The Hardyman

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The Hardyman
by Susannah Breslin
2007

By the time darkness had fallen on his eleventh birthday, Jack Xavier Jingle Jr. was in bed and falling asleep. At his side lay two new Transformer toys, Optimus Prime and Megatron. Since zeroing in on the gift-wrapped boxes earlier in the day and tearing them open with a joy that had made his father suck scornfully in on his teeth, Jack had devoted all of his energies to engaging the Leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, and the Ruler of the Decepticons, Megatron, in a bloody civil war battle that had raged violently across every one of the family home's wall-to-wall carpeted rooms. Jack's mother had sat anxiously above him in her armchair, praying for his salvation. Now, Jack was finally surrendering himself to sleep.
As the first of his dreams began unfolding itself inside his drifting mind, Jack found he was trekking through a metallic landscape. Instantly, he knew this was Cybertron, where Transformers had first spawned, a place where future progress had dictated green mountains be supplanted with graying skyscrapers and flowing rivers be replaced by concrete highways. The rival Autobot and Decepticon factions had begun their never-ending intergalactic battle for robot supremacy here--that is, before bringing their struggle to Earth. Immediately, Jack knew his mission was to save Planet Earth--and himself--from becoming mere collateral damage in this war of the machines.
Yet Jack could feel doubt, like a shadow, creeping up alongside him. After all, there was no way he alone could bring an end to such a stellar struggle. He would fail to negotiate a strategic peace capable of preventing his world's destruction. His body would betray him in the end, clinging desperately back onto itself rather than morphing into a fusion cannon powered by black holes or a combat-deck equipped with radiated weapons. Ultimately, Jack would prove no match for any mecha-overlord worth his servos that he might encounter in the bot battle.
In the reality of 1984, Jack couldn't shape-shift in the same way that his newly acquired Transformers had morphed between his hands all day. He was simply an eleven-year old boy, who slept with his toys, struggling to grow up in the cool shade of his frustrated accountant of a father and his depressed housewife of a mother in a small house tucked into the curve of a suburban cul-de-sac. But in his dream, as Jack marched through the crunching steelscape, an exoskeleton began forming around him. A monstrous metal cage grew out around his head, a huge steel-barreled chest expanded from his mid-section, iron limbs outfitted with massive talons and giant boots extended from his limbs. Totally transformed, twenty-feet tall and armed to the teeth, Jack wondered, for the very first time, if he was, in fact, quite capable of anything.
With that, Jack's dream world turned into a replica of his living room. There, Jack reached out to his mother and father sitting on the couch, and with his strong new mecha-hands, he lifted them both off the sofa by their thin and fragile necks. As his engines began to whir and to spin, he wondered what the kids at school would say if only they could see him now.
2
At thirteen, Jack's long forgotten collection of Transformer toys had been stored in a dusty shoebox at the back of one of his closet's higher shelves. Since his father had been felled by a heart attack a year earlier on a subway train in the middle of rush-hour traffic--surrounded by people who, fittingly, did not know him--the majority of Jack's time had been spent alone in his bedroom, the door locked, the shades drawn. These days, Jack was engaged with the contents of quite a different box, hidden underneath his bed. In it sat a stack of magazines populated by women who wanted nothing more than to wile away their days reclining nude next to backyard swimming pools and sprawling naked atop unmade beds.
Over these women, Jack perched, studying the mysteries between their widespread legs as the women politely averted their eyes. Not long after his father's sudden departure from this world, Jack's body had commenced grumbling and spewing beyond his control. He had discovered his transformation could be summed up in one word, "puberty," but navigating his way alone through its rocky terrain was far more complex. As the final school-bell rang inside the white box of his eighth-grade classroom, it was as if a railroad-sized nail in his pants was drawn towards the magnet of pornography hiding beneath his bed. If his mother knew the real reason Jack had no time to stop and say hello when he walked in the front door, she might have learned how to allow her needs, as Jack had, to be subjugated to the relentless demands of his undeniable penis.
Try as he might,