Memoirs of a Crimefighter

by Seth Jacob

  It was more than just a matter of having no free time. I had spent a year in semi-denial about my superpowers, instead I remained convinced for a long, long time that it was all a lingering aftereffect of that first SUHP trip. I kept telling myself that I was having SUHP flashbacks, that a minuscule amount must still be in my system somehow, even though I knew that was absurd and scientifically impossible. I kept telling myself that there was no way that I really was going to live the rest of my life as a superhuman.

  I felt like I had no one to talk about it with, and although I tried not to, I thought about it constantly. I would try to mention SUHP whenever the topic of drugs came up, which tends to happen with teenage boys a lot, and not so subtly wonder out loud if anyone we knew had permanent superpowers from taking it. It was always an idea that everybody laughed off. No one ever copped to having superpowers, and statistically speaking, it’s likely that I really was one of only a few people in the entire school who had a genetic predisposition to superhuman ability.

  The summer after I graduated high school was a strange time for me. I was living with my dad at his apartment in the city until college started in the fall, and with all that free time on my hands, I was coming to terms with the fact that these things I could do were not going to wear off. This is who I am now, I kept thinking over and over again, and I knew that the rough ideas I had about my future meant nothing. I used to think that I would go to school to be a lawyer…but how could I now?

  How could I sit in classrooms and offices and courtrooms for the rest of my life when I could do the things that I could do? Who could go into work from 9 to 5 when you could be leaping hundreds of feet through the air over rooftops with the city lights glittering below you? What would happen when my mind drifted during those long, lawyer hours and I’d see myself stopping dangerous mad men in colorful costumes with my bare hands while crowds cheered for me like I was a glorious spandex demigod? I could try to keep my head down and live a normal life, but how do you live a normal life when you know with every fiber of your being that you’re not a normal man?

  Pop culture has given us this idea that the young superhero stitches together a superhero persona over the course of a long weekend. He just sits down at his desk and draws on a sketch pad and just like that, his superhero identity is born fully formed on the page. He whips out a thread and a needle and some fabric and before you know it, the montage is over and he can start beating up bad guys. If you’re a young, superpowered kid and you’re thinking about becoming a superhero, I can’t stress enough that this was the complete opposite of how it was for me.

  It took over a month of agonizing to create what eventually became “The Spectacle.” I went through dozens of superhero names before I found one that wasn’t taken and wasn’t also embarrassingly stupid. I have no artistic talent whatsoever and designing a superhero costume was a maddening process. I destroyed a notebook full of crudely drawn Spectacle prototypes to spare myself the excruciating torment that the internet would deliver if those sketches ever got out. Slowly but surely, The Spectacle emerged from mountains of crumpled notebook paper.

  Once I finally settled on a costume design that didn’t make me look like a complete idiot, I spent another week clumsily piecing it together. Although the design I was working from is the same one that I use today, that first attempt was a shameful excuse for a costume. I couldn’t sew spandex for shit, I butchered the cursive “The Spectacle” writing on the breast of the blue jacket, the yellow piping on the red spandex pants was just shamefully bad, the black domino mask was too big and it kept slipping down my face…but it was good enough to get me started.

  Writing about the first time that you put on a costume and went out looking for criminals to punch in the head is like writing about sex. You’re never going to capture the thrill of the act, not in a million years of writing and rewriting, and anyone who hasn’t done it isn’t going to understand unless they do it themselves. With that in mind, let’s talk about one of the best nights of my life, the night that I stopped wanting to be a superhero and became one, and how everything that could go wrong, did.

  I slipped into the costume on the roof of my dad’s building so he wouldn’t notice me leaving the apartment in it. My entire body was shaking and my heart was racing faster than a hummingbird with a coke habit as I put on the ill fitting thing. I had watched hours of footage of superheroes leaping from building to building, but nothing prepares you for that moment when you’re standing on a rooftop and you’re looking at the ledge and you’re trying to force yourself to start running towards it. Intellectually, I knew that I could make the jump from the rooftop I was standing on to the one across the street. I had made jumps five times that distance in the woods at school while testing the limits of my newfound powers after lights out. Intellectually, I knew that I could do it, but try telling that to the screeching voice in your head telling you that you’re about to plummet to your death.

  After a good twenty minutes of psyching myself up, I ran towards the edge of the roof as fast as I could. My brain was a beehive that had been hit like a piñata before I started sprinting, but once I finally forced myself to move, I stopped thinking. My thoughts evaporated, and there was only the pounding of my feet on the cement roof, my rapid, sharp breaths going in and out, in and out, the rushing of wind on my masked face, the honks and engines and squealing brakes and traffic sounds hundreds of feet below, and the edge of the rooftop racing towards me. Then—I jumped.

  I felt like I was weightless as I shot across the air above the city street. For a split second, I felt incredibly calm as I saw the city spread out below me, and then gravity began clawing at me once again. I was falling towards the building across the street, and as I flew at it, I realized something that erased any sense of calm I had and replaced it with sheer panic. I had jumped too far, and I was about to overshoot the rooftop.

  I kicked my feet and flailed my arms as I missed the far edge of the rooftop by a few inches, and suddenly I was sailing past it. Here’s where I’d like to say that my life flashed before my eyes, or that I had some sort of profound epiphany that I needed to survive so I could dedicate my life to the fight for truth and justice, but honestly, all I was thinking was “FUCK.” I fell past the rooftop I was aiming for and across a dark alley and before I even knew what was happening, I crashed onto the roof of a building below the one I had intended to land on.

  I tumbled on the gravelly roof and skidded across it before clanking my head into an air conditioning unit. I sat there for a few seconds, legitimately surprised to still be alive, and then I burst into uncontrollable laughter. My whole body ached from the rough landing, my head hurt from denting the aluminum casing of the air conditioning unit, adrenaline gushed through my veins like river rapids, and death had almost taken me in a supremely humiliating way…but I felt amazing, I felt vibrant, I felt so alive.

  I sprung to my feet immediately and started running for the next jump. I launched off of the rooftop and towards the wall of a much taller building. I hit the reflective windows of the wall and pushed off of them, propelling myself even farther and higher. I landed again on a window ledge, but this time, I hit the ground running at a full clip. It got easier and easier every time I hurled myself from one building to another.

  Everything became so fluid, my mind didn’t have space for anything but spotting the next roof to land on, the next flagpole to swing from, the next billboard to bounce off, and I lost myself in the organic process. Even the mistakes, the smallest of slips on damp concrete or the misjudging of angles, they seamlessly folded into it all and became starting points for the next move. It’s like when a musician plays a wrong note in a solo, and he toys with it and it evolves into this amazing riff that repeats throughout the song. I started to flow as I rocketed from building to building, across traffic filled city streets, deliberately falling dozens of stories before touching down on a balcony and starting it all over again. Even as I type this, I know it sounds pretentious,
but the lines started to blur between me and the city.

  Hours had passed and I had traveled halfway across the city when I saw him. I was catching my breath while sitting on the ledge of a rooftop when I happened to notice an armored car on the street swerve and then screech to a stop. The back doors of the armored car swung open, and The Whimsy stepped out of the vehicle with a duffel bag stuffed with stacks of cash. Even from so many stories up, I recognized The Whimsy from the research I had done on costumed crimefighting, research that mostly consisted of reading back issues of Spandex.

  I was instantly convinced that I could take him. The Whimsy was always portrayed in Spandex as a joke of a costumed criminal. One issue described him as “the self proclaimed ‘ironic supervillain’” in an article titled, “Five Worst Villain Costumes of the Year.” He clocked in at number three, which was a generous place to put him on that list considering that his costume consisted of a neon blue polo shirt, a plaid fanny pack, skinny jeans, one of those bulky, 90’s watches that say the time out loud in a bad robot voice, and neon pink framed sunglasses. The Whimsy was just a 16 year old, wannabe supervillain who had been in and out of super-juvie since he was 13. His fanny pack full of ironic, high tech gadgets was an amusing novelty, but I was confident that my powers would make this kid an easy first win for The Spectacle.

  The street clogged with traffic as the armored car sat in the middle of the road. The Whimsy took a brief glance in his neon pink sunglasses at the two armed guards scrambling out of the vehicle. The truck was overflowing with purple knock out gas. The coughing armed guards tried to take aim at him, but they passed out on the street before they could fire a single shot, and then The Whimsy ran. I bounded off of the ledge, into the branches of a tree, and then onto the top of a cab. The top of the cab rang out with a hollow bang with the impact of my weight, and I saw The Whimsy look over his shoulder at me as he weaved in and out of bumper to bumper traffic. We made eye contact for a fraction of a second, and then I was after him, ricocheting off of one car to another like a skipping stone across a lake.

  The Whimsy managed to turn the corner of the street and make it out of my line of sight before I could reach him. I touched down on the roof of the armored car, and then flung myself off of it and towards the corner where The Whimsy made a sharp left to lose me. I bashed into a newspaper vending machine with my hip as I made a running landing on the sidewalk, it fell over on its side, and the glass of the box shattered. Papers with the front page headline, “Superb 6 Stop Mistress Gorgon’s Subway Rampage” spilled out into the busy intersection. I pivoted around the corner and spotted The Whimsy kneeling down and tying the laces of his retro, neon teal and yellow high top sneakers. I took a few steps towards him when I saw that he wasn’t tying his shoes…he was squeezing the rubber bulbs on the tongues of his shoes. I had just enough time to wonder why he would be bothering with those archaic shoe pumps that pretty much did nothing when the bottoms of his sneakers emitted a pulse of bright white light.

  Suddenly, The Whimsy exploded away from me in a flash of white energy from the treads of his high tops. In less than a second, he was a tiny dot arcing through the city skyscrapers.

  “Son of a bitch,” I muttered, and then I ran after him as fast as I could on the sidewalk. I was trying to build up momentum for one big jump so I could tackle The Whimsy out of the sky. He was so far ahead of me now that he looked like a bouncing strobe light the size of a flea. I was really starting to pick up some speed as I put everything I had into this sprint, I sidestepped pedestrians who strolled by me at a glacial pace, I hopped right over a little old lady who dropped her purse like she was a hurdle, I was moving faster than I ever had in my life, and then, when I felt like I couldn’t possibly run any faster, I sprang into the air in the direction of the tiny blip of light that was The Whimsy.

  I tore through the sky at him like a bullet, and I saw him look over his shoulder at me and reach for his fanny pack when I slammed into him in mid air. My weight overwhelmed the energy propulsion in his shoes and we plummeted towards the street. Fortunately for us both, I had grabbed onto him pretty tightly, and I controlled our descent despite his struggling. The landing on an empty stretch of sidewalk was rough on my knees, but I kept The Whimsy from hurting himself in the fall.

  “Alright, tough guy, you fought the good fight but now it’s time to—” The Whimsy stopped fighting against my superhuman grip on his blue polo shirt, and he pushed a button on his bulky, old school watch. The watch blasted sound in my face so loud that it cut me off in the middle of my hackneyed attempt at superhero banter.

  “The…time…is…two…oh…seven…A…M,” the robot voice blared in my ears in a mind-numbingly loud ultrasonic frequency. I threw up my hands to block my ears and The Whimsy pulled away from me, keeping his wrist aimed at my head.

  The ear-piercing sound vibrated my eyes and made the street around me foggy and unfocused. My ear drums felt like they were being stabbed with red hot needles. My whole skull reverberated with the ultrasonic waves of the 90’s robot voice reading out the time again and again, and I felt warm blood trickle out of my nose.

  “The…time…is…two…oh…seven…A…M…” The Whimsy was a hazy blur, and he backed away slowly as the booming voice jack hammered into my head.

  “Stop,” I couldn’t even hear myself say this through the deafening ultrasonic sound.

  “The…time…is…two…oh…eight…A…M…”

  Right when I thought my brain was going to burst, the robot voice trailed off to a high pitched whine, and then it faded out completely. My eyes stopped vibrating and The Whimsy shook his wrist, tapped the screen of his bulky watch, and then he shrugged at me. The bottoms of his high top sneakers started glowing with white energy again.

  Before he could pop up into the air again, I lunged for his fanny pack and looped my fingers around its plaid belt. The white energy pulsed on the bottom of his shoes and his feet flew out from under him while I held him down by his fanny pack. While I fought against the force of whatever crazy hover technology was in his sneakers, The Whimsy whipped his phone out of his pocket. The bright light pulsating from the bottom of his shoes fizzled out, and I lowered him to the ground while he typed on his phone in the most casual way.

  “Kid, what the hell are you doing? Jesus Christ, stop texting and tweeting or whatever, I’m in the middle of citizen arresting you here.” The Whimsy held up one finger, as if I was rudely interrupting some important text conversation and he’d be with me in one second, and I honestly was taken aback. This was just a little sixteen year old kid, and he was beaten. What was I supposed to do? Punch him in the face? In the moment, that seemed a little harsh.

  The Whimsy’s phone flashed as if he was snapping a picture of me while I tried to figure out what to do with him. Then, the flash on his phone started flickering rapidly and the light got brighter and brighter until it was so blindingly bright that it was leaving huge blotches of purple in my vision. Again, The Whimsy started backing away from me as I tried to block my eyes from the extremely bright flashing. He was disappearing from me in the blinding after images, and out of just pure frustration at this point, I barreled forward and punched at the source of the light.

  I landed a lucky blind shot and shattered the glass on the back of the phone which seemed to break that infuriating LED flash. The Whimsy unzipped his plaid fanny pack and started to snake a hand into it to pull out his next absurdly annoying and painful trinket, but I grabbed at it and just tore that tacky thing off his waist.

  “Alright. Okay. That’s enough of that bullshit. Uh. Drop the duffel bag, and put your hands on your head.” I tossed the fanny pack aside, and The Whimsy reluctantly took the duffel bag off of his shoulder. He let it drop to the asphalt, and then he raised his clenched fists in front of him.

  “I’m sorry…what are you doing? You want to fight me? You’re all out of your party tricks, you don’t want to fight a dude with superpowers, Whimsy.” I walked towards him, not even remotely t
hreatened by his fighting stance, and I threw a sloppy punch at his jaw.

  The Whimsy bobbed his head out of the way, and he jabbed me right in my bleeding nose. I was stunned by the blow, but also shocked that he was able to land it. Everything I read about The Whimsy made me think that he relied on corny super-gadgets, but this kid was clearly reacting with superhuman reflexes. His jab was like a lightning bolt. The Whimsy had superpowers, and I had no idea what they were.

  I swung wildly at him, just trying to end this fight before it spun out of control, and The Whimsy skipped out of the way of my punch. I threw a left cross which hit the air next to him as he danced around me, and then I just started punching at a rapid fire pace. I didn’t even scrape him with a punch. He was so much faster than me. Fighting The Whimsy was like trying to hit a fly that just buzzes away before you can raise your hand to slap it.

  I was getting frustrated. I was winded from throwing all these super strength punches that didn’t connect, The Whimsy’s total silence was driving me crazy, and that’s when he started hitting back. He hit me in the jaw with a right hook that I didn’t even see coming, he battered me with jab after jab, and even with my own superhuman reaction time, I was helpless against his undeniably greater super speed. Thankfully, The Whimsy didn’t seem to have any super strength, otherwise his flurry of punches probably would have killed me, but I’m not invulnerable. His barrage of blows to the head were messing me up in a big way, and I knew that I couldn’t take much more.

  I’m not proud to say it, but I panicked. A fight or flight urge came over me as he peppered me with punches, and flight was looking pretty appealing. The Whimsy pulled back his fist for what might have been a knockout blow, and I just leapt up and over him. I didn’t look back as I landed on a rooftop behind The Whimsy, and I proceeded to run straight home. I changed into my regular clothes on the rooftop, and when I walked back into my dad’s apartment, he didn’t even notice my swollen face and profusely bleeding nose. He barely looked up from the spiral notebook he was writing in to ask where I had been, and I barely put in the effort to make up an excuse about being at a friend’s house. My first night as a superhero ended with me icing my puffy, aching face and mulling over all the mistakes I had made, but despite the pain and the embarrassment, I went to sleep excited to go out and try again as soon as possible.