ASPHALT AND CONCRETE, TOWNS AND HIGHWAYS: Road Trippin' with Superheroes, Throwing Away Money, & Indiana's Contribution to Facial Hair

FAIRFIELD, Ohio (ZP) -- The bookstore spun around me. I thought I was going to faint, right there, amongst the magazines and paperbacks.

Grief! Good God, the power of grief! Of witnessing the death of a trusted friend, a childhood mentor!

I'd heard about his murder, sure, back in 2005. Lots of people had. But only then, in the chilled silence of a bookstore, could I handle reading the gory details of his death.

A bullet through the skull, the trigger pulled by a trusted friend. The body incinerated in secret by the assassin's goons. I felt my legs starting to give out beneath me; I planted an arm into a shelf. My throat muscles constricted. I thought for a moment I was going to cry.

And then, suddenly, I was no longer alone.

"The OMAC Project is stellar. Kinda Sad, huh?"

I turned around to see this young woman, Middle-Eastern features with purple lipstick and a nose ring, staring at me with these sad eyes.

She understood. Everybody understands when an icon, fictional or real, dies.

"Oh. Yeah. It's taken me this long to get around to reading about it...Blue Beetle was a favorite of mine..."

I explained, rambled actually, about how I'd grown up reading many of the characters involved, how I wasn't really a comic fanboy type, that it was my birthday, I'd taken the day off from work, and I was just in the bookstore browsing when I saw a copy of The OMAC Project staring at me...

She laughed. And suddenly, I felt awkward, a total imbecilic spaz, as if I'd just told this complete stranger that I lived in my parents' basement and collected fucking Star Wars figurines.

Pretty girls, particularly those who obviously know more about the modern state of comic books than I do, make me nervous. I regained my composure, cleared my throat.

The Silver Age Blue Beetle was one of my favorites growing up, mainly through his short-lived 1980s solo series and the old Justice League International series. Hell, I never wanted to be Bruce Wayne or Batman when I was a kid -- too damned depressing. Superman? Please. The world's full of too many friggin' Boy Scouts. But billionaire IT company CEO and genius inventor Ted Kord, with his nonlethal BB Gun and his flying ship shaped like - you guessed it - a giant blue beetle? Now, that guy had a sense of humor, a flair for sarcasm and nonchalance and sheer love of being, well, a superhero.

And the writers and artists killed him off. One of my childhood heroes. Murdered in cold blood for the sake of plot development.

"So you're a Justice League fan? Oh my God... you HAVE to read this if you are..."

She reaches over my shoulder and pulls down a trade paperback copy of Identity Crisis, Brad Meltzer and Rags Morales' modern opus, one of the most controversial miniseries in comic history. In its pages one superhero's wife is raped and then murdered, another superhero's ex-wife goes crazy, and yet another person near-and-dear to the ol' Dark Knight 's heart loses his father in one of the most gut-twisting series of panels I've ever seen.

I would be buying that graphic novel, too, I explained. I was grateful when it turned out that she wasn't a nosy salesclerk, wasn't trying to get me to hurry up and buy something...

"So you're spending your birthday buying graphic novels?"

I started to come up with some sort of rational explanation. Yes, after my morning fishing trip had been abruptly canceled, I was indeed shopping for graphic novels on my Thirtieth birthday. But I wasn't... I wouldn't...

"That's so COOL!"

And we ended up talking for a good hour after I bought, yes, a few graphic novels as a birthday gift to myself, sharing a cup of joe at the chain coffee shop next door, discussing why, exactly, the Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and obscure comic book characters sometimes change one's perception of life to the point where real people grieve when those superheroes die on paper.

She even held my hand as I explained how I was about ready to cry when she'd walked up behind me. She said that was the sweetest thing her 18-year-old ears had ever heard come out of a 30-year-old guy's mouth.

Hey, she was just easing my pain. Really. Seriously. I mean, c'mon... what 18-year-old girl would, well, hit on...

Aw crap.

There are worse ways, I guess, to turn the Big Three-Oh. I mean, how many guys get the phone numbers of recent high school graduates slipped to them because they're old enough to remember The Crisis of Infinite Earths miniseries and the day Barry Allen, the Silver Age Flash, died?

* * * *

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- He says that he's the Nobody Man, that the drugs had done him in and his brains were gone, that he wasn't much of a man without his beer first thing in the morning.

He has a name, he says, somewhere lost in his past. He prefers to cook up new names when strangers pass by, interesting and peculiar names, in the hope that some poor schmuck will hook him up with some drinking money.

Downtown. South Monument Avenue. Beneath the afternoon shadow of Billy Yank, German immigrant Rudolph Thiem's gorgeous sculpture, bronzed and perfect atop the Butler County Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers Monument Building.

And I give a fresh ten-dollar bill to a Nobody Man, one of the drug-zombified, one of its marginally homeless, one of the City of Sculpture's lost causes. Thiem's sculpture represents the victory of the Union over the separatist southern Confederacy of the 19th century. Nobody Man's face alone could serve as a scarred monument to a nation's failures.

He grew up in the city, this Nobody Man. His grandmother, he claimed, worked in one of the city's legendary, forgotten brothels, back when men like John Dillinger hid out in plain sight in the city's streets, back when the Mob Bosses of Big Chicago turned Hamilton, Ohio, into Little Chicago.

He'd been a soldier once, a factory worker, an inmate, a steelworker, and, always, a drunk. And sometime in the 1990s he found religion in the form of methamphetamine, that marvel of home-cooked, trailer park chemistry. After doing a bit of time in County for, well, being a junkie who never figured out how to dodge possession charges or child support payments, he went clean...

... And he's been on the streets ever since. He shows me his arms. The scabs are gone. And so is, sadly, most of his mind.

He can't hold a job because, well, he hears voices of angels, demons, and biblical characters. He keeps getting evicted from flophouses because, well, he's still substituting the cheap booze for prescription meds he can't afford.

I gave him the ten-spot because he looked like he could use it. I gave him the rest of my pack of cigarettes because he'd asked for one or two, had offered to give me the money back for just a smoke.

Giving isn't about the recipient's intended use. It's something humans do as an unspoken bond, almost as a form of communication. It's how we let people know, without words, that they still mean something, even if the world says that they don't.

Strolling back towards my pickup, a concerned woman, mid-thirties, walks up beside me as I'm waiting for on crosswalk signal. She'd apparently been watching my conversation and exchange with the Nobody Man from afar. And she wanted to voice her unsolicited opinions, too.

"...Honey, that crackhead's gonna just blow that money..."

"...You just threw your money away on a black..."

"...You gotta be careful with those NEE-ggers. They'll rob you around here..."

It's a free country. Everybody has a right to express their opinions. So I expressed a few of my own.

"So tell me, lady: why didn't your mama do the world a favor and just scrape your fetus outta her with a rusty coat hanger?"

If I have to hear somebody else's racist rant, well, I have just as much right to tell that person that I question their very existence, their value in society.

God bless the First Fucking Amendment. And at least ten bucks and a pack of cigarettes made some poor guy's day.

Yeah, it's an evil, barbaric, crude world, lady.

* * * *

LIBERTY, Ind. (ZP) -- Facial hairstyles would not be what they are today if it weren't for the former U.S. Civil War commander who was born here, in this sleepy little Hoosier town.

Former U.S. Gen. Ambrose Everett Burnside, commander, Army of the Potomac, November 1862 to March 1863. First president of the National Rifle Association. Jilted ex-lover of Confederate spy (and Oxford Fucking Ohio native) Lottie Moon. Gunsmith and inventor of the Burnside Carbine rifle. Governor and Senator of Rhode Island...

Fascinating guy, really.

Like I said. Unless you're a U.S. Civil War buff, or, well, have a peculiar interest in really shitty war strategists from that time period, you probably could care less.

Now take a look at that last name again: Burnside. If you flip the syllables, you get the word sideburn. There have been many names for the ol' hairy cheeks look over the centuries, but, now, the English-speaking World over, everybody knows sideburns when they see them.

Elvis. Evel Knievel. Luke Perry. The Beatles. Isaac Asimov. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson...

... And, well, pretty much every schlocky lounge lizard, biker, and disco performer of the last fifty years or so...

It all starts here, baby. Liberty Friggin' Indiana.

"Hey Jason... When you gonna write a Union County thing? We're only a few minutes away, man!" She asked in her email. "We're interesting."

As I stare at the long-dead, long-forgotten general's name on a memorial plaque in front of the Union County Courthouse, smack dab in the middle of a tiny Midwestern town square, I start laughing to myself, almost hysterically, as I instinctively reach up with both hands to feel my own tiny sideburns.

An old man and his wife are sitting on a bench nearby. The old man laughs, hollers my way.

"We gave the world sideburns. And we're damn proud of it."

Liberty Friggin' Indiana.

Well, I'll be damned...

It all starts here, baby. Middle of nowhere in particular.

- # # # -

IT'S OKAY TO HAVE SQUASH ON YOUR MIND, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NAKED: Having a Head Like a Slingshot Can Lead to a Different Sort of Question

BUTLER COUNTY, Ohio (ZP) -- I planted my Doc Martens into the muddy bottom of Four Mile Creek, water up past my thighs, the smell of rotting woodland flora drifting up with the water.

Just past dawn on a Sunday morning. I ate about a dozen spiders on the trails out to the creek, their overnight works unseen as I walked, the first hiker of the day accidentally ending both arachnid lives and perfect architecture.

I loved every moment of my ten-mile hike, a veritable pig in the pokeberries, but I really came to just wallow away in the mud.

Even the leeches that fed off my legs, the ones who were probably left drunk from a holiday weekend's worth of Jello Shots and Irish Car Bombs and Cuervo, were tolerated.

The mushy mush at the bottom of the creek, at least, washes away easily, and won't require a long shower afterwards, just to get the stink of its perfume out of my nostrils.

No laptop. No cell phone. No MySpace or Facebook profile messages to sweat.

No text messages or voicemails or IMs.

And no weird looks from guys I don't know, no looks from strange drunk women who think they know me, or from younger women who read me, who thought I was something that I'm not...

Just me, baby. Just me.

* * * *

I must've been smiling. I don't smile much, but I think I felt those muscles a-twitchin' and strainin', the laugh-lines filling in the crow's feet.

I hate my smile, think its one of my least charming features. I only smile, usually when nobody else is around, when I can get away with it. And I usually smile the most when I can get away from everyone but myself.

There's just something seductive about solitude in a wilderness that makes trudging through the mud just so much fun.

* * * *

I crank out two hundred push-ups, four sets of 50, as Captain Marvel and Superman battle above Metropolis, as the pair fought over Lex Luthor's supposed turn into a legitimate presidential candidate.

Yup.

It's 5:07 a.m. on a Sunday, and I'm watching Justice League Unlimited Season 1 DVDs while I sweat and groan and stretch.

The scene hits at Push-up No. 74. One of the greatest battles in the history of animated comic book adaptations.

Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal. Once more popular than the Man of Steel himself, back in the 1940s, the Captain gets suckered by Big Blue, chumped in anticlimactic fashion, reverted to Billy Batson with one of Marvel's own mystical lightning bolts.

"Dude, Supes is vulnerable to magic, " I say out loud. "Marvel's a kid empowered by magic."

"That's so... unrealistic."

I flip over on my back as the episode credits roll and the theme music plays. I start my crunches, slow and painful, the ol' groin strained once more from one worthless night of sex - with someone I don't even like.

"I'm either the world's nerdiest chach, or the chachiest nerd," a stray thought bellows. "I re-pulled my groin in a spite fuck, and now I'm watching cartoons and thinking about the Power of Shazam!"

* * * *

I start laughing, distracted by another singular thought bouncing around my mind like a supervillian from the Dark Knight's fist. It involves The Question, an old Charlton Comics character sucked up by DC when it acquired the line back in the 1980s.

Comics legend Steve Ditko may be best known as the co-creator of the Spider-Man mythos, but The Question has always been a personal favorite of mine. Alan Moore supposedly based his Rorschach character, in the classic Watchmen limited series, off of Ditko's Question.

"Hmmm. Rorschach.

"Rors-CHACH. Heh. Now that's fucking funny. Never noticed that."

I stop at Crunch No. 42, get up, put on another episode of JLU, one of my favorites. I start laughing again, hit the deck, and start another set of crunches, as the Jeffrey Combs - voiced version of the Question spins conspiracy theories to another character, the Huntress.

A different sort of question pops into my mind, an ancient question that carries my brain back to Moore's limited series, back into ancient Rome, back into...

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

"Fuck, dude. Who really does watch the watchmen?

"Hell, I don't think Mrs. Perfect would know Alan Moore from Mandy Moore...

"What the fuck was I thinking?"

The same guys, I assume, who do crunches as the asscrack of dawn while watching superhero cartoons, thinking about bad sex and Alan Moore and Captain Marvel's decline into obscurity since the 1940s.

The same guys, I assume, who like to get up before sunrise just to hump like Jarhead Infantry through a nature reserve, who take a digital camera to snap photos of flora and fauna, who're just looking to get all down and dirty in a creek.

Hell. Four Mile Creek's been better to me than most of the women I've been involved with.

* * * *

Yep.

I'm a strange one.

A social butterfly of a loner, a hermit who loves disappearing into crowds of people, who occasionally has to remind himself that humanity does indeed have some worth as a species beyond the abstract.

When I was a kid, I used to hate the way my mind works - I always felt ashamed that my brain, with its supposedly High IQ and damned - near - photographic long-term recall, made me a freak of nature.

Growing up in virtual isolation on a Virginia farm, with grandparents whose library collection included hundreds of foreign language dictionaries, NATO manuals, and UN and State Dept. publications, probably didn't help that feeling much.

But now I embrace my eccentricity like a warm blanket on a cold night. I'm constantly fascinated by how my own thought processes work, how my neurons fire inside of my skull, and by the way those abstract visions interact with my surroundings.

As I waded through the muddy water of Four Mile Creek, I suddenly remembered what it was like, for example, to do the same thing when I was a kid, how simple of a pleasure playing in dirty water is, how much energy crackles up from dark water.

I found a deep spot in the creek, and, fully clothed, fell back into the murky depths, the water sucking me down into its bosom, the guppies and tadpoles parting to accept my body into their commune.

As I fell, I noticed that I had an audience.

I caught a glimpse of a woman clad in a black micro-mini and white knee-high stockings ducking behind a tree as I hit the water. My heart raced, and only instinct reminded me to close my eyes or risk losing yet another pair of pricey, disposable contact lenses.

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The goddamn mosquitoes and some emo chick. Who the fuck goes hiking in a skirt and knee-highs?"

I sank to the bottom and thought about DJ Shadow's "Midnight in a Perfect World [VIDEO]," a song off of his Endtroducing... album, for some reason.

Don't ask me. No clue where that one came from. Probably something about the flow of the beats he sampled and the feel of the water and the sight of a scenester - looking chick hiding behind a tree.

I think about the weirdest shit sometimes.

Think. It's what I do best, really.

And sometimes, I even scare myself.

* * * *

One of the most intriguing things I've ever been told, by anybody, occurred a dozen or so months ago, just a few miles from my mud hole along Four Mile Creek, during a full moon.

A woman and I were sprawled out on a blanket, mostly covered by this ratty comforter I used to carry in the back of my pickup. We'd just finished off a bottle of iced tea, a midnight picnic of vegan eggplant wraps and roasted squash.

I smelled like, well, one would expect a librarian to smell like after spending all day moving dozens of pallets of steel shelving back and forth across a construction site.

But my fellow moonwatcher smelled perfect.

She smelled of every mile of air she'd just traveled, smelled of the rental SUV, smelled of JFK International in New York and a connection in Reagan National in Washington and of leather luggage...

And the smell of squash and eggplant was on her breath, too, rich in onions and fresh basil and citrus aromas.

I'd looked up at the moon and told her that she smelled wonderful.

There is no way to describe the face she made. Even the moon seemed to read disgust in her face, disappearing behind black clouds to hide from an outburst from a very passionate woman.

"Man, you're just fucking insane sometimes. Man of fucking mystery."

And then she told me to never change. And all was good with the world. Hadn't really figured on hooking up with a friend that night. That's what we were - just friends. Just happened.

Sometimes, knowing how to cook for a vegan can get a guy into trouble.

Now, every time I smell squash and eggplant together, I think about being naked, beneath a full moon, covered in a ratty comforter that fell apart three months ago.

And every time I see or hear a reference to Ditko's The Question, one of my favorite men of fucking mystery, I think of feature dancers and showgirls and burlesque performers.

If there are bigger comic nerds to be found outside of librarianship, they'll almost certainly be found taking their clothes off inside of strip clubs.

* * * *

As I came back up from my impromptu bath in the creek, memories of her face that night mingled with the lingering beats of DJ Shadow, the visions of Captain Marvel and Superman duking it out, and the taste of polluted creek water.

I took a deep breath and kept on grinning my normally hidden smile.

Ain't nothing wrong with being a Man of Fucking Mystery. Just ask anybody who grew up reading comic books. I felt just like The Question Sunday morning, hidden behind a faceless mask, clad in matching blue fedora and trench coat.

The woman in the black mini had come from behind the tree, was hollering something from the bank and pointing at the ground.

After pounding the water from my ear canals, I learned that she was trying to tell me that my cell phone had been vibrating, that she'd stopped it from slipping off of the rock and into the water, and that she wanted to know if she could bum one of my Marlboro Mediums.

Yes, I'm a chain smoker. And I hike ten miles, bring along my cell even when there's barely a signal. Do push-ups and chin-ups and sometimes dig homemade vegan food.

I'm weird, a Man of Fucking Mystery, even to myself.

I wade back to the young woman, the Watcher's watcher. She perches herself on a stump, facing me, knees drawn up to her chin.

I offered her a cigarette, introduced myself, lit the cigarette for her. I told her that she didn't have to hide behind trees or fee bad for just watching.

She smiled and blew smoke from her nose, down across her knees. Said she hadn't meant to watch, but, well, the sight of some random guy falling backwards into a creek reminded her of something from a movie.

It was weird. So she watched. My phone rang and she saw smokes on the shore. Gave her an opportunity to say something, to spark a conversation.

And then she told me her story.

* * * *

A second-year undergrad, 20-years-old, hung over from drinking in her dorm room with another second-year undergrad. The guy had wanted to fuck - hence the free jug of wine he'd brought to her room. Not really that attracted to the guy, she blew him instead, spit the semen into her roommate's empty bottom bunk.

She blew the guy to get him to leave her alone, to simply get him to leave her space and to never come back. She'd only asked him over out of boredom - and nothing screams boredom to a 20-year-old dorm rat like a Labor Day Weekend with no money to travel.

She tells me that she came out to the nature reserve to think, to recover. She'd been drinking bottles of Fiji to get the taste out of her mouth. She didn't know if she should feel bad or not. She'd blown guys in high school, gone down on frat boys at parties, but she'd never blown a guy just to get him to go away.

She stopped, looked at me.

I have no clue why I'm telling you this. I don't even know you.

To ease her embarrassment, I tell her a story. I tell her about The Man of Fucking Mystery legend, the hook-up with Mrs. Perfect who was anything but, of watching Justice League Unlimited and doing 200 push-ups.

"You're weird. Weirder than me."

She clarified - I was kinda creepy weird and kinda intriguing weird, a good mix that often inspires her to walk up to random people and strike up conversations.

She took off her little backpack, opened it up, and pulled out two big plastic containers of overpriced mineral water. And I drank one to wash away the taste of dirty creek water. She drank the other to wash away the semen taste.

Ritual cleansing sometimes requires strange conversations, where answers sometimes involve a different sort of Question.

- # # # -