Why People With Scuff Marks Make The Best Companions. By Jeff Smith ASK ANYBODY smart what's wrong with America today and after you get through talking about defining what you mean by "America"--are we talking "the Americas" like Latin America and Canada, or the United States of America, or what?--and after a lot of brow-furrowing and tangential dead-ending, the conversation eventually will get around to the realization that our nation has lost its heroes. To amount to much of anything, a nation needs heroes. And not just movie actors who can do stunts. Stunts are cool, but any kid over the age of three knows that any chump can perform any heroic stunt with the help of special effects. What I mean when I say America needs heroes is that America needs the real thing. Without the real thing, the movies have nothing to imitate. Art imitates life. Somebody smart and quotable said that, a long time ago, and it will remain true forever. John Wayne may have been the last universally recognizable American heroic icon, but all he did was imitate the real American heroes from everyday American life who delivered big performances in small roles. Cowboys, soldiers, sailors...men called upon by circumstances to dig deep within themselves and deliver. Ultimately, even Wayne himself was called upon to find what was best and most heroic in himself--when he was dying of cancer and had to stand before the world a weak and wilting human. He came through with strength and courage. Imagine how much better an actor and icon he might have made had he been called upon to be a real hero while he was a young man. Imagine how much better a nation we Americans might be if we admired and emulated men and women whose heroism was real and honest and unashamedly, unromantically corny. Still, it spoke well of America that for generations we idolized the fiction that John Wayne portrayed--honest, direct, patriotic, the protector of the underdog. Just as you are judged by the company you keep, you can best be understood by the company you would keep if you had your druthers. Those would be your heroes. My own childhood heroes began with Roy Rogers, then Cochise. Then Stirling Moss, the race car driver. But as I grew a little older and smarter I came to admire my own father more than anybody else I'd heard about, because I watched my dad get up every morning and go to work and come home and smile at my mom and make jokes with the neighbors and grin and quietly set a good example for my brother and me...all while enduring constant physical pain, and the knowledge that his luck had left him and life wasn't going to imitate the dreams of his youth. This is all very corny stuff and you diabetics should watch out for sugar overload, but I'm this huge fan of Mort Smith because he took such an ass-kicking from life and never let it keep him down for long. His health went to shit when he was 21 and newly married. He ignored the prognosis and kept working like a galley slave, to the ultimate result that his rosy financial prospects went similarly to shit when he was 30. So that, under a death sentence from the doctor, and with an unborn kid on the way, he and Mom and my brother Dave left home and family for a new and hostile unknown, where hard work, poverty and that dry heat we hear so much about, awaited in plenty. And as is the way of things in nature, given sufficient heat and hammering, the result is forged steel. If you start with the right ingredients. Dad had the right ingredients. So did Mom, come to think of it. Her heroism was less obvious, but all the more admirable because she didn't have to hang around and be heroic. It wasn't her health that went to hell, after all. She could have bailed on Dad and had a softer life, but she didn't. Nor did she make a major production of martyrdom. Pauline and Mort just kept on going, and loved their kids and had fun with their friends and wrestled with debt and doubt together in their room before bedtime. And that, I discover as life offers me the occasional surprise, is the kind of character I prefer, and begin to seek out in the people I pick to spend my time with. People with scuff marks on them. And wry grins on their faces. Like my friend Jody, from Tucson High School. Cute? Well I should say. You should have seen her in that short little cheerleader skirt, with those red-and-white pom-poms and tassels on her tennies. Had the best calves I remember seeing on a girl. Wholesome as hell. Don't guess she was kissed more than twice between 1960 and '64. But then she grew up and got married and got dumped and left to raise two kids, clear the hell and gone back to Boston, and then she got cancer and looked like she was going to die, only she beat it. All of it. And, by damn, she still grins and talks like she always did, and has that same manic enthusiasm...only she has seen the elephant, as the saying goes. She knows what life is about. And death. I think she's worth spending my time with. So does my friend Lincoln, who spends as much of his time with Jody as he can. They've been sort of sweet on each other for 36 years, but only just got together about three years ago. Isn't that terrific? Me, I just reconnected with a friend I met about 20 years ago. Damned if she didn't have a knock-down, drag-out with breast cancer, the same year I was butting heads with pine trees. It's been fun catching up on the lost years, the mileage and the wear-and-tear. We've learned more about life than we ever expected to, and we've come to realize that we feel sorry for the folks we know who are unmarked by the passage of time, untutored in the school of hard knocks. We recommend poverty, poor health, going in harm's way, getting spit at and missed, shit at and hit, and all of these while as young and elastic as possible. It proves to you that damage is sustainable, caution is largely useless, and that you might as well get after it, because nobody gets out alive.

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