Read Online Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout - Free Book Online

largely ignored my behavior. They turned inward, losing themselves in their idyllic romance. Their relationship actually was idyllic, powered by equal amounts of goodwill and affection. And passion too, I guess.
    It’s baffling, but I can attest to it. I was there for most of the soap opera.
    My father may have sent his inheritance straight to hell, but my mother also made sacrifices, dropping out of med school to follow her crazy Irishman. He, meanwhile, complaining that his colleagues were unimaginative and incompetent, resigned from his professorship in quantum physics at Harvard. The two of them lived on their modest teachers’ salaries in the Colonia Roma, a hip neighborhood in Mexico City, until my father finally decided to go back to the United States. He had some new ideas he wanted to bounce off his former colleagues, and more important, he needed financial backing, something that would be hard to find in Mexico for a problematic gringo who didn’t know how to kiss university officials’ asses and who virulently despised politicians and opportunists.
    My mother tried to convince him to stay. She loved her city, life made more sense there than it ever would in an anonymous American suburb. But for once, my father wouldn’t listen. He was convinced that it was time, not just for professional reasons, he explained, but also to deal with unfinished family business—and to express his opposition to U.S. interventionist policies in a way that “really mattered.”
    Vietnam.
    â€œOut here anyone can speak out against the war and it makes no difference. But if I get a professorship in the States, I won’t just be working; I’ll be able to directly influence U.S. academics.”
    My mother thought it was bullshit, another of her husband’s idealist fantasies; she’d learned to live with them, but they still drove her up the wall. Nonetheless, she gave in. Within months, we had packed a few belongings, sold everything else, and boarded a plane to Boston.
    What happened next is irrelevant: high school, college, boyfriends with acne, ten million comics read beneath the covers, psychopathic snipers, political correctness, thermoses filled with gin, overweight couples holding hands, distant wars, unreliable condoms, ecstasy, the Cure, discovery of a voracious sexual appetite that would lead to good times and more foul-ups, an arrest or two, Dostoyevsky and Bukowski. My life moved beyond the mundane when I finally found a way to link my true interests with an academic and professional pretext that justified them. After years of denial, I accepted that my true passion was comic books: reading them, drawing them, writing them, and—why not?—researching them. I realized they could be seen as a means of pop expression, as the sketchy realizations—with their low cost and unique accessibility—of people’s aspirations, ideals, and fears.
    I spent my childhood obsessed with the comics that I was forbidden to read. Any book with more than five pictures was suspect, from the low-brow Adventures of Kaliman and Mickey Mouse to Tintin, Superman, Astérix, and Corto Maltese. It made no difference; anything with thought bubbles was instantly condemned, even thrown out the window.
    â€œIt’s entertainment for imbeciles and illiterates,” my father said.
    This forbidden aspect was part of their allure.
    I concentrated on studying and writing my thesis. While comics were often used for the most base and mercenary ends—as propaganda tools, vehicles for consumer and religious training, mechanisms for controlling the masses, and systems of sentimental education—I postulated that they could also be used to break the information monopoly of mass-media consortiums, the ideological oppression of the state, and the mental laziness of those incapable of opening a book. It’s not that I thought humanity would free itself from its chains by reading the funny