Apocalypse Hardy
(Spoilers)
I used to have a boyfriend who didn’t talk. He was the kindest man I’ve ever met; decent and generous and sensitive. He was smart. He was very funny, provided we were alone, or in the company of his close friends. Yet he was so debilitatingly shy that he completely shut down in the company of strangers. He could sit through an entire party without saying anything more than “yes” or “no,” and then only in response to a direct question.
I talk a lot. I rant and rave and make Twitter threads; everything I write goes over word count. I’m just a big, human-shaped sack of words, spilling all over, and this guy was the best possible person for me, on a bad day, because he would watch the words spill out, and he would listen carefully, and after twenty minutes or so of monologue, he would take a deep breath and utter one single carefully chosen sentence.
It was always the exact right sentence, was the thing. He calmed me down immediately, in a way no-one else has ever been able to do. He made me feel heard, and he made me feel valued, and he gave me perspective, and he took about five words to do it. Sometimes, that guy’s five-word sentences were all that kept me going. Some of them still do.
I’ve written a lot about women, but Apocalypse is a story about men; a way to talk about why I’ve loved or respected or looked up to certain men, and actively not looked up to others. Hardy, Nick’s companion for most of the book, is not my ex-boyfriend. He has elements of many people, and he is his own person. He is, most importantly, an attempt to write a portrait of a man entirely devoid of toxic masculinity: He’s very big and very strong. He’s constantly picked on and mocked and ostracized, and has every reason to be angry at the world. He’s experiencing romantic rejection and unrequited love with Nick. These are all things that, we’re told, inevitably make men shitty and mean and violent, yet Hardy is the most reasonable and gentle person in the book.
Yet it felt important, when writing about men, to talk about the guy I would want to call when the world ended. Because the other thing about my boyfriend was that he was a big guy, who struck people as not necessarily neurotypical, and pop culture has given us one very specific image of a big, silent, not-neurotypical man.
I don’t know exactly how the Extremely Large Disabled Man emerged in our culture as the ultimate monster. They’re particularly popular in slasher movies, but the first slasher was Norman Bates, and Bates was whip-thin and prone to monologuing. Somewhere along the line, we replaced that image with a big wall of a guy (Leatherface is six foot four, Jason Voorhees is six foot five, the tallest Michael Myers was six foot seven) who moves silently but comes down on you like a ton of bricks. That guy is always, always driven to kill by his disability.
Michael Myers was institutionalized as a child, and the very unsubtle moral of Halloween is that we were better off. Jason Voorhees was “deformed,” with “severe mental disabilities.” Leatherface doesn’t have a clear diagnosis, being raised by cannibal hillbillies with little access to healthcare, but he plays with children’s toys, and is easily confused, and — like all of these guys — he doesn’t speak.
Queer coding is, of course, also a major part of the Extremely Large Disabled Man’s lifestyle. Voorhees, who is based on Norman Bates, gets the same gay backstory Bates did — the son of a coddling mother (over-involved mothers supposedly being the root cause of all homosexuality) who is warped into doing nothing but her will, unable to separate from her even in death. Leatherface, being a simpler fellow, just wears aprons and lipstick. It shouldn’t be surprising that being autistic or having a cognitive disability is shown in the same villainous light as being gay or trans, or that the two are seen as related. Not long ago, you could be forcibly institutionalized for either one.
So, on some level, Hardy is just an effort to refute one of horror’s ugliest tropes in very simple terms: What if you met a tall, autistic gay guy and he was, like, super nice? What if his silence and his lack of clear facial expressions (these killers always wear masks) were just how his body worked, and he was honestly trying to help you out? More than that: Why do we see a big, “freakish,” socially out-of-step person as a threat, given that they are more or less guaranteed to be a victim — why do we keep telling stories in which those guys are scary, given that society is set up to punish them for being who they are?
It’s an important question. Many, many boys have been killed for being gay. Autistic and other disabled people are shot by police after relatives call for help during crises, because they don’t react in ways the police are prepared to understand, and a police officer is trained to deal with things he doesn’t understand by shooting them. Someone like Hardy is presented to us as a killer, and precisely because of that, he is more likely to be killed.
Loneliness can kill you, too. We know how gay boys with autism fare in the average American high school, and it is grim. Hardy’s immense gentleness, as a person, arises out of a context in which only a few select people have ever been gentle to him. He values kindness because he knows it can save lives. Chased through town, mocked and reviled for the strangeness of his body and the circumstances of his creation, when all he wants is to find another like himself and, hopefully, be loved — there is one monster at the root of all these other six- and seven- and eight-foot monsters, one original Big Guy who is much smarter than he looks. Being a giant corpse is hardly typical, and before the movie adaptation robbed him of speech, Frankenstein’s monster loved monologuing.
Hardy is the only person in Apocalypse 1999 who’s actually shown listening to music. He’s an auditory person; he can become so obsessed with sounds that he loses track of everything else. When he’s hit his limit, he soothes himself by going to get a Walkman and a pair of headphones. It makes sense to me that Hardy would have the best taste in music, out of all of his friends, for the same reason he’s more book-smart than they are: He spends a lot of his life alone. He has time to research.
The things that were considered coolest in the 2000s were often already happening in 1999; “Staralfur,” the song that defined yearning and grandeur by 2004, came out this year. Beck’s Sea Change was Mutations with a string section. “Indie” would become sort of a watered-down white-guy gruel, over the course of the coming decade, but in the ‘90s, the best music was made by glorious weirdos: Thom Yorke, Beck, Bjork, PJ Harvey, people who could never in their lives pass for normal, and who made the world better by not trying. “Human Behavior” is basically the monologue Frankenstein’s monster would give if he were a Scandinavian sprite with great taste in beats.
That’s how I see Hardy — a glorious weirdo, a great band people are sleeping on, something that’s going to be incredibly cool five years from now even if everyone ignores it today. Hardy is “Staralfur” in 1999: A huge, beautiful song from the future that no-one can understand. If he can make it to the twenty-first century, his home country, he’ll find his people there. The question is whether that future will come.
This week, proceeds from Apocalypse 1999 will be donated to TransPonder, based out of Eugene, Oregon, a “a grassroots, completely transgender founded and led nonprofit based in Eugene, Oregon” which “provides support, resources, and education for the trans/gender diverse community and its allies.” The organization was selected by our illustrator, Benny Hope.