By day, he is a cheerful greeter in a big box chain store. But by night he is a crusading superhero.
As superheroes go, he’s very low-key and unassuming. Nobody in town knows his real name or his true identity, but his superhero pseudonym is “Jim.”
Like all superheroes, “Jim” uses his unique superpower to fight the forces of evil. But this superhero has a specialty. The only evil he combats is the evil of discrimination. Even more specifically, he only combats discrimination against cripples.
Superheroes these days need to have niches, just like lawyers. They need to tap into unserved markets. “Jim” noticed that whereas there are a bunch of laws protecting cripples from being fucked over, no one enforces these laws. Thus, he developed his own brand of vigilante justice.
For “Jim,” this justice quest is personal because he, too, is crippled. Since childhood, he’s walked with a limp. And everybody knows that when nature leaves cripples lacking in one area, it always compensates them for it in other ways—- like how all blind people have acute hearing and all deaf people have super sensitive tastebuds. Well since nature cursed “Jim” with a limp, it blessed him with the ability to turn people into muskrats.
Yessir, you better not piss “Jim” off or he’ll turn you into a muskrat with three blinks of his left eye. And the way to piss him off is to fuck with his people.
Because “Jim” is a modern superhero, he has an app. That’s how cripples in distress send him an SOS. They contact him via his app. When “Jim” first set up shop as a superhero, he got a lot of messages from cripples who were pissed that someone was illegally parked in a cripple parking space. So “Jim” donned his superhero outfit, raced to the scene of the crime and turned the driver of the car hogging up the cripple space into a muskrat. (“Jim”’s superhero costume, by the way, is pretty much just a burlap burqa. It’s designed to disguise his true identity while still being comfortable and functional. In order to conceal the fact that he has a limp, whenever “Jim” is on duty as a superhero, he rolls around on rollerblades).
“Jim” doesn’t get parking SOS calls anymore. Ever since word got around town that a rollerblading guy wearing a burlap burqua was turning people illegally parked in cripple spots into muskrats, nobody illegally parks in cripple spots anymore.
Now “Jim” concentrates on righting more egregious wrongs. Consequently, while he is a great hero to cripples, most everyone else in town sees him as an outlaw. When he turned the liquor store owner who refused to put a ramp on his establishment into a muskrat, he stirred the wrath of the local Chamber of Commerce. And because he turned a landlord who refused to rent to cripples into a muskrat, all the landlords hate him, too.
With all these powerful, politically-connected forced aligned against him, the town council unanimously passed an ordinance making it a capital offense to turn someone into a muskrat. So “Jim” is a wanted man. There's a big price on his head. So he operates in the shadows, turning dirty no-good discriminators into muskrats and disappearing into the night, one step ahead of the law.
Wouldn’t that make a great superhero movie?
(Smart Ass Cripple is completely reader supported. Purchasing Smart Ass Cripple books at lulu.com, subscribing on Amazon Kindle and filling the tip jar keeps us going. Please help if you can.)
ANNOUNCING: Smart Ass Cripple's Little Chartreuse Book. A new Smart Ass Cripple book hot off the presses at lulu.com. It still has that new Smart Ass Cripple book smell. Get yours today! Help keep Smart Ass Cripple going!
No comments:
Post a Comment