It had been raining. I knew because it was still raining; the gutters were filling up. The building in front of me had windows laced with concrete birds, little statues to scare off the real ones. I was standing on the footpath, my cape blowing weakly in the afternoon breeze.

  People in business attire power-walked under umbrellas and homeless men chased them, in case they dropped the umbrellas. Nobody cared that there was a bona-fide superhero standing there.

 The slanted roofs sat parallel with the slanted street below, and it seemed the people were slanted too, somehow. Then I realised I had one foot in the gutter. If you want to know how to ruin a good pair of tights, this is a good way.

 A cackle started up in my ear. 
 “You’re standing in the puddle,” the criminal to my right said. “Not such a superhero now, is ya?”
  “Actually, these tights are waterproof,” I said.  
  “No they aren’t,” he said. 
  Unless he was a mind reader, I was going to have to work on my lying.

  I stepped up out of the gutter, yanking my arm as I did so. This pulled the criminal down into the puddle. Handcuffs are good like that.
  The criminal’s name was Muffy, which is a terrible name for a criminal but a great name for an idiot. Muffy was an idiot. I had just caught him shooting a gun at the police station. He’d hit a window and a concrete statue of a bird fell from the second story ledge and hit a real bird. Luckily, that bird was already dead from old age. 

  Every time I had to go to the police station I got nervous. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t liked there. The feeling wasn’t assuaged by the big sign in the window that said ‘No superheroes allowed’. For some reason, having super powers doesn’t garner you any respect with law enforcement. All anyone wants to do is sue you: reckless endangerment, reckless driving… most of the ‘reckless’ crimes, really.
   I sighed, which blew over a rubbish bin. It hit a homeless man, who ran off to find a lawyer to sue me and use the money to buy an umbrella, probably.

  My powers aren’t all that complicated. Just take your average five senses and multiply them by a thousand. I bet you’re thinking you now have 5000 senses, but you don’t. You just have 1000 times the power of those five senses.
  And by you I mean me.
   Plus, you have the strength of an ox with a million times the strength of a horse. That’s like a gazillion horsepower, if you want to measure it like that. It’s not even a real number, so you can measure it any way you want.

  I pulled Muffy along, up the stairs to the station door. On the landing, I got a closer look at the window that Muffy had shot. The bullet hole had spider-webbed the glass surrounding it. Then I got even closer and found it was actually a real spider-web. The bullet had gotten lodged in the reinforced glass. My handsome face frowned. That spider never did anything to anyone, as far as I knew. I tried to find the spider to question him but he must have been too upset to speak to anyone. 

  “Now look what you’ve done,” I said, yanking my arm so that he flew through the station doors. “Made a spider homeless.”
  Muffy howled a bit but I think that was more from being catapulted through the air than from guilt. The howl made all the officers in the station look up. When they saw it was me with another criminal, they all groaned. They rolled their eyes too, which was unnecessary, since they had already groaned.
  The cops didn’t like me much and they didn’t pretend to. They used to pretend, but after I discovered they had poisoned my birthday cake they gave up the ruse. I can’t be killed by poison, I kept telling them. Geez, weren’t you even listening when I told you my super powers?
  “Well, what does kill you?” one of them had said impatiently.
  “See, that’s exactly the sort of comment that makes me not want to tell you,” I’d said, exasperated.
  Yet still I kept trying to make a good impression. I smiled at the officers and dragged Muffy over to the reception desk by the Chief of Police’s office. Then I tripped over, delivering me and my captive face-first into the tile.
  It’s understandable that the cops resent a superhero on their turf. But that’s no excuse to use tripwires. That’s just cruel. I might have superpowers but I still have feelings.
  “I hate you, Stupid Man,” Muffy said.
  Stupid Man wasn’t my real superhero name, but it had caught on. The cops had started it. They had started saying the S on my suit stood for Stupid. It did, but they’d taken it out of context. The crest on my suit actually says SCC – Stupid Criminal Catcher. That means I catch stupid criminals. The Chief had said you could also read it to mean I’m a stupid person who catches criminals, but I don’t see it. Besides, at least I catch criminals. The only thing the Chief could catch was a cold. You can’t lock one of them up; I’ve tried.

  “Not you again,” the Chief said, through a sniffley nose.
  “Why don’t you talk through your mouth?” I said. “Your cold would be less noticeable that way.”
  “Shut up, Stupid Man,” his nose replied. “What are you even doing here?”
  The Chief was a rotund man who didn’t like criminals, superheroes or people referring to him as ‘rotund’.
  “I’ve brought you a criminal,” I said, raising my arm to show him that Muffy was still attached to me.
  “Oh geez,” the Chief said. “Sorry, Muffy.”
  “Yeah, so you should be,” said the criminal.
  “Next time I promise it’ll be one of the boys that picks you up,” said the Chief. “If you’re going to go to all the trouble of committing a crime, you should at least be arrested properly.”
  I couldn’t believe my super-sensitive ears; but I had to, since they were super-sensitive. Here I was, delivering a criminal right into the arms of the law and I wasn’t even getting so much as a thank you hug.
   “James!” the Chief called. “Get out here and deal with Muffy.”

  James was the Chief’s secretary, body man, personal assistant. In my business we’d call him a sidekick, but law enforcement doesn’t take kindly to terms like that. Probably some policy of theirs. I thought to myself, I could do with a sidekick. Give people someone else to insult for a change.
  James bumbled into the reception area. He wore a police uniform, but I couldn’t be sure it was the same as the one all the other cops were wearing. Somehow everything looked wrong on him. His shirt was both too tight and too loose, and the insignia on his left shoulder was half hanging down, as if it hadn’t been sewn on properly. His hair was a mess, but he smelled like shampoo all the same.
  “In the lock-up or the kitchen?” asked James.
  “Lock-up, moron. What, do you think I want to make him a cup of coffee or something?”
   The Chief liked to make fun of James because he was dumber than the Chief was. The Chief was dumb, but not quite as dumb as James, so it made him feel superior to tease the kid. Dumb people do things like that.
  “Stupid kid,” the Chief said when James had taken Muffy away. “He almost let Muffy in the kitchen again. Thanks for that, by the way.”
   He wasn’t really thanking me. The story about the kitchen is one of the reasons the cops didn’t like me. I had arrested Muffy before, months ago, and James had let him wait in the kitchen while I was cleaning the slime out of my hair. A bucket of slime atop a door can make lots of cops laugh, if it lands on the right superhero.
  Anyway, Muffy had gotten into the Chief’s personal supply of coffee. As far as I can tell all he did was have a cup. But the Chief had taken that one thing and stuck it in his craw, wherever that is. Then he stuck it in the rest of the officers’ craws. They were all on traffic duty for the next two weeks. The Homicide team found four more bodies once they came back. 
   James popped his head back around the doorframe.
  “Did you say lock-up or…?” His voice trailed off.
  “Lock-up,” the Chief’s teeth said.
  James giggled. “Well, don’t blame me but Muffy is, in fact, in the kitchen.”
  “Oh, I’ll blame somebody,” said the Chief.
  “Blame Muffy,” James suggested.
  I jutted in, heroically. “Blame me – if you’re going to blame anyone.”
  The Chief turned to look at me. And then he did look at me. He looked at me right in the mask.
  “Yeah, smart idea, Stupid Man,” he said. “Let’s blame you.” He grabbed James by the scruff of the neck and pulled him in close.  “Now get him into the lock-up or you’ll be up to your ears in paperwork!”
  “Not paperwork!” James said.
  “Yes, paperwork.”
  The Chief released James and the kid stumbled out of the room. If my face wasn’t so strong I would have winced at the Chief’s treatment of James.
  “What are you still doing here?” the Chief said.
  “I thought we could have a chat,” I said.
  The Chief looked at his wrist. “I don’t have any time for you this morning.”
  “You’re not wearing a watch.”
  He had forgotten about my super sense of sight. And that it wasn’t morning.
  “Fine,” he said, throwing up his arms. “You can have an appointment in, oh, let’s say six minutes.”

  He left the reception and I just sat there, twiddling my super thumbs. I played thumb war with myself.
  I won.
  I looked around the station and took in the blinking computer screens. I took in the cops connected to those machines, feeling them up. Whatever happened to solving crime with just simple wits, smarts and super powers? That’s how they did it back in the old days, whenever they were. Maybe it’s another one of those policies.
  I thought more about my sidekick. He wouldn’t have to do anything too strenuous. Just sorting out my fan mail, my hate mail and sending out the same thank-you note to everyone. Paperwork, mostly.
  Just as I was beginning to think maybe the Chief had made me wait six minutes for no good reason, six minutes was up. I strolled into the Chief’s office, this time noticing the tripwire before I made a fool of myself. The Chief balled up his fist in disappointment.
  “Hey, I saw that.”
  “No you didn’t,” the Chief said. “You were too busy watching your feet.”
  I don’t know how many times I had to tell him my super-human powers included having peripheral vision. Actually, that’s just a regular-human power. Maybe the Chief never understood because he didn’t seem to have any peripheral vision. That would explain why he was always raising his hand arbitrarily and knocking James in the face when he would walk up alongside him. But that might also be explained by the fact that the Chief was a dick.
  Another thing that was explained by the Chief being a dick was a poster he had on his office wall. It said: “James, I hate you.”
  “Is that poster really necessary?” I said. “What did he do to deserve that?”
  “He always makes my coffee cold,’ the Chief said. “I don’t know how he does it, but every time, it’s cold.”
  “I actually like cold coffee,” I said.
  This was true. It’s a bit of a secret, but it helps with the super powers. Like spinach for that vegetable guy.
  The Chief looked at me for a few seconds. “You’re a very strange man,” he said.
  “A very strange super-man,” I said. “So, why don’t you just fire him?”
  “He’s the Commissioner’s nephew; I can’t fire him. I give him all the grunt work, but he still manages to piss me off all day.”
 The Commissioner, I thought, was a smart lady. 

  We got down to business. The Chief didn’t like me delivering criminals to the police’s doorstep like I had been. It was bad publicity. Who were the crime fighters in this city anyway? I said I thought it was just me, but apparently the cops have some claim on that too.
  The Chief made a deal with me: if I would stop delivering criminals to the police’s doorstop he’d change my official name to Special Police Advisor.
  “I thought that’s what I was now.”
  “No,” he said. “Your official title is Public Jackass.”
  This was news to me. Though it did explain why it was written all over my mail.
  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “There’s not much point being a superhero if I can’t fight crime.”
  “You can fight crime; just don’t rub it in our faces.”
  “Yeah, but that’s kind of the fun part,” I said. “That’s not enough to make me quit.”
  The Chief said, “Well, what will you quit for, jackass?”
  Before I could answer, a phone rang and the Chief left the room. I heard James say “Ouch” from behind the partition. Peripheral vision.
  I looked back at the “I hate you, James” sign. I don’t like it when someone bullies a sidekick like that. Sure, he’s your inferior. Maybe he even should be walking hunched over so that you’re always the tallest person in the room. But you can’t just hang a sign that says you hate him. That’s disproportionate. And if there’s one thing I hate, it’s disproporiotionality.
  If there’s two things I hate, it’s disproportionality and long words. 

  I left the room and walked into James’s office, which was actually a cubicle just outside the Chief’s office. His window was the one Muffy had shot at. On the desk there was a fax machine that wasn’t plugged in and a large daily planner with a pen attached by a ribbon. Someone had written ‘James’s Computer’ in chalk on the front of the folder.
  I liked James’ style. No fancy technology.
  Pinned to an otherwise blank wall was a picture drawn in crayon. It was of a stick figure with a long beard holding a flask of bubbling liquid.
  “Did one of your kids draw that?” I asked.
  “No, I did,” James said, and looked at me funny. “It’s my picture of my ideal boss.”
  “A scientist?”
  “Well, a wizard, but I guess a scientist would be OK too. Someone with a beard, anyway.”

  James rubbed his face where the Chief had smacked him.
  “The boss you have now, you ever think of standing up to him?’
  “Sometimes,” he said. “Other times I just think about trying to get his coffee the right temperature.”
  “You know, some bosses actually like cold coffee.”
  “That’s a myth,” James said, as he walked over to the window. I noticed it wasn’t raining anymore.
  James touched the broken spider web.
  “Poor spider,” he said. “What did it ever do to anyone?”
  Had I not been worried about my bright teeth blinding him, I would have smiled – and not just because he was using small words.
  “James,” I said. “How would you like to be my sidekick?”
  There was a pause. Then he said, “Would it involve any paperwork?”
  “Almost none,” I said, fingers crossed behind my back.

  James pursed his lips; his eyes looked around his humble cubicle.
  I said, “ I could grow a beard, you know. Pretty quickly, too.”
  “Is that one of your stupid super powers?” The Chief was back. 
  I didn’t answer him. He knew very well it was. The Chief looked at James and scowled. His stupid face said, “What are you smiling at?”

  James started to tear at the insignia on the shoulder of his shirt and said: “Chief, we’ve got an announcement to make.”

 Previously unpublished, written 2008-09.

Did you know that the saying ‘blind as a bat’ is erroneous, as all species of bats can see? And did you know that I go to sleep every night thinking of you?

It will never go off.

I’ve been writing at Bon Vivant, a new comedy website. My pieces are here:

You Are Ugly

Since You’ve Been in That Coma
http://bon-vivant.com.au/2011/11/21/since-you’ve-been-in-that-coma-by-daniel-hedger/

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Circus Dreams

(Source: bonvivant)