Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story

by Bousquet, Mark

  (off-screen interviewer says: “She’s a general manager at the Grand.”

  Whatever. She got it the same way she got Kid’s identity: by spreading her legs.

  2

  “So, in closing, I’d like to thank Professor Sil for allowing me to speak to you. I want to leave you with this … I would ask you to remember that heroes are people, too. When I go home, I take off this bolo mask, put away these batons, and step out of this uniform, and I’m just a normal guy. Just like you. I might heat up leftovers in the microwave for dinner. I might be going on a date. I might be gay. Or an alien. Or visiting my sick father in the hospital. The point is that heroes need time off, too, just to be normal. Like you. That fight with Mr. Monster last month where I saved LA? Why do you think you didn’t see me in public for six weeks? Yeah, yeah, I know the story I read in the papers this morning that said I wasn’t in public because I was negotiating where to go after leaving Rapscallion. How many of you go back to your dorms or fraternities and sit around in sweat pants, eating Cheetos, and watching Jurassic Park on DVD? You need that ‘you time’ to help replenish the energy you spend as students and as reporters. Heck, when it comes right down to it, I might even be enrolled here as a student. If nothing, else, we’re pretty much the same. Okay, maybe you’ve never been to space, and maybe you’ve never been to 1963, but we’re both stepping away from our parents — or mentor — to live on our own for the first time, right? And I bet, just like me, you’re ready to be your own person, to make your own way in the world. Thank you for your time.”

  3

  He shakes every hand.

  It has been a long week for Kid Rapscallion, visiting schools and police departments and hospitals and churches and community groups and business leaders and now, finally, it’s Friday afternoon and he just wants some time to cut loose, but he knows the deal. Frank has always stressed to him the importance of interacting with the public, of creating and crafting and nurturing a public persona that people could believe in.

  So he shakes every hand from every college student in the room, from every professor who had come in to listen, from every university big shot who rolled in just for a photo op. He keeps his interactions brief and friendly and banal.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I am looking forward to serving the people of this community.”

  “I’m sorry, but I make it a point not to discuss politics.”

  “Las Vegas was always my first choice.”

  “I’d be happy to.”

  “What I do isn’t any more important than what cops or firemen or soldiers do. They’re the real heroes.”

  “No, I’m not the guy who sits in the back row of your history class. Or am I?”

  When he was sixteen, which was two years ago by the calendar but several lifetimes ago by his experience, Francis gave him lessons on smiling and shaking hands and eye contact and what kinds of embracing was acceptable in public. Jason hated it, thought it was pointless, but he did it because it was the only way to get Francis to take another step on the road to letting Jason be an actual hero and not just a kid who trained with a hero inside a very large mansion on the outskirts of San Francisco.

  When it’s all over and Professor Sil has reminded Kid Rapscallion, “I had a good relationship with Gentleman Beaneater in Boston back in the ‘70s. If you’re looking for a reporter you can trust, that is. We worked the Gosford case together,” Vegas’ newest hero left the classroom and turns left to avoid the crowd on his right.

  “Lost?” a beautiful young blonde asks, leaning her back against the hallway wall as she held her books before her, under her breasts. Nancy Cathall has spent hours deciding on her wardrobe for this event and had decided to go retro, trying to look like a 1950s schoolgirl, like that Olivia Whoever slut in Grease.

  “Looking for the exit, yeah,” Kid Rapscallion says with a weary smile.

  “Does it hurt?” Nancy asks, pushing off the wall.

  “What?”

  “Having to smile all day?”

  Kid laughs. “It does.”

  Nancy takes a step towards him and shows him her index finger, then presses it against his costume, right in the middle of his chest. “Is that … kevlar?”

  “Is that what you really want to know?”

  Nancy pulls her finger back, then steps back. “I guess people are always working you, yeah?”

  “And you’re not?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely working you,” she smiles, “but I’m going to be honest about it.”

  Kid holds up his hands. “Look, Miss …”

  “You remember,” she challenges him.

  “Miss Nancy Cathall,” Kid says, another honest smile coming to his face, “I’ve never been one of these heroes who had a working relationship with a reporter, and I don’t think … oh, hell, you want honest?”

  “For now.”

  “You’re not big enough,” he admits. “You’re a student and if I’m going to win the trust of the public, I’m not going to do that giving exclusive stories to the college newspaper. No offense.”

  Nancy scowls, but just for a moment before coming up with a different approach. “I get that,” she says, re-taking a step closer to him, “and I suppose there’s nothing in this for you. That’s what Sil says is important, that both sides are getting something out of the hero/reporter relationship.”

  Kid Rapscallion nods. “Trust, too. I need to know you’re not going to sensationalize the private stuff.”

  Nancy nods, mimicking his action to build a bond between them. “That’s what I’m going to do, then,” she promises. “I’m going to find out something that you don’t want the public to know about, I’m going to bring it to you instead of publishing it, and then we can talk.”

  As she says this, Nancy pushes the books beneath her breasts up slightly, drawing his eyes to his sweater.

  Kid laughs, and shakes his head. “I spent a week recovering on Bellator Island with the Amazons, Miss Cathall. Not that I don’t appreciate the effort.”

  Pursing her lips, Nancy doesn’t give up. “Can I ask you a favor?”

  “Why not?” he asks. “Everyone else in this city has.”

  “There’s a pool among the BJ majors —”

  “You can major in that?”

  “Broadcast Journalism, smart ass,” she smiles, swiveling her shoulders back and forth just slightly because even if he’d spent a week with the Amazons, that doesn’t mean her breasts weren’t still awesome. “We’ve got a pool going. First person to get an exclusive interview with you wins the pot.”

  “How much is it?”

  “Who cares? I’m rich. I don’t need the money.”

  Kid rubs his face around the red bolo mask. “I’m tired,” he says. “It’s been a long week. I’ve given a thousand interviews all over town. What can you possibly want to know that, a) hasn’t already been covered, and b) that you’d think I want to talk about? I’m not giving you my origin story, I’m not talking about why I left Rapscallion, and I’m not going to tell you about whether Belle Flower and I are still dating.”

  Nancy smiles and let her right shoulder fall into the near wall, cocking her head just slightly to let her blonde hair fall away from her neck, exposing it to him. “I don’t want you to let me interview you,” she says. “I want you to give it to Lazlo.”

  “Who’s Lazlo?”

  “The gorgeous guy who asked you if you thought abortions should be illegal.”

  Kid shrugs. “Okay, sure. I’ll give him the interview. But … why? He seemed like kind of an idiot.”

  “He is an idiot.”

  “Then … because he’s an idiot?”

  “No, silly,” Nancy smiles, running her finger down his arm a second time, “I want you to give him the interview because he’s my boyfriend.”

  Turning in the aftermath of one last smile, Nancy walks away and doesn’t look back. Kid watches her go, knowing he should never have sex with her and knowing he was inevitably going to
have sex with her.

  4

  In the old days of seven weeks ago, Jason would simply walk down to the basement and fire up one of Francis’ state of the art computers and rifle through secret government data to check out Nancy Cathall. But this was a “New Chapter in Jason’s Life,” so he sits in the public library and relies on Yahoo, HotBot, Lycos, Google, MSN Search, and AskJeeves to paint a picture of her.

  There isn’t much.

  She was going to be a junior. She was a local. She looked fantastic in a bikini. She was photographed at a club with Leonardo DiCaprio after the Miss Teen Nevada beauty pageant last fall. She was a member of a sorority. She’d written a series of articles for the college paper talking to out-of-state freshman about the culture shock of coming to Vegas that he printed out to read later.

  There was more information about the people around her: Her father owned Cathall Construction, a successful builder of apartment complexes around southern Nevada. Donated large sums of money to the Mormon church in the name of his dead wife and Nancy’s dead mother. Her boyfriend was a back-up third baseman on the baseball team with a DUI arrest and a bad shoulder.

  When he’s seen every picture of her the internet has to offer, he checks the clock on the wall and instantly forgets it. He shuts off the computer to clear his browsing information, and rises to his feet, yawning and stretching. He looks at the clock again: 6:42. Good, there is time to get dinner, shower, and take a short nap before he hits the city for his nightly patrol.

  “Don’t forget these,” a young woman’s voice says.

  Jason turns to see a cute, bespectacled librarian approaching him with the printouts of Nancy’s stories. “Thanks,” he says, taking them from her.

  “You should be careful,” she confides in him. “We can see what you search on the internet. My boss sent me out here to check on you to make sure you weren’t some kind of pervert.”

  “Um … thanks,” he says, looking at her name tag, “Becca. I was just …”

  “Relax,” she grinned, giving him a wink. “You weren’t masturbating, so you’re okay.”

  “Do people do that?”

  “At least twice a week.”

  Jason looks down at his seat and frowns. “You clean the chairs, right? I mean, not you, but someone cleans the chairs, right?”

  Becca smiles. She has short brown hair and a pleasant smile, and Jason guesses she is a shade closer to 30 than 20. Her outfit of a gray skirt and white blouse marks her as a professional, and Jason decides Becca might prove useful. Heroes didn’t just cultivate relationships with reporters, after all, and in a town where few people seem serious, this is a woman who clearly has her stuff together.

  Also, she’s the second woman he’s met in the past two hours with breasts so fantastic she looked like she literally stepped out of an Image comic.

  “Now that we’ve established I’m not a pervert,” he asks, pouring on Kid Rapscallion’s charm and not reeling it back in, “do you want to get some dinner with me? Or is there some rule against librarians dating their clients?”

  Becca laughs, but shakes her head. “I’m sorry, but a man has to do more than not jerk off in a library to win me over.”

  Jason tries a different approach. Holding up the printouts of Nancy’s articles, he confides, “I’m new to Vegas. I was just looking for a way to get a foothold here.”

  “And you got that from looking at pictures of Miss Cathall in her bikini?”

  “No,” Jason says smoothly, “I was looking at pictures of her in a bikini because she’s hot and I’m a guy and I’m 18 and I get distracted easily and I don’t have the internet in my apartment, yet.”

  It was Becca’s turn to look Jason up and down and saw that he had the body of a man more than a kid. “Are you an athlete?” she asks. “Baseball player at the university, maybe? Is that why you were searching that Lazlo guy? Your competition?”

  “No, no, definitely not my competition,” Jason says. “I’m … well,” he adds, scratching his head to try and look half-embarrassed by what he is going to say, “I’m kinda rich. Not, like, I’m trying to decide what yacht I want to buy, but rich enough that I can live wherever I want and goof off most of the day.”

  “So you spend it playing professional poker?”

  Jason laughs at the cover identity Francis had helped him create in an attempt to stay in the young man’s good graces. “I see I wasn’t the only one stalking someone on the internet.”

  Becca winked. “And unlike you, Mr. Kitmore, I have an office.” She licks her lips. “Want to see it?”

  5

  Blouse unbuttoned. Skirt hiked up. Bra and panties on the floor. Her back arched, her breasts pressing against her wooden desk, and his hands on her shoulders, his thumbs pressing into the base of her neck. Becca pulls him in and urges him on.

  She smiles at her reflection in the mirror to her right.

  6

  He doesn’t hold back.

  It is the first time in ages someone has wanted to sleep with Jason Kitmore and not Kid Rapscallion, and he finds this more exhilarating that he could have imagined. After trysts on space stations, with an alien princess, with Clockmaker Algebra in the White House in 1961, there was something decidedly erotic about doing it in some regular woman’s office at a library.

  He remembers things he wanted to do with Belle, things he did do with Jula, and wishes he could remember more about the time he’d spent two weeks ago at the Revolutionaries’ headquarters on the moon with Duplication Girl.

  He thinks of Frank and how he always told Jason not to have sex with people he didn’t know and trust.

  He thinks about Nancy Cathall and what she really wants from him.

  He thinks of Mrs. Overing, his high school math teacher.

  He thinks of Frank’s wife and shakes his head to clear her face from his memory.

  Almost absently, he thinks of Becca, who seems content to stick her ass back and let him do whatever he wants.

  7

  “Jason? Are you in? It’s Francis. Could you please call me when you get the chance? Don't worry, this isn’t me asking you to come back. You’ve made your decision and I respect that. I don’t agree with … sorry, that’s not what this is about. This is about a girl. I think I want my next sidekick to be a girl. Maybe then people won’t spread rumors about … well, you know how the press is.”

  8

  “Why me?” Lazlo Becker asks as Kid Rapscallion walks across the roof of a casino parking garage to talk to him.

  “Why not?” Kid replies, shrugging. It’s night but it’s still the summer, and Jason is discovering he doesn’t like the temperature regularly being on the big side of 100 degrees. He wonders why none of the superhero scientists have ever offered to sell Las Vegas a dome that would keep things cool. “That Kira girl keeps asking me. She calls the hotline — this part is off the record right now, understand? — calls my hotline five times a day asking for an interview, pitching new ideas. She wants to talk about my childhood or how I see myself as a role model or what life is like as Rapscallion’s sidekick. Finally, last night, she tells me there’s this gambling pool and if she wins she’ll donate all $300 to charity even though she’s a broke college kid who could really use the 300 bucks.”

  “She’s a bitch.”

  “Yeah, well, it takes all kinds, and my guess is you’re her least favorite person in class, so I figured I’d talk to you to piss her off.”

  “Nice.”

  “Yes, well —”

  “I thought maybe you wanted to talk to me because you’re a fucking faggot or something and heard I had a big dick. The internet says you and Raps—”

  Kid sighs and rubs his temples. “No, Lazlo,” he says, deciding right then he was going to have sex with Nancy Cathall as soon as possible, “I am not a ‘fucking faggot.’ Bit of an asshole, yeah, but I am definitely not a ‘fucking faggot or something.’ Now, do you want to do this interview, or not?”

  9

  THE DAILY
REBEL

  KID RAPSCALLION: “I AM DEFINITELY NOT A F*CKING FAGGOT”

  Exclusive Interview by Lazlo Becker

  10

  “No one wants to hear me blame the media,” Kid Rapscallion says from behind a podium in a nondescript conference room. On his left are leaders from UNLV’s LGBT Council, and to his left are from Las Vegas’ Rainbow Coalition. “I understand this, and I fully accept whatever scorn the public wants to place on me. It is important to note, however, and I have made this case to both the LGBT Council, the Rainbow Coalition, the Mayor, and other civic leaders, that I was using the language Mr. Becker used to present the question, and that my response was done in such a manner that anyone who overheard our conversation would understand my distaste for that choice of words. I request, again, that Mr. Becker release the full audio tape of our conversation and not just that one phrase, taken out of context. Further, the insinuation in Mr. Becker’s question that there must be a sexual component to my relationship with Rapscallion is, as I have stated hundreds of times, preposterous. Twenty, thirty years ago, people wanted to believe the best about their heroes, and now they want to believe the worst. It’s a sickness. Rapscallion is a good man. I want to apologize again, to LGBT people everywhere, and to announce that I have agreed to star in a campaign organized by UNLV’s LGBT Council to help spread the message of tolerance and acceptance. Thank you. There will be no questions.”