The first time someone shoved a mask in my hands, I told myself that this was just one more job. I’d get through it, collect my pay, and move back into what I was most comfortable with. One job led to two, ten, and before I knew it I was well into my career as one of costumed crime’s necessary components: I was a Goon.

What’s a Goon? Exactly what it sounds like. You’re a pawn in the machinations of a villainous mastermind’s great game. You’re an expendable asset to a criminal organization. You’re a gun for hire. You’re a knockaround guy, a hanger on, a prospect, a wannabe. You do crime on the behalf of others for pay.

By my reckoning, my career had more downs than ups. Considering I’m writing this from a cell in the country’s most notorious Ultramax pen, I’d say that’s pretty obvious. But if all you followed were the headlines, you’d probably think it was sunshine and roses, ten course meals and vacations in Bermuda. You always get a lot of ink when you pull off a successful heist. But it doesn’t matter how many headlines you earn, it’s the last one that really matters. The reality of life as a goon is that it’s a lot of blood and broken bones. Your fine dining is a prison cafeteria, and your vacation view is a cell block. 

That’s if you’re lucky.

The average retirement package for a goon is a padded room or a hole in the ground. I came up with a bunch of guys chasing the dollars, working jobs all over the country. In our line of work, you’d occasionally run into each other working for some cowl or another. All those guys I came up with are gone. Some went crazy, others ate their gun, one outright disappeared, but some just ran into the wrong cape on the wrong day.

I remember one night in September of ‘39 taking stock of my position. It wasn’t good. I was in a San Rosa hole-up that cost me what little cash I had left. I was bruised all over, covered in cuts, and needed a shower in the worst possible way. I couldn’t sleep because of the music from the all-night diner across the street, which constantly reminded me of how hungry I was. My clothes were ruined, I was running on fumes, out of moves, and I didn’t have a friend left in the world.

I was the lucky one.

That morning six guys and a cowl broke into the Rose City Savings & Loan in about the dumbest strong-arm daylight robbery you could imagine. The cowl was some jerkoff that called himself Blastmaster, inventor turned “criminal mastermind.” First thing he does is he  blows the front door off its hinges and poses on the wreckage. This was totally unnecessary, mind you. It was 8:30 in the morning and the bank was open for business. We could have just walked in, held the place up, jumped in a car, and been out of there before the cops even knew we were in town. Not this idiot. He wanted to put on a show.

Some show. Because of his “explosive opener,” the air was completely choked with dust and smoke, so we were constantly running into everything, including each other. As if the ridiculously loud explosion wasn’t enough of a tell, the bank’s alarm immediately starts ringing. So not only is everyone in the bank now blind and deaf, the entire city now knows what’s going on and they start peeking out doors and windows. I hear people say eye-witness testimony is pretty useless, but testimony from about 200 eye-witnesses is pretty damn convincing to a jury of your peers, let me tell you.

While the rest of us guys are bagging the cash and playing crowd control, Blastmaster decides he’s gonna give his dissertation about the virtues of the new world order or some other garbage. Talking about how society was decadent and bloated and he was definitely not a total moron but was indeed the man to set the world straight. Meanwhile, nobody can hear or see the frigging jerk, so really he’s just talking to himself instead of holding up his end and getting us into the vault. 

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You wouldn’t believe what a fiasco the vault turned out to be. You’d think a guy that invented a glove that could blow things up from a distance would be able to figure out how to blow the lock off a steel door. Not this idiot. He made three attempts and all he managed to do was make a lot of noise and jam the door into the hinges so bad we couldn’t hope to pry it open. Finally he gets frustrated to the point of desperate anger and decides to blow the door up, which he proceeds to do. The problem was he blew up everything inside the vault, too. The door shatters into a million pieces, the cash boxes explode, and it’s suddenly a blizzard of dollar bills.. 

This is where everything goes completely off the rails. I don’t know what you know about physics, but when you apply a sufficient amount of force into a small enough area, it tries to escape in the easiest way it can. Blaskmaster had just put the full force of his blasing glove into the solid steel bank vault with nowhere to escape except back where it came. In short, Blastmaster had just turned the bank vault into the biggest shotgun you ever saw, and it was pointed directly at him.

See, while the dollar bills might have just come billowing out like a fluffy cloud, the cash boxes also contained rolls of coins, which suddenly became very fast moving projectiles. The two guys that went into the vault room with Blastmaster weren't getting back up. The rest of us had about eight bucks in mixed change sticking out of us like tiny ninja stars. But Blastmaster? Well, there’s a reason you never heard of the guy. I hear they had to pull pieces of him out of the drywall. Ceiling, too.

And just like that the entire cockeyed plan crashed and burned. The rest of us stuffed what cash we could into our pockets and jumped into our getaway vehicle: a moving van. Nowadays that might not seem like a crazy idea to you, but back in 1939 there weren’t a lot of red vans screaming through the streets of your average city. We stood out like a sore thumb. I was pulling a freshly-minted penny out of my left arm when, as you probably expected, the law finally catches up with us.

Black Shadow, the motorcycle riding “King of the Road,” flies up on us like we were standing still. Now him you’ve heard of. He wore the black jumpsuit and the full face helmet. I remember at the time thinking he looked like a robot off one of those Flash Gordon films. His real name was Frankie Novak, just some auto mechanic and part time daredevil out of southern California with a lot of time on his hands. He would spend his idle hours tuning up his bike and guys like me all up and down the state, and that day it was my turn. He didn't have to invent self-driving machines, death rays, flying robots, he was just a wrench with a plan. That's all it takes to be a hero, a will and a way.

Before I know what’s going on, Black Shadow jumps off his bike, comes crashing through our windshield, and plants a dropkick on me that sends me flying through the van’s back doors. All that momentum was enough to carry me fifteen feet on ten feet of road.  I hit the ground hard, rolling across the pavement, through the guardrail, and over the side of the Evercrest Bridge. I freefall something like 60 feet or so and come crashing through the skylight of some rich guy’s sun room right in the middle of breakfast.

I don't know what I did to make that man so angry he tried to give me a one-way ticket to the big Adios, but it happened. He knew it would, too. Nobody ever came looking for me, I never heard the sound of a highly-tuned engine chase me as I stumbled through the alleys to the hole-up. He came through that windshield and as far as Black Shadow was concerned it was over for yours truly. You start the day busting into a bank for an easy score, you end it cut, bruised, beaten, and covered in scrambled eggs.

That's the life of a goon.

Right now you’re probably asking yourself, “How are you still alive?” It’s a good question, I asked myself the same thing. Regular people don’t just get up and walk away from a beating like that, but that's what I did, at least eventually. I wouldn’t know the answer to that question for another few years, but when I found out, a part of me wished I went to the vault with Blastmaster.