“Some of us never had superpowers in the first place you know. Look at me, I had to train to get where I am. Had to strengthen my body. Turn myself into a precision instrument.”
More like a massive tool.
What did I do to get saddled with this dick chunk? Why did he even take this detail if he hates capes so much? That’s when it dawned on me. Hating capes was exactly why he’d taken it. He wanted to see a superhero at his lowest ebb. Wanted to stand shoulder to shoulder with a God made flesh and say “Who’s the tough guy now?” This bodyguard of mine wasn’t about to jump in front of a bullet for me. This guy wasn’t going to jump in front of a Nerf dart.
What a sick joke. The amount of kindness I’ve shown this world I should have enough goodwill stashed to be able to bludgeon a puppy to death and still be in the karmic black. Instead here I am, all alone and left to rot in this grief-sodden f*ck-tomb.
March 20th
Today the heavy they put in charge of my wellbeing pulled out a dagger, plunged it into my guts and gave it the full 360.
Well, not literally. It was more like emotional damage really. Mood assassination. He tore into the lounge and flipped around on the TV until he found what he was hunting for – a news report taking place in C.H.A.M.P’s conference hall. I watched the screen as my former boss, C.H.A.M.P’s Chairman, took position behind a stars and stripes flanked rostrum.
“People of New York, I have some exciting news to share,” he announced to the assembled journalists. “Without further ado, I introduce to you our organization’s new Chief Officer...”
The crowd shuffled in their seats. The air bristled with microphones. After an implied drum roll, he let it fly.
“...Welcome to the stage... Birdy.”
And in he came, square-shouldered and doing his utmost to not look like the non-dairy creamer he was. Birdy switched places with the Chairman and marinated in the crowd’s applause.
I caught sight of my bodyguard smirking in my periphery. “How about that, huh?” he said.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The world’s mightiest superhero falls off the face of the planet but it seems that’s yesterday’s news. Apparently Birdy’s the headliner and I was only his warm-up act. A bug on the windshield of his rocketing success story. I’m telling you, if there were a competition for the most cruelly overlooked man in the world... well, I wouldn't even get nominated.
How could they kick me out and replace me with Birdy? Did everyone go cuckoo banana bread? That freeloader only got into this business because he hooked his caboose to my train, now they’re handing him the keys to the kingdom? What a joke. I never said it before because we’re kin and all, but Birdy’s good for precisely sh*t. For every one of my strengths he has a weakness. He’s so fragile he could get sunburn from the moon. He’s the only man alive with an allergy to his EpiPen. He’s the spare part that got left over after I was through being born.[69]
Birdy adjusted his microphone and settled the journos with a polite cough.
“Thank you. I’d like to begin my tenure as C.H.A.M.P’s new C.O. by making a special announcement. I am pleased to report that a major threat to this city has been apprehended and is currently being held in custody. Ladies and gentlemen, rest easy knowing that from this day forth...”
The journos leaned forward, eager for the scoop, then Birdy dropped the bomb.
“...from this day forth the Murder Circus are no more.”
Silence. Birdy’s so-called “special announcement” had landed like a humming bird with sore feet. Suddenly the room was a breeding ground for shrugs and raised eyebrows and tickly coughs. What was Birdy thinking? I can see what he was going for – scoring bragging rights by bringing my attackers to justice – but he’dforgotten one crucial detail. No one gives a three-legged f*ck about the Murder Circus.
A hand shot up in the crowd.
“Can you tell us what steps are being taken to apprehend Professor D’eath?”
Birdy looked to the wings for support but he was out on a limb. Welcome to the game, little brother. Tag, you’re it.
“Professor D’eath?” he stalled. “A task force has been assigned to the matter but I’m, um, unable to comment further on an ongoing investigation...”
What kind of a half-assed excuse was that? The crowd started to harrumph. If Birdy was going to come out the other side of this he’d have to seriously sweeten the pot. He swallowed, then went on as though he hadn’t quite come to the fulcrum of his gist.
“...I’m unable to comment, except to promise that Professor D’eath will be back behind bars before the week is out.”
Silence again – so much silence I heard myself blink – then the crowd erupted in applause. They went nuts! No doubts, no follow-up questions, just straight up adulation. Jesus. Birdy had cooked up a double-helpingof bullsh*t and those journos were eating it up like he was doling out filet mignon sliders!
Fired up by the response, Birdy thumped his chest and belted the rest of his speech all the way to the cheap seats. Gave some puffed up pronouncement about how this was just the beginning and how things were going to change around these parts and blah blah blah. How was anybody buying this? Were people that desperate for good news they were prepared to overlook Birdy sweating like Bruce Banner in a traffic jam?
My bodyguard could see how upset I was. He tilted his head to one side and placed a pally hand on my shoulder, solid as a trailer hitch. I was starting to think he felt bad for me, at least until he opened his mouth.
“You got shafted good, brah,” he said, toddling off to his post and chuckling all the way.
I don’t want to sound vindictive here, but I sincerely hope that guy chokes to death on a vertical mile of dick.
March 25th
On a scale of one to ten, today f*cking sucked.*I woke up in the dead of night still in front of the TV, one hand down the front of my pants and the other trapped in a sleeve of Pringles. Half asleep, I dragged my ass out of the recliner and shuffled to the bathroom to take a whizz. For some reason the door wouldn’t give though. I scooped out some eye boogers and realized I’d arrived at the wrong door. I didn’t know where this one led to and I wasn’t about to find out either; at least until I did something about the solid steel padlock keeping it shut.
I crept back to my bedroom, fetched a clothes hanger and went to work. I must have spent a half hour digging around in the keyhole, constantly checking over my shoulder to make sure I hadn’t woken up my bodyguard, until finally it gave.
KERCHUNK.
I swung open the door to be met with a chill that was damp and heavy, almost solid. Breathing it in was like swallowing wet chalk. Beyond the door was pitch black. I scrabbled around in the dark until my hand found a frayed cord dangling from the ceiling. I tugged it and a bulb fizzed to life, briefly illuminating a descending staircase, then PLUNK as the filament burned out and the space returned to darkness. I found Dad’s Zippo, flicked it open and struck the wheel. The flame flickered to life and lit up the stairs again, wooden, uneven and dipping into the gloom like a brush into an inkwell.
Taking in another dank lungful I pushed through a curtain of cobwebs and tip-toed into the depths, step by creaky step. The basement was dimly lit by streetlights that shone through the cellar’s filth-encrusted window. A patch of light fell on a shape pushed up against the cellar’s far wall. An old wooden trunk. It was mildewed, with rusted latches and rotten leather handles. Worthless. At least on the outside.
Someone had taken the time to bury the trunk in this basement after all. Hidden it away behind a locked door where no one would find it. Surely something valuable must lurk inside? A cosmic ring or a thunder god’s hammer or a chunk of alien meteorite. Something that transformed me from the busted up normal I’d become. Something that gave me power. Power and purpose.
Instead I found junk. An old rotary telephone, an ancient games console, a half drunk bottle of rye and a pile of dusty photographs. The photos were of a family man, a wife and two k
ids. I didn’t recognize anyone in them at first, at least until I covered up the top half of the dad’s face like he was wearing a mask. It was Brown Note, the C.H.A.M.P officer who guested at The Bunker before me. But why had he checked out without taking his family albums with him? Something told me I wouldn’t like the answer to that question.
I dusted off the games console, an original gray PlayStation, still in working order. It didn’t seem as though it had any software to go with it, but I popped the lid to find a disk left in the machine. I had to stifle a laugh when I saw what it was.
Captain Might: A Video Game Adventure.
I have zero recollection of licensing a PlayStation game, but then I’ve always been pretty loosey-goosey about granting permission to use my image, at least so long as the price was right.[70]
I took the console upstairs, plugged it in and turned the volume low before booting it up. At first I got a kick out of playing the digital me, locked in battle with my arch nemesis, Professor D’eath. It was near as I was going to get to revenge as I buzzed the synthetic skies – blitzing his Mandroid army in a storm of kicks and punches. It didn’t take long for the novelty to wear off though. It turns out the folks who wrote the game had chosen to portray me a little too faithfully and made my avatar indestructible. Forget about having three lives, I wouldn’t even need a second to beat this game. I guess I never realized it before, but Captain Might makes for kind of a dull protagonist. With no weaknesses there’s no jeopardy, and where’s the fun in that? A hero without an Achilles heel is like Indiana Jones without his fear of snakes, or Robocop without his Prime Directives, or Achilles without his heel come to think of it.
Still, if nothing else, the game was an escape from the real world, at least until the sun came up and I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the TV screen. That’s when it hit me; there I was saving the fake universe one pixelated planet at a time when all the while the real me was sunk butt-deep in a couch, walling himself into a fort of filth and garbage. I wasn’t Captain Might anymore. I was a cul-de-sac made flesh. A sprained vagina of a man. What made me think I was fit to wear the cape again, even in a video game? God help me, I just wanted to remind myself what it was to be somebody. To be special. To know what it was to soar.[71]
I’d do anything to be able to fly again. Just give me that one little thing and I could put everything back the way it was. Just cut me that one break. I’d take to the sky, orbit the Earth fast enough to switch its rotation, send the clocks back to the last timeI faced Professor D’eath and nip that sh*t in the bud. But no, I can’t even manage that anymore. I’m telling you, it’s the simple things you miss, it really is.[72]
April 4th
Defending the weak.
Demolishing evil.
Reigning triumphant over the hearts of womankind.
Those are the stories I thought I’d be filling these pages with. Instead here we are, balls deep in April, and all I do anymore is piss and moan. It’s like I’m a goddamned angst factory. You want to know how bad it’s gotten? I swear I just came this close to writing a poem.
I blame Doctor Love. She’s the one who talked me into letting my guard down. The one who got me in touch with my emotions. Who convinced me to open my blouse to the world; now there’s no buttoning the thing up. Thanks to her I’m a big leaky bag of feelings. Feelings! What the shuddering f*ck do I want with feelings? Feelings are for guys with manicured facial hair and wet noodles for arms. Feelings!
How could Love do me like that? How could she look me in the eye and stab me in the back?[73] I know we only spent a little while together but I genuinely felt like we had something. A friendship. An understanding. I even got to wondering if one day something might happen between the two of us, but no. She was just another villainess. Same as Super-Model and same as Miss Transit. One more evildoer to hang in my rogue’s gallery.
April 8th
Used to be I could see a flea’sassh*le wink from across the opposite side of a football field, now my vision’s gotten so bad that watching the TV for too long makes my eyes feel like they’re wearing a pair of boots two sizes too small.
“I need some glasses,” I told my bodyguard.
He got on the case without complaint, which I regarded as suspect until he had a pair of specs delivered that made me look like some Mister-Magoo-sticking-cookies-in-the-DVD-tray-motherf*cker.
“They suit you,” he said, the absolute piss-whistle.
When it comes to some people I swear there aren’t enough rifles or bell towers in the world.
“Fetch me a damned catalogue,” I told him, tossing the glasses back at him. “Better yet, hook me up to the internet so I can do my own shopping. Seriously, how about some Wi-Fi up in this bitch?”
“You know the rules. No contact with the outside world; it’s for your own protection.”
“I’m not looking to contact anyone! Besides, who would I talk to?”
“It’s protocol.”
“It’s cruel and unusual is what it is. A man has needs!”
I understand cutting my access to email so I couldn’t blow my cover, but cutting my access to adult sites so I couldn’t blow my...? Well, you get the picture. It’s not like I was getting conjugal visits. I’m telling you, it’s outright barbaric what this man’s doing to me.[74]
April 11th
I was getting an internet hook up with or without my bodyguard’s say so. A smartphone would do the trick. Getting hold of one without leaving the house would require the internet though, or at least a phone. You can see the bind I was in. Then I remembered I’d seen a phone just recently – an old rotary model – down in the basement, sat inside that moldy trunk.
I crept downstairs, fetched the telephone and found a wall socket in my bedroom to plug it into. When I put the receiver to my ear and heard a dial tone I almost pulled my world famous fist-pump-whilst-hovering-in-mid-air move. Luckily I remembered I wasn’t able to do that anymore, so my bodyguard wasn’t alerted to the sound of me face-planting into the bedroom floor.
Fingers trembling, I dialled 411, asked to be put through to the closest Best Buy and whispered my order.
A couple of days later a UPS truck pulled up outside. My bodyguard was at his post, sat in an armchair facing out the front window, eyes sweeping the street. I’d snuck outside the night before and left a note on the front gate telling the UPS guy to drop the parcel in the mailbox, but if my bodyguard saw the delivery he’d be sure to screen it. I had to find a way to distract him.
“I think I saw something in the bushes out back,” I told him.
“Probably a stray dog,” he said, eyes trained out front.
“Might have been. Or it might be a shape-shifter in dog form getting ready to juice my neck with his razor-sharp fangs. Could go either way I guess.”
The bodyguard harrumphed, climbed to his feet and cocked his weapon.
“Can’t have you getting off that easy,” he said, heading out back.
As soon as the lunk was out of sight I raced out the door, commando crawled across the front lawn and snatched the parcel from the mailbox. Then I dashed back inside, stuffed the package down the back of my pants and did my best to not look out of breath as he returned from his reconnaissance.
“Nothing out there, dummy,” he said, then he rapped me on the skull with one of his pig knuckles and sniggered.
Yeah, laugh it up, you mope, because if I’m the dumbest son of a bitch alive then you’re my idiot brother.
April 14th
Let’s get the obvious out of the way first – yes, I did spend day one of my newfound global interconnectivity locked in my bedroom flogging my cyclops. What can I tell you, I’m a passionate man. Deal with it.
After that I started to get a bit more productive. I figured if I could order a phone without getting caught I could order some more things. Hell, I could even sell some things – make a little scratch with an online tag sale and do some real shopping. Every little helped now I was stuck getting by on a l
ousy stipend.[75]
I set myself up with an eBay account and put some old toys up for auction. I was hawking junk mostly, odds and ends that survived The Murder Circus going all Shock and Awe on my apartment. I owned too much crap anyway. Owning the tools of your trade is one thing but I was hoarding like a crazy person. For crying out loud, I had ten gallons of shark repellent I was getting absolutely no use out of.
At first it looked as though none of my auctions was going to draw a bid. No watchers on my tibonium handcuffs, my utility belt flash bombs or even Professor D’eath’s shrink-ray. I’m telling you, man – this economy. I started to get some nibbles eventually though. A guy in Tallahassee took a two-way wristwatch off of my hands, some housewife in Juno paid top dollar for a job lot of tracer devices and a man I’m almost certain was Nicolas Cage is now the proud owner of a slightly scorched Dusk-Stalker costume. Not too shabby.
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