Less Than Hero

by S. G. Browne

  Over by the southern fountain, Randy lights up another cigarette and takes a deep drag as one of the thugs starts scratching at himself and whimpering, his skin blistered and covered with angry red splotches.

  Randy is called the Rash.

  While it’s not the most glamorous of superhero names, Randy has embraced his new identity. We all have. We’re genetic mutants. Freaks of science. A product of our profession. The modern prescription for an overmedicated society.

  The last of the criminals cries out as his waist expands and his arms and thighs grow to twice their thickness. Before he has a chance to run away from Frank, he busts through the seams of his clothes and falls down, incapacitated, his frame unable to support the extra weight.

  Frank is known as Big Fatty.

  Two more punks show up late to the party. When they see what’s happening to their buddies, they turn and run toward the subway entrance, so I take off after them.

  In the four months since the skateboarder in Central Park, I’ve learned to direct my yawns at a single individual in a crowd with a range of up to fifty feet. I can even hit moving targets while running at full speed.

  Just before the two punks reach Twenty-Third Street, I yawn and they collapse, sliding along the sidewalk and coming to rest next to each other by the park entrance, their eyes closed in deep, unexpected slumber.

  They call me Dr. Lullaby.

  Some people still get confused about my name, though I guess I shouldn’t take it personally. After all, it’s not like I’ve ever done any interviews or tried to set the matter straight. But apparently some people think I’m some kind of serenading physician or academic pedophile.

  I think I need to hire a good publicist.

  Since Isaac’s ability to hand out boners has largely gone unnoticed, none of the tabloids have given him a pseudonym, so to make him feel better we all call him Professor Priapism.

  Vic walks up to me and slaps me on the back. “Nice shooting, Doc.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “Now let’s wrap ’em up and call it a night.”

  Using zip ties and duct tape, we tie up the assholes and leave them gift wrapped for the NYPD, then split up and make our way to our respective homes.

  It used to be that after a session of fighting crime we would go out and celebrate. But with our exploits being chronicled in the papers and on the local news, it’s become risky for us to be seen together late at night grabbing a beer at the KGB Bar or pierogi at Veselka.

  I guess that’s the price of being a superhero with a secret identity. Sometimes you have to be willing to make a few sacrifices.

  Vic and Frank head for the subway while Charlie, Randy, and I venture home on foot, heading down Broadway. We don’t talk about what happened. Now it’s just business as usual. When we do talk about it later, we’ll discuss it in the privacy of Charlie’s or Randy’s or Vic’s apartment, breaking down what went right and what went wrong and how to do it better next time.

  I never thought being a crime fighter would require troubleshooting.

  The three of us walk past a bank of newspaper-vending kiosks, most of them empty, but there’s still a copy of yesterday’s Wall Street Journal in the display window as well as a copy of the New York Post, the headline announcing:

  BAD APPLES IN THE BIG APPLE:

  SUPERVILLAINS SUCK

  Much as they’ve done with us, the media has given names to the two villains who have terrorized New York with their supernatural ability to steal people’s memories and give them hallucinations: Mr. Blank and Illusion Man.

  Over the past few weeks their exploits have become notorious, leading to a lot of political finger-pointing and a demand for beefed-up police patrols. There have even been reports of the FBI and CIA getting involved.

  The problem is, no one knows who Mr. Blank and Illusion Man are, what they look like, or where to find them. Not even us.

  “I read that some people have had hallucinations that lasted for several days,” Charlie says. “And that everyone who’s encountered Mr. Blank has suffered permanent memory loss.”

  I don’t know about anyone else’s personal best, but the longest I’ve been able to make anyone take a nap has been thirty-seven minutes.

  “Illusion Man and Mr. Blank are awesome names,” Randy says. “A hell of a lot better than the Rash.”

  Randy’s not real fond of his nom de plume.

  “I hope we never run into either of them,” Charlie says.

  “Why not?” Randy asks.

  “Because they’re too powerful,” Charlie says.

  “Come on,” Randy says. “You can’t believe everything you read in the daily rags. What kind of superhero are you?”

  Charlie looks down at the ground and answers quietly into his chest. “The practical kind.”

  Randy’s cell phone goes off, his ringtone playing “You Shook Me All Night Long” by AC/DC. He pulls out his phone and checks it, a grin spreading across his face. “Looks like I’ve got some late-night booty to call on in Chelsea, boys. Hallelujah! Can I get a Jim Morrison?”

  I don’t know if that means he’s going to love her madly or be her back door man, and I don’t want to know.

  “Catch you superheroes later,” Randy says, then runs off down Nineteenth Street.

  “How does he do that?” Charlie asks.

  “Do what?”

  “Get laid all the time?” Charlie says. “It’s like a superpower or something.”

  “Hopefully he doesn’t get his two superpowers mixed up,” I say.

  Charlie and I continue down Broadway to Union Square. My lullaby radar sweeps back and forth, checking out the homeless camped out on the benches and the drunks stumbling out of the nearby bars and the late-night crowd gathered in front of the subway entrance.

  “Hey Lloyd,” Charlie says once we’re through Union Square and heading down Fourth Avenue. “Do you think I have what it takes to be a superhero?”

  “You are a superhero,” I say. “We all are.”

  “I know,” he says. “But I want to be like the superheroes in the movies and comic books. Smart and brave and heroic. Someone like Spider-Man or Batman. Superheroes kids look up to and want to be when they grow up.”

  “Spider-Man and Batman aren’t real,” I say. “While kids may idolize them, they’re just fictional characters. You’re real, Charlie. And people do look up to you.”

  He nods. “I guess I just wish I had a real superpower. Like I could fly or become invisible or bend steel with my bare hands.”

  “You do have a real superpower,” I say. “And you use it to help a lot of people. That’s the true meaning of a superhero. Not whether or not you have superhuman speed or can leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

  After a moment, Charlie nods his head a couple of times and says, “Okay.”

  “And for what it’s worth, you’re one of the bravest people I know.”

  “Thanks,” he says, a smile brightening his face.

  We continue to walk along in silence, our breath pluming out in the cold November air, the city crouched and lurking, hiding in shadows.

  “Hey Lloyd. Do you think I’d look better in a red cape or a yellow one?”

  I’m in Washington Square Park, sitting in the shade of the Arch—not preparing to fight crime but trying to score some charitable donations from marks walking into and out of the park via Fifth Avenue.

  I don’t usually panhandle outside of Central Park, but Thoth the Spiritual Prayformer booked the Bethesda Terrace Arcade for the afternoon, and my other favorite pitches were taken by an assortment of jugglers, magicians, and balloon-animal artists, which is how I ended up here, trying to appeal to the denizens of Greenwich Village.

  “Chunky Monkey, dude!” some NYU student on a skateboard says as he rides past and flashes the peace sign. All I know is he’s not flashing any green to help pay my rent.

  My sign today reads:

  ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE . . . AND AN OCCASIONAL PINT OF BEN & JERRY’S.


  Not one of my top ten signs, but you can’t expect a superhero to put a lot of energy into holding down a day job. I don’t know how Clark Kent and Peter Parker do it. I bet in real life, they’d hate punching a clock at the Daily Planet or Daily Bugle. Or else they’d get fired for missing work because they were out fighting crime.

  Maybe if I had a billionaire alter ego like Bruce Wayne I wouldn’t have to panhandle, but since I don’t have inexhaustible accounts to fund my weapons research and my last couple of clinical-trial checks have been less than fifteen hundred combined, I need to find a way to supplement my income.

  Something tells me the Green Lantern doesn’t have to worry about making rent.

  I watch the NYU student ride away without contributing to my cause and I think about making him fall asleep, but I don’t want to attract the wrong kind of attention. And making skateboarders fall asleep is yesterday’s news. Besides, I need to conserve my energy for more important endeavors.

  Being a superhero is a lot more work than I expected. It takes tremendous energy and commitment and attention to detail. You have to hone your skills. You have to maintain your focus and concentration. Otherwise you might end up making the wrong person break out in a rash or throw up.

  I wonder if Superman ever has this kind of internal monologue.

  But in spite of all the effort it takes to be a superhero, this is the most fun I’ve had in years. I wake up every morning and I can’t wait for nightfall. During the day I walk around checking out people, sizing them up, wondering how fast I could take them down if the situation called for it. Still, sometimes I ask myself how I ended up with this superpower rather than someone else. Someone more deserving. Someone who didn’t sleepwalk through the first thirty years of his life.

  When it comes to self-worth, I’ve never made much of an investment in my own stock value.

  I read somewhere that human beings are made up of thirty elements: mostly oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, with a little calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and sulfur thrown in for seasoning. Boiled down into a consumer product, we’re not worth much more than a foot-long sandwich from Subway. But when you add up all of the intangible qualities that make us human—things like courage and integrity and compassion—the overall value of the individual shoots up dramatically. Some more so than others.

  Most of my life, I’ve considered my own market value closer to penny stocks than to precious metals. But over the past few weeks, I’ve developed a newfound confidence to go with my supernatural ability, and my self-worth has soared.

  Now if only I could parlay that into rent money.

  So I sit behind my sign, thinking about stock prices and scientific elements and cold-cut combos while trying to project some pre–Thanksgiving holiday cheer. But Washington Square Park isn’t the best location to capitalize on the spirit of the season.

  This time of year, Rockefeller Center and Times Square are the prime busking locations, where holiday crowds are in abundance wearing their festive Santa Claus red, their pockets filled with Tannenbaum green. Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men still strikes the right note when everyone’s in a cheerful mood and possessed with the spirit of giving.

  Maybe I should have used a holiday-themed sign, except every Joe Panhandler in the five boroughs plays that angle. I prefer to stand out in a crowd. The problem is, there’s not much of a crowd. Still, after four hours I’ve made thirty-seven dollars and change, which is more than I could make behind a register at Pret A Manger or the Food Emporium. So I pocket my dollars and quarters and other loose change and head for the subway.

  On my way out of the park, I pass the chess tables and stop to watch a handful of matches in progress. I consider sitting down and playing a little competitive chess for cash, see if I can turn my thirty-seven bucks into seventy-four, but I don’t want to risk losing my hard-earned money. You never know when you might get hustled. Plus the last couple of times I played against Blaine he won every match, so it’s not like I’m at the top of my game. I suppose I could always make Blaine fall asleep and take whatever money he has in his wallet, but that would be an abuse of my power.

  Being a superhero is so complicated.

  As I’m watching the chess matches and debating my morality, a black homeless woman walks past, pushing a shopping cart filled with her belongings and shouting at some invisible antagonist, giving him a piece of her fractured mind and waving a hand in the air as if dismissing him.

  While it’s not the same woman I saw in Tompkins Square when I was playing chess with Blaine, there’s something about her that makes me think about how the other woman started shouting and waving her arms around like she was fighting off some attacker, much like this one.

  At the time I figured the woman at Tompkins Square was just a broken-down homeless woman with a few spark plugs missing, but what if it was something else? What if she wasn’t just cracked out or mentally ill? What if she was hallucinating? And what if someone with a supernatural ability was responsible for causing those hallucinations?

  This train of thought continues through my head and when I look out the windows, I see Blaine leaving lunch early in the East Village just before a homeless guy starts screaming about being impregnated by aliens.

  I see the two of us playing chess in Tompkins Square as the homeless woman walks past. I see Blaine watching her, staring at her, then turning back to the chessboard after she starts shouting at some invisible companion.

  I hear him ask me if our abilities will go away if we stop volunteering for clinical trials, and I hear him tell me nothing unusual has been happening to him.

  I could be imagining things or jumping to conclusions, connecting dots that aren’t really there, but I can’t help thinking there’s something going on with Blaine.

  Maybe he lied. Maybe he’s developed abilities and he’s not telling us. Maybe he’s the one responsible for all the hallucinations.

  You think Blaine is Illusion Man?” Charlie asks.

  Vic, Frank, Randy, Charlie, and I are at Randy’s for poker night. I don’t know if the Fantastic Four or the X-Men get together and play Trivial Pursuit or Guitar Hero to decompress from fighting the forces of evil, but we’re all looking forward to a night of hanging out and playing cards.

  Or at least we were.

  “She could have just been a mentally unstable homeless person,” Frank says after I tell them about the homeless woman at Tompkins Square. “It’s not like there’s a shortage of them in Manhattan.”

  “Maybe,” I say. “But that wasn’t the only instance where something weird happened when Blaine was around. There was also that guy who freaked out during lunch the day we figured out what was going on.”

  “What guy?” Charlie asks.

  “It happened just after Blaine left,” I say. “He started shouting about being impregnated by aliens.”

  “I remember that,” Randy says.

  “Then there was that guy at Curry in a Hurry,” I say.

  “You mean the douche bag who thought he was Karma?” Vic says.

  I nod. “That’s the one.”

  “I thought you said he might be like us,” Frank says around a mouthful of pastrami sandwich from Katz’s.

  Frank’s pushing 225 pounds now, which is a good forty pounds more than he used to carry. I’m a little worried about him, but right now, I’m more worried about Blaine.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Maybe I was wrong about him. Maybe he was mentally disturbed. Or maybe . . .”

  “Maybe he was hallucinating and he thought he was Karma,” Charlie says.

  I touch my nose and point to him.

  “So that’s three times,” I say, holding up three fingers for emphasis. “Now, we’ve all been guinea pigs for the past five years, and we’ve all participated in a lot of the same clinical trials. Including the one in August where we took all of those drugs to see how they interacted.”

  “That was right before this all started,” Randy says.

 
“Right,” I say. “So if we all developed these abilities not long after that, doesn’t it seem likely that Blaine would have developed one, too?”

  This last question is met with a silence so thick Frank could probably eat it with a fork.

  “Son of a bitch,” Vic says. “He’s been playing us.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Frank says. “Everything Lloyd mentioned could just be coincidence.”

  “I thought you said there’s no such thing as coincidence,” Randy says.

  “Yeah, Big Fatty,” Vic says. “Are you eating your words now, too?”

  While the three of them discuss Frank’s new diet, I glance over at Charlie, who is staring out the back window. When I follow his gaze to see what he’s looking at, I don’t see anything.

  “What is it, Charlie?” I ask.

  He just keeps staring.

  “Charlie?” I say, then reach out and put my hand on his shoulder.

  He blinks and looks at me. “What?”

  “You kind of spaced out there for a minute,” I say.

  “I did?” He looks around, confused, and then stares at me with this odd expression, as if trying to figure out a riddle. “When did you start going gray?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “A couple months ago. Why?”

  He shrugs and smiles. “It makes you look distinguished.”

  “So what do we do about Blaine?” Randy asks.

  “I say we gang up on him,” Vic says. “He can’t take us all.”

  “Maybe we should talk to Blaine first,” Frank says, attempting to be the voice of reason.

  “You mean like an intervention?” I say.

  “A supervillain intervention,” Vic says. “Great idea. ‘Thank you for all that you’ve done to enlighten us with your boundless knowledge of trivia, Blaine, but your decision to cause people to hallucinate is hurting all of us. We all care about you. But please stop or else we’ll have to make you throw up and turn into Fat Bastard.’ ”