Bicycle Superhero

Dennis O’Neil

Superheroes traditionally have secret identities. They use these to keep the prying eyes of the general public from interfering in their “normal” lives.

He come around the corner off Greenwich like a french fried son-abitch and he smack into this black kid on a skateboard and he don’t even slow down, no, he shoots up Charles and hangs a right onto Seventh and he gone, this bastard in a red Corvette.

That’s when I seen him. Or noticed him, really. Skinny dude in the standard uniform, jeans, tee shirt. He’s got long black hair that just hangs and he’s wearing them rimless John Lennon glasses. Riding a bike. I mean, a bicycle that you pedal, not a motorcycle. Clunker bike. Balloon tires, coaster brake, handlebars rusty where the chrome wore away and stuck in wrong so they ain’t lined up with the front fender, and paint scraped away in twenty, thirty places. Bike’s apiece of shit, dude ain’t even that ‘cause you notice a piece of shit. Only all of a sudden he changes!

Let me remember just how it was: About four in the afternoon, July, raining a little. Dude was over on the sidewalk in front of the pukey green building that’s in the middle of the block and for a second a ray of sun got through the clouds and hit him and there was a glare like a somebody hung a hundred flashbulbs on the dude and they all going off at once and then—

He’s still there. But different. The glasses are gone. The hair doesn’t hang, it lays across his forehead and it’s daring you to touch just one tiny strand. The chin, cheeks and brow look like you could bust concrete on them. The jeans and tee shirt have changed into a red spandex racing suit and muscles bulge so his arms and legs look like they was made of strung-together bowling balls. Golden boots, calf-high. The bike’s different, too. Slim and sleek and shiny—not shiny like silver, shiny like a diamond. Wheels thin as wires and no spokes I could see.

He’s facing west. The Vette headed east and after the corner, south. Before the dude changed, he saw the accident—the black kid, remember?—over his shoulder. Then—the handlebars and the front wheel spin. A blur there on the sidewalk with blades of pink and blue and orange light slicing the air around it.

I wish I could draw this. It’s taken me thirty-seven minutes to relate just this much, and not just because I’ve been trying to say it as I might have said it then, either; and the whole thing happened in, I’m guessing, less than ten seconds. I’m leaving a lot out, too (the black kid lying on the pavement, the scrawny trees in front of the pukey building, the rain, the clouds, the whir of traffic on the avenue a hundred yards away—a lot.) Anyway, when the blurring stops, the dude and the bike are facing east and for a second they seem to quiver and—

Another blur. A horizontal one that starts where the dude was on the sidewalk and moves up Charles, around the corner, onto Seventh with the rain slanting after it filling the vacuum it leaves. The dude and his bike, moving at more than a hundred miles an hour. It’s rush hour and thousands of maniac New Yorkers (and maniac Jerseyites, who are worse) are creeping away from their jobs in their usual fury, left hands steering, right fists cramming down their horns, bumper to bumper, a vast, noisy sea of automotives that Moses couldn’t have parted with two rods and—

Does the dude care? No. He tips up the front of his bike, does a wheelie for a tenth of a second and zooms onto the cars. A Nissan Sentra. Leap onto a Ford Taurus. Leap onto a Dodge van. Then—he soars onto the top of an eighteen-wheeler semi, glides over the cab, wafts light as a feather to the pavement inches away from the grill if a feather can waft at a hundred-plus. The Corvette is directly ahead, stopped at Houston Street by a red light and a stream of crosstown traffic. Light changes. Corvette squeals forward. Dude and bike fly over the Corvette, land and stick—not the smallest bounce. Handlebars spin. Dude now faces the driver of the Vette, the murderous hit-and-run bastard. Who freaks. Twists his wheel to the left, which puts him in the path of the semi. Brakes hiss too late. When the noise stops, there’s a heap of Plexiglas and aluminum that started the day as an expensive sports car. The driver is a shredded, bloody, moaning mess.

My father was hunched over his drawing board as I entered the apartment. Without raising his gaze, he greeted me. “Que es, mi perrito.”

“Little dog” was his pet name for me.

On a taboret by his elbow were his treasures, three Windsor-Newton brushes, and a bottle of india ink, a pen in a jar full of blackish water and the vinegary red wine he’d recently begun to favor: he paid a dollar a quart unless he could get it cheap.

“Nada, padrecito.” (I called him mi padre, or padrecito, because although we both spoke English—you got a sampling of my teenage English a few paragraphs ago—we were more comfortable with Spanish. Pero mi he olvido el Espanol. Even if I did remember it, you might have slept through your high-school language classes. So, en Ingles:)

“You got work?”

He looked up, his eyes webbed with tiny red lines, an ink smudge on his chin darkening his whiskers. “Lettering job. From Gruenwald at Marvel.”

A nip of disappointment somewhere in the region of my sternum: Lettering paid 18 a page, which was better than the nothing he had been earning for the past two months, but worse than his inking rate of 45 or his penciling rate of 65. And my father wasn’t a letterer, damn it, he was an artist. Back in Puerto Rico, family and friends would come to the little house outside San Juan we’d moved into a year before my mother had died, and pore over his drawings of the great superheroes, his Spider-Man and Captain America and Hawkman and even his Superman, comparing them to the work in the thousands of comics that littered the rooms, and everyone would say my father’s renderings were better. Drink beer and praise him as a genius. The editors in America seemed to agree. After receiving a few form rejections, he began to get personal letters encouraging him. One of the smaller companies finally offered him a job, the inking of an eight-page story to run as a second feature in a book about the Korean war. He did it and did it well and a mere week later he took from an envelope a check for 320 dollars, a fine sum for such small effort. The note accompanying the payment said that if he was serious about a career in comic art, he should consider moving to the mainland. A year or two in New York would establish him, and after that he could live anywhere in the world where there were mailboxes. Within a month, he had sold his old Buick and the house and we were on a plane bound for New York.

He took a swallow of wine, swirled his pen in the water and asked, “How was school?”

“Okay.”

“Your job?”

“Okay.”

“Nobody’s kicking my little dog these days?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

“I saw the notice.” Leaving for school that morning. It had been taped to our mailbox downstairs.

“Yes. I called the landlord and told him I would soon have money. He said it did not matter. We have to go.”

“We’ll find something better, Daddy.”

“Of course we will.”

I went behind the board to pat him on the shoulder. I looked at the work he was doing. The word balloons were too large, sometimes covering the faces of the characters in the drawings, and the letters themselves were also too large. Because he had not bothered to pencil guidelines onto the board, the lines of copy were uneven and misaligned. There was an inkblot in the middle of one panel where his pen had dripped. I saw three misspellings.

“I’m tired,” I said. “You mind if I turn in?”

“A little dog needs his rest. I’ll be in myself pretty soon.” He wasn’t looking at me. His gaze was fixed on the bottle. But he seldom drank when I was present, and I pretended ignorance of his thirst; we couldn’t have been falser if we’d been wearing greasepaint and speaking iambic pentameter.

I went behind the curtain that separated our two narrow cots from the rest of the apartment, dropped my jeans and tee shirt on the floor and lay down. I hadn’t told him about the Corvette and the dude on the bicycle. I wondered why. Because he wouldn’t have believed me? No, my father believed in everything, from saints to lucky charms to succubi to alligators in the sewers. He was the world’s finest believer, my father was. Then why? Because, I suddenly realized, he would have felt cheated. He had not seen this… what? What was this bicycled avenger?

I heard loud voices. I raised my head and peered out the window. In the light from the streetlamp I could see two transvestites standing in the street and shrieking at each other. The largest of them, a grotesquely fat man almost seven feet tall, wearing a black cocktail dress and silver pumps, was waving a baseball bat. The smaller, skinny one, in a velvet miniskirt and a sunbonnet, held a clutch purse open and upside down in front of the fat man.

“… no money, silly-billy.”

“You gave it to your wife.”

“Did not.”

“Liar!”

The fat man swung the bat. It bounced off the sunbonnet and the knees beneath the miniskirt buckled. The bat arced upward, paused, began to descend and—

Stopped. Caught in mid-swing by a sinewy brown hand, which was attached to a muscular arm in red spandex. The dude stepped into the light and whispered, “Enough.”

“Hell it is,” the fat man screamed and brought the bat around in a flat trajectory aimed at the dude’s face. The dude punched. Once. The bat clattered to the sidewalk and was immediately buried beneath a black cocktail dress and a lot of fat.

I must have blinked. The dude was gone. The skinny man was kneeling by the fat man cooing. I lowered my head and silently answered my own question. What was the bicycled avenger? A superhero. No other word for him.

On my way to school the next morning, I fished a Daily News out of a wire trash can and scanned it for news of the Corvette. There was a two-paragraph story on page 18 describing the accident, but nothing about the superhero. That was amazing. A couple hundred people had witnessed the incident. Could I have been the only one who had seen what had truly happened? Was that possible?

We left our Greenwich Village apartment the following Saturday and moved into a lower east side tenement. We shared four rooms with a family of nine Cubans, a regiment of rats and an army of roaches. I thought nothing could be worse, that our lives could only get better. I was wrong.

But I survived.

Watched my father deteriorate into a twitching mass of coughing and pain, and survived. In my worst moments, and there were plenty of them every day, when I was tempted to crime, drugs or at least the red wine my father managed to continue scoring, I allowed myself to drift into a reverie. I remembered the superhero. The red-spandexed, golden-booted, silver-bicycled protector of the—I was sure—innocent, the helpless, the kind and the decent. A creature like man, but different, perfected, someone wiser, juster, more compassionate who could compel eyes to raise in willing admiration.

On my eighteenth birthday, I saw him again. I was returning from a housing project in Red Hook, in Brooklyn. I’d gone there to see a girl of wit, intelligence, bilinguality and awesome breasts I’d met at a dance in Bed-Stuy. I’d found her in a playground smoking crack with three guys. She hadn’t recognized me. She probably wouldn’t have recognized her mother.

I fled onto an elevated platform and waited for a Manhattan-bound train. An old, old woman in a threadbare brown coat with a Sunday Times magazine covering her head and three bulging paper bags mended with tape at her feet was huddled on a bench near the stairs. I avoided her. She was muttering and she almost certainly stank. A slim man in a fur coat and grey fedora stood a few feet away staring at his snakeskin cowboy boots. Someone else I didn’t want to meet. I gazed up the tracks, trying to will a train into sight. Then I heard a flat, hard snap. I turned. Two red flashes in the shadows in the stairwell and, a half-instant later, two more snaps. Someone on the steps was shooting at the guy in the boots, who was tugging an automatic from his coat pocket. He dropped to his knees and fired. Snapsnapsnap. It was a gunfight, no rare event in that part of the city, and the old woman was directly between the shooters.

She squeezed her eyes shut and began to scream, “Mother sweet Mary have mercy—”

And there he was. There it was. The silver bicycle, riderless, streaking from the darkness at the end of the platform. It slammed into the kneeling gunman and knocked him back, dumping him onto the tracks. A figure in red spandex appeared next to the old woman—from nowhere?—vaulted a railing and dropped onto the second shooter. A pistol spun into the air and a fist struck flesh and a body tumbled to the landing below.

Then silence, except for the old woman’s prayer, now whispered: “… deliver us sinners…”

I put a finger under her chin and tilted her face up. Her eyes opened. “You’re all right now, mama,” I said. She did stink, but that was okay.

I left the platform and went home. I passed through different kinds of neighborhoods, from shabby to elegant to sordid, across the Brooklyn Bridge, uptown to Fourteenth Street, where I shared an apartment with three other students. I didn’t mind the long, chilly journey. I had a lot to consider. To begin with, who was my superhero? Did he have a name? Because, if he didn’t, maybe I should give him one. I seemed to be the only person who ever saw him—and that was something else to mull: why? In comics, everyone seems to know about superheroes; they’re always famous. But suppose the hero didn’t want fame? Suppose, for whatever reason, he preferred to do his deeds as anonymously as possible. Suppose—this was a weird notion—he felt unworthy of his abilities. He’d hide them, wouldn’t he? The ability to hide them might be one of his powers. But then, why not hide them from me?. Obviously, he couldn’t. Because I had special training? Since earliest childhood, my father had shared his faith in superheroism with me—I knew that he did believe in superheroes as surely and strongly as he believed in sewer-dwelling alligators—and that early conditioning may have given me a mental warp which enabled me to resist whatever Citizen Mercury used to make himself invisible.

Citizen Mercury?

Where had that come from?

It wasn’t bad, though. Mercury was the Roman god of speed, and my dude was nothing if not fast. But Citizen? Well, a number of heroes had borne military titles, specifically Captain: Captain Atom, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Captains Midnight, Action, Fearless, Flash and Victory, probably more. There had also been a couple of Majors, Liberty and Victory, who was no relation to the captain. Putting a rank in front did lend some cachet to the name. But the military sucked—everyone has known that since Vietnam, and anyone who hadn’t learned it from Vietnam surely learned it from the Persian Gulf. So Captain wasn’t good; Lieutenant, Colonel or General would have been worse; Private or Corporal would have been silly. “Citizen,” though—why not? It implied humanity, humility and identification with the common man, all good qualities for a hero to have. I had to admit it wouldn’t have looked good on a cover, and when I said it aloud it just sort of plopped off my tongue, but this was life, not comics, and anyway, nobody would ever have to hear it.

I was wrong about that. Someone did have to hear “Citizen Mercury,” someone whose own name was Angeline Gomez. But not for a while.

Specifically, not until I’d seen Citizen Merc in action a dozen more times over the next six years: a purse snatcher; a mugger with a knife in Central Park; a holdup man with a gun in a deli; a baby whose carriage was in the path of a beer truck; a pimp beating on a hooker; a hooker beating on a John; a biker beating on a mailman; a husband pushing his wife out a tenement window; three car thieves; two burglars—all had abrupt and violent dealings with the Citizen.

He had changed. He was bigger, lither. The red spandex suit had been replaced by something darker, looser, somehow more dignified. He’d switched from a Captain Marvel look to a Batman look. I half expected him to appear wearing a cape, but he didn’t; I guess he knew capes were passe.

While C. Mercury was dealing with the street realities of the Apple, I was living, as industriously as possible, the slightly ludicrous life of the extremely short. I hadn’t grown an inch since eighth grade.

But I had, in approximately this order, developed a sense of humor, stumbled through high school, graduated from New York University, met some women who weren’t into the basketball-player physique and had three hot affairs and a cool one, gotten engaged and unengaged, sampled marijuana, cocaine, LSD and various alcohols and discovered, to my relief, that I liked none of them. My father’s predilections had been buried with him. He had been dead for six years when I met Angeline and I wish I could say I mourned him, or at least missed him.

“He was a drunk and a dreamer and a loser and I despised him,” I told her.

“He was also an artist,” she said.

“No excuse.”

We were lying on a sofa in her cousin’s apartment watching Saturday Night Live with the sound off. She was a psych major from St. Louis I’d met the previous summer when she’d come east to spend a month with a cousin who lived in the Village. We’d corresponded, and gotten together when she’d returned three weeks earlier for another visit. Male heads seldom turned when she passed, but she was soft and she listened and seemed to care. Our relationship was dangling between hormones and superego. A condom was a boulder in my hip pocket.

She kissed me, a comforting, sisterly kiss on the cheek, and said, “I’m sure he loved you.”

“Not as much as he loved vino and comic books.”

“How do you know?”

“He spent time with the wine. He took care of the comics. His little dog he ignored. If it hadn’t been for Citizen Mercury—”

“Who?”

I’d uttered it. The name. Without planning to, without wanting to. For a second, I wished I could suck the words back in. But I couldn’t, and I couldn’t dismiss them with a joke or an excuse either, or change the subject, because, once having said them, I had created a need to speak more—explain, describe, share. The Mercster had been mine alone for years and I realized, suddenly, that I wanted help with the awe and terror of the secret he was.

“You’ll think I’m crazy,” I said.

“Probably,” she said, smiling and snuggling closer.

For an hour, feeling her weight on my chest, her breath on my cheek, staring at silent images on a screen, I told her. Every story, Corvette to latest burglary. I finished and waited in an agony of suspense for her reaction.

She got up, switched off the television and with her back to me said, “He’s you. You must know that.”

“No way. I don’t go around being heroic.”

“Maybe not. Maybe you imagined some of it. But you might have done some, too. The bag lady and the guns—”

“Sure, I’m gonna go against a couple of nine-millimeters—”

“I’m not saying you did. But you could have. In a fugue. A state of temporary blackout. You do things you don’t remember later.” She turned and leaned forward, almost bowing, hands splayed on thighs as though she were a quarterback addressing the huddle. “How did you get home from Brooklyn that night?”

“On my bike. I was tired and I was gonna take it on the train—”

“So you had your bicycle. You could have thrown it at the guy in the boots and jumped on the other one.”

“The Corvette—”

“You were wired. You didn’t go a hundred miles an hour or jump over trucks to catch him, you didn’t have to, not in rush-hour traffic, but you thought you did.”

“The witnesses—”

“They might not have noticed a kid on a bike in the excitement. They might not have said anything if they had. They’re New Yorkers.” She perched on the arm of the sofa. “Listen, I just thought of something. You described the whole scene with the Corvette and the truck pretty completely. Well, you were blocks away, on Charles Street. How could you know what happened, exactly?”

“The story in the News—”

“Two paragraphs gave you all that? Two paragraphs that didn’t even mention a kid on a bike?”

“Okay, I made it up. But the others—”

“The transvestites—you were young and healthy and they were old and drunk and crazy. The same kind of explanation could work for the rest, too.”

“Say you’re right. Why didn’t I take credit, get my picture in the papers, get a reward?”

“You were the little dog. Little dogs don’t do great things. Superheroes do.”

“All in my head, huh?”

She bumped onto the cushion beside me and squirmed over.

“Yes, but don’t sound so sad. Citizen Mercury is you, or who you are inside, and it doesn’t make any difference if you really did those things or not. Wanting to do them is what counts.”

If I was Citizen Mercury, then the Mercmeister got laid that night.

But he didn’t, because I wasn’t. No hero would have treated Angeline as I did. I didn’t call her the next day and didn’t answer the phone when I thought she might be calling me. A week later, she surprised me as I was crossing Washington Square Park and, voice full of hurt, asked why I had been avoiding her. I tried to answer, but all I could find inside me was a mute resentment. I went to a bench and she followed me. We sat.

“Did I make you mad?” she asked.

“You know,” I replied, snotty and overbearing, “you’ll be a great shrink. You’ve got the gift. Nice, neat explanations for everything. ‘It’s daddy’s fault, it’s mommy’s fault, it’s your potty training, it’s a fugue.’ Nice, neat boxes. If it won’t fit inside a box, it isn’t real. Not to you. Not to the hot item from Saint Louie, Moe.”

What I was saying I believed. How I said it was loathsome to me.

Angeline stood and hurried away.

I watched her go, hoping someone would appear and undo the damage I hadn’t known I would, or could, do. Hoping for Citizen Mercury, I guess.

I’ve seen a lot of New York dawns since then, prowling the neighborhood or staring out my bedroom window. Finally, yesterday, as I was having a second sip of scalding coffee in a Seventh Avenue doughnut shop, I had my flash of enlightenment. The reason I resented Angeline’s explanation is this: Citizen Mercury has to be something grander than short, skinny me having a hell of a time. If he isn’t, if I merely imagined this demigod whose reality has sustained me, he’s no better than my father’s faiths, and that’s no good at all. That means I’m trapped inside my old man.

Citizen Mercury has to be real.

I left the doughnut shop, pillaged my credit card and bought a suit at Barney’s. Tie, shirt, Florsheims too—very expensive clothing. Cost almost as much as my father had earned during his entire comics career. I’ll wait until midnight and then walk through the grim regions of the city: Harlem, Fort Greene, Red Hook, Bed-Stuy, East New York, the Bowery, in and out of the parks, schoolyards, wino bars, through the crooked alleys in Chinatown and along the vacant stretches between the Hudson piers. Flaunting my finery and my vulnerability. Being an easy victim. Inviting trouble. Sometime soon, I’ll be attacked and when I am, I’ll look for a savior to burst from the darkness. If he doesn’t come, I may die. If he does, I’ll call to him, I’ll beg him to wait, I’ll reach out and touch him and I’ll see my hand on his arm, see that he’s big and splendid and not me, and then I’ll thank him and find a place where I might be able to rest.

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