Close Encounters of the Superhero Kind

Kiersten's comment from yesterday made me think of the first superhero I ever met.

Picture this: Slayer and I have moved in together, because he said he was moving to Cleveland, and I invited myself along for the ride. We moved into this huge-ola high rise apartment with a view of Lake Erie and a drug dealer across the hall. (They did not tell us about the drug dealer in their promotional literature, either, which made me very disappointed.) My place of business was still in Toledo, so I telecommuted. We had a two bedroom apartment, one bedroom of which contained my office.

On nice days, I liked to keep my window open so I could hear the gulls while I was working. Not that I particularly like gulls, but it was an attempt to fool myself into thinking that I was living in some tropical paradise instead of near a lake that I won't swim in because of all of the medical waste. Unfortunately, this charade was ruined when they started redoing the parking-lot-slash-underground-garage. Imagine lots of pounding and beeping-in-reverse trucks and you've pretty much got it.

But this is where the superhero comes in. See, there was another high rise down the coast from ours, and you could just see it out the window if you nearly dislocated your vertebrae. Or, if you wanted to take it easy on yourself, you could go out on the balcony. Anyway, I was on a conference call one morning when I heard the yelling. It sounded vaguely like, "Shut up, you f-ing f-ers!!!"

That's when I saw him. He was out on his balcony at 8:30 in the morning with a can of Old Milwaukee in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His mullet fluttered in the lake breeze; his wife-beater displayed his scrawny, sunburnt arms to maximum effect. He was the one man with the nerve to take a stand against the evils of early morning construction. He was MULLET MAN.

And sure enough, every morning they were out there, so was he, shouting various conjugations and combinations of the f-bomb, waving his beer in irate fury, running his hands through that party-in-the-front hairstyle of his. But this was no party, for Mullet Man felt strongly about the sanctity of his early morning booze-on, and he started flicking lit cigarettes down at the workers. One morning, he was simply gone. Vanished off into the hazy distance to help people in need: when early morning stillness is shattered by the monotonous beeping of a truck driving backwards.

It was probably for the best. My clients were always asking me who was shouting in the background, and it was hard for me not to giggle.