After Thanksgiving, things were hopping at the Union Stripe Café. A lot of businesses along Woodward Avenue booked our “banquet hall”—basically, another storefront adjacent to and about the same size as our regular dining room—for holiday parties. Even the professionals from the medical center, notorious for being stingy tippers, had to pay up—a fifteen-percent gratuity was automatically added to their collective bill. Some patrons got so drunk they still left change—only a few percent, but gravy for us wait staff. Some nights I was walking out of the restaurant with more than a hundred bucks in cash—good money in the early eighties.

One night as we were about to close, Chas Bradford, daytime dishwasher at the restaurant and cartoonist at large, came in from the cold. He carried one of those old-style portfolios that are made from two boards with a cloth hinge that tie on three sides with strings. No doubt, this was a relic he’d scavenged from his tenure at that downtown Detroit furniture clip-art agency, Bissell & Banks.

“Hey, Clarissa,” he said as he climbed on a stool at the bar. He set the portfolio down in the same motion and began untying it.

“Hey, Chas,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I have a favor to ask of you. Are you still up for modeling for me? You know, to draw you? It’s for an assignment.” He began fumbling through sheaves of drawings.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Nude modeling seems to lead to harder stuff…like prostitution, or turning into a megavillain.” I was thinking of Dana.

“What’s wrong?” Chas asked. “You seemed like you were into the idea earlier in the fall.”

“Yeah, but I had just met you,” I said. “And I was being silly.” I remembered the occasion well. It was at Nancy’s house party; I had had a couple beers and was being my usual audacious, charming self.

“But you’re good at it,” said Chas. “You did it for Nancy. She did some great drawings of you.”

“But she’s the only one I’ve ever sat for,” I said. “I’m not a professional artist’s model, like Dana. Besides, I’ve never had a guy draw me naked—I’m not sure how I’d feel about that.”

“Mrs. Lichtig scared you off, didn’t she?” asked Chas. “She is kind of creepy; she keeps talking about you, hoping you’ll sit for her class. But it’s not an assignment for her; it would be for my commercial illustration class. And it would just be for me. I’d be the only one who’d see you.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Especially after you’ve been with Avie…”

“Oh, that’s it,” said Chas, knowingly. “It’s because I lost my virginity with your sister. Really, would it be weird for you? It shouldn’t. Here, let me show you what I’m talking about.”

He pulled out some half-begun drawings on Bristol board, arranged in panels like a comic book. They showed megaheroic figures in battle with towering robots, sketched out roughly in pencil. He also showed me some thumbnail sketches, but these were too scribbly for me to make out the action, even though he explained what they represented in exhaustive detail.

“See, I have to create a set of illustrations involving the human figure, but they can’t be based on photographs from magazines or anything. I have to use original life reference. As you can see, I’m not so good at drawing women; they tend to look like fashion dolls with muscles. At least, that’s what Mr. Keeter says.”

“Oh, I get,” I said, beginning to decipher the scrawls. “Those stick figures with massive basketballs on their torsos…they’re supposed to be women.” I could see poor Chuck needed to learn to draw women’s wider hips, too. “Why don’t you get Avie to sit for you again? She’s got that shapely hourglass figure you want in your work and then some.”

“Avie’s beautiful and all—she’s great for cheesecake,” said Chas. “But she lacks the requisite athleticism I envision for this piece. Besides,” he confessed, “Avie’s mad at me. We went to a gallery opening in October, just as friends. I ended up flirting with some other chick.”

“Some chick?” I said. “What are we, in the sixties?” Avie probably had mentioned to me putting Chas on her shit list; if she had, it had just gone in one ear and out the other. It was hard keeping up with her life and loves; last I checked, she was pining away for some six-foot-tall drag queen who did local theater. “You know, Chas, if you turned gay, I’m sure my sister would fall madly and permanently in love with you. Avie’s something of a fag hag—always obsessing over whatever she can’t have, and what never will be.”

Chas didn’t blush like I expected—what a difference losing your virginity makes. Instead, he kept right on making his pitch.

“You don’t have to take your clothes off or anything, Clarissa,” he said. “You can wear your megahero uniform. In fact, that’s the point. I want to put Ms. Megaton Man into her own comic strip—you deserve your own illustrated adventures. See? This is you beating up these robots—although I’ve made you more an axe-wielding barbarian. I may even be able to get a few strips published in the free alternative newsweekly, The Motor City Monitor—they like to run local cartoons.”

Oowee, I thought. That was supposed to be me? Chas was going to need to cut way down on the boobs.

“I’m not sure I want my likeness and secret identity appearing in print, Chas,” I said, “even as idealized cartoon drawings. Besides, why not The Detroit Day? Doesn’t your older brother write a column for them? You’re good enough to have your work printed in a major metropolitan daily.”

“That’s a family newspaper,” said Chas. “I’m not sure they’d be ready for The Real-Life adventures of Ms. Megaton Man. I want this to be gritty and urban and real.”

My adventures belong next to the phone-sex ads in that hippie giveaway?

“You could tone it down,” I suggested. “Or make up your own character. How ‘bout a pretty suburban white girl with a long, flowing cape? And a gleaming, urban metropolis—‘Our Fair City’?”

“There are enough mainstream costumed crime fighter comics out there,” said Chas. “I’m not into that company-owned, corporate work-for-hire crap. I used to read that stuff as a kid, but now I’ve outgrown it. I’m into Underground Comix and Greenwich Village experiments like RIP! By Shel Messerschmitt, and stuff the critics write about in The Comics Furnace.”

“I remember now—you’re into all that Eurotrash stuff. Who’s that Bohemian arthouse genius you adore so much?”

“Arturo, pen name of Girard Jarreaux—and he is a genius,” Chas insisted, somewhat petulantly. “He’s Swiss, or Belgian, or French—I forget which. Anyway, I aspire to be the American Arturo someday, if I can get good enough.” He tucked the drawings away and tied the portfolio closed. “Look, Clarissa, I need to make life studies as part of this assignment. You don’t need to be nude, or wear your uniform—you can just wear a leotard or a bathing suit. I can change your name to Miss Megatronica or make you Japanese if you want—whatever. I’ll even give you final approval before I turn it in. The final product will have no resemblance to Ms. Megaton Man, if that’s what you want, I promise you. But I just need to sketch you for about an hour in some action poses as raw material, or I’m sunk in this class. Won’t you help me?”

I don’t know how I let myself get talked into these things, but I took pity on him and agreed. We made an appointment for the next night. It would be late when I got off work, but all young cartoonists are night owls. After I finished my shift at Union Stripe Café, I folded my apron and walked across Woodward Avenue to Chas’s apartment, which was less than a block away on East Willis.

I was nearly to the front door and about to ring the buzzer when I realized, “Shit—I didn’t wear my Ms. Megaton Man uniform underneath my civvies.” And I certainly didn’t have a swimsuit or leotard. “Oh, well—I’ll just have to pose for him in the buff and get it over with.” It wasn’t like I hadn’t done the same for Nancy, although I ended up sleeping with her. If worse came to worse, I thought, and Chas got a boner, I promised myself I would only use my hand, not my mouth.

There was no answer, but also the door wasn’t locked—broken. I entered and walked up to the second floor. It was nearly midnight, but I could hear music from several apartments. Medical students and other students, presumably, were cramming for finals. Which was what I should have been home doing.

I knocked on Chas’s door, but there was no answer. Some rock music was playing inside the apartment, so I guess he couldn’t hear me. This door was unlocked, too, but that wasn’t so strange, since Chas was expecting me.

I’d never been in his apartment before, but I knew I was in the right place. The dining room on the left was where Chas set up his drawing table, and I recognized some of his drawings taped to the walls. The light was on over the drawing board, but Chas wasn’t around. I peeked into the small, adjacent kitchenette; he wasn’t there, either—just a sink full of dirty dishes with cockroaches scurrying around. Under the sink I noticed a cardboard box with three cans of spray paint—odd, I thought; no doubt for some art project.

On the drawing board were some unfinished drawings and sketches of a female megahero. She roughly had my costume with the plunging V-neck, but she had some ridiculous utility belt and shoulder armor. She also had longer legs and a flowing cape. Her hair was all wrong. Of course she had much bigger boobs than me.

“Chas sure needs to observe real life,” I said to myself. “This won’t do at all.”

I walked back down the hallway to the living room, where a record-changer was playing some white rock-and-roll—not too loudly to make the neighbors complain, but loudly enough so that someone might not hear someone knocking on the door if they were in the back bedroom, which was at the long end of the apartment.

On the coffee table were a couple empty wine glasses and an empty bottle of red wine. There was also a lighter and a couple smoked marijuana joints in roach clips in the ashtray.

There were a few large sheets of drawing paper on the floor along with some sticks of charcoal, a chamois, and an eraser. The drawings were unfinished, little more than quick, sketchy gestures, but they were clearly of a woman. They appeared to have been drawn from life rather than imagination. The body-type—flat-chested, with robust bottom—was not unlike mine. But the hair—shoulder-length, black, with Cleopatra bangs—was unmistakably that of Peggy Weir, the girl who lived upstairs. But no, that couldn’t be; Grosse Pointe Peggy had sworn off virgins and never dated any guy who wasn’t studying law or medicine. She’d never give Chas the time of day.

Beyond the living room were two bedrooms and bathroom. I walked down the hall, calling, “Chas? I’m here.”

I got to the first bedroom door and opened it before I realized two people were moaning intensely inside. The room was dimly illuminated by a vintage lava lamp—I kid you not—and Chas was lying on a mattress, his dick in his hand. Sitting squarely on his face was Grosse Pointe Peggy from upstairs, facing the wall. I could tell it was Peggy from the back of her head, and her unmistakably cute butt—which was grinding back and forth like one of those whirligig flying machines in the old newsreels trying desperately to get off the ground.

You can’t unsee something like that, so I thought I may as well share it with you. Try getting it out of your mind now.

Neither one heard me, thank God; as I said, Peggy was facing the wall, and Chas—well, Chas obviously had a girl sitting on his face.

Peggy from Grosse Pointe, who refused to sleep with virgins nor any man who was less than a future doctor or lawyer. Well, I guess Chas had convinced her he was experienced now, thanks to my sister Avie. Peggy even seemed willing to overlook Chas’s status as an art school dropout and daytime dishwasher at the Union Stripe restaurant, at least for one night.

I crept away and slipped out the door of the apartment just as the throes of orgasm crescendoed over the crashing rock music. I was happy for them. Chas, I guess, had found his model, if not his muse. Whether she knew it or not, Peggy was destined to be an arthouse comic-strip megahero.

I walked home the several blocks in the dark, past the steam-power station on and the Vernor’s Ginger Ale bottling plant on Woodward Avenue. It was past midnight, but nobody was out. If I hadn’t been a megahero, I might have been apprehensive about being out alone after dark in Detroit, but the fact was the North Cass neighborhood was relatively safe; I always felt that you had to go looking for trouble in order to find it, but if you walked fast and kept to yourself, nobody bothered you.

I couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d seen at Chas’ apartment. I knew from experience that posing for somebody wasn’t an erotic experience, except for the fact that you have your clothes off. The artist is concentrating on getting their drawing right, after all, which requires concentration. But I did like showing my body to Nancy, and after she was done drawing me we did fool around. And although I wasn’t looking forward to it, I expected Chas to get frisky after drawing me; and was prepared with a strategy to deflect it. I never thought sitting on his face while he took care of himself, however.

Now I was a little disappointed, and more than a little horny. I thought about dropping into the Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar, but was too tired from work to feel like going through the ritual of picking someone up, taking them back to my place, and shooing them out the door afterwards so I could get some sleep.

I also didn’t feel like waiting to get home before getting off. But where to give myself a cheap thrill on the nighttime streets of North Cass?

As I walked, I passed two old Victorian houses on Forest Avenue that I must have passed a million times, day and night, on the way to and from work at the restaurant. One, I knew, was rented out to a white male professor at Warren Woodward University; I had seen a distinguished-looking gentleman, escorting young white women, presumably his grad students, in and out the front door from time to time. I don’t know who rented the house next door, but I imagined it was a similar setup. I further imagined in both houses both old guys were independently banging away at their young, bent-over little fuckbitches right now. Nice way to earn a grade if not an education if you happen to be a pretty white girl.

I noticed that the dark recess between the houses formed a sort of alley where the security lights didn’t reach. No one was around, and as I say, I was pretty horny, so I slipped into the darkness. Once my eyes adjusted, I saw only a few neatly arrayed garbage cans, their lids firmly in place. There were no lights from the windows of either house, and not a sound to be heard.

Now you think only old, lonely guys in raincoats go around masturbating outdoors. Let me tell you, more women would do the same thing if we lived in a just, free, and equal society. I don’t want you thinking I did this sort of thing all the time, but there was something relaxing and thrilling about the frigid air, the darkness, and the desolate time of night that felt right to me, particularly after what I’d seen Chas and Peggy doing. And there was also the thrill of defiance and the risk of getting caught, and having some old, white son of a bitch and some young, white tart yell at me for beating off in their alley.

I slipped off my rabbit-fur lined gloves and slid my warm hands down my pants. It only took a few minutes for me to take the edge off. I emitted a few intermittent, soft moans into the dark, night air, but finished with one loud moan and a brisk shudder that startled a cat, who must have crept onto the garbage cans and leapt from a loose lid, creating a clatter that scared the fucking shit out of me. I let out a loud gasping cry that I managed to cut short, even as I continued with my orgasm for well over another minute. I worried that houselights would come on and residents would swarm out of the houses with pitchforks, but everything remained quiet. After I was done, I put on my gloves, slipped out between the houses back to the street, and walked the last few blocks home. I looked back at the two houses; no lights ever came on in the windows.

You probably think I’m a total pervert, buying dirty books and sitting in porno theaters and masturbating outdoors at all hours. But I found a certain freedom in transgressing the norms of society. Again, maybe it was Dana rubbing off on me—maybe why I secretly admired her, even though she was scary. That was the culture on offer in big American cities; men could enjoy it, so why couldn’t I?

I thought about Dana that last two blocks home, wondered where she was on this cold night. Then I thought about the three cans of spray paint in Chas’ kitchen—it had barely registered at the time, but it was all safety-orange. When I got home, I called Nancy, Audrey, and Hadleigh’s apartment. Luckily, Nancy answered the phone.

“Jesus Christ,” said Nancy, sleepily. “Clarissa, it’s one o’clock. What do you want?”

“Do you have any spray paint in your kitchen?” I asked. “Just take a look for me.”

They had a portable phone; I forced poor Nancy to traipse all over her apartment.

“Not in the kitchen,” Nancy reported. “But in the hall closet. What do you need it for?”

“I don’t need it,” I said. “Is it safety-orange?”

“Yes, it is,” said Nancy. “But what…?” It took her a few moments to make the connection. “Wait a minute—it’s just like the graffiti on my abandoned house. But honestly, Clarissa, I don’t know how it got here; I never saw it before.”

“I know, silly,” I said. “You wouldn’t confess to having safety-orange spray paint if you’d been the one responsible for all that anti-Ms. Megaton Man graffiti all over the city. I found the same stuff in Chas’ apartment. I’ll bet there’s more in the Holistic-Humanist church as well.”

“What do you think it means?” asked Nancy.

“It means Dana Dorman is really trying to frame my friends for her crimes,” I said. “She’s obviously planted cans of spray paint to cast suspicion on them. She’s so unbelievably bad at villainy.”

I apologized to Nancy for bothering her and told her to go back to sleep. As soon as I hung up, the phone rang.

“It’s Soren,” came the voice over the line. “Can you come over to the church now? Wear your costume.”

This was weird timing. Maybe somebody had seen me jerking off in the alley, and I was going to get called on the carpet. Anyway, I slipped into my costume and went out the back stairs of my apartment. No one would see Ms. Megaton Man in the dark alley that led to the church resident two doors down.

I let myself into the side door and went up to the third floor. The Y+Thems were assembled in the kitchen, all wearing their mismatched uniforms—Soren “Sabersnag” Sneed, Beatrice “Kiddo” Bryson, Kavanaugh “Tempy” Kleinfelter. Jasper “Rubber Brother” Johnson was there, too, stretching all around in his purple and magenta costume. Komik Kat had his full uniform on as well; they all wore stern expressions.

I thought to myself, This is about me fingering myself in the alley, isn’t it? Believe me, I’ve learned my lesson. I resisted the temptations to blurt this out.

Instead, I asked, “Where’s Avie?” She was the only church resident who was absent. “She’s all right, isn’t she?”

“I asked her to watch Ben Franklin Phloog for me,” said Kiddo. “She’s with him in the nursery downstairs.” She sat at the kitchen table rapping her fingers.

“This isn’t a meeting of residents,” said Soren. “It’s a meeting of your friendly neighborhood megaheroes. That’s why we needed you in attendance, Clarissa.”

“Is this about safety-orange spray paint?” I asked.

“You mean the stuff Dana clumsily planted here in our food pantry, and at my hair salon?” asked Kav. “Not exactly; it’s about Dana, though.”

“She’s obviously been the one who’s tagged all that graffiti talking shit about you all over Detroit and Ann Arbor,” said Jasper. “But frankly, as much as that may hurt, Clarissa, that’s the least of her crimes.”

“She’s acting pretty juvenile,” I said. “I feel somewhat responsible, since I did fool around with her, against my better judgment.”

“Her delinquency isn’t your fault,” said Soren. “Dana has a history of emotional issues. She’s had a rough life, and a hard time adjusting. Adjusting to her sexuality, to her megapowers, dealing with her traumas. Adjusting to this harsh town.”

“She may present a tough exterior,” said Kav, “but she’s had a hard time accepting herself. She’s at war with herself—she’s been at war with herself for a long time. It can happen to the best of us.”

“None of us knows why the universe gave us these weird powers, why we’re such freaks,” said Kiddo, staring glassy-eyed into the middle-distance. “Let alone why we have to suffer persecution from the civilian human race. There’s no guidebook for being a megahero.”

I sure knew that feeling.

“Most of us are drawn to the light,” said Jasper. “But a few of us go bad; take Norbert Nostrand, for instance. The Quantum Leaper—there’s a guy I came up through the ranks with; but he’s always vacillated between good and evil.”

“What’s Dana done this time?” I asked. Dana Dorman, the megaheroine who called herself Domina, sometimes worked as a waitress at my restaurant, the Union Stripe Café. More often, she served as bouncer, in full dominatrix regalia, for the lesbian biker Bottleneck & Tie-Up Bar. Avie suspected Dana also had a long list of well-paying male clients she humiliated on the side as well. And, she worked as a nude drawing model. Most recently, she’d scrawled crude, mean-spirited epithets concerning Ms. Megaton Man’s sexual history all over abandoned buildings throughout the region. Although straight society might take a dim view of any of these pursuits, none were criminal, strictly speaking, or even of questionable morality, in my book. But maybe I needed to go to church more.

“She wrote us a note,” said Jasper, who used a stretchy arm to reach across the tiny kitchen to pull a piece of paper attached to the refrigerator by a magnet. He handed it to me. It read,

Sorry guys, can’t take this straight life anymore, even in its liminal, Bohemian form. Decided my destiny as a Youthful Permutation is not with the Y+Thems, but on the dark side. I’m just a bad, bad girl, and from now on I’m going to own it. Look out, world.

“We need to face it, group,” said Kozmik Kat somberly. “Domina is now a hardcore megavillain.”