April 17th, 1981

Benny Johnson turned 7. He had a big party out in the backyard of the house that he lived in over on 3rd and Glover. It was a quiet neighborhood with tall trees and lots of big houses where the driveways all held two cars and kids carried bookbags instead of just plain old books without the bags. It was a good birthday, with lots of cake and icecream and presents and half the kids on the block at his house yelling and Mom and Dad smiling and taking pictures. It was a Sunday, and the next day was Monday, back to school and work. It was also the day Benny's dad became ElectronMan.

It was just like in the comic books, like all of the origins of all the other fantastic figures in the 4 color pulps. There was an accident at work and Benny's father collapsed and was taken to the hospital. They took lots of X-rays and pictures of his chest and stomache and even the inside of his father's head. It wasn't until late that they let the family come up and see the father.

Benny walked up the long white hallway of the hospital holding his mothers hand. He could hear the tap-tap-tap of her high heels on the vinyl floor. His mother was serious and didn't smile, and it made Benny more than a little afraid, but after he saw his father he understood better.

They went into the white room where the blinds were opened onto the neon lit boulevard streets that lay beyond the hospital window. His father was in a bed in the corner of the room and he turned when Benny came up to the siderail and looked at his son, and he tried to smile, but he couldn't smile. There was something wrong with his face and it wouldn't work right.

His mother sat and held his father's hand and spoke quietly.

Benny couldn't hear most of it, but he did hear 'radiation', and that is when he sat up straight. Redation... redation?

He sat up quick then in the straightback chair and ran over to the side of his dad's bed and grabbed onto his father's sleeve with both of his small hands.

"Redation is like Boweavilman and all the Z-men Dad," he said in a quick voice. Benny's eyes were bright just looking at his Dad and thinking, 'now I understand what is going on, now I understand!'

His father just turned and looked at his son and slowly tried to smile while the mother turned away and bowed her head and didn't say anything at all.

Dad nodded then, but the smile didn't quite work, that side of his face wasn't quite right yet, and so it didn't really look like a smile at all, but like some sort of grimace, but Benny knew what it was, it was a smile. And Benny smiled back and gripped harder onto his father's arm. He understood now that his dad was a superhero.

April 24, 1981

Boweavilman had been unconscious for two days when he had been radiated under Dr. Doom's evil gamma rays. And Zee had been out for only a few minutes before he had transformed and become the fastest human alive.

Benny's dad was in the hospital for a week before he came home. And then he came home in a wheelchair that his mom pushed and his father just looked at his son for a moment when they came in the door, but then the father looked quickly away, because he was embarrassed.

Mom pushed the wheelchair up to the stairs and then told Benny to go get something to eat, even though he wasn't hungry and he told his mom, "Mom I'm not hungry." But she had told him to go get something anyway because it was getting late and he needed something. So he went and stood in the kitchen while his mother struggled to move his father up the stairs out of the wheelchair and up the stairs to the bedroom. After they got halfway up Benny came and stood in the doorway of the kitchen and wanted to cry but he didn't say anything, because his mother couldn't see him and he didn't want her to know that he saw them and it made him feel like crying and he didn't know why.

May 15, 1981

His Father was getting better, slowly, over the weeks that passed , he had progressed from climbing out of the chair on his own to standing for brief minutes. It took another two months before he could speak clearly or stand for any length of time, and it was still almost six months before dad went back to work.

In November dad went back to work, with good color in his cheeks and his strength mostly back. He didn't talk much about his powers, or what it all meant, but Benny held his hand when he went back and kissed his cheek and told him he loved him and to come back home soon and safe, like his mom had said every night when she laid him down in his bed and prayed with him and he fell asleep and slept all through the dark and silent night.

Once he had waken from a nightmare, but his father had come and knelt next to the bed and held his son's hand and smiled and told him it would be alright, and Benny had held his dad's hand and fallen back asleep and forgotten to be afraid, and so he had slept all through the night.

It was February when Dr. Doom came again. He crept into the factory where Benny's father worked and wrecked havoc, and it was all doomed, and Benny knew because that is what he heard his father say and he knew the word doom and knew that it meant Dr. Doom.

His father went back to the hospital, and took more radiation. He was building up his power for the evil Dr. Doom, but he was very very tired when he came home from those times and Benny would sit with him on the porch and his dad would just watch the sky like it was something special and Benny would just sit with him and try not to talk because his dad couldn't follow along too fast because all the training took all the umph right out of a person.

But Benny sat and smiled and felt the sun on his face and held his father's hand and knew in his heart that everything was going to be all right. Because his father was a superhero now and even if Dr. Doom was strong, well dad was strong too and after all, it was always the guys in the comics that won anyway. It was supposed to be that way.

Had to be that way.

At seven, the world wasn't a complete mystery and all make believe, but some of it you had to believe because you just couldn't stand for it to be another way. And if you were there you would know what I mean.

So Benny sat with his dad and held hands and watched the sky and sipped at cokes and waited until Mom called them in to eat dinner. Until she came out onto the porch and the screen door banged closed behind her and she said "Dinner's on!" and then Benny and Dad would slowly stand and stretch their legs and follow her into the house. Where the door would bang closed again and they would shuffle into the dark interior of the house and be lost in the shadows of the living room and dining room and the evening that descended out of the cloudless sky and came down and made it night.

Sometimes at night his dad would cry out, but Benny knew it was only because he was concerned about Dr. Doom.

March 4, 1982

In March uncle Harold drove up in an old blue Chevy with the windows rolled down and a cigarette sticking out of his mouth and a gold ring on the index finger of his right hand. He said it was an engagement ring to a catholic girl he met in Philadelphia and had proposed to and they had exchanged rings and put them on their right hands until they were to be married and then they would swap the rings and wear them on their left hands.

He came into the house wearing a brown suit and a brown hat that sat on his head and looked just like Skeeter Jones sometimes did in those old stories where he would come in and sit down next to Zee man and say: "I have something to say."

Uncle Harold came in and sat down on the couch and held his hat in his hands and didn't look up much as mom came back in and sat down in the chair opposite and Harold said something about policies and mom had this white pale look on her face that Benny didn't understand, except then that Uncle Harold went upstairs and talked to dad a long time and then came back down and told mom as she was wiping her eyes, because she had been sad for some reason and had cried and he had told her: "Don't cry Evelyn, it's gonna be OK, I got it taken care of, I got David's signature and it says right here, all legal and fair and square that you had insurance when all this happened."

And mom had hugged Uncle Harold and he had looked embarrassed and extricated himself delicately and smiled weakly and told her not to tell anyone about the paperwork. And she had shook her head. And benny who was playing in the kitchen with his army men, had looked out and saw Uncle Harold and had shaken his head too.

"It's gonna be alright." Uncle Harold had said and then he had gone out the door of the small white house with the lace curtains on the windows and down the cracked sidewalk and back into his old blue Chevy sitting at the curb and then he started up the engine and had driven off and smiled and waved as he went down the block.

Mom had stood on the porch for over an hour after he had gone and cried and Benny came and sat next to her and Dad came down from upstairs, limping and leaning on a can he had brought back from the hospital and sat and held Mom's hand and didn't say anything until she had quieted and not said anything at all after awhile, just held his hand and sat next to her husband and her son and felt the hot breeze of the day wind down and grow cool.

"It's all right," Dad said, but Mom had only frowned a little bit, like maybe it wasn't completely all right, but she kissed him quick on the lips and then she went back into the house and after awhile there came a soft sound of a radio turned down low from inside, and the sound of dishes in the sink and water running and the sound of glasses drying with the drying towel that sounded like swish-swish-swish when you rubbed it in the glasses.

April, 1982

Benny turned eight with little fanfare and went to school and came home and sat in the kitchen and had a piece of cake with his mother, because his father was a little sick and couldn't keep down any food. And so it was mostly quiet. He got a notebook for his birthday, a spiral notebook that he scribbled the name Electron Man on the cover of and drew pictures of his father with goggles on his eyes and fighting Dr. Doom.

In some of the pictures his dad's hair was falling out.

It was the radiation.

The power that made his dad a superhero.

After awhile Benny didn't like his dad being a superhero anymore. He stopped writing and drawing in the notebook and threw it behind his bed and left it there.

In May the radiation treatments weren't working anymore and his father had a relapse and went back into the hospital.

Benny found the notebook under his bed and pulled it out and started writing in it again.

In June Benny's dad Electron Man lost his battle with Dr. Doom and didn't come home. Benny went to the funeral and held his mother's hand and didn't say a word. He didn't cry for several weeks, but then when he did he couldn't stop. He was taken from school to the hospital where he cried until he exhausted himself and he passed out. The doctors at the hospital put him on fluids and had him stay the night for observation.

Benny's Mom sat in a chair next to his bed all night long. The next day he was discharged and they went home and tried to pick up the pieces of their lives.

May 26, 1983

In May the insurance claimed was rejected and Uncle Harold found himself umemployed and facing possible criminal charges for fraud. Mom got a job waitressing and raised Benny through college, before she retired and moved to Florida.

June 15, 1996

At twenty three Benny got married and a year later he and Tracy had a little daughter.

January 19, 1998

Coming home from the office one night, Benny Johnson was accosted and shot at short range with a 22 caliber pistol that emitted a projectile that went straight through his left leg and came out the other side. The shooter was struck by a car as he fled across the street and was killed. Benny Johnson went to the hospital where he was treated for a gunshot wound and released. He went home to his wife and their young daughter and his wife had cried and held him and he had said over and over that it was alright, he was ok.

The next day he went back to work with the help of a cane into the Lavardo Insurance Agency where he worked. He made calls all day long and even sometimes during lunch, with men and women that were down and out, or couldn't afford insurance, but he would find a way anyway.

He would talk to them on the phone and he would say to them, "It's going to be all right, you have to trust me on this, it's going to be all right."

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