Real Superheroes Have No Names

Out Looking In

2011-09-05T14:14:00.000-07:00

They found our hero in the gutter
With a diamond ring and a gun.
He'd done it for the love of Lucy
And ended up on the run.

Watch out for Lucy,
Though she may look frail.
Say excuse me, Lucy,
Darling don't you use me;
I don't want to land in jail.

- Watch Out for Lucy, Backless, Eric Clapton 1978

Homeless for three months.

Not
 without a home of course. But it didn’t take much to figure that if the
 grass sower had access to my wallet, my car, my license plate, then he 
knew my address, and if the house hadn’t been burned down yet, or maybe 
booby-trapped, then it was at least under surveillance. 

Frankly,
 though, that isn’t why I didn’t go back. I’m not sure what was going 
through my head. I was withdrawing from whatever painkillers the 
hospital had intravenoused into me, that bloody highway in my neck was 
rerouting traffic while construction  went on, I had 
forgotten the name of my slaughtered wife and daughter, and, as I 
recall, I was heavily into the belief that I had been to the pearly 
gates long enough to figure out that they didn’t exist.

So I was fucking tired and I just didn’t have the heave to pick up my feet much past Bay and Queen.

So
 I leaned against the corner of 390 Bay. The thrum of all the 
re-insurance companies scuttling about its granite skeleton couldn’t 
throb through my marrow deep exhaustion, I remember feeling. I leaned 
against that building, pictured 9/11 briefly, wondered how that much 
steel and concrete stays erect, and stayed there for, I think, almost 
three days.

You
 know those sped up city-scape sequences that they use to represent the 
hum of daily life in the big city? When your brain goes on hold, that 
shit happens. The key is not to move your eyes. After a few hours, 
you’ll start to see the cars bunch up at the stoplights like flashing 
salmon resting before the next leap upstream. The people, multi-coloured
 blood cells flowing by, brush by you like you’re as unimportant as 
cholesterol plaques.

Care
 as little as you can and the roaring scoop of your belly pain fades 
into the sound of the streetlights coming on all at once. Over zealous 
car horns collapse into the spinning mutter of rubber on asphalt. Your 
skin is no longer the definite terminus of your body and it mingles with
 the particulates of diesel, the astringent sting of mouthwash and the 
shudder of streetcars trampling their way along their lucky tracks.

At
 some point, my leaning collapsed into a squat. The ligaments in my 
knees eventually sagged enough that my ass contacted the sidewalk. I 
guess I was woken by the tiny mucousy sound of my mouth opening; it’s a 
muscular contraction to keep the jaw closed.

My saliva was more paste than liquid. Three days without water will do that. Yeah pasty mouth, followed shortly by death.

So
 just after my mouth went basset hound on me, and just before I kicked 
the empty bucket for good, well, that’s when the Queen came by and gave 
me water.

I call her the Queen because like Elizabeth, her right hand makes that unceasing backhand wave. Unlike the United Kingdom’s monarch, this Queen has been on the streets as long as had I lived in Toronto.

I’d
 see her a few times a week while I was taking computers at Ryerson. 
Yes, my friends and I made the requisite nasty comments about her. I 
think I may have instigated the whole Queen moniker, by whipping out 
that clichéd homeless person insult, “Get a job!” And one of my friends 
mockingly defending her highness’ honour by bellowing, “She’s got one, 
man, she’s the Queen!” His sneering of “The Queen” accompanied by pursed lips and the over-arrogant backhand wave.

Why
 do only groups of people make those kinds of comments about street-folk? I never even thought those thoughts when I passed her
 on my lonesome. You worry about getting too close and smelling their 
stink, sure, but you don’t go out of your way to spit some lame 
vernacular at them. Why in groups?

Now,
 she was there, sallying to and fro a few yards from me. Her hand wave 
was more of an upright palsy now, and as she sashayed closer and closer 
to me, I could hear her mumbling invective. I think it was about the 
time; she was urging everyone on the street to get where they were 
going; people were waiting for them; how rude it would be to make them 
wait; have a look at the old city hall’s clock across the street. But I 
was dehydrated and probably delirious.

I
 do remember her wafting into my personal space, and yes, the stench 
would have woken a Mike-Tysoned boxer better than an ammonia caplet. I 
remember her reaching into the same long black trench coat she’s worn 
all these years. I remember thinking that its blackness was now a 
wrinkled grey. Rhino skin. 
Triangles of furrowage from years of being folded into a sidewalk 
pillow.

Things
 clinked inside her coat. Dusty, ancient, borderline medieval things. 
She withdrew her nearly Pakastani tanned hand, veins the size of dew 
worms roped around knuckles stretched taut, unharvested fruits of 
arthritis grown under seasons in the city sun.

A
 sparkling unopened plastic bottle of water in that claw. Without 
missing a beat in her muttered tirade against time, she broke the seal 
of the cap – I assume she knew how weak I was – and left it at my side 
near my hand.

Like
 a Persian rug gone mad, her talk opened up its weave to say to me, 
“Drink and live now, boy.” The streams of salivary rasping closed over 
again. An eye closing. A racing flood rising over a mid-stream stone.

And then one more gasp, “We’ll see about yer killing yourself tomorra.”

Her
 back to me. The wake of her body odour washing over and away. Her 
backhand wave clearing a furrow into her oblivious subjects. The sea 
parts and closes again behind her.

Tit for Tat During Tête-à-tête

2011-08-29T07:13:00.000-07:00

She showed me hers and I showed her mine. All lookee, no touchee.

It was almost a physical sensation, the change in her tone when I called her. “’Seat of my Pants’”… and then after I told her who I was and why I was calling. “Oh thank Christ! I was having the shittiest of days. Thank you! Thank you!”

We arranged a convenient meeting time and she invited me to her office/loft-space.

“Just you and me?”

“Uh no,” she responded, “My business partner and camera guy, Dale K---- will be there too. Never know when you might need witnesses.”

On the day, she greeted me with a dry strong handshake. The wrinkles born of what I assumed were years of TV work deepened and yawned as she smiled and introduced her collaborator. Dale was swarthy lout whose camera-toting had lost him his muscular symmetry.

She turned down the volume on the Tom Jones duets and clapped her hands together. “That them?” She had spotted the manila envelope I had brought with me.

She looked to Dale and peeped a giddy little girl noise. I handed her the envelope.

She slid them out onto the coffee table’s glass top. They looked yellower in this light. With all of them leafed out like that, I could see the differences in pens used. Shades of blue, a couple of blacks and even the lacerated alarm of red.

She was about to scoop them, but stopped herself. “Oo, fingerprints!” And she went to the other side of her kitchen’s island and disappeared under the sink. Returning she wriggled on a pair of school-gum eraser pink dish-washing gloves.

“Impressive, huh? You’d never know I’m a CSI addict.”

Dale smirked and rolled his eyes. Then to me, “I swear she’s half detective. At CBC, you didn’t borrow her stapler without a hazmat suit on.”

I watched them quickly pour over the pages. She filled the auditory vacuum with questions like, “And you say you found them in the sleeves of a record collection?”, “Could you show us the house where they came from?” and ended on “Would you do us a huge favour?”

They wanted a sample of my handwriting, just so they wouldn’t look the fools. I complied amiably.

After writing a few paragraphs of “The lazy brown cartographer inked the fjords disparately and without enthusiasm…” I capped the pen she had lent me and went to collect the diary entries.

Her lips pursed instantly. Wrinkles radiating from her pucker drained the friendliness briefly, long enough to see her feral side.

“Oh, you’re not going to leave them with us?”

“I wanted to keep entering them on the blog.”

“Right, ok. Um.” Her eyes boring holes into the pages. If the sun had been behind her, her retinal lenses could have started them smoldering.

“Could we pay you for them?”

“Possibly,” I answered calmly. My hands had straightened the pages and slid them with a whisper back into the envelope. “Make an offer on paper and send it to me, and I’ll consider it.”

Desperately (pore-sized sequins of sweat had erupted on her upper lip), she posed, “How about, maybe we could copy them now? So we could see if they match up with what we’ve got on tape…?”

“The tape… Yeah, you can copy them. Could I have a look at the tape?”

She glanced at her camera man. He had nothing to add, so she finally proffered, “Ok, no copy, just…”

“No, I just want to have a look.”

So while she used the copying function of her fax/scanner/printer, Dale took me into a small room, a one-time den charred with briquettes of electronic video equipment, all of which seemed to trail one or more wires to a grail-esque pearlescent Apple laptop. It glowed like an angel waiting for us.

Dale roamed the mouse through various folders and finally double-clicked on a file with the dubious title of “Security Vid No edit”.

A new window sprouted, a giant blue Q flashed up and then there was a grainy black-and-white image dominated by the disappointing view of a sidewalk. “The front door security cam from an electronics shop.” Dale’s stub of an index finger drew my eye into the upper corner.

“Watch there.” It was a black rectangle that was the unlit space between two buildings. He pressed the virtual “Play” button. His finger kept pointing at the black rectangle. “Wait. Wait. Okay here it comes.”

The black rectangle went white three times. Blip and then blipblip. Each time highlighting the warbled brick pattern of the corner of the building. Like some alley-way hooker was trying to spark her crack pipe. Except far less dramatic and romantic.

I felt tremendous disappointment. “That’s it?”

“We think that was the gun fire you described. Guns don’t usually have muzzle flare, but if the slugs hit metal.

“Now wait for it…”

His finger and thick nail urged me to keep gazing in the same area. The dark rectangle seemed to ripple.

“He’s in the shadow. Looking to see if there’s any witnesses.” Dale’s voice trailed each word. He’d obviously watched each frame of this sequence many times. “Nobody there… Off it comes and he swings it down now.”

There it was.

That same horned skull, but mounted on some kind of helmet, rounder, a chin strap flapping akimbo. “26 frames and we knew it was the same skull on your blog.”

The foot, lower leg and the skull took a step and escaped the range of the camera. Dale backed it up to the least fuzziest blur of the skull. The tiny triangular shadows cast from the spines were what brought me there. The everyday street-lamp glare balefully shining down on something that had never before been lit. A demon taking off its calcified hat for a midnight stroll.

Her voice behind me was smug and gleeful. I could feel the eight-year old in her, sharing a glimpse of her Xmas morning with me. Stocking spewed chocolates in her breath. “It’s him, isn’t it?”

She gave me the diary entries, back in their manilla home. My hand imagined the weight of a bone and Kevlar helmet.

“You’ve read all of the entries, yeah?”

I nodded. My eyes still on the single stalled image on the laptop.

“We need a name for him. All super-heroes have names. He’s got a secret identity, an origin story, a costume… no cape unfortunately. But did he ever name himself?”

“Yeah,” Dale gruffed in eagerly, “Like, uh, Skull-man or the Revenger or something.”

I didn’t reply until the silence held us all too tightly.

“No, he didn’t call himself anything. No cape, no underwear on the outside of his leotards. In fact, he loathed what he became.”

She leaped on this with cannibalistic joy. “Really? Good, good. What did he say?”

I finally took my eyes off the laptop. Weirdly, I was all forlorn and a bit angry at these two people now. Stupid bullshit possessiveness. I had taken the glasses off Clark Kent and screamed “Look! It’s him!” And as everyone clustered around the reddening super man, I was pushed to the back of the crowd, and felt sorry for what I had done.

“You’ve got the diary now. It’s all in there.”

Without saying good-bye, I got up and left.

Position Wanted

2011-08-22T07:06:00.000-07:00

Rumour has it that you can play dirty.
I'll tell you what I'll do about that, yeah!
I'm playin' them at their own game, yeah!

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
You'd better do it,
'Cause it makes you feel good.
If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
You're never gonna help yourself.

- If You Can’t Beat Them, Jazz, Queen, 1978

Healing.  It takes time. It uses up bodily resources. And it never recreates the  exact person that you were before the injury or illness.

The  morning as I stepped out of the hospital, I disputed all these things to  myself. A half-hearted argument with myself to keep my mind off other  things. Moments after standing up out of the wheel-chair – I felt like I  was refuse being hauled to the curb, not a recent ICU patient, going  from intense minute by minute scrutiny to the shadows of downtown  Toronto where even the eye of the sun avoids you – I felt dizzy. Deeper breaths only managed to move the hospital porridge from  the bottom of my gut and throw it against the trap-door under my Adam's apple.

But  I wasn’t going straight home. I had made my life complex recently. But  if the police went over my car, they’d find blood and a specially  modified helmet and mask. It might be circumstantial evidence, but, like  I said, I had already complicated my life.

My  car, of course, was not where I left it three nights ago. The buses  might run slow, the city budget may always need federal hand-outs to  balance, but fuck-goddamn, the tow trucks must be part Swiss watch and  part industrial strength Hoover vacuums.

A  skid mark of my blood still stained the sidewalk looking like the little one’s  favourite drink. She pronounced it “chokkit milk”.

Healing,  yeah, healing a wound like mine. After the white blood cells swallow  infectious or noxious intruders that enter through an unexpected  orifice, the cells to either side swell into the gap. If the wound isn’t  too wide they bulge out onto a matrix left by the dead (or missing)  cells. Like jello filled balloon animals, they twist in the middle until  they pop apart. Two where there was one. An unmarriage that creates a  new life exactly like the old.

My  old life. With a marriage. Sunshine spilling into our bedroom. I wake  up before her and peer over at her shoulder, its horizon rimmed in the  sun’s purest white light. I swear it saved its best for her. Those  Saturday mornings that I could call my weekly chokkit milk. Same name,  same feeling probably.

If  the wound is particularly deep, if it slashed through the cellular  support matrix, then the body has an extra step. The cells beneath the  wound exude a new matrix made out of collagen fibres. They don’t get  enough practice perhaps because this new net isn’t exactly like the  previous one. It’s warped, not in line with the cells to either side. So  when they start to swell over this new rope that bridges the chasm,  they’re off kilter, out of alignment. Not so nice and neat. And that’s  why and where we get our scars.

Scarring  is only skin deep as far as we can see, unless of course it happens on  your heart. A good ol’ heart attack actually scars the muscle tissue.  While performing an autopsy, coroners can look at the blood pump and  trace out previous, non-lethal heart attacks. Unless of course, the  recent seizure was so severe that the heart ruptures. Explodes. That’s  an odd thought, isn’t it? Your brain has enough oxygen left in it that  you could actually think about what that muffled pop was in your chest.

And if it was quiet enough where you were… you’d hear the absence of the beating. That final friend leaving you alone. To die.

The  walk from the hospital to the tow depot is only about a kilometer and a  half. A healing man walks slower. And notices his slowness with the  diamond focus of the reprieved.

The  round man behind the chest high counter looked like he bathed  regularly… in black grease and nicotine. He rolled on his chair over to  the counter and then stood up. His yellow edged eyes looked at the  bandage around my throat. His cigar thick fingers were bapping away at a  computer terminal carved from beige soap, asbestos and twenty year old  notions of good design.

“License plate?”

I told him. His fingers hiccupped on the key. He gave the enter key a particularly hard smack.

“You already been here,” he said to the terminal angrily.

“Me? No, I haven’t.”

“Yeah, you have. Says here. Says you didn’t want it no more.”

I  was too tired to be angry back at him. Images of my blood pressure  forcing itself through my neck also made me take another, deeper breath.

“So it’s gone?”

“Not yet. Tonight it woulda been.” More angry thumping at the dead-horse of the terminal. “Gimme yer license.”

“I did.”

“No, no, yer fucking driver’s license.”

I went into my wallet. And apparently, somebody else had too. My driver’s license was gone.

His yellow, hyperthyroid eyes were all over my hesitation.

“Stupid motherfuck… get the hell outta here!”

My  blood went up. I swear I could feel it gushing over the stitches under  my skin. Blood red rivulets around a fallen branch from a leaning  riverside tree.

“Gowan, motherfucker! Or I get the cops!”

I left. My fist squeezed in upon itself. Wishing I had something to bend or break.

But  I didn’t directly leave the impound. I took a stroll. Let my breathing  clear out the blood that had been curdled by anger. Let my eyes wander  till I found the familiar rear-end of my car, that was no longer mine.

Unlocked.  The door opened and let loose that familiar gush of scent. Even  blindfolded, every driver would probably know their vehicle’s particular  odour-ratio of old fries, dirty shoes and accumulated layers of every  day cologne… or perfume.

I  sat in the seat that cupped me as familiarly as you could cup your  wife’s breast. Your hand already widened to the perfect semi-circular  cupola.

My  blood was there too. Enough dried sauce to barbecue two racks of ribs.  But everything else was gone. The helmet and mask. The bag that I  carried all my equipment in. Gone. Whoever was here with my license.

The same person, I was suddenly sure, who had left me a flower pot full of razor grass.

They had my stuff. They had my license. They knew who I was and where I lived.

They had everything.

Almost.

I  flipped down the sun visor. The picture was still glossy and shiny. A  sunrise in the dusty heated cloud of the car. Their two brilliant  smiling faces laughing at me from beyond the grave. A come hither  tempting. Right here! Right now. C’mon. Take off the bandage and ram one  of your fingers into the stitches. You’re strong enough. You should  have died here in the car three nights ago.

Healing and scars change you. Broken knuckles won’t bend as far. Repeatedly slashed skin becomes brittle and easily split.

And as I looked down at their picture, I wondered what injury my mind had suffered that I could no longer remember their names.

My  wife and daughter. Every “Littlest Pet Shop” toy in her still untidied  bedroom… and the exact angle of her feminine freshness products on the  shelf under the bathroom sink.

But the scar had formed right where their names were.

Connections Unwanted

2011-08-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Though (to date) nobody has used the comments ability of this blog, I have received several communiqués through the attached e-mail function.

Twelve in fact. Seven have been folks thinking I’m looking to hook up with other individuals who “obviously share the same sexual fascination with men in tights.”Um, yeah. Just so y’all know, I’m flattered that you think my Bat-cave would love to be pummeled by your Super-cock, but I’m more of a Fortress of Solitude type-o-guy.

Four of the twelve were no less passionate. These, uh, “ultra-focused” comic-book fans must have googled something to do with super-heroes and wound up in a place they automatically assumed was a tiny fan-fiction niche. But not finding any alternate universe stories of Wolverine taking on Green Lantern, chose to vent their disappointment in a negative fashion.

For example…

----- Original Message -----

From: M---------
To: meatsticks@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, August 3, 2011 3:30 PM

Dear Mr. Meat-stupid,

I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to pull. You’re lame attempt to steal the Punisher story and try to make it your own shows that you don’t have an original thott in your pea-sized brane. I hope Marvel sues you’re fucking ass off. But they probably won’t because nobody even bothers to read boring crap like this.

Sinserely,

A REAL Punisher fan

Sigh, yeah. Others were a little less aggressive, but bothered to mention that I’ve also ripped off Batman’s utility belt, Spider-man’s over developed sense of responsibility, Hellblazer’s loner mentality and even the Hulk’s “the madder he gets, the stronger he gets”. That one’s beyond me.

I didn’t respond to any of the original twelve missives.

Not even this one:

----- Original Message -----

From: J---------
To: meatsticks@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, August 8, 2011 5:15 AM

To Whom It May Concern:

My name is Janine F----. Until recently I was a European news correspondent for CBC News. My current project would benefit if you could grant me an interview regarding your blog about this non-fictional (?) vigilante.

And viewing the actual pages that you purport to have in your possession... Well, they would make more than just my day.

Please call at your earliest convenience: (647) xxx-xxxx.

Thanks in advance,
Janine F----

Exec. Producer
Seat of My Pants Productions

I hesitated over this one. No condemnation, no assumption. Just query and invitation. A real name and telephone number maybe. Plus it made me realize how much I missed bouncing the Diaries of someone else’s wall. But in the end, the triviality of the time it was sent put me off. It wasn’t much, but 5:15 AM? Jeezus, must be some kind of comic book freak looking to trap me into a face-to-face insult session. No thanks.

She/he/they/it didn’t give up though…

----- Original Message -----

From: J---------
To: meatsticks@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2007 5:15 AM

To Whom It May Concern:

Please have a look at the attached scan of the headline of this article. It’s from a community newspaper that publishes out of the Queen Street East area. The area the first “diary” entry supposedly took place.

If you agree to meet with me, I can show you the rest of the article.

Look forward to meeting you,
Janine F----

Exec. Producer
Seat of My Pants Productions

And there was the attachment. Laying there as noticeably as a used condom in a church pew. I didn’t immediately open it. I’ve had my share of viruses that I stupidly contracted by opening stuff from other people I didn’t know. I scanned the thing twice with two different virus/mal-ware detectors. The little jpg file didn’t set off any alarms.

So I did the fateful double click.

No paper name, most of the date obscured, no by-line. Either this Janine was smart enough to chum the water and jig the lure before setting the hook, or there simply wasn’t any such article and I was being suckered. (Though why? I’ve never understood the power-tripping of pranksters. And I didn’t see how this person was going to get any money out of this encounter.)

I took a lot longer to make the decision this time. I finally worked up my courage, went over innumerable contingencies, possible outcomes, even legal avenues they or I might race down… and once I was certain and completely ready… I let it pass. Told you I wasn’t a super-hero.

She tried one final time.

----- Original Message -----

From: J---------
To: meatsticks@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, July 10, 2007 5:15 AM

To Whom It May Concern:

I have surveillance video of what I believe is the first entry in your “Diaries”.

If you choose not to contact me, I won’t bother you again.

Thanks again,
Janine F----

Exec. Producer
Seat of My Pants Productions

When You Don’t Want to Go Home

2011-08-08T10:10:00.000-07:00

I’m living in the world of the super-hero.
Everybody catch the show.
And when the film is done,
The viewer passes on,
And I wonder, yes, I wonder,
Where does the super-hero go?

- Super-hero (from “Keep the Dogs Away”), Thor, 1977

Before  my eyes opened in the ICU, my nose was already informing me. Oceans of  anti-septic hand gels washing up against vanilla-scented bleaches. The  over-laundered smell of hospital linen; fore-cursors of old folks’  hell-homes. The flexible plastic oxygen tubes poking up my nostrils,  giving me the perfect ratio of oxygen. But the smell of the plant came  from outside the pressurized canisters hidden somewhere in the  institutional chartreuse walls.

On  the 20 by 20 centimeter table beside my bacteria free bed, was a spurt  of green grass, maybe a foot and a half high. Fireworking out of a terra  cotta pot. Wincing and drooping, it seemed, as it tried to  photosynthesize the photons from the eye-drying fluorescents of the  room.

The  grass was a green shot with dull grey and an almost yellow stripe up the  centre. My crusted-over eyes picked out the tiny serrations along each  leaf’s edge. The inside elbow of a mantis; the insect finally stopping  its eternal preying and stretching its killer limbs to heaven.

“Hi  there,” said a young brown man striding into my previously private  room. “You’re awake. Good.” His stethoscope and the slightly darker  brown bags under his eyes told me he was the emerg doctor even before he  said, “I’m Doctor Parmaj. I closed the hole in your neck.”

I was under sedation. His words and movements seemed like they were skipping every other beat.

“You’re at St. Michael’s hospital, the emergency ward. Can you tell me your name and your age?”

My wallet lay like a leather turd beside the plant’s pot. He knew who I was; he was seeing if I knew. I told him.

“Goooood.”  He drolled, clicking a pen the thickness of a robot’s finger and  writing in a folder that I didn’t see him open. I sniffed the palette of  oxygen being provided to my lungs.

“How are you feeling?”

“Little… slow”. It felt like my saliva had turned to drying sap.

“Yeah,  a little morphine there.” His coffee coloured eyes looked into mine.  Concern or checking my pupil dilation? Both? “Do you remember what  happened? You weren’t saying a lot under the anesthetic.”

The teeth in his smile were so white they were almost blue.

My  story was short, but the morphine was giving me the time to find it. I  told him that I had been doing some duct work in my house. Cutting sheet  metal. That I lost hold of a large piece and it fell on my neck. That  with all the blood I didn’t think an ambulance would reach me in time.

He nodded, writing the story into the chart. So now it’s true.

“It  sliced you pretty good,” he told me. He drew his finger across his own  neck in demonstration. Pepper grain stubble poked out of his leather  brown throat. “A four inch slice that almost completely severed your  sternocleidomastoid muscle right across. I put that back together, but  more frighteningly…” His eyes looked tired not scared. “… the corner of  the metal went deeper… into your carotid artery.”

My nodding seemed far away from me. Like her waving from the dock, when I took the girl for rows on the lake.

“You  probably noticed the blood pulsing out. Jetting?” More distant nods  from the patient. “If it had been your jugular, it wouldn’t have done  that. The jugular takes blood back to the heart mostly with gravity’s  help.”

He’s trying to impress me. Why? Cuz I showed up with a piece of his kind of hardware, his sole domain, sprouting out of my neck?

“Anyhoo,  it nicked you right where the carotid bifurcates…” – his fingers split  into a peace symbol on his neck – “… one supplying blood to the face and  top of the head, and the other, to the brain.” His smile widened  blindingly in a moment of true humour. “We used your clamp in the  procedure. Thanks for bringing it along.”

He pulled my forceps out of his lab coat pocket and placed it beside the grass’ pot.

“Three weeks you should be back to your usual capacity. Till then take it easy, wouldn’t want you to have a blow out.”

He  rose. “Unfortunately, thanks to the continual shortage of beds we  suffer in our supposedly first world medical system, we’re going to send  you home tomorrow. I’ll be back just before they set you loose, to  remind what watch for… hemorrhages, dizziness, blood spurting three feet  out of your neck, that kind of thing. Today make sure you enjoy our wonderful  selection of pureed foods.”

Click-click. The cigar sized pen slides into the lab-coat pocket again. Safe and sound. “Any questions?”

My  eyes traveled up with what felt like the speed of a caterpillar. And  found the grass plant not waving in the wind. “Who…?” I croaked. My  voice couldn’t make the climb all the way up and out.

“You’re  larynx wasn’t damaged. You just need some water. I’ll have the nurse  bring you some.” His eyes swiveled under those huge dark lashes. “As far  as the plant goes…” His fingers traveled out to stroke the sagging  length of its leaves. “They didn’t leave their nam… Ow!”

Missed  him pulling away from the plant. Saw the beetle-backed bead of blood on  his finger. He sucked it like any non-doctor would. “Cut me.”

He  headed for the door with his finger in his mouth. He was more than  ready to go, but then his eyes found mine again. He took his finger out  of his mouth, tasting his own fluid.

“My  partner died of steroid abuse a few years ago. Couldn’t find a liver  donour to replace what he had destroyed. If you’re done with them, good.  Even though, I hate to say this, but it was probably the thickness of  your neck muscles that prevented your head from being half sawed off.”

“I’m done.”

“Good.”  His finger cried another red tear. “Damn.” He put his finger back in  his mouth and left me with the grass.

My  water came from an aging Jamaican princess who was masquerading as a  nurse. She sucked her teeth audibly when she saw my plant-mate. “Now  who’d be going and giving you that nasty piece o’ work?” Turns out she  grew up with this stuff in the Caribbean.

Razor grass.

50 Ways to Avenge Your Lover

2011-08-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

The urge to gain vengeance. Is that what separates man from the other beasts? If you kill a she-wolf’s pups, will she track you down over hill and dale and day and week, just to match death with death?

I don’t think so. I think that takes a particularly evolved form of determination. In fact, I think the animals, always more sensible than their primate cousins, would run as far from the kin-killers as possible.

Excuse me as I leap (in a single bound; look ma, no proof!) to the conclusion that revenge is uniquely human. A social mechanism devised to make us think twice about offing the members of someone else’s clan, tribe, family.

So is our hero a quitter? A Punisher without a capital “P”? Tune in next time, when, well, c’mon, you know the answer. You have an unfair advantage. You know there’s quite a few more albums to be released. Yes, he’s going to come back. So relax and enjoy the death of that particular plot-twist.

Let’s roil about in that goo of revenge a little bit longer, shall we? Might as well. It’s in you. Supposedly it's in all of us. We just have to find the right trigger.

With some it’s as big a target as their ego. “Yo momma’s got teeth in the back of her neck and the bitch chew like this!” That reason has been around ever since Niobe opened her big mouth way back at an ancient Greek birthday party. Leto had all 14 of Niobe’s pups offed… just for a few words.

Others have to feel like there’s a threat to their stability, their success; the wolves would mark it as territory. We’re just a little less pissy than them. It might, ultimately, be a male instinct. Deep down all us guys have a obsessional hold on our women. Our gal is raped, hoo-boy; that red glaze folds down over our eyes and we punch till our knuckles peel down to the bone. Never had that pleasure? Then just think about the last time you thought she cheated on you. If you had lined up her and her perp-lover, which one would you hit first? 99.9% it would be the guy. Or at least the guy first. Slaughtering your horn-dog mate and the possibly gestating fetus within its traitorous uterus, well, that’s another wonderful social mechanism.

Let’s not forget the ultimate, for those of you who have a child. Ooooh, I didn’t have to push too hard on that button, did I? You get all incensed when the kid’s teacher gives your kid a C-. Some joker decides to actually lay a hand on your offspring? Oooo, Mother Mary in a tub. I’d bet all my unborn children that the Palestinians and Israelis could care less about the piece of dirt they’re not sharing, because they’ve mowed down each other’s innocents. Religion and history are just ancillary for them. Extra bullets. It’s on, motherfucker. Or should I say, “Child killer”?

Whether you think its knee-jerk backstabbing derived of millions of years of chemical flow in homo sapiens, or it’s our soul being mistreated by the malign spirit of a festering evil resident in another of God’s creations, the result is the same.

Our “hero” though. He’s stopped, given up.

But why should we wallow in his chasm-sized depression? We read about super-heroes to feel good, don’t we? Because everything is so perfectly black and white in that world. Hell, we love super-dudes so much, we’ll even dress up like them. In public!

I had a small stringer of links to people that liked to show off their brighty-tighty pajamas and masks. Wikipedia of course made my research a waste of time. All the links, plus more are in this entry:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-life_superhero

And glory be to Hosanna on high, the super-wannabes are even going on patrol! Serving their communities. Putting their lives (sort of) on the line.

I guess it happens in a society that has everything. No offence, I know these folks are well-intentioned, but I suspect that if they thought they’d get shot at, they’d put their underwear back under their pants and use their Bat-phone to dial 911.

They’re not revenge-killing. Or even revenge-patrolling.

There are no links or entries for our skull-helmeted, knife-slinging friend. Our Man of Steroids, the Ghost Ridder of crime, our unfriendly neighbourhood mob-mass-murderer. He’s all alone in a class by himself.

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

Silly rabbit! Blogs aren’t just for emotional release any more! Nope, they let people connect. With me.

Not just people. Folks who make documentaries. Yeah, journalists.

Journalists… with video.

I Still Quit, Part 2

2011-07-25T07:44:00.000-07:00

On your own, And I'm alone
In the shadow of what we've done.
And I can't help but think
That some day you'll be back home.
Fly away, fly away,
To your new home across the bay.
Leave your nest, oh baby leave the best
Thing that you've been.

- Quiet Riot, Metal Health, 1983

I  don’t know about you, but when I realized I was dying, a wave of calm,  anti-nausea floated down over me. Like cool linen sheets after the heat  of a sapping July day. I felt it touch my head, my brow, coating me all  the way down. Vanilla ice cream under my skin.

Or  maybe it was the blood loss. But I saw my heart rate slow, the arcs of  blood were heaving from my neck in fewer quarts per second.

My  first aid knowledge is marginal and my on-board medical equipment was  even lighter. As my vein or artery or whatever painted an abstract  portrait of my death on Razor’s office wall, I went through my  checklist.

Gauze? Nope, that’ll just stop the gusher from hitting the wall.

Tourniquet? Sure, if I want to die of asphyxiation rather than blood loss.

Bandaids? Geeze, c’mon idiot! Teflon suturing thread and curved number 8 needle? Too Rambo to even try.

5.5” curved lockable Kelly Forceps? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forceps)  I could clamp off the bleeder. Hawkeye and B.J. would drink a  still-brewed martini to me if I could pull it off. Standing outside  myself, as I write this though, it’s a ludicrous thought: forceps  jutting out of my neck while I sashay down the promenade, tipping my  bloodied top hat to all the ladies and ships at sea. If the CEO of my  former employers hadn’t thought it a wonderful and symbolic parting gift  for my “bereavement and healing leave”, I wouldn’t even have a pair of  these things.

I  ripped open the velcroed leg pocket and slid my thumb and finger into  the smooth-edged instrument. To open it, you have to squeeze it together  and then force your fore finger and thumb to move in opposite  directions. Then you can pull apart like normal scissors.

I  must have done it. I must have found the vein on the first shot. Klick,  klick, klick. As the locking-teeth pushed over each other. The blood  stopped shooting. Holy Virgin-Mary-in-a-lawn-tub, I just stopped dying!

Now  I had to focus on getting out of there. Razor and his deli-slice  arm-bands had gone out the door and might be rallying some troops, or  the cops even. So I picked the dirt caked window. Already open, it led  onto what must be one of Toronto’s last iron fire escapes.

As  my feet hit the back alley’s black top, my knees buckled and the rest  of my body sagged down. My face was a few inches from inhaling a used  condom, a wizened mouse corpse, and several shards of beer bottle glass.  It all started to fade… literally to black.

Oh  right. Passing out. The Kellies had stopped the blood exiting my neck,  but they were also keeping it from reaching its intended destination: my  brain. 

As  carefully as my palsying fingers could manage (they were already getting  cold!), I unlocked the clamp and let the blood flow onto the pavement.  Sharing body fluids with the condom, trying to resurrect the mummified  mouse, re-filling the shattered bottle shards… and since the black  stepped back, it must have replenished my thirsty brain.

A  few pulses and then I re-locked the forceps in my neck. Had to keep  enough blood in my limbs to make it to the car around the corner. And  then?

St. Michael’s was the closest hospital. Trivia that comes with administering a medical database for pharmaceutical distribution.

As  I staggered, using the building walls and lamp-posts as crutches, I  pulled off the mask and helmet. Avoided eye contact, because goddammit, I  didn’t want anybody to ask if I was okay. Yeah, shit-for-brains,  doesn’t every Kevlar-wearing avenger have bloody forceps stuck in his  throat? Just fucking move on, there’s nothing to see here, people.

I  had to do the unclamp and re-clamp thing 4 more times. The last time it  didn’t work. The black negligee that was being drawn over my eyeballs  didn’t go away. I cracked the car into a solar-powered parking meter  (How do they work at night? Where does my VISA number get stored? How  fucking long did I sit in the dead car making it my casket before I  threw open the door and collapsed a few meters from the yellowing  plastic emergency sign at the anus end of St. Mike’s?)

The  dead thick white light of the emergency sign became that light at the  end of that tunnel. The so-called near death experience.

Yes,  your brain gives a jerky playback of the highlights, lowlights and a  few crushingly neutral moments of your life in a more or less reverse  order.

The  whirring sound of the bullets. The tungsten-egg-crack of a skull bone  being forcibly swung open. The mewing of “Daddy! Daddy!” as she felt  the word coming out of her perfect puffy lips; playing with it like a  gelatinous bubble toy. The stab of an appendix rupture, more light than  pain. Not the wedding, but the walking by a store window and feeling the  tug of the dress on my eyes, even though her hot hand, always moist,  kept heading down the gum-dotted sidewalk. Long sweet kisses peppered by  the tongues of lovers with no names. The curdling rev of a motorcycle  jiggling my thighs. The stench of my mother’s unwashed panties as proof  she was human. Bright bouncing balls and twinkling dinkie cars in the  duvet of summer sand. Air harrumphing from my lungs as the bicycle  handle-bars punched me in the gut for trying to jump it over a too  flexible plywood ramp. The rash of heat around my nose and eyes, the  coming of a great guilty cry, even though the yellow callused hand of my  father never descended towards my frightened vulnerable butt cheeks;  the crashing scream scraping out of my throat “It’s not right! It’s not  fair!”, before the flood of phlegm closed it up and a blazing white yet  cold light blinded all my selves’ eyes.

It  began to recede, that light. There’s no after life, damn you all! It’s  just the brain shutting down in reverse. Neurons and nerves. Liquids and  bio-electricity. All scientifically explicable and philosophically  depressing. Playing the tape one last time in the opposite order that it  was recorded.

And  when I woke, knowing that the afterlife was a joke, a tool, a promise  that had no punchline, no purpose, no pay-off… when I woke knowing that,  I knew that they were gone. My girls, whose memory made me kill, cut,  and torture.

No  afterlife. They were gone forever. It made all this, my last purpose,  my last remaining distraction, meaningless. It no longer mattered. Wow.  Again the air is hammered out of my little lungs. And I don’t feel like  making the effort to inhale again.

And  so I quit. Fuck it. I’ll just stay here in the life-affirming blue and  beige of St. Mike’s ICU and drizzle away. The tubes can feed my veins.  The nurses can sponge my flaccid cock till it bleeds. The doctors can  clipboard my health and practice their bedside manner at the side of my  armour-plated bed. Go ahead, heal me back to Olympic standards. 

But I’m done. I’m staying right inside here.

These Walls Are Thick

2011-07-18T06:35:00.000-07:00

The walk to the house wasn’t long. But it felt long. She was so quiet. Once she looked behind her. Behind us.

That clichéd bit where the author tells you that the character clutched the steering wheel/cliff edge/bad guy’s wrist so hard that their knuckles turn white? It happens for real. The chords of her purse were being choked to death by her right hand. The knuckles turn white because the person is actually squeezing the blood out of them.

I felt the urge of empathy. So like the crapping urge. Once you notice it, you have to do something about it.

“You’re really quiet.”

“Sorry. Just… thinking.”

“About…”

“What I should tell you. What I shouldn’t.”

And then the house was in front of us. Guess I had clamped that urge longer than I thought.

She mounted the three porch steps and unlocked the door. Inside she closed the door behind me and relocked it. Relocked one of the locks. There were four of them, made of metals in thicknesses I had never encountered before.

She saw me looking at them and told me, “The back door is the same except there’s no key hole on the outside.” She rapped on the door. It thunked thickly.

She took three steps over to the front bay window. She dragged a finger across it. She stepped away and the space left was me-sized. I entered it and dragged my finger over the glass. It didn’t feel like glass. It was slicker, almost like oil.

She took off her shoe. Flipped it over so that heel, a modest pump, became a hammer’s head.

She smashed it at the window. Angrily.

It didn’t break. Or crack. It just kind of flexed. I saw it shimmer like a jelloey ice. She offered me the shoe.

“It’s okay, I believe. Interesting selling point.”

Her smirk was addled and could only hang on her lips a half second.

My rationality immediately suggested, “Understandable when your wife and kid have been taken down by bullets.”

“I found the receipts. It’s called ‘bullet-resistant’ glass. Apparently truly bullet-proof glass is too thick or something to actually be useful.”

I nodded. Images of beached fish danced through my mind.

Fortunately, she went on. “I wanted to show you that… the door and the window. Plus I couldn’t pull this out in a café.” She was reaching into her purse. All I thought was ‘Oh shitters, she’s pulling a gun on me now.’ And my superhero reflexes kicked in.

Yep. I stood there like a spring sapling. A dumb old bovine chewing its cud, stupidly staring its slaughterer right in the eye. Told you I could never be a super-hero.

Wonderfully, it wasn’t a gun.

“I don’t know what the hell this is,” she said as she carefully unwrapped the plastic wrap from around it.

I knew what it was.

It was the mask.

Or rather it was a plasticine model that I’m sure he cast into the real thing. Cast out of some polycarbon-super-hero-substance-name.

I took these pictures of it later.

I was able to take them because she handed it over to me. That’s the real reason she had asked me out to coffee. She wanted to leave this murderous foundling on my doorstep. Like the death of her brother had left the thing on hers.

“Take it. I’m moving back out west. Maybe further. I want to stop thinking about it.” She pulled out a large manila envelope. How trite, how cliché… how fucking bladder draining. “He didn’t have much personal stuff. No letters, no diary…” I nodded and was thankful she wasn’t looking at my eyes when she said the word diary.

“Just these. Some receipts. I guess he burned the rest.” She looked towards the working fire-place, cleaned out of any ash. Nice, a selling point that might make people forget the bullet-resistant glass and the Fort Knoxian doors. ‘And did ya know, the former owner, my brother, was a mass-murderer who ran around in Kevlar spandex and a horned skeleton mask. Cool huh?’

She didn’t know that. And she was making sure she never would.

“Will you give me your number,” I asked, still nodding, like an apprentice carpenter being taught how he’s going to fuck up his first dove-tail joint. “Just in case?”

“No.” Flatly. Becoming serene with the knowledge that she was actually going to walk away from all this glamorous drama.

“Let’s walk around the place once, ‘kay?” Dreamily. Fugue state.

An empty house waiting for new occupants is bright and spacious and echoes horrifically. There are scuffs where the furniture set its feet. Doorknobs that were burnished by the same hands a million times. Moving out and leaving behind this old hulk that wombed you for thousands of hours. Hollowed out pumpkin-like. And left to… well, who cares? It’s not your problem anymore. They can piss in the working fireplace for all you care. Knock down the thickened supporting wall between the kitchen and living area, so that it caves in upon itself. A pumpkin on the side of the road on November 2^nd. Rotting in upon itself. Curling and collapsing slowly in.

Conversationally, she mentioned that the police had found bags of blood hanging in the fridge. “Like proper transfusion bags.” They had matched the blood found in the car. Her brother’s. She was become more and more ethereal as the tour wound down to its demise.

As she locked us out of the house, she murmured, “Thanks.”

She was down the street, before I muttered, “Yeah. You’re welcome.”

Her purse swung lightly in her loose grip. A gay little dog dashing back and forth past her ankles.

Album 4: Wild & Crazy Guy

2011-07-11T06:28:00.000-07:00

Many people come to me and the say hey Steve, what do you look for in a girl? And I tell them, I want a girl with no neck. That way, when she enters a room… every head turns. Except hers! She has no neck!

- Steve Martin, Wild and Crazy Guy, 1978

It’s over. There is no fucking afterlife. I quit.

My first day home after an all OHIP expenses paid 12 day vacation in the beautiful, recently refurbished St. Michael’s Hospital. 

During  my stay there, Dr. Weintraub told me that between the loss of blood and  the unique way in which I managed to slash my own neck, caused my heart  to stop four times. Once for as long as 3 and a half minutes.  “Remarkably”, he quoth around a pen which he had mistook for a popsicle,  “We don’t see any signs of brain damage.

I disagree, doc. I’m a fucking retard. Because I thought “Razor” was only a stupid machismoed nickname.

Let me go back 13 days, cue the wishy-washy flashback effect. Or is slamming, blasting light dipping to black more de rigueur?

Size  does matter. I got back home and read all of Mercurio’s files in 48  hours. No sleep. I rocketed through them, cocaine up a movie star’s nose  kind of speed. Every page, every mug shot, kept me tripping on to the  next one. And in the end, the guy with the thickest case file had to be  the guy who knew both sides the best. Knew what I had to know.

The  centre of his deal was a nightclub. It had changed names several times  over the past decade – Shangri La, West Enders, Serious (yeah, I’m  serious), The Corporation, and most recently Righteousness. The guy who  owned the place was also the owner of the throbbingly thick file. Most  of his charges stemmed from, were committed at or around, or were linked  to his possession of Righteousness.

I didn’t even get a chance to ask him.

I  drank far too much Nigerian Dark at the Starbuck’s across on the other  side of Righteousness watching various folks enter the two-storey,  one-time warehouse. The aforementioned owner of the nickname “Razor” was  sporadic in his appearances there. Every time I did see him though, I  remember joking to myself that he had to pick a tough moniker like that  because his real name was Dimitry Cokkov [Bloggist Note: to preserve the  humor, the name has been changed, but the genitalia reference is still  there.] 

I  learned differently the night I chose to go in. Night, because Mr.  Cokkov’s daytime appearances may have been intermittent, but the eastern  Bloc work ethic forced him there every night.

I  bought shiniest, blackest clothing and shoes for the excursion.  (Checked myself out in the mirror before I left; it was freakish. I  remember that face. But it’s attached to the body of some troglodyte  with veins on his biceps and a neck as thick as a truck tire.) I loaded  up my giant duffle with my gear and layered in some old vinyl records on  top. My cover song.

I  parked the car around the corner. $20?! Because they knew some young,  dumb, full-of-come night clubber from the ‘burbs would pay it.

I  walked past the line of radiantly undressed youngsters who were all  waiting to fuck, be fucked, or get hammered and live lives unfettered by  hang-overs, aging and responsibility.

Straight to the seven foot tall 400 pound bouncer who was checking me out, because I was actually thicker than him.

The  noise, sorry, "music" was oozing out of the cracks in the building. I  shouted over the din, “The DJ forgot some of his shit!” Mr. Seven Footer  cocked a neanderthallic eyebrow at me. I unzipped my duffle part way,  enough to reveal a few discs. “His records! The fucking idiot forgot  some of his records,” I acted (I hope) like I was pissed off at a prima  donna, “Can you believe that shit?”

Apparently he could believe that shit, because he smirked and opened the door for me.

I  think there were more woofers and tweeters in the place than there were  people and there were a lot people. A tired looking shooter girl saved  me a lot of looking. She asked if she could get me anything. “Dimitry!” I  screamed. She couldn’t quite make out what I was saying. “Where’s  RAY-ZOR?” I hefted the duffle again, this time with the zipper shut. “I  got his shit!”

“Oh,  he’s up in the office,” I lip read from her gigantic glossy pout. She  pointed up through the smoke and mirrors and seizure-inducing light  show.

It took  three minutes for me and my duffle-shaped dance partner to squeeze  through the grind stoned human beings and to get to the door marked  “Employees Only”.

I  ducked into a bathroom to do my Superman in a Phone Booth routine. I  wound up in the handicapped stall (more room there) listening to a  couple of “employees” in the next stall. Either they were fucking their  brains out, or they really enjoyed watching each other use the toilet.

Even  with parts of the outfit on underneath my civvies, it still takes about  12 minutes to suit up. The duffle and my clothes are disposable; no  I.D. and as DNA empty as I can make them. (I’ll be caught  eventually. In fact, it might be the only way to finish what I’d  started.)

Athletes  talk about a switch that goes on when they play. And those over-paid  boobs are only selling themselves for money. My switch is the lowering  of the helmet and mask. The infra-red goes on, the mini-hyperbolics  start feeding my ears everything from mice farts on up. It’s not my  heart that pops first. It feels deeper, somewhere underneath my kidneys.  Lower than a vomit precursor, but it bubbles up the same way. Rippling  up through my diaphragm, kick-starting the heart, playing soccer with my  larynx. Shuddering into the deepest chords of the muscles of my limbs.  Sudden dog-panting heat.

I can’t help but smash the stall door open. It popped off as easy as Cheerios in a kid’s mouth.

Two  people saw me in the hall on the way to the door at the end. Even high  on E or drunk, their hesitant smiles – I’m in a Halloween costume for  fuck’s sake – drip off their faces. Maybe it’s the way I walk. Maybe  they’re sad cuz the skeleton-faced man won’t do a happy jig. They  flatten against the hall walls. My shoulders feel ten-miles wide.

The  door was reinforced aluminum but the frame was wood. I planted a boot  right next to the door knob. At a hundred miles an hour, cheap cedar  exploded. The door cracked off the back of a black fellow’s ass and  skull. I jammed a G-10 under his ear – I don’t remember unsheathing it –  and pulling down hard. I felt his liquids soaked through my chromium  knuckled gloves.

A  ridiculously stubbled lackey on a leather couch actually got his  six-shooter out. The G-10’s aren’t made for throwing, but he flinched as  it whirled in his direction. His big brother must have picked on him  when he was little. With my empty hand, I grabbed his gun hand; the  ex-KGB guy who runs a place north of Scarborough  spent three solid days teaching me that when you pull on somebody,  their instinct is to pull back. So you use that. Give them what they  want.

I gave  him his own gun muzzle under his rib cage… Squeezed his hand and made  him shoot himself, twice. One of the bullets must have ricocheted off  a  back rib; it blazed up behind his clavicle and punched him in the jaw. I  heard his neck snap; a thick wet pop muffled in jello.

I finally got to set eyes on Dimitry “Razor” Cokkov. Him I need to be able to talk.

He’s  a lanky squid. Long and pale. His big Russian forehead made even more  bulbous because he’s got his greasy dark hair pulled back in a  pony-tail. But his most distinctive fashion faux-pas are the thick, long  leather bracelets, Conan the barbarian style. Thin, cheesy metal  striping on each.

His body guards dead or bleeding out, Razor cuts for the door.

I  dive into his knees. I think one of them momentarily bent the wrong way. He  goes down like Crumplestiltskin and I’m sitting on his gut. Just like  my Brazilian Jiu Jitsu instructor instructed. Ready for the ground and  pound.

Or in my case, ready for the mask to dip down and begin the interrogation.

That’s when I learn why he’s called Razor.

It’s  not that he’s a sharp dresser. Or excessively quick witted. It’s those  Conan forearm bracers. Those thin strips of metal weren’t decoration.

They were actually razor blades mounted into the leather.

Me,  idiot that I am, hovering over him, giving him a shot, or a slice, at  my most vulnerable spot. My neck. He doesn’t punch. He’s been here  before. He hammers his elbow into my throat and then pulls back.

My body is telling me something’s wrong, even before I feel the heat of blood being where it’s not supposed to.

Then I see it. The blood actually jetting, as far as a 16 year old’s ejaculate, in triple time. In time to my heart beat.

And  even over the deafening heartbeat of the music below, I can hear it. My  own juice hitting the wall, the floor, in such amounts… spattering like  pregnant rain drops. A pre-tornado downpour hitting the moss-eaten roof of  my grand-father’s farm.

Coffee With A Dead Superheroes Sister

2011-07-04T06:51:00.000-07:00

All those little icebreakers that are barely comfortable in a normal conversation… the weather, what do you do for a living, I just saw… (insert name of recent, inoffensive mainstream blockbuster) and I really… (choose one: liked it, thought it was too long, couldn’t get over the price of the theatre tickets). Those clichéd bits of inroad…

With her, they felt like a balloon that’s managed to go unpopped for seven months. Wizened and discomfiting to be around. A homeless Tourette’s victim who picks the streetcar seat next to you.

This one time, it was less uncomfortable to cut to the chase. To actually talk about the dead body lying in the middle of the room.

“I did the star 69 to get your number.”

I nodded, and sipped the black coffee. Noisily because it was hot.

“And I know you said that you couldn’t remember seeing him. How long have you been in the neighbourhood?”

“Um, about 8, 9 years I guess.”

She nods, holding her cup close to her mouth, but not drinking. The steam tendrils around her nose, which is foundationed slightly. I feel flattered. And the flattery makes me feel guilty because I’m married. “Yeah, that was right around the time.”

“The time?”

A big inhale before she let’s the carpet-roll of story come out. A familiar pattern to her that makes a difficult thing easier to lay on someone’s floor. “His wife and his little girl. And him too actually. They were caught in a gunfight. The crossfire. They died. He just withdrew. From everyone, everything.”

I had to feign a reaction. I already knew all this. Hiding behind my own coffee, I knew more than she did.

“Here in Toronto?” I asked.

“Yeah, can you believe it? Maybe because of the other incident that happened that day, it just got pushed a few pages back in the papers.” Her eyes wandered out through the front window to Queen Street.

It was that feeling you get when you get a phone call or attend a meeting and the person who’s done the calling isn’t telling you why they called it. That eye-rolling irritation, with a timid flutter.

I push into her. “That must have hit you hard.”

A smile crawled over her mid-thirties face. “I guess. I had gone to B.C. for school. He stayed here and kept his life going. Y’know, finished computers at school, started climbing the IT ladder. Married his high school sweetie, well sort of. The house. A kid.”

Her eyes’ focus bounced around me, blue bumble bees buffeted by an emotional summer wind. Prelude to thunderheads.

“Funerals without a body, they’re like birthdays without cake.” Rain coming as tears, form on her lower lids. “Except opposite of course. But they’re both unfinished.”

She sniffed back the crying snot that was threatening to honey down out of her nostrils. Her hair was a standard: Not Excruciatingly Blonde by Clairol with Rather Mousey Roots by Mother Nature. She looked up to the ceiling and shook her head. That big inhale again. This time matched by a settling exhale.

As her eyes came down, she put her palms on either side of her cup and saucer. When her eyes reached me… No, when she leveled them at me, she had decided to go through with the why.

“At the estate sale, I didn’t put everything up for sale.”

“Oh no?” My secret identity – if I could have possibly been a super-hero – would be befuddlement. I hoped it was more convincing than Clark Kent’s appearance-mogrifying nerd glasses.

“The place – their house – is sold, but the transfer isn’t till Monday. I still have the keys.” She reached to the back of her chair, the strap licorice-dangling, leading to a purse, with house keys, no doubt.

I nodded and started counting out change for the coffees. Maybe on the way there, she’d divulge the other why’s: why she hadn’t told the corpse-desperate cops what she was about to show me and why she picked me as a confidante.

I had my own why’s. Why me? Why was I agreeing to go? And was I, no why was I actually feeling horny?

Album 3: Let's Dance

2011-06-27T07:35:00.000-07:00

Like weeds on a rock face waiting for the scythe,
Ricochet, ricochet.
The world is on a corner waiting for jobs,
Ricochet, ricochet.
Turn the holy pictures so they face the wall.
And who can bear to be forgotten?
And who can bear to be forgotten?

- David Bowie, Let’s Dance, 1983

People look better from far away and with clothes on.

From  a distance everyone has the chance to look beautiful. But the closer  you get, the more you see. My wife and child are on the other side of  death’s fence and they are as gorgeous as cartoon characters. Outlined  with ink and memory. Blemishes and bodily excretions blurred into bright technicolor slapsticks. Every argument and tantrum has long been  exhumed, carved out of the mud and pus and filled in with Tiger Tail and  spumoni ice creams. Happy dandelion fluffs suspended in a sky of  misery.

This  is what I think as I pull out a box-cutter and slash off Mercurio’s  clothes. The hairs on his body were all black and coarse, kith and kin  to their pubic cousins. The grey shadow of stubble punching through his  cheeks and chin. Where he sits most often, on his fish belly white ass,  errant red rosettes of pimples. His subcutaneous fat jiggling with the  palsy of his blubbering and begging. From 20 feet away, with his clothes  on, he probably picks up pretty regularly.

As I hack off his underwear, he begins blathering about the safe in his den and its combination.

He smiles because that stops me. Nodding like a retarded bobble-head. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll show you.”

I follow his mooning buttocks up the stairs. Forty years of shit eventually stain your crack no matter how well you wipe.

I  have vague recall of shag rugs and overwrought oil paintings. The flash  of a bedroom that even a pervert would call over-the-top. But his home  office was Spartan and functional. Almost admirable.

Desk:  all IKEA powder-coated aluminum and birch veneer. Probably called MUMBL  or EFICENT or some other pig-English. Chair: the extra-ergonomic mesh  weave that fools you into believing your ass isn’t slowly spreading into  a shitting pancake. Shelves: lined stem to stern with the orange-beige  volumes of Canadian law, and right up to date with the all the addenda.  And then the real gold: 4 solid filing cabinets on wheels.

“Roll  that one out,” , still hand-cuffed, he chin pecks at one of the  cabinets. Keeping my eye on him, I pull the one forward. It moves as  easily as a new-born Porsche.

“You can barely see it, but there’s a panel in the floor. Press down on any two corners.”

I  do so. The panel whispers up an inch. I pull it out the rest of the  way. Underneath, the eye of a combination lock stares up at me. The  small safe nestles between floor beams. He gives me the combo. Very eagerly.

When  I don’t start twisting the dial, he tries not to panic. When you’re  naked, it’s harder to hide that you’re lying. On him, I noticed that his  dick actually crawled further into his body.

He  tempts me. “I got almost 50k in cash in there. Some coke. Plane tickets  and hey, a few passports.” My hand goes to the filing cabinets.  “There’s even a couple real special pornos. Imported from Cambodia. Stuff that goes all the way.” He tries to laugh, like you would with a buddy who’s looking at the waitress’ tits too.

The safe also might contain a silent alarm. I put in the wrong  combination, and the cops, especially for this snotty neighbourhood, are  here at the speed of light.

I turn the mask down at him. Time for it to speak.

I knock on the top of the filing cabinet. The mask says, “Who’s buried in here?”

With the audio-modulator that I wired into the mask, my voice hisses out of two 1-inch speakers in my helmet. I went for a cross between Dennis Hopper in Blue  Velvet and Darth Vader in an underground garage. A resistor on one speaker causes a split second delay so it  almost sounds like there are two voices. I smelled Mercurio start to  lose control of his asshole.

I knock the cabinet again. Harder.

“Juh… juh… just clients. The good stuff is in the safe, man.”

I put one hand on the handle of the cabinet. The other on the corner. I start to pull.

He  manages a laugh. “They’re locked. They won’t open.” I can’t hear him.  The muscles, the anterior deltoids, the trapezius where it grabs my  skull, behind the ear. They’re making too much noise as they bunch up.  Like a bale of straw compacting, rustling against its own fibres.

As the lock on the cabinet pops, Mercurio’s breath escapes him. “Oh fu…”

For  the next four hours, I’m going through files. Mercurio’s certainly got  the lungs for lawyering. Despite his incessant nattering, I learn how to  go for the liver of each client file. Find the charges. Any that  mention racketeering, gang-related offenses, extortion, loan-sharking,  high-level trafficking, ownership of buildings that have been implicated  in prostitution or human trafficking, all that good shit. The stack is  half as tall as me.

Four  hours of office work. The adrenalin has long worn off. The crick in my  neck hurts worse because of the weight of the mask and helmet.

I  turn it on to Mercurio again. “Up,” hisses Darth Hopper. Merc moves,  moaning about how he’s had to piss for the past two hours. I lift the 30  pounds of files and shoulder him back downstairs to his gigantic living  area.

He  watches me empty his gym bag and stuff the files in it. Maybe it was  just the dawn sun starting to trickle in his tinted windows, but he  looked like he was turning a bit green. His worried “What’re you gonna  do with those?” gets shut up, when I force him to “Show me your  kitchen.”

“Why?” He tries humour. “You getting hungry? Heh.”

“No,” I breathe, “This box cutter’s too sharp.”

In his granite countered, monolithically-applianced kitchen, I find a thick, short knife. He probably pares guavas with it.

“Whattya  need with that?” My answer is to shove him back to the grand plains of  his living room. I sit him in what I judge is the middle.

He  flops down on his back. “God, I’m so fucking tired.” I yank him by his  hair back into a sitting position. “What?” he groans, like he’s gotten  used to all this.

“I need your balls on the floor, motherfucker.”

Now he’s awake all over again. A gibbering rubber-lipped lawyer.

“Spread  your fucking legs.” He mouths off more. I put the tip of the paring  knife half an inch up his left nostril. “Or I could just kill you instead.”

He  slowly spreads his legs. The shudder and stutter over the hard wood.  His cock has climbed nearly completely into his pelvis. A purple turtle  head barely poking out of its shell. All that extra skin that he  probably describes as 8 inches of heat-seeking moisture missile has to  go somewhere; and so his scrotum sags all the way to the red oak flooring.

I  need time to hop his fence and scramble through the ravine back to  my car. But I want him alive so he can tell his shit-hole clients that  somebody’s got all their files… their addresses.

I  raise the knife. 

“Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus.” He chants. I ram the  knife down between his legs, straight through his nut sack and 3 inches  into the floor.

I  managed not to hit a testicle. He can pull himself away from it. He’ll  only have to slice through about an inch of scrotal skin.

When his 10 second scream peters out, I jam the mask in his face.

“Tell them. All of them. That I’m coming.”

As I leave, I notice he finally took that piss.

Enough About Him, What About Me?

2011-06-20T13:18:00.000-07:00

You’ll have to forgive my fascination with superheroes. If I was into the therapy, I’d probably be diagnosed with an obsessive neurosis about vigilantes in star-spangled costumes.

But if I did join the ever expanding ranks of the “mentally ill”, I suspect I’d learn that a fetishist’s love of patterned granny panties or a cutter’s desire for the sting of bloody release stems from simple things.

Me, I don’t feel any pain.

No, really. There are only about 30 of us in the world. It’s called Congenital Indifference to Pain with Anhidrosis or CIPA. For those who care, Wikipedia’s pretty on top of the physical side of things: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain_with_anhidrosis.

For those who prefer life to be an unending cavalcade of summaries, let’s say that my nervous system has formed or malformed in such a way that I don’t feel pinches, burns, impacts, bites… anything that the other 7.6 billion humans would consider painful.

Hey, wow, eh? Many of you are probably now leaping-in-a-single-bound to the conclusion that I would make the perfect superhero. I’ve got my first power: immunity to pain. Sorry to disappoint, but the inability to feel a knife in your guts simply means you’ll bleed to death because you don’t know there’s a blade tickling your duodenum.

This is probably a better example. When I cut my first tooth as a toddler, I was in emergency six times in a week. Blood would spontaneously start pouring from cuts in my lips or on my tongue. It was a simple conclusion that I was biting myself; but I never cried about it. There would suddenly be a gory patch of fresh blood on my Scooby-Doo bib. My mother would gasp like a tire imploding, and little me would laugh and giggle at the funny face my horrified mom was making.

She told me later that one intelligent – read "sadistic" – doctor poked my pudgy cherubic heels with lancets. Each time, a pill of blood would bulge out, but I would continue to suck on the tongue depressor the nice man in the bright white coat had given me.

The diagnosis: CIPA. The treatment: like a leper, I had to be watched constantly. If I swallowed a safety pin, I’d die of internal bleeding. External cuts go unnoticed, infect, and I could die of advanced sepsis.

My first five years of life were spent on the inside of windows looking at kids on bikes and in swings and falling out of tree-houses. Carelessly they skinned their knees, were stung by bees, and whined about tiny splinters in their neurologically perfect finger-tips.

I went from the prison of a padded crib, to wearing knee pads and leather mittens on the rare instances that I went outside.

After twelve years of living with the learned fear of injury, surely my teenage years became a riotous release of rebellious extroversion, right?

Briefly, yes. For three months of my fourteenth year, I said fuck-it and did everything all the other kids were doing. With predictable results.

I went to the high-school dance and woke up the next morning with grapes of swelling around the knuckles of two toes which I had dislocated. My wrist had locked up around the bone-chips that I had knocked loose. Must have been the slam dancing.

I learned to drive a car. Slammed the door on a thumb, crushing it flat. Hilariously I simply tried to yank it out, like you might do when your coat or seat belt gets caught in there.

And, here’s some intimate honesty for you, I ruptured a testicle losing my cherry to Amy Rooks. She seemed to really enjoy when I slammed hard into her hole. That wet smack-smack-smack sound made her chin jut up and even virgin-balled me knew it felt really good to her. So I increased the speed and the impact. We both came. And a half-hour later my left nut was the size of a lemon. I didn’t fuck anybody again until I was twenty-two.

Amy helped re-institute my isolation by telling everybody about my self-induced testicular gigantism. I withdrew to the library during spares, lest I hear the chant of “Coconut”.

And that’s when I forged my relationship with that gallant tribe of people known as super-heroes. We had something in common: physical pain was unknown to us. Comic books were a world where I could belong.

It was natural then that I started to draw. As long as you stay away from exacto-knives, it’s really hard to hurt yourself in art class. Poking yourself with a sharpened pencil or a pen nib is manageable. It was another link, a wider, more intimate entry way into super-hero-land.

I was now creating the over-sized bosoms of the wonderful women and the mountainous biceps of the marvelous men who were my mentors and confidantes.

So, that’s what I do. If you were at a party and you needed to label me, you’d ask that: “So what do you do?” I’m a freelance graphic artist. Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, all the way down to the stone-age tools of pen, ink and paints.

And that’s why I really want this guy to be a superhero. Record-man. Diary-dude. The Masked Diary Writer. Maladaptive Coping Strategy Man. I’m forcing the issue, I know. I truly want it to be true.

Or so his sister Rebecca, the estate salesperson, told me when she called me back this past weekend and asked me out for coffee.

Album 2: Rock & Roll Machine

2011-06-13T08:09:00.000-07:00

And we don't need the lady
Cryin' 'cause the story's sad.
Rocky mountain way
Is better than the way we had.
Yeah, yeah, yeah…

- Rocky Mountain Way, Triumph, 1977

No, I don’t feel guilty.

I’ll feel guilty when the suits on Bay St.  stop smirking over their human shaped stepping stones. When the  corporations stop trumpeting their billions of dollars of profits off  the back of millions of dollar-a-day third world slaves. When religious  zealots of all stripes stop putting guns or righteousness into the hands  or heads of their brainwashed children.

It’s a long line before it’s my turn to feel the guilt I deserve.

As  far as I had researched, Mercurio Palsemetti* had no family-shaped  vacuum in his life. I’d have to let him know what that’s like. Maybe  we’d have time to chat about denying our guilt too.

From what I’ve been able to glean so far, the organized criminals in Ontario  have been able to keep to themselves through an unspoken geography of  territories. The two minute ejaculation of violent stupidity that  brought me into this was an exception. But it’s not just their “business  is business” attitude that keeps things quiescent. There’s a criminal  buffer between the larger groups. A cartilage that prevents the bones  from scraping together. The sinovial fluid gang, if you will.

Mercurio  is their lawyer. Yes, somebody has to represent them, but does he have  to be so flagrantly rich about it? From the number of quotes this guy  has in the Star and the Sun, you’d think he has his thumb on their  publishers.

Palsemetti’s digs were north of Toronto,  blessed with a wonderful ravine view and sequestered behind a twelve  foot iron and masonry wall. The main house was over 4000 square feet.  The coach house housed an indoor pool. Lucky coach. I knew the layout  because I obtained the blueprints for fifty dollars at a municipal  government office; rich folk have contractors renovating their places so  often, they get tired of asking for ID and permit numbers.

I  assumed he had a security system, and the movie action stars might be able to  “tap” into the security cameras or snip the green wire, but this ex-I.T.  professional for a large medical lab firm can’t even hotwire a kid’s  tricycle.

So  while my ribs and cheek bone reformed their relationships with the rest  of my body, I sat in a car, following, stalking, getting to know all about  Mercurio. Now every time I see the sculpted nasal bone of a BMW  Roadster, I get that little hormonal jazz under my diaphragm.

His  schedule was a nightmare. Completely unpredictable. Sometimes he’d come  home at 8 p.m. Other times long after midnight. So I parked three miles  away, nearly broke an ankle climbing down into the ravine and got into  my evening wear. Kevlar is the new black.

That  day before all this, I watched my wife sob so deeply she gagged on her  own vomit. Since the day she left, I’ve added fifty pounds of muscle. I  was never out of shape, but I never imagined I’d be able to bench press  over 500 pounds. As I nearly hurled myself over that fence, the shrunken  balls, the bacne and that new ache in my liver became completely worth  it.

I hunkered  in the back corner of his yard, nervous about motion detectors, and  watched his football field long driveway for those blinding Roadster  halogen headlights. How many accidents have those arrogant fucking  things caused? Why aren’t they illegal? I told myself that if I didn’t  get what I wanted from him, I’d smash those damn floodlights on my way  out.

Finally a car turns in. Automatic gate opens without a squeak. Half way down the  drive I hear one of the 3 garage doors start to open, automatically.  Automatically, I sprint for the back of his house. As his car/penis  slides into his house/vagina, I roll in behind. I’m this S.O.B’s new  S.T.D.

Mercurio  hauls his ass and a gym bag out of the car. This guy is in half-decent  shape. But all he has to bench-press right then is the alarm code beside  the door that leads from the garage into the house.

As the last digit of the code is in, I charge. My shoulder rams him in the lumbar/kidney area. For the next month, he’ll piss pink and think of me.

Our  combined weight cracks the door in half. About ten seconds later, he’s  in hand-cuffs and I’ve tasered him twice in the throat. Just for the  pure fuck-with-him of it.

It’s May --, 199-. Approximately 11:30 p.m. He’s got a long night ahead of him.

Bloggist’s note: Not his real name obviously, but he needs a moniker because he comes back later.

Paranoia Sets In

2011-06-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

The second after I put up the last entry, I looked at it with a mental squint. I had been looking at these hand-written documents as being fundamentally true. My therapist said that despite my background, I was an "idealist romantic". Or maybe it was romantic idealist. Whatever.

What if these damn papers were just the oozings of a unpublished bi-polar who happened to die of booze and anti-depressants?

I took a day’s worth of spare-time and travelled on-line and through microfiched newspapers. Nothing about a multiple murder in any alley of the Greater Toronto Area. Not on the day that it supposedly happened and not the days around it.

(Note: There was a very significant gun related incident in Toronto day that day. It's so unique that I'm making no mention of it, because the instant that I do, even Google drop-outs would be able to pin down the exact date. I'm not exactly sure how, but I worry that single thread might lead them to being able to trick out a street name or, worse, a person's.)

The light of my super-hero fantasy was dimming rapidly. It had only one person and one place of contact left.

I sat and thought for half a day, determining a plan of attack and deciding how far I was willing to go. That set, it was a simple matter to research the ownership of the estate sale house, and, because of a pretty unique last name, calling twelve numbers (out of a possible twenty-seven) and asking the potentially morbid question, “Are you related to a Ted P-----?”

Six apologies, 4 hang-ups and a “No, but I could be anyone you want for 50 bucks” later, I recognized the voice of the woman on the other end even before asking the question. And the pause before she answered was familiar too.

“Who is this?” Her voice was the underside of a rotted log. Tired, sad, a lone centipede of thin anger.

“The estate sale a few days ago. I was your ‘first customer of the day’. I bought the record collection.”

“Right, Mr. Twenty-bucks.” Again a pause, which is only an absence of sound, everything else is still there. “We don’t do returns,” she said trying to keep it light.

“Oh no,” I returned with a laugh in my voice, “No problem with the product... or the service.” Remember the plan. “I’ve been listening to the albums,” I lied, “and I realized that Ted must have been a pretty young guy to…”

“… to be dead,” she finished mercifully.

“Yeah. I thought it might be appropriate... I was wondering if I could make a donation to whatever health problem he had... Y'know?”

“Health? Oh, you mean like the Heart and Stroke Foundation or muscular dystrophy or something.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“That’s really nice of you, but I don’t think…” Nervous breath-laugh up over the bone in her throat. “It’s just that they don’t know what killed him.”

I pushed it a bit. “Oh, ‘natural causes’.”

She leaned over the emotional fence and said, “There wasn’t a body.”

“Oh.”

“But there was too much blood for him to have survived.”

The distance between us grew so fast right then, I could almost feel the air rushing by my ears. She was hearing me go. She must have witnessed that in other peoples’ voices, in other peoples’ eyes, a dozen or more times, every time she explained what happened to her brother, cousin, whatever he was to her.

My grandma had a cataract, frozen milk that had poured in over a beautiful teriyaki brown. It kept her safe and smiling. Through funerals and cancers, and from seeing a once-spotless house peeling down around her. It excused her from caring about anybody or anything.

Two good eyes and I was no different.

“That’s terrible. Sorry to bother you.”

“No, it’s okay.” Yeah, she had watched a few cataracts grow in her time.

“Thanks for your time.”

“No problem.”

“Bye now.”

“Bye.”

I’m no super-hero.

Real Life Super-powers #1: Human Echolocation

2011-05-30T11:07:00.000-07:00

It's not Daredevil and his radioactively amplified hearing, but it is documented echolocation in humans.

It does require you to be blind, and further to develop your blindness early or late in life. I've missed the early life, but how long do I wait to blind myself? I plan on living till I'm about 130 years old, but the average is still somewhere in the 70's. I don't want to miss the party trick of the century.

Except that I think I may be partially deaf, I'm predisposed to this power. I can already tell when my wife comes into the bedroom. Even her slender quiet form leaves a sound shadow as she passes in front of the running dehumidifier.

Twenty bucks to first true-believer who can use echolocation to determine if a criminal is telling the truth.

Album 1: Rock 80

2011-05-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

Waiting by the shoreline

In Somalia for your reply

I need you to come see me

That's no lie

The guns are getting close

The sweat pours like dew

That fell from the trees in Tripoli

In the spring

I'm white hot

I can't take it anymore

I'm white hot
By the Somalian shore

Yes, I'm burning to the core
I need rain.

- Red Rider, White Hot, 1980

Fuck it all, that didn’t happen like I visualized.

All the training, all the preparation, all the research… over a year and a half, and I’m sitting here with – according to my self-diagnosis using a few reputable internet sources – 16 self-inflicted stitches, a dislocated shoulder, 6 circular bruises where the bullets must have hit, and since it hurts to breathe I suspect 2 broken ribs just above the floaters on the left side, and it even hurts to smile so I’m pretty sure that guy stomped me a broken orbital or cheek bone, wherever those zigomatic or risorius muscles attach.

I know it hurts when I smile because I smiled afterwards. Before the rush wore off. As I was taking off the get-up in a subway washroom stall. After I puked in the toilet (well, half in the toilet). I nodded to myself and a stupid grin peeled back on my face. I had done it and I was still sucking air. I was actually alive.

And 5 of them were dead.

I was armoured up and I sat in that stinking dumpster for at least a half hour. Every doubt I thought I had dealt with since April --, 20--, came back to me. I doubted why I was there; I doubted every hour of my physical training; I questioned the efficacy of the drugs; I certainly doubted my sanity for waiting in the dark off an alley on ---4 Q---- Street East.

But the single diamond hard point that was unassailable was that somebody had to deal with them. Even if all the one-on-one cognitive and group therapy, even if all the anti-depressant and occasional anti-psychotic meds worked and turned me back into a normal functional human being, somebody had to do this.

So I sat until I heard their two vehicles pull up. Adjusted my legs under me, hoping they wouldn’t cramp up as soon as I straightened them. Listened to their macho bullshit chatter as they came closer. Dialed in my night-vision visor when I heard them whining about the light over the back door being out. And just as one guy, the fattest one, squealed when he stepped on the three inch caltrops I had spread around the door, I tossed out the flash grenade into their midst, covered my eyes for two and half seconds.

First mistake, I smashed the dumpster lid up as I jumped out. I hit it so hard it gonged off the brick wall behind and again when it shut. They couldn’t see but now they had a focus, a direction.

Even so, I killed two before any of them could pull a pistol from their belts, shoulder holsters, or in the case of Squealing Fat Boy, from the crack of his greasy cottage-cheesed ass.

A pat on my own back: I made the right choice going for the serrated edges on the two Spyderco Civilian G-10’s.

One of the guys, a chinless fuck with an over-dose of old-man’s cologne, had his head only half on after I dragged the blade across the middle of his throat. From what I had experienced in those 10 days at the slaughter-house in O-----, the cartilage and bone in the larynx might have saved the guy’s life. But at the abattoir, I wasn’t this amphetamined maniac who had jumped out of a dumpster dressed in a black Kevlar Halloween costume. And of course, there was the mask.

I sliced through that guy’s Adam’s apple like it was a rotten McIntosh.

The second guy was twisting away, running and pulling his gun, kind of bent over. So I got him in the lower back, started at what I hoped was a kidney and pumped my arm twice. Sawing my way in towards his spine. I actually felt the knife’s serrations go clickety over the bone. I twisted like I practiced. On a pig, it opened the wound wider. Not immediately deadly, but let this shithead bleed out. I had 3 more. All of them with their guns out by now.

Out and firing.

Mother-fuckers didn’t care now if they shot their buddies.So that’s what scared people do. I’ll have to remember that.

I figured there would be gun fire. I mean that’s why I was here murdering them in the first place. I had hung out at a firing range just to get used to the sound; so it wouldn’t freeze me up. I had molded rubber ear protection in under my helmet. But it was still so goddamned loud. That close, the percussion of bullets being catapulted out of the muzzle, it actually jars your bones. I could feel my teeth rattle inside my mouth-guard.(When I had spit it out later, I saw that I had actually bitten clean through it.)

The first three rounds that hit me caught me square in the gut. Knocked the wind out of me, making me drop one of the blades. Finally, something went as I expected. My breath was gone, but the anaerobic training allowed me to get to the next guy. Some muscle bound freak who might have been taking more steroids than me.

But no matter how shrunken the roids make his balls, he still noticed when my steel-toed combat boot knocked them up into his oesophagus.

As he crumpled over, I slammed my knife down, hammer-fisted it right through his back ribs and into his heart. It jammed in there. Maybe between two ribs, or maybe his Hulk-like trapezius muscles had contracted around it. It happened with the pigs; sometimes you had to put a foot on them, and use both hands to yank it out.

Two more slugs told me I didn’t have that kind of time. One off the thigh. And one straight off the knee cap, hyper-extending it. Kevlar and alumina ceramics kept the joint from completely exploding.

Fat Boy’s buddy charged me. Bulled me over and started stomping on my head. That trashed the night vision. Lights started to explode inside my skull.

My brain was bouncing around in my skull. Unconsciousness started to creep up. It was really peaceful. Like a big thick duvet that your grandma would pull up to your chin on Christmas Eve. Heavy and lulling.

I was ready for that. I had planned that this is the situation in which I would actively think of them.

I don’t know that the army has dreamed up this kind emotional training yet. The dress as the enemy and brutally kill the two most important people in your life. Right in front of you. And then use your memories of them, everything gentle and soothing, like the skip of her flip-floppered feet over the old peeling floorboards at the cottage. Like the surprised happy-shock when the puppy decided to lick the inside of her little mussel shaped ear.

Take those most powerful memories, practice getting over the barf-inducing sobs and super-charge them into an anger so pointed you can feel sweat prickling through your skin.

Cognitive behaviour therapy turned on its fucking ass.

With that lightning coursing through me, my head turned into a painless rock. With the image of the back of her head exploding onto the black rubber of a car tire, I grabbed his patent-fucking-leather-shoed foot and twisted it so hard, I felt his knee come crunchingly unglued.

He fell wailing. I rolled up and hammered his useless knee with the knucks I had built in to my gloves.

As a piece of her skull flapped a white flag in slow motion, I kept smashing at his knee until it was the consistency of school-room mucilage.

Distantly I noticed Fat Boy pinging a shot off my helmet and one into my side.

I took my jack-hammering hand over to Patent-Leather’s head. The dome of the skull hardens as you get older, but there are these lines of cartilage through it, called sutures. I pounded. It only took three shots, and his head caved along the sutures. The membranous bag that held his brain together split so fast, he didn’t even have time to twitch.

Fat Boy was all out of bullets and his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He had watched it all. With the caltrops embedded in his fat feet, he couldn’t run. And the tetanus bacteria on the spikes would let him live long enough to tell them. He could blather until his fat fucking jaw locked right up.

I turned the mask to him.

That mask is the only artistic thing I’ve ever made in my life.

The look on Fat Boy’s face told me it was a masterpiece.

“You tell them.” My voice, powered by the emotional and physical drain of what I had just accomplished, resonated through the cave of my throat. “You tell the rest of them.”

And then I ran. Ran before my insides turned to liquid and I started Hershey squirting in my pants.

62 Records in the Crate

2011-05-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

That was Monday. The crate must’ve stayed on the floor outside my bathroom till Saturday. Saturday is a day you can take extra long craps. You sit on the throne relaxing in the breezy luxury of being bare-assed. Relaxation at one end allows thoughts to drift into the other.

Sometimes you close your eyes and wonder why it is your smell only makes other people puke. Sometimes you look about the bathroom, noticing how you should clean the dried dew drops off the mirror or fix the toilet handle that needs jiggling each time it’s flushed.

And other times you read. Things you wouldn’t bother to read anywheres else suddenly become mesmerizing. The snake-oil descriptions on the back of a shampoo bottle. The we-assume-you’re-a-cheap-rummy warnings on rubbing alcohol. The tiny print that informs you the nail clippers have already travelled farther than you ever will.

That Saturday, the edge of the crate was poking past the horizon of the bathroom door jamb.

I had to actually raise my ass off the toilet to reach it. But I did, and dragged it over the linoleum. I didn’t plan to look at all of them, so I slid a sleeve up and out from the middle.

The Go-Go’s “Vacation”. The pinkily-clad girls in a water-skiing pyramid on the front. Boy, Belinda became far cuter after she left the other ladies behind. I peeked in the opening and the black-blue gloss of the record winked at me. I rolled it out, maybe just to see how big the unavoidable scratches on it would be. Maybe to see how they did the sticker around the spindle hole.

Why is long forgotten now.

That one extra-long crap session on that one particular Saturday in late August went a lot longer. The blood-infused pressure circle on my ass must have taken a month to wear off.

Along with the disk, two hand-written sheets were tucked in the jacket. The first page began in mid-sentence, so it wasn’t the first first page. I’m not one to spoil a story for myself by reading the last page of a novel; hell, I freak on anybody who tells me what happens on the next DVD of the Sopranos.

I left the pages unread. Put them back in the sleeve. And went to the end of the crate where I surmised that the beginning would be. That first disk was "K-Tel’s Rock 80". And the two pages that peeled off either side of its record were numbered.

One page started with a circled number one.

Three hours later, twenty minutes after my ass started to have the pins and needles, I reluctantly wiped, flushed and popped my knee joints straight.

I had read 7 of the 62 albums’ hidden diary pages. The author’s tight, crabbed, slightly slanted scrawl was burned on the white parts of my eyes. Whenever I blinked, I could see it in red on the inside of my eye-lids.

The guy who wrote it – a guy who I realized was now dead – would never call himself this, but it was obvious to me. These pages, this diary was written by a superhero.

Introductions & Explanations

2011-05-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

Early in the summer of 2010, there was an estate sale in my neighbourhood.

Now normally, I’ll see a garage or yard sale and continue to walk by. My life’s quota of gaudy neon stuffed animals is filled and all my relatives have had boy babies. So frilly girl’s dresses on white plastic hangers are alien and useless to me. I’m too pessimistic to believe that I’ll find a mint copy of Amazing Fantasy number 15 amidst the piles of Archie comics, so I always keep on truckin'.

However, that Monday morn I was doing my stepping right when a tired looking woman was propping up the “Estate Sale” sign in the postage-stamp sized garden. I was only a block and a half from my Toronto home. Coincidence is composed of soundless, tiny chains.

I thought estate sales were grandiose affairs that happened at manors and mansions, not at a well-kept semi-detached just outside the downtown core. But you don't need wealth, just death, to sell off a mortal's trappings.

Death and your proximity to it come with built-in morbidity generators, so even though my feet kept a-walking, my eyes must have hesitated. The tired sign woman had turned to prop open the screen door. That hydraulic-looking thingamajig at the bottom of the door gave her some trouble, but as she stood up from it, she saw me seeing her.

She looked haggard and down enough that I felt obligated to cheer her up. It’s this instant obligation, even for people I don’t know – I think – that’s making me post this stuff.

So cheerily, but not too – after all, estate sales mean somebody died, right? – I asked, “Open for business?”

She half-smiled and responded, “I guess so.”

I could have said, “Well, good luck” or “Maybe I’ll stop in later, I’ve got to get to a dentist appointment”.

But lying to the recently bereaved, which is what I assumed she was, feels cruel and wrong and invites curses from the ghost of the dearly departed.

“Great,” I said and felt my feet moving in a new direction.

Why do obligations lead to ever increasing obligations? I say this because I had no desire to buy some dead person’s stuff; I pictured yellowing doilies and badly framed oil paintings with too many reds and oranges. I had maybe 30 bucks in my wallet and better things to spend it on. But now, I felt obliged to look and looking leads to buy. Especially when you're the only customer in a retail outlet that is a house just down the street from yours.

I was gearing myself to select the first not-too-heinous Dalton knock-off and get the hell out. Duty done.

Though my neighbourhood is ancient, steeped in century old Victorian homes, it’s been gentrifying nicely. The inside of the death house didn’t reek of the ex-occupant who began rotting in the upstairs four-poster bed. Twelve foot high ceiling and a modern minimalist style gave the first room, a dining-family room combo, an airy and light feel. Not my style, but closer than the Addams-family digs I had expected.

“You’re the first one,” she said quietly as she breezed past me to go to the kitchen.

“Oh good.” I scanned the room wondering what I could quickly snag and not pay more than five dollars for.

“Anything particular you’re looking for?” she called from the kitchen. Sounded like she was pouring herself a glass of water.

In my head I said, “Oh yeah, I comb dead people’s stuff with shopping list in hand. I follow the obituaries every Sunday, barely able to restrain my consumeristic glee. In a former life, I scavenged corpses on medieval battlefields.”

But what I said was, “Music?”

She came back out sipping her water and pointing to a wooden box in the corner. The solidly built crate was labelled “Dynamex” in faded ink.

“He had some vinyl.”

“Oh really?” I sauntered quickly over, feigning interest. Honestly, I was sure that a box of old records would cost far more than what I had on me, and I could scoot out looking disappointed. Hell, the dynamite crate must be worth more than twenty bucks alone.

I knelt down and fingered through the records. Looked like 70’s and 80’s mostly. I pulled up a couple, but I didn’t even read the band-names or register the album art. Too eager to get on with my soul-shriveling plan of escape.

“Wow, cool. Hmmm,” and a beat to lend realism, then, “How much?”

She shrugged gave me a “I dunno” pressing of the lips together. Then, “Twenty?”

My eyebrows rose in what I hoped was a look of consideration, but inside I swore. I knew I had twenty, but I didn’t want to spend that much, especially on something I utterly did not want.

“You could get more for them,” I told her with sagacity and kindness.

“It’s okay. I’m not up to haggling.”

Oh, not fair, even if somebody in your family did just die.

I looked back to the wooden crate stuffed with the Pat Benetars and Triumph discs. Damn this dead guy’s choice in music, and damn his taste in minimalism; not a brass unicorn or faux-crystal candle holder in sight.

Desperation wins.

“Ok, 20 it is.” My hand was already flipping open my wallet and pulling out the required legal tender. “Here you go.”

I scooped up my booty and headed for the door. I tossed a “Thanks!” over my shoulder. She didn’t say good-bye immediately, so I knew something else was coming. “Do you live near here?”

I told her. She nodded and asked, “So did you ever see him or meet him, or from before, his wife and daughter?”

My face was a mask of neutral pleasantry, immune to further inquiry. “No, I didn’t.”

She expected this answer. “Well, thanks.” A slight waving of the twenty.

“Oh no, thank you!” A slight raising of the albatross crate. I said it with genuine joy. I was, after all, now getting out of there.

Off the heating sidewalk, the late summer breeze wafted the smell of old cardboard from the box into my face.

Twenty bucks. Lousy music. A dynamite crate.

Too much spent to just ignore what was bought. A purchase too lousy to dump to a friend. A container too large to give to the garbage on the way inside the house.

All those things. And my own stupid curiousity and sense of obligation led me to find what was hidden, page by page, inside the sleeves of the records.

Caveat Lector

2011-05-16T11:04:00.000-07:00

Hi there.

I don't know how you feel about somebody saying "Hi there" and immediately spitting out this:

"In order to protect myself and my family from potential legal and even physical harm, I have changed the names of people and locations. Hopefully this is just excessive paranoia, but better safe than sorry."

But consider it spat, and we'll forget that it ever was.

If you think you might be one of the people that I or the journal is describing, then please let me know immediately. Hopefully, we can work something out. If we can't, then, I'll stop posting and delete the blog. No problem.

I do think, though, that this blog does have a purpose. I'm hoping that it will help curb a growing trend -- an idiotic one in my estimation.

There are regular people who dress up in costumes that make 60's psychodelia look restrained, adopt nom-de-costumes that would make Stan Lee throw up a little in his mouth, and “patrol” their neighbourhoods looking to prevent... well, I'm not sure. Gangs of supervillainous raccoons knocking over the First National Garbage Can? Evil geniuses bent on parking illegally after 12 a.m.?

Interfering in real crime is going to get you hurt. Hell, you'll probably get your ass handed to you by those three 13 year olds smoking weed in the park.None of you have “powers”. Very few of you have superhuman skills that were honed in a secret Buddhist Ninjitsu monasteries in Tibet. You're more than likely frightened of the spider in the tub, radioactive or not. Most of you probably don't even work out on a regular basis, what with all the patrolling you've been doing.

Yes fellow mortals, they are out there. Their dreams of kicking ass have led them to try forming their own Little Justice Leagues:

http://superheroesanonymous.com/

http://www.worldsuperheroregistry.com/world_superhero_registry_maine.htm

http://answerthecall.ning.com/

Just call the cops. Please.

I'm not being a downer. I'm not against good samaritinism. I just think that once you've read these pages, this superhero diary, you'll be very happy to stay a Peter Parker or a Clark Kent.

Okay, I know. Enough blathering and start posting these damn things right?

Come back every week. I'll have something new for you.