Hyper-chondriac Read Online Free

corner store and buy every comic he could get his hands on: Superman, Batman, Action Comics, Plastic Man, The Star-Spangled Kid, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Captain America. If there was a guy with a cape on the cover, the comic would find a way into his bedroom. However, for some mysterious reason his collection peaked and then began to dwindle. No matter how many comics he bought, they continued disappearing faster than he could replenish them. Finally, he discovered the cause. Whenever my dad was out playing stickball, my grandmother would throw a few out. She had no idea he’d even notice; cleanliness was more important to her than the latest exploits of Clark Kent.
    So whether to relive his childhood, feel protected or just ward off evil, my father was the only adult in town who still collected comic books and was obsessed with superheroes. He wore a Justice League of America jacket—even when it was way too hot for a jacket of any kind; a baseball hat with the Mighty Thor proudly displaying a large hammer was a fixture atop his head; and he always wore a large pewter Superman ring on his right hand with a giant S on it, decades before Hollywood started sinking its teeth into the comic book genre.
    â€œSam! Get up here! You forgot your Superman ring!” my mother would shout. (In later years they rigged up an intercom system so my father would transform into Pavlov’s dog whenever he heard a buzzing sound.)
    â€œJust a second, Rhoda!”
    Then he’d charge up the fifteen stairs and enter the bedroom, crawling on the ground in slow motion.
    â€œToo weak…need…ring…have…lost…all…superpowers!”
    â€œYou’re an idiot, Sam!”
    My mother didn’t laugh a lot, at least in her current condition. So being called an idiot was the equivalent of a round of applause at a comedy club.
    She probably could’ve used a drink, but that wasn’t an option in our house. My parents have had a total of four drinks over the last three decades (two Old Milwaukees, a White Russian and a frozen piña colada). And cursing was nearly as rare. We probably had the highest yelling/squeaky-clean language ratio of any household in America. Four-letter words were prohibited under any circumstances. Approximately once a year, somebody would go absolutely nuts and spell “shit” aloud. “Your father is such an S-H-I-T!” my mother would say, in a cadence barely above a whisper.
    Luckily, I didn’t have to worry about too many of my friends being exposed to the tension emanating from each room, because it was rare that I had anyone over. I blamed it on Rufus, our Old English sheepdog, named after an innocuous character on Sesame Street. As a puppy in his pre-Frazer days, Rufus was cuddly and friendly, but he quickly transformed into a bona fide attack dog from living with our family. And one day he snapped. A cable TV man went into our backyard when we weren’t home, ignoring both the leaping, overtly aggressive, loud-barking ninety-five-pound shaggy dog baring pointy teeth and the large-font Beware of Dog sign displayed prominently on the fence. Rufus tore him apart in about twenty seconds and my family had to go to court. Although we won the case, my mother blamed me for the incident, since I was the one who wanted cable.
    In addition to my parents’ behavior, I was aesthetically ashamed of my house. The common areas were all exceedingly messy and the carpets threadbare and stained. And, unlike any of my friends’ homes, ours consisted solely of antiques. I made all my phone calls from an old 1943 rotary pay phone inside a 1927 phone booth with a glass accordion door that shut for optimum privacy. I watched television lying horizontally in a 1902 red vinyl–covered barber chair and checked the time on a 1936 neon bank clock that was the size of a small desk. There was a giant movie poster for Down to Earth starring Rita Hay-worth from 1947