#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.

#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.

#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.

#38: My Appointment with Pammy (or, Meeting Jointly)

I pushed thoughts of my parents’ pending divorce out of my mind and resisted the temptation to fly up to our old Boswick-Addison neighborhood and confront them about the matter. Daddy would still be at work at that hour—or perhaps he was parked at some motel in Dearborn instead—and I had enough issues on the table with Mama. She refused to reveal the identity of my biological father, and—as I had discovered during my trip to New York over the winter—had for reasons unknown lied to me and Avie all our lives about our grandmother’s death. Apparently, Grandma Seedy—Dr. Mercedith Robeson-James—hadn’t died on some government mission during World War II, as we’d been told, but was alive and well. In fact, she’d even manufactured my custom-made Ms. Megaton Man uniform especially for me in a place called the Doomsday Factory in New Jersey, although I still hadn’t met her.

#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.