#125: Re-Election Day

When I got up the following morning, my first priority was to set my Ms. Megaton Man visor and buttons on the windowsill so they could recharge for several hours in the sunlight; after that, to find my polling place, the spooky St. Oriel Byzantine Church. It was a short walk from our West Forest apartment down Third Avenue almost to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. I made it a point to get my ass out of bed early and cast my ballot for the challenger to President Harry Foster Lime, whoever that might be. I couldn’t start my day unless I knew I’d done at least that much to defeat him, as had been accomplished in my own reality.

#117: America’s New Nuclear-Powered Hero

The following evening, Mama, Alice Too, Clarissa Too, and I all sat at a table in the Union Stripe Tavern watching the election returns on the TV above the bar. My Counterpart was not wearing her Ms. Megaton Man uniform, of course. Instead, she wore an Orchard Lake University sweatshirt and jeans and sneakers Mama went and bought for her. And she and Alice Too appeared virtually indistinguishable, since Mama had been working out so much; she looked like she was ready to fight crime as the Mod Puma, too.

#116: Live, Coast-to-Coast

By the time Preston drove us to the TV station, Mama was already in makeup. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
        “I’m here to tell America you’re my love child,” said Mama. “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Black folk and white folk have been getting it on since before they discovered America. Hasn’t anybody read Othello?”
        “I think Othello takes place after Columbus discovered America,” I said, “although Avie would know for sure. Besides, it’s far from the ideal love story.”
        “Othello was president of Spain,” said Mama. “If the Spaniards can do without racism in 1492, why can’t America today, in 1984?”

#108: West Forest Knight Rangers

I must have dozed off grading stacks of midterm exams for Intro to Urban Social Policy 101, the giant lecture course for which I served as a teaching assistant at Warren Woodward University. They were handwritten in those lined-paper exam booklets, and each one was like deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. My job was to assess each one fairly, and discern which students had studied for the exam but froze up under pressure, and which were just bullshitting with a lot of filler material. One student scrawled, “I think the planners of the modern cities did a really good job using modernity to plan modern cities”—What the hell did that even mean? And why would anyone taking a college course in city planning ever bother to write such a trite tautology? Another wrote, “Le Corbusier hated the cramped medieval city; he wanted to replace it with apartment blocks and green lawns. Except that people liked their traditions, so Corbu just built overpriced houses for rich people on the outskirts of Paris instead.” I couldn’t tell if that was brilliant and insightful, or just gobbledygook. After three hours of this kind of rubbish I had to close my eyes to relieve my splitting headache.

#102: The Multimensional Pinpointer

It was going to take a while for it to sink in that my eighteen-month-old distant cousin had singlehandedly fended off a battalion of robotic invaders at the Youthful Permutations headquarters in Troy while I had been reading my Introduction to Hypothetics textbook for an upcoming seminar in my off-campus apartment in Detroit ten miles away.

#101: Secret-Secret Weapon

I wandered into the living room, sifting through the newspaper clippings. I had difficulty absorbing the information they reported: flying robots had attacked the Youthful Permutations headquarters up in Troy, just north of Detroit, in broad daylight. All of this had taken place within the past week, apparently, while I, holed up in my apartment, hadn’t heard a word about it.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.”

#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.

#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.

#41: The Thirteenth Scientist

So, there I was, standing in the studio space of my garret apartment while my Asian friend, Audrey—who had a body virtually identical to mine, except with slightly bigger boobs—wore my Ms. Megaton Man uniform, while the woman who had sewn it—my long-lost grandmother, Mercedith Robeson-James—inspected her handiwork like it was hanging on a department-store mannequin. I had just phoned my half-sister, Avie, that Seedy James, whom our mother had always died working for the government during World War II, was alive and well, and Avie said she was on her way over…
     But before I tell you what happened next, there’s a part I skipped over. So let me back up.