Here’s what we’ve come to see: a boy in greasy jeans, t-shirt plastered to his scrawny ribs by a wind that doesn’t blow on those sweltering below. He’s scaling a railroad bridge above the open sewer that in the ‘hood we call the Chicago Insanitary Canal,
swinging between girders, the kid who couldn’t throw straight or hit a ball if his life depended on it, the wuss too chicken to punch back, transformed before our eyes into an acrobat without a net, exhilarated by the proximity of death.
One misstep from dashing out his brains, and suddenly assured as that ultimate athlete, a cat, he balances along a ledge and shimmies a high-voltage pole, ignoring signs that picture skulls and promise both DANGER and PELIGROSO.
He’s learned the edge is theater and mounts the stage, not a star but some artist of the strange, a Fool who makes us kings with our necks craned as he ascends a drainpipe, and outlined against cinematic sky, leaps the abyss
between roofs. Now, three stories high he’s perched on Rita Colon’s bedroom sill, peeping in her window while she gets dressed for school. And hey, we know a dare’s not brave, but crazy, which is as close as some guys get to being cool.
An earlier version of “Daredevil,” by Stuart Dybek, was published in The Mid-American Review
