Negotiating a Boy Hero

Luke and Steven spent ages trying to assemble the ultimate superhero for themselves, and of course I was in on all the negotiations. We liked Star Wars, but there’s that Luke Leia thing and they turn out to be brother and sister. But the Force was a good idea. Later on they brought out Star Trek, which was interesting as a future world. They really loved Terminator, and of course I was supposed to be Linda Hamilton. Fucking hell, fine. They were trying to put in what they knew about gender to their superhero you see. And then they loved Aliens, we watched that whole series over and over. And again, I was Sigourney Weaver. Which is hard to live up to!! But the Aliens thing, yeah, totally got it, it was a show down between women where all these guys died, but the guys were kind of stupid, which is why they died, and even in her underwear Sigourney could still shove a huge alien out a space lock and swear all at once!

When they brought over Robocop I was like, WTF? You boys are fucking intense! Now I have to be a cyborg, oh man! And they really were arming me with fucking heavy conflict movies. I wasn’t really originally going to go in that direction of being boy, but it was of the utmost importance. And sometimes they would give me this wild look like “Do you get it yet?” And I did disintegrate with them at the same time, but I was doing it in a different way, because I didn’t want to follow either of their leads because I knew neither was really working. But I did spend time in the psych system, and I did spent time drinking, and both times I was like “Fuck, you guys! Why do you keep doing this? What does this do for you that you keep doing this to yourselves?” I mean, I did know, by then, but I had no way of talking to them about feelings, because they would always start drinking or popping pills. And I started realizing I was going to have to tell them a wild boy story to start getting them out of it. Because that’s the way I talk to people.