* * *
—
When we got back down to the city, there was some talk about maybe starting up some sort of superhero team, but honestly, it all kind of seemed like a lot of to-do.
“I just feel like the whole using-our-powers-for-good thing is kind of a cliché at this point,” said Joelle (lead vox, fire-laser eyes, flight). “Like what are we supposed to do, just wander the streets, waiting until we see someone get mugged? It doesn’t seem like the best use of our time.”
But then Iris (lead guitar, kinetic vibration, teleportation) gave this really stirring speech about like responsibility and all that, and what it means to be a citizen of this universe, and the social contract or whatever. I wish I could remember it better, because it sounds super-hokey when I paraphrase it, but it really was a pretty great speech, super-inspiring, and it totally made you feel like everything happened for a reason and there was a noble thread sewn into the tapestry of your narrative and, just by existing in this world, you were a part of something wonderful. But I don’t know; maybe you kind of had to be there.
* * *
—
So then we were superheroes for a while, and that was a whole thing.
I don’t remember all of it, the superhero stuff, because it was kind of a lot and I was fantastically drunk during most of the important parts, but it comes back in sparks and flashes, those nights. It was broken-bottle-in-the-street nights, busted-nose-from-a-fifty-foot-fall kind of three-day weekends. It was nights of stumbling, falling, laughing, shouting, punching, crawling, screaming, crying, leaping, flying, living, drinking, singing, drinking—we wrestled angels, real honest-to-God fallen angels all fucked up on amphetamines, and we battled sea creatures as tall as the Transamerica Pyramid, and stayed up all night shooting the shit about fucking nothing, and fucked groupies, and stopped bank robberies, and did interviews where reporters would ask questions like, “Is it true you’re impenetrable?” and Joelle would get real close to the tape recorder and, without breaking eye contact with the interviewer, say, “I can’t speak for the others, but I’ve been penetrated hundreds of times.”
We’d get mobbed by the press, microphones shoved in our faces, flashbulbs exploding, stopped in the street on our way to save the world. “How do you stay humble?” And wiping the whiskey off our lips, we’d stumble-leap into flight or something like it toward whatever next adventure and shout back behind us, “We don’t.”
Joelle’s harem of admirers went from a half dozen to a couple hundred seemingly overnight. Pretty girls would spill up to Clay in bars and diners and say, “Hey, aren’t you one of the Up-and-Comers?” and Clay (drums, cowbell, molecular absorption of the kinetic energy and physical density of objects) would smirk and say something super-cheesy like, “Well, I’m up but I’m not coming.”
But Lizzy was the worst. She’d go right up to them, these women, sitting alone or with friends, or with their girlfriends or even boyfriends, husbands, it didn’t matter. She’d go up and say, “Hey, what are you doing with this guy? Here’s the deal: I’m hella good in bed, I play bass guitar, and I have the power of spooky hexagons. You want to get out of here?”
Meanwhile, there was always a villain to battle, a lawsuit to settle, a licensing agreement to negotiate. Mutt Wang quit his job and started working for us full-time as our business manager. I don’t know what we would have done without Mutt, really I don’t. Like, how are superheroes supposed to stay in the black? Especially superheroes who are drunk all the time and constantly knocking over buildings. Mutt rented a space for us downtown that we could use as our base of operations, and in her spare time, Iris converted it into an interdimensional helisphere.
So, you know when your favorite band signs on to a major label, and it’s exciting and you’re happy for them, but then their new album comes out and it sounds overproduced and super-poppy and you sort of forget what made them special in the first place? Well, I hate to say it, because it’s such a cliché at this point, but that’s kind of what happened to us with the introduction of the interdimensional helisphere.
Suddenly we were traveling to distant moons and hypothetical worlds and battling even worse guys with worms for heads and arms for legs in dimensions within dimensions, but even with all the craziness going on around us we tried to keep our feet on the ground (or, if not the ground, then at least on one of Lizzy’s spooky hexagons) and remember who we were.
One time, Clay, so drunk he could barely stand, beaten to an inch of his life by Dorjak the Destroyer, vomited onto the ragged plains of Earth-12 an entire pitcher of raspberry mojito and, while absorbing the kinetic energy of the fossilized ancient heart of an alien warrior king, turned to me, smiled dumbly, and asked, “Hey, who do you think will be the first one of us to get married?”
Turned out it was Joelle, breaking a couple thousand hearts with the wedding announcement: “I Only Have Fire-Laser Eyes for You.” She had a pretty sweet wedding too, except for the part where the DJ wouldn’t play “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” no matter how many times Lizzy and I requested it, and also the part where the Shadowman attacked us right in the middle of the cake cutting, which, if you ask me, was a super-dick move. Well, we all got wasted real fast and defeated the Shadowman and his lemming army, again, but the wedding was more or less ruined and Joelle’s husband, Sam, was really upset.
“I just wanted one day that wasn’t about you and your superhero friends—one day that was about us.”
* * *
—
What I mostly remember from that time are the talks. Long conversations with Iris about Truth and Justice and Society, and bitch sessions with Joelle about which supervillains were actually kind of cute and which ones were total dicks, and lazy rambling powwows with Lizzy, holed up in diners and bars until three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine in the morning, frothy mixes of inside jokes and bittersweet reveries over exes and philosophical quandaries and mumbled ponderings over what does it take to get some goddamned service in this place.
Lizzy was the first person I told when Mutt Wang asked me out.
“Mutt Mutt? My Mutt?” Lizzy cackled out a mouthful of cornflakes. “What did you tell him?”
I shrugged. “I said I’d think about it.”
Lizzy nodded thoughtfully. “You should hella go out with him, Porkchop. You could use a stabilizing force in your life.”
“Oh, I need a stabilizing force? Should we drill down into your love life?”
“That hardly seems relevant.”
“Are you finding deep emotional fulfillment in the parade of bimbos you take home?”
“They’re not bimbos.”
“I’m sorry, the parade of scintillating conversationalists, the paragons of wit and class…”
Lizzy crossed her arms. “There is nothing less attractive in a woman than a hatred of other women.”
I rolled my eyes and performed the international symbol for jerking off. “I’m devastated you don’t find me attractive. Truly. It keeps me up at night.”
Lizzy smiled. “For real, though, you should go out with Mutt. You like Mutt.”
“You don’t know who I like.”
“I know everything about you. Besides, when was the last time you dated a guy? If you don’t do something with a penis in the next”—she looked at her watch—“week and a half, I think they’re going to take away your bi card.”
I laughed. “Is that how it works? Because that is super cisnormative.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“What subject?!”
She leaned in. “I think you might be a full-blown lesbian, Porkchop.”
“And what are you, the welcoming committee?”
“Are you kidding? I already have to compete with Iris. I’m trying to get you off the market here.”
“Oh, now I see what this is about.”
“I am o
ne hundred percent looking out for my interests, was that not clear?”
“Okay, but what if Mutt and I go out and it’s weird and then he’s still our manager so I have to see him all the time? Or what if it’s not weird—what if it’s great—but then later it’s weird?”
Lizzy grabbed the flask out of my purse and poured some vodka into her coffee. “Do you ever think maybe you’re overthinking things?”
* * *
—
So, I went out with Mutt. He took me to this super-shmancy place up in Marin. I told him about how I was trying to teach myself guitar, and he asked if he could come back to my apartment and hear me play something, which I thought was a pretty bold move. I had intentionally not cleaned my apartment before the date, the thinking being that if my apartment was messy I wouldn’t bring Mutt home, a kind of advanced not-shaving-my-legs technique, but then I brought him home anyway, so, shows what I know.
I had written this dopey love song for no one in particular, but it didn’t really feel ready to play for anyone, and besides, it felt like if I played it for Mutt, then I would really be saying something, and I didn’t think I wanted to do that. Instead I played a Fleetwood Mac song. I think I did a pretty crummy job of it—I must have missed like half a dozen chords, but Mutt didn’t seem to notice, or he pretended not to notice, which I thought was pretty annoying either way, because if he really couldn’t tell, did we really want this guy to be our manager, and if he was just pretending I did a good job in order to be nice to me, then that was pretty condescending. But then anyway, Mutt and I had sex.
The next morning, Lizzy immediately cornered me in the helisphere kitchenette.
“How was the sex?” she asked.
I choked on my yogurt. “Did Mutt tell you we had sex?”
“No. You did.”
I rolled my eyes. “If you could interrogate evil henchmen half as well as you interrogate me…”
Lizzy smiled at me. “Congratulations, Porkchop. Your chops have been thoroughly porked. I’m proud of you.”
I did my best impression of Lizzy’s trademark who-gives-a-shit scowl. “So, what about you? Are you going to find someone?”
“I find people all the time.”
“Yeah, but that’s just because you don’t care about any of them. I’d like to see you around a girl you actually liked. I bet you’d be the biggest fucking moron in the world.”
She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me and sipped her coffee.
* * *
—
So, then I was twenty-four for a year, and that was a whole thing.
It was fun, for a little bit, being twenty-four, in that way that all things are fun for a little bit, but at a certain point, it started to dawn on me that as time passed, we were playing music less and less, and blacking out more and more, and it seemed like the longer we’d been doing this, the more alcohol it took to get our powers going, and every time we defeated this deposed alien viceroy or that disgruntled mutant dolphin, there’d be some other thing just waiting to take its shot at us, and it started to feel like, is this really why any of us got into this in the first place?
One time, Clay asked me if I’d ever thought about quitting. “I mean, we’re in our midtwenties. Doesn’t that feel kind of too old already to still be fucking around, getting drunk every day and battling psycho lizard-beasts? Like, are we still going to be doing this when we’re forty?”
I had to admit he had a point, but frankly, I wasn’t really good at anything else.
“Besides,” he said lightly, “there are only so many times you can beat up a guy before it starts to mess you up in the head.” He chuckled to himself—awkwardly, sadly.
“Clay,” I said. “Those guys we beat up—those are bad guys.”
And he said, “I know…” And he fiddled self-consciously with the bead on his necklace.
But whenever I would talk to Mutt, who was, I guess, my boyfriend now, about cutting back on the whole superhero thing, he would get really passionate about how this was my calling or whatever and so few get the opportunity to do what I did and I would be crazy to walk away from all that. “And besides,” he would say, “what am I supposed to do if you guys all suddenly stopped being superheroes?”
And I don’t know if I was ever convinced, not a hundred percent, but I knew that he really cared and I guess I figured that sometimes being in a relationship meant doing things you weren’t totally on board with for the sake of making the other person happy.
“Also,” he would say, “I need you to sign these forms. This is a standard licensing agreement.”
And I loved Mutt, in that way that you love something when you’re at a place in your life when you’re ready to love something and there’s a thing there that you can love. And I still had that dumb little love song I wrote that I was teaching myself how to play on the guitar that I performed for no one. Sometimes I would practice it while Mutt was in the shower and he’d come out and say, “What were you singing just now?” and I’d say, “Nothing,” and it felt good to have a thing that was mine and mine alone.
And I enjoyed being in the band, and I did think what we were doing was important, but more and more often, someone would get sloppy with the math and land on the wrong side of plastered. We’d be fighting the Osmonaut, and in the midst of battle, Clay would just start checking his phone for text messages, and it was like, hey, can we focus here?
Some nights, instead of going home, Joelle would drink herself to sleep on the couch at the helisphere, and the next morning, when one of us would ask her if everything was okay with her and Sam, she’d say, “I’m fine, it’s just—I spend so much time here anyway, and Sam and I live all the way in Berkeley and it’s such a hassle trying to get over the bridge,” which kind of made sense, but also on the other hand, Joelle could fly, so I didn’t really get why rush-hour traffic would be a going concern for her.
And then there was the time Lizzy and I were holed up in an air duct in the CyberCorp building, trying to figure out how to bring down the Mad Goddess Suspira, who had just assembled all the Proto-Universe Crystals into an unstoppable Power Scepter, when Lizzy suddenly got all sullen and antisocial and just looked at her feet and mumbled, “What’s the point? I mean, what’s even the point of anything?”
And I said, “Lizzy, this is not the time for this. Did you drink red wine? You can’t do that; you get all sad and sleepy.”
“I saw Kathleen,” she slurred. “Did I tell you? I saw Kathleen?”
I shook my head.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with her, and for a while, she was just ignoring me. But then after I saved that little girl from the sentient BART train last week, finally Kathleen agreed to meet up.”
“Lizzy, that’s huge.” Through the slats of the air duct I could see Suspira loading her Power Scepter into CyberCorp’s Time Vibration Laser.
“So I saw her last night. And I told her, you know, ‘Kathleen, I’m still in love with you.’ I didn’t mean to say it, I wasn’t planning on saying it, but it just…”
She was getting really worked up and I motioned at her to lower her voice.
She did not lower her voice. “I said, ‘I know I wasn’t always there for you, but things were so crazy then, and I did a lot of work,’ you know, ‘I’m not that girl anymore.’ But she was just like, ‘You are that girl, that’s the whole point. That’s who you are, Lizzy.’ ”
The whole building started shaking as the Time Vibration Laser powered on.
I said, “Hey, you think we could maybe talk about this later? I’m totally invested in this story and I definitely want to hear about it, but, you know, the laser and everything…”
“And you want to know the worst part?”
The crystals on Suspira’s scepter started lighting up, one by one, and Lizzy leaned in close and whispered through a
cloud of Merlot breath, “The worst part is she’s right.”
“Jesus Christ, Lizzy. I get that you’re sad, but I can’t be your fucking babysitter right now. There are bigger things to deal with. If we don’t stop the Time Vibration Laser, it could destroy the planet.”
“Psh. You mean the planet where Kathleen lives? Kathleen’s precious planet?”
I rolled my eyes. “This is not a good color on you.”
She shrugged. “What do you want from me? I’m no hero. I’m just Lizzy.”
“Yeah, okay. You’re Lizzy. And I think you’re fucking awesome. I, for one, adore Lizzy, she’s the bee’s fucking knees. But if you don’t get it together and help me stop the Mad Goddess Suspira from firing her crystal-powered laser, then that means Kathleen was right about you.”
“Whaaaaaaaaa? No.”
“Don’t you get it? If all of humanity is destroyed in a fiery time-holocaust that you couldn’t stop—Kathleen wins!”
“That’s fucked-up!” Lizzy exploded out of the air duct and in one swift move cut off the energy of the Power Scepter and pinned Suspira against the wall with some spooky hexagons.
Later, back on the ground, when Iris was explaining to the press what had happened exactly, Lizzy had sobered up a little and she gave me a bashful kind of shrug, like she was saying Thanks and Sorry and Thanks again all at once, and I shook my head at her, like, Of course.
Mutt climbed through the crowd of bystanders and grabbed my arm. “Thank God you’re okay.” He wrapped his arms around me and kissed me, like people do in the movies. I was a little self-conscious, kissing Mutt like that in front of the cameras and everybody, but Mutt said it was good to show everybody that we had personal lives. It humanized us, Mutt said.
* * *
—
We were all pretty jazzed up after that battle, but when we got back to the helisphere, Joelle’s husband was waiting for us.
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory Page 12