hercules

A short story from the perspective of a child's memories of the past

I had spent all of my time up until this point in my life barefoot. I was a baby born to parents late in their hippy lives and I was raised with a sort of free range parenting style that allowed me to walk around the small grotto we lived in nearly naked, I wasn’t afraid though, because even in those early days I had a constant feeling of propriety and knowledge, that I could come out of the other side of anything completely untouched, I guess at four years old, and being able to read and ride a bike already you do feel kind of invincible, but it wasn’t always so. I did feel vulnerable for a short time in my life, when I could barely walk, and yes dear reader, I do remember back to that time. Strange as it may seem, I remember my mom and dad holding my hands between the two of them and helping me walking along the beach where I was born, when I was only sixteen months old, that is my first memory, seeing a little sand crab in the wee morning hours on a beach in southern california and scrambling after it to eat it, or play with it, I don’t fully remember my intentions but it was there that I started forming memories that would be the basis for the things that I would later use to build a knowledge base of the world around me, and the first thing I learned is: Crabs pinch when you try to catch them. 

Fast forward two years and my father and mother moved us to northern California in a small little town called Rancho Cordova, which isn’t so small nowadays, but when I grew up there you could still walk along the train tracks and ride your bike all day until sunset, and play in the rain outside and there was nobody there to make you afraid or do you harm, or at least that was how it felt. My father had renovated a 1986 dodge ram van and painted it racing orange, that was quickly fading to the base gray underneath. But he had emptied it out inside and turned it into an impromptu camper where for the better part of five years he drove us around in it and took us to different christian conventions and concerts and gatherings all across CA and other states, it was a great way to see the countryside of CA when I was a kid, and sometimes the van doubled as our shelter when my parents couldn’t find a place to rent, or we had run out of relatives to stay with. It was during one of these times that one of the first strange events in my life occurred, they would go on to get much weirder, at this point it was my mother and father, and me and my three siblings all living in the obnoxiously orange van. So it was pretty cramped. My father had gotten word about a “fellowship” or gathering, which was mostly semi-reformed hippies who now espoused the love of god instead of the love of LSD, or they would espouse both. They were crowded in a public park, thousands of bare ankles and horsehair shoes, smelling of patchouli and old carpeting, my father held my hand as we walked through the throng of people, clapping and swaying back and forth in jubilation to christian music pumped through some large speakers set up outside of a carnival barker style revival tent. We went inside and it was hot and smelled of unwashed humanity, a hot rankness of body odor that cut through the smell of earth and wet grass. People were standing in makeshift pews made of rows of collapsible steel chairs and there was a pastor on stage gesticulating wildly yelling things into a microphone like “And GaAAaaaWD… Et cetera” I can’t remember the rest. My father pushed us to the front of the makeshift stage that was hastily slapped together and extremely hot from the open stage lights lining the edges. I didn’t know why we were here, my dad loved to listen to different pastors on the radio, and sometimes coast to coast AM, but he had never struck me as a southern big tent revival type of man, as a four year old I just stood in place my legs getting tired as my dad looked on in wide eyed wonderment like a small child himself. My siblings were all standing around in the far back of the tent not wanting to experience the heat of the lights. 

Some heavy rock music was piped over the speakers and some stage pyrotechnics went off releasing billows of smoke like we were at a monster truck rally. “INTRODUCING THE POWERTEAM FOR CHRIST!” The same preacher yelled over the microphone so as to be heard over the guitar heavy music. And I immediately knew why we were here, because my dad, for all of his faults, and issues, couldn’t resist a good sideshow, like watching a bear fight a lion, or watching two monster trucks go to a tug of war. He was captivated by it. Four hulking figures stepped out of the smoke onto stage and were summarily introduced by the pastor. “Introducing first: John Joseph” A tall ridiculously muscled and tanned man with a blond mullet walked forward on stage and grabbed a piece of rebar that was sitting on a pedestal and proceeded to use his teeth, a towel, and some serious body English to bend the bar. He threw it to the ground and screamed “Praise jesus!”. “And second we have a bear of a man, who needs no introduction… Seamus!” and at that a wall of a man whose skin was as dark as midnight walked forward and picked up a phone book that was conveniently on the ground “If any of you have ever had things you need to overcome, remember nothing is impossible” He said, ripping the phone book he was holding in half with little to no effort. “Praise Jesus!” He said as he threw both halves into the screaming crowd. “And next we have the magic man himself, Sean Huddle!” the preacher turned carnival barker yelled into the microphone. A slightly overweight but thickly muscled man walked forward from the group and picked a brick up off the floor and held it up. “This brick represents all of the fear and anxiety I felt before Christ came into my life” and then he smashed the brick over his head, again with little resistance. I was floored, this was amazing it was like pro wrestling for Jesus. I couldn’t turn away. “And last but not least we have the indestructible Hercules!” the preacher exclaimed, pointing to an extremely well built stocky man with a large beard, and coiled wire like hair poking out from his tank top. Hercules walked over to a large barbell that had three tractor tires on either side and cleaned it to his chest, then pressed it over head with little to no expression on his face, as he put it down it shook the whole stage with its weight. He looked around the audience with a very bleak look on his face and said in a dry monotone “God is great” and so it went on for several hours, breaking bricks, and lifting heavy objects, and bending bars. And my dad maintained his excitement throughout the entire ordeal, I nodded off some half way through their little act as it was very repetitive and laced with a heavy dose of preaching that I had a hard time keeping my eyes open for. My father picked me up and I fell asleep. I woke up several hours later with my head resting on his shoulder as he carried me through the park and back to the parking lot. Down from the van my father heard some screaming, and some yelling that sounded like someone being assaulted. My mind was on more sleep, and maybe getting some food in my stomach, but my father being the type of person he was couldn’t just let it pass, he handed me to my mother for safekeeping and ran over to where the noise was coming from, my mother didn’t seem to understand the concept to stay behind as she tailed behind my father rather quickly, I guess her plan was to swing my limp body at them like a baton or something if all else failed. I heard a woman yell “Let go of me!” and some deeper voice cursing and rambling incoherently. It was something like a sinking feeling, I had never felt before up until this point, but I recognize it now as the same feeling you get when you’re struck in the balls. A sinking feeling in your gut as it were. “Mind your own f*****g business!” the man spun around and pointed a revolver at my fathers head, his face was boiling over with madness and rage, “Just stay out of this'' he repeated, my mother stepped back and into another man who was obviously working as the lookout for the mad man with the gun, she didn’t know what to do but I could see in my fathers eyes that he knew he had made a terrible mistake, at this point I didn’t know where my siblings were but I assumed that they were in the van waiting for my father to drive us all back up to my aunt’s place where we were currently staying. The world spun around me, I knew that this was it, at four years old I was staring death in the face. And then as if out of nowhere a large hairy knuckled hand enveloped the revolver in one massive fist, that covered half of the mad man's hand as well, the hand closed down with what appeared to be little effort, crushing the gun with a sound of twisting metal. “What the f**k?!” the mad man screamed as he dropped to the ground clutching his broken hand. He shuffled under the car as best he could hiding from this massive bulk of man moving with the speed of god like retribution. With one arm the thickly muscled figure lifted the car and grabbed the would-be assailant by his belt, and like a man tossing a cat he threw him thirty feet across the parking lot. He hit the pavement some distance away and we heard a sickening wet crunch as bone met pavement. The bulk of a man standing now in front of my father shuffled him out of the way with the swipe of a hand as though he were turning the page of a book, swiftly yet gently. The attacker that stood behind my mother came around with some kind of pipe in his hand, it didn’t go so well for him, he swung downward, but our rescuer caught it in one hand and bent the pipe in the shape of his fist. “What the fu…” the other would-be attacker managed to mumble out in confusion before he too was thrown across the parking lot like the human garbage he was. “Thank you, thank you so much, oh my god! Who are you?” The woman in the car being attacked asked. Our rescuer stepped into the light and we saw the thickly bearded face of the man who was performing circus acts for Jesus earlier in the night. He smiled a half cocked smile and shrugged his shoulders. “I’m Hercules” was all he said. My father staggered around for a few minutes in a stupor brought on by the shock of what had just happened, not only had he survived a death defying situation, but he had met an apocryphal hero out of the pages of one of the greatest Hellenic poems. My father hugged my mother and I, and turned to thank Hercules. But he was gone. 

I had questioned myself many times about that night, believing that I had made all of it up in my head, but after I peeled back the layers and layers of cynicism that covered me for so many decades I started to wonder if perhaps it wasn’t the fever dream of an overactive imagination and instead the actual events that transpired that night, I had asked my father about it when  I was old enough to formulate such sentences but he denied it out right ever having happened. So it was either my imagination, Or it was the culmination of too much television and too little sleep. As  I got older I thought  I went back to examine what I had seen, if it was all in my imagination why didn’t Hercules look like the hero portrayed in popular television and film at the time? Anglo-Saxon, white, blue eyes, blond hair, lithe and tall, instead he was short and stocky with thick wiry black hair and a giant beard, performing circus acts for what little pay and adulation he could garner. At the time it meant little to me, his name, or his actions, it sunk in much later and I came to realize the Irony; a hero of old and a demigod, son of Zeus, working for the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth spreading the word with his strength, and deeds, for the religion that wiped out all of his followers.