“That’s what he said,” swore Samson’s mother. “A mountain.”

At the age of twelve, Samson went to the market with his father and found a man’s money purse on the ground. Samson scooped up the purse and rifled through it. Suddenly, his father was upon him, producing a little stick, which he broke over his son’s skull.

“I wasn’t stealing,” cried Samson.

Samson did not know if that was true or not. He hadn’t had time to think. People were looking at him. His head was hurting. He wanted to lift his father in the air and dash him against the earth. It was not the kind of thought that angels had.

Samson began thinking less and less about being an angel and concentrated more on what he was truly good at. As an adult, when he looked back upon the day at the market, he would think that that is how you become a certain way. That is how you become who you are. He would not think this thought with sentimentality. He would think it while biting into a stick of celery.

At fifteen, Samson made a friend named Jason. Jason was a Philistine but he and Samson got along just fine. Jason was always full of helpful advice. He told Samson that it wasn’t enough to perform feats of strength; you had to distinguish yourself. He told Samson he would need a catchphrase. Jason made a few suggestions: “Bring on the pain,” “Load me up, boys,” and “I am stronger than a tree trunk, and you?”

“Any schmuck can yank a crocodile’s tail off,” said Jason, “but to make the people love you, that’s a gift.”

When working on gimmicks, the first idea that came to Samson was to grow his hair long. His mother, when recounting the story of the angel, would sometimes say he told her Samson was going to be a Nazarite. A Nazarite was a kind of holy man who was not allowed to touch dead people, drink booze, or cut his hair. The angel had told her all kinds of other things, too, most of which she forgot almost immediately, but Samson’s mother had resolved to raise her son like a proper Nazarite.

Samson’s father, who did not have much use for God and superstitions, had attributed his wife’s angelic vision to an attack of the nerves. He refused to have his son go about with the hair of a pony.

There was one summer, though, when Samson was in his thirteenth year, when his father was away travelling on business, that his bangs got long enough to fall into his eyes. He liked the way they felt there. He liked blowing them out of the way, because it gave him something to do when people looked at him. He wanted to keep growing his hair until it reached his chin, but when his father returned, he told Samson that he looked like a girl. Samson told his father that he didn’t care and his father slapped him on the nose.