The Good Guys Don’t Always Win
I’d like to relate a conversation I had with a 4 year old girl on the subway yesterday morning. I was sitting down, and this girl and her mother and father were standing in front of me, holding onto the pole. Normally, I would have gotten up and given my seat to the kid, but sometimes in the mornings I am tired and grumpy and ignore the voice in my head telling me to do the right thing.
Anyway, I had decided to take a break from ‘real’ books (i.e. fantasy novels) and read comics for a couple of weeks, so I was reading the latest issue of She-Hulk (which is amazingly well-written by Dan Slott).
This little girl, who couldn’t have been more than 4, was all wrapped up warmly on her cute winter coat and knit cap, with gloves and little booties. She had blonde hair peeking out of her cap and red cheeks from the cold. If she’d been holding a kitten, I swear she might have been the cutest thing I ever saw.
(Side note, as my wife points out, I hope I never have a daughter, because I will likely be wrapped around her little finger as soon as she can talk.)
So the girl’s mother (who is kind of hot, in a European sort of way, with her beret and knotted scarf) is nattering on in French to her husband, whose back is to me. They’re not ignoring their daughter, exactly, but neither are they paying attention to her, and she is bored.
The girl sees that I am reading comics, and starts turning her head to get a look (it’s upside down to her). I notice this, and turn the book 90 degrees so she can see better.
“That’s cool,” she says, pointing to an ad for a Spider-man water pick.
I pull off my earphones (my sole defense against the press of New York which threatens to consume me every day), and look up at her smiling face. I always have trouble talking to kids. I hate it when people don’t respect kids’ intelligence, and raise their voices two octaves and act like they’re a retard on ecstacy when speaking to children, but I also am cognizant that you can’t talk to kids exactly like you would to an adult, either.
“Uh, yeah,” I said lamely, “You’d never get cavities if you used that.”
“No,” she says, pointing again at the picture, specifically to the jet of water coming out of the pick, “it’s cool because it shoots like a web.”
It’s then I realize that she is wearing Spider-man wool gloves.
Now THIS is a kid I can talk to, I think.
We proceed to discuss the ads in the book from then on. She doesn’t know She-hulk from any movies, so poor Shulkie might as well not exist, but she is happy to discuss the Incredibles, saying “I liked when the baby turned into a lizard and went bluh bluh-blah! and scared the bad guy.”
We also saw an ad for a Doctor Octopus statue (she agreed with me that Doc Ock is fat), and she told me she loves the X-men. I showed her a picture of Spider-Woman, and she said “That can’t be Spider-Woman, her webs look like zippers!” 4 years old, and an art critic! Amazing!
Then she asks me, “Why is Doctor Octopus always so mean to Spider-man?”
“Because Spider-man gets in his way,” I told her.
“But why does he want to kill him?” she asked.
“Because Doctor Octopus likes to rob banks,” I said, “and Spider-man won’t let him. If he gets Spider-man out of the way (I deliberately avoided use of the word ‘kill’), then he can rob all the banks he wants.”
“But what if he kills Spider-man?” She asked.
“He won’t,” I said, “because Spider-man is a good guy, and the good guys always win.”
She looked at me with sad eyes, and my heart broke when she quietly said, “Sometimes they don’t.”
I looked at her in shock for a few minutes, struggling to find a response. I felt the full weight of responsibility hinging on my next words. Do I raise my voice two octaves and lie, or do I speak to her like an adult? The middle-ground wasn’t giving me any answers.
“Sometime the good guys lose because they forget to be good,” I told her at last. “Like when Spider-man lost his powers because he was selfish and stopped helping people. When the good guys remember to be good, they always win.”
It was still a lie, but it was the best I could do. Kids need hope, after all.
That voice in my head is still berating me for lying to a little girl, though.
Crap.