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.

- # # # -

SHORT TAKES AND SUCH: Mau-Mauing the Bodywash BourgeoisieAnd Other Sorted Tales

AND BEING WELL-READ
SOMETIMES MEANS A GUY'S
BETTER ENDOWED ELSEWHERE,TOO...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- She wasn't going to respond because the guy was, well, a Grade-A douchebag of a chachball, primped and waxed and reeking of overpriced cologne.

"I dunno. I guess I'm just into, ya know, more real guys now... like waking up from a bad dream or something..."

She'd met the caller through a friend of a friend. They hooked up once, junior year. And recently he'd tried to kiss her at an Oxford bar, grabbed her ass and asked her to go home with him one last time...

And she went home alone. Yes, she is so hot - guys tell her that all the time. But it takes a whole hell of a lot more than bourbon on a guy's breath to get into her pants these days.

"I guess that's why I'm ready to get the fuck outta here, ya know?"

Unfortunately, he still had her number. When she was much younger, back when she was much less sure of herself, she would've hooked up with the guy in a heartbeat. Back then, super-preppy guys were her type. When they flattered her and bought her drinks, she'd spread her legs at the end of the night, pass out, and hope to God the condom didn't break...

She looked at the text message for a few seconds, deleted it, and turned off her cellphone.

"Anyway... what was I saying... Oh! This guy I've been seeing up in Columbus... we were talking last weekend, about punk music..."

Her new guy is about my age, 30ish. And he, too, grew up listening to a lot of hardcore punk music, enjoys reading the most obscure things, and, much to the embarrassment of her well-to-do family, is unrepentant when it comes to his militant, individualistic political views.

"It's weird, ya know? You remember talking online, what you said about guys who declare their independence just by being themselves? He's like..."

The new beau even comes complete with piercings and real (not bullshit emo, she adds) tats, as well a fondness for David Lynch films and Walt Whitman. And over the last few months, he's introduced her to all sorts of interesting people -- aspiring artists and poets, musicians and writers and even a chess-playing truck driver.

He even took her on a midnight picnic -- complete with wine and cheese!

There's just something breathtaking about her story, beautiful and simple -- the stereotypical former high school cheerleader finding her Prince Charming in the form of a tattooed punk who works in a warehouse...

"As the saying goes, well... just because I dress like this doesn't mean I'm a communist."

"Um... okay. Kinda weird, there. What the fuck?"

"It's a quote. Sorry, random."

"Oh. A poem or something?"

"Sorta. Billy Bragg. Or Lars Frederiksen, depending on who ya ask. Ask your boy. He might know it..."

And for some reason, I'm sure that, well, even if he didn't know the source of the quotation, he knows it now.

There's nothing in the world like a good love story, nothing like a tale of chess-playing truckers and moonlit picnics to leave me, well, without anything original to say.

A CHAW OF LEVI GARRETT, A LOAD OF POSTS
(AND EQUAL PARTS BULLSHIT):

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- A sentence or two, a laugh, and a quick, black spit onto the parking lot.

I'd seen the old man pushing his loaded lumberyard cart across the lot as I pulled into the hardware store. I offered, with a holler, to give him a hand before he killed himself.

Well into his eighties, and, well, he'd promised the Missus a new fence. And, goddammit, that's just what he was going to give her.

The steel plant retiree, round as a pumpkin and just as sunburnt orange, tossed the five 80-pound bags of quick-setting concrete into the back of the old station wagon while I loaded his pressure-treated fence posts onto the roof. I'd offered to do it all, but he insisted that he was still just as strong as he was when he'd retired back in the 1980s.

He offered me twenty bucks for my trouble. I declined. He offered me a six-pack of beer, the one sitting on the passenger seat. I explained that I was on a work errand and couldn't, well, drink on the job.

But the old man was a pillar of conviction - he would not take charity. Finally, we struck a deal. I'd run out of cigarettes, and he had a brand new pouch of chewing tobacco poking out of the pocket of his overalls...

Talk a bit, laugh, spit. A dirty joke here, a woman story there, and black juice shot forth into the air like cannon fire. Our conversation must've been a thing of beauty, a marvel to watch and to overhear. Carl Sandburg and Woodie Guthrie couldn't have done the workingman's lament any better.

And our lack of, well, urban sophistication must've driven the weekend warriors back into the safety of their gleaming SUVs, probably sent the soccer moms shopping for lawn chairs and garden fountains running for the nearest bottle of gin at the goddamn garden club.

"All these goddamn rich bastards," the retiree said, "Wouldn't know shit 'bout how to build their own goddamn fence..."

"Ain't that the truth, man? Up in Oxford, we've got em everywhere."

If there were such a thing as a repellent for the American Bourgeoisie, it'd come bottled as a few minutes' worth of hard, manual labor for no pay other than a chew of Levi Garrett.


SOMETIMES, MATTRESSES COME
WITH CUNTS AND POINT SPREADS...

OXFORD, Ohio (ZP) -- I took a large gulp of my drink, almost choked on it, as one of the women seated on the other side of the booth attempted to shove her high-heeled foot into my crotch.

I looked down between my legs -- gold hot pants! My God! Will somebody shoot whoever decided to resurrect that 1980s fashion nightmare?

I'd returned to the table too early. The two drinking companions I actually liked were still outside, still smoking their cigarettes. Sucks serious ass, sometimes, being the nicotine speed freak...

"So... hehe... you still wanna know? Okay... you get so many points for 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds... all the way up to, like, seniors and, like, grad students..."

I couldn't help but stare. Bright pink -- PINK! -- lipstick, lime green polo, spray-on tanned with the collar popped, trendy bobbed haircut styled in such a way as to cover one eye. And there she sat, this petite little woman, perched on the lap of an Amazonian blonde.

They were giggling, drunkenly fondling each other. It would've made for one hell of a sapphic tale had the conversation been different and the bar less crowded...

The Amazonian, for the record, was the owner of the crotch-violating golden leg. And, for some odd reason, I felt like I was trapped in a goddamn John Hughes flick.

"Okay, I got that. So... how many points do you get for librarians? Or faculty? What about, like, a lawyer or doctor?"

The Amazonian answered. Faculty, she said, were extra points in the game, rated based on hotness and age. Librarians? Well, librarians were of a point value that had yet to be determined.

Both women claimed to have already earned their faculty bonuses. Little Ms. Pepto was up a few points on Ms. Hot Pants.

Or...wait... No. I may have that backwards. Dammit. They just kept giggling, fondling each other, speaking in strange, tipsy Ohio Girl squeaks...

As I inquired about their points-for-sex game, I prayed that neither woman took my curiosity as an attempt to flirt, hoped that it didn't indicate any desire to become the sexual equivalent of a basketball free throw.

"So you're, like, really a librarian, right? Like, that's like really big here, huh?"

"Yep."

"Like, do you, like, enjoy reading?"

"Yep."

"Oh. My. God. Really? You don't look like you read a lot."

"Hooked on Phonics worked for me."

"What? Oh. Never mind. Did I tell you I, like, LOVE your hair... OhmyGod... it's, like, PERFECT!"

"Yep."

And with that, my friends returned from their slow-ass smoke. I jumped out of the booth, let the golden Amazonian leg fall to the floor as my compatriots slid back into their seats.

Thank you, Jesus. Saved by the buzzer.

- # # # -

BOXING AWAY A FEW MOMENTS OF A SATURDAY: How to Get Your Ass Kicked and Love Humanity at the Same Time

Another glorious chapter of Klingon history. Tell me, do they still sing songs of the great Tribble hunt?

- Odo [Rene Auberjonois]
From the episode "Trails and Tribble-ations,"
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 1996

HAMILTON, Ohio (ZP) -- The sound of Mexican Spanish and playing children and giggling cholas rang throughout my pounding skull as my knees buckled, my dancing done for the day.

Gossip about some female lead in a telenovela, Destilando Amor, from a group of chirping young women, sang through my body with every punch that made contact, with every point my opponent took from me.

Whump. Whump.

"Oscar" landed two solid right jabs into the headgear, enough to wobble the brain within my skull, enough to start spinning the world.

I easily blocked the third punch, but my almost child-like attempt at a comeback, a series of left crosses and right-left jabs, a last-ditch right hook, signaled the end.

My out-of-shape, winded body gave up after a phantom left popped the mouthguard halfway across the yard, a simple reminder that the summer's woes had left me nothing more than a shitbag full of sloth.

The skin-sheering heat and humidity choked me as I spun, my last view as a boxer the urban decay of a migrant neighborhood in east Hamilton, a few miles away from Pershing Avenue.

* * * *

Pershing, as in ol' General Black Jack himself, the legendary U.S. military commander during the First World War, savior of Europe.

A man better known, in Mexico and the Southwestern United States, as the Big Bad Gringo who'd once been dumb enough to pursue Pancho Villa, the Mexican legend, across the border, back in 1916.

As the Mexican freedom fighters triumphed in the only successful military attack on the continental States in the 20th Century, yet another Gringo had failed to keep a Chicano from winning a fight.

* * * *

I could've, possibly, made one last stand, could've played Davy Fucking Crockett against the one-one-two-one barrage of Santa Ana punches, but the sight of a four-year-old girl slapping the dirt with both hands, counting me out as I tried to get back to my feet, her face smeared with ice cream, finally brought the sparring match to a close.

Two and a half rounds against a welterweight Mexicano, a born citizen of the Estados Unidos, son of an Illegal Migrante Father and a Texan Mother.

The Rio Grande Kid, not even old enough to vote but counting down the weeks until his military enlistment, waiting to build a future for himself and his immigrant girlfriend, the teenage mother of that little chica, had KOed his big brother's former sparring partner.

* * * *

Hard to believe there are dumbass peckerwoods throughout Butler County, self-righteous rednecks throughout the U.S., who think "Oscar" and his young family don't belong in this country.

No one asks my opponent where he was born, if he's a U.S. citizen by birth - every job the kid's had, he's had to prove his birthright based solely on the fact that his skin is brown and he speaks Spanish.

Why aren't these assholes talking about building a fence along the Canadian border? I mean, we've had friggin' terrorists sneak across that side of North America.

Hell, we had a U.S. citizen carrying a highly contagious strain of friggin' tuberculosis fly into Canada, then drive on over, Border Patrol failing to detain him because, well, he was coming in from Canada.

Oh yeah. The majority of Canadians have white skin and speak English.

And I'm sure that fueled some rage inside him, the anger of any teenage father told that the mother of his child doesn't have the skills to be a U.S. citizen, a woman who wants to open a beauty salon one day, who told me he once lost his temper at a Germanic shopping mall clerk in Colerain for calling his daughter illegal, even though she's just as Ohio as the next kid born in this state.

With that much pent-up fury, I'm lucky my head stayed attached to my body during the bout. Fortunately for me, "Oscar" is a gentle soul, a true boxing artist and gentleman.

A good fighter turns rage into fuel, never wastes that fuel on something as stupid as uncontrolled violence.

Especially on an innocent older guy, a friggin' librarian with a blind spot on his right, with lead footwork and who drops his guard to talk smack.

Why waste the energy?

* * * *

No permanent damage.

I stayed on the ground, tossed off the gloves, and stared at a convoy of ants dragging the carcass of a beetle through the dust. Oceans of sweat poured from my head, turning the convoy's path into a muddy trap.

I could feel my left hand swelling, the knuckles gnarling up from my miserable showing. I spat pink, salty saliva - no loosened teeth but a few open wounds bleeding behind the molars. And, though my nose cartilage was intact, untouched in fact, I was certain that if we'd been sparring without headgear I would've been on my way to the emergency room.

* * * *

To be quite honest, I don't think I've ever enjoyed getting my ass kicked so much in my entire life.

Some lessons are best relearned, textbook free, in a notoriously bad neighborhood in the middle of goddamn nowhere Ohio.

And sometimes, the only way to relearn what makes a man a man is to play Black Jack Pershing to another's Pancho Villa, to swing for flesh and gasp for breath as one makes contact with nothing, to hit the dirt like a comic strip Palooka and accept that the world sometimes beats a man down just to teach that man how to get back onto his feet.

Oscar's girl brought me a bag of frozen mixed vegetables. For the hands. And a handful of Motrin and iced tea, as requested, for everything else. In broken English, the Indio-featured teen, large hoop earrings swinging behind jet-black Indio hair, told me that I fight good, fight good.

She took the victor his cold glass of sweet tea, helped him out of his gloves and tape and wraps, gave the victor his victory kiss long and hard. The winner's daughter sat in the dirt next to me, singing songs in gibberish, in that universal language only other little girls can understand.

"I think ya'll are gonna be alright, kiddo."

The child doesn't speak English, save for a few phrases picked up from Sesame Street and Dora the Explorer and other kids' TV shows. She cocked her head, giggled, and went back to tormenting the ants beneath a scorching sun.

* * * *

And I think I'm gonna be alright, too, actually.

It's good for the soul, really, to lose some fights. Reminds a person of the importance of being alive, of watching the sun rise over the horizon, of the sheer positive energy that lights up across the cosmos like fireflies in a jar.

So what if I ended up spitting out a chunk of filling from my teeth a few hours later? Or if my already pulled groin feels worse, or if my south paw aches from the work my right should've done? And who cares about a damned headache, a jarred sense of self?

I am alive.

And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? Walt Whitman once asked, And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul?

Hell.

If ol' Pershing hadn't gotten his ass handed to him in Mexico, that White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant illusion of the United States would be just about as American as Kaiser Wilhelm II.

- # # # -