I was taking notes as fast as I could. But to me Phoenix still seemed like a mystery wrapped inside an enigma. Added to that, there was something very unsettling about talking to someone hiding behind a mask. With his face and expressions concealed this way, I felt he—maybe even I—might be capable of doing anything, like a bank robber in a black balaclava, a hooded member of the KKK, or a porn star before 1960 half-hidden behind a carnival mask. Then, suddenly, I had a lightbulb moment: Maybe I was already wearing a mask. And you, too. The meaning of everything was always hidden in masquerade. And maybe we all were playing characters, roles, social masks we tried to live up to with identity being both malleable and imagined. Sometimes that social construct—the self—felt like a cage. I wondered: What if we took off our masks, and discovered there was only a bottomless emptiness and freedom? Was that what we were afraid of?
Midnight Jack parked the car on a side street on Capitol Hill. I felt I was still scratching at the surface of Phoenix Jones, but once we started walking down Broadway, with the sharp odor of marijuana hanging in the air, and Phoenix’s eyes tracking left, then right for trouble, I discovered there was a method to this madness. To his crime-fighting skills. Flanked by Ghost and Pitch Black, he stepped up to two heavily tattooed bikers arguing outside a bar. He told them, “Let’s keep it cool, gentlemen, let’s all have a good night.” The bikers stopped and gaped in disbelief, as if Phoenix had just fallen from the moon. Or maybe they thought the circus had just come to town. Twenty feet away, a coke dealer with Medusa-like dreadlocks stopped in the middle of a sale, shoving his plastic baggie back into his pocket. It was as if they’d just seen Pope Francis step out of a limousine. And then everyone was asking for his autograph, or for Phoenix to pose with them for a selfie they’d post later on Facebook. Other people—a generation raised on comic books and cartoons—came pouring out of restaurants and taverns to give him a high five, thank him for handing out food to the homeless, for stopping car and bus jackings and people urinating in public, and helping tipsy ladies get a cab at two in the morning. He couldn’t swing across Seattle on a spider’s web. Or leap tall buildings in a single bound. But they knew he was as close as they would ever get to a bona fide costumed crime fighter. Of course, some people heckled him, some threw beer cans at his head, some gave him their middle fingers, and told him to get a life. But for just this moment the shock of seeing him wiped away for a heartbeat any thought anyone had of doing something wrong. He was fun. A free Disneyland distraction. And, to do him justice, wasn’t that all anyone ever needed to turn people away from crime—just this one present moment in time—for what other moment was there?—to forget themselves and laugh and walk away from trouble with an outrageous story to tell their friends?
Unfortunately, that moment was going to be short-lived.
Phoenix reveled in the adulation of his fans, that was clear. Because he was always thinking of the optics, he posed with them for fifteen minutes. But I could tell he was disappointed that we hadn’t yet captured any criminals. It was a slow night for superheroing. He flicked a fast look my way and sighed. “When there’s nothing going on, you feel pretty silly in this outfit.”13 His voice sounded flat, a little tired. “Let’s patrol on foot a little longer, maybe over on First Avenue.”
Back in the car, I asked him if the rumor was true that he was an amateur mixed martial artist and cage fighter. He was silent so I asked him another question. Was he a day-care worker during the day, as some people said, teaching life skills to autistic children? He answered quickly, “Yeah, I love those kids. They’re neglected. They’re ignored.”14
Then he left another silence, which I did not break. A moment passed, then two. His eyes became thoughtful. Then he cleared his throat and lowered his voice by half. “When I was a kid, my whole biological family for some reason or another decided that I wasn’t worth anything, so they sent me far away to foster homes. I had thirty brothers and sisters, depending on the time.15 Everything I had was secondhand. Used. My clothes. My toys. There was nothing I could call my own. I always wanted my piece of something.”16 Phoenix continued, “I’ve always been poor—evicted twice17—but if I have to be an at-risk, young black man, then I want to choose my risks myself. I want them to help other people.18 When it’s all over, I want there to be an account of things that I’ve done and for people to look at me and say, ‘He succeeded. I don’t care if people didn’t want him. He made himself.’ ”19
I let that sink in. He. Made. Himself. That made me look at myself. I could put everything I’d ever done on a three-by-five index card.
It was 2:15 A.M. With little traffic at that hour, we were downtown in ten minutes. And no sooner than Midnight Jack cranked off the ignition, we heard peals of laughter and a commotion outside a nightclub. Faraway liquid figures under the Alaskan Way Viaduct were shouting, darting in and out of darkness.
“Phoenix, look down. Look down!” Black Knight pointed toward Columbia Street. “Big fight!”20
Phoenix sprinted from the car, tearing full tilt toward them, holding two cans of pepper spray, shouting back over his shoulder in a voice shredded by the wind, “Go, go, go! Get me nine-one-one! Call nine-one-one!”
That’s when everything spun out of control.
When I caught up with the others, my chest pounding, Phoenix was bellowing at a group of people, “Break it up!” Enraged, a woman began pounding wildly on him with her shoe, hurtling words like stones. “You piece of shit!” Then, as it happened, she tripped and fell flat on her face. Out of nowhere, a silver car came plowing down the wrong side of the road on Western Avenue, nearly hitting one of the partygoers. Young men were lunging at Phoenix, who pepper-sprayed one of them in the face. He threw me a look of panic. “Where are the cops? We need the cops now. This is getting serious. Protect yourselves.” I was feeling panicky myself, but, so help me, the rush of adrenaline made me feel buoyant, too.
The woman who fell was shouting, “I got fucking pepper spray in my eye!”
Behind me, the documentary filmmaker, who had been following Phoenix for eight months, was sputtering into his cell phone. “There’s a huge group of people fighting at Columbia and Western, and there’s pepper spray, and superheroes, and I don’t know . . .”
To me, the police didn’t so much arrive as they seemed to materialize out of thin air. The woman who fell would later identify herself as Maria on radio station KING 5, saying, “We were just walking down to our parking lot after having a good time in Seattle, when a little argument broke out between our group and another group, and all of sudden we were attacked by these guys wearing Halloween costumes.” She demanded that Phoenix be arrested. The cops were more than happy to comply. They took away his cans of pepper spray. One officer glared at me and others in the Rain City crew. “Anybody else want to join this party? We’re about to arrest the whole bunch of ya and clean things up. We’re about tired of this game.”
I watched them clamp handcuffs on Phoenix. Then lead him to a patrol car. Inside, he sat with his shoulders hunched, his head slung forward. Then his eyes swung up, and he gave me a sheepish sideways look. “I guess it’s been a long day’s night, eh?”21
He was in King County Jail for the next seven hours, arrested on suspicion of fourth-degree assault.22 They took away his super suit, telling him, “This way we can keep your big mouth shut.” That afternoon, after posting a $3,800 bail with no charges filed, he was all over the news again. Two days later he was in court with his lawyer. I was there watching with members of the Rain City Superhero Movement, feeling for the first time like I was one of them.
A court officer made him take off his mask during the hearing. When he did I clapped both hands over my mouth to muffle my reaction. No, he wasn’t bad-looking. Just not how I imagined he might look. He didn’t have chiseled features or a lantern jaw. But his hair was dramatic, an imitation of the do worn by a popular, early 1990s hip-hop performer named Christopher “Kid” Reid. It looked like a black pencil eraser on top of
his head. And during the proceedings, he saddled his nose with a pair of wimpy spectacles that even Clark Kent wouldn’t wear. But now the world knew his name, Benjamin Fodor. That he was twenty-three years old. And that he had a 5-2 amateur mixed martial arts record, fighting under the name—wait for it—Flattop.
You’d think that would have been the end of the adventures of Phoenix Jones. He did lose his day-care job. But being unmasked opened new doors. The offers came pouring in, even from Hollywood. He went from amateur to pro when he signed a contract with the World Series of Fighting, and won his first match in three minutes against Roberto Yong on September 18, 2015. One day later, he stopped an attempted murder on Capitol Hill.23
It’s almost midnight. I’ve graded all my students’ papers for tomorrow after spending hours correcting their grammar. That would be unbearable if it wasn’t for what I do now in the wee hours of morning. My skintight Spandex costume, just back from the cleaners and very sexy, hangs in my closet, waiting for me. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights still belong to Phoenix Jones.
But Monday through Thursday belong to me.
Notes
1 Because Phoenix Jones is a real, living person whom I respect and admire, and also because I had to take a certain degree of artistic license in this fictional story about him, I think providing endnotes for my sources as well as pointing out what I’ve invented for literary reasons is appropriate.
For information about Phoenix Jones, I relied on published news stories, his online posts, YouTube videos, and the following book interviews and articles: Jon Ronson, The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones (Riverhead Books, 2011); Keegan Hamilton, “The (Alleged) Adventures of Phoenix Jones,” Seattle Weekly, June 1–7, 2011; Nick Wong, “Phoenix Jones: Portrait of a Superhero,” fightland.vice.com/blog/phoenix-jones-portrait-of-a-superhero, April 6, 2015; Stephie Haynes, “Phoenix Jones: Getting to Know the Man Behind the Mask,” www.bloodyelbow.com/, March 28, 2015; and Ryan McNamee Productions and Phoenix Jones, “Phoenix Jones Stops Assault on Vimeo,” http://vimeo.com, October 10, 2011.
2 There is a photo of Phoenix Jones and superhero Buster Doe in the Dreaming comics and game store, which accompanies Ashby Jones’s story “Bam! Pow! Superhero Groups Clash over Roles, Methods,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2011. However, I have no idea if Phoenix Jones visited the Dreaming on October 8, 2011.
3 This expensive, elaborate version of Phoenix Jones’s super suit came, I believe, later when he had a fund-raising campaign to upgrade his costume, http://thephoenixjones.blogspot.com/, August 15, 2015.
4 Hamilton, “(Alleged) Adventures,” p. 13.
5 Catherine Avalone, “Randall Beach: The Bloody and Often Odd Life of a ‘Superhero,’ ” New Haven Register, posted April 4, 2015.
6 Those are real-life superheroes, but I don’t know who was with Phoenix Jones on this night of his arrest.
7 Hamilton, “(Alleged) Adventures,” p. 12.
8 Avalone, “Randall Beach,” p. 4.
9 Hamilton, “(Alleged) Adventures,” reports seeing Phoenix Jones in a Kia sedan, but I doubt he was driving that on this night.
10 Ibid., p. 11.
11 http://thephoenixjones.blogspot.com/.
12 Christina Ng, “Citizen Superhero ‘Phoenix Jones’ Arrested in Seattle,” Good Morning America, http://abcnews.go.com/US/citizen-superhero-phoenix-jones-arrested-seattle/story?id=14704985.
13 Jones, “Bam! Pow!”
14 Wong, “Phoenix Jones,” p. 14.
15 Ibid., p. 10.
16 Ibid., p. 11.
17 Hamilton, “(Alleged) Adventures),” p. 16.
18 The rest of this sentence is my imagined dialogue for Phoenix Jones.
19 Wong, “Phoenix Jones,” p. 11.
20 This entire scene is taken from McNamee Productions and Jones, “Phoenix Jones Stops Assault.”
21 This line about a “long day’s night” was the theme or creative prompt given to writers Claudia Castro Luna, Nancy Horan, and myself when we agreed to write new stories for the seventeenth Bedtime Stories literary gala sponsored by Humanities Washington on October 2, 2015. For these events, the theme must appear somewhere in the story.
22 Sara Jean Green, “Superhero Bound for Court,” Seattle Times, p. B1.
23 “Phoenix Jones Stops Attempted Murder,” King County News, September 23, 2015.
Night Hawks
Your right is to action alone; never to its fruits at any time. Never should the fruits of action be your motive; never let there be attachment to inaction in you.
—Bhagavad Gita, book II, sloka 47
Seven or sevenish
Playwright August Wilson and I always met at 7:00 P.M. at the Broadway Bar and Grill, which was just a short walk from his many-roomed home on Capitol Hill in Seattle. We looked for the smokers’ section at the rear of the restaurant in a spacious, dimly lit room with two televisions mounted on the peach-colored walls. He would arrive as tidily dressed as ever, his demeanor courtly and dignified, even gracious, with his salt-and-pepper goatee neatly trimmed, and wearing a stylish, plaid cap on his balding head. (He once told me, “I should just stop going to the barbershop.”) We were two old men with a combined hundred-plus years of American history on our heads, only three years apart in age, and raised in the 1940s and ’50s by proud, hardworking parents. You might say that for fifteen years these eight- to ten-hour dinner conversations at the Broadway were our version of a boys’ night out. It was a lively, laid-back place filled with young people, straights and gays, students and Goths, and much nicer than the dangerous place we would end up in before this evening was over.
After a handshake and a hug, we would sit down, order organic Sumatra French Roast coffee and a big plate of chicken nachos with black beans, olives, and guacamole. Then we began the ritual that defined for me our friendship. We always tried to remember to bring some kind of gift for each other. It was a ritual of respect, generosity, and civility. The presents we gave each other were always art, or about art, and each represented our lifelong passion for the creative process. Because he knew I was a cartoonist and illustrator, he would give me, say, the tape of a documentary showing Picasso at work, or The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker and The Complete Far Side by Gary Larson. I, in turn, would give him a limited-edition, facsimile reproduction of one of Jorge Luis Borges’s short story manuscripts presented to me during a State Department–sponsored lecture tour in Spain, because Borges, Amiri Baraka, Romare Bearden, and the blues, or the “Four Bs” as August called them, were the major influences on his work.
Eight o’ clock
Finally, after we’d examined and discussed our gifts, and the waiter, a thin young woman, leggy and tattooed, with bright red hair and a nose ring, returned to top off our coffee for the second time, we’d relax and let our hair down. This experience, we both knew, was extremely rare in the lonely, solitary lives of writers, especially those considered to be successful by the way the world judged things, so we sometimes looked at each other as if to say, “How did you happen?” This unstated question was filled with equal parts of curiosity and affection, partly because he and I belonged to an in-between, liminal generation that remembered segregation yet was also the fragile bridge to the post–civil rights period and beyond; and partly because American culture had changed so much since we began writing in the 1960s, growing coarser, more vulgar and selfish year by year, distancing itself from the vision of our parents, who were raised to value good manners, promise keeping, personal sacrifice, loyalty to their own parents and kin, and a deep-rooted sense of decency. On the stage, his goal was to make audiences respect their hardscrabble lives and his own. This new era of hip-hop, misogynistic gangsta rap, and profanity-laced ghetto lit sometimes made our souls feel like they needed to take a shower. He told me often that if he ever met the Wayans brothers, he planned on slapping both of them silly.
“You know what?” I could tell by the tilt of his head that he felt playful tonight. “When I was out of town for re
hearsal these last few months, I’d leave my hotel room, walk over to the theater, and every day I’d see the same man panhandling on the street. He stopped me every day, and every time he had something new for me, so I had to give him some money. For example, one day he pointed down at my feet, and he said, ‘I know where you got those good-lookin’ shoes. I can tell you exactly where you got those fancy shoes.’ ”
The man August was describing could easily have been an antic character in one of his plays.
“You got ’em on your feet,” he said. “But I know somethin’ else, too. I know the day you were born. I can tell you the very day you were born, and I won’t be wrong or off by more than three days.”
August was born on April 27, 1945.
When he asked this fellow what day he was born, the man cackled and said “Wednesday.”
And so it went for fifteen years of pas de deux. Sometimes we’d lean into the table to hear each other better when our voices were blurred by the clatter and clang of dishes and swirl of laughter and conversation from other tables around us, talking about our hopes for our children, our wives, our agents and lawyers and business partners, the next story we planned to write for Humanities Washington’s yearly Bedtime Stories fund-raiser, a passage I translated for him that he liked from the Bhagavad Gita and our works in progress—Gem of the Ocean and Radio Golf for him, the novel Dreamer for me. But for the most part, and because I’m Buddhist, I did the lion’s share of listening. Also because my middle-class life in the Chicago suburb of Evanston had not been half as hard as his in the Hill District of Pittsburgh. He wanted someone to listen as he spoke about his life, all the experiences and ideas not always in his plays but which were, in fact, the background for his ten-play cycle. Over fifteen years, I heard about his biological father, Frederick Kittel, the German baker who was always absent from his life, and his stepfather, an ex-convict who spent twenty-three years in prison for robbery and murder. He adopted his mother’s maiden name, Wilson, in rejection of his German father; he began using his middle name, August, when a friend told him not to let anyone call him by the first name he used throughout childhood, which was Freddie. August told me that when he entered the newly integrated public schools of Pittsburgh, he was attacked by a gang of other kids; the principal had to send him home in a taxicab to protect him, but all he could do was ask over and over, “Why? Why are they trying to hurt me? What did I do?” And I learned about why he dropped out of high school his freshman year when a black teacher accused him of plagiarizing a twenty-page term paper entitled “Napoleon’s Will to Power” and refused to apologize.
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