#145: Fusion Jazz

Clarissa’s first-person narrative resumes …
        “You expect me to believe the Quantum Quest Quartet became the Megatropolis Quartet simply because all four people temporarily forgot their team name on the Fourth of July, 1976?” I said. “I assume they later recovered their memories. Why didn’t they go back to the original team name? Had they already filed paperwork that prevented them from changing it back or something?”

#115: The Burgundy Blip

I hadn’t even been Ms. Megaton Man for the longest time. Some days I was so busy with schoolwork for my own seminars and courses, not to mention my responsibilities as a TA, that I rarely even thought of being a Megahero. I felt more and more like the ordinary Civilian I had been most of my life—I hardly identified with Ms. Megaton Man at all. She had, in a sense, already gone underground—submerged in the background of studious grad student Clarissa James.
        The only visible vestige that remained were the burgundy tresses I had not time to maintain.
        I phoned Tempy first thing in the morning. “Can you come down to my apartment right away? It’s an emergency.”

#114: Hiding in Plain Sight

When I woke up Monday morning, my only thought was to get to school without incident. I tucked my hair up under my old Arbor State Abyssinian Wolves knit cap, pulled up the hood of my Warren Woodward Warhounds hoodie for good measure—nothing like mixing and matching collegiate licensed apparel from my two schools—and marched out the back door with my book bag. I thought I would be clever and instead of taking Second Avenue directly up to the Warren Woodward campus I took a roundabout way along Prentis to Cass Avenue.

#113: October Surprise in November

The first Sunday morning in November started off rather typically for me: playing the clarinet for the nearly-secular First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City church service. Our dysfunctional music ensemble was led by a long, grey-haired college-dropout organist—really a oboist and English horn player who never practiced the keyboard much during the week—who doubled as our insufferably snobby music director, choosing which hymns to butcher by cleaving out verses that didn’t meet his musical taste; a half-deaf brass player who doubled on electric bass and ukulele; a deeply manic-depressive older lady who played flutes, xylophone, and glockenspiel but always forgot her glasses, music, or the correct instrument she had intended to bring and always arrived in the sanctuary in a state of flustered meltdown; and her codependent husband, a guitarist and flugelhorn player who was forever offering to run home and retrieve his frantic wife’s glasses, music, or alto flute or whatever.

#109: My Dinner With André

I met Chase, Peggy, and Marge at Union Stripe just as Happy Hour was in full swing and turning into the dinner pre-symphony and theater rush. Because Marge and I used to work there, the hostess treated to the front table in the window facing Woodward Avenue.

#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.

#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.

#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?”

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#40: Topmost Secret Priority

Finally, it was the first day of fall semester of my senior year in college. It was a bright, sunny morning in Detroit’s midtown, with traffic crossing Warren and pulsing down Woodward at a brisk pace. I had an early morning class at the Arbor State Extension by the museum, which meant I had to cross that busy intersection; I was nearly run over by a Mack truck running a red light. Later, on the way back, I had to dodge a city bus that apparently didn’t want to brake for a black girl to get to my late morning class on the campus of Warren Woodward University.

#39: North Cass Ditty in the City

“So, you played ‘Deep Throat’ to Pammy Jointly’s Woodward and Bernstein, then you deep-throated Trent Phloog to alleviate your guilt,” said my half-sister.

#37: The First Holistic-Humanist Congregation of Cass City

About a week after my tumble with Nuke, I was coming home from my summer class at the Arbor State Extension and passing the church, hoping perhaps to get another glimpse of the man with the stretchy arm. A white van had just pulled into the church parking lot with a New York license plate. The brake lights went out, the engine shut off, and the side passenger door opened. An orange, fur-covered arm had pushed it open; then, a leg that looked more animal than human stepped out. Long, shiny saber teeth protruded from the mouth of the enormous tiger-man that appeared. He wore long shorts, a tank top, and tennis shoes.