Story XV: Charles Atlas

New York, 1965. A ninety-eight-pound weakling chases a yellow balloon five stories up.

Mid-sixties. I worked in an ad firm over on Madison. We weren’t the big boys. We were working out of a dime-store basement. Comic book ads, tricking kids out of postage stamps and a buck ninety-nine. “Be a man. Grow some muscles.” It worked. The whole operation ran through a post office box in Grand Central.

I was a string-bean out of high school who could draw comics. I wasn’t ever going to be good enough to draw Superman, but I could draw a weakling and a he-man, kick-the-sand-in-your-face bodybuilder stuff. A couple times these crooks paid me with return postage envelopes to keep me there. I still like to kid, “But what could I do? I’m a weakling, too.”

It was spring. We were Midtown on Lex. The 30s. This little girl with a yellow balloon was fastening the buckles on her red Mary Janes, getting down on one knee the way kids do. Her mother told her to be careful before she let the balloon go, and mom should have tied it off, because it slipped out of the kid’s hand and into an elm tre…