My dad was Spider-Man once. Not in the movies or in the cartoons, but in hospital hallways and the rooms of sick kids. You may have met him once, I don’t know.

He would take me on his road trips sometimes, his spider suit crumpled and lumpy in the backseat.

“Dad, you ever gonna wash that thing?”

“Don’t got time between fightin’ Doc Ock and the Goblins,” he’d always answer back.

“All I’m saying is it smells and I don’t think the kid cancer ward wants to get a whiff of your BO.”

He’d roll down the window and light one up. “I’ll wash it when we get to the motel.” He’d blow the smoke out the window, but the smell would always linger. It would stay in the cab, infect our clothes, get inside my lungs, and make me gag. I didn’t know how he got away with his spider suit being drenched in that stench.

 

---

 

Dad worked for Marvel in the ’70s. He would drive around the Midwest visiting sick kids in hospitals. While wearing his Spider-Man costume, he’d give them toys and comics and bring smiles to their faces.

He called his truck the “Spider-Mobile” and had it painted blue and red with the spider symbol decaled on the doors. Everywhere we’d go, people couldn’t help but stare and point.

We’d always end up at some roadside diner where he would order the same thing.

“I’ll have the pancakes, please. And eggs, fried, please. And a coffee, black.” He’d crane his head around to get eyes on the waitress as she walked away.

“Perv.”

“In a couple years you’ll understand.”

We sat in silence until the food came, each of us glancing absently at the parking lot outside the window. We had just left Portland and were on our way to Seattle.

While traveling with him could be fun, I preferred spending my summer vacations at home and not stuck in the cab of my dad’s pickup or a hospital. “How many more visits do we have to make?”

“Tour’s almost up. Got a few more stops.”

“There’s nothing to do out here.”

“What’re you talkin’ about? There’s plenty ta do. The world is a lot bigger than just our Brooklyn apartment.”

“Whatever.”

“You know I met Stan Lee once?” he said in between puffs of smoke.

“No you didn’t.”

“I did. I swear. Met ’im at Marvel’s office when I got the gig.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Real nice guy. Told me the world needed heroes like me.” He had already told me this story 17 times that summer.

“And then he yelled ‘Excelsior!’ real loud?”

My dad shot up and laughed real big. “He did!”

I smirked. “No, he didn’t.”

 

---

 

I didn’t like being dragged around by my dad across the country. When he would be entertaining the kids, I’d be stuck alone. Sometimes I’d read and reread the comics he carried around, but they’d all blend together. Mary Jane would get captured, Spidey’d save the day. Same story next week. I wasn’t sure how they ran for hundreds of issues.

Other times I would wander the halls of the hospital. They were all the same. Always so cold, even in an Arizona desert. Full of old people, or dying people, or old dying people. And then there were the kids. So many of them, and sometimes you couldn’t tell them apart from the older patients. They wore gowns over their thin frames all the same. I wondered how my dad could do it, going to the kid’s ward to pretend to be a hero to kids that might not be around the next day.

I asked him once. The end of the summer was nearing and I would be going back home to school soon. We had just gotten into Seattle this time and a kid kept trying to get me to play with him. He was so short, so bald, so gaunt. “This is Spider-Man, and this is Peter Parker, but they’re the same person, I just got two toys. And this is the Green Goblin, and this is Rhino, and this is….” He was talking at me for a while, showing off all the different toys he had collected over the years in this hospital. It got me thinking my dad wasn’t the first Spider-Man he’d met.

“Here, you be the Green Goblin and I’ll be Spider-Man.” He put a green figure in my lap and sat down on the floor. “I’m Adam. What’s your name?”

I really didn’t want to get sucked into playing with this kid, but didn’t have much of a choice at this point. “My name’s Peter,” I said. My dad looked over at us and waved. He was standing over the bed of a kid that could barely keep her eyes open, too many wires to count poking out of her.

“Just like Spider-Man!”

“Yeah, just like Spider-Man.” I looked at the green-and-purple figure I held, orange pumpkins in both of its hands.

I glanced around the room, at the dozen or so kids. They all looked so sick, all so young. We had visited hundreds of them at this point. Chances are the ones we had seen at the beginning of the summer were no longer around.

My stomach tensed up, a big black hole sucking the rest of me inward. My mouth went dry and my throat tightened. I squeezed the Goblin and its edges and points dug into my palm.

“Mom says I got loo-key­-ma. I don’t really know what that means. I can’t go outside much, and I get tired really quickly. I get special treatments a lot. Someday I’m going to be like Spider-Man!” He held up his toy as high as he could, a wide smile filling his face. “I’m going to get superpowers when I’m real big.”

“I’m sorry.” I dropped the toy on the floor in front of Adam and rushed out, looking for the nearest staircase. I ran down, down, down, until my legs gave out from under me and I collapsed on my hands and knees on a stairway landing. I hyperventilated, tears flowing like never before. I cried loudly. I could feel bile rising in my throat and choked it back down.

“Pete?”

Footsteps behind me, then a hand on my back.

“Hey, Pete, it’s okay, it’s okay.”

“Dad?”

“I’m here, bud.”

I sat up against the wall and curled into his embrace. He sat with me in full Spider-Man costume, his mask in one hand. His curly blond hair spilled from all around his head.

“How do you do it, Dad?”

“Well, Pete, I…I don’t know. I guess—I have a good cry every now and then, just like you here. But then I tell myself that them kids need me. They need a Spider-Man, a Superman, a Batman. They need somethin’ to take their mind offa their shit, just for a day.” He wiped a tear from my face with his red-and-blue gloved hand. “And I, ya know, just gotta be strong for ’em.”

He took a deep breath. “They can’t see me tear up underneath the mask.”

“I’ve never seen you cry before.”

“There’s plenty’a things you haven’t seen me do.”

He sat with me for a bit, five minutes maybe, until my breathing slowed. I felt so relaxed in Spider-Man’s arms.

“Well, I gotta go back up before they start wondering where I went. You stay here for as long as you need, okay? Take a walk around the block, it helps. I’ll be done in a coupla hours.”

My dad rubbed my hair and stood. He slipped on his mask and went upstairs.

I sat alone for an hour, two, I don’t know. Eventually I got up, left the hospital and took a walk, just like my dad said to. I had to clear my head before our next visit.

Austin Manchester is an experienced bookseller and aspiring author living in New York City. His work has been published by The Literary Yard, Finding the Birds, From Whispers to Roars, and Iris Literary Journal. He is currently at work on what would be his debut novel.

Photo by Janet Biehl in Homage to Medical Frontliners Series