Michael Broder Action Figures It is many self-inventions later and I don't know where I live, under the boardwalk or on the 57th floor, one is so simple, the other so elegant, and I speak, rapping my chest, pointing and poking like a deaf mute, from which I am descended after all, as I am descended from shoemakers and rag sellers and illiterate women who soak bread in water and throw it at the corners of the room, muttering curses, or is that the woman on the subway, my grandmother, my mother, dead now, these past three hundred years, aching to ascend, aching in the joints, down on her knees with the dentist to fill my teeth, taking me for allergy shots or to Kresge's, McCrory's, for comic books and GI Joe dolls — action figures I mean — I always wanted a blond one, and when I finally got him, he was German, a whole new level of weird, dressing him and undressing him, making him fight the Americans and lose, making him suffer humiliation, until my brother had the bright idea— throwing him in the bathroom sink, dousing him with lighter fluid, and setting him ablaze— noxious fumes filling the apartment, my mother at work. about Michael Broder