The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes: An eSpecial from Riverhead Books

by Jon Ronson

  “I’m one of those guys that toils in obscurity,” he says. “Nobody knows my name because you don’t get credit on a movie poster.”

  When he learned there were people doing in real life what the likes of Tobey Maguire only pretended to do on a film set, it unlocked something profound within him. So he approached them, offering to photograph them in heroic, unironic poses. His hope is to de-ridicule them—make them seem valiant, worthy of respect. The project has become Peter’s calling in life.

  It is testament to Phoenix that most people had no idea their world existed until he came along. The CNN report praising his bravery has now had six hundred thousand YouTube hits. Something about him, and not the others, has captured the imagination. I hope to work out what that thing is.

  The next morning I have coffee at a downtown Seattle café with Knight Owl.

  “Last night might have been dangerous,” I tell him, sounding annoyed.

  “We ruffled some feathers.” He nods. “When we walked past that bus stop there were people mumbling under their breath. It could have got out of control. I don’t think they would have gunned us down. But they may have taken potshots and run. Still, shots fired would have been a crime. It would have been attempted murder in my opinion.”

  “Well, I’m glad none of that actually happened,” I say.

  Knight Owl used to be a graphic designer. “There was no promotion potential. I simply existed. It was thankless. I wanted something more with my life.” So he joined the movement.

  There is, he says, a bit of a superhero trajectory. When they start out they make rookie mistakes. Then they hit their stride. Then they not infrequently start to believe they have actual superpowers. Then they burn out and quit.

  The first rookie mistake is to adopt a superhero name that’s already in use.

  “It’s a general faux pas,” he says. “Anything with the words ‘Night,’ ‘Shadow,’ ‘Phantom,’ those dark, vigilante-type-sounding names tend to get snapped up pretty fast.”

  “Have there been any other Knight Owls?” I ask.

  “There was an Owl,” he says. “The Owl. But he ended up changing his name to Scar Heart, as he’d had a heart transplant.”

  He says he chose his name before he knew there was a Nite Owl in the Watchmen comic, so when people online tell him, “You’re a fucking fag and by the way, Knight Owl’s taken—haven’t you seen the Watchmen?” they don’t know what they’re talking about.

  The second rookie mistake is to “get caught up in the paraphernalia. People should think more about the functionality.”

  “Capes clearly aren’t functional,” I say, “because they can get snagged on things. Is cape wearing a rookie mistake?”

  “If you’re going to do some serious crime fighting there’d better be a good reason for a cape.” He nods. “And grappling hooks. No, no, no, no, no! What? You think you’re going to scale a building? What are you going to do when you get up there? Swoop down? Parachute down? You’re not going to have enough distance for the parachute to even open.”

  Grappling hooks was one of Phoenix Jones’s rookie mistakes. He also had a net gun, but on one occasion it backfired and ensnared him and he fell on the floor and had to be cut loose by the police. So now he leaves it at home.

  Then, at the other end of the trajectory, are the burnouts. I ask Knight Owl if he’s worried about Phoenix. Maybe he could become a burnout.

  “I think he should take his doctor’s advice, rest up, get healthy, get strong,” he replies. “The way he’s going is a recipe for disaster.”

  I talk to Phoenix on the phone. He’s frustrated that I never saw him engage in any proper crime fighting. I promise to stick around with him and give it another chance. He says a trip to the dangerous Seattle suburb of Belltown at 4 am on a Saturday night should do the trick. We make a date.

  Meanwhile . . .

  . . . San Diego. Wednesday night.

  I’ve been wanting to see another superhero operation at work to compare Phoenix with, so I’ve flown here to meet Mr Xtreme. He’s been patrolling most nights for the past four years, the last eight months with his protégé, Urban Avenger.

  They pick me up at 9 pm outside my hotel. Both are heavily costumed. Mr Xtreme is a thickset man—a security guard by day—wearing a green and black cape, a bulletproof vest, a green helmet and visor upon which fake eyes have been eerily painted. His outfit is covered with stickers of a woman’s face—Kitty Genovese. In March 1964, she was stabbed and seriously wounded in her doorway in Kew Gardens, Queens, New York. Her attacker ran away. During the next half hour thirty-eight bystanders saw her lying there and did nothing. Then her attacker returned and killed her. She has become, understandably, a talisman for the RLSH movement.

  You cannot see an inch of Urban Avenger’s body. He’s wearing a weird, customized gas mask, green-tinted sunglasses, a red full-length hoodie, and long black leather gloves. Underneath it all he looks quite small and skinny. He says he’s in his late twenties, has children, and works “in the food service industry.” That’s all he’ll reveal to me about his secret identity.

  He says he loves being covered from head to toe. “When I wear this I don’t have to react to you in any way. Nobody knows what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s great. I can be in my own little world in here.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I say. “I was once at a Halloween party and I didn’t take off my mask all night. It completely eliminated all social anxiety.”

  “Sometimes I wish I never had to take the mask off,” says Urban Avenger.

  We begin our patrol through the nice, clean, well-to-do downtown San Diego. We pass bars and clubs filled with polite-looking young drinkers. A few take pictures of them on their phones. Others yell, “It isn’t Halloween anymore!” from car windows. Urban Avenger says he doesn’t understand how Phoenix is forever chancing upon crimes being committed. He’s so lucky.

  “What are the odds?” he sighs. “I almost never see anything.” He pauses. “Last October we got involved in breaking up some street fights.”

  “Five months ago?” I say.

  “We haven’t really seen anything since,” he says. “It’s been really quiet around here. Did you and Phoenix Jones patrol Belltown in Seattle?”

  “I believe we’re going to,” I say.

  “Google ‘Gunshots in Belltown’ and you’ll come up with a hundred stories of gunshots being fired in, like, the last year,” he says wistfully.

  Some boys pass us. “Want some reefer? Ganga? Weed?” they quietly murmur.

  “No, that’s all right,” says Urban Avenger, walking quickly on. The boys shrug and continue on their way.

  “Good thing I got all that on video,” Urban Avenger eventually calls after them, indicating a small camera attached to his shoulder.

  “Crack? Heroin? PCP?” the boys call back.

  “Did you really film it?” I ask.

  “No,” says Urban Avenger. We continue our patrol.

  “I noticed that you didn’t make citizen’s arrests on the drug dealers,” I say.

  “We didn’t have probable cause,” explains Mr Xtreme. “All they did is say something. If they’d shown us crack rocks or marijuana it might have been a different story.”

  “You could have said you wanted to buy some and then they’d have got the drugs out of their pockets and you could have arrested them,” I say.

  There’s a short silence. “That’s true,” says Urban Avenger.

  As we reach the end of the patrol we get talking about burnout.

  “I can relate to burnout,” says Mr Xtreme. “All the times I thought about hanging it up. But what would I move on to?”

  “The person under the mask really hasn’t accomplished much,” says Urban Avenger. “But as a superhero I can go out and do something. I can feel like a better person, kind of.”

  “If I wasn’t trying to make a difference in the community, I’d just be sitting around drinking beer,” says Mr Xtreme. “Watc
hing movies, going broke, just being negative.”

  The real-life superheroes like to portray their motives as wholly benevolent, but if they were being driven purely by philanthropy they’d have become police officers or firefighters or charity volunteers. Something else is evidently propelling them—a narcissism. It’s an odd sort of narcissism, of course, when the narcissist disguises their face, but the lust for fame and glory is unmistakable.

  Only one of them, however, is achieving it: Phoenix Jones.

  Back in Seattle he said he knew why he, alone, has captured the public’s imagination. It’s his bravery amid a community of superheroes who talk the talk but in practice basically don’t do much more than hand out food to the homeless.

  “When you wake up one day and decide to put on spandex and give out sandwiches, something’s a little off,” he said. “I don’t call them real-life superheroes. I call them real-life sandwich handlers.”

  In fact there’s only one other crew out there actively looking for dangerous scrapes, and that’s the NYI—the New York Initiative. And so, in the days before returning to Seattle, I email to ask if I can join them. I receive a very non-comic-book response. Yes, I can, but only if I accord them “. . . professional respect by cooperating with our scheduling and more importantly our tactics in the field. . . . A bulletproof vest will be available for your use. . . . The scheduling is not negotiable. —Zero, co-founder of the New York Initiative.”

  We meet for a strategy briefing outside a movie theater near Washington Square Park, Lower Manhattan, at 10 pm. There are ten of them. They don’t look much like superheroes. They look quite intimidating, in fact, like a street gang, or some kind of private security detachment dressed entirely in black, with only cursory flashes of color.

  “I look at it like a homeland soldier who has stickers on his helmet,” explains Zero, a tall, good-looking, blond-haired man. “I’m an artist. I’m a fighter. I’m a radical. I’m in a state of unrest.” He pauses. “I’m trying to promote a new term instead of ‘superhero’: X-Alt. It’s short for Extreme Altruist. I think it’s going to open a lot of doors for people who don’t want to be directly linked to the superhero stigma.”

  “Is any of this because of Phoenix—” I begin.

  “We’re not going to comment on Phoenix Jones,” snaps Zero, shooting me a look.

  Before Phoenix came along Zero and his crew—headed by the veteran superhero of nine years’ standing, Dark Guardian—were America’s most famous RLSHs. But these days the media don’t really want to know them.

  They put a bulletproof vest on me and the night’s maneuvers begin. The plan is to confront the pot dealers in Washington Square Park, those men who sell to the students at the adjacent New York University.

  We enter the park at 11 pm. It is all very quick and efficient. A dealer is standing alone, looking incredibly startled and upset to see ten frightening men rushing toward him.

  “Are you the police?” he says, in a small voice.

  The superheroes surround him, shining torches in his face, screaming, “This is a drug-free park! A drug-free park! People, not drugs!”

  They look like a pack of dogs chasing a fox. The dealer practically chokes with fright.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” he shouts, running away onto the Manhattan streets.

  Even though the operation seemed to me to unfold with a textbook precision, an embarrassed-looking Zero asks to speak to me quietly.

  “It was a disorganized clusterfuck,” he says, evidently furious with himself, like a virtuoso opera singer who does a flawless performance and then beats himself up. “Please don’t write about how disorganized we were. If the dealers read it they’ll think they can take us. . . .”

  My night with the NYI leaves a bad taste in my mouth. These men just seemed menacing, with no fun to them. I don’t want my superheroes to be bullies. I want goofy charm. When Phoenix Jones walks down the street passersby point and laugh and gasp. Whereas all the NYI seem to get are anxious sideways glances. I agree with Zero: there’s nothing superheroish about them at all.

  Seattle. Saturday night. Phoenix Jones is in a bad way. He’s still sick from the stabbing and the baseball bat incidents and has now developed a fever of 102.5.

  “I found out this morning I have tetanus,” he tells me.

  “You have to sleep,” I say.

  “No sleeping for us,” says Phoenix.

  I’m starting to like Phoenix a lot. For all his naivety, there’s something infectiously upbeat about him. He’s forever cheerful and positive and energetic. I ask him if he’s addicted to crime fighting and he says, “Yeah, I guess you could put it in the addiction category. It’s the highlight of my day. Addictions are normally detrimental to health. This is detrimental to my health.”

  He puts his positive spirit down to a stable home life: “Me and my girlfriend have been together since I was sixteen. I make my own money. To be a successful superhero, you’ve got to have your life in line.”

  This will be our final night patrolling together. Phoenix is still embarrassed about our essentially crime-free washout patrol of the other night and is hoping to show me something more dramatic. They’re a small team tonight—Pitch Black and Ghost are his only companions.

  We begin at 1 am in Pioneer Square. The bars are closing and drunk kids are piling onto the streets, but there’s still a frustrating absence of crime. Phoenix notices a girl sobbing in an alleyway.

  “Are you okay?” he asks her, bounding over.

  “We’re good,” her friend says, quite sharply.

  But then, from somewhere up the street, we hear a shout: “I’m going to fuck you, bitch.”

  “Let’s go!” yells Phoenix. He, Ghost, Pitch Black, and I start to run frantically toward the mystery commotion.

  “It’s the YouTube guy!” a nearby teenager shouts delightedly. “Can I get a picture of you?”

  Phoenix screeches to a halt.

  “I’ll be right with you guys!” he calls to us. He poses for the girl.

  “Phoenix!” I sigh.

  By the time Phoenix has had his picture taken, the potential criminal and victim are nowhere to be seen.

  By 3 am we are giving up hope. Phoenix is reduced to suggesting we rent a hotel room, phone some prostitutes, and ask them on their arrival if they need help escaping the web of prostitution.

  “I think the problem with the plan,” I say, “is if a prostitute turns up at a hotel room and sees three men in masks, she’s not going to immediately think, ‘Superhero.’ Plus, she may have to travel right across Seattle. It’ll be an hour out of her night.” They agree to abandon the idea.

  Suddenly we notice a man across the street drop a small, clear bag onto the ground at the feet of another man.

  “YAHTZEE!” yells Phoenix. He rushes across the road. “What did you just drop?” he asks them.

  “Pretzels,” says the man, picking the bag up and showing it to us.

  There’s a silence.

  “Good!” says Phoenix.

  We adjourn to a nearby café. “Aargh!” says Phoenix, in frustration.

  Our very last hope, at 4 am, is Belltown. When we turn the corner into the district, everything changes. By day this place is nice—with bars and restaurants and art galleries. It’s just down the road from the famous Pike Place Market. But now, at 4 am, the dealers staring at us look nothing like the exhausted old crackheads from the bus stop, nor the two-bit pot dealers from Washington Square Park. These are large gangs of wiry young men. They stand on every block. The police are nowhere to be seen. I take in the scene and instinctively take a small step backward.

  “There’s a possibility we could get into a fight,” whispers Pitch Black. “If that happens, back off, okay?”

  “What are you doing?” a man calls from across the street. He’s part of a nine-strong gang.

  “Patrolling,” Phoenix calls back. “What are you doing?”

  He, Pitch Black, and Ghost walk toward him. I
reluctantly follow.

  “You’ve got to respect people’s block, man,” he’s saying. “You don’t come down here with your ski masks on. What are you doing, getting yourselves entwined in people’s lives? You guys are going to get hurt. You understand? You want to see our burners?”

  I’m sure I remember from The Wire that a burner is a stolen cell phone. But that doesn’t sound contextually right.

  “I don’t care,” says Phoenix.

  “You don’t care?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really?”

  “I’ve already been shot once,” says Phoenix.

  “I’ve been shot three times!” another member of the gang says, looking weirdly proud. “One motherfucker round here got shot in the nighttime. Innocent bystanders get shot here. Think about the bigger picture. You’re putting your lives on the line. If you guys get killed, if you guys are in a casket, your mommas are going to be like, ‘For what?’”

  “Don’t be a hero,” another adds. “That superhero shit? This is real life! You’re going to get hurt, fucking around.” He pauses. “How you feed your family is not how we feed our family. For real. We’re not out here just for the fun and just for the show-and-tell. This is real life.”

  I am finding myself ostentatiously nodding at everything the crack dealers are saying, I suppose in the hope that if the shooting starts they’ll remember my nods and make the effort to shoot around me.

  “I appreciate the info,” says Phoenix.

  Suddenly a gang member takes a step forward and peers at Phoenix through his mask.

  “You’re a brother?” he says. “You’re a BROTHER and you’re out here looking like THIS? You’ve got to be out of your fucking mind, man.”

  And then, it all changes. “I feel threatened right now,” he says. “You’ve got ski masks on. I don’t know if you’re trying to rob me. A guy got shot last Friday in Belltown by somebody with a mask on. Is that you?”

  “You don’t have to be here,” says Phoenix. “You’ve got choices.”