I had the picturesque garret apartment in what was once part of the attic, basically one room, a kitchen, and a bath, with all kinds of ceilings angling every which way, and windows pointing to the front and side of the building. There were other apartments on the top floor, and a long hallway that ran to the back of the house to the external back stairs—these egresses would come in useful if I needed to be Ms. Megaton Man in a pinch. At least it was a place to hold my stuff, although I’m not sure I’d call it secure. But at least it was within easy walking distance of the Arbor State extension, Warren Woodward, and the Union Stripe restaurant, where I landed a waitressing gig.
Avie and I drove back to Ann Arbor in Daddy’s pick-up one Saturday in July to get my bed and dresser. I left a bunch of my fat clothes up in the attic—stuff that hadn’t fit me since my belated growth spurt of nearly two inches that left me a little more slender, too. I also bequeathed the big honking black-and-white TV in the living room and the dining room table to the house. We moved some of Simon’s things into my empty bedroom and played with Simon for half an hour. Then we said our goodbyes—Trent was at work so it was easier with only Stella there—and took off.
Back in Detroit, we came down my new street, which was one way going east, past my house, turning into the dogleg of the alley next to the Holistic-Humanist Congregation parking lot, then parked in the alley proper behind my building, by the back stairs. As we rounded the corner, I happened to glimpse a black man—one of the church caretakers—clipping the hedges along the front of the church. As he did so, he went to pick something up—a hose or rake or something—but instead of bending over at the back, I could swear he simply stretched out his arm and picked it up. I mean stretched it out to twice it’s length. I had never seen anyone do anything like that—not even a megahero.
“Avie, did you just see that?” I said, as she parked the pickup.
“See what?”
“The groundskeeper—he stretched his arm like a rubber band.”
“I didn’t see anything,” she said.
We moved the stuff into my apartment, which meant three flights up the back stairs and down the long hallway to the front of the house, where my apartment was. Each time up and down the stairs, I stopped at the top balcony and looked over the side, which had a view of the church parking lot, trying to catch a glimpse of the groundskeeper. I didn’t see him every time, because he was moving a wheel barrow around and stuff, but when I did, he seemed perfectly normal. Perhaps the stretching had just been an illusion; after all, we had been in a moving car.
After we were done, there was no place to sit except on the bed—this was a tiny studio. There was a junky old dinette set in the even tinier kitchen with two junky red-cushioned chairs, but it would be a long time before I’d feel comfortable sitting in either of those without a towel over them or something. So Avie and I just flopped on the bed.
“Thanks for helping me,” I said.
“It was nothing,” she said, rubbing her shoulder. The bruise I’d given her was long gone, but obviously this meant I had to fork over my spare key, if only out of guilt. Thereafter, I would often find her at home waiting for me when I returned from my Arbor State extension class in the afternoon, or after my waitressing gig at the Union Stripe restaurant on Woodward late at night, where I got a job—fixing us both lunch or a snack from a CARE package, courtesy of Mama. This saved me a lot of money, but it also meant Mama and Daddy effectively had access to my apartment whenever they wanted, a situation more prone to sudden invasion than I had had in more remote Ann Arbor. Just about anybody was liable to walk in on us—meaning me and whomever I happened to bring home from the restaurant or the Third Avenue Grub Street Grill—or, occasionally, the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar, a lesbian biker bar with a reputation for being somewhat rough, but which happened to be right nearby. Being Ms. Megaton Man, I felt relaxed there, and if I had to punch somebody, I wouldn’t have had a bad conscience about it.
During what I called peak hours, times I thought most likely Mama might innocently feel like barging in on me on purpose, I made sure I picked up an art student— preferably some white girl with magenta hair and piercings—from the latter establishment, the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar. This was me at my most transgressive, to be sure, and more than a bit passive-aggressive. But if Mama wasn’t going let me stay at home—and not surrendering her TV den as my once and future bedroom had been itself an act of pure passive aggression, I thought, to say nothing of keeping the identity of my real, biological, megahero father from me, of the fact that my grandma Seedy was still alive—then Mama could just barge in on me with my face in some white girl’s crotch, going to town on her labia, or her doing the same to me. Naturally this mortified my mother Mama—it never crossed my mind what would have transpired if Daddy was with her—and it was unspeakably cruel of me, but Mama got the message after a couple times, and totally stopped dropping by unannounced before Labor Day. In the bargain, I kind of grew fond of one of those magenta-haired art students, and we actually became pretty good friends.
As I said before, my real preference was never for girls, although Avie thought it was politically cool, and she liked Nancy, the magenta-haired art student. Avie was always talking about lesbianism in the abstract as a politically defiant act, and hung out with feminists and socialists and non-conformists in her theater crowd. But I think she gagged at the thought of another girl’s privates in her nose; in fact, I know she did. Avie was boy-crazy, pure and simple; one time, we were in the Grub Street Grill, and I watched her mouth literally water over some guy’s cock—he was a waiter there and wore these really tight pants and I’m pretty sure he was gay—and Avie slobbered on her own boob. She had to use a bar napkin to dry off her halter top. And Avie was completely full of shit when it came to utopian social movements—she was about as committed to the proletariat and the auto workers and the lettuce pickers as I was to saving whipped cream from extinction.
She was always asking me about Trent and why I wasn’t back with him. Once, we were out at Ty’s First Base—we went to neighborhood bars a lot because my place was too small to think straight—she said to me, “Nancy is nice and everything, but you know that’s not your bag. You’re hetero, but you’re such a chickenshit.” I glared at her and she rubbed her shoulder to remind me not to hit her.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“I’ll bet Trent’s nothing but lonely in Ann Arbor,” she said. “I think you’d make a nice couple.”
“Where would we make a good couple, Avie?” I said, throwing up my hands. “He’s white and I’m black. You realize this is America, don’t you?”
“So’s Mama and Daddy,” Avie reminded me. “And they love each other.”
“And look what hell they’ve gone through all these years,” I said. “You remember when we were little kids, and all the times we’d be eating in a restaurant, and the other customers would be horrified that we were a family?”
“Nancy’s white,” said Avie. “You go to the museum with her all the time—you’ve had more white lovers than black.”
“People assume Nancy and I are just friends,” I said. “We don’t hold hands or French kiss in public, for cryin’ out loud.”
“People are in denial,” said Avie. “Seeing two women together gives them plausible deniability.”
“That’s just my point,” I said. “But when they see a man and a woman together, nobody assumes they’re just friends. And when one’s white and one’s black, people get all uptight—both black and white people.”
“You can’t wait forever,” said Avie. “Sooner or later, someone’s going to take Trent away from you, and you’ll have missed your chance.” She took a sip of her beer. “I know how to get to Ann Arbor.”
I said, “If you want to go lick Megaton Man’s balls, help yourself, Avie.” Besides, I happened to know he got handjobs from Imelda, one of his spooky neo-hippie coworkers at the bookstore, whenever he wanted. Or at least, often enough. But I didn’t tell that to Avie.
“You’re so mean,” said Avie. “And Trent, he’s such a nice man…come to think of it, maybe he’s better off without you.”
“Avie, you called Trent a privileged white exploiter the first time you met him,” I reminded her.
“That’s what I thought, until I was nearly raped by the real thing. But Trent is so nice…he would never hit me.”
She was right; Trent was so nice. I sighed. “Can we change the subject?”
“Mama wants me to move in next to you, to keep an eye on you,” said Avie.
“Next to me? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t you know?” said Avie. “The church next door to you has a residence. A group of college students lives there full-time, communally—like a real commune, not housemates like you had in the house on Ann Street. They watch over the place, and the church gets a break on their insurance. You know how dicey this neighborhood can be at night. Anyway, they have an opening, and I’m thinking of applying.”
“You?” I said in disbelief. “Avril James? A member of a commune?”
“Can’t be any worse than my theater group,” she said. “We’re practically a human daisy chain. Ever use a backstage dressing room with twelve people?”
“A cramped dressing room is one thing; you’re talking about living in shared space full-time,” I said. “Avie, honestly, you’ve got things too good at home. I can’t see you trying to go to college and negotiating living in a commune at the same time. At least not in your first semester. I’d think twice about that.”
“I’ve already applied,” she said. “Maybe we’ll be neighbors this fall.”
I got so used to having Avie waiting for me when I got home, I half-expected to find her asleep on my bed after school or work. After one late-night stint at the Union Stripe, I saw the light on inside my apartment from under the door. When I opened it, however, it turned out to be Secret Agent Preston Percy stretched out on my bed instead.
“Why am I not surprised?” I said, throwing my apron, which was filthy after serving clam chowder all night, in the hamper.
Preston stretched and yawned. He set the book he’d been reading back onto the milkcrate shelf. “Because we have a special bond, you and I,” he said.
“Which is?”
“We both prefer anal sex,” he said, reaching into his dress shirt pocket and fetching out one of his thin cigarettes.
“I don’t prefer it,” I said. “But since I’m a megahero, the walls of my anus, are you know, reinforced—”
“Yes, go on,” said Preston. “I love the pseudo-scientific explanations you megaheroes come up with.”
“—and I find it tolerable, if not pleasurable—”
“That’s what they all say,” he said, lighting up. “Don’t leave out the morbid fear of reproduction we both share.”
“Oh, shut up,” I snapped. “Besides, I can’t give, only receive—unlike you; Tempy told me you’ve gone from bottom to top…”
“Ouch!” said the secret agent, wincing at the mention of Kav Kavanaugh, the flamboyant, hairdressing Y+Them whom I’d met in New York. “No fair quoting old lovers to me.”
“…and that you’re so far in the closet…”
“You don’t take prisoners, do you?” said Preston. “Throwing Tempy in my face…how could you?”
“You started it, old chum,” I said. “Poor Tempy…too girlish for butch Preston Percy.”
“Good Lord. What’s next, a riff on Pammy?”
“Pammy tried throwing herself in your face,” I reminded him. “She said you weren’t man enough to go anywhere near her twat—with your tongue or anything else…”
“I surrender, I surrender. Jesus Christ.”
“I ought to sit on your face myself, white boy,” I said, “just for showing your face around here.”
“Don’t bother; girls have been trying to straighten me out for years. Hasn’t made a dent yet.”
“Who knows?” I said, caressing my inner thigh lasciviously. “Once you’ve tried black, you may never go back.”
“I’m going to tell your mother on you,” said Preston. “I should know better than to hold a serious conversation with a megahero.”
“Why don’t you tell my grandmother? And my other mother, the Mod Puma? And my real father…if you can find them?”
“Are you still on that kick? I thought you would have gotten it out of your system over Christmas. Didn’t that trip to New York teach you anything?”
“I learned that Roman Man denied being the sperm donor, and that the Human Meltdown is a rapist…”
Preston flinched at this, I could tell it wasn’t the first time the secret agent had heard similar reports about Chuck Roast. “For God’s sake, I hope you didn’t say anything to Stella,” he said. “She thinks the sun rises and sets on Chuck’s ass.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything to Stella. What could I tell her, anyway? That her beloved half-brother tried to rape my half-sister? And that I had to kicked his ass halfway back to Paris?”
“Just as well,” said Preston. “Stella has enough on her mind right about now.”
“What, with Rex?”
“Who else? That bitter old man only wants to keep his clutches on her out of sheer spite. He’s never forgiven her for betraying him, and especially with Megaton Man, whom he’s always resented—something to do with being swindled out of proper credit for coming up with the Megaton idea or somesuch. He also seems to have designs on Simon; would that he were the only one.”
I took off my shirt and trousers that I wore for waitressing, which were as filthy as my apron, and threw them in the hamper, too. Preston didn’t even glance at me in only my panties and undershirt—I never wore a bra. “What are you doing in the ghetto at this hour, anyway?” I said. “Shouldn’t you be in Ann Arbor watching the Son of Megaton Man?”
“This is hardly the ghetto,” said Preston. “This is the quickly gentrifying North Cass District. In another ten years, this place will make Ann Arbor look affordable.”
“Why, is ICHHL going to buy up this campus too?”
“Doesn’t need to,” said Preston, but he didn’t elaborate. “But I wish you’d told me you weren’t coming back to Ann Arbor in the fall; kinda throws a monkey wrench in my routine.”
“In what way?” I asked, slipping on some sweatpants. “You’re not the boss of me. Ms. Megaton Man isn’t even a regular full-time megahero.”
“Maybe not, but it was convenient for me having you living in Ann Arbor. I already have to keep an eye on the former Megaton Man and See-Through Girl, and I’m already dividing my time between Michigan and New York.”
“So, now you have to stop in Detroit along the way,” I said. “And you’ll get to see some girl-on-girl action next time you barge in here—I will definitely arrange that.”
“I wish you’d take this seriously,” said Preston. “You may never have asked to become Ms. Megaton Man, and I may have never asked for it either, but there could come a time when you’re needed…”
“When?” I snapped. “After all the white megaheroes get called up first?”
Preston dropped his cigarette and crushed it into the dirty linoleum with his dress shoe. “I should have known better than to have bothered.” He got up off the bed and paced toward the door.
I began to pull off my T-shirt. “Great, I can have some privacy and take a bath.”
The secret agent opened the door to leave, but stopped and turned. “I happen to know you’re more fond of the kid than I am.”
“So what?” I said.
Preston closed the door. I could hear his footsteps going down the hall to the back stair. I opened the door.
“Wait!” I called out. “Does somebody else mean to harm Simon?”
Preston stopped and looked back to me. “My fear is the whole world will want to harm Simon—if it ever gets out he’s the son of Megaton Man and the See-Thru Girl, and the next Meltdown.”
When Avie and I moved my bed and stuff from Ann Arbor, I left a of things in the attic on Ann Street, including old textbooks and other reading material from school that I wouldn’t necessarily need for my senior year back in Detroit. I should have just taken them to Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore and sold them for a few bucks, but I’m such a packrat—and the afternoon Avie and I took Daddy’s pickup to get my stuff, Trent wasn’t there. He was at work, at the bookstore. After loading up the pickup with all my furniture, lugging that big, heavy box a few blocks—even though I’m Ms. Megaton Man—and making a special trip would mean running into Trent and saying another awkward goodbye. So it was just easier to throw Elements of Communication and Statistics and Society and so on in a box and stash them upstairs.
But I did bring a few books with me to Detroit I knew I would need over the summer, including a dictionary, a thesaurus, and my well-read copies of Maya Angelou. Somehow, I also brought along Pamela Jointly’s first book. We were all living together in the Ann Street house while Pammy was putting it together; even though she was busy teaching journalism classes most of the time I still saw a lot of her. I read or at least glance at many of the clippings she was revising for inclusion—it was a collection of her old controversial columns from the Manhattan Project, the daily newspaper she worked for in New York alongside Trent Phloog, whose secret identity was Megaton Man. Pammy composed reminiscences and editorial commentary to go between the articles; she called it her anthology-memoir. I remember her giving me a copy when it was published, but she was rushing off to some book signing and didn’t even have the time to sign it for me, and I was too busy with finals to sit down and read it from cover to cover.
It was one of those things I treasured, that meant something to me—mainly because I had never known anyone who had ever written a book and had it published—and I couldn’t part with it, even though it wasn’t required reading. Nor did it have anything to do with my major. Now, for some reason, it had fallen in with the stuff I’d brought to my attic apartment on West Forest Avenue, almost by accident. It sat forlornly with the few other tomes in the milk crate that served as a shelf next to my bed, with my clock radio and hand lotion.
Even though the coming school year was going to be intensely busy, once I had settled in, the summer was beginning to look long and boring summer in Detroit, even more boring than Ann Arbor in the summer. I was living away from my parents in that isolated apartment, and there was nothing going on around the Warren Woodward campus; aside from the class I was taking at the Arbor State extension, and my portable black and white TV which only showed summer reruns, there was nothing to do. One day Pammy called me up on the telephone I had just plugged into the wall from the phone company. “I heard you moved back to Detroit for your senior year,” she said. “We should meet for lunch and the museum one of these days.” It was unusual to hear from Pammy, because aside from living together as housemates, we hadn’t exactly been the closest of friends. But we made a date to meet in the Medieval Court Café of the Fine Arts Museum in a few weeks.
As soon as I got off the phone, I fetched Pammy’s book off the milkcrate. Megamusings: Collected Controversial Columns, 1975-1980 was a slender edition, hardcover, with a glossy black dustjacket and a nice picture of the author on the inside back flap. My first thought was that I should bring it along to our luncheon and have her autograph it—to her best friend, Ms. Megaton Man. Then I started flipping through it. Obviously, she had written her columns in New York before she had moved to Ann Arbor and before she met me. But then it suddenly hit me: I’d become Ms. Megaton Man while the book was still in production. I had saved Trent and Percy’s lives from a falling stack of firewood; I’d been to New York and met the Youthful Permutations and the Doomsday Revengers; I’d even battled the Human Meltdown in a harrowing showdown over the Jersey Coast. I had actually joined the class of megapowered beings that Pammy wrote about critically in her Pulitzer Prize-winning controversial columns. Suddenly, what Pammy Jointly had to say about Megaton Man, the Megatropolis Quartet, and all us megaheroes and megavillains had a tremendous urgency for me.
Needless to say, over the next several days, I read the book from cover to cover two or three times. I sat in my hot, sultry apartment in my underwear, my rickety box fan blowing reading late into the night; I took it everywhere with my in my book bag and read it in the Detroit Public Library and in coffee shops after class. I made notes in the margins, I underlined passages with a pencil and a pocket ruler. I made special note of the megaheroes I had actually met in the index, and wrote down their secret identities and any other information I knew about them. By the time I was through, I had thoroughly annotated my copy, and it was no longer mint condition.
Pammy’s critique of megaheroes was swift and to the point: they represented the worst impulses of society. Hyper-masculine males like Megaton Man and overly-sexualized females like the See-Thru Girl offered exaggerated stereotypes, indicative of the unrealistic gender roles in America. The fact that these costumed crime-fighters, their identities shielded from public knowledge, took the law into their own hands, signaled a breakdown in our social institutions, not the least of which was the criminal justice system. The fact that Megaton Man in particular—the Man of Molecules, America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero—wielded the explosive force of a million tons of TNT and personified U.S. foreign policy and America’s insane arms race with the Soviet Union was, in Pammy’s view, particularly unhinged.
I couldn’t argue with any of it. All those over-muscled guys were overcompensating for their masculine insecurities, and the shapely women in the revealing costumes modeled unrealistic standards of beauty for girls—and, for the most part, they played subordinate roles on teams like the Quartet. I had seen even worse things when I visited New York—the exploited Y+Thems and their unsafe Devastation Chamber they used for training, and the sexual harassment and other exploitative working conditions they endured.
But I also knew something else, and it made me increasingly angry as I read the book over and over: these megaheroes were people, risking their lives. They had a human side, completely missing from Pammy’s account, and Pammy knew that—she lived with Trent and Stella, former megaheroes, at least in their civilian form. And she saw how tenderly and conscientiously they raised Simon, their child. And Pammy also knew me, although she hadn’t been there to witness my transformation into Ms. Megaton Man, nor had she ever seen me in action. But she knew me, Clarissa James, and she knew I wasn’t a bad person. I wasn’t the kind of monster she tended to depict in Megamusings. None of us where. I had never talked with Pammy about my experience as a megahero; none of our lives in the Ann Street house factored into the book at all. Many of my notes in the margins were correctives to her text; what her book needed was the human side, the civilian side, of being a megahero. She should show how we live day to day, how we love, how we fuck, how we care for one another. She knew all that, but maybe she needed to be reminded. On the phone, she had mentioned the possibility of a follow-up book, and wanted to pick my brain. Well, I was determined I was going to give her my two cents when we met for lunch, so her next book would offer a more balanced view.
Satisfied with myself, I put my marked-up copy of Megamusings back on the milk crate next to my dictionary and thesaurus, and began counting the days to my luncheon with Pammy.
Next: Giving Nuke a Tumble
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Archival Images:
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| Clarissa battles Chuck Roast in Chapter 29 of Volume I. |
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| Inked blueline. |
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| Blue and graphite pencil on Strathmore 400 Drawing paper. |
All characters, character names, likenesses, words and pictures on this page are ™ and © Don Simpson 2019, all rights reserved.
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