The Irony of Being a Hero

The Irony of Being a Hero

What’s worse than being a superhero?

That might sound like the start of a joke to you. If you’re anticipating a punchline, stick around. Felix Welter comes into the story in a moment, and his life is the punchline of a very, very cruel joke.

But first, let me tell you about Collins, Illinois, population 14,000, the safest town in America. If there was ever a normal, all-American town, Collins was it. The houses were respectively wide apart, complete with white picket fences and grey shingle roofs and long driveways leading to a two-car garage where people stored their family memorabilia and college graduation photos. In front of the house, a brightly-colored mailbox and carefully, perfectly pruned begonias; inside, at least two bathrooms; products of familial photo-shoots framed and hung above the fireplace; and a basement, used as a gym, maybe, or something else of the sort.

You may be sensing some acidity in my tone – bitterness, maybe? Collins was a perfect town for perfect people, and if you say you wouldn’t want to live in a perfect town with perfect people and lead a perfect life – well, you’re a liar. We all do. Life in Collins may not have been especially exciting, but it wasn’t scandalous, or shocking, or outrageous either. For the most part, that is.

This is where we get back to Felix Welter, who was the only exception besides his great-grandmother, who ran away with her gardener years back. Felix sometimes thought that the only thing she left behind – except for his grandfather and a gambling debt the size of Texas, that is – was a legacy that skipped two generations and landed right in his hands, and it was soiling the perfectly normal reputation of the Welter family name. His mom had cried when she heard, and his dad stormed off to a bar in the next town over where he could drown his abnormal sorrows. And Felix? Felix locked himself in the basement for a solid five hours and thought and fretted over why, why can’t he just be like everyone else.

It’s not like Felix was fucking the gardener, or anyone else on that matter. No; his sordid secret crossed every border that there could possibly be crossed where sordid secrets are concerned. In his mind, Felix conjured a diagram to show it. It was a scale, like a thermometer, except near the bottom there were words like ‘proper’ and ‘straight’ and as you progressed further and further up the scale of disgrace the words escalated to ‘dishonest’ and ‘scandalous’ and ‘outrageous’ and ‘abhorrent’ and, at the very top, ‘inhuman’.

'Inhuman', he thought, was the best way to describe it, really. Not just because his secret was beyond any scandal the world has ever seen but because it was, literally, inhuman, and Felix wasn't one to throw around the word 'literally' so easily.

So here it is, after much build of tension – Felix Welter's sordid, inhuman secret:

Felix was a superhero.

Well, technically, Felix wouldn't say he was a superhero – he had superpowers, but it's not like he used them – the mere thought was mortifying for him. Besides, Collins was the safest town in America, so there wasn't anyone to save, or be a hero for, really. But for the sake of the joke, Felix Welter was a superhero.

What, then, is worse than being a superhero?

Being a teenage, angsty, sexually-frustrated, unemployed superhero in the safest, most normal, perfect town in America.

Now that's one hell of a punchline.

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When Felix finally told his parents that he could see through walls and shoot laser from his hands and probably fly – that particular hypothesis he had yet to test – there was a brief scandal, whereupon Felix's father accused his mother of cheating and disowned Felix for approximately three minutes.