by Seth Jacob
I sat down on a wooden bar stool, and it dawned on me that there were a lot of supervillains in the room. I saw The Abnormalite, a pink skinned monstrosity of a man with fangs, four arms, and eight eyes, playing pool with The Immaterial Man, who was a fog cloud in the vague shape of a person. The Abnormalite gave me the stink eye with half of his eyes while the other half carefully lined up a shot on the pool table. The Immaterial Man watched as The Abnormalite sank the eight ball in the side pocket (or at least I think he was watching, it’s hard to tell with a humanoid puff of smoke). I spotted superheroes mingled in with other villains I was less familiar with, and these superheroes barely even qualified for the name…they were really more of the “anti-hero” type. These were the kinds of heroes that you don’t see on the cover of magazines, that you’ll never catch tweeting or making an appearance on a talk show or signing autographs for kids. In the crimefighter circles I usually run in, anti-hero is a dirty word.
Their costumes had skulls and sharp metal spikes and chains and knives strapped to their hips as well as absurdly large guns and if I’m not mistaken, one guy had a live grenade dangling from his utility belt. I recognized Sergeant Silence, an anti-hero pushing 70 whose hardcore, merciless treatment of villains practically caused the term “anti-hero” to be coined just to describe his particular class of crazy. I’m not ashamed to say that the hair on the back of my neck stood up at the sight of him drinking by himself in a booth in his combat camo and with his flamethrower harnessed to his crooked, age bent back. All these anti-hero guys were so grizzled and brimming with so much rage that it would be funny if I wasn’t afraid that one of them might try to cut me just for showing my face there. What could my father possibly be doing in a place like this?
“What’ll you have?” The bartender was a middle aged, stocky woman. She seemed a little bored by me, like she had seen young superheroes get chewed up and spit out by this place so many times that it was getting old.
“I’ll just have a beer. Whatever you have on tap,” I responded. She brought me the beer, and plopped the glass on the bar.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?”
“You’re a little young for me, sweetheart…besides, I don’t date superheroes anyway,” She snickered while she started mixing a drink.
“No…no, I was just curious…have you ever seen Jack Titan in here?”
The glass she was holding slipped out of her hand, and she spilled a half made drink all over the bar. She leered at me with suspicion, and then she started over on the drink.
“Maybe. I’m not sure. Why do you want to know?”
“Well. He passed away recently, and I know he came here, so…you know, he was my dad, so I’m sort of trying to find out more about him…” I drank my beer and I suddenly felt like my stomach was a cement mixer, churning with nervousness and panic. This whole plan felt like a massive mistake.
“I don’t know what to tell you. He’s never been in here,” she responded, and she wouldn’t make eye contact with me as she remade the drink.
“Oh…is it possible that he was in here on a night you weren’t working?”
“I’m the only bartender here, I work every night, sorry.” She finished the drink and carried it over to The Abnormalite. I saw her discreetly whisper something to The Immaterial Man as he was racking up the balls for another game, and he pivoted his hazy fog head in my direction. Then, I heard a phone ring in the back room of the bar, and the bartender walked so fast to answer it that she was almost running.
I sat there drinking my beer, and I wasn’t exactly sure what to do next. I wasn’t ready to give up yet, but I also wasn’t prepared to strike up a conversation with any of these upstanding, friendly citizens. I tried distracting myself by looking at my phone, but The Immaterial Man and The Abnormalite were staring at me, and it was making me extremely uneasy. The bartender casually strolled out from the back room of the bar right when I was about to bolt.
“Can I get you another?” Her attitude had radically changed. Everything about her was now screaming friendliness.
“Uh, sure,” I was leaning heavily towards leaving. No one here had any information on my father, and even if they did, they weren’t going to share it with me. The bartender refilled my glass, she gently placed it in front of me, and then she leaned in conspiratorially, like she was about to tell me a secret.
“You know, I did know Jack Titan. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I actually fought him a bunch of times. I was a henchman, well henchwoman, with The Punster. My name’s Jane, by the way.”
“Yeah? Nice to meet you, I’m…ah, The Spectacle.”
“Sure you are. Yeah, I was one of The Punster’s Goons. Back in the day, Punster had a gang of henchmen, he called us Goons, he dressed us up in these hazmat suit uniforms with these tanks of goo that you could spray at the capes to slow em’ down. You know, ‘goo’, ‘Goons.’ It was part of his pun thing.”
“Right,” Something about the way Jane had just turned the switch from “extremely standoffish” to “aggressively outgoing” was unsettling.
“Whatever happened to The Punster?” I asked her. The Punster was in so many of my dad’s clippings, and I was curious what happened to the wordplay obsessed supervillain.
“He, you know, he passed a few years ago. He was, you know, ah…old.”
“Okay…yeah, that makes sense.”
“Yeah.”
“Think you could tell me anything about my dad, like why he was here?”
“Oh sure, sure, I could tell you loads of stories!”
For the next few hours, Jane spun tales about my father that were endlessly amusing. She told me about the time The Punster built a giant, ant-shaped android called the “Antdroid” that almost killed my father. She told me about the time Punster had Jack Titan in a huge vise, and how he kept screaming “Jack Tighten! Jack Tighten!” over and over as it squeezed the life out of him until he was able to break the metal contraption through sheer physical strength. She told me about the first time Jack Titan faced the Goons and how they almost drowned him in a sea of immobilizing, chemical goo which The Punster synthesized himself. She told me story after story about my father and The Punster’s demented, pun-themed schemes, and she poured me beer after beer to go along with them.
I thought that I was learning the things that I had set out to learn. I thought that I was getting to know the man that my father was as Jane weaved an epic narrative of Jack Titan versus The Punster. The way she told it, they were archenemies on an almost mythical scale. Time and again, Jack Titan fought the mad Punster. He escaped his pun death traps and he foiled his boundless supply of pun schemes that would have been admirably creative if they weren’t fueled by a deranged, pun obsessed criminal mind. The way she told it, my father was a flawless hero who bravely fought a cackling caricature of a villain. Jane served me a pretty lie, and I ate it up without realizing that it was all a distraction.
Eventually, Jane ran out of legends of my father, and by the time that she did, I was inexcusably drunk. When I tried to pay my tab, she said that it was “on the house,” and even in my drunken stupor, that seemed odd to me. I didn’t question it. I should have known then what had happened, but I just staggered out of the Flasked Crusader, oblivious to the sideways glances of grimacing supervillains and anti-heroes. Joel the bouncer gave me a friendly nod and thanked me for the Dragon General recommendation, and I leapt away from the Flasked Crusader. I wasn’t just drunk on the free beer I had been guzzling for the past few hours. I was drunk on the false assumption that I had achieved my goal. I thought I had just found out a wealth of information about my late father. I vaulted from rooftop to rooftop, loaded to the gills and lucky that I didn’t slip and fall, and I was filled with a sense of satisfaction and achievement that was about to be shattered.
When I made it back to my apartment, I couldn’t even get my key into the lock. I was tempted to tear the door off the hinges, but I finally managed to unlock it, and stumble into my bedroo
m. I fell onto my bed and the room spun around me. My booze drowned brain was seconds away from sinking into a deep, dreamless sleep when I noticed something that jolted me completely awake. My father’s box marked Trophy Room was missing. I got out of bed and walked over to my desk where I had left the box. A single vial of soup was sitting where the box had been.
Super strength is a funny thing. Sometimes, it’s like the entire world is made out of mist. Up to a certain point, everything feels like it weighs nothing. You punch a wall, and your fist goes through it as if it was a curtain of vapor. You lift up a few tons of steel and concrete like a kid carrying a big ball of cotton candy. Sometimes, super strength is thrilling…but when you’re angry, it’s the height of frustration.
I threw the vial of soup against the wall so hard that the glass exploded into a fine dust and the liquid inside vaporized instantly. I slammed my fist on the middle of the desk and it split in half and collapsed in on itself. My bookshelf was next, and I just sliced at it with a stiff hand like cutting ice cream with a red hot knife. The shelves fell apart and the books burst into confetti and rained around me. I snatched the metal doorknob of my bedroom door and I squeezed it like a stress ball. The fist sized doorknob crunched in my hand to a little sphere the size of a grape. There was no conscious thought, nothing left of what I think of as “me”, there was just indescribable rage and an endless frustration at the fact that no matter how much I broke, I just felt like I was swinging at shadows.
Chapter 5: Delusions and Illusions
I woke up feeling very silly. I had yet another hangover, I was surrounded by smashed furniture, and I felt like an idiot. I thought I could just waltz into that bar and find out what I wanted to know. All I accomplished was getting the attention of someone in that bar who called Jane and had her distract me with hours of bullshit while someone was in my place stealing the box of my father’s superhero stuff. A wealth of information about my father’s superhero career was lost because I was cocky and naïve.
I got out of bed, still dressed in my Spectacle costume that I had passed out in, and looked around at the wreckage that was the undeniable evidence of my little temper tantrum. It all seemed so senseless. My father was dead, and learning all about his secret superhero life wasn’t going to change that. I stepped over the ruins of my book shelves and into the main room of my apartment, and it occurred to me that any one of the people in the Flasked Crusader could have been responsible for stealing the box.
The bar was filled with supervillains and anti-heroes. Who knows how many grudges my father had built up over the years? How could I know why someone would want to steal the box of his stuff when I had barely even begun to look through the volumes of journals, endless mementos, and decades of photos? How did they even know that I had the box and where I live? Who can predict the whims of bat shit crazy people who dress up in brightly colored spandex, people who are so incredibly narcissistic that they seriously think that they can rule the world?
Maybe it was as simple as a collector of superhero memorabilia seeing an opportunity to add to their collection. At that point, I really didn’t care anymore. I was over it, I was done living in the past and trying to find out about my father’s superhero career that he hid from me my entire life. I sat down on my couch, took a deep breath, and just tried to put it all out of my mind. I reached into my costume jacket pocket and took out my phone…the match book that led me to the Flasked Crusader caught on my phone and fell into my lap. I held it in my hand, and as I looked at the little flap of stiff paper, I knew that it was one of the last remnants of my father that I would ever possess.
I carefully turned the match book over in my hands, like it was some sort of sacred relic, and I looked at the crude drawing of a superhero drinking from a flask on its cover. My father had written a recent date on the flask, and I rubbed my fingers over pen indentations that his hand had made only a month ago. For a few minutes, I sat there examining the matchbook and reflecting on it. Then, I ripped it in half. I was ready to let go of this stupid crusade to understand my father’s superhero life, but right as I was about to tear the halves into even smaller pieces, I noticed something that made me hesitate.
Someone had written something on the inside of the matchbook. There was an address and an apartment number, and below it a note that read:
“Stop by any time.”
I still gripped the piece of stiff paper in my fingers, and a tiny rip was starting where I was pulling at it. I wanted to finish what I started and destroy both the address and the note, I really did, but I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let go of my stupid crusade, not when there was still the smallest of leads available to me. I just had to know.
I put in a few hours of crime fighting with The Millennials, who had become understandably annoyed by my erratic behavior, but I skipped the obligatory post-patrol bar hopping. Instead, I went to the address in the matchbook. It was a surprisingly nice building, nicer than the building that I lived in and even the one that my father lived in. It was in a neighborhood that was one of the wealthiest areas of the city. As I jumped onto the roof of the thirty story building overlooking the park, I wondered what a person this filthy rich would be doing in a place as low class as the Flasked Crusader.
I thought it would be best to just bypass talking to the doorman. I didn’t even know who I was here to see, and I couldn’t imagine that any explanation I could offer would get the doorman to let me up (“Uh, I found this address in a box of my dead dad’s stuff?”). So, I popped the doorknob off of the door on the roof and I took the stairs to the apartment. Even the stairwell seemed opulent, with its tasteful wallpaper and polished railings.
When I arrived at the apartment, I knocked on the front door, and excitement surged through me. I didn’t know who was going to answer that door, but my imagination had already cooked up a few scenarios. Maybe it was a member of the Superb 6 who was interested in making Jack Titan a full time member of the team. Maybe it was a famous reporter looking to tell the story of Jack Titan, or maybe to offer him a job as some sort of gonzo superhero journalist covering crimefighter culture from the inside. Maybe it was a woman?
The peephole turned dark as the mystery person behind the door evaluated me. Half a minute passed as I felt eyes judging me through the peephole. Then the door swung open, and a kid, maybe nineteen years old, was standing in front of me. He was wearing big, mirrored aviator sunglasses, a neon green, tennis ball colored hoodie with the hood practically swallowing his head, and khaki golf shorts with the letter “D” printed on them hundreds of times in a repeating pattern. He was probably a full foot shorter than me, and he had a wispy mustache.
“Well?”
“Uh…are your parents home?”
The kid’s head tilted and his forehead furrowed in surprise. Then he started giggling.
“No, my parents aren’t home. Are you selling girl scout cookies?”
“No, I um—”
“Because if you are, I’ll take a dozen boxes of thin mints. I’ll eat the shit out of some thin mints, you know what’m saying?”
“Uh…my dad, Jack Titan, I found this address in a matchbook with his stuff? He died recently, and I’m just sort of—”
“Oh fuck. He died? Oh fuck. For real? Let me take a look at that.” The kid grabbed the half of the matchbook with his address on it right out of my hands. Even through the mirrored aviators, I could see a look of recognition on his face as he read the square of stiff paper.
“…come in here,” he commanded, and I walked into his apartment.
When he answered the door, my first thought was that this kid had rich parents who indulged his terrible fashion sense. His apartment made it clear that this was not the case. It was decorated by a young person who had an unlimited budget, but severely limited taste. The main room was a massive space with a big glass window overlooking the park, but he spared no expense to ugly up this gorgeous apartment. He had several bean bag chairs, each the same tennis ball green as
his hoodie, lying around on his nice wood floors. There was a long, gold colored couch in the center of the room facing a white wall. There was a metal statue of a naked woman, except for a bright red cape and a yellow utility belt slung around her bronzed hips, by the door. He had a replica of the refrigerator sized crime computer from the Superb 6 cartoon show, complete with useless flashing lights and glowing vacuum tubes, but it’d been converted into a keg. On the far wall, an enormous Warhol-style grid of his face in all different color palettes leered over his apartment.
“Take a seat man. Can I get you something to drink?” The kid guided me to his gold couch which faced a big, blank wall. There were video game controllers on the glass coffee table in front of the couch, a couple issues of the superhero gossip rag Spandex, and a bong designed to look like some sort of cosmic, reality altering weapon.
“No, I’m fine. I actually just wanted to ask you about—”
“Water, coffee?”
“No, really, I’m cool, I just—”
“Beer? Club soda? Sparkling water?”
This kid was deliberately trying to get under my skin. It was working. He took a seat on a nearby bean bag chair and grinned at me.
“I’m sorry man…you’re a superhero, and I kind of just fell back into my natural instincts to fuck with you, you feel me? You know, because I’m a supervillain and all.”
“…Right.”
The kid got up and extended a fist for me to bump. I saw that the knuckles of his right hand had the letters, “D-E-L-U” tattooed on them. I reluctantly bumped his fist, and he sat back down on his yellow bean bag chair, almost disappearing into it like a chameleon because his hoodie was the same ugly color.
“I’m Dr. Delusion…you’ve probably heard of me.”
“I’m The Spectacle, and I’ve heard of a Dr. Delusion, but I’m pretty sure he was a lot older than you. Also, I’m pretty sure you’re not a doctor.”