Charles Atlas: Notes & Outrageous Spoilers

"Oh, Mac! You are a real man after all! Gosh! What a build!"

SPOILERS TOP TO BOTTOM

If you missed Story #15: Charles Atlas when it was posted, here’s the link. Otherwise, the usual warning: everything below will be spoilers top to bottom.

---

ORIGIN STORY

As usual, here are the 3AM notes on “Charles Atlas” which was called “The Yellow Balloon” right up until we “went to press,” as it were.

The early story notes come with a basic idea that never changes—along with a small admonition to myself about “rereading Walter Mitty,” although I never do reread it despite my crystal clear instructions. This is a life pattern.

Note also the Introduction to the Story 101 advice on “there is always drama as he gets painfully close to it, then the stakes rise.” By story #15, this should not have required an explanatory note to myself.

The original notes:

Man who climbs scaffolding to retrieve small girl’s balloon. The balloon gradually drifts further away from him, but he finds the courage he never thought he had. Strips his shirt off, becomes more and more manly, possibly in front of another person.

The child cheers him on, then the mother, then the crowd. Finally he stands there holding the yellow balloon on the highest branch. He's a professor of physics at Columbia. At the end, he ties an acorn to it and it slowly descends. There is always drama as he gets painfully close to it, then the stakes rise.

Reread Walter Mitty.

THE PHOTO

This origin story comes with a photo and a caption.

Cobble Hill Park, Brooklyn. That is the Tree of Original Inspiration. At the time I thought of the story I was sitting on a bench at lower right. At lower left there are always birthday parties for children too young to know they are taking place and parents who will shortly be priced out of the neighborhood when baby #2 arrives. So, voila, a man, a bench, a tree, a balloon—and the germ of an idea for a story. No balloon was released into a tree for the creation of this story. Some came dangerously close.

THE COLUMBIA PROFESSOR

For all the clarity of the basic idea out of the gate, this story took some fits and starts to figure out who exactly was doing the climbing and how this would be framed. I knew the guy would need to be slight of build, powerfully uncourageous from the exterior, and bookish.

When the story got going, he turned from a professor of physics into a film teacher. The story was going to take place in the 40s or 50s, but, oops, there were no film departments then. This moved the story into the 60s and after a few aborted approaches, the 1960s were all that was left of my Columbia Film Teacher. My professor, by the way, taught a class on “Movies of Heroism.”

Somehow, and it completely escapes me now, every progression of the professor’s climb was going to be linked to a specific film with expanding stakes. He would be inspiring himself along with the movies he taught about but never lived.

And so: each of the movies he imagined as he climbed dealt with some tribulation related to masculinity. Here was a sequence of potential movies:

1. Buster Keaton

2. To Kill a Mockingbird

3. High Noon

4. Stagecoach (John Wayne)

5. Dumbo

Dumbo is the interesting one because the idea of a feather came from the film. In the movie, a magical feather Dumbo believed made his flight possible was revealed to be nothing but a simple feather in the end. The feather was, however, Dumbo’s source of a deep, Ozian, self-induced confidence. A crutch. Reading that, I wish some mention of Dumbo was left in there.

One of the reasons the professor’s movies died as a source of inspiration for our climber was the decision to tell the story from the observer’s point of view. The character witnessing the moment of grace was more important than the one who achieved it.

But the grounding in pop culture of the 1960s remained.

While none of my professor’s films made it, I still ended up with Tarzan, King Kong, Singing in the Rain, and Superman comics.

But above all, we ended up with…

CHARLES ATLAS

This advertisement that was at the back of every comic book I devoured as a youth. I was a slight boy with a fevered imagination and skinny arms, possibly more Clark Kent than Superman, although a boy with enormous upside. This slight boy was certain he would someday be 6’ 1” and ripped, ladies.

(I remember, lying in the tub, my toes just long enough to turn the hot water tap on and off, thinking, “I am Superman and they think I’m Clark Kent.” This thought occurred at an age greater than I am willing to admit even I were ever to write the most scandalously confessional essay. It was some age less than my current one.)¹

Every boy who ever grew up reading comic books with superheros, read and reread the Charles Atlas ad. We know this because that ad ran in various forms for forty years. That is a lot of sand kicked in a lot of boys faces.

And that is a lot of boys sending money to Department R325 on 23rd Street in Manhattan, 10010.

“I enclose 10c. Please send me a copy of your famous book showing how “Dynamic Tension” can make me a new man.

In case you are wondering:

No, I personally did not send away for it.

I was holding out for the height of 6’ 1” which, because of long toes, my mother assured me I would reach (to our equal disappointment.)

BOW BRIDGE & BOULDERING

There is another, more important seed to this story.

When I lived in Los Angeles, I went “bouldering” with a friend. In bouldering, if you don’t get out much, you have no safety equipment and you make your way up and across and hopefully down large boulders. It is like free solo climbing on a much less dramatic stage but with equally serious impacts if you fall.

That morning when we first got out to the location, I remember thinking how crazy it was to be climbing on the sheer faces of these rocks, but, little by little, when you start focusing on the climbing your danger signals abandon you. Before long, you are doing some, how to put it, “dumb shit.” Bouldering is enormously fun both for the physical and mental challenge but also for the awareness of how much you can overcome fear when you’re focused on something.

None of us know the depths of courage we are capable of. So, the morning bouldering informed the deepest level this story.

Second reference point.

To this day, every time I’m in Central Park and I’m near Bow Bridge, I look at it with shock and awe. In film school I was shooting a movie about a man who discovered a magic baton that played grand orchestral music from an invisible orchestra when he conducted with it. Every time he made the magical music the baton shrunk. Storytelling 102, perhaps.

One of these moments conducting took place on Bow Bridge.

But not just on Bow Bridge.

On the ledge of Bow Bridge. It took place with the lead actor, me, standing on the bridge wall conducting god-knows-what, probably Ride of the Valkyries.

Yes, that. You don’t want to fall from there. I stood on that waving a shrinking conductor’s baton. What the fuck?

I don’t even know if I intended to stand on it, but once we were on site, and the thought of the image of a man standing on the edge of that bridge conducting occurred to me, the moment was a have-to. Up I went.

So, maybe I’m being too hard on myself on the courage meter. In the right situation, I might be a click or two to the right of the top of the bell curve.

Possibly, we all are.

This story believes we all are.

WHAT I LISTENED TO WHILE WRITING…

(SITTIN’ ON) THE DOCK OF THE BAY (TAKE 1)

In my mind’s eye, Otis Redding was always sitting on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge looking out at the bay. There is no reason to believe this from the lyrics. That is simply where I subconsciously decided to imagine him whistling. At the time, my entire knowledge of the West Coast was: Hollywood Sign, Golden Gate Bridge, Space Needle.

About the whistling:

It was never meant to be in the song. The whistling was a placeholder for lyrics that weren’t written yet. Redding planned to come back to the studio to punch in the last verse. A plane crash, of course, took his life and prevented that from ever happening.

You have to listen to the outtake above, if you have not heard it already. It has the least prophetic comment ever broadcast into the studio from an engineer’s booth.

“You’re not going to make it as a whistler.”

There is no whistler more famous than Otis Redding.

Enjoy.

1. In defense of myself, I ended up more or less at the top of the bell curve of male heroism. Which means I would not have scaled my way to the 5th story and leaned out off a drainpipe. It is likely I would have gotten up on the bench without prompting. There’s a 5% I would have climbed into the tree. Zero chance that I would have kept climbing with construction workers egging me on. Come to think of it: I’m not sure I would go through the blue construction site door.

We leave Tuscany today! 😭