Who Writes This Stuff?

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.