Who Writes This Stuff?

I’m chasing Hammerspace and Fumigator through an alleyway outside New York City Hall. We’ve just been attacked by the Scarlet Avenger, one of the most recognized superheroes in the world, despite her well documented aversion to all forms of media. I haven’t seen any sign of destruction outside the building and I’m beginning to wonder how she stopped that bomb Hammerspace threw out the window from demolishing everything on the street level, when I hear an unusual wooshing sound.

Hammerspace yells “Move!” and he and Fumigator both dive for the pavement as a huge dumpster crashes to the ground narrowly missing them both. I look up to see Scarlet Avenger slowly levitating down to the ground with us, her arms crossed smugly. The woman is the hottest kind of ice. She never ever loses her cool.

“Maybe I can’t kill you, Hammerspace, but I can hurt you so bad you won’t want to live anymore,” she says as Hammerspace and Fumigator regain their feet. “Now let General Welfare go or I’ll start breaking parts of you.”

Suddenly, the strangest thing I’ve ever seen happens right in front of me. Something explodes all over the back of Scarlet Avenger’s head and puffs out into a cloud of brown dust that scatters little specs across her shoulders. She screams in agony and turns around.

Behind her stands a man in a fine grey suit with wonderfully combed hair and the longest eighteenth century style side burns I have ever seen. He holds a can of Hershey’s cocoa powder in his perfectly groomed fingers. He is the Schrodinger.

Scarlet Avenger reels. She clearly is having difficulty staying on her feet. The Schrodinger speaks up. “Like most women, the Scarlet Avenger has a weakness for chocolate. However, hers is quite a bit more acute. Isn’t that right, dear?”

“Eat shit, Schrodinger,” she says.

The Schrodinger licks his knuckles and puts his fist in the can of cocoa powder. “I find that dark is preferable to milk, but the cocoa powder is most potent, especially when it’s moistened for maximum stickiness.” We all watch as the Schrodinger punches her in the face so hard even Hammerspace winces. I can hear the cracking of her nose. Somehow, she keeps standing. Wet, brown powder sticks to her face. “You see, as long as the powder adheres to her, she’s completely powerless.” He hits her again, this time so hard she spins around on the balls of her feet and faces us for a second before she drops to the pavement.

The Schrodinger dumps the rest of the cocoa on her crumpled form. He turns to the rest of us. “Come along now. As much as I enjoy battering that red headed slut, Power Team will be here momentarily and, sadly, we haven’t the numbers to fight them.”

The Schrodinger takes us to a black limousine which is waiting nearby and we jump in. The driver peels out and we’re leaving the city in the dust.

Two hours later we’re on the Schrodinger’s private jet headed for some secret installation hidden somewhere out in the ocean I’m assuming, although I have no idea for certain. One thing is for sure, though. The Schrodinger travels in style. We’re talking leather interior, sound system, a full bar – he spares no expense. I make a point to sit down with him during the flight.

“What can I say? My business is being bad and business is good. No really. You tend to amass a lot of wealth over so many centuries. I still have money in the stock exchange from the twenties. It really is true what they say about making your money work for you. I haven’t worked since the depression.”

How did you come to be unkillable?

“I don’t know. I was just always that way. It can be a bit odd, considering most in this business developed abilities after an accident of some type or an encounter with magical beings or one of a dozen different common things, but I simply am what I am.”

He tells me he knew Hammerspace would be in trouble once he heard about General Welfare’s disappearance, and that the murderous trench coated bad guy has developed a following in the villain community over the last two days. “Since what happened to Malo we’ve seen a lot of stunts pulled by upstart firebrands – punks wanting attention mostly. But what Hammerspace did is very inspiring. Not many villains have defeated a superhero like that. I cannot think of the last time it happened. And the way he executed the sidekick was just refreshing. You don’t see that kind of ruthlessness usually these days. He’s certainly caught some important eyes, if you catch my meaning.”

He has significantly worse things to say about the Scarlet Avenger. “I first found out about the chocolate trick when she tried to break up my plot to put mind control serum in the Los Angeles water supply. The treatment plant was right next door to a Nestle packing facility. Doom Machine was working for me as sort of a bodyguard at the time. He threw her into the building and she went crashing through the wall and into a bunch of supply crates and chocolate bars were all over her. She couldn’t do anything. Once Doom Machine realized her powers didn’t work he picked her up and snapped her in half. I was simply ecstatic. I made a tape recording of her screaming actually. I often listen to it when I… never mind.” Yes. Please never mind.

Hammerspace kicks back in a seat at the rear of the plane. He seems surprised when I tell him what the Schrodinger had to say. “That’s fine, but I don’t want people thinking I just did it to impress the league. I did it because I’m evil. I’m like, way evil. Way more evil than you can possibly fathom. I’m ready to set a new precedent in the field, and I don’t want people to say he’s just doing it for attention, because I’m not.”

One parachute jump later we’re being picked up in a submarine that takes us deep beneath the sea to the Global Crime League’s secret undersea dome. If you’ve never seen an undersea dome (I’m betting you haven’t) it is really something to take a look at. The Schrodinger explains that under the ocean is truly the only place left to hide on planet Earth now that there are planes and satellites that can comb virtually all of the land space on the globe in a few short days.

Inside the dome we are greeted by a contingent of armed guards wearing shiny metal armor and carrying very expensive guns. These are the first actual henchmen I’ve met and I pick out one of the higher ranking members and ask some questions as they’re leading us down a large corridor from the airlock. He identifies himself as Steve. “Yeah. I’ve been a henchman for eight years now. I used to sell cell phones, but once the market got saturated I had to find something else. I was hanging out with this guy, Ray, at the time and he was connected so he showed my resume around and got me in with Ghettoblaster. You really have to know somebody to break into this field.”

And it isn’t a cushy field to be in either. Danger and death lurk around every corner for the professional henchman. Assignments are often difficult and failure is not an option. “Doom Machine zapped Ray a few years ago after a run in with Fire Dancer. It was his own fault though. He had a whole squad of guys and she’s not even class two.”

Steve refers, of course, to the Defense Department’s ranking system for superhuman threat assessment. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it works like this: A class one superhuman has one relatively simple superpower. Fumigator and Fire Dancer (who shoots fire from her fingers) are class one superhumans. Class two superhumans have either multiple superhuman abilities or one superhuman ability with multiple applications. Hammerspace and Principal Uncertainty are class two superhumans. Class three superhumans have many super abilities with multiple applications and could represent a serious threat to national security by themselves. The Scarlet Avenger is a popular example of a class three superhuman. She could throw the White House into space if she wanted and an armored cavalry division could do nothing to stop her.

Now that Malo is dead and General Welfare is out of commission, the only other creature on the planet with that kind of power is Doom Machine and I find myself staring right at him.

Next Week: In the den of the dreaded Global Crime League.

I’m sitting in the Mayor’s office in New York. Well, it used to be the mayor’s office. Now it belongs to Hammerspace. He lounges in a big leather chair with his feet on a desk that still harbors Mayor Bloomberg’s metal name tag.

“Mayor Hammerspace just doesn’t sound threatening enough. Mayor Hammerspace is a guy who invests in low risk mutual funds and walks to the other side of the street when he sees a black guy coming. It doesn’t say ruthless dictator who holds the city within his iron grasp. That’s what I am. This is my iron gauntlet of pain” he says as he holds up his right fist to demonstrate for me. He has been pondering this bizarre title situation since he took over the Mayor’s office two days ago, in a coup that was carried out so easily the former city hall administration should be ashamed.

It went down like this: In the middle of a press conference in which the Mayor was all too happy to discuss General Welfare’s disappearance rather than the specifics of the social equality legislation he was supporting, Hammerspace smashed in the doors to the press room with the Mallet of Malice and entered. The police were unable to stop him, largely because he had a nuclear explosive which he threatened to detonate if they tried anything, and he simply pushed the Mayor away from the podium and declared himself the new ruler of New York.

“I got the bomb from soviet defectors a few years ago. Where else do you get a nuclear bomb?” he answers when I ask him how he got his hands on the weapon.

Immediately after kicking the mayor off stage Hammerspace began making new laws and regulations right there at the podium. “For my first act as ruler of this city, I declare that every resident shall be taxed on forty percent of their income! If you do not pay your taxes you will be executed. In fact, all crimes committed in the city will now be punishable by death! Fear me, city of New York! Fear the asphyxiating grasp of despotism that is my rule!”

And so Hammerspace is still lying back in his chair when Fumigator walks into the office with surprising news. “They love you out there” he says. Hammerspace is taken aback, and frankly so am I.

“What?” he says, sitting up in his chair.

“Yeah. They’re partying in the streets.”

“Why? I burden them with the shackles of oppression and obscene taxes!”

“Well, no. Not really. You actually lowered the taxes. They were paying like sixty percent before.”

I knew this before. But I didn’t have the heart to tell him. He seemed so excited about his despotism.

“What about the mandatory death penalty for all crimes? That has to have them pissing themselves.”

“They’re okay with it. The city had kind of a crime problem before so, you know. They’re already talking about turning the prison into a conservatory or something.”

“I really need to kick it in gear with the evilness here. What about something with abortion? People hate abortion. What about forced abortion of minorities?”

“That’s pretty harsh, Mel.”

“That’s the point.”

“But that will really piss people off. What if they revolt or something?”

“We’ll confiscate all the guns first.”

“I think New York already has a gun ban.”

“Does anyone else see the irony here?”

Seconds later, a crimson colored glove shatters through the wall, only a few feet from the door, and into the room steps the famed and elusive Scarlet Avenger. Even the few existing photographs of her could not have possibly prepared me for this. In person, the Scarlet Avenger burns with an aura of intensity hotter than the sun. The movement of her hips as she walks is like the violent thrashing of an ocean vessel in a tropical storm. Her bouncing red hair shimmers like diamonds in an inferno. Her long slender legs lift the feet of a princess and each time they crash back down the earth quakes beneath them. Her perfect figure is the envious rage of every supermodel enveloped in crimson shrink-wrap. Briefly she turns her head and I dare to look in her eyes for a fraction of a fraction of a second before the most furious intimidation I have ever known threatens to tear my soul apart.

Fumigator sums this all up with “Dude.” Then Scarlet Avenger choke slams him through the floor. Yes. All the way through the floor. I could never have come up with that. She’s creative too.

Hammerspace already has the suitcase nuke in his hand and he’s brandishing it for her to see. “Stand back, Scarlet whore. Even you can’t survive a nuclear-” Then she kicks him in the nuts and takes the suitcase away.

She turns to me with a glare of focused rage and for the first time I hear her voice. She says “who the hell are you?” with a thick English accent that allows her to sound pissed off and yet still more refined than the classiest debutante. The Scarlet Avenger is English? There are British superheroes? Instead of answering her I’m thrown by this notion for a moment. Then I realize how ignorant it is. She has to repeat herself. This makes her a little less refined.

I tell her I’m an embedded journalist reporting on supervillains for Trigger magazine. She drops her guard, confused and says “Well, that’s just ace then. I’m glad rock and roll magazines are still busy promoting positive role models.” I think she’s being sarcastic. A moment ago I couldn’t look at her, but now it’s hard not to.

She punches into the suitcase nuke and rips out a big chunk of colored wires as she approaches my chair. She drops the clump of wires to the ground and with her free hand reaches into her cleavage to fish around for something. “You know, I’m promoting my new album,” she says as she pulls a red business card from her costume, which upon closer inspection, is some sort of ultra glossy rubber. “I don’t usually do interviews, but maybe that can change.”

Across the room, unbeknownst to her, Hammerspace peels himself up from the floor and draws an anti-tank weapon from his jacket. He takes only a second to aim as I curiously examine the Scarlet Avenger’s business card. I note that the card lists contact information for an agency that represents her, but not her own info.

Hammerspace pulls the trigger and his bazooka emits a deafening ka-pow which echoes throughout the building and hurts my ears. All of the windows in the room shatter as the Scarlet Avenger catches the shell in her hand with all the difficulty of a major league infielder in a softball game. She puts a hand on her hip and smiles back to him. “That was quite a googly,” she says as she tosses the impacted artillery round over her shoulder. “Now tell me what you’ve done with General Welfare and I might let you live.”

Hammerspace cackles loudly. “Everyone knows you have a strict no-kill policy, Scarlet Harlot. I’ll see your bet and raise you dead bystanders.” With that he smiles and tosses a plastic explosive out a nearby window.

In a blur, Scarlet Avenger flies out the window in a race to catch the bomb before it lands in the street. Hammerspace turns to me and shouts as he runs from the room. “We have to get out of here! That bought us like ten seconds if we’re lucky!”

I chase him down the hallway toward the stairwell. As we’re running by the elevator he pushes the button to call it, but he keeps running. He shouts back “Elevators are a terrible escape route, but if you push the button sometimes you can trick a superhero into thinking you’re in there.” Sure enough, we hear Scarlet Avenger peeling the steel elevator doors open as we’re running down the stairs into the basement.

We find Fumigator in the basement and Hammerspace drags him to his feet. Hammerspace yells at him. “We have to go! She’s right behind us!”

Next Week: On the run from super heroes…

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m at the Stanley Lloyd Kaufman Middle school in Sunman, Indiana, a godforsaken place where there is no cell phone reception for miles, winningest is considered a proper word, and the value of a man is the number of inches his lift kit adds to his pick-up.

I’m here officially to cover a Hugs not Drugs lecture by Jose Canyousee, General Welfare’s teenage sidekick. I’m here unofficially because supervillains hinted that something might be going down. I’m sitting in a folding chair in the back row and I’m wearing a business casual ensemble so I don’t stand out. I have a hefty camera so I look like a press photographer and I used an old press pass to get in (you wouldn’t believe the security in public schools these days). I’ve also got a flak jacket under my clothes that I picked up at the police uniform supply store. The damn thing cost a fortune and I honestly don’t think it will provide much protection if death rays and laser beams start zapping around the room, but I might as well do what I can.

It’s two o’clock by the time the auditorium is full and kids between the ages of eleven and fifteen (I figure there must be a few flunkies) sit talking to their friends and appearing generally unexcited about the coming performance. A few teachers have to snap their fingers and shoosh the rowdier students when the lights go down. The show opens with an over-the-hill volunteer band and some rejected Disney World backup dancers doing a lame song about the dangers of drug use. I spot more than one Bob Marley shirt in the crowd of kids during this time.

At the end of the musical number Jose comes out amidst a howling high note introduction from the dance crew and starts telling the kids about the dangers of drug use. He’s wearing his trademark spandex American flag costume with cowboy chaps. I think his intentions are good, but this doesn’t seem to be a good way to reach these kids. Looking around the room I notice quite a few of them are more interested in their cell phones than what is happening on stage. That all changes in seconds.

An explosion rocks the building as the rear auditorium doors are blasted off their hinges. Hammerspace steps into the building pointing the Mallet of Malice at Jose across the crowded room. He issues a threat in his thunderous villain voice. “Jose, can you see your demise at my hands!”

Remarkably, the entire crowd is unshaken. Everyone is paying attention now, but no one seems upset. It takes a moment for me to realize they all think this is part of the show. I, knowing this not to be the case, am ironically more unsettled than everyone else.

“The Trenchcoat!” shouts Jose from the stage.

“It’s Hammerspace, dick!” reprimands the villain.”

“I’ve already sent a distress call to General Welfare, Trenchcoat. Your days as a criminal mastermind are numbered!”

“Even at his fastest, General Welfare can’t get here in time to stop me from killing you!”

“Whoa! The k word? In front of the kids? That’s totally not cool.”

“What?”

“You’re supposed to say destroy or vanquish or annihilate or something. Nobody says the k word. It’s just unprofessional.”

I’m caught off guard and I can see that Hammerspace is too. Jose has obviously been out of the game for a while. That or he’s been in it for way too long.

“And even if you capture me and put me in your fastest acting death trap, the General will have time to get here and save me, so do your best, Trenchcoat!” he continues.

Hammerspace pulls a shotgun out of his jacket and shoots Jose in the guts. In truly diabolical fashion, he does this over the heads of several rows of students, who I’m fairly certain are able to feel the buckshot whizzing by their hair. He approaches the stage calmly as Jose attempts to crawl away.

“A gun! Guns are for cowards and losers-“ he utters before Hammerspace finishes him off with another barrel full of buckshot.

“Oh, but I’ve won here,” Hammerspace says, turning to face the audience. “Go children! Run! Flee! Tell everyone what you have seen here today! Tell them so they may never forget the name of Hammerspace!” With that, he launches into a classic evil cackle that reverberates through the room. The boom mic picks it up and it echoes even more loudly. It reaches a deafening level as the children and the school faculty run panic stricken from the auditorium. I take cover behind some bleachers and continue to watch Hammerspace.

Once the room is empty, except for the two of us (and Jose’s cadaver), I ask Hammerspace exactly what he’s attempting here. “Killing the sidekick is a big move for any supervillain. If you want to establish yourself as the number one archnemesis, you have to kill someone really close to the hero,” he answers. “That’s why I tried to kill Welfare’s woman a few weeks ago, but it turned out she was just some girl he went on one date with so I gave up on that.” He has a point. After all, where would Green Goblin or Joker be had they not murdered Gwen Stacy and Jason Todd? As much as Hammerspace claims to dislike comic book characters, he draws a lot of his ideas from them.

Moments later, Hammerspace is gone, having discarded his costume and walked out of the building appearing like any normal schmoe. The usefulness of an alter ego hadn’t quite demonstrated itself to me until now. As a normal guy, I tend to focus on the super side of everything. Super beings are very much the opposite. For them, the every day alter ego seems to be the more exciting. And it makes sense. After all, being super is their job, and which would you rather be? Yourself or yourself at work?

The secret identity, in fact, is arguably stronger than the super identity. It is easily more dangerous, because you don’t see it coming. You never see it coming.

And so I’m still in the auditorium hours later interviewing police when General Welfare crashes through the concrete wall nearby and storms up to the stage. A few cops look like they might want to restrain him, and they almost begin to, but then their better judgment impedes them and they just stop what they’re doing and stare helplessly. He leaps up on to the stage and cradles Jose’s crumpled body in his arms. He shrieks “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”

“YES!” Shouts Hammerspace as he drops from a catwalk above the stage. No one saw this coming. He’s been here the whole time.

“You! I’ll kill you!” screams General Welfare.

“Oh, please, Welfare. We all know you have a strict no killing policy.”

The General picks up a nearby cop and takes his gun, throwing the cop aside. He points the gun at Hammerspace and fires wildly. Hammerspace pulls his trench coat open wide like a perverted old man in a Chuck E Cheese. The bullets are sucked into another dimension.

Hammerspace cackles madly. “A feeble attempt from a feeble hero!” he taunts. “Soon you will join your pathetic boy child in oblivion!”

Welfare doesn’t say anything. He rushes Hammerspace like a stampede on the Serengeti. I dive behind a theater seat, afraid there might be a shockwave from the impact when Welfare hits him. Instead, there is nothing.

I stand up from behind the chair and see the bottoms of General Welfare’s boots disappearing into Hammerspace’s trench coat. Hammerspace turns to face the small army of police surrounding him. Some of them pull guns but he shouts them down.

“Fire at me and you risk hitting your precious hero!” he says. No one shoots, even though this is entirely illogical. General Welfare is completely invincible. He takes missiles in the face like gnats hitting a windshield. I doubt bullets would offend him.

The police are powerless to stop him, and so Hammerspace simply walks out of the building and vanishes.

Next Week: Hammerspace takes over the city. Hilarity ensues.

“What I really need,” says Hammerspace as he jogs along in a track suit and headband (over his mask) “is to really lay the smack down on General Welfare.”

Keeping pace with us is Fumigator, a seven foot tall monster of a man wearing a tank of poison gas and an elaborate alligator mask complete with a muzzle and teeth. It covers his face completely and his voice comes through as a muffled echo. He replies, “Yeah. That guy is an asshole.”

I asked Fumigator earlier about the gator theme and the poison. He filled me in. “I went with the gator theme because I went to the University of Florida. That’s actually where I had the accident that left me completely immune to all types of poison gas, hence the fumes – fumigator. The mask is actually made from a real alligator head. A friend of mine is a taxidermist. I can give you his card if you want. It has a lot of scare factor, and that’s something you want, but it’s a pain if I get an itch or a runny nose or something.”

One of the most important parts of the villain’s lifestyle is regular exercise. In order to do battle with the likes of superpowered do gooders, supervillains need to stay in shape. Cardio is a must and weight training is also pretty typical. That’s why Hammerspace and Fumigator go on a daily 5k run. They stick together just to be safe in the event that they might run into a superhero. Although the possibility is slim, this is still a good idea. One of the worst super fights in history occurred in August 1991 when Knight Watch ran into Brute Suit in New York’s central park whilst walking their dogs. The two began a scuffle over Brute Suit’s alleged neglect to pick up his dog’s leavings, which escalated into an all out battle to the death. Ultimately, a large area of the park was left a desolate, crater-covered wasteland. Both Knight Watch and Brute Suit were killed by a National Guard armored division. Ever since, costumed super characters have been more careful about these things, and a buddy system is never a bad plan.

Fumigator met Hammerspace during a routine bank heist in 2006. “I walked into the bank with my poison gun ready to go and I yell everybody down, but then I realize they’re already on the floor,” Fumigator recalls. “That’s when I walk back to the vault and see this dickhead cramming safety deposit boxes, I mean the whole boxes, into his coat. He wasn’t even opening them.”

“I open them with a cutting torch back at my apartment,” Hammerspace interjects.

“I didn’t know that then. So I was just confused, you know? There’s this guy doing my job and we end up in sort of a stand off for a minute. But then in walks… What was his name?” He laughs as Hammerspace jogs his memory. “That’s right! The Peacekeeper! What a costard. His power was that nobody could commit acts of violence in his presence – including him. So Hammerspace just kept taking stuff. What was he going to do? We both laughed so hard. I think we literally laughed him out of the business. I remember the security guard standing there yelling at him to do something.”

Hammerspace continues to bounce ideas off of Fumigator. “Do you think he gets his powers from the sun? I could find a way to block it out.”

Fumigator seems unreceptive to this idea. “He kicked the crap out of Doom Machine at night once. I saw it.”

“Maybe he stores energy during the day,” Hammerspace counters.

Fumigator shakes his head. “Nah.”

“See, invulnerable heroes usually have some kind of Achilles heel, you know, like… uh… That guy (Achilles)” Fumigator tells me. “If we can figure out General Welfare’s secret weakness we can take advantage. So far we’ve tried poison gas, well, obviously (he points to his gas tank), death rays, ultra mega death rays, radioactive minerals. Hammerspace dropped an anvil on him from a building. Other guys have tried acid, magic spells, bombs, undersea pressure, aphorbic bombs – you name it. It’s been done. He takes a licking.”

“Didn’t Terrortron nuke him once?” Hammerspace adds.

“Yeah, during the Uzbekistan thing. That was ugly.”

I can’t help but picture General Welfare taking an ICBM the size of a building square in his puffed out chest, smiling the whole time. The blast incinerates his costume in milliseconds but he remains, walking from the charred crater of scorched earth stark naked, his smug expression never changing. What does a person think as the air catches fire around them and everything that was ceases to be? Is it absolute terror, or is it as mundane as a drive to work? As his hair was burning off in ten million degree temperatures was he wondering what he would do for lunch? Or is his hair invincible too?

“What about the stasis field bomb idea? What happened with that?” Fumigator asks.

Hammerspace rolls his eyes. “I can’t show a two year work history and unless you get me into Fort Knox to load my coat with gold bricks, we don’t have the funds.”

It is at this point in their conversation that I interrupt to ask a question I suspect I will regret later (and I do, although not to the extent that some would have you believe). I ask Hammerspace why he can’t simply break into the place where they keep the stasis generators and toss one into his jacket.

He laughs. “They’re too big to fit in my jacket. I would need somebody to forklift it off the ground and then I still couldn’t conceal it anywhere.”

Fumigator interjects. “Isn’t the whole point of your super power that you don’t have to conceal anything?”

“Well, sort of. I have to be able to hide things initially but then they just sort of… poof. They’re gone.”

“Don’t you wonder about that? Where does all that stuff go?”

“To the Hammerspace. That’s why I’m Hammerspace. I mean, I thought that was established.”

“Yeah, but what is it exactly? Is it like another dimension? What’s it like in there?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been in there. I don’t think that’s even possible. That’s like a snake eating its own tail or something.”

“Have you ever thrown anything alive in there?”

An hour later we’re in a pet shop off the turnpike somewhere. Hammerspace is buying a big bunny rabbit, which Fumigator picked out because he thinks the idea of making a rabbit disappear is more hilarious than any other animal we could have chosen. He buys a small dog leash to go with it.

We don’t even leave the pet store to conduct the first experiment. Hammerspace puts the leash on the animal. I make a joke about the first bunny rabbit shot into Hammerspace. Neither of them thinks it’s funny. I’ve never been funny.

Fumigator picks up the rabbit, which is a fat rabbit. It doesn’t move around a lot. He pulls the rabbit around on the leash for a while to make sure it can’t get loose. We’re getting a ton of stares from people in the pet shop now. A lady with a Siamese cat asks me if we’re doing some kind of TV show and for the first time I wonder if people around us see figures of legendary greatness or if they ogle simply because a grown man in an alligator costume is walking a rabbit on a dog leash. Hammerspace points this out to Fumigator and they get on with the experiment before we gather any more unwanted attention.

Hammerspace holds his trench coat open and Fumigator tosses the rabbit at him. He closes the jacket and the bunny is gone. Its leash dangles from the folds of Hammerspace’s jacket. Fumigator stares strangely at this, and even Hammerspace seems somewhat perplexed. “I’ve never had anything alive go in there, and I’ve never had any sort of lifeline dangling out either. So this is a first for a couple things. It’s kind of weird because you can actually make out where this place ends and the nowhere begins. I’m gonna be pissed if that thing gets lost in there. Who knows what it could get into. The last thing I need is a rabbit running around eating up my store of Nutrigrain bars. What if it dies? Everything I pull out of there is going to smell terrible.”

Fumigator hangs on to the leash for a few minutes to see if the rabbit tugs at all. We get nothing. He shrugs. Hammerspace reaches into the coat and pulls out the rabbit. Fumigator is somewhat impressed, but he says that in order to be certain we need to send the rabbit in without the leash to see if Hammerspace can still retrieve it. We do. Hammerspace pulls it back out a moment later with no difficulty.We all immediately know the next step, although it is Fumigator who brings it up first.

“I’ve got to go in.” He says.

Hammerspace is more reluctant. “I don’t know. I think that’s kind of gay.”

“What?”

“Jumping into another guy’s hammerspace. It’s just kind of gay, that’s all.”

“Whatever, Richard Gere. You put a rabbit in there already. By that logic you just committed bestiality.”

A fifteen minute argument then ensues, which I won’t reproduce here because it is completely pointless and somewhat homophobic. I’m not saying I stand by the gay agenda, only that I need this book to appeal to as many readers as possible.

Finally, Hammerspace and Fumigator turn to me and demand I settle the argument. I tell them I’d personally like to know what’s in there, and frankly, I can’t believe no one has thought of this before.

Hammerspace caves after Fumigator bothers him a little bit longer and they decide to give it a test run, but Hammerspace still insists that we find a female person for this experiment. Being a supervillain, Fumigator concedes that it does make more sense to toss a civilian into the Hammerspace before he risks his own life. The two of them settle on a cashier named Debbie whom Fumigator gasses with some sort of poison. As she wobbles and topples he scoops her off her feet and tosses her unconscious body into Hammerspace’s jacket.

Bystanders begin screaming and running when they see this. We run down the street and wait for ten minutes or so in an alley, during which time Hammerspace notes aloud that he’s never had anyone throw anything into the hammerspace before. He tells me this has given him a really wicked idea, but he won’t elaborate any more on the subject.

Once the coast is clear and the guys have determined that no superheroes are coming to the rescue, Hammerspace pulls a hysterical pet store clerk from the confines of his infinite storage space. I try to ask her what it was like in there, but she runs away.

It is Fumigator who points out the most important thing we have learned from this experiment. “Once something goes in there, it can’t leave until Hammerspace pulls it out.”

Next Week: Hammerspace commits a felony.

Hammerspace paces back and forth as he excitedly shouts into a cell phone at someone called Fumigator. The side of the conversation I can hear is disappointingly vague. I’m only able to pick up a few blurry details that weren’t reported already on television, but this much is certain: El Malo Grande is dead.

El Malo Grande, the hulking and terrifying figure at the head of the Global Crime League, was killed this afternoon in an altercation with unknown assailants at his volcano fortress on Tibia Island in the Central Pacific (approximately forty kilometers southwest of Skull Island). Eventually Hammerspace hangs up the phone and I’m able to get his inside perspective on what happened.

“Somebody freaking whacked him while he was tanning by his pool. They dropped right into his fortress and whacked him! Fumigator thinks it was Graveyard Kill Team One. He heard Malo killed a few of them before they got him.”

Hammerspace begins a long explanation (at my request) as he mixes tea in his kitchen. “The GCL is the ultimate brotherhood of evil-doers. There are usually eight or ten of them and different guys are in or out at different times, but they’re the biggest, baddest, most famous villains out there, real legends – guys like Doom Machine and Mr. Meltdown, household names. Everybody wants an invite to the GCL. They run the show in the world of supervillainy. They’re kind of like CAA or The William Morris Agency in that way, only not quite as vicious.”

For the record, the current GCL line up consists of: Mr. Meltdown, with his ability to turn anything he looks at to mush,  Principal Uncertainty, the ex-high school administrator who can be in two places at once and walk through walls, Doom Machine, an alien cyborg with a massive complement of built-in destructive devices, Dark Pope, the infallible supreme pontiff of the church of atheism, The Schrodinger, who is immortal as long as no one is looking at him, Ghettoblaster, able to project massive explosions by beatboxing, Osama Bin Laden, and, until today, El Malo Grande, the invincible and super strong Latino leader of the group.

“The Graveyard, and this is the stuff you won’t read in the paper, is a super secret organization that conducts operations all over the globe. They do some policing of the super beings occasionally.”

So they’re kind of like Interpol, but for supervillains?

“Are they like Interpol? If Interpol will make you watch them murder your infant to get information about security threats and laugh at you when you bring up the Geneva convention then yeah, they’re like Interpol.”

So they’re not good guys?

“No. Superheroes are good guys. The police man that helps you find your mommy when you’re lost is a good guy. Graveyard are definitely bad guys. Well, I guess they’re good guys when they fight us because we’re the bad guys, but they play both sides of the fence too. And these are the scariest guys out there.”

And they work for?

“Nobody knows. Well, I mean obviously they know, but – it’s an expression. You know what I mean. I think they’re Americans or maybe NATO or something because they have a lot of fancy gear. You know those stories you hear about black unmarked helicopters buzzing cattle mutilations and stuff? That’s them. Skullface told me he thinks they work for the lizard people, but he smokes a ton of weed and sometimes paranoia is an issue for him.”

The lizard people?

“There aren’t really lizard people. Well, unless you count Fumigator. Is an alligator a lizard? I’m not sure.”

An alligator is a reptile, and what Hammerspace says about the Graveyard is completely uncorroborated by any reputable sources, although some details are occasionally backed by supermarket tabloids. News rags like that are full of reports of  black, unmarked helicopters, secret societies and government cover-ups, and they also run headlines claiming the president is having an affair with a space alien. Although I’ve heard the name Graveyard thrown around here and there during my research, I’m far from convinced there is actually such a group. The evidence is sketchy at best. Reports are nearly all second or third hand, and even The Toxic Shocker, whom Hammerspace met in person and claimed to have worked for the group, has a reputation for making ridiculous claims to pump up his social stature. There’s no good reason to see this as anything more than an urban legend imagined by bewildered super people to explain that which they have no control over.

I’m deeply fascinated that a supervillain would put stock in a myth like this. Normal people fear the boogeyman (real or imaginary). Peculiar is the idea that the boogeyman checks under his bed for something even scarier before he goes to sleep.

“Anyway, this is huge. With El Malo Grande dead there’s going to be a major shake up. The GCL will be out for blood after this, and lots of guys will be pulling off the most ridiculous stuff they can come up with trying to score creds to impress them so they can get a spot on the team. All hell could break loose pretty fast.”

Getting street cred in the world of supervillainy is no easy task. Anybody can hold up a bank or tie a pretty girl to some railroad tracks, especially if they have decent super powers. The GCL doesn’t bother talking to villains unless they’ve become a household name by themselves. Usually villains have to trigger an event that has some sort of global implications to gain that sort of status. Doom Machine got his invite after he broke the Scarlet Avenger’s spine and left her a paraplegic (she was healed by undisclosed means after a year on the sidelines). The Schrodinger summoned a planet eating monster from another dimension into the middle of New York City to get invited (superheroes eventually teleported it to Soviet Russia, where it was eaten by the planet). Osama Bin Laden… Well, you already know what he did to join the team.

“Every guy’s dream is to do some shit like that and end up getting a major crossover. Crossover is a business term. It’s when a bunch of superheroes have to team up to defeat you. The more the better. Schrodinger pulled that off with the monster thing. Scarlet Avenger got brainwashed by Demento. That was huge. He got killed in that though. The biggest was El Malo Grande. It was after he was on the team already. He did that thing where he stole Amazing Man’s powers and tried to launch a nuke into the Earth’s core. He took on General Welfare, The Crusaders, Power Team and The Magician by himself. That’s what legends are made of.”

But now the legend is dead, leaving a massive void that seems likely to be filled by terrifying violence and also a plethora of nagging questions. Who did this (if not the folkloric culprits of Hammerspace’s imagination)? And how exactly does one kill an invincible man? “I wish I knew,” Hammerspace says. “Of course most invincible guys aren’t actually invincible per se. They’re just ridiculously durable. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, but believe me, just because a guy can take a wrecking ball in the face and walk away doesn’t mean he can swim in molten lava or eat a dirty bomb for breakfast. It’s all different. Now your truly invincible guys, there isn’t much to be done with them except remove them from play somehow. You can freeze them or encase them in bronze or something. Stasis fields are a possibility, but they cost a damn fortune. I tried to get one to use on General Welfare. You ever walk into a bank and tell a loan officer you need thirty million dollars to entrap a superhero within a boundary of infinite rigidity and time suspension? There’s no FHA for evil conquerors. You’re on your own in this business.”

Hammerspace watches Pride and Prejudice on the television as I bring back a sandwich from the deli around the block. The sight throws me at first and he has to explain. “Hollywood is too much like work for me. You know I see explosions and guys throwing buildings and flying people every day on the job. When I come home I want to relax with something that takes the edge off. I’m a big fan of Merchant Ivory productions and I have a lot of nineties sitcom boxed sets. I love Family Matters. Frasier is great too. Besides, movies get so much stuff wrong. It’s annoying. I mean, how many times do you see a movie where the main character is a writer and it just drives you crazy pointing out all the things they got wrong?”

He makes a point. In the movies writers are often rich, good looking and charismatic. In reality we have difficulty paying the bills and spend most of our lives alone with a word processor. I won’t complain about the good looking part. At least in my case, they got that right.

“It’s inescapable. The worst is the henchmen. Nobody really has henchmen. I guess a few of the really rich guys do, but I’ve never had a henchman. I’ve never even met a henchman. Can you see that classified ad? ‘Wanted: Individuals to commit crimes in matching costumes for low pay. Will be murdered after too many failures.’ Who’s going to take that job? And what do they put on their tax return?”

He goes on about henchmen for a while before moving to the subject of villainous plans. “They don’t always think these things through in fictional portrayals. Bad guys are always trying to destroy the world in comic books. That doesn’t make sense. We have to live here too. Why would we do that?”

On superheroes. “There’s no way, super powers or not, that anyone can stumble on as many crimes in progress as the superheroes in comics. It’s like every time they walk down the street something happens. ‘Oh look, the bank is getting robbed. I better intervene.’ That doesn’t happen. One of the main reasons I use my super powers for evil is that I get to stir up interesting situations instead of waiting around for them to happen. Superheroes aren’t allowed to do that. It has to be incredibly boring.”

On costumes. “How the hell do people not recognize them? Superman? All he does is take off his glasses. It’s absurd! Nobody in this business is getting by with anything less than two thirds of their face covered. Most do just the uncovered mouth thing like I do, but a lot of guys go full ski mask with just the eyes uncovered. I can think of one or two women that tried that opera mask look, and it’s sort of sexy, but it’s how you end up with large super powered rapists waiting at your apartment when you get home. That’s what happened to Fire Dancer.” Indeed, and you can read about it in her book, Getting By: Life As a Sexual Assault Survivor.

On the few realistic fictional heroes. “There aren’t any I can think of that are spot on. The worst are usually the ones normal people find the most plausible, like Watchmen. They don’t even have super powers. Nobody makes it in this business without super powers. Batman could never happen. It’s ridiculous. Do you have any idea what it’s like to fight people who can pick up a fire truck and throw it at you? I have an infinite supply of munitions on me and it’s still way too hard. That guy has a utility belt and he knows karate. What the hell is that? And I’m not saying nobody has ever tried it. I know they have. None of them last very long.”

Next Week: I love it when a plan comes together.

After the super battle I’m slightly shaken, but not stirred. I call Larry from a payphone and excitedly tell him there’s far more here than a three page magazine article. This is at least a book. For a moment I feel like Truman Capote when he first set foot in Holcomb, Kansas.

I walk down the street after hanging up on the perplexed and slightly annoyed Larry, who adamantly insists I cut this down to whatever Trigger wants. I’m in a fugue. I don’t know how to find Hammerspace now. He effectively lost me when he vanished into that puff of smoke a few chapters ago.

I’m a few blocks from the payphone when I spot the flashing lights of police cars and fire trucks. I keep walking toward the disturbance until my way is blocked by police officers and a line of crime scene tape. On the other side of the police perimeter is a furiously burning gasoline tanker which firefighters scramble to spray with extinguishers. A way off from the tanker I see two paramedics hoisting the invisible remains of Force Field Girl into an ambulance. Apparently she ran from the battle with Hammerspace and was hit by a car (because she was invisible), which then lost control and careened into the parked gasoline tanker, causing it to explode. I can’t help wondering about causality after this. If Foursight had never said anything, perhaps she wouldn’t have run. But then maybe Hammerspace’s grenade would have blown her apart. What exactly did Foursight see? Was it exactly this? Was this the only possibility? Was it like watching a television or was it much more complicated than seeing one scene at a time in the order that they go down? Maybe he sees all possible futures simultaneously, but somehow he can pick the one that will actually occur because of what he knows about the present. This awes me for a moment before I decide Foursight just isn’t that smart, and I shake the notion.

I return to my hotel room and flip the TV on just for the noise to keep me company. I lie down and stare at the ceiling as I dial Hammerspace’s cell phone number hopelessly. I’m shocked when he actually picks up. I stumble on my words at first, but it’s surprisingly easy to convince him to meet up again.

It’s three in the afternoon when Hammerspace picks me up from the sidewalk in front of the hotel in a green Honda Accord complete with rust holes. I assume this is a cover, because driving around in some sort of super car would draw too much attention. I immediately ask him about the disappearing act, and he assures me it isn’t any sort of super power, only a slight of hand trick that anyone can do. He won’t tell me exactly how it works, though.

We drive back to Hammerspace’s building. I’m pretty excited to see the inside of a supervillain’s lair, but what awaits on the other side of the door is shockingly normal. Hammerspace lives in a studio apartment on the third floor of a building that smells alarmingly of cat urine. He explains that this is because of the cat lady on the floor below him. I ask him how many of the animals she has and he says “none, but she keeps her litter box in the stairwell.”

The inside of the villain’s hive is cluttered with peculiar items. He has a chemistry set complete with boiling beakers atop bunsen burners and enormous lengths of twisty wires connecting them all to a large Tesla coil. There is a rifle-like device which is clearly labeled ‘brain scrambler’. A man-sized robot spider sits deactivated behind his couch. A baseball diamond is displayed prominently inside a glass case near the entryway. A discarded sock hangs over the edge of the display case. Hammerspace passes all of this to sit down in a dilapidated reclining chair in front of the television. He kicks off his boots and puts up the foot rest. He reaches down and plucks an open bag of pork grinds from the floor next to the chair. He offers me some, but I decline. They give me heartburn.

Hammerspace seems more and more annoyed as I inquire excitedly about his death rays and robospiders. “You act like you’ve never seen a brainwashing machine before,” he eventually interrupts. “It’s not that big a deal. They don’t even come in handy very often. Maybe when the death ray runs dry. You haven’t seen a death ray either? They’re all over the place.”

I get him to talk more about the global super weapons black market. “There are a couple of evil super scientists out there that build this stuff and pretty much sell to the highest bidder. Some of it comes from space aliens too, but don’t write that in your article. It pisses off the fundamentalist Christians. Super scientists? They’re like scientists but they do super science. Super science is like regular science, but way ahead. That’s where all the lasers and stuff come from. It’s all powered by radioactive waves. You can get radiation to do just about anything.”

Hammerspace sees something on the television that catches his eye and he reaches over to his coffee table for a tiny black spiral notepad. He jots something down and then explains. “This where I write down all of my evil schemes. I like to write things out and let them sit for a little while before I really put anything in motion. Sometimes you come back to it later and realize it’s just stupid. Like one time I came up with a plan to make kinoki pads that suck people’s souls out of their feet. I had been drinking, but still. I come up with so many ideas. The mind of an evil genius is always rattling away. The gears never stop turning. Like this here, I just saw that kid from The Sixth Sense on TV and that made me think of this thing where you would pay it backward.”

Pay it backward?

“Yeah. Basically, I’ll go out and perform three evil deeds on complete strangers and I’ll tell them to perform three evil deeds on three strangers. So it will spread like a chain letter until everybody on the planet is evil.”

And that accomplishes…?

“Well, that’s the part I haven’t ironed out yet, but that’s why I write these things down and come back to them. It’s good to look at things from a fresh perspective so you can really weed out the bad ones.”

Ever wonder what kinds of things an evil mastermind watches on TV? He lists his favorites for me as he surfs channels. “The Sopranos, American Idol, Family Matters reruns, COPS – I love COPS. I love watching degenerates get their asses beat.”

Degenerates?

“Oh yeah, you know. Crack hos, junkies, trailer trash, to some extent drug dealers, just scumbags in general.”

I should probably be a little afraid to ask the next question, but my reputation for having no tact and no fear must be upheld, so I do it. I ask him what divides him from those kinds of people.

His masked face twists into an appalled contortion I can’t replicate in any literary way. “Are you joking? I’m nothing like those people. I mean, I suppose I understand where the average Joe might lump us all together as criminals, but that’s like saying Hitler and Pam Anderson are the same because they’re vegetarians. It just doesn’t work. What I do I do with class. Those people are animals. They’re little more than chimps given an orgasm button in some sort of lab experiment. They just push it and push it until they waste away and die. They have no self control, no ability to plan ahead, no greater thought processes, and no idea what they’re doing. But I know exactly what I’m doing. I have plans and ambition. If I had to pick one special thing that separates us that would be it, the ambition. Real people have it. Dirt bags don’t.”

This ties into another interesting aspect of Hammerspace, which has become even more evident as he sits here watching TV – his total shift in diction when addressing superheroes as opposed to the way he speaks to me during everyday encounters. “Yeah. That’s a big part of it. If I’m robbing a bank and the Scarlet Avenger lands in front of me and I say ‘I ain’t do nothin’, bitch’ that’s how a common hood rat talks. I want the Scarlet Avenger to know that I’m a vastly superior threat. So I might say something like ‘Well, well, well, Scarlet Avenger, we meet again. Shall we dance the dance where you DIE!’ That sounds very chill. I’m letting her know I’m an educated and reasonable gentleman, but that I want to kill her.”

So if this were Dungeons and Dragons you would be lawful evil?

“I have no idea what that means. I’m not a nerd-” is all he manages to say before he sees something that makes him leap out of his seat. “Holy shit!”

Next Week: Boogeymen

“I just remember I was standing near the cash register and the store was pretty slow, it was a Sunday afternoon I think, and she comes walking in wearing her Birkenstocks and a peace sign shirt and she plops these brochures down on the counter and says I should join Greenpeace.”

The aforementioned ‘she’ was Linda Sherman, 18, environmental advocate and future Ex-Mrs. Melvin Thompson. While he was initially dumbfounded by her pushy and domineering approach, she managed to recruit him to her cause by means he isn’t shy describing nearly two decades later. “I banged her in the walk-in right there. It was my first time. A girl does something like that and what eighteen year old boy wouldn’t go with her to the ends of the earth?”

So Melvin quit his job and ran off with Linda on the journey that would change his life and the future of the world for years to come. Together they set sail on the Gaia’s Child, an anti-whaling ship that toured the Pacific. Hammerspace elaborates. “I had put a little money together, and with my mom doing the tape gig and me gone she could rent out my room and make ends meet.”

Aboard the Gaia’s Child, life was an adventure for Melvin “We would pull up and just throw things at these little Japanese guys who were trying to kill dolphins. I know it was supposed to be a whaling thing, but it was usually dolphins for some reason,” he recalls. “I didn’t really care so much what it was about. I just knew we were having a good time throwing things at foreigners and having sex, holy crap, the sex. You wouldn’t guess it anymore but she was just an animal in the sack back then. The girl was a total whore.”

Unfortunately, Linda’s insatiable sexual appetite was also the cause of intense drama on the ship. She cheated on Melvin with at least two shipmates onboard, and he suspects she was unfaithful on numerous single instances while the ship was in port. “I was in a bunch of fistfights over her,” he says. “When you’re a kid you don’t realize women like that just aren’t worth it. They don’t care about you. She didn’t care about me.”

So it wasn’t unusual for the couple to be squabbling in August of 1996 when the Gaia’s Child, following a radar signal they suspected belonged to an undeclared whaling vessel, sailed straight into the accident that would leave Melvin with his unique ability to hide objects of any size on his person. “We came up on this ship that was just floating there in the middle of international waters and they weren’t responding. Nobody knew what was going on. We figured they were just pulling some scam to make us go away,” he says of that fateful day. “A lot of ships would sort of turn out the lights and just pretend they weren’t home. That’s not unheard of out there.”

Melvin and Linda had begun an argument earlier that day, with her claiming that he did not actually care about their cause on the ship. “She said I was just in it to play around, and she was right, but I wasn’t going to tell her she was right. You never tell a woman she’s right. That was one thing I knew back then that I was actually right about,” he says. So as the Gaia’s Child dropped anchor and crewmen attempted to identify the unknown vessel before them, Melvin lowered a dingy to the surface and headed over to the ship against the wishes of the captain, in a daring gambit to prove his worthiness to Linda. “How was I supposed to know they were testing a sigma ray bomb?”

The sigma ray bomb was born out of a cold war era attempt to bring science fiction into science non-fiction. It was a bomb which, upon detonation, bathed the surrounding area with sigma rays, beams which leading scientists of the day theorized would freeze any moving objects in a form of stasis, allowing troops to move in and occupy an area without sustaining or inflicting any casualties. Unfortunately, the sigma ray bomb didn’t pan out as planned. “We finally got it to work about ten years later but the carbon emissions were off the charts and we ended up getting slapped with a ton of violations,” explains former Sgt. Raymond Holleran of military research and development. “In the end it was cheaper and way more environmentally friendly just to kill people, so we stuck with conventional explosives.”

While the exact nature of the experiment in the Pacific isn’t known to the public the details aren’t important to Hammerspace. “I drove a boat into an army test target,” he says of the event. “They dropped an experimental super science bomb on me. It happens.”

Onlookers were less casual. “Aye, we figured the lass for dead, we did. Sunken straight to the bottom of Davy Jones’s locker,” recalls Captain Andre ‘Peg Leg’ Pilleggi, captain of the Gaia’s Child at the time of the incident. “We looked over the starboard and seen that ghost ship light up like the armor of the valkyries. We turned about the port and were heading out on all engines when me first mate spotted the crazy swabbie coming back.”

“I was a little disoriented, but that was it,” Hammerspace later told us. “Kind of like vertigo or something. You know when you see one of those Omnimax movies and there’s that tunnel of colored lights at the beginning and you feel like you’re going to fall out of your chair into the vastness of space? It was like that. That’s what it’s like to get superpowers. Of course I didn’t know I had superpowers until much later.”

After the accident, Linda didn’t cheat on Melvin ever again. She took up knitting and insisted they settle on dry land. She picked out an apartment in Greenwich Village with money from her trust fund where she and Melvin lived for most of their early twenties. He took a job at a nearby standardized test scoring facility. Still, the couple had their problems. Hammerspace elaborates, “She didn’t stop slutting around so much as she just changed into a completely joyless bitch no one would want to [expletive] anyway. Can I say that? Are you allowed to print that?”

With his issues at home becoming more and more frustrating, Melvin used his position at the testing facility to vent. “You know those tests you take in grade school where you fill in the little bubbles with a number two pencil and ship them somewhere to have them graded? I worked at that place.” Melvin was written up twice for misconduct on the job. “They caught me changing some kid’s name to ‘condom break’ on his test results. He was just so dumb and I was so angry I had to do it. In a lot of ways, that was my first act of villainy. It wasn’t quite super yet, though.”

After a succession of similar occurrences, Melvin was fired from the testing facility. He was determined not to let Linda find out. He began spending his days at the local shopping mall under the guise of working. “I would hang around and play arcade games. I got really good at Street Fighter. And that was actually how I discovered my powers. I was in the arcade with some friends and we worked out this system where we were cheating the ski ball machine. We had a guy behind it and one of us would roll him the balls under the machine and he would drop them in the center hole. So we accumulated this crazy amount of prize tickets and we used them to buy 849 packs of Pokemon stickers. We got so many we didn’t think we could carry them all. I just started sticking them in my pockets and that’s how I figured it out.”

Melvin’s newfound superpowers led to a rash of small time crime. “When you have an entire alternate universe of storage space readily available on your person it’s the easiest thing in the world to steal things,” he explains. “I could walk into a hardware store and walk out with a lawnmower, a chainsaw and a propane grill in my duster any day of the week. I remember, in the middle of Circuit City, jamming a fifty inch flat screen in my pants right in front of the security guy and like ten other people. The cops searched me up and down and had to let me walk.”

At home, Linda was becoming suspicious. The apartment had slowly accumulated several items which were obviously not affordable on a test scorer’s hourly wages – items including the aforementioned television, a whole range of stereo equipment, DVD players, gold ingots and a growing collection of original Monets. “I’m a big fan of impressionism. You know Monet was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting.” (I later found this exact line, stated verbatim, at the beginning of the Wikipedia entry for Monet. It was taken from Monet in the 20^th Century by John House)

In an attempt to distract Linda from his sudden and mysterious accumulation of wealth, Melvin proposed to her in a lavish New York restaurant with a full carat ring he purchased from Tiffany’s & Co. Despite a long history protesting the global diamond trade, Linda accepted. The marriage was short lived. “If she was cranky before that she turned into a full on, frothing at the mouth, wretched velociraptor after we got married. It lasted about a year.”

Thanks to her particularly shrewd attorney, Dick Morgan, Linda secured an unusually high alimony payment in the divorce. Looking back, Hammerspace had this to say: “I know now that you don’t get married to fix things. Getting married just makes things harder if it does anything at all. The divorce was awful. What a mess. And Dick Morgan is an asshole. I don’t care what people say about him,” he pauses and then adds “I guess the up side was that afterwards I had more time to dedicate to my career.”

Next Week: The villain’s evil lair…

Melvin Mitchell Thompson, the boy who would become one of the world’s greatest supervillains was born in Flint, Michigan, a little town right smack in the middle of the glove. Throughout the middle of the twentieth century the city was a thriving industrial complex. Flint was the original headquarters of General Motors near the beginning of the century and continued to be one of the largest centers of automobile production even after the leaders of the company moved to Detroit. During the Second World War a large portion of allied tanks and vehicles were manufactured in Flint. After the war, Flint continued to produce thousands of cars well into the nineteen sixties when the city began a slow decline. It began with the cultural phenomenon popularly referred to as “white flight” and worsened during the seventies oil crisis. With automobile sales at record lows due to skyrocketing oil prices, production was cut. Lower production meant lower employment, and to the city of Flint that meant grave news. Auto workers, a huge portion of the city’s residents, began losing jobs. Local businesses began to lose revenue. A chain reaction had begun that would climax with the closing of nearly all the GM plants in Flint and the departure of almost everyone who could afford to leave. By nineteen-ninety, Flint was a rotting carcass of drug addicts and die hard American auto workers who simply refused to leave even after years of unemployment.

“I was about ten when the plant closed and I was about fifteen when I think my dad finally realized things weren’t going to get better” says Hammerspace while standing in front of the Flint Cultural Center. “It took him years. He just kept saying they were going to come back. I don’t know what he was thinking. It’s like he thought all the Japanese cars were just going to catch fire one day and everyone would start buying American again. I don’t know.”

After the better part of a decade without income, unable to provide for his family, Melvin’s father, Jackson Thompson, strangled himself to death with his bare hands in one of the most bizarre suicides on record. “Anyone who says it’s not possible didn’t meet my old man. The bastard was tough. All those old factory guys were,” Hammerspace recounts. “It took the cops weeks to figure out how he did it.”

Melvin’s mother, Irina Thompson, employed part time at the local Betamax manufacturing facility, struggled to make ends meet. In 1991 the plant closed. Financially destitute, Melvin’s mother attempted to turn to prostitution. “She must have been terrible in the sack,” he explains. “I just remember her apologizing a lot and offering refunds. She ended up feeling bad for a lot of guys and giving them back more than they paid. It was no way to conduct business.”

By the time Melvin was eighteen the situation had become dire. Unable to afford food, the Thompsons had regressed to eating the roaches that infested the family home. After a time without any food in the house, even the roaches left. It was then that Melvin took matters into his own hands. He went into town one afternoon wearing his best shoes and his best shirt and began entering local businesses to inform them that he would do absolutely anything for a paycheck. After hours of scouring Melvin entered the Little Caesar’s Pizza on Main Street in downtown Flint.

“I was taking a pie off the oven when this kid walks in,” Tony Giacomo, the store manager at the time, retells. “I felt bad for him is all. I nailed his mom a week before and came out five bucks ahead and you know it’s bad when it comes to that.” Feeling sorry for Melvin, Tony Giacomo offered him the only job he had available. “Back then we had just got those low flush toilets, and this was during the cheeser cheeser days, so you wouldn’t believe the monster number twos that was going into those shitters. Thing is, the hardware store went out of business and this was before the internet. We were all working ninety hours a week and none of us was going to drive to Detroit to get a plunger. So the toilets were plugged up all the time and you just had to man up and reach down there. I didn’t have time for it, but I couldn’t get nobody else onto the payroll neither. So I told him, I says every turd you pull out, I’ll give you a dollar under the table. He was happier than a pig in shit.”

Melvin set to work that very day. He was arguably the best toilet unclogger the Little Caesar’s pizza chain ever employed. “There wasn’t a minute went by that kid didn’t have his hand down a toilet,” Giacomo recounts. “He was the hardest worker I ever seen. He pulled ten, fifteen, twenty turds a day. After a few months one of my guys lost a hand in a pizza cutter mishap and got laid off so I gave Melvin his place on the crew tossing pies. But he kept pulling turds too. That was back before all this hand washing bullshit. You can’t do that now.”

Melvin began working constantly at the pizza parlor. “I remember one week I worked one hundred seventy five hours. I just didn’t sleep.” With his extra earnings his mother was able to quit hooking. After she quit, the family found they had even more money coming in. With that money Irina could afford to buy Melvin’s younger siblings cheap microwaveable macaroni and cheese. They tried it for a week, but then returned to eating roaches.

Things were looking up for the Thompson family by the mid nineteen nineties. Melvin was able to keep up with the mortgage on the family home and even Irina Thompson found a new job molding tapes at the local VHS plant. But working such long hours was beginning to take its toll on Melvin Thompson. “I barely remember the whole two year span from ninety two to ninety four. It’s just a huge blur like a bad drug trip or something. Then she walked in one day and changed everything.”

Next Week: Behind every great man is… an overbearing bitch.

Hammerspace rolls his eyes and frowns smugly as he takes in the costumed cadre before us. He sighs. This reporter is uncertain what to do, as there may be a dangerous super powered battle of titanic proportions about to explode before him.

The team of superheroes ahead of us is called The Five Freedoms and they wear star spangled jump suits that appear old and somewhat faded as if they may have picked through Evel Knievel’s trash to form their wardrobe. Their leader, The Flouridian, speaks. “So, um, Hammerspace, you’re a wanted criminal,” says The Flouridian in a shivering, uncertain voice. “We can’t let you go.”

Hammerspace replies with a sneer. “I don’t have time for suposers. Get lost.” Suposers is a derogatory term for superheroes, specifically ones of questionable aptitude. “It’s super and poser. You put the words together and you get suposer. Also known as spandies, costards, justies, super zeroes, vigilidiots, the list goes on and on,” Hammerspace explains. “I wish you could see how much of this I deal with. People think that superpowers are always worth having, but that’s because you only ever hear about the useful ones. For every General Welfare out there there’s ten other guys who had the same lab accident but ended up with ability to smell colors or turn gold into silver by touching it or pee orange juice or something else that’s totally worthless. Most of them are smart enough to know they don’t have anything going for them, but some of them end up like these idiots.”

And he isn’t exaggerating. The Five Freedoms consist of The Flouridian, a man whose teeth (and only his teeth) are completely invincible, The Lamanator, who has the miraculous ability to read the mind of Lorenzo Lamas from anywhere on the planet, The Tether, an inner city youth who can fly as long as some part of his body is touching the ground, Force Field Girl, a young woman who can turn invisible, and last but not least, Foursight, a jazz musician who only sees what will be happening four minutes in the future.

The following is a transcript taken from my tape recording of the event.

Flouridian: You can’t talk about us like that, Hammerspace.
Hammerspace: I just did. What are you gonna do about it?
Foursight: Oh no, not Force Field Girl!
Force Field Girl: What? What about Force Field Girl?
Foursight: You get blown up after General Welfare gets here.
The Tether: General Welfare?
Foursight: He gets here but Hammerspace knows about it already somehow and he’s ready for him.
Hammerspace: Mwa ha ha ha ha! You’re a fool Foursight! You’ve brought doom upon yourself and your comrades! (Hammerspace pulls a large shovel from his jacket.)
Foursight: But General Welfare will be ready for you when he gets here. He already knows you know.
Hammerspace: Does he now? (Hammerspace pulls a hand grenade from his jacket.)
Flouridian: Foursight, shut up! You’re going to get us all killed!
Force Field Girl: No! I have to know how I get blown up. I don’t want to die!
Lamanator: Lorenzo has decided to change the style of his ponytail!
Flouridian: That’s all he ever does! Why are you even on the team?
Mike Leon: Do you mind if I ask you some questions?
Flouridian: Identify yourself!
Mike Leon: Mike Leon, I’m interviewing Hammerspace for Trigger magazine. How long have you been superheroes?
Flouridian: Whoa! Whoa! We’re not superheroes. That’s a trademark. We’re super heroes. Two words.
Mike Leon: I don’t think that’s how trademarks work.
Flouridian: Are you an intellectual property attorney?
Mike Leon: No.
Flouridian: Then shut up. You want to get sued?
Force Field Girl: Please don’t let me die! Please!
Lamanator: Can’t you just make a force field?
Force Field Girl: No. That’s not my power!
The Tether: It’s not? That’s stupid.
Hammerspace: Enough! It’s time for you all to meet your doom!

Hammerspace tosses the hand grenade into the group of superheroes. I turn and leap head first into an open dumpster. The dumpster rattles from the blast of the grenade. I poke my head out in time to see Hammerspace smacking The Flouridian in the face with the Mallet of Malice. An invincible tooth embeds itself in the steel of the dumpster.

The Tether flies toward Hammerspace with one finger touching the ground, and the Lamanator comes at him with an uprooted stop sign (I’m still unsure if he plucked it himself or it was blown free by the grenade), but Hammerspace is like an engine of destruction amidst the feeble abilities of The Five Freedoms. He sends them sprawling. As the members of the hero team attempt to peel themselves from the pavement he cackles loudly.

“Your powers are useless against me, Freedoms,” he says as he raises his mallet to crush the head of the unconscious Lamanator. “Now I shall destroy you all!”

But as Hammerspace brings the mallet down something stops him. Something none of us saw coming (well, except for Foursight) halts the force of his smashing attack with quickness like none I’ve ever seen before.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Doctor Jacket causing mayhem and destruction,” says the star spangled crusader before us in a booming and masculine voice reminiscent of a 1960’s television commercial. He stands an even six feet of perfectly chiseled muscle decked out in a skin tight American flag themed costume topped by a four star general’s M1 steel pot helmet. He is General Welfare, possibly the most well known superhero in the world.

“I can’t let you hurt these citizens, Jacket!” Welfare thunderously proclaims as he lifts Hammerspace off the ground by his neck with one hand.

“For the tenth time at least, it’s Hammerspace. Hammer space,” Hammerspace angrily replies. “Now be a real patriot and DIE for your country!” As he shouts he draws a flame thrower and unleashes a furious stream of burning napalm that engulfs General Welfare. The General tosses Hammerspace to the ground.

“Only monsters settle their problems with guns, Jacket! It’s a good thing I’m completely invulnerable or that cowardly cheap shot would have hurt.”

“Blast you, Welfare! Mark my words! We will meet again!”

With that, Hammerspace tosses a smoke bomb at the ground and vanishes. He’s gone. I bury myself back in the dumpster to avoid being seen by the recovering superheroes, but I’ve lost him. I’ve lost Hammerspace.

Next Week: Terrible man, terrible childhood.

It’s almost noon as Hammerspace walks into a Dunkin Donuts on the I-95 for our interview. I can’t help but think the up and coming supervillain is as far from cliché as a supervillain can get as he sits down across from me in his purple rubberized armor and black trench coat. He doesn’t wear a shred of spandex and a cape is nowhere to be seen.

“A lot of guys dropped the cape back in the late nineties. It just went out. And you can’t blame them really. You ever try to ride a motorcycle with one of those things? It’s a real good way to end up like Isadora Duncan. Of course I catch a lot of flak for the black trench coat. It used to just be sort of roguish. Highlander wore a black trench coat. After Columbine it has a whole other meaning, but I didn’t become a professional evil-doer to worry about hurting people’s feelings.”

Is that what you call it? Professional evil-doing?

“Well, that’s a little long winded. I’m a big fan of what works. Supervillain. Supervillainy. Criminal enterprise. Evil mastermind is a good one.”

Hammerspace obviously isn’t shy about his moral alignment. “Why would I be?” He says as he sips a black coffee from a paper cup. “With the kind of nonsense that goes on in the world every day, I think it’s refreshing to have some people that just say ‘Hey, look, we’re evil. We’re the bad guys.’ I mean look at the last three presidents of the United States. Clinton promised to fix the economy, but he just wanted to run the show and get his knob polished. Bush was all hometown, God and country, but he just wanted to run the show and kill some towel heads. Then there was Obama, all about hope and change, but he really just wanted to run the show and, who knows, healthcare, something, something, socialism. This new guy – who knows, but I’m sure it’s the same. At least I’m not covering anything. I want to rule the world. Bam. There it is. It’s on the table. That’s it. No bullshit. And I’m better than those guys because of it.”

And he may be on to something. After two recent high profile scuffs with New York’s most prominent superhero, Hammerspace most definitely has some idea what he’s talking about, even if he is a little cocky. “General Welfare is a fool, a pathetic fool and I will crush him and enslave his beloved city.”
Of course being a super powered scoundrel has left a bad taste in the mouths of some. The mayor’s office officially labeled Hammerspace a threat to public safety last month after his most recent bout with General Welfare, in which a subway train was completely destroyed and a young woman was witnessed falling hundreds of feet from a skyscraper before being swept to safety by the military uniformed protector of freedom. “I said ‘You may have defeated me this time, Welfare, but can you defeat gravity itself to save the woman you love?’ and I threw the bitch off the building. How classic is that?”

Hammerspace chuckles as he takes a bite from a donut with cherry filling. He appears surprised and puts the donut down to curse at the donut shop clerk. The clerk looks like he’s not sure whether to call the police or look for a hidden camera. I defuse the situation by asking the next question.

“What is it that makes me a super villain and not just a villain? I have a super power. I mean, obviously.” I inquire further. “Christ, you’re not too keen on the research part of your job are you?” I explain to him that the question is just for the purpose of the interview because people want to read these things coming straight from him. He gets it. “Well, it’s like this: I can keep anything in my jacket. Whatever it is, I can toss it in there and pull it back out later. It doesn’t necessarily have to fit underneath the coat, as long as I can fit it in there initially.” What he means is that he has a magic satchel, as it is called in the literary world. In the early nineteen hundreds, with the advent of animation, cartoon characters, who weren’t limited by the laws of physics like live actors were, began to pull all kinds of objects seemingly from the nowhere around them; baseball bats, guns, musical instruments, anvils and, last but most certainly not least, giant mallets. This led to the coinage of the term hammerspace – a word for the extra dimension from which all of these objects were drawn. When Bugs Bunny pulls out a huge mallet and uses it to smash Elmer Fudd, he is pulling that mallet out of his hammerspace.

“Yeah. It comes from old cartoons. It’s sort of an obscure word so I figured you would have to be kind of smart to get it and those are the best kind. It’s the clever little names you have to think about for a second that you remember. Some guys just don’t get these things at all. I worked with a villain last year called Deathkiller. That’s trying too hard. It sounds like a high school thrash metal band. We get it already. He’s evil. Whatever. He ended up getting shot by his own remote control nerve poison dart gun. Beginner mistake. It didn’t surprise anybody. Speaking of poison there’s a guy that works for Graveyard called the Toxic Shocker. He even kind of looks like a tampon, but I met him once and he’s more of a douche than anything. Then there’s Dick Detective, do what you want with that one. Saikoziz, because apparently being too dumb to spell is cool. Commander Commando wants us to know he’s really commanding I guess.” I try to skew the conversation back to the actual physics of his super ability but he really likes this topic (and honestly I find it too insightful to exclude – I hope no one mentioned is offended). “Then you have the guys with names that just don’t make sense. The Black Bandit is a white guy. I think maybe that makes him racist, but I’m not exactly sure. General Welfare’s sidekick’s name is Jose Canyousee. It sounds clever at first, but then you meet the kid and you realize it wasn’t intentional. And the titles are all over the place. Everybody’s doctor this or Captain that. Captain Colonics is my favorite. That guy is way too into holistic medicine. I thought about a title for a while but I couldn’t come up with one that had a good sound to it.”

About five minutes later he finally stops talking about how easy it is to get a lordship outside of Great Britain and we get back to the subject of his jacket. He explains that he doesn’t necessarily have to be wearing a jacket, but that he just needs some sort of fold or pocket (something I didn’t know going into the interview). He lists some items he commonly carries around. “Hand grenades, ray guns, and of course the Mallet of Malice.” The Mallet of Malice is Hammerspace’s trademark weapon. He draws the medieval warhammer from the jacket as he talks about it and sets it down on the table. “I got it at one of those festivals where a bunch of nerds dress up in fairy costumes and sell ten dollar turkey drumsticks. It’s not magic or anything. I really don’t even use it that much. I whip it out and wave it around to look cool, but if the shit really hits the fan with invincible super foes I need the heavy artillery, not some replica for forty year old guys that still live with their mom.”

An hour later we’re pounding the sidewalk. Hammerspace stops at a newspaper vending box to get a tabloid that features a tiny picture of him down in the corner. He puts a quarter in the machine but takes the entire stack once it’s open. He drops all the tabloids along the sidewalk as we continue walking. Theft and littering before ten AM. The guy takes his evil doing seriously. A busty girl gives us the stink eye as she passes and both of us give her a good once over. “You get really kooky women in this business,” he says. “I was with this girl for a little while she would crawl around naked on all fours and howl like a wolf around the house. It didn’t work out. The suicide girl look is pretty much a necessity. I haven’t been with a girl who didn’t walk around in torn fishnets since my ex-wife. Normal women just don’t go for the whole evil empire thing I guess – unless you’re really successful. El Malo Grande can’t go to the Quik Stop without taking a supermodel back to his volcano fortress. It’s probably like that with any career really.”
As he drops the last of the newspapers we’re interrupted by a startlingly loud throat clearing sound. Behind us stands a bevy of costume clad personalities with their arms crossed and capes flowing. Superheroes.

Next Week: Hammerspace does battle with superheroes…well, sorta.