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 cou…