A Comic Fool

Tom Balatro’s fingertips pressed into his palms making two tight fists. Hatred burned within him. Before him were two men who were mocking a helpless child. They were young, only in their early twenties, and they knew no better, but they were making the wrong choice. Blood flooded Tom’s face, and he grew more tense during each minute of the conversation taking place in front of him.
“Hey, tubby, you gonna eat all of those hamburgers yourself?” The dark-haired one prodded the child in front of him. Then his friend added to the mockery:
“What do you weigh, butterball?,” to the kid. “He probably weighs three-hundred,” to his friend.
Tom had been waiting in line at Hot Burgers for nearly twenty minutes and it was, indeed, hot inside of the restaurant; his stocky figure was burnished with sweat. He was sweating even more when he got to the register. Tom abruptly realized that he was no longer watching the two twenty-somethings tease the poor chubby child.
“Sir, what can I get for you?” The cashier smiled at him.
“Oh, nothing; I mean, sorry I can’t eat right now.” His heart pounded in his ears a few more times, ushering him out of the surreal world of frustration in which he had found himself. His appetite was gone, so he left.
Tom Balatro was forty-three and handsome. He drove a 1994 Mercury Sable that ran well enough to not take it to the junk heap. He was not obese like the child that had been mocked in the line ahead of him, but he understood the child’s pain and felt an intense sympathy for the boy. He had always made things like that personal, and he had always sided with the underdog. He drove around the parking lot of Hot Burgers to see if the kid was still around and spotted him climbing into a minivan fifty feet from where he had been parked. He hurriedly drove over to the van.
The child was sitting in the middle seat of the van with tears resting on his fat cheeks. His mother was comforting him, telling him that the two men who had mocked him didn’t matter and that he was her pride and joy. Tom rolled down his window and tried to make things better for the discouraged boy.
“Excuse me miss,” Tom implored the mother. She looked up at him with fierce eyes; indeed, the child was her pride and joy, and, indeed, she had dealt with cruel people before.
“What?”
“Well, I was in there when those two punk kids were being mean to your son. I am sorry about that. They were just some stupid kids with low self-esteems who needed to invent something to mock.” Tom looked at the boy. “Son, ignore what they said. You have bright eyes and strong arms; you don’t have to let people push you around…” He suddenly felt like ‘push you around’ was a little too close to an insult for a round person. “…I mean, you can do some great things; just ignore people like that and listen to your mom – only her opinion and your opinion matter.” Tom ended his encouraging statement weakly and with apprehension. He thought, “Why did I say ‘push you around’?”
“Thank you for trying, but we don’t need your input.” The mother hissed at Tom.


“You should have just stayed out of it.” Tom spoke to himself as he drove home from Hot Burgers. He was the successful owner of a comic book store called ‘Tom’s Comics.’ Ever since his childhood, Tom had enjoyed comic books and the colorful, meticulous illustrations that filled them. He called himself a comic-seur, a connoisseur of comic books, and that was how he titled himself on his business cards.
The thing that had attracted him to comic books, he had analyzed, was akin to why he had felt sympathy for the fat kid at Hot Burgers. He knew what it was like to be mocked and feel insignificant, and yet he knew that he possessed a rarely-disclosed power just like most people who were oppressed. Just like the heroes that lived in comic books: nerds, chubby people, ugly people, and little people – they all had something amazing inside of them. That is why comics, Tom believed, were the key to understanding the underlying potential of every broken person. That is why he fought for the underdog, or at least sympathized with him.
Tom pulled into his driveway at eighteen Power Station Drive. He lived exactly two point three miles from his comic book store and had recently calculated that he burns an average of eleven point five ounces of gasoline every time he drives to work. Tom had speculated that if he was to no longer go to the grocery store or anywhere other than to his shop, he would only have to fill his tank once a month. Tom often analyzed things quantitatively like this.
He climbed his front stairs and entered his house through a door locked with four deadbolts. This home was clean – clean and lonely. Tom rarely took visitors and only dated a little during his free time, but his freedom was something he was afraid to give up, so he had decided to never marry. His routine, upon arriving home, was to strip down to his boxers, sit on the couch and watch two hours of television while eating his dinner. He didn’t have any specific television shows that he wanted to watch, he just liked to have something to look at while eating.
Tonight, without food, Tom decided to break his routine and called his father. Al Balatro was a very intelligent but basic man. He had spent most of his life as a union electrician and was often called upon to solve complex amperage problems. “He has a way with numbers” his wife Jean would always say. This made Al proud. He was born from a long line of successful trade labor men. His father had been a carpenter, just like his grandfather, but his great-grandfather had been an iron-worker. For some reason, the family history was fuzzy when he traced it back to their native home, Italy. Al was reading the new copy of Scientific American magazine when his phone rang.
“Ahoy.”
“Hi Dad, its Tom.”
“Oh, Tommy, I thought it’d be your sister. She just got a job down at the Railroad, did you hear?”
“Yeah, I knew about that. I was just calling to see if you could get together sometime. I need to talk, let off some steam, you know?”
“Okay. I miss talking to you, ya know, when do you want to meet?”
“Some time later this week would be best, in the morning.”
“You pick, I’m retired, ya know.”
“Wednesday at seven?”
“I’ll be there, you want me to swing by your place?”
“Yeah. Thanks Dad, I love you.”
“I love you too, son. See you then.”
Tom hung the phone up and took a breath. He and his father had not met for quite awhile. It would be nice to see him again, but Tom was afraid that some of the old stuff would come up again. For some reason, Al was not very pleased with Tom’s career choice. Not that an old man would understand the prestige of owning a comic book store. But the root went further than that. Tom’s father knew something about him that few people were privy to: Tom was gifted. He had mathematical abilities like no person he had ever seen. Tom had even shown great promise in his early years of undergraduate nuclear physics studies at the University of Texas. Tom had dropped out, though.
“Dad, I hate it, I am the laughing stock of the whole department.”
“Son, don’t quit. You have something that we Balatro’s are proud of: a good mind. Just because people see irony in your life doesn’t mean that you have to let them control you.”
“You don’t understand. Science has a whole social side to it. You drop names, you meet people and network with other scientists. I just cannot stand the social side. I love numbers, yes. But I hate working with other intelligent people, and that is what you have to do in the world that science occupies.”
“If it is the people you can’t stand, maybe you should hole yourself up like Grigori Perelman and solve some obscure mathematical problem like the Poincaré conjecture. Just don’t let your mind go to waste, son, I am begging you for society’s sake.” Tom rolled his eyes at his father’s allusion to the brilliant and elusive Russian mathematician who had solved a long-unsolved mathematical problem that had boggled great minds for a nearly a century.
“I love comic books. Can’t you just accept that. I will be catering to the needs of many ravenous minds who will discover that they, too, could become real heroes.”
“I understand, Tom. But, don’t give up the better dream. Anywhere you go, there will be people who will make fun of you. I made the mistake of giving up my dream because I couldn’t handle it, don’t you give up yours.”
“I’m not.” Tom had ended the conversation nearly twenty years ago, and the topic had been brought up only twice since then. Yes, Tom had a great mind, but he used it for a different dream: he opened a comic book store where he could encourage the young and old alike to live heroic lives.


Tom also had a love for words. On his wall was a prominent old-script lettered poster framed in gold encrusted wood that said:

Etymology
The history of a word exemplified by tracing its development and relationships through the ancient tongues.

When he had been growing up, his father had tried to steer Tom away from studying language or etymology because they were related to comic books in his mind. Words were good things, but it did a man no good to know where every word came from. “A man only needs to know words in order to use them to communicate, and we only speak English in this country,” Al would tell his son.
Tom was elated when he enrolled in college and discovered that every degree that was related to science required Latin and Greek courses as a part of their core standards. His first spring in college was spent learning Greek and the Greek background for the words commonly used in physics and mathematics. Then the fall brought Tom’s ready mind the world of Latin, the root language for most European tongues. It was this first fall of undergraduate studies that began to give Tom an ill feeling for the intellectual world. He lasted only one more semester before deciding that academia was not for him. During this last semester, Tom made several enemies among his colleagues and classmates, had a few girlfriends, and astounded teachers. The enemies Tom created were because he had something that everyone wanted – a great mind that would guarantee him a grant in any field in mathematics or physics later in his career. He was constantly challenged and maligned by jealous scholars. Therefore, worse was his ending, and his semester of Latin had made him critical of words and humanity alike.


Tuesday morning Tom woke up on a wet pillow. He had established a regular pattern of drooling in his sleep. He rose from bed with the typical morning groans of displeasure. The light from outside was white, it was a beautiful summer day. Tom’s Comics would sell a lot today according to Tom’s calculated chart of weather-to-comic sales ratios. Motivation walked the aging man to the bathroom where the obscured window was white with light and divided by two stripes of red on the exterior.
“What on earth?,” Tom gazed at the red stripes showing through the window. Was it paint? Blood?
He dressed quickly, went outside and circled his house to the side where the bathroom window was striped in red.
“You…” Tom stopped himself from cursing the punks who had tagged the side of his house. In great letters of red spray paint were the words ‘Comic Fool.’ Tom never expected to be the victim of graffiti, but the choice of the words proved to him that this was not the work of street thugs – the suspect would be someone he knew, probably a two-decade alumnus of the University of Texas, an old enemy who knew that he was in the comic book industry.
That day – in spite of Tom’s anger – the sun brought many customers and Tom sold over $500 worth of comic books and collectibles at his comic book store. Exactly within the fifty-dollar field that Tom had estimated within his statistical analysis of environmental conditions and sales. Tom’s ratios were never wrong.


Al Balatro shook his head and read, “Comic Fool,” as he pulled into his son’s driveway. “I should have seen this coming, no wonder he asked me to talk.”
Perhaps humor would put Tom in a better mood. Al climbed the stairs to the front door as he heard his son unlocking the deadbolts that kept everyone out.
“Ya know, a paint job like that can really screw up the resale value of a house, Tommy.”
Tom glared at his father. “Yeah, well, I’m not done painting yet.”
“So, ya want to get something to eat?”
“I made some pancakes if you want.” Tom thought that his father ate out too much since he retired. The local supermarket café enjoyed Al’s presence for over twenty hours a week as he and his old retired friends all sat around and drank coffee, clogged their arteries with fatty foods, and talked about their life accomplishments. Al often wished he could brag about his son, but a comic book store owner in the family didn’t seem impressive to him.
“Well, that sounds good, thank you.” The two entered the house and Tom prepared two plates of food.
“Coffee?”
“What else?” The caffeine, Al projected, would help him stay awake during his son’s inevitable comic book drivel. The two ate silently for a few minutes, and then Tom placed some judicial paperwork in front of his father.
“Dad, I’ve decided two things.”
“You’re changing your name!?!” Al exclaimed when he read the first line of the papers.
“Yes, I am changing my name. I have also decided that I am going to move to Massachusetts and pursue a career in theoretical physics.” Tom looked at his father, waiting for a reaction. The old man knew; in order to have his ‘greater dream,’ his son would have to change his name.
“Son, I understand, but this is drastic,” then pride moved Al, “you going to MIT?”
“Yes.” The father could brag about his physicist son to his friends at the supermarket café now. He might even read about his son in Discover or Scientific American now and then. But would Tommy really be his son if his last name was different from his?
“Son, I fully support your choice. I think that you will revolutionize the mathematical world, ya know. But do you have to change your last name?”
“Dad, we’ve been through this before, I cannot stand in the academic world unless I have a name of distinction and honor, a name like ‘Thomas Giuliani.’” Tom had made his decision, and Al accepted it with a bittersweet plea.
“It’s just that there is nothing wrong with having a last name that means ‘Fool’ in Latin, Tommy.”