Normalized (The Complete Quartet)

by David Bussell

  [18] My crib – or ‘Might Heights’ as I dubbed it – was a deluxe penthouse suite right in the heart of the city. I personally never went in for crystal fortresses or floating citadels or any of that junk. I preferred to keep things simple. I didn’t need a state-of-the-art laboratory or a special two-ton house key (unless I wanted something to drop in the bowl at one of Humungo the Devourer’s sex parties – heyoo!), all I asked for was a wet bar, a trophy room and a plasma screen big enough to cause a melanoma.

  [19] ‘Super-Model: The Movie (tagline: Get Ready for Miss Adventure!). The film was not received well by the critics. In fact, a reviewer at the A.V. Club gave the movie an A plus, clarifying that it would be “A Plus” if no one bought a ticket to see it. Meanwhile Harry Knowles of Ain’t It Cool News famously said of the film, “It stinks worse than a proctologist’s handshake.”

  [20] Unmasked: the idiot’s supermarket tabloid of choice. The magazine was, unquestionably, the premier source of superhero camel toe news. Though I featured prominently in this particular issue, the next headline went to The Inevitable Bulk’s fiancé, charmingly referred to as ‘Sweaty Betty’ in reference to the pit stain she was showing as she flipped off the slimeball pointing a camera up her skirt.

  [21] Drinking on an empty stomach, that was my mistake. It would never have happened if I’d eaten something starchy before the party kicked off. Unless that beer I had was skunked, maybe that was it. Or it could have been an allergic reaction to the cranberry juice in those two-dozen vodkas I drank. Of course I wouldn’t rule out a spiked drink – you roll the dice when you put Ashton on your guest list.

  [22] Not to be confused with the supervillain, Spinmaster, who is still wanted for his part in the Hurricane Irene disaster.

  [23] A lounge record called Music to Save Girls By. As well as cracking the crime-fighting and music industries, I’d dipped my toe into several others. My likeness had been licensed to a best-selling line of Mattel action figures, I’d invested in a nightclub (a superhero only joint called Ditkoteque) and headlined a string of box office smashes. Putting me in movies was a no-brainer for Hollywood – the kids loved me, my face was known the world over and I even provided my own special effects. Despite all that, the most profitable of my movies was a zero-budget sex tape hacked from my phone that was so popular it went on to become the world’s first four-quadrant porn movie. Larry Flynt mass-marketed the thing (or Professor XXX as I call him), releasing it, co-incidentally, with the working title of this book: The Hero Inside.

  [24] Once a superhero had his look down the next step was to come up with a title, then copyright it. Skip that last part and the next thing you knew someone was ripping off your handle and using it to sell sex lube. Don’t believe me, just ask Astroglide. Another thing to consider was the potential for a superhero title being used for mischief, as Power Punch discovered when the two letter insignia on his chest earned him the nickname Pee Pee.

  [25] C.H.O.M.P was soon to become the network’s flagship broadcast and ratings juggernaut. Running with the banner ‘Rex Kettner: Taking a C.H.O.M.P out of C.H.A.M.P,’ the show quickly built a reputation as the clarion voice of the non-superpowered man on the street, which was accurate enough, just so long as that man was a terrified, shrieking idiot with a terminal dose of penis envy.

  [26] It was working with D’eath that enabled Mimix to infiltrate the Oval Office and imitate the President that time. He might have gotten away with it too if he wasn’t such a moron. Can you believe the guy stood in front of a microphone and said “fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice — you can't get fooled again"? Forget about impersonating a President, that’s not even a good impression of a human being.

  [27] Some say on a clear day you can still see that steel ball going.

  [28] The Murder Circus was a flea-bag Barnum & Bailey themed crime outfit. The group included Acro-Bat: ‘Half trapeze artist, half bat!’; Strong-Man: ‘a savage brute with the strength of a hundred men!’; Miss Fortune: ‘cross her path and your outlook be bleak!’ and Fräulein Frigid: ‘heart as cold as a Bavarian tomb!’

  [29] I never had much use for transport, wheeled or winged. What’s the use when you can outrun an F15 jet with both legs tied behind your back? Besides, by not using a vehicle, I had a carbon footprint so small it would have made Al Gore blush. Despite all that though, the folk at Mattel insisted I try out a ride for the sake of an action figure tie-in, proving once and for all that common sense isn’t as common as you might think. The best their designers could cook up was a soft-top dune buggy monstrosity that – despite its sorry looks – tested off the charts with the ages 5-9 demographic. In fact, their focus groups liked it so much that Mattel teamed up with Volkswagen and custom-built a one-off prototype. The thinking was that if kids saw me driving the buggy around town they’d hassle their parents to buy them the miniature version for Christmas. For me, the experience was not a winning one. Before the car came along I’d have women on the streets tucking their phone numbers into my tights. The one time I took that buggy for a test drive the only thing that got tucked was a message under my wiper that read ‘HOMOFAG.’ Sadly I didn’t get to take the buggy out a second time as somebody jacked it and dropped it into the Hudson River. Never did catch the culprit. Terrible shame.

  [30] By which I mean villains like The Conundrum, a kooky crook whose MO was kidnapping folks then leaving cryptic clues to their whereabouts scattered all over town. Honestly, what has to happen to a guy for him to wake up one morning and say, “Today is the day I put on a hat shaped like a question mark and call myself The Conundrum”? Truly the man was an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an utter dipsh*t. The only guys who came close to The Conundrum in terms of sheer lameness were Skyscraper, who wore five-story extendable legs that gifted him with the incredible power of being knocked flat by a stiff breeze; and The Carp, who dried out like a cheap printer cartridge the second he was out of water (and was accordingly re-dubbed ‘The Crap’). There’s a place for villains like these, my friend, and that place is last place.

  [31] That’s not to say supervillains hadn’t returned from the grave before. A good example would be the time Heatwave had played possum a few years previous. Heinous business, that. While I was fighting for the buffet at his wake, he was busy torching the other side of town with his Sun Gun. Boy, was my face red (his victims even more so). Honestly, if it’s not one thing it’s another with supervillains. I’m forever waiting for the other shoe to drop and find out I’ve been duped by some doppelganger from a parallel dimension, or an evil twin, or a goddamned robot decoy. The old robot switcheroo was a particular favorite of Professor D’eath’s, who’d returned come back to life so many times that the inscription on his tombstone might as well have been written in dry-erase marker.

  [32] Dr Rune’s enchanted crown was the key to his power, inscribed with an ancient symbol that made it the ultimate conduit of arcane energy. I’mtalking some serious Dungeons & Dragons sh*t.

  [33] Mom’s known for her short fuse, not to mention her spectacular ability to hold a grudge. Her long list of enemies includes Mayor Bloomberg, that weather girl who wears too much make-up, and the ATM on the corner that’s always giving her attitude.

  [34] Kidding.

  [35] In fairness, if Black Magic had his way he’d have been called The Negromancer.

  [36] If you wanted to see racism with its heart on its sleeve you needn’t have looked any further than The Supremacy, a clan of superpowered scumbags working out of Alabama led by a pointy-headed piece of trash calling himself White Flight. The Supremacy were yee-hawing Hitler-humpers; the kind that throw around Nazi salutes like they’re hailing a cab in a thunderstorm. They were the sworn enemies of a host of minority groups, in particular an LGBT team named Homo Superior, whose members included Captain Fabulous, Girl-Man, Power Bottom, Mansplant and Gay Panic (a pair of conjoined twins, only one of which was gay, much to the distress of his brother, with whom he shared an anus).

  [37] Tiboniu
m: the strongest, most resistant metal on Earth. The substance was accidentally invented by a man attempting to create a microbrewed craft beer. Boy, he really went stray on that one.

  [38] They brought in that sub-clause after all the unpleasantness with Dr Rune.

  [39] Why do we make them do that anyway? Have you seen the biceps on some of the guys we lock up? Forget about giving them physical exercise – put them on a program of crochet and thin stew, I say.

  [40] I include a copy of my performance review below, which was obtained later via a Freedom of Information request. Much as I’d have railed against it at the time, reading it now I have to confess there’s very little in it I disagree with:

  Employee: Might, Captain

  Job Title: C.H.A.M.P Chief Officer

  Reviewer: XXXXX - XXXXXXX

  Competencies:

  Communication – 1.40 – Unacceptable

  Truly words fail me, though certainly not as badly as they fail this employee. The Captain’s communication skills leave a great deal to be desired, consisting largely of grunting, pointing, and the occasional hip thrust. The less said about his written skills the better, which are mostly evidenced by obscene bathroom doodles of distressed, topless women calling out his name in rapture (all autographed of course).

  The Captain also exhibits a disturbing lack of empathy to the views of others. Case in point, when I suggested that an operational restructure might allow for a wider dragnet and boost the chance of relocating Professor D’eath, the Captain called me a “dick farm” and offered to “restructure [my] face.”

  Judgment – 2.10 – Tolerable

  The best testament to this employee’s mental acumen is the sheer speed at which he offers excuses for errors and assigns blame to others, which I’m forced to concede he is something of an expert at.

  Cost Consciousness – 1.20 – Unacceptable

  Captain Might employs a wealth of tactics to ensure the organization he belongs to is in a constant state of financial haemorrhaging, chief of which is a total lack of regard for the cost of city infrastructure. As well as the collateral damage visited upon the Federal Reserve recently, in the past year alone the Captain has been responsible for:

  1. Badly denting the Metropolitan Museum of Art

  2. Causing incalculable damage to the Chrysler Building when a stray cough blew out each and every one of its windows

  3. Hurling the Staten Island ferry at an enemy combatant for calling him (quote) “a choad.”

  Recruitment & Staffing – 1.40 – Unacceptable

  Perhaps the clearest insight into the Captain’s recruiting methods was when the phrase “midweek hump” entered into the conversation and he pointed lewdly at a passing female staff member before putting up his hand for a high five. Let the record state that the gesture remains ‘un-fived.’

  Summary:

  When the Captain and I set goals last fall we agreed that the bar of professionalism would need to be raised significantly by the date of his next review (or at least I agreed; if I recall, he was busy watching a phone-captured video of his brother, Birdy, screaming helplessly as an office paper shredder swallowed his cape). I can report in all earnestness that Captain Might has limboed under this already ground-scraping bar without so much as a graze.

  The Captain’s inability to carry out his duties in a way that is consistent with his contract of employment leads me to recommend termination of employment, active within the shortest time frame possible.

  [41] Answer: some semen. Still, when you can see things on an atomic level you quickly come to realize that basically everything contains some semen.

  [42] Plus it gave Gerry the opportunity to mop the floor underneath me, for which he was grateful.

  [43] Everything was not fine.

  [44] Not much of a catchphrase, I know. Much as I tried, I never did manage to make a slogan stick. Too bad when you consider how lucrative the novelty ringtone market is. My first attempt at dropping a bomb-ass catchphrase – “Is it just me or is it Captain Might in here?” – only ever drew looks of pity. The second – “You just earned my stamp of disapproval!” (expressed before delivering a devastating curb check) came over way too try-hard. The third – "Is Captain M gonna have to put his foot in a n*gga's ass?" – was received so poorly that my P.R. guy, Jules, insisted I went on live TV to get baptized.

  [45] A bit hysterical given that common consensus had it I was immune to the whole dying thing. Point of fact, I once got caught in the epicenter of an atomic explosion and escaped without so much as a perforated eardrum. Chances are that even as a corpse I’d have been bulletproof.

  [46] Not literally – telepathy is one superpower I could never quite pull off.

  [47] Dear reviewers. That last sentence was in reference to the Captain Might statue, so when it comes to printing pull quotes, let’s remember a little thing called context.

  [48] Figuratively speaking. I’m happy to say we haven’t seen an actualsh*tstorm since Colonel Colon hung up his brown cloak.

  [49] X-ray vision was my little secret. I got a kick out of knowing that even with all the powers I had on show I was still capable of way more than anyone realized. Some of my abilities I didn’t keep on the hush deliberately, mind you, I’d just lose them in the shuffle. I could go years before remembering I could talk with certain breeds of monkey or erase human memories with a kiss. Crazy thing is, for all I knew I had powers I never even found out about. You remember the story of Tom Perrin, right? The guy who worked as a government filing clerk for thirty years before discovering he could make people do anything, absolutely anything, just by asking? His whole life he’d been sitting on this incredible power and never done a thing with it – not even so much as cheated his way out of a speeding ticket – and all because he’d never thought to ask anything of anyone. He could have been the most powerful man on the planet, but by the time he found out what he was it was too late to change. He’d lived the life he wanted and it had been a happy one, shared with a wife, a family and friends who loved him without needing to be told so. It took a long time for me to understand the moral of that story, but one day I’d get it. One day we all would.

  [50] Actually, please don’t do that.

  [51] A hole in the head being, at one point in time, a legitimate treatment for treating psychological disorders. People love to harp on about the good old days but they conveniently forget about things like skull drills, not to mention rampant polio and institutionalized wife beating.

  [52] I love this city but man can it get you down. Did you know that more people are bitten each year by New Yorkers than they are by sharks? You can look that up.

  [53] The guy flipped. For two days straight our very own Man of Krill bombarded the whole of the Eastern seaboard with thirty-foot waves and a legion of underwater critters. All told, the damage caused ended up being fairly minimal. Zero casualties and only one wounded; a baked surfer who mistook a narwhal for an underwater unicorn and got himself shished trying to hug the thing.

  [54] She wanted to revisit the mile-high club but I chose to disavow her of that notion. Call me a prude, but freezing my ass to the bone and hitting the sidewalk at terminal velocity are turn-offs of mine.

  [55] A scene that my editor recommended I drop from the book, having described it as “Not so much a scene as an obscene.”

  [56] I include a snippet of the message to Birdy here, being as people write open letters nowadays like there’s some sort of envelope famine:

  Dear Birdy,

  I’m writing this letter today because I want to feel closer to you (gay), but also to talk about Dad and him dying and what that did to me (not so gay).

  You and Mom were good enough never to say it but I know you resented me for not saving Dad that day. How couldn’t you? You’d seen what I’d become in the years since my superpowers dropped. I could stop a rockslide on the other side of the planet and be home before the toast popped, so why couldn’t I get across town to stop one measly car wreck? W
as I just feeling lazy that day? Did I have something better to do?

  Here’s what I never told anyone before, but I heard Dad’s crash. Heard him cry out right before that truck T-Boned him and just about cut him in half. Heard the metal twisting and the glass shattering and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it. Because it was Dad. A scream from a stranger is a problem to be solved, but hearing Dad in his final moments poured lead in my veins. My powers became an oversized suit and I tripped over my own pants. I had one sliver of a moment to make a difference and I choked and I’ve carried that around my whole life.

  See, there are downsides to being the most ultra-capable man alive. I learned that the hard way. You remember before Dad passed (before I got my powers even) when we used to visit Grandma in Poughkeepsie? Mom would insist on us riding in different cars – one with her and one with Dad – that way if there was an accident she’d only lose the one of us? We used to think that was morbid as hell but we couldn’t fault her logic. Then one day she just sort of gave up. Dad was gone and I was invincible and everything was different. Last trip we took upstate she strapped you up front and had me sit in the back with the belt that wouldn’t buckle. I complained and she just sighed and said “It is fine.” She wasn’t worried about me anymore. All she cared about was you, even though if we had actually crashed I’d have plowed into the back of your head like a wrecking ball. Thank Christ she never figured that out or she’d have tied a rope to me and dragged me to Grandma’s on the bare bones of my ass.