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

  “I’ve been in the system since I was ten years old!” the man yells. “I haven’t got no choices! When your kids get older this is going to be the same shit.”

  “I disagree,” says Phoenix.

  “It can’t be better!” the man yells. “This is it!” A silence. Then, “When I see ski masks I’m thinking, ‘Are these guys going to rob me?’”

  The nine men withdraw up the block to decide what to do next.

  “Have a good night. Good meeting you,” calls Phoenix.

  They’re watching us, murmuring to each other. Their problem is that nobody wants to buy crack in front of three men dressed as superheroes. While Phoenix and his crew stand here, the dealers are losing all their business.

  Phoenix points to two packs of cigarettes under the windshield wiper of a nearby car.

  “Those are indications that you can buy here,” he says. “So I’m going to take them off and annoy the crap out of them.”

  He scrunches the packets up and throws them onto the sidewalk.

  At this, one of the gang steps forward. If you were watching from across the road it would seem as if he just wanders past us. But in fact he whispers something as he does: “You keep staying on our block we gonna have to show you what the burner do.”

  “Thank you, it’s great meeting you,” says Phoenix.

  “What’s a burner?” I whisper.

  “A gun,” Phoenix whispers back.

  The man loops and rejoins the others.

  The streets are deserted. It’s just the dealers and us. But then, miraculously, a taxi passes. I flag it. The superheroes all have bulletproof vests. I have nothing. I have a cardigan. I want to see how the drama plays out but I don’t want to be killed. “I’ll give you twenty bucks to just stay here,” I say to the driver.

  He looks around, taking in the scene in an instant. “No,” he says.

  “Thirty?” I say.

  And then, suddenly, the whole gang, all nine of them, some with their hands down their trousers, as if they’re holding guns just under their waistlines, walk toward us. I can’t see much of Phoenix’s face under his mask but I can see by the way his hands are involuntarily shaking that he is terrified.

  “My shift is over,” calls the taxi driver. “I need to go home now.”

  “Forty!” I yell. “Just stay there!”

  “I don’t care about the money!” the driver yells. But he doesn’t move.

  The nine men get closer.

  “Are we leaving or are we standing?” says Phoenix.

  “We’re standing,” says Ghost.

  “We’re standing,” says Pitch Black.

  “You’re willing to die for this shit?” one of the men is yelling. “You’re willing to DIE for this shit?” They reach us. “You guys are dumb motherfuckers,” he says. “I don’t even know what to say. You guys are fucking stupid.” He stares at Phoenix. But then his voice softens. “If you guys are going to stand here and die for it I guess we’re going to have to walk home. We should shoot your ass, but I guess we’ve got to go home.”

  And they do. They disperse. They go home.

  “You won!” I tell Phoenix.

  I can practically hear his heart pounding.

  “They had the weapons, the numbers, but they backed down to the image of Phoenix Jones,” he says.

  “I’m going to bed,” I say.

  “We’ll stand here for ten minutes and solidify the corner,” he replies. “You don’t want to stand with us?”

  “No,” I say. “I definitely don’t.”

  I jump into the taxi. And when I arrive back at the hotel my legs buckle and I almost fall onto the floor.

  5 am, Phoenix telephones. He’s shrieking with laughter, babbling, hyperventilating, letting out all the adrenaline.

  “That was ridiculously intense!” he’s yelling. “In a few hours I’ve got to be a daycare worker!”

  It is the next afternoon. There’s a comic convention in town. I spot Knight Owl and one of Phoenix’s friends, Skyman.

  “Ooh, look, The Rocketeer!” says Skyman. “You never see Rocketeer costumes! That is PRICELESS! I gotta get me a photo of that! Ooh! Lady Riddler! Nice!”

  Skyman approaches a Batman.

  “Is that a real bulletproof outfit?” he asks him.

  “No,” Batman replies, a little apologetically.

  “This place,” I tell Knight Owl, “is full of costumed people who would never confront drug dealers in the middle of the night. You and Phoenix and Skyman exist in some shadow world between fantasy and reality.”

  “Yeah, man,” Knight Owl replies. “What we do is HYPER reality!”

  And then there are cheers and gasps and applause. Phoenix Jones has arrived. He is a superstar here. He sees me and we hug—two brave warriors who have been through a great adventure together.

  “Thank you for making our city safe!” a woman in the crowd calls out to him.

  “You’re a very cool man!” someone else shouts.

  I tell Phoenix it is time for me to leave.

  “When you write this be sure to tell everyone that what we do is dangerous,” he says.

  “I think you’re great,” I say. “But I’m worried you’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “Well, don’t make it seem like I’d be dying for a choice,” he replies. “I couldn’t quit if I wanted. You know how many people in this city look up to me? I’m like the state’s hero.”

  And I suddenly realize that I feel about Phoenix the same way everyone here does. I think he is an awesome superhero.

  Phoenix Jones, REAL superhero.

  As I walk out I hear a father whisper to his young son, “That’s a REAL superhero.”

  “Are you a real superhero?” the little boy asks Phoenix.

  “I’m real as you can get,” Phoenix replies.

  Afterword

  Six months pass and then, one day in mid-October 2011, Phoenix is everywhere. My first thought when I see, via my Google news search, that 433 media outlets have in a matter of hours published articles about Phoenix, is that he must be dead.

  It turns out that he isn’t dead.

  Self-proclaimed Seattle crime fighter “Phoenix Jones” was arrested early Sunday morning when he pepper sprayed a group of people leaving a club. Now, in the aftermath, his identity has been revealed. Phoenix Jones is actually Benjamin Fodor. He is 23 years old, lives in Seattle and is a Mixed Martial Artist. Seattle police detective Jeff Kappel said the group was leaving a club near 1st Avenue about 2:30 a.m. when Fodor, in costume, intervened.

  “They were dancing and having a good time,” Kappel said. “An unknown adult male suspect came up from behind and pepper sprayed the group.”

  —Seattle’s Q13 Fox News Online, October 10, 2011

  Hours later one of the partygoers—a woman named by the media only as Maria—gives an interview to a Seattle radio station, King/5:

  “We were just walking down to our parking lot after having a good time in Seattle, when a little argument broke out between our group and another group, and all of a sudden we were attacked. I turn around and we’re being attacked by these guys wearing Halloween costumes. He says, ‘I’m a superhero’ and sprays everyone. Nothing gives him a right to do that. That’s harassment and assault.”

  “Oh, Phoenix,” I think as I read these reports. “I put my life on the line for you. What have you done?”

  I try to reach him but to no avail. He’s in a jail cell somewhere in Seattle.

  And then, a few hours later, a shakily filmed and chaotic thirteen-minute video appears on Vimeo. It turns out that one of Phoenix’s group filmed the whole thing.

  The video: It’s late at night in some floodlit, industrial part of Seattle. The superheroes are patrolling, as normal, when one of them suddenly yells: “Phoenix! Look down! Huge fight!”

  “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!” Phoenix yells, clearly thrilled, running instantly into the midst of the altercation. “Call nine-one-one!” he shouts to his frie
nds. “Call nine-one-one!”

  That’s the Phoenix I know. I bet it had been another frustratingly slow night for him, so the chance to shine courageously must have been quite the blessed relief.

  As soon as Phoenix enters the fray—and it’s hard to tell how violent the fray had been because the moment Phoenix arrives everyone stops fighting and just stares, baffled, at him—a small woman begins to repeatedly hit him with her shoe.

  “You piece of shit,” she yells. (This is the woman later identified as Maria.)

  Everything becomes chaotic. A car zooms in and deliberately hits a pedestrian. It is presumably a car driven by one of the partygoers, and makes me suspect that the street fight Phoenix intervened in had not been a friendly little nothing thing, as the police and Maria had intimated, but something more serious.

  “Where are the cops?” Phoenix yells. “We need the cops now. This is getting serious.”

  A young man races toward Phoenix and he responds by pepper-spraying him in the face.

  “I got fucking pepper spray in my eye!” Maria yells at one point.

  A terrified-looking bystander, a nerdy man in a sweater, calls the police and stammers into the phone: “A huge group of people are fighting and there’s pepper spray and superheroes and I don’t know.”

  “Protect yourselves!” Phoenix yells.

  “Oh my God, oh my God,” says the nerdy bystander, and as I watch this from the safety of my home I think, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

  The video ends.

  Phoenix is booked into jail on four counts of assault. He’s released on bail the following afternoon. Two days later—a few hours before Phoenix is due to be arraigned in court—my Skype flickers into life.

  “Phoenix!” I say, startled. “You’re unmasked!”

  “The police took my Super Suit,” he says. He sounds sorrowful. “I was debating whether to show you my face or just these. . . .” He waves his biceps in front of the Skype camera. “Hey!” he says, pretending to be the voice of his significant biceps. “Remember me?”

  “I DO remember you,” I say.

  Phoenix doesn’t look like I’d imagined he would. All I’d had to go on was the muscular physique, so I assumed his face would be tougher, more stern or something. But, while handsome, he’s also unexpectedly goofy-looking. He’s wearing nerdy, quite effeminate spectacles, and has a strange haircut that looks like an upside-down bucket.

  “That’s an incredible haircut,” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s like Kid ’n Play, the Black Elvis,” he explains. “So. Anyway. The police stole my Super Suit. They said it was evidence of a crime. But if someone commits a so-called assault, you don’t take their shirt and pants.”

  “It does seem punitive,” I say. “What did you say to them when they took your suit?”

  “I said, ‘Really?’ They said, ‘Yeah, that way we can keep your big mouth shut.’ It’s been a rough road.”

  “How does it feel to be unmasked?” I ask.

  “Extremely uncomfortable to say the least,” says Phoenix. “They’re not going to charge me with a crime. They can’t. So I’m going to be sitting there in court in a few hours, unmasked, not charged with anything. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Unmasked and named,” I say. “Will people knowing your name now be problematic for the superheroism?”

  There’s a short silence.

  “Wait,” Phoenix says. He looks startled. “People know my NAME?”

  “Oh my God,” I think. “Nobody has told him.”

  “Phoenix,” I say with concern. “Yes. They do.”

  “Hehehehehe!” says Phoenix. “I knew that! I’m just kidding you!”

  “Oh, Phoenix!” I say.

  I thought I’d find him humbled, perhaps even broken, but he’s as enthusiastic as ever. He’s convinced there’s no case against him. “The police said they were frolicking and dancing,” he says. “My video comes out and there’s no frolicking, no dancing. They’re trying to make it seem like I was out of control. What kind of guy who’s out of control stands there and lets a girl hit him in the face thirty-six times with a shoe?”

  “She says she was pepper-sprayed,” I say.

  “My pepper spray has orange dye in it,” Phoenix replies. “So no way was she pepper-sprayed by any spray belonging to Phoenix Jones. So she can take that claim and . . . throw it away.”

  “But still,” I say. “In hindsight would you do anything differently?”

  “Yeah,” says Phoenix. “Next time I’m in a situation like that I’m going to use more of my superpowers. I’m going to freeze time so I can make every decision right.” He pauses. “No. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  Phoenix seems in high spirits. He has a new girlfriend—a superhero named Purple Reign. She looks veiled and impressive and an excellent match. He says the assault charge is nothing about the incident and all about a preexisting police agenda to shut him down.

  “I dress up as a superhero and fight crime because I like to,” he says. “They dress up as cops and don’t fight crime because they like to.”

  But, he says, their agenda to disempower him by unmasking and naming him has failed: “You’re not a superhero until you take the mask off. Think about it. Batman wasn’t Batman until he was also Bruce Wayne. Phoenix Jones isn’t Phoenix Jones until he’s also the other man.”

  “Benjamin Fodor,” I say. “Benjamin Fodor.”

  “You can’t stay masked forever,” he says. “I wanted to, sure. But now I can talk to kids in hospitals. I can check into any school in America. I can do a lot of stuff I couldn’t do before. There are so many opportunities I never thought would open up. I can go in my Super Suit and meet the president of the United States if I want to. I can take my mask off and take photos with him.”

  “That might not be as easy as you think,” one of Phoenix’s friends murmurs in the background.

  “They tried to take me out but they gave me a bigger voice,” says Phoenix. “Everyone who thought I was crazy now sees I’m a man. I’m a man with a history of activism and no criminal record. I’m in great shape. Now everyone’s going, ‘Wait! He’s a professional mixed martial arts trainer! Wait! He’s CPR certified and trained! Wait! He’s the main manager of an autistic home!’ They turned me from a weird rubbered-out freak into an American Superhero. I think they thought they’d find someone who lives in his basement and doesn’t have many friends and is sort of socially awkward, and instead they got a guy living . . .” Phoenix pauses. “. . . the American Dream.”

  Phoenix Jones. Unmasked but undimmed. As I write this the Seattle police are yet to decide whether to press charges.

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

  It was an August evening and I was drinking with Bob Hare in a hotel bar in rural Pembrokeshire, West Wales. He was a quite feral-looking man with yellow-white hair and red eyes, as if he’d spent his life in battle, battling psychopaths, the very forces of evil. It was exciting to finally meet him. While names like Elliott Barker and Gary Maier had all but faded away, surviving only in obscure reports detailing crazily idealistic psychiatric endeavors from days long gone, Hare is influential. Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted his contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out using his PCL-R Checklist, which he has spent a lifetime refining. His was not the only psychopath checklist around, but it was by far the most extensively used. It was the one used to diagnose Tony at Broadmoor and get him locked up for the past twelve years.

  Bob Hare saw the Oak Ridge program as yet more evidence of psychopaths’ untrustworthiness. Try to teach them empathy and they’ll cunningly use it as an empathy-faking training exercise for their own malicious ends. Indeed, every observer who has studied the Oak Ridge program has come to that same conclusion. Everyone, that is, except Gary Maier.

  “Yeah,” Gary had told me, “I guess we
had inadvertently created a finishing school for them. There had always been that worry. But they were doing well in the program. . . .”

  They were doing well and then, suddenly, he got fired.

  “When they saw their leader be trashed like that, I think it empowered them,” Gary said. “There was like a ‘This is bullshit!’ And we got a rebound.”

  Some of the psychopaths, Gary believed, went off and killed to teach the authorities a lesson—that’s what happens when you fire a man as inspiring as Gary Maier.

  He sounded mournful, defensive, and utterly convinced of himself when he told me this, and I suddenly understood what a mutually passionate and sometimes dysfunctional bubble the relationship between therapist and client can be.

  I had e-mailed Bob Hare to ask if he’d meet me and he’d replied that he’d be teaching his checklist to a group of psychiatrists and brain imagers and care workers and psychologists and prison officers and budding criminal profilers on a three-day residential course, and if I was willing to pay the £600 registration fee, I was welcome to join them, although a copy of the thirty-page checklist wasn’t included in the price. That would cost an extra £361.31. I negotiated his office down to £400 (media discount) and we were all set.

  This was the Monday evening before the first day and the attendees were milling around. Some, clearly impressed to be in the same room as Bob Hare, approached him for his autograph. Others looked skeptical from a distance. One care worker had told me earlier that she’d been sent by her employers and she wasn’t happy about it. Surely it was unfair to doom a person to a lifetime of a horrifying-sounding psychopathy diagnosis (“It’s a huge label,” she said) just because they didn’t do well on the Hare Checklist. At least in the old days it was quite simple. If someone was a persistent violent offender who lacked impulse controls, they were a psychopath. But the Hare Checklist was much wilier. It was all to do with reading between the lines of a person’s turn of phrase, a person’s sentence construction. This was, she said, amateur-sleuth territory.