#96: How We Lost the Farm

Let’s just say I half-convinced my grandmother, Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James, I was telling the truth. Of course, I couldn’t prove I was Ms. Megaton Man in some other reality, because in this one, I was only civilian Clarissa James. As such, I couldn’t fly or do anything megaheroic to demonstrate I once possessed megapowers. In fact, with a rod in my thigh bone, I couldn’t do much more than spin around in my wheelchair with my one good leg. But my knowledge of her own past as one of the thirteen Doomsday Factory scientists that had worked on the Atomic Soldier seemed to convince Grandma Seedy the alternate reality I described was at least theoretically plausible.
        She didn’t think I was completely crazy, in other words.

#95: Civilian Clarissa

Next thing I knew, I was back in Detroit, in my folks’ home, still in my accursed wheelchair. I was in the middle of the dining room off of the kitchen. Mama and Daddy were making a big fuss over me, about rearranging the first floor guest room, which they had been using as a TV den, but were converting into a temporary bedroom for me so I wouldn’t have to go up and down the stairs while I convalesced.
        Avie was helping them, bringing down pillows and bedding from upstairs, after Mama and Daddy brought down the mattress and box spring.
        I called Avie aside.
        “Avie, I’m not supposed to be here,” I whispered.

#94: The Parallax View

In this alternate reality, certain events were unfolding differently from the way I remembered. Trent and Stella weren’t on speaking terms, even with Stella about to give birth to their baby. This made no sense—what could explain it? Doctor Messiah suggested it could be that in this reality, Clarissa James wasn’t Ms. Megaton Man. But I didn’t see what difference that could have made, since in the early spring of 1981—when Simon Phloog was born—I hadn’t yet become Ms. Megaton Man anyway.

#93: Tripping With Doctor Messiah

The next moment we were standing in front of my old house on Ann Street in Ann Arbor. I could feel the hard, scruffy cement of the driveway beneath my bare feet. It wasn’t as disorienting as I’d expected, although for a moment I was slightly dizzy.
        “At least astral-projection across space is possible,” I said, as if I were informing Doctor Messiah. “But, am I really here?”
        Doctor Messiah stood on the sidewalk next to me in his bare feet, arms folded, a faint smile on his lips. “Why don’t you find out?”

#92: Magic Carpet Ride

That afternoon, I went up to the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute. Given the time of year, I expected Doctor Messiah to be off on a mystical summer sabbatical in some exotic, foreign place like Tibet or Transylvania. But to my surprise, I found him in. As usual, he wasn’t busy studying any of the arcane materials stored on the endless shelves which took up nearly the entire top floor of the Wardell Hotel. Instead, he was just silently sitting cross-legged on his oriental carpet, barefoot in worn flared jeans, the yin-yang symbol on the chest of his black turtleneck oddly glowing, meditating.

#91: On the Down-Low

When I returned to Detroit, I had the apartment on West Forest Avenue all to myself. Avie, following in the James sisters tradition I had inadvertently initiated, had gone up to Camp Michi-Fo-La-Ca for a two-week stint as a camp counselor, just as I had done for three summers between my freshman, sophomore, and two junior years of college. But whereas my first summer camp had introduced me to a variety of sexual experiences courtesy of the older, more wizened college-age counselors, my younger and more extroverted half-sister already had years of experience of her own and a wealth of hard-won sexual knowledge; I could only imagine what her fellow counselors would be learning from her.

#90: Profusion and Proliferation

Introduction to Volume IV: Civilian

I graduated from Arbor State University in the spring of 1984—a year late, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere and at the time was still trying to live down. Briefly, I attribute the delay in part to what I call my delayed freshman crisis. Being a studious student, it took me a couple years of college before I came out of my shell socially and sexually, aided by more extroverted friends and various psychoactive substances, not to mention a serendipitous, protracted hookup with Yarn Man.
        Another impediment was my discovery, in the summer of 1982, that I was a natural-born megahero, which earned me a costume and some quirky new colleagues. As Ms. Megaton Man, as I called myself, the few adventures I’d had, if you could call them that, were a distraction at best, only making my return to the dean’s list that much more challenging.

#89: Crown Heights

When they joined the Reconstituted Megatropolis Quartet, the Phantom Jungle and Rubber Brother thought they’d be doing glamorous things alongside Liquid Man, Yarn Man, and Kozmik Kat, like battling intergalactic menaces that threatened to invade earth.
        In truth, so did I.
        Instead, our alter-egos—Donna Blank, social worker, Jasper Johnson, philanthropic volunteer, and myself—had to spend all our time coordinating with the City of Megatropolis Social Services to find housing, financial assistance, and food stamps for all the civilians who had lucrative careers in the Quantum Tower in the other reality, but had found themselves completely dislocated, socially and financially, by the sudden move to this dimension.

#88: The Quantum Tower

Since my visit to the Forbidden Future, I swore off any form of transportation that was faster-than-light let alone temporal or dimensional, and decided to fly myself to New York as Ms. Megaton Man. So, one morning I suited up, with the class ring my father had bought me for graduation snugly under my yellow glove. Kozmik Kat, who could probably fly but was too chicken to try, had to settle for being uncomfortably crammed into my backpack. The digital readouts on my visor kept me out of the air lanes—it even provided me a good public domain book to read, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White—and we made it in a couple of hours, although Koz clawed me once or twice when I wasn’t paying attention and we hit turbulence.

#87: Those Chosen Few

In the parking lot outside the Big Yard, I spotted my father, Clyde Phloog; although he was in his civilian form and not his default Silver Age Megaton Man stature, he still seemed a head taller than everyone in the crowd. He was dressed in a sharp business suit and was snapping away with a self-developing film camera as Stella and I approached, triumphant, in our caps and gowns, clutching the scrolled mock-sheepskins we’d received on the stage.

#86: Apocalyptic Megachallenges

Flying back and forth from Detroit to Troy had been relatively easy for me, even in winter, because it was north and south, but Detroit to Ann Arbor was a different story. Arbor State University was due west, and often I’d often run into strong westerly winds, and in frigid temperatures it was even worse. My uniform offered thermal protection for most of my body, but the V-neck on my torso went down to the bottom of my sternum, leaving the center of my chest, neck, and face exposed to the wind. In late February, with highs in the twenties and lows below zero, I would really feel it.

#85: Who Watches the Watchmen?

I’d been haranguing Avie for twenty minutes with my theory about the Multimensions, and my suspicions concerning Reverend Enoch, while she went through her workout in the basement of our apartment.

#84: Archangels and Other Responsible Grown-Ups

The weekend before finals week, all I could think about was the impromptu trip I had taken with Kozmik Kat to the Forbidden Future. Most people visit Europe after they graduate, as a present; I had accidentally visited 2184 before my graduation. It felt like I’d had desert before finishing my vegetables; graduation was going to be anticlimactic.

#83: The Tragic Realization of Temporal-Dimensional Travel

Before I could clamber to my feet, two of the Megaton Mice had grabbed Kozmik Kat by the whiskers and were flinging him around the clearing.
        “Hey, you guys! Cut that out!” I shouted. But the other two had clamped onto my ankles. For their size, they were strong. “Ouch! That hurts!
        I shook them off; they went rolling toward the rubble pile. But Koz wasn’t faring as well. “Guys! I’m a different person now!” he cried, as one twirled him by his tail. “I would never chomp your brother today—really! He even tasted lousy, compared to other mice. I haven’t touched one since!”

#82: My Excellent Adventure with Kozmik Kat

I had often wondered what caused readers of popular fantastic fiction to spend as much time, if not more, poring over the writings of Emil Reardon Ryerson, Grover Edwin Honath, and Henry Potsdam Lipschitz, and memorizing shelves of information of completely made-up worlds like Whagool or the Daemonic Ravines of New Hampshire, or the Antediluvian Age, and yet be unwilling to put the same energy into public school, and later a master’s degree in history, philosophy, or French Medieval lit?

#81: Views from Olympus

“What up doe, Banky?” I said as I entered the Troy+Thems hall.
     Few people get my sense of humor to begin with, and my white colleagues weren’t sure they had permission to laugh at a black woman doing her impression of a racial stereotype. But Rubber Brother loved it.
     “Ha! Buckwheat from The Little Rascals,” he chortled. “Clarissa, that breaks me up every time you do it!”

#80: Escape-Ism From Flung-Into-Ness

At first, I wasn’t sure why I had been so rough on Trent over breakfast.
     True, I did have a lot on my mind, and men can have such rotten timing. And he was being awfully presumptuous, making plans without keeping me posted. I suppose he also thought he’d been loyal to me all this time, just to still be thinking of me, and then finally, after long indecision, acting upon it. Still, it wasn’t like he’d been trapped in another dimension all this time; he could have called, or borrowed a car to see me, or written me letters.

#79: A Little Pseudo-Martian Told Me

I found that as March ended and April—my last official month of undergraduate college—began, I was spending a lot more time in the stacks of the Inland Ocean Archeological and Anthropological Institute than I was at the other available libraries to study for classes. Just as Michele had told me, I had ready access to the institute any time I wanted, at all hours; I merely walked into the elevator in the lobby of the Wardell Building and it whisked me right up to the thirteenth floor, express, without being buzzed up, or having a special turnkey. Somehow, the lighted buttons recognized my touch.

#78: Afternoon of the Asp

After my morning art history class at the Detroit Museum of Fine Arts, I found myself chatting with Michele Selket, Doctor Messiah’s teaching fellow. Ostensibly, I had questions of her about the class, but to be honest, I also had much bigger concerns outside of school.
     On the steps, we considered Rodin’s Thinker and watched the water cascade down the steps of the newly-installed fountain pouring down toward Woodward Avenue. After she answered my questions concerning how to distinguish between the Renaissance, Palladianism, Greek Revival, and neoclassicism—her answer in fact didn’t clear anything up for me and I doubt anyone’s ever would—she asked, “Is there anything else on your mind, Clarissa?”

#77: Schroedinger’s Cat

The Wilbert Dunlevy Himmelfarb Presentation Festival of Undergraduate Research is held every year in mid-to late March, depending on when spring break ends and Easter occurrs, on the main campus of Arbor State University. This year, it landed on March 21 through 23, 1984. Sponsored by the Albert Kahn School of Arts and Sciences, the festival took over almost an entire floor of the Modern Language Building, with programming running concurrently in more than two dozen classrooms. Drawing from all the satellite campuses including my own extension in midtown Detroit, the programming featured mostly seniors giving brief synopses of the senior theses they had completed during the fall semester, but ambitious underclassmen could also enter to showcase their research projects.

#76: Who’ll Have You?

A week later, Secret Agent Preston Percy called to summon Avie and I to an urgent meeting of the Y+Thems at their Troy, Michigan headquarters. “Be here this afternoon,” he ordered.
     “Impossible,” I replied. “I’m scheduled at the Union Stripe Café, and I have a buttload of homework…”
     “Call off,” said Preston simply, and hung up.
     I got Nancy, who was back in the employ of the restaurant after quitting abruptly the summer before, to cover for me at the last minute. Avie and I drove up to Troy in her Pacer that evening, our megahero uniforms under our civvies.

#75: He, She, Him, Her

“Shouldn’t it be the Positive Woman?” asked Avie. “If the Negative Man stopped being a man, he might have stopped being made of anti-matter as well…”
     “No, he was still made of anti-matter,” I replied. “I mean she. He’s a she now. She just switched genders. Or sexes. Or whatever you want to call it. I mean, he switched…into a she.”
     We were all sitting around Wilton Ashe’s bookish apartment on Ferry Street at Cass Avenue—Avie, Wilton, Audrey, and I. It had a big bay window open to the south, and was crammed with all kinds of houseplants and bookshelves. It only had one bedroom but it had a nice-sized kitchen and living room. The walls were white and everything was open and bright. The sky was clear and blue and the steam heat cranking from the radiators almost gave the illusion of spring or summer, even though it was still winter.

#74: Double Negative

I agreed to go back up to Troy a few nights later, on a night when I wasn’t scheduled at the Union Stripe Café. But it had been so long since I’d used my megapowers I really had to psyche myself up. The last time I had tried pulling on Avie’s weight machines, I could barely do ten reps at forty pounds, flabby civilian weakling I had become. But when I put on my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, my courage came back and I managed to fly to Detroit’s northern suburbs without any problem. I had no choice, since I don’t drive and I didn’t want Avie hanging around dangerous scientific machinery any more than was necessary. In fact, I was hoping she’d get so busy with school and her theater group that she’d forget about joining the Troy+Thems altogether, so I never even let on to her that I was going.

#73: The Whistleroar of the Wondrous Warhound

Neither I nor Avie had bothered to do any cleaning in our apartment since we’d moved in before New Year’s, except for a quick tidying up before my birthday gathering. She had promised to dust and run the sweeper in the upstairs living room, and I agreed to handle the kitchen and bathroom, which was right next to it. We both managed to find ways to procrastinate—me with my homework and her with her working out in the basement. But by mid-February, the bathroom was starting to get funky, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. So there I was, scrubbing the tiles in our shower. I could hear Avie clacking away at the weight machine down in the basement, and was more than a bit perturbed at her. What if Clyde and Alice² were to drop by? Of course, this wasn’t likely—I hadn’t heard from them since they’d gone to New York.

#72: Guess Who’s Not Coming to Dinner

Chuck Roast’s eyes opened instantly. He bolted upright, grabbing the cushions of the sofa. Holding one in front of himself defensively, he cried, “Who? What?”
     “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “What is the Human Meltdown doing back in America?”
     “I was recovering from jet lag, if you must know,” he said. “What are you doing...? Oh, that’s right. You used to live here.”
     Chuck rubbed the sleep from his eyes, set the cushion back in its place, turned, and put his feet on the floor. He relaxed somewhat, satisfied that I wasn’t immediately going to attack him.

#71: The Troy+Thems

It was the first of February, the day before my birthday, and I was walking home from my afternoon class at Old Main when I noticed a white van in the parking lot of the First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. This wasn’t just the usual white van belonging to the residents, my friends the Y+Thems, which was always there, but a second van parked alongside it. On the side of this van were the words Inter-faith Church Healing for Hopeless Liabilities, and there was a dumpster unceremoniously plopped down next to it that ICHHL workers were quickly filling with debris.
     “Oh, no,” I said to myself. “What now?”

#70: The Once and Future Crime Busters

After our mysterious encounter with our art history professor, we broke off and scattered about the museum to select a painting or statue to write about. I chose a large canvas by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900) entitled Cotopaxi (1862), a large tableaux that filled up an entire gallery wall, or so it seemed to me, featuring a volcano erupting. Smoke billowed up into the stratosphere, creating a blood red sky around a setting sun, with lush, colorful jungles stretching toward you in the foreground. There was even a little South American man and burro on a path watching the whole thing. Ever since school trips in childhood, it had been my favorite painting in the whole museum; I could stand in front of it and have it fill my whole field of vision for hours at a time. I remembered a teacher in grade school telling us it was an allegory for the Civil War that was waging in the American South when it was painted, so I threw that in my paper, although my guess was Professor Joshua bar-Joseph, whom his teaching fellow Michele Selket referred to by the mystical nickname Doctor Messiah, would consider such pedestrian interpretation overly-determined and literal-minded.

#69: Art History with Doctor Messiah

“Are you sure you’ll be able to get back to Ann Arbor okay, uh, Dad?” I asked, as Avie’s Pacer neared our mama’s apartment.
     My biological father—Clyde Phloog, the Silver Age Megaton Man, only now dressed as Lt. Colonel Clyde Pflug, USAF—smiled broadly. “I’ve got those capsules Dr. Joe gave me,” he said, patting his medal-encrusted breast pocket. “After the blue one I took wears off, I’ll be able to fly back as the Silver Age Megaton Man. And if it doesn’t wear off, I can take a red one to speed up the conversion.” He looked dimly at Kozmik Kat, who shared the back seat with him. “I only wish I had a lint roller for all this cat hair.”
     “Sorry,” said Koz. “I shed whenever I’m around radiation.”

#68: Will the Real Dr. Joe Please Stand Up?

We all looked in horror at my father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, to see what effect, if any, the blue gelatin capsule would have on him. Would it really neutralize his megapowers? Was the man who gave it to him really Dr. Joe, or was he Doctor Software, and the man who just entered the gymnasium the real Dr. Joe? And was the capsule a lethal dose of some kind of poison the arch-nemesis of all Megaton Men had prepared especially for him?
     “This Megaton Man is just as dumb as any of them,” said Kozmik Kat. “Silver Age or otherwise.”
     “Clyde? Are you all right?” asked Alice² with concern. “You look a little peaked.”
     Clyde began to swoon, and let out his trademark “Woo!” He stood outside the boxing ring now, but grabbed up at the ropes to keep his balance. “I feel dizzy, all of a sudden.”

#67: Knock Down, Drag Out

I shed my bookbag, winter coat, and civvies, stripping down to my Ms. Megaton Man leotard and panties. Koz took my bookbag before I could retrieve my yellow gloves and boots, let alone my red cape, brass buttons, or translucent-orange visor. “You won’t be needing that stuff,” he said, throwing me a pair of white silk boxing trunks instead. “Here, put these on,” he said as he grabbed a pair of red boxing gloves that hung on a peg on the wall.

     I noticed Alice², the Mod Puma, had shed her boots with their razor-like talons, so we were both barefoot. Presumably, she wasn’t wearing her taloned gloves, either, under her boxing mitts. She had slipped on a pair of black boxers nearly indistinguishable in color from her navy blue tights.

     All that was left after my gloves were tied was the padded head guard that boxers wear around their faces for protection during sparring matches, and a mouthpiece to protect the dentistry. “Is that really necessary?” I asked, as Koz proffered these.

     “Better safe than sorry,” said Koz.

#66: Plenty of Free Parking

I don’t know why I tell my sister Avril anything, because she always makes things more complicated.
     I mentioned to her that I desperately wanted to visit our Grandma while she was in Ann Arbor, and to visit my biological father, the Silver Age Megaton Man, and our alternate mama, the Mod Puma, at Megatonic University.
     “Great,” said Avie. “I’ll drive.”
     “No, I just want to fly in and out, real quick,” I said. By myself, was the implication.
     “Nonsense,” said Avie. “Seedy is my Grandma, too, and Alice² is our alternate mama.”
     “I’ll come along,” said Kozmik Kat. “I like the Mod Puma…I like any feline character of the female persuasion.”

#65: At No Fixed Address

“What possible justification could you have for evicting me, on the night before Christmas?” I said, my eyes narrowing at my landlord. “I pay my rent on time. I’m clean, I’m quiet…”
     “Up and down the stairs with your friends all the time,” he replied. “Men, women, all hours. You have some kind of twenty-four hour orgy going on in my attic!”
     The lady on the first floor who listened to fire-and-brimstone radio preachers all the time, I figured, had blown the whistle. I resisted the urge to break my landlord’s jaw in three places, something I was pretty sure I was angry enough to do—even without my megapowers. His words were so completely shocking, it took me a moment to realize his breath was rank with booze.

#64: Edge of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Volume III: Troy

The fall semester of my senior year had ended strongly, and it looked as though the year itself would end on an upbeat note. Moving back to Detroit had been a good move; I had successfully completed my senior thesis on urban cultural theory, and nearly all of the credits in my social planning major had been completed. I was looking forward to a spring semester much like the fall had been. My schedule—mostly electives—would be entirely in the University-Cultural Center, with classes held either at the Arbor State Extension across from the museum or at Warren Woodward University, where I had already taken several cross-listed courses and where I had applied and planned to go to grad school. Except for paperwork, I would have little need to visit Ann Arbor regularly until graduation—which I really looked forward to, because it meant walking in the ceremony with Stella Starlight, my old roommate and almost the first friend I had made there, who would be graduating at the same time.

#63: The Snows of State Fair Avenue

“Wait a minute!” cried Yarn Man. “How do we know it’s really the Silver Age Megaton Man and the Mod Puma the Time Turntable has brought back from another dimension—and not just a couple o’ crummy imposters?”
     The Mod Puma turned and glared at him. “Bing, how would you like the polka dots on your boxers to migrate up to your eyeballs?” Feline-like, she lunged off the turntable and into the snow, executed a few practice karate kicks with her taloned feet, and held her clawed hands stiffly in front of her face, ready to chop.
     Yarn Man grimaced and covered his groin with his red mittens. “That’s the real Mod Puma, all right,” he conceded.
     The psychedelic cat relaxed her stance. “I thought so,” she said.

#62: This Fairground, This Battlefield

I wasn’t wearing my Ms. Megaton Man uniform under my clothes for extra insulation as I usually did this time of year, since I was wearing my nice dress again to visit Mama. So, I had to race back to where Avie had parked her Pacer. There, in the back seat among the groceries and gifts, I had stowed my book bag, just in case. I stripped right there, in the parking lot behind Mama’s apartment building, hoping none of her neighbors happened to be looking out their back windows at just that moment to see her daughter turn into a megahero.

#61: Cool Jazz Christmas in the Medieval Court Café

The Slick dashed into my john to take a leak; how romantic, I thought. In the front room of my studio garret apartment, I stripped off my civilian clothing and stood barefoot in my Ms. Megaton Man body suit, waiting. I wondered if he’d have the courtesy to put the toilet seat back down when he was through.

#60: Spotting a Roof-Runner

I was downtown doing some Christmas shopping—window shopping, really—for Mama and Avie, and wasn’t having much luck. I never knew what to get Daddy—Avie and I usually teamed up to get him a power tool from the hardware store at the last minute, so I was putting off any consideration of that gift entirely. My senior thesis was turned in, and except for a final exam tomorrow, my semester was in the bag. The following spring semester would be my last as a college undergrad. But instead of a sense of relief and anticipation, there was a knot in the pit of my stomach. I found myself worried about Dana, about what I may have done to screw things up and turn her into a megavillain. I dreaded when we’d meet again, when I would inevitably have to kick her ass.

#59: Mona Lisa Outer Drive

After Thanksgiving, things were hopping at the Union Stripe Café. A lot of businesses along Woodward Avenue booked our “banquet hall”—basically, another storefront adjacent to and about the same size as our regular dining room—for holiday parties. Even the professionals from the medical center, notorious for being stingy tippers, had to pay up—a fifteen-percent gratuity was automatically added to their collective bill. Some patrons got so drunk they still left change—only a few percent, but gravy for us wait staff. Some nights I was walking out of the restaurant with more than a hundred bucks in cash—good money in the early eighties.

#58: Megahero-Free Zone

“Look, Mama,” said Avie, proudly. “Clarissa’s wearing a dress.”
     “What’s the occasion, Sissy?” asked Mama.
     “You mean besides having Thanksgiving dinner with our Mama?” I replied. Avie and I were helping Mama take the turkey out of oven in her tiny new apartment near Eight Mile Road. “I can be traditional when I want to.”
     “You didn’t have to get dressed up for me,” said Mama. “But you do look nice in a dress for a change. I don’t think I’ve seen you in one since high school.”
     “Clarissa went by the house to pick up her old clarinet,” said Avie. “Daddy told her she was dressing too much like a boy lately and that she should grab some of her old dresses out of the attic, too, while she was at it. Only, they don’t fit her anymore. So he gave her money to buy new reeds and a new frock.”
     “Avie can’t keep anything secret,” I said. I stuck my tongue out at my half-sister.

#57: The Revelation from Missouri

I should probably mention that in my student days, especially when I wore my civilian clothes over my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, I was never anything to look at. I dressed down in the cooler months, September through May in Detroit. I wore jeans that were neither excessively baggy nor excessively tight; a baseball jersey, extra-large T-shirt, sweater, or school sweatshirt, depending on the weather; and a hoody, windbreaker, or baseball jacket over that. In really cold weather, I had a winter coat—kind of a weatherproof parka with a fake-fur hood. Oh, and I got an old army jacket just for kicks. I seldom wore makeup during the day, and I never wore my wavy, burgundy hair any special way other than sometimes pulled back in a ponytail. It wasn’t that I was necessarily going for the lesbian look—I never went in for plaid shirts and work boots, the de rigueur uniform of the brush-cut bull dyke; I just never wanted to attract sexual attention to myself when I was hoofing between my classes at the Arbor State Extension and Warren Woodward University campus. In a harsh city like Detroit, it seemed an eminently practical decision.

#56: Ms. Megaton Is Skank

“Then what did you do?” asked Avie. She sat at my tiny kitchen table, wolfing down cheese curls like they were goin out of style.
     “I took off his clothes, and then I knelt down…” I said.
     “Were you naked?” My half-sister wanted ever detail.
     “I had on my panties,” I said. “I was having my period, I told you.”
     “Was he lying on the bed?” asked Avie.
     “No; that’s a good point, Avie,” I said. “Gene was standing; I asked him to stand. He was uncomfortable about it, maybe because of the way the ceiling angles; he was nearly hitting his head. You know what he said?”
     “What?”

#55: Sex Drive in the Motor City

I need to backtrack here and explain a few things.
     You see, I had always thought the Ann Street house where I lived during my early college years was a commune. But it was no more a real commune than its basement rec room—which Daddy had built and where Yarn Man and I had holed up for a few lost weeks—was a real hippie crash pad. There was nothing at all about the lifestyle Trent, Stella, Pammy and I were living at the time that was truly communal, least of all in any utopian, sixties sense. We were all simply housemates who shared a living space. We each rented our own bedrooms and shared certain other spaces in the house. We didn’t buy food together or even eat together all that often; we didn’t have a set list of chores or obligations. We just cooperated and respected one another, and otherwise took care of our own messes. Otherwise, we all remained very suburban and middle-class in our outlook.

#54 Devil’s Night in Detroit

The Y+Thems set up an impromptu outdoor chimney in the parking lot of the Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City. Soren and Dana made it out of brick salvaged from some demolished building nearby, and Avie and Kiddo, with Benjamin Franklin Phloog strapped to her torso, brought firewood back from the suburbs in the Y+Thems white van. By sundown, a bright, warm blaze was burning, and we huddled around the hearth in our almost-winter coats, warming our hands. Kozmik Kat broke out some marshmallows from the church pantry, and Jasper converted some fallen branches from trees on the tiny church grounds into sticks that we used to skewer and roast them. It was more than a seasonal ritual for us, although it had that air; it was also the Y+Thems’ job, what they had been hired to do as resident guardians of the century-old neo-Gothic church building. They planned an overnight vigil in rotating, two-hour shifts to protect the structure from vandalism, or worse, arson, on the most dangerous night of the year. It was the night before Halloween—Devil’s Night in Detroit.

#53: I Got the Senior Thesis Blues

I clacked away at my typewriter into the wee hours of the morning. In the background was the Warren Woodward University public radio station, WWWU, humming at a low volume on my cheap clock radio. It was so late, the programming had gone from news to jazz to classical; they were now broadcasting some free-form art rock courtesy of a deejay who was also an editorial contributor to Detroit’s anarcho-primitivist underground newspaper, The Fifth Wheel. The sounds were hypnotically weird, and I was getting bleary-eyed.

#52: Big, Blue, Bulky Guy!

The behemoth robot seemed momentarily confused; its four pairs of red camera lenses whirled around inside its bubble-like glass helmet, taking in the situation.
     “The Hybrid Man seems conflicted,” said the Phantom Jungle Girl, leveling her stone-tipped jungle javelin at the Bot, just in case. “The mad scientist here has given him a direct order contradicting the moral code Wilton and Audrey programmed into him.”
     “Kill the costumed intruders,” Grady barked again, waving the remote in his hand. “And kill these two civilians, while you’re at it.”

#51: B-50, the Hybrid Man

I ran down the hall where I’d seen my cape disappear and burst through some swinging doors into a large laboratory, darkened except for some blinking lights on equipment I couldn’t make out. With the infra-red vision of my visor, I immediately spotted my cape and buttons; they lay lifeless on the floor just a few feet into the lab. For a moment, I feared my cape was dead.
     I picked them up and shook the dust off. I slung my cape around my shoulders and snapped buttons back onto my uniform at the clavicles. The buttons responded by flashing magenta lights, and my cape fluttered.
     “Good; you weren’t killed,” I said. “But something shut you down as soon as you entered this place. What…?”

#50: Telling Tall Tales Along the Ann Arbor Trail

After locking up her office, the Phantom Jungle Girl and I raced downstairs to the waiting Y+Thems van. Rubber Brother was in the passenger seat; with an elongated arm, he opened the sliding side door for us to hop in back. Domina was behind the wheel; she was the only Youthful Permutation. The others—Soren, Kiddo, and Tempy—were never part of our plan, Jasper wanting to keep the operation light and mobile.
     But much to my surprise, my sister Avie and Kozmik Kat were waiting for us in the back seat.

#49: Enter: The Phantom Jungle Girl!

Despite the invitation from Donna Blank herself, not to mention the urging of Rubber Brother, I still procrastinated about visiting Royal Oak. After all, what was I going to tell a licensed social worker? That there was a laboratory deep under the Arbor State where not only Megasoldier Syrup was produced, but also the dead returned to life, and possibly some kind of scientific project was underway that was fusing together incompatible dimensions of reality? And that this may have been connected to my own missing biological father and the return of my long-lost Grandma?

#48: Donna Blank, District Defender

I was in my sweats, shivering at the poor steam heating in my garret apartment, reading over the voluminous notes my advisor had scribbled all over my senior thesis draft, when suddenly there came a knock at the door. “Who is it?”
      “Jasper,” came the reply. “Jasper Johnson.”
     I let him in. Rubber Brother was nattily attired in a sharp business suit with a carefully-folded pocket handkerchief. “You look awful,” he said. “Are you feeling well?”

#47: Dana Dorman, Two Doors Down

Ever since she’d arrived from Megatropolis with a vanload of Youthful Permutations, I’d gotten the vibe that Dana Dorman—the megaheroine known as Domina—had the hots for me. I suppose I’d gotten that vibe from the several times she’d overtly hit on me; her rather crude suggestions in front of the others were frankly embarrassing, and revealed how ill-equipped and lacking in social skills some megaheroes can be. I’d had to make it clear to her over and over that she simply wasn’t my type—she was way too aggressive. But I tried not to be rude to her; after all, she was living in the communal residence of the Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City, just two doors down West Forest from where I lived, with the other Y+Thems exiled in Detroit—along with my younger half-sister, Avie.

#46: Will the Real Mervyn Goldfarb Please Stand Up?

The man casually perusing a magazine at the newsstand at the front of Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore turned to me, perhaps expecting to see an old friend. But I could tell from the look in his eyes that he didn’t recognize me at all.
     “I saw you shoot yourself up with the homemade Megasoldier Syrup you cooked up in your bathtub and sold to unsuspecting college students as a steroid shortcut to megaheroic physique,” I said, “Your musculature puffed up to the size of Megaton Man—then you exploded into bluish slime all over the alley next door!”