Oliver Benjamin
been witnessed by these underpants. I was even wearing these when
I disowned my dad.”
Colin went into the bathroom to put them on, leaving everyone
else a bit startled. This was the heaviest they’d ever seen him.
“He has a family?” Leona asked.
“Oh yes,” Roy replied.
She bit her lip. “I guess I’d always imagined Colin creating
himself through masturbation.” There was little she did not know
about the Undergrounds regulars, but Colin had made a point never
to speak of his family.
“Is he in touch with them?”
“No.”
“What’s his father do?” Bennie asked.
“You’ll have to ask him that,” Roy said.
When he came out of the bathroom, Bennie and Leona asked him
the same question at the same time. The young man was taken aback.
But then he rejoined with savage enthusiasm.
“He maintains the presence of evil in the world.”
The stout young man walked up to them and turned his back.
Then he offered them a categorically gruesome sight: digging his
thumbs into the waistband of his underpants, he pulled it outwards
so that they could see the cleavage of his pendulous buttocks. He
flipped the band up so that they could read the name written in
permanent marker all those years ago. The underpants and his
buttocks were disturbing enough, but the red ink seemed somehow
more horrible.
Colin Bidden, it read. A mother’s handwriting. The “i”s were
dotted with little strawberry hearts.
“No way,” Bennie said.
“But your mother…who?” Leona said.
“The one Roy loved was my stepmother,” he said, covering
himself and circling around the bar for a whiskey.
“So that’s how you know Roy,” Bennie said.
“Sí, señorito,” Colin said, “We’re united by a common enemy.
The loins of my fruit.”
As different as they had been from one another, Colin and Roy
shared this one thing: a mother who died while they were young.
Colin once pointed out that this was the fate of all heroes in cartoon
epics. Heroes in epic literature were often without fathers, but those
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