The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes: An eSpecial from Riverhead Books

by Jon Ronson

  Also by Jon Ronson

  The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

  Them: Adventures with Extremists

  The Men Who Stare At Goats

  The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones

  And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes

  Jon Ronson

  Riverhead Books

  a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  New York

  2011

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also By Jon Ronson

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones

  Afterword

  A free excerpt from Jon Ronson’s The Psychopath Test . . .

  Riverhead Books

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2011 by Jon Ronson Ltd.

  Cover and interior photographs by Peter Yang/AUGUST

  Photograph of Phoenix Jones in the hospital by Jon Ronson

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Published simultaneously in Canada.

  Some of this material has appeared previously in GQ.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To Beth Taylor and Sarah Mirk

  The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones

  Phoenix Jones, real life superhero.

  I am rushing through the night to the emergency room to meet a real-life superhero called Phoenix Jones, who has fought one crime too many and is currently peeing a lot of blood. Phoenix has become famous these past months for his acts of anonymous heroism. He dresses in a superhero outfit of his invention and chases car thieves and breaks up bar fights and changes the tires of stranded strangers. I’ve flown to Seattle to join him on patrol. I only landed a few minutes ago, at midnight, and in the Arrivals lounge I phoned his friend and advisor, Peter Tangen, who told me the news.

  “Hospital?” I said. “Is he okay?”

  “I don’t know,” said Peter. He sounded worried. “The thing you have to remember about Phoenix,” he added, “is that he’s not impervious to pain.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I think you should get a taxi straight from the airport to the ER,” he said.

  So here I am, hurtling through the night, still with all my luggage. At 1 am I arrive at the ER and am led into Phoenix’s room. And there he is: lying in bed wearing a hospital smock, strapped to an IV, tubes going in and out of him. Still, he looks in good shape—muscular, black. Most disconcertingly, he’s wearing an impeccably handcrafted full-face black and gold rubber superhero mask.

  “Good to see you!” he hollers enthusiastically through the mouth hole. He gives me the thumbs-up, which makes the IV needle tear his skin slightly.

  “Ow,” he says.

  Phoenix Jones, recharging in the hospital.

  His two-year-old son and four-year-old stepson run fractiously around the room. “Daddy was out fighting bad guys in his Super Suit and now he has to wait here,” he tells them. (I promise not to identify them, or his girlfriend, to protect his secret identity.)

  He looks frustrated, hemmed in, fizzing with restless energy. “We break up two to three acts of violence a night,” he says. “Two or three people are being hurt right now and I’m stuck here. It bothers me.”

  By “we” he means his ten-strong Seattle crew, the Rain City Superheroes. They were patrolling last night when they saw “this guy swinging at another guy outside a bar with a baseball bat. I ran across the street and he jabbed me in the stomach. Right under my armor.”

  Unfortunately the baseball bat landed exactly where he’d been punched a week earlier by another bar brawler holding a car key in his fist.

  “A few hours ago I went to use the bathroom and I started peeing blood,” he says. “A lot of it. So I came to the hospital.”

  I glance over at Phoenix’s girlfriend. “There’s no point worrying about it.” She shrugs.

  Finally the doctor arrives with the test results. “The good news is there’s no serious damage,” he says. “You’re bruised. It’s very important that you rest. Go home and rest. By the way, why do you name a pediatrician as your doctor?”

  “You’re allowed to stay with your pediatrician until you’re twenty-two,” Phoenix explains.

  We both look surprised: this huge, disguised man is barely out of childhood.

  “Go home and rest,” says the doctor, leaving the room.

  “Let’s hit the streets!” says Phoenix. “I’ll get suited up!”

  Phoenix Jones

  Phoenix didn’t know this when he first donned the suit about a year ago, but he’s one of around two hundred real-life superheroes currently patrolling America’s streets, in Florida and New York City and Utah and Arizona and Oregon, and on and on, looking for wrongs to right. There’s DC’s Guardian in Washington, D.C., who wears a full-body stars-and-stripes outfit and wanders the troubled areas behind the Capitol building. According to Peter Tangen, the community’s unofficial advisor, DC’s Guardian has “extremely high clearance in the U.S. government. Nobody knows what he looks like. Nobody knows his name. Nobody knows his job. Nobody knows the color of his skin. I’ve seen him with his mask off. I’ve been to his house for dinner. But that’s because of the level of trust he has in me.”

  And there are dozens more, like Salt Lake City’s Citizen Prime, who wears steel armor and a yellow cape and is in real life “a vice president of a Fortune 500 financial company,” says Peter Tangen. Like the majority of real-life superheroes, Citizen Prime undertakes basically safe community work, helping the homeless, telling kids to stay off drugs, etc. All are regular men with jobs and families and responsibilities who somehow have enough energy at the end of the day to journey into America’s more needy communities to do what they can. Phoenix is reputed to be by far the most daring of them all, leaping
fearlessly into the kinds of life-threatening situations the other superheroes might well run shrieking from.

  Every superhero has his origin story, and as we drive from the hospital to his apartment, Phoenix tells me his. His life, he says, hasn’t been a breeze. He was raised in an orphanage in Texas and now spends his days teaching autistic kids how to read. One night last summer someone broke into his car. There was shattered glass on the floor. His stepson fell into it, badly gashing his knee.

  “I got tired of people doing things that are morally questionable,” he says. “Everyone’s afraid. It just takes one person to say, ‘I’m not afraid.’ And I guess I’m that guy.”

  So he retrieved from the floor the mask the robber had used to break into his car, and he made his own mask from it. “They use the mask to conceal their identity,” he says. “I use the mask to become an identity.”

  He called himself Phoenix Jones because the Phoenix rises from the ashes and Jones is America’s most common surname. He was the common man rising from society’s ashes.

  2.30 am. Phoenix says he wouldn’t normally invite a journalist to his Secret Identity apartment but they’re moving on Monday as their safety was compromised: “You walk in and out in a mask enough times, people get to know where you live.”

  It is a very, very messy apartment. Comic books and toys and exercise videos are strewn everywhere. He disappears into the bedroom and emerges in his full bulletproof superhero attire.

  “Let’s bust some crime!” he hollers.

  Downtown is deserted. We see neither his crew nor any crime.

  “How are you feeling?” I ask him.

  “I’m in a lot of pain,” he says. “The cut’s still bleeding. Internally and externally. A couple of my old injuries are flaring up. Like some broken ribs. I’m having a rough night.”

  I glance at him, concerned. “Maybe you’re going too hard,” I say. “Aren’t you in danger of burning out?”

  “Crime doesn’t care how I feel,” he says.

  Just then a young man approaches us. He’s sweating, looking distressed. “I’ve been in tears!” he yells.

  He tells us his story. He’s here on vacation, his parents live a two-hour bus ride away in central Washington, and he’s only $9.40 short for the fare home. Can Phoenix please give him $9.40?

  “I’ve been crying, dude,” he says. “I’ve asked sixty or seventy people. Will you touch my heart, save my life, and give me nine dollars and forty cents?”

  Phoenix turns to me. “You down for a car ride adventure?” he says excitedly. “We’re going to drive the guy back to his parents!”

  The young man looks panicked. “Honestly, nine dollars and forty cents is fine,” he says, backing away slightly.

  “No, no!” says Phoenix. “We’re going to drive you home! Where’s your luggage?”

  “Um, in storage at the train station . . .” he says.

  “We’ll meet you at the train station in ten minutes!” says Phoenix.

  Thirty minutes later. The train station. The man hasn’t showed up. Phoenix narrows his eyes. “I think he was trying to scam us,” he says. “Hmm!”

  “Can you be naive?” I ask him.

  There’s a silence. “It happens to the best of us,” he says.

  Does this guilelessness make him delightfully naive or disturbingly naive? I wonder. He is, after all, planning to lead me into hazardous situations this weekend.

  4 am. We finally locate his crew on a street corner near the train station. Tonight there’s Pitch Black, Ghost, and Red Dragon. They’re all costumed and masked and, although in good shape, shorter and stockier than Phoenix. He stands tall among them, and more eloquent, too. They’re a little monosyllabic, as if they’ve decided to defer to their leader in all things.

  Pitch Black

  Ghost

  Red Dragon

  They have a visitor—a superhero from Oregon named Knight Owl. He’s been fighting crime since January 2008 and is in town for an impending comic book convention. He’s tall, masked, and muscular, in his mid-twenties, and dressed in a black and yellow costume.

  Knight Owl

  They brief Phoenix on a group of crack addicts and dealers standing at a nearby bus stop. A plan is formed. They’ll just walk slowly past them to show who’s boss. No confrontation. Just a slow, intimidating walk past.

  We spot the crack addicts right away. There’re ten of them. They’re huddled at the bus stop, looking old and wired, talking animatedly to each other about something. When they see us they stop talking and shoot us wary glances, wondering uneasily what the superheroes are covertly murmuring to each other.

  This is what the superheroes are murmuring to each other:

  KNIGHT OWL: “I’ve discovered a mask maker who does these really awesome owl masks. They’re made out of old gas masks.”

  PHOENIX: “Like what Urban Avenger’s got?”

  KNIGHT OWL: “Sort of, but owl-themed. I’m going to ask her if she’ll put my logo on it in brass.”

  PHOENIX: “That’s awesome. By the way, I really like your black and yellow color scheme.”

  KNIGHT OWL: “Thank you. I think the yellow really pops.”

  PITCH BLACK: “I just want a straight-up black bandanna. I can’t find one for the life of me.”

  PHOENIX: “You should cut up a black T-shirt.”

  PITCH BLACK: “Hmm.”

  Knight Owl, Phoenix Jones, and Red Dragon on patrol.

  We’re ten feet from the bus stop now. Close-up these dealers and addicts look exhausted, burned-out.

  “Leave them alone,” I think. “Haven’t they got enough to deal with? They’ll be gone by the time the daytime people arrive. Why can’t they have their hour at the bus stop? Plus, aren’t we prodding a hornet’s nest? Couldn’t this be like the Taco Incident times a thousand?”

  The Taco Incident. Ever since Phoenix burst onto the scene some weeks ago with a short item on CNN extolling his acts of derring-do, the wider superhero community has been rife with grumbling. Many of the two hundred real-life superheroes out there, evidently jealous of Phoenix’s stunning rise, have been spreading rumors about him. The chief rumormongers have been New York City’s Dark Guardian and Washington State’s Mister Raven Blade. They say Phoenix is not as brave as he likes people to believe, and he’s in it for personal gain, and his presence on the streets only serves to escalate matters. For this last criticism they cite the Taco Incident.

  “Tell me about the Taco Incident,” I ask Phoenix now.

  He sighs. “It was a drunk driver. He was getting into his car so I tried to give him a taco and some water to sober him up. He didn’t want it. I kept insisting. He kept saying no. Eventually he got kind of violent. He tried to shove me. So I pulled out my Taser and I fired some warning shots off. Then the police showed up. . . .”

  “I didn’t realize he was a drunk driver,” I said. “The other superheroes inferred it was just a regular, random guy you were trying to force a taco onto. But still”—I indicate the nearby crack dealers—“the Taco Incident surely demonstrates how things can inadvertently spiral.”

  “They’re in my house,” he resolutely replies. “Any corner where people go—that’s my corner. And I’m going to defend it.”

  We walk slowly through the drug dealers. Nothing happens. Everyone just stares at each other, muttering angrily. It is 5 am. Our first night’s patrolling together ends. I’m glad, as I found the last part a little frightening. I am not a naturally confrontational person, and I still have all my luggage with me.

  When I was growing up in the 1970s and devouring Batman comics, introverted geeks like me tended not to actually patrol the streets looking for crimes to thwart. We were the lame ones, running shrieking from real-life danger, cheering Batman vicariously on from our homes. How did all that change? How did my nerd successors get to be so brave?

  The Real-Life Superhero Movement actually began, their folklore goes, all the way back in 1985, in Winter Park, Florida, when a young m
an (whose real-life identity is still a closely guarded secret) built himself a silver suit, called himself Master Legend, and stepped out onto the streets. He was an influential, if erratic, inspiration to those who followed.

  “Ninety percent of us think Master Legend is crazy,” Phoenix Jones told me. “He’s always drinking. He believes he was born wearing a purple veil and has died three times. But he does great deeds of heroism. He once saw someone try to rape a girl and he beat the guy so severely he ended up in a hospital for almost a month. He’s an enigma.”

  The rise of the mega–comic conventions has surely helped fuel the movement. I remember a friend, the film director Edgar Wright, returning from his first San Diego Comic Con, saucer-eyed with tales of hitherto reclusive geeks wandering around in immaculate homemade costumes, their heads held high.

  “It was like Geek Pride,” he said.

  But the community has really blossomed post 9/11 and especially during the recession of the past few years.

  “It’s in the zeitgeist of our nation to help strangers in need,” says Phoenix’s friend Peter Tangen. “Many RLSHs [real-life superheroes] were raised learning morality from comic books and have applied that to their everyday lives. It’s our natural way of reacting to the challenges of the day.”

  There’s no national convention or gathering, but Peter Tangen is doing all he can to make them a structured, self-respecting community, with a coherent online presence.

  Peter’s origin story is as remarkable as any of the RLSHs’. He is by day a Hollywood studio photographer. He’s responsible for a great many of the instantly recognizable superhero movie posters—Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, etc. But he’s always felt like a cog in the machine.