Ruminations on youth, superheroes, and the Choad not taken

Buck Sparkman sat down on the back steps to his house and tossed back a vial of idiot. His backyard had succumbed to the clap. 

The grass was red and irritated.

And the azalea bushes were oozing a viscous cheese. 

Once again, the gravedigger had fallen short of his suburban duties. 

This time, the disease had slowly worked its way down the block, spreading from tree to tree, bush to bush. 

The daisies were especially promiscuous and, therefore, especially susceptible. .

While everyone knew that, they also knew who was really to blame: Buck Sparkman, their friendly neighborhood gravedigger.

These things shouldn’t have bothered Buck, but they did.

And he regretted it. But not as much as he regretted every moment doing yardwork. 

Like now. 

Around the neighborhood, the lawn mowers were rumbling their weekly dirges and the sprinklers were watering the yards with a mix of cipro, cortisone, and curses… all directed at Buck Sparkman, 

The gravedigger tossed the vial of idiot in the recycling bin and fired up his mower. 

The war was on. 

Again.

The mower attacked the soil like it was its enemy, laying waste to hopes and dreams. 

Every weekend, Buck made hate to his lawn and it showed. 

The Sparkman residence had yet to receive a Yard of the Month sign and likely never would. 

At least as long as the restraining order was in place. 

Buck yanked the chain and the lawn mower grunted and growled. 

The birds flew from the trees and the squirrels grabbed their nuts and pissed themselves. 

Would today be the day that Buck Sparkman defeated his backyard once and for all?

His Tombstone XIII, 2BR02B, dinged. 

Buck let go of the throttle. 

The mower rumbled to a halt as tales of war crimes were whispered up and down the block, frightening the old and rallying the young to commit acts of heinous heroism. 

Sparkman read the epitaph. 

It was the office, Craven’s Mausoleum and Bail Bonds.

His services were needed. 

A superhero going by the name of the Delivery Boy was trapped inside a burning building, a building, mind you, that had exploded in red sauce and cheese after the costumed avenger arrived 30-minutes late to a distress signal with cold, deep-dish pizza. 

It was the third time this month the gravedigger had been called in to handle one of the Delivery Boy’s mozzarella-covered messes.

Buck sat back down on the steps and typed an epitaph back to the office.

“A fire rages like a hemorrhoid

Attracting cape and cowl

Another superhero cries.

I’ll be there in five.”

The backyard battle was over, but the war would go on. 

The squirrels juggled their nuts and chuckled, and the birds cursed his name. 

Buck didn’t care. 

He hated them as much as they hated him. 

But not as much as he hated superheroes.

Not that this was always the case. 

In his youth Buck loved all the greats — the Ass Men, the Spittoon, Captain Strap-On, and the Incredible Choad. 

But then the day came when Peru Nicklas’ malfunctioning Tombstones triggered a worldwide hardware breakdown.

The next day, not much had changed. At least as far as most could tell.

Yeah, Buck’s mom lost a few pounds on a new diet and dad was finally able to find a moment of peace and quiet, but the world was pretty much how it was the day before, mildly amused at itself and looking for somebody, anybody, to laugh along with it.

No one ever did. Especially in Hellsboro.

The first indication that Buck had that something had changed happened when he ran into Harper Mason at Hemlock Harry’s Comics.

Harper was born the son of a stay-at-home shoeshine man with a five-figure crystal meth habit and a mom who could take more licks than a Footsie Roll Pop.

Try as they might, the neighborhood ne’er-do-wells never got to the center. 

Not even the assistant pastor at Bloody Trinity Tabernacle. 

Buck remembered how Harper had shown up at tee-ball practice with a mask covering his entire face. 

Mrs. Mason apologized to Coach Kale for her son’s appearance. But, doctor’s orders, the mask had to stay on. Hives.

Meanwhile, Mr. Mason waited in the car and furiously brushed the bugs off the dashboard, the steering wheel, and the never-emptied ashtray. He was too busy to notice anything else.

Eyeing Mr. Mason in the car, Coach Kale tried to keep his distance as Harper’s mom’s cleavage continued the conversation. He thought about the time he helped Mrs. Mason pay the monthly rent, three weeks in a row. 

Of course, no doctor said that Harper had to wear a mask. 

This much was obvious, judging by the dark purple around his eyes. 

Truth be told, Harper had immersed himself in a day-long marathon of Incredibile Choad cartoons, and he thought it’d be a good idea to make his skin the same hue of violet as the brutish, take-no-shit radioactive beast. 

It worked.

At least from the hairline to the bridge of his nose.

Which is what Buck and his teammates discovered shortly after Mrs. Mason left and Harper removed the mask, doing so with a defiance his teammates had never seen before.

Buck and his buddies never mentioned their teammate’s appearance.

Not in the dugout.

Not in school the next day.

Or the ones after that.

Three weeks later at Hemlock Harry’s Comics, just days after the Great Pomeranian Incident, Sparkman noticed something different about his former teammate. 

Buck could sense it from across the store. 

He wasn’t sure what it was. 

It was almost as if Harper’s body was throbbing, like an infected finger. 

Sparkman tried not to stare as he flipped through the latest issue of Heavy Mega magazine. 

Not even the promise of intergalactic boobs could hold his attention.

Strangely enough, this was the first time that Harper had ever been happy. Or at least showed it. 

Buck starred as Harper’s grin grew wider and wider as he shuffled through back issues of The Incredible Choad, displaying a mouth of missing teeth and blood.

Sparkman watched as Harper settled on three issues and walked to the counter, with a stiff lumbering gait and tiny droplets of blood leaving a trail from the back issue boxes to the cashier station. 

Buck could’ve sworn he heard the sound of ripping jeans and saw a purplish pallor overtaking his one-time teammates’ face as he stepped up to the counter.

The police report was unclear of what happened next. 

No one actually saw it. 

Not even Sparkman, who out of shame looked away. 

But judging by the purple spray on the collector copies behind the cashier and the racks of new issues, Harper’s body had simply exploded. 

This was markedly different from Mr. Mason’s demise. He’d been torn limb from limb. From what, Mrs. Mason couldn’t recall.

Needless to say, Buck Sparkman hadn’t picked up a comic in years. 

He didn’t need to. 

The skies were filled with them.

***

Buck stepped out of the marinara- and mozzarella-covered building, carrying the Delivery Boy in a mylar bag over his shoulder. The weeping superhero was in need of a spandex change, but otherwise he was in near-mint condition. 

The gravedigger tossed the Delivery Boy in the back of his van and shut the door. 

Buck crossed the street, far enough away from the van so he wouldn’t have to hear the muffled, cellophane-covered cries of the caped crusader. 

Once the crying had come to a stop, Buck would take the hero to the graveyards and bury his Tombstone once and for all. 

Sparkman stopped in front of a boarded-up mom-and-poop shop — a once-bustling shizer house where sitcom moms served scat to plus-sized baby Hueys one spoonful at a time. 

Buck peered through a crack between the boards covering the front window.

The diaper pails were overflowing. 

The walls were stained with spoiled milk.  

A life-size teddy bear with a rattle between its cheeks was bent over a pack ‘n’ play. 

And the floor was covered in baby powder and lines of droppings, making the entire room look like it was a three-dimensional treasure map leading to a sex crime. 

Even through the glass, Buck could smell the dried sweat, shit, and rotten milk.

But most of all, he heard the cries, “Mama, mama. Baby needs a new diapie.” 

Either that or it was his tinnitus acting up again.

Buck first noticed that he had a problem with his hearing shortly after he busted up a particularly nasty Han Roll ring, one that had shut down the movie industry. 

For nearly a year, every film that made its way to the silver screen transformed into Star Cars, mid movie.

Star Cars? 

You know, that Seventies-era kung fu, street-racing, epic fantasy about farm boy-turned-vigilante drag racer Luke Shaftwalker, the wizened old mechanic/bookie Obie Wang, the prostitute with a heart of gold Princess Laya, the lovable pusherman Han Roll, and the corrupt vice cop Limp Dickard. 

It didn’t matter what movie it was. 

A rom-com-zom-dram.

An Old Testament tearjerker.

An inspirational biopsy. 

At some point a newly widowed Moses or a stuttering King Kong or a lovelorn, brain-eating secretary would begin to pepper her dialogue with nonsensical grease monkey jargon and quasi-mystical, self-help aphorisms, baffling both the mind and violating the laws of grammar. 

And then, the plot would shift, not quite so subtly into George Lupus’ masterpiece. 

The dashing but semi-dastardly aristocrat would stop pursuing the comely, virginal commoner and instead embark on a quest to rescue a Labrador retriever that had been nabbed by an asthmatic dogcatcher. 

Or the mask-wearing, chainsaw swinging psychopath would look down at the pot-smoking prankster moments after severing one of his limbs and announce a previously unknown and unimaginable familial relationship, delivering moviegoers with an unexpected shock. 

Or the vampire bride would, during a wedding-planning montage, suddenly announce that the maid of honor had a high midicalorian count. 

Most viewers didn’t even recognize that anything strange had occurred when the Han Roll began. They rolled with it, that is until the obligatory shot of a leading character in a sexy slave girl outfit appeared. 

That’s when the riots would inevitably start.

At the height of this particular Han Roll, the weekend death toll rivaled the international box office numbers for the week, although they fell far short of the domestic ones. 

After the 18^th straight week of Han Roll riots, Buck Sparkman was called in. 

On his first assignment, a bigfoot-like Yukkie boxed his ears. 

On the second, Buck was hit in the nuts by a cuddly Ewonk. 

On the third, he got a right good spanking by the gummi hand of a Haribo raider. 

On the fourth assignment, he was punished by a probe droid until he blurted out the location of the secret Weeble base. 

Each job was a failure. 

And the Star Cars Han Roll rolled on. 

By the time the fifth assignment arrived, Buck realized his efforts to stop the Han Roll had been all wrong. 

This Tombstone malfunction could not be stopped by mockery. 

It could not be stopped by flooding the market with endless iterations of the same cheap merchandise. 

It could not be stopped by resurrecting the corpse of Joseph Campbell and subjecting him to a thousand frakking facials, from a thousand frakking men. 

That only increased the Han Roll’s power. 

And the death toll was rising.

Ultimately, Buck Sparkman realized he needed help. He needed Truckers. 

At Sparkman’s request, the die-hard fans of Star Trucks came to the multiplexes in the hundreds. They were dressed in Star Flagellation yellow, red, and blue, reciting Shakespeare in its original Lingon, their phasers set on stun and their phalli set on never-been-laid. 

But what Buck had in mind was not a direct assault on the silver screen. 

Nope. 

He intended to take on Star Cars indirectly. 

The beginning of the end of this particular Han Roll began with a simple question.

Buck directed it to the multiplex Truckers in the audience and said it within earshot of the actors on screen who were trapped in the Han Roll: Could the U.S.S. Coitus Interruptus take on an Imperial Star Fellator?

At first, the Oscar-winning actress who had been stripped of her prudish Jane Austen clothes and been downgraded to a slave girl bikini paid no attention to the Truckers as they debated amongst themselves in the theaters, halls and restrooms of the multiplex. 

To the bikini-bound actress, the answer was obvious: the Interruptus was nothing more than an intergalactic dinghy compared to a Fellator. 

But the Truckers were relentless with their theories.

Photon torpedoes were fired. 

Shields were raised.

And thermonuclear bomb-strapped ensigns were teleported onto the bridge of the Fellator, detonating themselves and destroying the imperial vessel. 

The actress on screen couldn’t take it anymore. She had to give the Truckers a piece of her mind. She had to enter the debate. 

Unfortunately for her — and for the rest of the Han Roll players — once you entered the debate, you could never escape. 

There was no answer. 

There was no way to survive. 

This was a Kobayashi Haiku. 

This was meme death.

And for the next eight months, Buck and his army of Truckers traveled from one multiplex to the next, putting an end to each and every Han Roll. 

In the end, the movie industry was saved. 

And Buck was paid.

Well?

Unfortunately, that was a matter for debate. 

But one thing was certain: Buck Sparkman couldn’t get the Star Cars theme song out of his head. 

It plagued him. 

He sought medical help. 

While the doctors could treat it, the insurance wouldn’t cover it. 

Not with a blanket. 

And certainly not with a pillow.

Fortunately, Buck crafted a plan.

Within a week’s time, every medical textbook that had ever been published and every medical textbook that would ever be published, had been revised. 

Tinnitus had been redefined as the inability to get the Star Cars theme song out of your head. 

The insurance industry was helpless.

They had to cover it. 

Needless to say, a class-action lawsuit against George Lupus soon followed. 

Even Academy Award-winning Star Cars composer John Thomas was among the plaintiffs.

Outside the van, Buck stuck his finger inside his ear and wiggled it. 

The theme momentarily subsided. 

Sparkman had a job to finish, tinnitus or not.