It was the last Saturday in March, just a few days before Stella was to go into the hospital—to give birth to the love child of Megaton Man—when again Daddy’s pickup rolled into the driveway. I heard the honk from upstairs. Only this time it wasn’t carrying a load of gravel, or Daddy; when I got to the front porch, Avril was letting down the tailgate. There was something big and boxy under the blanket.
“What is it, Avie?” I asked.
“What’s it look like?” said Avie. “Mama finally bought a new color TV; Daddy sent you the old one.”
Now I could make out the shape of our old TV—an ancient black-and-white cathode ray tube inside a big, heavy wooden cabinet. It had sat in our living room for years.
“But where’s Daddy?”
“Daddy’s gotta work Saturdays to pay for the color TV, Sissy,” Avie answered snidely, “and your rent.” She was already removing the bungy cords. “You’re supposed to have some big, manly Megahero living here with you, who can lug it inside—right?”
“Don’t shout it all over the neighborhood, stupid,” I said, walking down the steps. “He’s just a Civilian now.”
“Who are you calling stupid? Do you want this thing or not?”
Of course I wanted it; I helped her wrap up the cords.
“Is he cute?” Avie asked. “You’re Megahero roomie?”
“I told you, he’s nice-enough looking,” I replied. “Now be quiet.” I climbed up onto the truck to help wrestle with the TV.
By this time Stella had come out to the front porch; she was moving pretty slowly, as you can imagine, being nearly ready to give birth and all. “Hi, Avie,” she called out. “Pardon me, but I’m just going to sit here and watch.” She moved slowly toward the porch swing to sit down.
“Hi, Mrs. Megaton Man,” said Avril. “No problem; you take it easy.”
“Don’t call her that,” I whispered. “She’s not Mrs. Anybody.”
I wanted to explain to Avie how Trent and Stella had some kind of newfangled, post-modern relationship, but since I couldn’t describe it, I just helped Avie remove the blanket and slip it under the TV, so we could slide it out of the truck.
By then, Trent had appeared on the porch. He was wearing his nametag lanyard and was out the door to Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore. When he noticed Stella, he stopped to help by holding the wobbly swing steady as she sat down.
“Who’s the skinny white guy?” asked Avril. She was moving behind the TV cabinet now, to push it toward the open tailgate.
“He’s the Megahero I told you about, only he’s a Civilian now. Push it toward me.”
Trent saw us struggling on the truck, so he pitched in. The television wasn’t too heavy with the three of us lifting, but it was cumbersome, and we were just barely able to maneuver it through the screen door and around the foyer into the living room. That we managed not to smash it to pieces was a miracle.
We set the TV in the corner of the living room. Trent was behind it, boxed in. He had somehow gotten his nametag lanyard caught on some screw or something on the back of the TV, which yanked him over into an uncomfortable crouch. As he struggled to free it, he made small talk to cover his embarrassment. “So, Avie, Clarissa tells me you’re into theater,” he said. “What kind of plays do you put on?”
Now, Trent didn’t know this, but he was speaking to Avril James, Maven of the Theat-uh—not to mention a Self-Styled Social Activist, all capitalized. Only family and friends ever called her Avie, and unlike Pammy and Stella, who had bonded with my sister with all that Right On business, Trent was not a friend—yet.
“My name is Avril,” she stated firmly. She informed Trent that her newly-formed thespian collective did not merely put on plays, as he had so profanely referred to them, but staged theatrical works”—in the spirit of Agitprop and the Actor’s Studio, and some great, world-famous actor only she and a small circle of initiates had ever heard of.
I winced because I knew my sister was only getting started.
Poor Trent, still struggling to free his lanyard, got an earful—on the history of the North Atlantic slave trade, capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism; institutionalized racism and corporate greed; deindustrialization and the economic plundering or our inner cities; how all men were rapists; and—perhaps most important of all—how movies shot on Kolordot color film stock that faded. “Did you know the 1955 movie musical Tinsel Town Toe-Tapper has turned completely pink?” Avie demanded, pounding her fist on the top of the TV.
Trent was no doubt familiar with all of these various discourses; he worked in a used bookstore in a college town, after all. But seldom had he been singled so brutally to serve as the whipping boy on behalf of his oppressive class, which included all straight, white, males. Still, Trent listened attentively and respectfully to the entirety of Avie’s screed—he had little choice, pinned against the wall and with his lanyard still caught on the TV as he was.
I could only guess what was going through Trent’s mind: He had never owned a plantation full of slaves, never committed a hate crime against a homosexual, never raped a woman, never personally gassed a single Jew at Auschwitz. In short, he’d never oppressed or exploited the underclass—I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. This only took into account his presumptive Civilian record, leaving aside for the moment whatever green-and-purple evil he had thwarted as Megaton Man.
A weak “Woo!” was all Trent could muster in his own defense.
“I’m not saying you’re a bad person, as an individual,” Avril conceded, “You’re probably very decent. But you have to realize the position of privilege and power you hold by virtue of being born straight, white, and male. You’re a member of a privileged elite, and the system is stacked in your favor.” According to Avie, all Trent had to do was put on a three-piece suit, walk into corporate America, and land a job as a Wall Street banker, “just like that!” She snapped her fingers. Consequently, she said, “You deserve to lose your turn—so the rest of us get a fair shot.”
I told you, Avril could come on pretty strong. She sounded like my Consciousness-Raising 101 course I had taken my freshman year—all compressed into three minutes after drinking a strong pot of coffee.
Trent somehow extricated his lanyard from the TV and was rubbing the back of his neck where it had dug into his skin. “I think you have a point there, Avril,” he said, “historically speaking.”
“You can call me Avie,” she said, as Trent squeezed out from behind the television. “Well, it was nice meeting you Trent. You’re alright.” She smiled as she shook his hand. He smiled wanly; he gave me a funny look and scampered out the front door, late for work.
“He’s not such a bad guy,” said Avie, proud to have given her obligatory sermon for the day. “He does have a nice ass.”
“What the fuck, Avie,” I said. “That’s my housemate, not the president of Federal Motors. You think he owns a yacht or something? He drives a used car.”
“Sissy’s got a cru-ush, Sissy’s got a cru-ush,” she taunted.
“Shut up,” I said, swatting her on the butt. “I do not.” Stella was right outside, sitting on the porch; luckily the window was closed.
“He’s almost old enough to be your real daddy,” she said.
“Daddy’s my daddy,” I said, tears welling up in my eyes.
“I’m sorry,” said Avie, hugging me and smothering me with kisses. “I’m just jealous of my big sister, living in a cool house on her own, away at college and all.”
I got some tissues from Pammy’s desk. “Sometimes you have a big mouth,” I said, sniffling.
Out on the porch, Avie gave Stella a hug, and asked her how soon for the baby. “Not long now, said Stella. “Aren’t you going to at least stay for dinner?”
“School night,” said Avie. “Got homework back in Detroit. And Daddy want’s the pickup back before dark.”
On the driveway, Avie hugged me again, but I was still kinda mad at her.
“I almost forgot,” she said suddenly. On the front seat of the pickup were a set of rabbit ears and a UHF box. “I trust you can hook these up yourself,” she said, handing them to me. There was also a shopping bag on the floor; she pulled it out and set it on the porch.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
“Our old comic books,” said Avie. “Turns out Mama hadn’t thrown them out—she came across them doing some spring cleaning.”
Avie kissed me on the cheek, walked around to the back of the truck and closed the tailgate, and hopped in behind the wheel. Waving goodbye again, she backed down the driveway and headed down Ann Street back to Detroit.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
A black-and-white TV and old comic books—Ann Street was shaping up into a real cultural center.
The next morning, when I came downstairs, the TV in the living room was on, but nobody was watching it. One of the network morning shows was giving the weather report. I turned if off. I found Trent in the kitchen eating cereal. He already had on his lanyard for work. Stella and Pammy had apparently left for campus already; Trent had probably taken them and dropped them off, then come back.
I sat down next to Trent and apologized about the scene the day before. “Avie can get a little bit strident,” I said.
“You can say that again,” said Trent. “I thought she was going to castrate me right there behind the television. I don’t get it; your dad is white.”
“Avie’s daddy’s Cajun,” I corrected him. “There’s a distinction in Avie’s eyes.”
“Wait—I thought your dad…”
“We’re half-sisters,” I said. “My real father’s white, too, I’m pretty sure. But I can’t get Mama to say much about him. Supposedly he was in the military.” I explained to Trent that I had only guessed my daddy was not my real father as youngster, when I began to notice there were no baby pictures of me with Daddy, only with Mama. “But there were plenty of baby pictures of Avie with both Mama and Daddy. I must have been six or seven. I cried and cried about it.”
Trent sighed. “It isn’t a perfect world, is it? Our baby—Stella’s baby, that is; families in general … I mean, it’s just never nice and neat, is it?” He looked down at the nametag dangling at the end of his lanyard. The prospect of becoming a father had him pretty frightened.
I put my hand on his. “You’re a good man,” I said. “You’ll make a great father.”
“Thanks,” said Trent.
“You were never in any danger yesterday, by the way,” I assured him. “Avie forgot to bring her dull gardening shears.”
Trent looked at me uncertainly for a brief second, then burst out laughing. We both laughed for several minutes.
Finally, somebody was starting to get my sense of humor.
It was the last day of March, a Tuesday. When I woke up, everybody was gone. Stella, who was just about ready to have her baby, had no business doing anything but taking it easy. But she wanted to get in one last morning class for some reason or other—probably some meaningless quiz or test or something. Trent had driven her and no doubt hovered outside in the hallway the whole time, and when class was over had chauffeured her back to Ann Street. After lunch, Stella and I sat at the dining room table, as usual, doing homework.
Trent was kind of fidgety and restless, as you might expect; he had called off work, because any minute he might have to take Stella to the hospital. He was in the living room on the sofa, trying to read Hegel, but couldn’t sit still. He kept jumping up and down, looking at the clock on the wall, perusing the books on the shelves in Pammy’s nook.
“Will you please stop pacing?” Stella snapped. “I’m trying to finish this paper.”
Trent apologized. He sat back down and picked up Hegel.
“The baby will come when it’s ready,” Stella said to Trent. “You should have gone to work. Why don’t you call and see if they still need you? You’re not doing any good around here.”
Border Worlds Used and Slightly New Bookstore was only six blocks away, but Trent wanted to be present the moment Stella needed rushed to the hospital.
When the doorbell rang, Trent leapt up from the couch. “I’ll get it!” he cried, as if one of us were likely to beat him to it.
Now, from where we sat in the dining room, I could see into the living room and out the front window well enough, but not to the foyer or the front door. We hadn’t seen anybody come up the sidewalk, so we had no idea who might be standing on the porch.
We heard Trent open the door and talk to somebody. They were clear on the opposite corner of the first floor from where Stella and I sat, so I could hardly make out the speech. It sounded like Trent said: Hi, Preston! What a surprise. What brings you to …
I could hear the screen door open, there was some scuffling, then I heard Trent cry out: “Oh, my God!” He must have fallen against the front door, because it sounded like it slammed against the wall.
There were some more words, and the screen door slammed shut. It sounded like Trent was stumbling around in the hall. I looked at Stella. “What the heck?” I said. She was concerned, but not in any condition to spring up from her chair; she shrugged her shoulders.
I got up and ran through the kitchen just in time to see Trent stumbling up the stairs. When I got to the foot of the stairs, he was halfway up. “Don’t worry; I’m all right. It’s nothing.” I watched him disappear upstairs.
Just then, Pammy walked in the front door behind me with a bag of groceries. “What was Preston doing here?” she asked.
“Who’s Preston?” I told Pammy we were in the rear of the house and hadn’t seen who had been at the front door, but that Trent had spoken to somebody.
Preston Percy, Pammy explained, was the copyboy who worked with Pammy at The Manhattan Project—the one who had been her live-in boyfriend until they both realized he was gay. “He was dressed like a spy just now,” said Pammy. “I could swear I saw him slipping a hypodermic needle back into his trench coat.” They had passed one another on the sidewalk. “He said, ‘Hi, Pammy. Looks like rain.’”
We could hear muffled sobs coming from the bathroom upstairs. “Is that Trent?” asked Pammy. “Is he all right?”
“I think he’s a bit tense, with the baby coming and all.” I helped Pammy with the grocery bag to the kitchen. She pulled out a cookie sheet and started spreading out some frozen fish sticks and fries.
“You hungry, Stella?” asked Pammy.
“Starving,” came the reply from the dining room.
Pammy set the temperature and popped the sheet into the oven.
Suddenly, there was the sound of shattered glass upstairs.
“Oh, good Lord!” I said, and ran back down the hall and up the stairs. Outside the bathroom door, which was locked, I listened for a moment, then gently knocked. “Is everything all right, Trent?”
He stopped crying and said, “Uh, yeah, everything’s fine—just a little mishap with the mirror on the medicine cabinet. Would you mind getting me a broom and a dustpan?”
“Sure thing,” I said.
I went back downstairs and got the broom and dustpan, which we kept hung on the inside of the door to the basement, along with an old cardboard box, and brought them back. The door was still locked. “I’ll just leave them out here, okay, Trent?”
“That’ll be fine.”
I stepped away slowly from the bathroom door, waiting to see if he would open it. But he didn’t. I could hear him blowing his nose.
Back downstairs, Pammy wanted to know: “Is Trent okay? Is he cracking up?” She was wondering if we would have to be making two trips to the hospital. We could hear the scratchy sound of broken glass being swept up, then dumped into the cardboard box.
The timer rang, and Pammy pulled the fish sticks and fries out of the oven. Stella waddled—with much effort—from the dining room into the kitchen, and I set the table. Momentarily, we heard Trent’s footsteps and he clomped down the stairs.
He sounded heavier than before—much heavier.
The three of us, not yet seated, stood next looking down the hall. We watched as Trent lumbered to the bottom of the stairs—broom, dustpan, and cardboard box in hand—and turned toward us. The usual grey Abyssinian Wolves T-shirt he’d been wearing seemed tight on him now, especially across the shoulders. As he marched toward us, his thighs seemed thicker, more muscular—even underneath is baggy grey sweats.
The kitchen seemed suddenly much smaller as he squeezed past us to the back door. He hung up the broom and dustpan, and set the cardboard box of broken glass just outside the back door next to the trash can. He came back in and washed his hands in the sink. “Smells like fish sticks!” he said.
That was our cue for me and Stella to sit down, and Trent joined us. He looked so thick now—his jaw was suddenly lantern-proportion—that I thought he might crush the second-hand chair. Stella poured some milk, I un-twist-tied a loaf of bread; and Pammy, wearing oven mitts, served some hot fish sticks and fries off the sheet and onto our plates.
“So tell me, Trent,” said Pammy. “What brought Preston all the way from Megatropolis?”
Trent only licked his lips and looked at the fish sticks. “Mmm … this sure looks good! I sure have an appetite, all of a sudden! What was that? Oh, yes, Preston …”
Trent continued to grow, literally grow, right before our eyes. His T-shirt was now stretched to the limit; his torso and shoulders were now so broad it was tearing at the seams.
Riiiiip! Trent began to cry.
“What is it?” pleaded Stella. “Trent, what’s going on?”
Trent suddenly leapt to his feet, his shirt hanging in tatters, and ran from the kitchen. His footsteps, now even heavier, stomped up the stairs.
“That dirty son of a bitch,” said Pammy, setting the sheet down on the stove top. “I think I know what happened.” Preston Percy, she explained, hadn’t just been the copyboy of The Manhattan Project and Pammy’s sexually-confused boyfriend who eventually came out of the closet. “Preston also secretly worked for the government, just like Megaton Man.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Pammy explained that shortly after arriving at the newspaper, Preston had been recruited by ICHHL—the Ivy Covered Halls of Higher Learning—to become a Secret Agent. Despite its innocuous-sounding name, ICHHL was in fact a powerful, quasi-governmental organization originating in certain Cold War academic science programs, but whose mission had come to encompass the surveillance of all known Megaheroes. Once Megaton Man—in the guise of Trent Phloog, cub reporter—was planted at The Manhattan Project, it became Agent Percy’s job to keep an eye on him. “Preston wasn’t there to make coffee,” said Pammy, “although he made a darn good cup of coffee—he was the only one in the office who ever bothered to clean the machine; he was also the handler of America’s Nuclear-Powered Hero—reporting directly to the White House.”
“Whoa,” I said. “If this Agent Percy is in Ann Arbor, it can only be because …”
Stella finished the sentence: “… because America wants its Nuclear-Powered Hero back.” She got up from her seat at the table with much effort, and waddled toward the hall. Pammy and I got up, too. “No,” said Stella. “Let me go to him.” She slowly lumbered up the stairs. “Poor Trent.”
There was nothing for me and Pammy to do but eat sit there and look at our fish sticks, which suddenly weren’t all that appetizing. We could hear sounds from upstairs—like Trent moving his bed around in his bedroom—and some talk between he and Stella. After a few minutes, Stella came back down the stairs.
Behind her was Megaton Man.
If Trent was big before, he was even larger now; Stella walked in front of him, slowly enough, but Megaton Man had even more difficulty just fitting through the hall. The two of them walked past us through the kitchen and out the back door, into the yard. As he passed, I got a full view of Megaton Man’s primary-colored uniform—blue body suit, yellow gloves and boots, red trunks, big yellow “M” on his chest, cowl and goggles, and red cape attached to his collar bones with shiny brass buttons. The bulging muscles did kind of make him look like a giant walnut on steroids, but the effect in person wasn’t as repulsive as I imagined.
Pammy and I watched from the kitchen window. Stella and Trent—Megaton Man—stood in the middle of the back yard, under the clothesline, exchanging a few private words. I imagined Trent was apologizing for having to leave, just as the baby was due, but that duty called, etc., etc.. She in turn seemed understanding, and wished him luck on whatever dangerous mission was ahead of him. Then, in the blink of an eye, Megaton Man took off, straight up, into the air.
I had never seen anything like it in my life.
“That was cool!” I said.
Then we saw Stella almost double over with pain. Pammy and I shot out the back door. Stella was experiencing cramps. “You better get me to the hospital,” she said. “I think I’m going into labor.”