#165: The Bizarre Files

Dallas and Hoskins clicked their utility belts about a block from the Newburgh Road hotel to become visible again.
        “Lucky you spirited away that spitfire before those Earthling agent types confiscated it,” said Dallas. “I just hope Hatori and Merino don’t find out you mislaid it—and that it was involved in that explosion. They’re the alpha-type personalities in our group and think they’re our den mothers. Munro and Jordyn I’m less worried about.”

#164: Roberts

Agent Lemon Lime woke with a start. “Did you hear that?” she asked. It had sounded to her like a thud, a boom, in the distance, like an artillery shell in war.

#160: Telegraph Road

Lemon Lime had a mind of her own.

#159: Green Eyes

Clarissa thought she saw a shimmer in the alley as she climbed down the ladder from the roof of her apartment building. But her Ms. Megaton Man visor was in her garment bag, along with her uniform. She landed on the back stoop of her apartment and rifled through the bag; by the time she affixed the visor and scanned the alley, whatever it was she thought she saw had gone.

#158: Screen Door

Avie James thought she heard what sounded like tires on gravel in the alley behind the apartment. She was in the kitchen at the rear of the apartment, not cooking or cleaning but planning a stage production on the small kitchenette table. Her notebooks, sketchbooks, and drawing and writing implements were spread out.

#146: Megatron Man #1

“Chase Bradford’s comic book has been published? By a real publisher? That’s wonderful,” I said. I had seen much of the original artwork while he was working on it, but being busy with grad school myself, hadn’t been in touch with the aspiring cartoonist in quite a while. “How do you know, Nancy? Have you seen it?”

#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.

#106: Drawing Board Booty Call

On my way out of Chas’s apartment building the next morning, who do I run into on the landing at the foot of the steps but Peggy, the rich white Grosse Pointe girl slumming in Detroit and studying literature at Warren Woodward University, returning from her escapades out on the town. The look on her face told me immediately she knew the kinds of sleazy things Chas and I had been up to the night before. “How is the undiscovered genius, anyway?” she asked dismissively. “Haven’t seen him crawl out from under his rock lately.”

#105: Blank Book of Dreams

A week before the start of classes, the WWU Student Bookstore was already abuzz with activity. Warren Woodward University, being an urban school, was a very different campus from Arbor State, which was set off in the remote, bucolic woodlands of Michigan west of Detroit. By this time of year, athletes would have already returned to Ann Arbor, and for the past two weeks been jogging around the Diag like troops of marines, whether male or female. By now, one week before the fall semester, regular students would have already begun moving back into dorms and apartments. State Street would be swarming with freshman and returning upperclassmen hunting for textbooks at Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Book Store, filling the bars and restaurants and movie theaters, and generally looking to get laid.

#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.”

#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.

#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.

#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.

#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.

#42: The Theoretical Unraveling of the Kitchen Sinkverse

Avie and I immediately wanted to whisk our newfound grandmother up Woodward Avenue to Eight Mile to reunite with our Mama, who hadn’t seen her mother in over forty years. But Grandma said she had to make an urgent phone call first. Seedy used my dial-up rotary phone and Avie, Charles, and I—and Audrey, who was still dressed in my Ms. Megaton Man uniform—crowded into the tiny kitchen of my garret apartment to give Grandma some privacy. I had a feeling it was some kind of official scientific business.