Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (7 page)

Jason leads her back to his room, where he picks up his gym bag and slings it over his shoulder. The walk has given him time to think about how he’s going to answer that question, and he decides on brutal honesty. “I snort a shit ton of cocaine,” he finally says, “and I fuck every attractive woman I can put my dick in, and while I’m floating on powder or watching Winsome Wings’ tits bounce in front of my face, those two drowned kids, the five burned victims from Kolt Tower, the twenty dock workers from Fisherman’s Wharf, and all the rest of the people who aren’t alive anymore because I wasn’t good enough do me a favor and leave me the fuck alone for an hour or three.”

“I don’t even.”

“You thought Francis wanted you to talk to me so you’d have someone to look up to?” Jason asks. “Wrong. He wanted you to talk to me so you could see who not to be.”

“I don’t think —”

“You’re a 15-year old kid and I’m going to leave you alone in this big house and whatever that hologram was just so I can go to the moon and visit Duplication Girl,” he says, stepping past her into the hallway. “Think about that,” he says, and leaves.

26

“Hey.”

“Hey yourself.”

“You look tense.”

“Been a long day, and it’s gonna get worse,” Kid Rapscallion grumbles. “Gotta get into the Stockade and see Five of Clubs. Or the Penthouse Man. Or whatever the fuck his official classified name is.”

“Vincent,” Duplication Girl says. “Vincent Vogelsung.”

He decides he hates that the Revolutionaries make him put on his uniform while inside their moon base, but when you’re a group of the most powerful superheroes around, you get to make the rules. Maybe that’s what he hates. Not the costume but the fact that they get to make the rules. It’s always them who get to make the rules. The goddamn Revos and old timers like Rapscallion.

Pricks.

Even the women.

“Hey sourpuss, I have just the thing,” Duplication Girl smiles as she snaps her fingers, and suddenly there are two of her standing there, exact copies down to the bright orange uniform with the exploding black star and “DG” logo and the impish, orange pixie cut.

“Not now,” he says.

“Really?” she asks, and there is another snap of her fingers and then there are three of her and the two copies begin kissing and the original starts jingling a vial of coke in front of him and the voices of the bus kids and the Tower burn victims and the drowned fishermen and fucking Francis … goddamn fucking Francis … always on his back …

He takes the vial.

27

TRANSCRIPT FROM
TARNISHED LEGACY: THE SECRET LIVES OF CAPES

Season 1, Episode 5 (S01E05): “Kid Rapscallion”

REBECCA ROKERS

You’re looking for motivation where there isn’t one. Duplication Girl was always going to end in flames. I don’t think Jason (expletive) her and snorting coke with her led — in any way — to what happened to her.

NANCY CATHALL

Duplication Girl? Yeah, her and Jason … I mean … we all have demons, right? Those two made each other’s demons go away when they got together. That’s the secret of a good relationship, I think. (pauses) That’s not a terribly romantic sentiment, is it?

(off-screen interviewer asks: Is that what Ro’meo does for you? Makes your demons go away?)

It’s … (deep breath) … I need to take a break, ok?

JASON KITMORE / KR

(old interview from 2006 feature story with ANC)

I never even knew her real name. DG was always adamant about that. In hindsight … (shakes head) … in hindsight, I never even saw what she did coming. (chokes up) I wish I had. She was … look, we’re all screwed up, yeah? All of us, and I’m not just talking heroes here, but I mean every single living human body has some kind of darkness inside of them. With the cape and cowl crowd … our demons have a way of manifesting and I think the line between being a hero and being a villain is a whole hell of a lot thinner than the public realizes. Francis used to say that the big difference between one side and the other was that the heroes had gotten help in cutting a deal with their troubles, while the villains were controlled by theirs.

28

“More,” Jason urges.

“I … I can’t,” one of the Duplication Girls says beneath him.

“I want more,” Jason says, twisting his neck to look around at the naked bodies strewn about the room.

“I don’t think I can,” the Duplication Girl on his right says.

“I’ve never gone beyond eleven before,” the Duplication Girl on his left says.

“Do it,” he says, snorting a new vial of cocaine that he’s pretty sure is alien given to him by the Duplication Girl responsible for keeping them all high. The more DG creates copies of herself, the more he can see the slight variations in them, like different parts of her persona are either bubbling to the surface, or that the splitting process is somehow sorting those different traits out. The one with the tray of coke is like the mother hen. He doesn’t need her. He needs …

“I’ll do it,” the one he needs says, moving onto the bed to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him passionately.

And then there were twelve.

And then there were thirteen.

And at some point he passes out and when he awakes, he finds an entire day has transpired.

29

“You look like shit, kid,” the older, thinnish man with thinning black hair says with a smile from atop a stool.

“Get bent, Penthouse of Clubs,” Kid Rapscallion says as he stands before the glass prison cube that houses superpowered criminals here in the Stockade, a hero-controlled prison located in a pocket dimension. Vincent Vogelsung sits inside a glass cube inside a larger, igloo-shaped room of metal. Inside the cube is a stool, a bed, a desk, and a toilet.

“You’re as clever as they say,” the man smiles.

“I’m sorry, how do I address you?” Kid asks. “Five of Clubs? Penthouse Man? Traitor? Shitbag? What the hell kind of name was Five of Clubs, anyway? Couldn’t count to six?”

“Vincent will do,” the former hero and villain says, “and I picked that moniker because it was unassuming. I never wanted to be on the cover of magazines or invited to join the Revolutionaries.”

“So you were really just pretending to be a hero but were actually a villain?”

“My lord,” Vincent laughs, rising off the stool, “it can’t work the other way, can it? Did Francis pick you out of a hat?”

“We’re not here to talk about Francis.”

“Oh, of course,” Vincent winks.

“What the hell does that mean?”

“It means, no matter what you are vocalizing in a given moment, everything you say and do is a comment on your relationship with Francis Flack.”

“If I wanted a shrink, I’d go see Therapist Z.”

“Fine,” Vincent says, “we can play this your way. To what occasion do I owe the pleasure of your company?”

Jason slaps a photo on the outer wall of the prison cube:

I WILL WATCH LAS VEGAS BURN FROM THE TOP OF THIS CITY. NO ONE CAN STOP ME.

Vincent is momentarily confused and then begins to laugh. “You’re not here because you think I did this, do you?” He motions around to his cage. “You do realize I’m in the Stockade, right? Oh my dear, dear boy,” he says, wiping tears from his eyes, “she’s had you running blind and stupid at the end of her leash since you met her, hasn’t she?”

Jason scowls. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Vincent sits back on the stool and continues to laugh when he is interrupted by Striped Star’s voice on the com system. “Jason,” she says, “you need to come see this.”

30

For all his complaining about the Revolutionaries and their old fogeyness, Jason would never deny that feeling of awe one experiences walking into a room and seeing someone like Striped Star or Eagle ’62 standing there. These were the lineage heroes, and while there had been two Striped Stars before this one (one during World War 2 and another in the 1950s), and while Eagle ’62 had taken on the red, white, and blues from Eagle ’41 after the first soldier’s 21 year run in the tights, these were the heroes everyone in the community looked up to, the heroes everyone wanted to be.

The were the fucking Revolutionaries, yeah? And while Jason knew they weren’t perfect, that the team had had their share of problems - both in and out of costume — even the so-called “Reality Generation” of heroes like himself could feel their wills bending to one of respect when they were in their presence.

Jason wondered how much of that was because they’d been around for forty years and how much was because of their actual worthiness. Yeah, sure, they’d save the world hundreds of times, but —

“Focus your thoughts,” the Psychic Navigator commands as Jason enters the massive, circular control room at the heart of the Fort. Unlike Star and Eagle, who still looked much like they had for the past 40 years (him because of the government serum that gave him his powers and her because she
’
d received a blood transfusion from the actual, honest-to-goodness God of War), the Navigator was starting to age. Graying hair dominated his temples, and there were lines on his gaunt face. He
’
d been in this life since the 1970s and there wasn
’
t anything keeping him from looking like a guy in his mid-50s. “There is a serious issue at hand.”

Jason turned to give the Revolutionaries’ resident telepath/telekinetic a withering glance that told him what he could do with himself.

“I believe that is Duplication Girl’s forte, is it not?”

“Knock it off,” Striped Star orders from the center console. The walls of this round room are viewing screens, and before Jason turns to look at the various images playing around them, he lets his eyes take in Star. Statuesque, beautiful, and noble, her genetic lineage seemed to meander through as many different races and ethnicities, as possible, ending up in her, an American Army brat of Mexican parents who could trace her father’s side of the family back to the Aztecan gods and her mother’s to Mount Olympus. Dressed in leather armor, her omnipresent sword hanging off her hip, Jason feels the stirrings of desired conquest in his loins, but pushes them aside as he asks her, “What have we … oh, hell.”

On the screens around him are the same scene played out from multiple angles:

Colbie Cross, dressed in a Kid Rapscallion costume, lashed to the roof of the Grand Vegas.

31

Apes riding dinosaurs terrorize Las Vegas. Jason’s eyes see these images and his brain properly processes them, but he has eyes only for the costumed villain standing over Colbie. The villain wears a white uniform with almost unnoticeable silver stars that rotate around her body from her left boot to her neck. Her face and hair are covered by a white mask with a silver star in the center.

“We’re running our recognition program,” Striped Star announces, changing one of the screens to the computer program cycling through every superhero and law enforcement database on the planet, “but there’s no costume match, no body match, no S.O.P. match on record. She calls herself Fake Out, but we think she’s a completely new villain.”

“She’s not,” Jason says, his heart knotting up and twisting. Though he can’t see her face beneath the mask, he knows the body and knows the smile. “Her name is Rebecca Rokers,” he says. “The Penthouse Man is her uncle.”

Striped Star’s face tells him she’s not ready to believe the young hero who once asked her what it was like to be the most jerked-off to woman in history, but Jason doesn't see it because his eyes are locked onto Becca’s smile.

“It’s her,” he stands his ground. “Believe me.”

“How can you be sure?” Striped Star asks, looking to him for just a moment before turning to the Psychic Navigator. “Does he know her? How? What is the nature of his —?”

“The nature of my relationship with her?” he asks, spinning on Star, resenting her turning towards the Navigator. “You make everything sound so goddamn clinical. The nature of my relationship with her is that I put my dick in every hole she has on a regular basis,” he says, balling his hands into fists.

“Based on all intelligence reports, you could make the same claim about many women,” Striped Star reminds him. “What makes you so certain?”

“Because for the past two months she’s been my goddamn assistant.”

32

None of the punching and kicking matters.

There is a larger point to be made on that, Jason thinks, as Striped Star tells him that none of the apes riding dinosaurs are actually there, that what they’re seeing on their monitors is some kind of mass illusion. If they were there and Kid Rapscallion had to spend the night punching and kicking his way through the dinosaur-riding apes each encounter would be forgotten midway through the next opponent.

Once upon a time, the punching and kicking is what the whole superhero endeavor was all about. Jason is pretty certain this is a function of the ‘60s.