Enhanced

by Cosca, Paul

  These documents are worth.

  Right there you can see the memo that started the whole thing in motion. That’s President Herbert Hoover giving an order to the United States Public Health Service to organize a study of the new virus. That’s where Dr. Grant entered the picture. He was one of the top men over at the Public Health Service and found himself leading the new study. Or that’s what he thought, anyway. The background work had already been taken care of, and the study was going to be conducted at the Tuskegee Institute, a private black college in Alabama. Dr. Grant flew down there and met with who he thought was a representative from the college. A man named Teddy Freeman.

  And right there...that began the most unethical experiment directly conducted by our government. It...

  Mel breaks off mid-sentence. I almost ask her what’s wrong when she scoops up her wine glass and goes to the door. She fishes through her bag and finds a roll of tape, which she uses to cover the peephole. She crosses back to the window, pushing the shade aside slightly and looking through. She takes a healthy drink from her glass and looks out into the night.

  I thought...maybe this was stupid...but I thought it was going to be really easy to share all of this. I’ve been on pins and needles for so goddamn long, just ready to spill my guts. But now I’m here, and I’m not so sure about it. They can’t touch you. I’ve already made sure of that. But I’m not a civilian. Or at least I wasn’t then. I know what they can do to me. And I know they’ve already tried. ...I’m sorry. I’m rambling.

  I ask her to elaborate on who they are and what they’ve tried to do.

  I can’t say. Not only because I feel some stupid sense of loyalty, but because you’re safer not knowing. They are who I was. I was recruited right out of college and spent ten years with them. They trained me. Made me who I am. And I had to leave them. I was up in Alaska, looking for a particular target, but the lead was cold and it never really did pan out. I had only a little

  bit of time left when I met Dr. Grant. Even at the end of his life he was fiercely intelligent. He’d joke that he’d lost his edge, but I didn’t buy that. And he was good. Genuinely good. In my line of work, you learn that just about everything falls into shades of gray. But Dr. Grant was one of the good guys. Maybe not all those years ago but...he’d been up there, sitting patiently for a very long time. Like I have. When you’ve got this kind of information, you watch everyone you meet. You watch and you wait for the right person. And as soon as you encounter them, you know. Grant knew with me. I know with you.

  She looks back from the window. A sickly, yellow light from the parking lot falls over her face. In that unforgiving light, she looks much older. Tired, and intensely nervous. I can see the tracks that tears have made down her cheeks. She pulls the shade closed again.

  I’ve been running. Running and running. I’m just so...so tired. They must have been watching Grant. I was sitting in his office and he unlocked one drawer, then used a different key to unlock a box in that drawer. He pulled out all these files and a revolver and just watched as I read it all. This is who I was working for. This government. I read about it, and he told me what it was like to go through it firsthand. And after...I went straight to my superior and asked him what the hell this was all about. What he might know. I was told to drop it. Told it was a “non-issue”. That’s when I quit and that’s when they started searching for me.

  I’m...shit I’m sorry. This isn’t about me. I’m getting off track.

  I try telling her I’m just as interested in her own story, but she waves it off.

  1932. Nathan Grant is down in Tuskegee, and he’s working with, though it’s really under, Teddy Freeman. They’ve got just a small, little operation. Best to keep it small so the flow of information stays tight. Grant had two grad students who’d come down with him from Georgetown. Those three, plus three nurses to help with checkups, and Teddy Freeman. That’s all.

  Grant was told that the sample pool for testing would be fifty. Just

  fifty people. He was told by Freeman that those fifty would be informed that they were in an experimental trial and that they’d be getting great medical treatment in return. But right away the whole thing just turned to shit. Those fifty turned into 100. And at 150, Grant was informed that none of the patients were being informed about anything. When the sample pool hit 200, He started asking serious questions. And he found out he wasn’t nearly as in charge as he thought he was.

  As Dr. Grant began asking questions, his grad students had some serious suspicions of their own. There’s one still living, but I’ve made a promise not to give his name. The other was named Oscar Soriano. He was twenty-eight and getting his doctorate in biology. From what I’ve heard he was passionate and proud and very straightforward. Dr. Grant hadn’t shared his suspicions with the grad students, but he didn’t have to. Their subject pool had ballooned. The checkups were erratic and confusing. They found that their patients were coming back to them with completely random symptoms. A great deal of the subjects had no reaction at all. Some had minor effects that were impossible to tie to anything. Many died. Horrible deaths. Cancer was rampant in the study. But the people they were seeing...the subjects...they had no words like that. They called it “bad blood”. And I think that tells you what you need to know about these test subjects.

  They were good, simple people. They weren’t sophisticated. And they sure as hell weren’t informed. These days, you get your ass sued off if you try to do something without informed consent. Down in Tuskegee, the real people in charge just didn’t care.

  By the end of December, Dr. Grant just couldn’t do it anymore. He’d been sent down to Tuskegee to be in charge, but he couldn’t make any decisions that would help anyone. Everything he wanted to do was overridden by Teddy Freeman. When the lab closed up for a few days for Christmas, he went up to Washington to find answers. Oscar Soriano and the

  other grad student stayed behind, because they wanted to find a few answers for themselves.

  Soriano used his key to break into the lab late in the night on Christmas Eve. The other grad student followed, more out of fear than courage. These two young men had barely been told anything. They had no clue what was in all those samples they’d given all those people. Just 10cc of liquid. Just a tiny dose. Soriano grabbed two samples out of storage. Since they were a government operation, they had access to some fancy technology, though the grad students weren’t typically the ones running it. Back then, the electron microscope was just beginning production, but they had one down in Tuskegee. And when Soriano looked at one of the samples under the microscope, he realized why.

  A virus, it’s also called a phage by the smart types, is incredibly small. Lots of things can be seen by regular microscopes, but phages are just way too small. So when Oscar looked at the sample under the electron microscope, he became one of the first people to see the RGR virus. Of course, he had no idea what it really was. He was fairly sure he was looking at a virus. But what did it do?

  Before his friend could stop him, Oscar injected himself with the other sample. He figured no one was going to give them straight answers. The one way to figure it out would be to go through what their subjects were going through. And he was right, I think. The next time they saw Oscar Soriano, they all knew exactly what the potential of the RGR virus really was.

  October 13th, 1988

  I had intended to come back to see Cyrus the day after our first interview, but a bulldozer of a cold front crashed through New York. I could barely leave the house in the following two days. But on day three the sun came out to visit, and I hopped in the car and got back to Blue Manor.

  As I come into his room, I’m struck by how much older Cyrus looks than when I’d been here a few days earlier. He sits by the window, sipping something steaming out of a ceramic mug. Maybe it’s the cold weather (and the fact that he can’t sit on his balcony and smoke cigars), but today he looks so withdrawn and deflated, like a balloon in the last few hours before it drops to the f
loor.

  When he sees me, his disposition changes. His balloon seems to inflate again, and he’s got his chair wheeled over to my end of the room in a hurry. He asks if I’d like a cup of coffee. I politely decline, and he tells his nurse to get me one anyway. I can’t help but smile as a warm cup of coffee finds my hands. I don’t drink it, but I’m content just to enjoy how it smells.CYRUS: Ah kid, where’d we leave off at? It was right at meeting Patty, yeah? See, I ain’t all soft up there quite yet. Maybe a little mushy, but I got more than pea soup up between my ears. So I’d met Patty and decided we were gonna make him this big sensation. But he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. And quite frankly, neither did I. I was just a reporter, and a young one at that. What he needed was a boxing manager or something. But I’ve always known better than to pass on a good opportunity, so I decided I was the right man for the job. The way I saw it, he needed two things right off the bat. The first was a new coat of paint. That suit was nice enough, no doubt about that, but it looked a metric ton of dull metal shit. So I took the money I had under my mattress and I found someone who usually painted cars to work on the suit. I didn’t really know what colors would look good, so I just went with my first instincts: red, white, and blue. It looked...ah hell, what’s a good word...garish. That’s a word we heard a lot then. He looked like a great

  big shiny American flag, and that right there inspired the solution to problem number two: a name. When I saw him in that getup, I knew just what his name should be: American Justice. Patty was about as American as Jesus Christ, but no one needed to know that. He could keep his Irish yap shut and I could be the mouthpiece for the organization.

  I’d be lyin’ through my teeth if I said we did everything on the up and up back then. We were doin’ something that nobody’d done before outside of show business: taking a regular guy and turning him into a celebrity. Not to mention trying to make a buck or two as we were doing it. Nowadays it’s easy to get somebody famous. They do something outrageous enough and someone will throw him on TV. But we were operating before there was TV. Trying to get someone in the public eye was a hell of a lot harder. No one was going to pay us just for lookin’ pretty. So what were we gonna do? Get creative, that’s what. I quit my job at the Times so I could work with Patty full time. But that doesn’t mean I gave up all the perks of my former job. I kept my press badge, and that little thing got us through a lot of doors that would have been closed otherwise. Sure, people have a response when they see a giant metal American flag walking around. But they have an even better response when they think they might end up in the paper. And hell, eventually we had plenty of write ups in papers all over the place. But I wasn’t the one writing the stories.

  The biggest problem right off the bat was...who was gonna give us cash for this thing? This wasn’t like any other kind of thing you might promote. We didn’t have an act, ya know? Can’t just take a big guy in a big suit and put him on Broadway. You need a gimmick! I was just about headed to the breadlines myself when I finally hit on it: security! He didn’t have to do a damn thing, and God knows they weren’t gonna give him a gun, but I rolled the dice and bet that I could find a bank somewhere that would throw us some dough to have Patty come and be an honorary guard for the day. Class

  up the joint a little and make everyone feel safe, ya know?

  I pulled some strings, made some calls, and soon we were doing bank jobs twice a week. With the appropriate amount of press on hand, of course. No good doing a thing if nobody’s watchin’. Before long we were actually starting to pay bills with the money we was bringing in, but it still felt like small potatoes. I’d never met a landlord that took hopes and dreams as rent payments, so I figured we needed to up the ante. And by winter, I’d cooked up a scheme I knew would be a winner. By 1935, every goddamn man, woman and child was gonna know the name American Justice.

  See, I’d been doing a lot of thinking. A lot of reading and research. A lot of folks think that the whole “Superhero” thing was my idea. All original. And when they’d ask me about it, I’d be more than happy to let them go on thinking it. But that’s really not the case. There’s always been superheroes. David takin’ on Goliath. Superhero. King Arthur and Lancelot. Superheroes. Hell, even ol’ Wyatt Earp was a superhero. And I can admit that I was even looking in the funny pages. Good ol’ Popeye was a superhero. And you may not know it, but Superman was out back then. I’ve said plenty of times that I’d never even picked up a Superman comic by that point, but that’s a lie and a half, chief. Everyone loved Superman. If me and Patty hadn’t come along, I think that’s the comic that really would have taken off, and I can’t say I was too displeased when I found our own comic book beating the pants off of Clark Kent a couple years later.

  Anyway, I had lots of sources. And I came to the conclusion that what was really gonna make Patty a big sell was to make him a living, breathing version of all these iconic figures. He needed to be a guy who would fight for the little man, like David. He needed to be noble and pure like the Knights of the Round Table. And best of all, he needed to be as American as a goddamn apple pie flavored hot dog like Superman. If I could nail all that and present it well, we were gonna make a mint. So I got to work.

  His big introduction...that took almost six months of planning. I was going full steam ahead way back in August of ‘34. And I’ll tell ya, chief. I’ve put together a hell of a lot of events, but none of ‘em have ever been as nerve wracking as that first one. St. Nick’s Arena, down on 66th. Is it still there? I heard they were gonna tear it down, the bastards. See, that’s New York to me. Those yuppies can have Madison Square Garden and all the prissy crap that goes along with it. New York isn’t about polish. It’s not about being bright and shiny. It’s about blood and sweat and St. Nick’s was all about that.

  I had to grease a lot of palms and call in a lot of favors to make it all come together, but as the new year got closer, it looked like we were really gonna pull the damn thing off. We sold tickets for a nickel apiece. That wasn’t gonna make anyone rich in profits, but that wasn’t the point. We wanted to put butts in the seats. You put enough butts in seats for any event and you’ll get the press there without even asking ‘em. Of course, I did ask. I called one or two. Or all of ‘em. But really, no one wants to get out scooped. Everybody’s got to have the headline, even if they don’t know what the story is.

  In the end, we filled almost every seat in the house. It was absolutely incredible. Everyone was there to see the big New Year’s Eve wrestling match. And the thing is, they didn’t even realize why it was a big deal. It was no different than the same wrestling matches that came through all the time. Same promoters. Same fighters. An event that usually drew a few hundred folks suddenly was packed to the gills. And that was the secret, see? Everyone could afford a nickel to see a show. Take their mind off of how terrible everything was and enjoy themselves for a night. And boy, they were in for a hell of a show.

  As Cyrus dives into his story, I’m struck by how passionate and alive it feels, decades later. Cyrus speaks with the enthusiasm of a carnival barker, but he carries an authenticity that a barker could never muster. In short, it’s very easy to get wrapped up in

  the picture Cyrus paints.

  Lights go down and the main event picks up. These two fighters, these weren’t big name guys. Chief, there weren’t big name guys back then. No TV, no publicity...hell, one of the guys had just recently given up the scientific wrestling thing. You ever seen a scientific wrestling match? No I guess you wouldn’t have. Well that was actual wrestling. No tricks. Damn things could go on for an hour because it had to end in a real pin. Luckily, this wasn’t like that, but it wasn’t a big high flying match either. No guys hitting each other with chairs, ya know? The other wrestler, bigger guy, his name was...ah hell what was his name? Grizzly Jack! That’s right. Had a beard like a lumberjack and what looked like a fur coat on his back from all that hair. He was a big burly son of a bitch and he talked a pretty good game. It wasn’t
too long before Grizzly took out...whatever his name was. Not comin’ to me. Anyway, he pins the other guy and then gets on the PA and starts rilin’ up the crowd. Asking if there’s anyone man enough to go into the ring and face him. Now there’s plenty of catcalling. Guys nudging each other. People throwing things in the general direction of the ring.

  Then we hear our cue. Big Grizzly Jack says “Ain’t there anyone out there man enough to step in the ring with me?” And from the back of the place comes this real loud voice that says “I AM!” and here comes this huge metal giant, right down the center aisle. Now here’s a trick you probably already figured out, chief. The voice they heard and the man they saw were two different people. I tried for two solid weeks to break Patty of that accent, at least enough to say two words, but no dice. And we couldn’t exactly have that thick Irish brogue talkin’ about how great America is, right? So I shouted it and shoved Patty on down the aisle.

  The whole place, I’m talking hundreds of people, they were dead quiet as Patty came down. The lights were shining off of his suit. To all these guys, he must have looked like a creature from a whole other world. Patty

  climbs up in the ring, and Grizzly Jack does just like we rehearsed, running up and trying to lay a huge haymaker right on Patty’s chest. Of course, because of the suit, what everyone heard was this great big metal GONG sound, and Patty didn’t move an inch. And oh boy, the whole place erupted. Thousands of people, on their feet and cheering. Even the press guys, those jaded sons of bitches, were hootin’ and hollerin’ like everyone else. And American Justice, not Patty now. Not anymore. American Justice picks Grizzly Jack up over his head and throws him out of the ring. And right then, I rush in and get on the PA system.