In the aftermath of my graduation and my half-summer sojourn in Megatropolis, I was experiencing a major letdown, as you might imagine. I had survived five years of college, after all, including all the unscheduled extracurriculars Ms. Megaton Man. Now, I was in the midst of major, despondent, dog-days funk. Summers in midtown Detroit were always quiet, but that summer I could have cut the ennui with a butterknife. The restaurant where I had worked as a waitress, the Union Stripe on Woodward near the Medical Center, didn’t need me back immediately, and my old school chums Nancy, Hadleigh, Audrey, Wilton, and even Chas had all fled town. My favorite lover Gene was apparently on some undercover mission and therefore incommunicado, and I hadn’t heard from either the Slick or Samson McSampson in months. Picking in the neighborhood bars I haunted at night were unusually slim-to-nonexistent.
I had little to do but face the piles of required reading I’d accumulated in anticipation of grad school seminars, not to mention course materials I would need to master for my position as teaching assistant. Additionally, my milk-crate shelves were full of fantastic popular fiction I’d amassed from used bookstores. I had also compiled a stack of hardcore porn that I compulsive jagged off to, despite its being geared toward the male gaze. At least the libraries of Warren Woodward University and the main branch of the public library were open, allowing me to escape my stuffy apartment—ICHHL had not provided climate control when they refurbished my apartment. So, I spent my days shuffling between air-conditioned buildings with a backpack full of books—I left the porn at home—which I read and made notes. I broke up my long bouts of study with intermittent wanderings through the galleries of the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts across Woodward Avenue in the afternoons to clear my head. In the evenings, there was nothing but dismal network TV reruns, which I watched like a zombie until I fell asleep.
By the end of the week, I had ingested as much urban policy and social planning, to say nothing of pulp fiction, as I could stand. I was completely tired of my stack of porn, to say nothing of my exhausted erotic imagination and entirely predictable hand. I was completely bored out of my skull.
One afternoon, I was lying on my bed, mindlessly fingering myself under my athletic shorts and not getting much from it. I found myself staring up at the ring on my other hand—the class ring my father had bought me for graduation. The blue opal was circled with the words, “Arbor State University,” flanked with “BA” on one side and “1984” on the other.
I stopped masturbating and took the ring off. I studied the inscription inside:
Clarissa James
America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero
America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero
I read over and over, even though I knew it by heart.
I reached for the phone and dialed a number I knew by heart, because for so many years it had been my own.
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“Not much,” came the voice on the other end of the line. “Stella’s taken Simon to stay at her parents in Redford for the long weekend, and they don’t need me at the bookstore for at least the next several days. You know how slow things get in Ann Arbor after school lets out.”
It was Trent, my second cousin, the former Megaton Man.
“Tell me about it,” I replied. I explained my sister had gone up north, that nothing was happening in Midtown Detroit, and that I was at the end of my rope.
“I thought you were off to Megatropolis for good,” said Trent. “What happened? Didn’t the Quartet work out?”
“Long story,” I replied. “Well, not really. I just wasn’t feeling the whole ‘big-time megahero’ thing yet.”
“Not ready, huh?” said Trent. “I don’t blame you. It’s a big stage, New York. You’ve got what it takes, but you really have to want it.” There was an awkward pause. “But it’s not like you’re marooned in Detroit for the rest of your life, either. If you’re lonely, you can always fly out here…”
“I was thinking the same thing,” I said. “Only, you could drive here…I mean, if you want to. You still have that car, don’t you? It’s the Motor City, after all. It’s your heteronormative male prerogative to waste gasoline and be the aggressive one. I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.”
“Really?” said Trent. “You want me to…? But before, you said…”
The last time Trent had shown up in Detroit, unannounced, it was just weeks before my graduation. “I was under a lot of stress,” I said. “I said a lot of things I didn’t mean. I wasn’t at my best.”
There was another long pause.
“Well, what do you want?” I snapped. “An engraved invitation?”
In the time it took Trent to pack an overnight bag and drive eighty miles per hour on Route 23—about forty minutes from Ann Arbor—he was at my front door, although he had parked in the back, in the alley. It was still afternoon, and I greeted him in my tank-top and panties. I didn’t have my glasses on, but it looked like he had a hard-on under the untucked flap of his baseball jersey. I averted my eyes and acted nonchalant.
“You can stay in Avie’s room,” I said. “I’m sure she won’t…”
“I don’t want to stay in Avie’s room,” said Trent.
He threw his bag over onto an old leather-covered easy chair Avie had recently acquired and took me right on the living room sofa. After that, we did it again, longer and slower, in my bedroom.
“You realize we’re second cousins?” I whispered, while he was still thrusting inside me. “In some states, this is against the law.”
He responded by succumbing to a shuddering orgasm.
“Christ, I didn’t expect you to come inside me,” I said. “I’m glad I started back on birth control.”
“Sorry,” said Trent. “I guess it’s been a while.”
We did it a third time before dinner after I reminded him miscegenation was still against the law in sixteen states.
After I made us some grilled cheese sandwiches in the nude, we spent almost the next forty-eight hours intermittently humping like two wild monkeys. I spent so much time on my belly that my neck got stiff from having to turn my head to avoid suffocating in my own pillow.
“Are you sure you’re not a horse?” I asked him during one of our brief respites. “‘Cause I visited a farm once, and that was all they did. We were in third grade at the time, and the teacher had a hell of a time diverting our attention to some big, red tractor.”
“You want me to do something else?” he asked.
“Pay some attention to my breasts,” I said.
Afterwards, I said, “You sure you wouldn’t rather be with a guy?”
“I’m pretty sure,” he said. “You’re more woman than I deserve, Clarissa.”
“Hearing that never gets old,” I said. “Although a girl can be skeptical. You really think I’m pretty?”
“You have the most gorgeous body I’ve ever seen,” said Trent, laying down on the bed next to me. “You have a beautiful face.” We were lying back down on the bed now, next to each other. “Christ, can’t you tell? I may never walk again.”
“But I’m not the girl of your dreams,” I said. “You live with the See-Thru Girl,” I pointed out. “You can’t possibly be content, settling for me.”
“Are you kidding? You’re beautiful, Clarissa.” He put his arms around me. “I know you’re not fishing for a complement. I’ve wanted you from the moment I first saw you in your Abyssinian Wolves athletic shorts. Honestly, I’m no more attracted to Stella than she is to me. It’s like we’re brother and sister or something—and after Chuck’s visit, I’m convinced she’d sooner do her half-brother than she would me.”
“Doesn’t she show you any affection?” I asked.
Trent laughed sardonically. “Clarissa, I know you have this romantic desire to see the parents of every child be madly in love with each other. But just because we have Simon, she and I—I mean, we’re just not. In love, I mean. Sure, I always have a certain visceral desire for her…I see her naked all the time. Who wouldn’t? Occasionally, she feels the same for me; at least she allows me to do it to her. But what we do I couldn’t exactly describe as an act of love or even genuine affection. It’s more…perfunctory than that.”
“What do you do?” I asked. “I mean, what does she let you do?”
He smiled wanly, uncomfortably. “Oh, this and that. Usually just the missionary position. After we shower, of course. Occasionally, she lets me put it between her breasts…”
“Oh, my God!” I cried. “Stella lets you fuck her tits?” I was truly shocked. I started laughing.
“She doesn’t like that word, tit,” said Trent. “You know her. She doesn’t even like the word breast. She refers to it as her ‘chest.’ No boobs, knockers, none of that.”
“And what do you do? I mean, where do you…”
“On her neck, mostly. Heaven forbid on her chin or face. You’d think it were toxic waste or something. If I did, she’d have a meltdown.”
“Well, you are the former Megaton Man,” I said, still laughing.
“Well, that’s one sex act we’ll never be able to share,” I said, tweaking my own little boobies.
“You never know,” said Trent, matter-of-factly. “You might get pregnant someday. They do get bigger; that’s Nature’s way.”
“I’m not going to get pregnant just so I can have my tits fucked,” I said.
“Anyway, it’s not as big thrill anymore, like it first was,” said Trent. “Not the way Stella does it. Nothing with Stella is particularly satisfying; somehow, she makes sure of that.”
“Poor Trent,” I said. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“I think something’s going on with her grad advisor,” said Trent. “I think that’s what had her so upset that day you ran into her on the Diag.”
I was disturbed at this. “You think he’s putting the moves on her?” I said. “Already, before she’s even his grad student?” I didn’t mention I had seen the old guy, Terrell Smythe, leaving the Ann Street house one afternoon the week following graduation.
“I don’t know; it’s none of my business,” said Trent. “She doesn’t want my help, that’s for sure. You should hear what her adoptive father, Seymour, thinks of him—considers him a complete charlatan. He’s urging her to switch schools.”
“You mean, you might be leaving Ann Arbor?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” said Trent. “We might be leaving the Midwest altogether.”
Stella did seem to have a “daddy thing” for older gentlemen, particularly decrepit, broken-down geezers; witness her loveless marriage with Liquid Man, Rex Rigid. But we didn’t discuss the matter any further, since for the time being there was no more information to discuss. Instead, we visited the museum on Saturday afternoon, attended church on Sunday morning—I happened to know it was summer vacation for Reverend Enoch, who was up north fishing, so it was a guest sermon by a bull dyke pastor on loan from Battle Creek—ate a lot of Chinese food and pizza, and had sex about five more times over the course of the weekend.
On Monday morning, I watched Trent as he packed his bag.
“Are we being fair to one another?” he wondered.
“No, of course not,” I said. “But at least we haven’t been arrested. And it sure hit the spot.”
I kissed him goodbye and watched him as he climbed into his brown Chevette and drove down the alley, back to Ann Arbor.
For the rest of the morning, I lay on the living room sofa, lost in my studies for the coming semester. But I had to lie on my side—my backside was a bit tender.
Next: Magic Carpet Ride
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| Unpublished drawing of Clarissa and Trent, based on a panel from Return of Megaton Man #1 (Kitchen Sink Press, July 1988). |
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