▸ Column · Modern grounded comic — Wolverine answering from his world of buried, implanted memories, the letter adapted to a stranger's laugh ambushing the writer at a bar
WOLVERINE replies.
The letter
I'm 34, and last week I ducked out of a bar early because some stranger let out a laugh — that same honking, too-loud bark — that belonged to Marcus Pollard, the kid who made my life a misery every day from fifth grade through eighth. My chest locked up and suddenly I'm eleven again, bracing to get slammed into a locker. And the thing is, I've got a good life now. Steady work, real friends, a partner who thinks I'm sharp and funny. But one laugh from a guy I've never met and I'm sitting in my car for forty minutes talking myself down. My therapist says I've "done the work," and I believe her — which makes it worse, because then I feel like a fraud for thinking I'd put it behind me. Is there an actual finish line to this? Or do I just get ambushed by that kid's ghost every time somebody laughs too loud for the rest of my life?
Wolverine replies
No finish line. I'm not gonna soften that for you, 'cause it'd be a lie and you'd smell it.
I got a head full of things other people put there. A lab, a cage, faces of folks I loved that I can't always tell are memory or invention. A sound, a smell, the wrong kind of light — and a hundred years drops out from under me and I'm back on the table. Don't matter how good the years since were. The body keeps its own books.
So hear me. You ain't a fraud. The forty minutes in the car ain't the work failing — it's proof you survived somethin' that was real enough to leave a mark. You don't get past it, kid. You get stronger than it. Different thing. The first time that laugh hit, you lost a week. Now you lose forty minutes, and you got a partner to drive home to. That's the work. That's it actually workin'.
Marcus Pollard's a frightened kid you outgrew thirty years back. He don't get a vote on who you are now. Let the ghost rattle. Then go back inside.
— Wolverine
Deadpool weighs in
Logan. Buddy. "Go back inside," very stoic, very you, I felt a single manly tear evaporate before it could fall.
But you skipped the part that's actually eating this person. Forty minutes ALONE in the car, narrator. Doing Marcus's job FOR Marcus. The bully retired in 1998 and you kept the franchise open — that "I'm a fraud" voice? That's not your therapist talking, that's a fifth-grader you're still letting hold the mic.
Here's the move Grumpy Wolverine won't prescribe: don't white-knuckle it solo. Next ambush, text the partner who thinks you're funny. Say the true sentence — "a laugh just sent me back to being eleven" — out loud. The ghost gets quiet the second somebody else is in the room with it. You already outgrew him. Stop volunteering for the rematch.
— Deadpool
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