I don’t know much about comic books, because I am not a pale friendless virgin. Granted I am a little pale right now, and my only friends are a fish and a giant lizard, but I assure you I’ve had TONS of sex. Tons. I’ve done ALL the stuff. One time after a show (and a couple beers and joints), my drummer kept asking everyone how Superman flies faster. He said “I understand that Superman can fly, but how does he fly faster?” I asked him “how do you walker faster? You just do it”. But he couldn’t stop obsessing about it. If you’re going to be bothered about something in comics why not “how does Superman fly at all?”
But also who even cares about comics? We have real people that can fly. Angel, before the commies murdered her, has been around for a while and she can (could) fly at like Mach 700. Surely the science nerds must have studied how she did it. I mean, what was going on there? She didn’t have wings or rocket flames coming out of her ass. And how did she accelerate so fast? If you go from zero to
800 mphs in .01 seconds, shouldn’t that set the air on fire and start a chain reaction of nuclear implosions that would break the world into three easy pieces? How is it that she can (could) fly at full speed into a giant commie robot and not get annihilated? Is she made out of diamonds or some other harder thing? Where is the science of superpowers?
If I punch something harder than Jell-O with even a fraction of my mighty strength without having a super-support structure of super dense muscles and bones as strong as freeway onramps, my arm and shoulder should explode like my dad’s head when I told him I needed to go on the pill or else he needed to start an abortion fund for me. But it doesn’t happen. Somehow I can punch things without that happening. Although if I punch something hard, I still rip the skin off my knuckles and it hurts. That makes no sense.
I should have thrown something at Mr. Maori, who I will now start calling the Flyin Hawaiian even though he does not fly and is not Hawaiian. Instead I went for a double handed shove to the stomach (which was about at shoulder level for me because he’s torching huge, also I’m going to start saying torching, try to get that going as slang) which may not sound like much, but remember how strong I am. It would have been like getting hit with a car. At least. Unfortunately, this time I was not catching him by surprise with a coke machine to the nose. I lunged at him and he caught my arm, which instantly broke in his grip – my arm, I mean. You see, this is what I am talking about. If I put 88 million pounds of pressure on my limbs everything is fine, but this joker grabs me and my bones snap like my mom’s brain when I asked her “so what’s the deal with sex anyway?” Explain that smart guy.
I’d never been badly hurt before, not really. One time when I was trying to get on the bus, a drunk driver slammed into the side of the bus and I fell back into sidewalk and bruised my tailbone. That hurt pretty bad. But getting my forearm crushed by a giant non-Hawaiian pacific islander was significantly more painful than that. It probably made things worse that I was being held in the air by that self-same shattered limb which was therefore bearing all my weight. Trim and sylphlike though I may be.
If you had asked me “Ela how do you think you would react to being badly injured?” after I called the cops on you for blatantly threatening me, I would have thought about it. And I don’t know what the answer would have been. But I am surprised by my actual reaction. I got angry. Very angry. I’m not sure I’ve ever been more angry in my life. The dull stabbing pain of my constant headaches was blown out of my mind by a white-hot poker of rage being plunged into my cortex (or whatever). You’re going to break my arm? Me? Ela? I had a top forty hit!
It doesn’t make much sense either, because I already knew they were there to kill me. If I was going to get angry, I should have already been angry about that. The attempted murdering of me. But for some reason I didn’t feel the blind rage until the non-Flyin non-Hawaiian broke my arm. I guess that made it real in the way that having a knife thrown at my head or a whip around my neck didn’t. El Hombre Gigante was holding me in such a way that I couldn’t reach his body, his arms were long you see, so instead in my rage I kicked him in the elbow. I think you’re supposed to bend your toes back when you kick someone but I didn’t – I felt the tips of my toes hitting him right on the pointy part of the elbow that gets all dry and rough in the winter. On other people I mean, I take care of my skin.
Unlike me, the New Zealander Brickman is super tough, but I am as strong as twenty strong men, so his arm still went the other way. I hurt my toes too. It was like the worst midnight walk to the bathroom toe-stubbing ever. I yelped more than he did, he just grunted as he became suddenly and irrevocably double jointed. He did drop me, and in my state of pissed offness, I moved forward and kicked him in the stomach – which was really something because as I said he was like 8 feet tall. I had to jump like one of those karate dorks in their white pajamas.
My foot went into his body. Which was gross. Remember that episode of I Love Lucy where she was stomping grapes? It was like that. Only with a guy’s guts. And it was a real problem for me because my foot got stuck and I fell backwards. I believe I remarked something like –
“Ah god, my fucking ankle!”
Making matters worse El Strongo Ligero fell over, on account of someone just collapsed his diaphragm with her foot, and since that was my foot stuck in his lower intestines I was dragged down also, with my ankle getting twisted like some kind of metaphor. I think I said something like –
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Fuck me!”
All this happened in about six seconds. What I’ve learned is that fighting isn’t like in the movies – it’s over quick one way or the other. Six seconds is a long time in certain contexts though. Veronica was approaching, intent on finishing me off with her stupid Samurai sword after carelessly parking her motorcycle in the bedroom and getting oil all over the carpet.
I held up my hands desperately “Wait, wait, doesn’t your boss want to kill me himself?”
“No.”
She came at me with her outdated weaponry and I levered up the two-thousand-pound man with my legs to block her angle of head cutoffery. When you’re that heavy, how can you even walk around in a place like this? If he stood on one leg, wouldn’t he crash right through the floor? He groaned as his murder buddy accidentally (?) slashed him across the back. I groaned as well, not even from the pain in my ankle, which was bad enough, but mostly from my arm – I had to brace myself against the floor to lever him up. Somehow that hurt worse.
I kicked the big man off my foot finally, at Veronica, but she dodged up and over him like a demented cheerleader leaping over a guy in a mascot costume. Remember when Joey Fisher said that she and Eric O’Hallerhan had sex inside the Lancer costume during a game? Bullshit. There’s no way you could fit two people inside there. She’s such a liar. I think she’s a nurse in an old folks home now.
I crab scrambled backwards with one arm and leg as best as I could and grabbed the space-gun I had discarded earlier with my non-broken arm. Well, the hand on that arm. You know what I mean. I pointed it at the leaping swordswoman but there wasn’t even a trigger as far as I could tell. Why is alien technology so hard to use?!
“Gun, kill her!”
I commanded, but it didn’t do anything. She came at me with an unnecessary leaping downward slash (it did look cool) and I flipped the big metal case Captain Stars and Stripes Forever kept all his alien stuff in at her with my good foot. I expected it to cut her in half, which seemed like the kind of stupid thing that would happen, but instead it banged off her like when Wille Pastrano bricked that free throw when he had a chance to win the state title. I had a lot of money on that game.
I threw the gun at her, and even with a left handed toss it hit her square in the face, but it didn’t do anything. It was made out of some kind of dumb alien plastic that weighed nothing – it was like throwing a whiffle ball. I flipped the couch at her but she dodged that too – she’s a slippery one she is. I grabbed Mr. America’s alien belt, my intention was to try and beat her with it like a chain, but when I touched it, it seemed to wrap around my upper thigh of its own accord (kind of like my manager at the Dairy Queen when I was 17). Next thing I know, I’m hanging in the air halfway upside down. Have you ever suddenly been weightless? It’s not a good feeling. I puked instantly. Which is crazy in and of itself. I’ve never gone from zero to puke spray in zero seconds flat. Usually it takes a while to work up a good ralphing.
The ceilings in The Goodwood (heehee) Park Hotel are high, but not that high. I don’t know if she did it on purpose or if it’s just what happened because I was bouncing along in the air unpredictably, but Veronica whipped her sword around in an upward motion and the very tip of the blade sliced right through my left nipple. And let me tell you, that HURTS. I swear for one second that hurt worse than breaking my arm or dislocating my ankle.
“Belt, fly me away! God damn it!”
That second part is when nothing happened. Veronica did a little jump-jump-jump move where she vaulted off the wall and would have cut me in half like a magician’s assistant (except for real with blood and dying) if there suddenly wasn’t a force field around me. After her cut slammed into invisible energy, she landed like a gymnast (by which I mean ably, not like she smiled and threw her hands up in the air for the judges) and regarded me curiously.
I managed to awkwardly flip myself around to face the ceiling and pull myself along to the window. I was terrified that I would just float away into the air and up and up until I suffocated in the ionosphere (or whatever) so I kept a firm grip on the façade of the building as I pulled myself out the window. I tell you this, out of the many terrifying things I experienced in the last forty seconds, hanging in mid-air clinging to the side of a building feeling like I was falling UP, was the worst. Veronica peered out the window up at me as I spider-crawled my way up to the roof feeling like I was hanging from a rope around my leg attached to a space shuttle blasting off.
“Whelp, now what?” I said to myself. And to any helpful ghosts, forgotten ancient gods, or invisible super people that might be nearby. You never know.
