal catastrophe. Glossy black-and-white photos of muscle-bound gods glared back at you from the pages, but it was the image of Mr. Universe Franco Columbu, hanging upside down from a chin-up bar like a meaty bat, that you kept flipping to. The photo was blurry and distant—just obscure enough that only a true disciple of the iron church could identify Columbu.

Next to you sat Liz Murphy. Just last year, she was the gangly volleyball phenom from Earl Warren Junior High—the one the boys nicknamed “Giraffe,” “Horse,” or “Armadillo,” depending on the angle of cruelty. But over the summer, Liz had staged a Cinderella comeback. A Caribbean cruise had transformed her: her freckles softened into a copper glow, her limbs filled out like poetry, and her hair—now longer and looser—carried the faint scent of strawberries and ginger.

You turned to her and said, “Hey, wanna see a picture of a bodybuilder at the beach?”

She gave you a skeptical smile and leaned in.

“See that guy hanging upside down?” you said, pointing at the photograph.

“Holy smokes, he’s huge,” she said, staring wide-eyed.

“That’s me,” you replied.

She squinted, confused. “What?”

“That’s me. Can’t you tell?”

Her disbelief cracked just enough for hope to sneak in. “Oh my God… that’s you?”

You nodded with solemn authority. “Yep.”

And just like that, you slipped into your own fiction. You told her how you’d been visiting your grandparents in Los Angeles, hanging out with your bodybuilding pals at the beach, when someone snapped the photo. The lie came easy. Too easy. Her awe washed over you like warm sun, and for a few precious seconds, you felt seen. Not as the skinny kid you were—but as the chiseled hero you wanted to be.

But then came the stomach-drop. The gnawing guilt. What kind of person, even at fourteen, spins a story so absurd just to taste a few seconds of admiration? You didn’t know. But if you had to trace it back—to find the origin of the myth-making—you might start in the treehouse of your childhood, the one where humiliation planted its flag and never truly left.

On dry land, you were Captain America incarnate—at least in your own mind. A five-year-old freedom fighter in light-up sneakers, flexing your spaghetti arms to vanquish Red Skull stand-ins wherever they lurked. And in 1973, Kindergarten was your battlefield. The enemy? A kid named Teddy Heinrich, your neighbor at the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose—a cherubic little stormtrooper-in-training who strutted around with the smugness of a pint-sized Aryan poster child.

You had no idea you were Jewish, not consciously. But Teddy sure did. He made it his mission to educate you—mostly through Nazi memorabilia and unsolicited history lessons delivered between episodes of The Three Stooges and Superman, which you watched on his living room TV because your family didn’t have UHF. His parents were phantoms—always cloistered in the master bedroom, never cracking a smile, and dressed like they were auditioning for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

One day, Teddy gave you the grand tour of his family’s closet. Instead of a vacuum or winter coats, he pulled out his grandfather’s SS uniform—complete with a swastika armband, as if he were unveiling a treasured heirloom. “Check it out,” he said, beaming. “The greatest fighting machine the world has ever known.” His father peeked out from the shadows, nodded with ghostly approval, and slithered back into the bedroom.

You didn’t know what to make of it. Your Nazi education came exclusively from The Sound of Music, and even then, the swastikas were mostly an inconvenience to the yodeling.

Days later, under the hot California sun, you and Teddy were sprawled on the apartment lawn. He used his magnifying glass to torch a grotesque Jerusalem cricket, its alien limbs writhing in agony. You kicked it away, trying to save the poor thing, but Teddy doubled down—burning swastikas and “Nazi” into a wood block like a miniature war criminal with a hobby.

You started mimicking him, doodling swastikas like a deranged architect. When your mother caught you mid-sketch, she froze. “Where did you learn that?” You dropped Teddy’s name like a hot grenade.

She banned the symbols and told you they were evil. You nodded, swore to behave—and went right back to etching them at school, seduced by their sinister geometry.

Then came the day Teddy called you a “dumb Jew.”

You didn’t even know what the word meant. You just knew something flared in your chest like a lit fuse. In an instant, you were on top of him, pounding his freckled face into the grass. He didn’t fight back. He just took it—limp, passive, stunned. You clawed at his cheeks, turned them into raw hamburger. It was an out-of-body experience. You were rage. You were justice. You were five years old and seeing red.

You walked home calm, maybe even proud. An hour later, Teddy and his mother showed up at your door. She was full of righteous German fury. “Your son did this?” she said, pushing her bruised child forward like Exhibit A. “I almost had to take him to the hospital.”

Your mother, stunned, sent you to the kitchen. You listened from the other room as she said, “Did he really do all this?”

“Yes!” the woman barked. “Your son should not be allowed to play with mine anymore.”

Once they left, your mother turned to you. You explained the swastikas. The Nazi closet. The slur.

She didn’t ground you. She didn’t raise her voice. Instead, she nodded with a quiet, ancestral gravity—as if somewhere in the back of her mind, ghosts had nodded with her.

In her eyes, you weren’t a delinquent.

You were Captain America.