“Well, bring my grandson with you. We’ll sit out on the porch and tie one on.”
Jerry sighed, “Dad, remember what happened the last time?”
“Yeah,” I chuckled, “Took ’em about three years to rebuild that stadium.”
I laughed, but I knew where he was coming from. God, I missed drinking. But at 83 years old, I just couldn’t handle my liquor like I used to. “Well, just come on over, anyways. I wanna see that boy.”
Jerry agreed, we said our goodbyes and hung up. I looked around. The house just seemed so empty since Alyssa passed. The kids handled it well, I think. Jerry got off to an early start making me a grandpa. James was still in college, studying to be a computer scientist. Both of them had plenty to distract them. I didn’t. All I had anymore were memories. Memories of my kids when they were little. Memories of Alyssa when we were still young (ish). Memories of being first the only, and later the greatest hero this city’s ever seen. Drunk Stan.
I glanced at the side table. There was a flask of 80 proof in there. But just as I had the last hundred times, I passed by. I figured I’d go watch a movie on that fancy new box James set up for me the last time he was home. The doorbell rang, right as I passed it.
I gave the door a skeptical look. I swear to god, if it was a Jehovah’s Witness ringing my doorbell at 8am on a Saturday morning, I’d tie him into a pretzel. I may have been sober for somewhere north of two decades now (with only a handful of slip ups), but the superpowers that, in my youth, had always come with drunkenness had begun to stick around in my sobriety. Probably just my body getting old. Or maybe the millions of gallons of booze I’d consumed had soaked in, and my body was still getting a steady drip as my muscles atrophied and my skin wrinkled.
Either way, I was still five or six times as strong as your typical World’s Strongest Man competitor. I could handle a Jehovah’s Witness. So I flung open the door and opened my mouth to tell the little fucker off.
Then I shut the fucking door post-haste and ran to the side table.
I chugged the flask down and felt that old familiar burn. The energy from the booze swept through me, making the years melt away. I returned to the foyer and, moving my head from side to side, peered out through the tiny windows on either side of my door to confirm he was still there. He was. Just standing there.
After watching him for a minute, I returned and yanked the door open again. “Kraven,” I growled.
“Stan.”
The wrinkles couldn’t hide that face I knew so well. Nor could the scars, though to be fair, I’d given him most of them. The lack of clown (or Klown, as he would excitedly insist) makeup was a little disconcerting. The weirdest thing was the look on his face. It wasn’t the expression of twisted, maniacal cheer or incoherent rage which had always vied for supremacy on his angular features. He just looked… Tired. “Call me Eric.”
I blinked. Kraven absolutely hated it when I called him by his given name. I couldn’t even count the times he’d monologued about how he’d become Kraven the Killer Klown. Eric was dead, and a new entity had taken his place, blah blah blah.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Eric? I thought you died in prison.”
“I did. Err, well, I had some tetrodotoxin smuggled in. So I sort of died. Then I went to Idaho.”
“Idaho?” I blinked again. …the fuck?
He laughed and I recognized a bit of that old insanity in it. But even still, he still sounded tired. “I always wanted to live in the mountains. Away from everyone. All the noise. I just never could bring myself to leave until I’d won.”
He never did win. I’d first caught him trying to rob a liquor store when I was just getting started. He’d just been Eric Goldberg, then. A skinny Jewish teenager from Harlem with a chip on his shoulder. It was his first time committing a crime. I knocked him out and left him for the police. The store owner gave me a gallon of cheap vodka for my troubles. Things since then had followed a pattern. Eric got crazier and more daring each time. And each time, I’d beat him a little bit worse.
After his mom died when he was barely old enough to drink, he cracked fully. That’s when the clown makeup first appeared. He started calling himself Kraven. The Killer Klown. His plans got bigger and bigger, and the punishment I meted out got worse and worse. I put him in a wheelchair for three years about six months before I retired and married Alyssa. The next time I saw him, he’d gotten all the supervillains to band together and take out the crop of heroes that had arisen in my wake. I came out of retirement for that. I killed his buddies in ways I’m generally not proud of. Then I locked Kraven in my basement and tortured him for a week.
Yeah. Drunk me is an asshole.
Eventually, I sobered up and realized what I’d done. I turned him over to the cops, then. There was talk of prosecuting me, but I don’t think anyone in their right mind really wanted to make an enemy of me. Especially after what I’d done to those villains. Last I’d heard, he’d died where they put him, in the psych ward at Miskatonic Penitentiary. Apparently, I’d heard wrong.
I must have stood there for a couple of minutes, lost in thought, trying to wrap my head around why he was here. Eventually, Kraven broke the silence. “Can I… Can I come in?”
That one took me a few more minutes to process. In the meantime, the instincts I’d developed as a family man, and more recently, as a widower grandpa took over. I opened the door wider and stood to the side.
Kraven -or more aptly, Eric- slipped past me and gave my living room a good once over. It was a nice living room, if I say so myself. I was always a man of humble tastes, and the gratitude of the city whenever I saved it (well, at least on those occasions when I didn’t leave behind too many suspicious stains on the rubble of collapsed buildings) had allowed me to retire in style. Or rather, in what passed for style in the mind of an old drunk.
The couch was a super comfortable microfiber number, and Eric sank into it when he sat down. I wandered over, energy from the booze still coursing through my veins, as it would continue to do until I burned it off, and sat in my favorite chair.
“Why are you here, Eric?”
He looked around for a few more minutes. He seemed mostly interested in the various bits of memorabilia I’d decorated the walls with. Gator Man’s leather biker jacket, the Withering Gaze’s special red-tinted sunglasses, stuff like that. It was a good thing that stuff held his attention too, because if he’d stared too long at the pictures of my kids or grandson, I’d have broken every bone in his body right then and there.
Eventually, he turned his face down to his hands. I followed his gaze and realized they were shaking. “I’m dying, Stan.
“A degenerative nerve disease, hehe. I forget what they call it. There’s no cure, heh. I’ve got something like 3 more months before my body forgets how to breath.”
“So what? You want sympathy?”
“No, I-“
“Good, you piece of shit. You’re responsible for the death of millions. Hell, you’ve probably personally murdered over a hundred. I’ve got no sympathy for you.”
He cackled a little. I could hear a hollow echo of the manic glee that had once suffused his laugh.
“No sympathy for me, thanks. I know what I am. What I’ve done. I just… Hehe, Well, you know about me, don’t you?”
“Wut?” I knew about him? About what? Huh?
“You know,” he insisted. “You’ve always known. It’s why you were also so much more violent with me than with the others.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I frowned. I was seriously lost, and it was pissing me off. Being confused about what Eric was up to was always a bad sign. It usually ended up with me in really thick chains and some trumpet dressed like a cross between a harlequin and a six-dollar sexy-nurse-halloween-costume pumping booze out of my stomach. I’d always have to figure out some trick to get some booze in me so I could escape. Once, I couldn’t even do that. The fucker had poured my stash down the drain the moment he caught me. I had to escape and take him down with just my normal human faculties. That had been a nightmare.
But this time, he didn’t seem interested in capturing me. He lifted one trembling, age-spotted hand and gave his chest a solid thump. “That I’m a superbeing. Like you.
“I mean, you had to have known. You’re the strongest superbeing the world has ever seen, and you’ve beaten the shit out of me dozens of times. Yet I’m still alive. Still walking and talking and shitting on my own. Hehe, I even have kids of my own. That was after you kicked me in the crotch and sent me flying three blocks down Madison Avenue. Remember that?”
“Hmmph. Yeah, I remember. You killed two security guards at the museum and rigged them up as marionettes.”
He laughed then. A full on, Kraven the Killer Klown maniacle laugh. “Yes. Good times, haha!”
I scowled some more. “That still doesn’t explain why you’re here.”
“I just, heh. I just… I wanted to talk to someone who understood.”
The question of whether or not Kraven had super powers had always floated in the back of my head. The general consensus among those who studied us superbeings was that he didn’t have any. But I’d seen some shit. I came down on Kraven for the people he’d killed, but my hands weren’t exactly clean, either. I knew what kind of abuse the human body was capable of taking before breaking down. Kraven had taken more abuse than all but the most overpowered villains. And yet here he was.
I did understand. I knew what it was like to be different. To be feared and worshipped. There was an island in the pacific where they carved my likeness out of palm trees and prayed to it the way a good little Christian would pray to God. Please, Drunk Stan, help me pass this test, tomorrow. Or dig up these coconuts, or whatever. Shit, was that racist?
Kraven had his own little ku-NO! I’m NOT going to do it. Fuck that. He had his own little Cult. A million and a half edgelords on the internet, quoting him, watching videos of his exploits and court appearances, sharing memes made from photos of his grinning face. (Mostly, these memes commiserated their inability to have sex with girls, or vented their spleens about the dumb “Brads” who got to have sex by treating women poorly.)
He certainly knew what it was liked to be feared and worshiped. And we were the last of our kind. No new superbeings had sprung up to fill the void after the villains had wiped out the batch that followed me, and then been wiped out by me, in turn.
“You know what it’s like to be misunderstood.”
Shit. Yeah, I knew that. All I ever wanted to do was help people. When I discovered my powers, I knew I’d use them for good. When I discovered that some others had powers of their own, and they’d all used them for their own gain, it merely doubled my resolve. I’d poured my heart and soul, my entire being into being Drunk Stan. I’d given the world the best years of my life. I fought demons, aliens, supervillains and once a giant rock monster gorilla thing I liked to call George.
But the world had watched me not in awe, but in fear. It was hard to blame them, I guess. I mean, I was Drunk Stan, not Sober Stan. Alcohol inhibits your judgement. It’s a well known fact. Sure, I’d fought off countless existential threats to my city, state, country planet and even universe. But the way I did it was… Not admirable.
For example, I’ve raped 13 people to death. And I don’t mean I raped them as they were dying. I mean, they died from getting fucked. That’s some fucked up, scary shit, if you ain’t got no superpowers to defend yourself with. Every single one of them deserved it, and the world had always dutifully sung my praises and celebrated my victories (well, so long as there weren’t too many suspicious stains, as I believe I mentioned already), but they’d always done so to stave off my anger.
And that was the kicker; I’d never have turned to villainy. I soon came to understand and accept the world’s judgement. I learned to live with it. I’d listened to their praise with my ears, while my eyes watched their eyes narrow and their brows sweat. If they’d acted out on it, it would have been a relief more than anything else. I understood them, but they never understood me.
I looked at Eric again. I tried to picture him through that lens. His dad ran off when he was still a baby. His mom was a prostitute, a former high class call girl from a nice family who’d discovered the joys of crack cocaine and ended up a single mother in a shitty, one-bedroom apartment in the inner city, holding down a street corner every night while her kid ran wild in the streets. Eric himself had been nursing a love of booger sugar since he was a teenager. Unfortunately for his many victims, he never fell prey to anything harder. The world might have been a better place if Kraven had died of an overdose in ’93.
Police records showed he’d filed a couple reports against his mom’s pimp. Apparently, the guy wasn’t too picky about his merchandise, and had made Eric turn a few tricks himself. I can only imagine how the pimp must have reacted when he found out. And there’s no way he didn’t; the cops back then were more crooked than my dick, and their security was about as airtight as a screen door.
Rough way for a kid to grow up. The kinda life that might push a man to do strange things. Looking at him now, he looked to be my senior, even though he was at least ten years younger. “Yeah, I guess I do.”
We talked for hours.
After a while, I had to get moving and burn off some of the energy I’d gotten from the flask. So I grabbed my golf clubs. “Do you play?”
“Been known to whack a few balls in my day, hehe.”
I groaned at that old canard. Still, I drove him down to the course with me, and we started playing. He was pretty good, actually. If I’d been sober, he’d have made me work to beat him. As it was, I found myself holding back. Not wanting to get too far under par. We kept talking, the whole time.
We talked about our grand visions for the world. Of course, he had one. All villains do, just like all heroes do. We talked about our methods. Mine were more… Honest, if no less wacky and comically homicidal. If you weren’t a villain, the only thing you had to fear from me was becoming an accidental collateral victim. Eric seemed to see the world as a bit more random, a bit more cynical. Human life had less magic to him, it was just another phenomenon in a universe full of strange phenomena. He told me he rarely enjoyed killing people, and somehow, I believed him. He was a sick fuck with a dead body, but most of his victims had died quickly, and relatively painlessly. It was only the bad ones he took his time with. I could definitely understand that.
He talked about his family. After spending a week in my basement being tortured, he’d begun to wonder what the appeal of settling down and having kids had been to me. He had always seen our rivalry as a game. A game to be won, no doubt, but a game nonetheless. And why would you stop playing a game just to become a game piece? The question had haunted him, until he met some methhead redneck chick out in the mountains where he’d escaped to. She was as nuts as he was, only in the exact opposite way. She more or less sobered up, he more or less calmed the fuck down, and they had about 5 kids, more or less.
His family didn’t know who he was, he told me. They knew him as Derick Rothstein. Only child, both parents dead. Inherited enough money to go live in a cabin in the woods for the rest of his life, and decided to do just that. He and his wife homeschooled his kids. She found Jesus when she sobered up and raised the kids pretty religious. Eric didn’t believe it for a second, but he put on a good show. He drove them an hour into town ever Sunday for church.
Jesus Harold Billy-Jean Christ on a pogo stick with a dildo in his mouth. The thought of Kraven the Killer Klown carting a bunch of screaming brats to church in a station wagon, bedecked in his Sunday best was enough to make me question everything I knew about the world.
Except Eric’s honesty. I believed every word of it.
I tried a couple of times to remind myself of who the man swinging a six-iron next to me really was. I recalled the psychopathic killer who’s plans I’d foiled time and time again. But each time, the effort was fleeting. All I could see before me was a broken down man, full of regrets, trying to come to grips with his own mortality. The longer the day went on, the easier it became to imagine him hugging his kids, pulling coins out of their ears and telling them corny dad jokes. I could see the man who nursed a woman through meth withdrawals and followed her into a simple life.
By the time we’d finished the last hole, the sun was setting. We sat down on a hill and watched the orange glow begin to fade.
“I’m glad I came out here, Stan. Hehe. Today was a good day. I don’t have many of those left.”
“You gonna go back home now, be with your family?”
He looked thoughtful for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I think, heh, I think I want them to remember me the way I was.”
I nodded.
We watched until the last sliver of sun dipped behind the trees.
“I don’t hate you, Eric.” I said, surprising myself. “I get where you came from. I know it was a hard life, and it taught you a lot of shitty lessons.”
“I know, Stan. I’ve always seen that compassion in you. I think it’s what let you be the first hero. The rest of us, we always had our own desires, first and foremost. But you never could stop thinking of other people.”
“I guess not.” I shrugged. Despite a lifetime of effusive-if-affected praise, I still hadn’t ever learned to take a compliment well.
“We were always enemies, heh. For forty years, we were enemies. Arch-enemies even. I enjoyed that. I never had any friends, hehe.”
“No, I guess you didn’t.”
“I’d like to think that we were friends today.”
I thought about it. I thought about the man who’d earned every beating I gave him, and I thought about the man who’d poured out his soul to me today. “I think that sounds about right, Eric.”
“Good.” He was quiet after that. We watched the stars come out for a few more minutes.
Then I hauled back, summoning every last reserve of strength in my alcohol-infused body, adding to it the remaining bourbon from my flask this morning and punched Eric in the head.
It exploded.
His body slumped over while bits of brain and skull were still raining down. I wiped some off my face.
“That’s the best I can do for you, Eric. You had a good last day, you died a clean death. But I couldn’t take the chance you’d go back to your old ways in your final days. I just couldn’t bring myself to believe you wouldn’t try to fuck over the world that fucked you over, one last time.
“I meant what I said. We were friends today. For whatever that’s worth.”
I stood up, my bones aching in ways I could have never imagined forty years ago. I got in my car and drove home.