Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story

by Bousquet, Mark

  “It will,” she smiles, “but it won’t give you much room for a tip and we do require an 18% gratuity.”

  4

  If this is my last meal, I couldn’t think of a better way to send my tastebuds out than with cheeseburgers, fries, and a strawberry shake, and I even had enough change to buy a bag of Cheetos from the vending machine for a late night snack.

  I’m three-quarters deep in the Cheetos when a tired Nancy knocks on the door.

  “Just … tell me it was because you fell off the wagon or you fell in love with someone or you heard a rumor that I was pregnant or you got kidnapped by an alien sex goddess who wouldn’t let you leave until you fathered 54 children with her bevy of buxom handmaidens.”

  “You know none of that is true.”

  She punches me in the chest, but the vitriol from earlier is gone. What I have lost in charm, I have gained in wearing people down. “Of course I know it’s not true,” she says weakly. “But just tell me that so I feel better.”

  I rub my eyes. “It was only 31 handmaidens.”

  She sighs. “Where’s Fred?”

  “Space station just outside of Jupiter. He’s got 72 square miles of jungle to roam. Couldn’t be happier.”

  “Why are you here, Jason?” Nancy asks. “Why come back to Vegas now? There’s no comic book convention in town, is there? Are you even still doing that circuit? I haven’t heard …”

  I open my mouth to tell her the truth, and then shut it. The way her sentence faded away at the end there … she might be playing tough with me but she’s obviously been Googling me from time to time or she wouldn’t know I stopped doing signings. When I open it again, it’s a lie based on something I read on the internet. “I’m meeting with some TV people in LA in a few days. Reality show stuff. Show called Legacy. Superhero nostalgia and all that.”

  “The Board says you can stay as long as you want in this room, but you’ve got to go upstairs and talk to the Chairman on Monday. She’s going to want something in return for this. I don’t know what it could be,” she says, and then squints at me. “Oh, Jesus, Jason, you haven’t written another book, have you? Didn’t you learn your lesson on that front?”

  “Do you want to come in?” I ask, emotion catching in my throat.

  “This isn’t a love story, Jason,” she sighs. “Cory has math homework and he’s terrible at math. Besides, you have Cheetos stains on your crotch.”

  I look down and see the orange powder on black shorts. “Turn off?”

  She’s already gone when I look back up.

  Nancy’s wrong. This is a love story.

  It’s just not her I’m in love with. No, Nancy and I are in love with the same person.

  Me.

  5

  Point of fact, I was kidnapped and there was an alien sex goddess.

  We’ll get to it.

  6

  I take a shower, then remember I have no money to do anything, so I switch it up to a bath because there’s fuck all else to do. I’m tempted to watch porn on the room’s TV, but as mad as Nancy is with me right now, I’m sure I’ll get charged for it, and if things go wrong, I don’t want to be stuck with a bill.

  Or explain to the Chairman (Chairwoman?) why I need to have an Asa Akira allowance as part of my comped room benefits.

  Nah. That’s bullshit. I don’t care about the bill, because I don’t plan on staying all that long, and there’s only a 50/50 chance I’ll even see Monday in Las Vegas. I guess I do still care enough about my image that I don’t want to see my name splashed across the gossip sites attached to a story about not being able to pay the rental fee on Hot Asian Threesomes 4.

  Five minutes into the shower-turned-bath, I’m bored out of my mind, so I get out and try to watch TV, but there’s nothing on that catches my attention.

  I shut the TV off and sit in the quiet of the room. The sun is starting to go down but I’ve still got a long night ahead of me in which I’ll have to find a way back into my old suite.

  I call my old manager, who is shocked to hear from me, and idly wishes I was in rehab instead of space because that would sell better. It turns out that Legacy show is doing an episode on me and they actually do want to talk to me. If I can make it to LA by Wednesday, they’d love to interview me.

  It’s not much money but it’s a chance to get back on TV, again. Get my face out there and try to be remembered as something else besides the guy who wrote Sex, Drugs, and Capes. I owe that to the people I wrote about, I suppose, and try to be now what I wasn’t back then.

  For four years, I was a hero, but didn't act like it.

  I saved Los Angeles once and Las Vegas twice, and I was part of six different missions that saved the world, and all I’m remembered for is that goddamn book.

  I blame 9/11.

  7

  PROPERTY OF UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT

  COSTUMED ASSET PROTOCOL EVALUATION SECTION (CAPES)

  Post-9/11 Biographical Report

  Submitted: May 15, 2002

  Compiled by: Captain Trisha Foggen

  Subject: KID RAPSCALLION

  Real Name: Jason Archibald Kitmore (Confirmed)

  Born: 02/19/1982 (Topha, Mississippi)

  Deaths(s):n/a

  Other Aliases: None

  1st Appearance: 10/30/1998

  (unofficial, versus non-powered

  opponent)

  01/24/1999

  (official, as sidekick, vs Ratness)

  06/26/2000

  (official, as solo hero, vs Prince

  Pistol)

  Notable Allies: Rapscallion (III)

  Notable Enemies: Mr. Monster, Fake Out

  Home City:San Francisco (as sidekick)

  Las Vegas (solo)

  Persona:

  Arrogant Show-Off. Not above commodifying his heroism. Sells autographed memorabilia at kidraps.com. Commercial endorsements with Ares Athletics, Bubbles Soda, Sordid Cologne. Did put life on line to save Los Angeles (vs Mr. Monster, June 2000) and Las Vegas ( July 2000). Not without his positives, but not someone we want to recruit.

  Powers:

  Kid Rapscallion (KR) displays Olympic-plus athleticism, but no obvious superhuman abilities. Analysts believe he is the beneficiary of chemical enhancements, privately supplied.

  Notes:

  Relationship with Rapscallion best described as frosty. Will surely be called to testify at upcoming trial of Rapscallion. Unsure if he will testify for Rapscallion or Indigo Impster.

  8

  At some point, it stopped being about the punching and kicking.

  Looking back on it, it’s not the fights with CyberDog or Doktor Demon or the Diamond Phantom or the Murdermatologist (ugh) that I remember as much as the personal stuff: the hookups, the breakups, standing on an alien planet, hooking up on an alien planet …

  Are you rolling your eyes at me? Are you playing the moral superiority card? Can you not believe that I can’t remember if I fought CyberDog more than I fought his successor, CyberDawg?

  Forget me for a second. What are you? A financial claims adjuster? A lawyer? A secretary? Let’s say, every day at work, you go into the copy room and make a copy of this document or scan that report. Do you remember every piece of paper you stuck in the copy machine? Hell no. But I bet you remember everything about that Christmas party where you watched Bob in the paper slot because he thought the copier was hungry, or that Wednesday morning when everyone else was out on corporate retreat and you let the UPS guy bend you over it, right?

  That’s what it’s like. It’s not that fighting Doktor Demon was boring, it’s just that having sex with his public defender happens less and so becomes more memorable.

  Also, more fun to think about.

  I mean, I remember almost everything about my first appearances (both as a sidekick and as a solo artist), I remember saving LA from Mr. Monster and Vegas from Fake Out (twice), but being a superhero is a fucking grind, man. There’s a constant stream of Has Beens a
nd Never Wills in silly costumes with silly names constantly screwing up your plans to have dinner at Patina with the really nice secretary your secret identity was set up with by someone who doesn’t know you spend your nights punching people, or going to a Jay-Z concert and finding out Bill Bored has slipped a hypnotic suggestion into the microphones that makes people think they want to donate all their money to a bogus charity, or getting a masseuse to work out the kinks from the Has Been or Never Will from the night before only to have her be a disgruntled fifth cousin of some girl you were rude to one day six years ago.

  All of those things really happened.

  You get into the game with the best of intentions, but being a superhero ends up just being a job. People don’t want to hear you say that, of course, because back when capes first appeared it was all about stopping Hitler and rallying the public and being these glorious, larger than life HEROES. That’s why all those original capes were decked out in bright costumes. Their powers were to stop Hitler and the costumes made them walking UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU posters. The public was sold on this idea of America’s best and brightest (brightest dressed, at least) fighting Nazi robots and enhanced soldiers and giving people something to believe in.

  The Revolutionaries Stop Hitler in Krakow! Buy War Bonds!

  Well, let me tell you something about the “Greatest Generation.” They ended up every bit as confused and conflicted and burned out as the rest of us. Do you know why Eagle ’41 was such a cranky asshole? Because he beat up some Nazis in Poland in the middle of a fog storm. When the fog cleared, he looked around to find himself standing near the edge of a mass grave at a concentration camp.

  How fucking stupid do you think he felt standing there in his brightly colored underwear next to the bodies of hundreds of dead Jews?

  And do you remember his partner on the Revolutionaries, Striped Star? The first one? The one that was only around during World War 2? Do you know the real reason why she quit? It’s because after Baron Black defeated her, Hitler ordered her transferred to Berlin, where a squad of SS officers straight up gang-raped her, filmed it, and sent it around to German encampments where it was used to raise morale, the sick fucks.

  Do you know what the Revolutionaries did when they found out?

  Nothing. Know why?

  Because say what you want about Baron Black’s political philosophy of German supremacy, when he found out what happened to Star while she was in Nazi custody, he straight up took his entire ROMULUS special division out of the war and told Hitler to go fuck himself. Before the Revolutionaries ever found out about what had happened to her, ROMULUS tracked down all ten of those officers who’d put their dicks into Striped Star and spent three months peeling the skin off their bodies.

  Inch by fucking inch.

  By the time the Revos ever heard word one, everyone responsible was caught, tortured, filleted, most definitely dead, and Striped Star had been returned to them.

  All thanks to their man they’d been created to stop.

  What do you think that does to a person? Do you know how many times good guys become bad guys become good guys, again? Or how many bad guys walk a redemption arc, only to fall back to the darkness, only to die, and then come back as the Spirit of Wayward Souls, only to become human again and birth mystical children with the soul of an alien grasshopper?

  Do you yearn for simpler days when “heroes were heroes and villains were villains?” If so, you’re living in a fantasy world that never existed. Heroes have always had their problems, and even the best of the best of us don’t get away clean. What you think of as the good ol’ days were just days when you weren’t getting the whole picture.

  And that brings me back to the moment where capes and cowls and the public decided to quit each other.

  9/fucking/11.

  Look, I’m not saying the public being mad at the cape and cowl community was completely misplaced, but the public fundamentally misunderstands how all of this works, so let me explain it: the cops take on street crime, the capes take on the capes, and the intelligence community takes on terrorists. It’s really that simple. There’s some crossover, of course, but on the inside, that’s how we break it down. If you’re a superhero and you start going after guys who knock over convenience stores, the cops are going to get pissed at you because they sure as shit aren’t equipped to handle Jazzmin or Qandy Qane & A-Bell. I don’t blame them for getting mad, either, because we get pissed when the NSA starts going after villains.

  Everything has its own place.

  Everyone does, too.

  PART

  TWO

  2000

  1

  TRANSCRIPT FROM TARNISHED LEGACY: THE SECRET LIVES OF CAPES

  Season 1, Episode 5 (S01E05): “Kid Rapscallion”

  BACK FROM COMMERCIAL BREAK

  NARRATOR (V.O.)

  After saving Los Angeles from Mr. Monster, Kid Rapscallion decided to end his time as Rapscallion’s sidekick and pass a sidekick’s final rite of passage by going solo. After fielding offers from multiple cities looking to welcome a new hero, Kid signed a contract with Las Vegas to become the city’s signature protector. Records from the Mayor’s office show that Kid’s deal was for three years, with an annual gratuity of $750,000.

  The city took immediately to its newest hero, ready, willing, and able to put the dark matter of the Five of Clubs behind them. In his first week in Las Vegas alone, Kid visited nearly 100 different classrooms, 30 boardrooms, 20 casinos, every police and fire precinct in the city, every hospital, and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he met the young journalist student who would play a critical role in his life over the next six years, Nancy Cathall.

  NANCY CATHALL

  I met Kid Rapscallion before I ever met Jason Kitmore, if that makes sense. It was July of 2000 and I was in between my sophomore and junior years. I was on campus all summer, working an internship at KLV-TV, and I met Jas-I met Kid when he came in to talk to our class about the superhero’s perspective on the reporter/hero dynamic.

  PROFESSOR MICHAEL SIL

  Nancy was a … very good student. Not top of the class but closer to the top than the bottom. She was — and I feel slightly uncomfortable saying this but in journalism, this is a reality — she was incredibly photogenic. A face made for delivering the public news about mall closings and weather delays. We had already talked, at that point, about whether her best career options were going to be as a desk reader or weather reader. Now, I say this as a firm compliment, mind you, Nancy knew that her best asset was her beauty, but she also had a … an energetic personality that drew people to her. Kid Rapscallion was no different.

  JASON KITMORE / KR

  (old interview from 2007 comic book convention)

  God, she was so hot I just kept coming back to her in the crowd. Well, crowd, there were maybe 25, 30 students in the room, so I don’t know if it was a crowd, but it was a full room, yeah, a full room. Anyway, Nancy sat in the third row, second seat on the right, but as far as I was concerned, it was the center of the room. I couldn’t get enough of her.

  NANCY CATHALL

  (smiling)

  He was hot, I’m not going to lie. That red suit with the black and white stripes down one side? What can I say, it worked.

  KIRA ENDRICH

  Yes, he was an attractive young man, and he and Nancy connected instantly. You could see it within fifteen minutes that he was the kind of guy who would go home with any girl at the bar he wanted, and she was the kind of girl who would go home with any guy she wanted. It was inevitable, I suppose, that there was an attraction between them, but this was a class, you know? He was our guest and was supposed to be talking to us about how heroes viewed the media and here he and Nancy were making eyes at one another. It was not professional.

  NANCY CATHALL

  I knew some of my classmates — Kira, mostly — didn’t like it, but at the time, my thinking was that, as a reporter, it’s my job to get the story. Obviously, someone like Kira was
much smarter than me, and my thinking — at the time, mind you — was that if she was going to use her brains, I should use my … um, my beauty. (coughs) That was then, I thought that. Of course, she looks much better now than she did then, so maybe we’ve both moved a bit towards the other’s position. Looking back to then, though, I can see why Kira was less than happy with my connection with Kid.

  JASON KITMORE / KR

  (old interview from 2007 comic book convention)

  Was I using her? (deep breath, deep sigh) I would say we were using each other.

  NANCY CATHALL

  He said that? He really said that? (Expletive) him. If I was using him, I’d be sitting where Kira “High and Mighty” Endrich was sitting right now, spewing conservative (expletive) on American News Channel. No, I loved Jason. It’s why I stopped being a reporter. I … (sighs) … I couldn’t do it. (takes a moment, regains composure) Look, every single reporter who covers a cape knows there’s two Holy Grail stories: you catch the hero being a crook or you figure out their secret identity, and I knew Jason Kitmore was Kid Rapscallion before anyone in the Vegas media. Anyone. Especially before Miss ANC, but unlike her, I just could not go public with it. It would have ruined him. Not every story needs to be told, you know?

  KIRA ENDRICH

  The public deserves to know the real people beneath the masks. I won’t apologize for outing him.

  (off-screen interviewer asks: “Not even after what happened to Fake Out?”

  I will not apologize for outing the secret identities of Kid Rapscallion, Fake Out, or any of the other thirty-two heroes and villains I’ve revealed for who they are to the American public that believed in them and was let down by them. The public deserves to know who these people are. We just pretended for sixty years that it was none of our business, and the fact that Nancy Cathall knew Jason Kitmore was Kid Rapscallion and didn’t go public with that information tells you why she’s waiting tables at the Grand.