In fact.... I'm counting on it.

The reasons why, when a sophmore in high school, I walked to this nearby building---a retirement complex for elderly teachers--- and rode to its top, getting ready to jump off it, were many and complex. Suffice it to say I believed I might be going mad---and since mad people can be dangerous to those they love, and cause heartbreak to them by spending years in a mental institution---I decided a quick death would be better for everybody.

Maybe I did go mad. Any sceptics can grab onto that as an explanation. I just know what happened...and it was as real as anything that ever happened to me, before or after. But I would be the first to admit, at that moment, I might be considered an unreliable witness.

It was a chill February morning, with low-lying fog over most of the area.

One old codger got on the elevator as I got off, looking at me curiously, but probably thinking I was visiting some grandparent. This was the late sixties, and a good neighborhood, and I didn't look dangerous.

I looked down. I was about twelve stories up, over hard pavement.

I got out on the ledge.

My body, more sensible than I, refused to move further. My legs wouldn't make that final step....tears of frustration built in my eyes. I wanted to kill myself, but was too cowardly to....

I started to swing myself back onto the terrace and its shuffleboard courts---

---and I SLIPPED....

I was falling thinking...

noi'mgoingtodiei'mgoingtoDIEthisisamistakei'mgoingtoDIE....

Then something HIT me, clasped me. I realized in retrospect its arms "gave" with me and only slowly brought me back up, so as not to snap my neck. It knocked the breath out of me though... We were heading up, up...

Then we landed on the terrace, and I slowly was getting my breath back....

And I looked up....

And if I had thought I was going crazy before, I was sure of it now.

He looked more like an acrobat in a circus. The tights were the regulation colors, but the form-fitting red boots looking functional, the emblem on the chest much smaller than currently being drawn. Even the cape seemed aerodynamic and useful. The body was muscular but not excessively so. This was no Arnold Shwartzenegger or Lou Ferrigno at the height of their bodybuilding career. An acrobat or a male ballet dancer was more the build he had.

The face...having seen Shuster's drawings, I appreciate the detail more and more. It wasn't a Chris Reeve/Curt Swan "pretty" face. It was subtly more pugilistic, like Harrison Ford's, although not as much as say, Charles Bronson's. It was very handsome without being pretty, but even that handsomeness had an oddness about it, some sort of heritage that looked almost mediterrenean, with his startling raven-black hair and dark-olive skin....but not quite. As if his heritage wasn't any mix I was familiar with. He looked me up and down, taking care not to look at my pelvis, with eyes as startling blue as Paul Newman's, and said, in a deep but finely controlled voice.

"No broken bones. Good. I saw you about to jump. I saw you decide not to, as I was changing---and then I saw you slip, and leapt."

He smiled, a smile that would have done Robert Redford proud, that would melt winter snows into a spring thaw.

"I won't tell you not to tell anyone about me. I think you need some psychiatric help, and if you do tell them about me, you'll just speed getting that psychiatric help. No one will believe you. Trust me."

Now, I had one advantage. In my grandmother's attic, I had found a paperback of my uncle's, called GLADIATOR. As he moved, I was as reminded as much of that as I was, say, George Reeves in the TV show or the early Superman stories I had seen reprints of.

If it was a hallucination (and I hadn't had hallucinations before) I had nothing to lose...

"Thanks---is it Clark Kent or Hugo Danner?"

He had been bracing for a leap. But then he turned on me, and suddenly I saw a flash of the original Superman, the vigilante who regularly took the law into his own hands. His eyes narrowed, and ---so fast!---he covered the ten feet between him and me so that he suddenly seemed looming over me, without seeming to cover the intervening space.

"Who are you? Are you some sort of plant for a trap---? Do you know what I could DO to you----No."

He seemed to be listening to something. I later realized it was my heartbeat.

"You're genuinely terrified. Surprised. You're just a fan....a literate fan."

He let me go.

"Sorry, son. Get some help."

Then he leaped. Leaped! What a feeble word for what he did...

I watched him soar in a hundred-yard arc, hit the top of the Green Hills plaza, and then run so fast he was a violet blur. If any saw him that fog-shrouded morning, they would have only gotten a slight glimpse of something speeding by, but unable to distinguish what.

I walked back to my high school, thoughtfully. I called my parents, told them about the suicide attempt, made arrangements for what would soon be six months of therapy for depression and suicidal tendencies. But as important as it was, it seemed almost an--- afterthought.

I had seen the impossible, and had to fit it into my framework of reality, somehow.

My grandmother took in boarders, and one longtime boarder was a oldish female reporter for the Nashville Tennessean. She had the biggest collection of TRUE CRIME type-magazines I've ever seen. I called my grandmother and asked to speak to her a second.

"Hey. Someone helped me and said he was an out-of-town reporter, from a New York paper, I think. Tall guy, dark hair, I think he wears glasses---do you know him? Where he's staying? I'd like to thank him---personally."

"Oh! Him? Some of the girls in the office were flirting with him like mad. He's in town to cover---"

Then she gave me some details and a name I'm not at liberty to divulge.

I cut classes and took a bus into downtown Nashville, stopping at a certain hotel.

X-ray vision, I was thinking. If he really has it, if it wasn't added like so much must have been added, I can't surprise him, can I? Curiosity got the better of me, though. I found out what room he was staying at, walked up to the door.

Then again---so suddenly I didn't see him move...he was behind me. This time in plainclothes. His glasses were on his face, and he sighed.

"I'm going to have no end of trouble out of this, aren't I? Kids. Too young to threaten, too easy to believe the impossible. If you had been an adult, you'd have committed yourself to an insane asylum by now. I had the same problem with Siegel, when he was about your age."

"I'm getting help. Psychiatric help."

"Good."

"I won't tell anyone. Honest. I just...I gotta KNOW."

"Come on in."

Then he told me a little, hauntingly little, of his life. Of how Philip Wylie learned some details of it, and made it into the novel GLADIATOR. How Jerry Siegel learned a little more. Where Siegel and Wylie deliberately altered some, lest that get a visit from a superhuman vigilante alien. How much of the later comics were total fiction. There were other parts of his life he refused to talk about.

I knew I couldn't tell. Even my therapist. It would be the surest way into the insane asylum. And of course, that was the reason for him to wear the costume---to have his adventures publicized in the first place, in a venue that noone would take as "fact"---even if he was seen, no one would believe.

We maintained a correspondence over the years. Slowly, he grew to trust my discretion, even though he would sometimes jokingly call me,

"Superman's pal, Al Schroeder."

Slowly, I found others. Others who refused to talk to the press, for fear of being laughed at, or labelled mad. Some, interestingly enough, masked the true events by talking about UFOs. But they were so glad to talk to someone who believed them. Who didn't think they had gone mad.

Slowly, I began to piece together bits and pieces of his long life.

Now I look twice his age. He's started again, with a "new" identity, as he has to do so often, but he hasn't aged.

It's unfair, but I don't envy him. Not his youth, not his looks, not his incredible strength and abilities. Those blue eyes mask a loneliness that shrieks to him every second he's on our world---a world that every instinct tells him is wrong for his race. A world where he'll always be an outsider.

He's given me permission to release some details---and fair warning, some other details I have deliberately distorted, as Wylie and Siegel did before me. To protect myself and my family---he still has many enemies---and to protect even he, who I have seen take bullets with no ill effects. I have come as close as I can....but there are lines I cannot cross.

I don't expect you to believe me. Call it a harmless hallucination that keeps me normally functioning otherwise.

That's okay.

I know the truth.

And the justice, and the American Way....

I've been luckier than I deserve. And I owe him a debt I can never repay. If he hadn't saved me, that cool February morning, I would have never married Barb, had my kids---I would have lost so much that has made my life deeper and stronger, and---in retrospect---so glad that my suicide attempt didn't work.

Read, and disbelieve. You're supposed to.

Your scepticism is his true "secret identity", his most treasured "Fortress of Solitude".