Batman was always my favorite Superhero. His powers didn’t come from a radioactive spider bite, he couldn’t leap tall buildings in a single bound, he possessed not one single superhuman power. He was just a good guy fighting against the forces of evil…albeit with an unlimited income and all the cool tools anyone could ever dream of…but nonetheless, under the bulletproof suit was just a common guy. Really, he shouldn’t even be considered a “super” hero…..just a hero.
I’m sure I probably did, but I can’t remember ever owning a Batman comic book. The T.V. and movies are where I learned to respect the Dark Knight. Yes…it all began with reruns of the Adam West portrayal of the Caped Crusader, complete with onomatopoeia laden episodes full of BAM!, POW!, and BOP! Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney…they all portrayed the Winged Wonder respectably. Christian Bale’s Batman was perfect in my opinion though. Sullen…Driven….Vengeful…Unsure of his path…Often injured…He was human…He was dark…The Dark Knight played to perfection.
Long before the movies started making millions at the box office I always fancied myself as Batman…just a common guy fighting the forces of evil. If you ever deployed with me and we found ourselves in a less than fortunate situation, you’d hear me lay out a plan that sounded a little far fetched. Inevitably the question would arise, “Do you really think you can make that work?” To which I’d always respond “Absolutely….I’m Batman, dammit”. I won’t bore you with the details, and I won’t even try to convince you that every plan worked….I’ll just finish that thought with a simple reminder that…Well…I’m still here.
Now…years ago I had decided that I was getting the Batman emblem tattooed on my chest. Even though I know that I’m Batman I thought the rest of the world deserved fair warning. But…that tattoo never materialized. This is the story of why I don’t have that tattoo.
Just as a preface…If you’ve never lived in a military town, there are quite a few notable difference to everywhere else in the world. One of those differences is the rotation of neighbors. A lot of the housing in military towns is rented due to the short time span most service members stay in one spot. In most cases you’re very fortunate if you maintain the same neighbors around you for three or four years. It’s not uncommon for you to return home from a six month deployment and not know a single other person living in the neighborhood where you’ve owned a house for the past few years. After a while, you keep your distance from the neighbors anyway…you learn and understand that it’s all just temporary. It’s just the nature of the beast.
SO…Tom and I are cleaning guns on his front porch. A lot of guns. We’d just spent the better part of the day at the range blowing off steam along with a lot of ammunition. Multiple platforms of rifles, and shotguns are leaning against the porch rail and the table between us is covered in pistols. The air is soaked with the scent of cordite, solvent and Coors. We’re both on leave (military word for vacation) …it’s the middle of the day in the middle of a work week….it’s a bright, sunny summer day but the street is nearly silent.
Ten days earlier we’d been in less than friendly environs…We had spent more time in Africa over the past two years than we had in the United States. What I described just a minute ago is exactly what happened to Tom. He came back from this last deployment to his wife and kids, but knew not a single other neighbor on the street. Ya know…the nature of the beast.
As we’re joking around and detailing the weapons a scream of “HELP” bellows through the neighborhood. Both of our heads start to swivel around trying to figure out from which direction the cry came. The street is vacant….there’s no visible sign of trouble anywhere. “HELP” the woman screams again and there’s no doubt now….It’s Tom’s next door neighbor.
I grabbed a pistol I’d just reassembled and quickly started loading a magazine….Tom picks up a short barreled shotgun from the porch rail and starts ramming shells into the tube. As we stepped off his front porch, I was slapping the magazine into the pistol as he was chambering a round into the shotgun. We made our way across the front yards between the houses. As we got closer to the neighbor’s house we could hear her screams as she pleaded with her God for someone to come to her rescue. Once on the front porch it became evident that the woman’s cries were coming from the second floor.
Now…this is what Tom and I did for a living at the time. Damsels in distress were a rarity, but if you were being held against your will or in danger of any kind, we were the type of guys you wanted kicking down the door. Because of our occupation, we were both under the assumption that it was a hostage situation of some sort and we addressed the situation as such. Looking back now….we should have called 9-1-1 and waited…which was what the lady on the other side of the street was doing as our dumb asses were preparing a frontal assault on a house slap-dab in the middle of a quaint little neighborhood in eastern North Carolina.
Tom and I slip up onto the front porch in a 1×1 cover formation used to clear houses. Front door is locked and bolted. Three seconds later the front door is busted off its hinges and two heavily armed, highly trained men come through the door ready to eliminate any threat that gets in the way.
The woman screams again from upstairs…(in hindsight, probably from the sound of the door being caved in)….with silent hand and arm signals being used to keep us on the same sheet of music we start up the stairs, clearing every possible avenue of approach on our route. We make our way down the hall clearing the rooms flanking each side until we get to the room at the end of the hall…the only room with a closed door.
As we were counting down to make our assault on that room the woman screams one last time and we burst through the door, Tom down low with the shotgun, me standing erect with a .45 caliber hand cannon gripped tightly between my fingers, safety off, hammer back and finger on the trigger….
Now…at that point in our lives, Tom and I had seen some pretty gruesome shit. But nothing could prepare us for what was on the other side of that door on that beautiful summer afternoon.
Our damsel in distress was an overweight, pasty white housewife…spread eagle on the bed, nude, tied to all four bed posts with some kind of decorative red rope. Her equally rotund husband was face down on the floor, unconscious and bleeding from a head laceration….wearing nothing but a Batman mask, cape and boots. Best we could figure, he was jumping from the dresser to the bed in their new master bedroom and didn’t take the height of the ceiling fan (running full blast) into account.
Tom covered the lady in a sheet and proceeded to untie her as I unmasked the Dark Knight, checked for a pulse and started questioning the woman to the whereabouts of any type of first aid kit she may have. He was alive…He was going to have a hell of a headache, and need a bunch of stitches…but I just needed to get the bleeding stopped for the time being.
About that time the police come rushing in the house…the lady starts sobbing uncontrollably, the cops hear the cries and come flying up the stairs and down the hall to find the same thing we found, except now there are two additional guys with loaded guns in the room. Now I can’t tell you what those cops thought….but it had to look like a robbery gone bad and a defeated Superhero bleeding profusely in the bedroom floor.
Weapons down…Hands up….cuffed and hauled down the steps….they put us in the squad car and left us there while they sorted things out. The ambulance had come, toted the Caped Crusader off and was well out of site before they finally came down to apologize to us, take our statements and let us go. We got the customary “Leave the police work to the police” lecture and then we were given back our guns.
An hour after the police had cleared out Tom and I were still sitting on his porch. The weapons were all packed away and we were just having beers. Our damsel in distress pulled the car out of the garage and left, staring straight down the road, refusing to look our way. We figured she was headed to the hospital to check on Batman’s well-being….but she never came back….and neither did Batman. There was a contractor at their house (now jokingly known as Wayne Manor) the very next day repairing and replacing what Tom and I had broken. A moving company came in and spent an entire day packing the house out and the property was on the market the next week.
I saved probably three or four hundred dollars that I would have spent on that tattoo. I just couldn’t make myself emblazon that emblem on my chest after that….and if you ever see me grin when someone mentions Batman….now you know why.
And every time you see the Batman logo from now on, you’ll smile too. You’re welcome.