Sometimes all you can do is wait, and hope that a billionaire will save you.
It was a cold, dark night in Gotham City. Wisps of black and violet smudged across the sky like old paint. The moon struggled to illuminate the gloom below its ephemeral bulk; the night – getting darker and heavier with each passing minute – threatened to swallow not just the faint glimmers of light, but the moon itself.
Bernie Roberts stood inside his underpass. If he wasn’t exactly comfortable, then at the very least he was sheltered from the elements: it could be worse. He warmed his hands in his pockets, trying to flex the feeling back into his fingers.
Here he was, spending another night of countless nights beneath the neon stars of his hollowed-out home, empty tonight of the howling wind that sometimes threatened to evict him. He was 48. This was his first and last step on the property ladder. He didn’t feel sad about that. He didn’t feel much of anything. There was no time for pity in a city that alternated between cold indifference to your very existence one moment and then actively trying to snuff it out the next. Gotham had all the love and wisdom of an Iron Age God.
There was death on every street. Down every alleyway. Round every corner. That was just a fact.
Bernie watched as a crowd of men in bowler hats and balaclavas sped towards him from the darkness outside, their heavy wads of stock portfolios held aloft like clubs. He didn’t even try to run; there was nowhere to hide, and, besides, his limp was too stiff to take him anywhere fast. They swarmed him; beat him long and hard; beat him until so much blood fell from his face that he looked like he was fighting not men, but Ebola.
Bernie had lived inside that underpass since he was a teenager, and now he had to face the prospect that he was going to die there.
No, he said to himself, in a voice he’d long considered dead.
I will not die here.
Not here. Not tonight.
I want a home of my own. A family. To get a job in a hotel and raise chickens in the backyard. It’s not too late… I won’t let them kill me…
Adrenalin returned sharpness to his senses. His arms turned to steel, propelling the boulders his fists had become into the faces of his shocked attackers. He clung on to the miserable shadows of his life with a violence and vigour that hadn’t raced through his sunken veins in decades. His fire and fury caused the bankers to redouble their efforts to destroy him. Or at least try to. They were reeling. Hurting.
They were losing.
And their breed wasn’t used to losing.
Their blood splashed the walls of the underpass like paint flicked from a laden brush, as those grimy, bony fists of Bernie’s continued to punch and pound at the bankers’ Bryl-creamed skulls.
From the darkness beyond the underpass came a sound like a kite unfurling in the wind. Something swooped from the murk and dropped down firmly at the tunnel’s dark jaw. The men’s shaking fists all fell silent as they turned to look. They froze: meat-puppets in a life-sized diorama. The eerie, artificial lights of the underpass made it difficult to make out the dark figure who was now watching them from the night beyond. But the dark figure could see them.
And he was angry.
“It’s… it’s the Batman!” cried one of the bankers, as the caped crusader emerged from the darkness.
Batman hated these kinds of scenes; they made him sick to his stomach. That’s why he’d made the mask. That’s why he paced and prowled through the city of Gotham at night. Waiting. Watching. Ready to put things back the way they should be.
Ready to make things great again.
Batman swished through the underpass, and positioned himself right in the middle of the huddle of men.
“Now you’re going to pay for what you’ve done,” he growled.
And, with that, he grabbed Bernie by the scruff of the neck and started kicking the ever-loving shit out of him.
BIFF! (Tannen)
“You’re a bad dude!”
KA-POW!
“You’re deep state!”
SMACK!
“You’re fake news!”
CHA-CHING!
The bankers huzzahed and hoorahed!
“Thanks for saving us, Batman!” they shouted excitedly.
Batman dropped the tramp’s corpse to the ground, reached into his utility belt and pulled out his bat-penis, before showering the dead man’s chest with a tremendous amount of bat-piss.
“I’m Batman,” he said. “The greatest Batman. Believe me. Nobody Batmans better than me.”
The bankers danced in a circle around Batman shouting ‘MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN! MAKE GOTHAM GREAT AGAIN!’ as Batman found a hidden reservoir of piss in that little winkie of his, spun round and around in a circle, pissing all over them, too, as they grinned and clapped with glee.
I watched – astonished – not quite sure what to make of it all, and feeling slightly guilty that I’d just stood there scribbling down notes as a middle-aged man had been beaten to death by a fat old maniac.
Batman’s identity is no secret, of course. No sooner had billionaire property magnate Bruce Trump yanked on his suffocatingly-tight bat-themed corset for the first time than he’d taken out a full-page ad in the New Gotham Times that revealed his ‘secret’ persona to the world. Naturally, this was next to a full-page ad, also taken out by Bruce Trump, in which he vehemently denied that he was Batman, and threatened to sue anyone who repeated the claim. Which of course he’d already done himself in the adjoining advert. Bruce Trump is now the only man on earth ever to have successfully sued himself. Under the terms of the law-suit, Trump now has to pay himself damages of £500m.
Which of course he’s refused to do.
Trump always releases details of his vigilantism schedule well in advance to ensure full-spectrum press coverage. That’s how I managed to be present at the bloody demise of Bernie Roberts. I conducted a short interview with Trump as we stood next to the piss-covered dead guy.
I first asked his opinion on other superheroes in the public eye.
“Superman?”
“Weak.” He nodded, before adding: “Retard.”
“Captain America?”
“Unpatriotic.”
“The X-Men?”
“Shouldn’t be serving in the military.”
“Wonder Woman?”
“You know my policy on fucking all things Amazonian.”
“Doctor Victor von Doom?”
“Great guy. Strong. His people love him.”
I pointed out that Dr Doom rules the Kingdom of Latveria as a brutal dictator; not to mention that he harbours super-criminals and ploughs billions into developing different ways in which to destroy the earth.
“Strong,” he repeated, nodding. “Good chest.”
I asked him what had motivated him – a man of such disgusting wealth – to take a more direct hand in society through his role as Batman – besides, of course, being able to bill the city for his services, and forcing the mayor to give him a massive tax break to boot.
“Well, I’m finally able to take on the greatest scourge that modern America has yet faced.”
“Income disparity? Inequality?” I asked.
[“You?” I thought to myself]
“The poor,” he said.
“The poor?”
“And Mexicans.”
“Are there any Mexicans in Gotham City?”
“Not now,” he said, pouting.
“OK. But let’s talk about tonight: what’s the tangible benefit to society of kicking an ostensibly innocent homeless man to death?”
“And poor Mexicans, they suck the worst,” he continued.
“We’re done with Mexicans now.”
“You’re damn right we are. Bad hombres.”
“Let’s get back to the matter at hand. You kicked a homeless man to death.”
“Did I? Or did Trump just free up hospital staff and help to lower house prices?”
He tapped the side of his skull.
I stared down at my notepad. I didn’t know what to say.
“How much do you spend on R&D at Trump Enterprises?”
“If they want to dance, that’s their business, but I’m not paying for it.”
I stared at my notepad again. “It means Research & Development…”
He continued. “I didn’t do it anyway.”
“You didn’t do what?”
“The homeless dude. It wasn’t me.”
“You didn’t beat him to death?”
“It was the Black Panther.”
“Obama?” I asked incredulously.
He nodded.
“But I watched you do it.”
“’Trump has more class than to do what Obama just did, which is to beat a homeless gut to death.’ Use that quote in the write-up, OK?”
“But…” I said again, “I saw it with my own eyes.”
“Your eyes are fake news,” he said, “You see, Jamie, the problem with Trump City is that the…”
“Gotham City,” I corrected him.
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. “There are bad hombres here.”
“And you’re getting rid of them?”
“I’m draining the swamp.”
“I thought that drain the swamp thing was a reference to corruption. Aren’t you supposed to be fighting corruption? How does attacking the poor and making life easier for the rich fight corruption?”
He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut in before he could say it: “Fake news?” I suggested.
He slapped me on the shoulder. “You’re getting it.”
I later discovered that prior to losing everything and ending up cold and alone in a Gotham City underpass, Bernie had run his own construction company. He and his crew had worked the contract for the ‘Trump Enterprises’ building back in the 90s, but the business was wiped out when Trump failed to pay Bernie for any of the work he’d carried out or compensate him for any of the cash outlaid for materials. All of which makes Bernie Roberts’ last words all the harder to process:
“Thank you… Batman.”
Bruce Trump would like to think he’s a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, when in reality he’s a contradiction wrapped inside an improbability. Without his inherited wealth and narcissism a man with a face such as his would’ve struggled to seduce Mrs Miggins the school dinner-lady – a lady with significantly more chin-warts than hygiene certificates – and probably would’ve found himself fired from a succession of fast-food restaurants for continually sexually harassing customers and pilfering from the till, before eventually finding himself – quite appositely – sleeping in an underpass before being beaten to death by a crazed billionaire.
I wondered if there really was such a thing as a benevolent billionaire, or if the billionaire alter-egos of ostensibly ordinary superheroes in comic books are only written rich to explain how they’re able to finance an expensive life as a vigilante without having to work.
Was Tony Musk – aka Iron Man – a good guy?
Tony Musk looks like the by-product of a DNA-gangbang between John Barrowman, Ally McCoist, and some description of hideous merman. Musk is his name, his brand, and he very much looks like he has a musk; a heavy one, probably redolent of seaweed, skunk and self-satisfaction.
I interviewed him in his lab in Musk Tower as he pored over plans for the new crowd-control robots he planned to market to the middle-east.
“You know, it might shock you,” he said, his eyes darting around crazily, “but I’ve got some great ideas for the poor. First of all, to put them in rockets and shoot them into space.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding. “So they can learn satellite repair, and maybe help to explore and seed other planets?”
He stared at me blankly for a moment. “Yup. Yup, let’s go with that.”
As we were talking, a woman fell past the window, as she hurtled towards the city streets below. We both ran to the window. War Machine whooshed down from the roof, scooped the woman in his arms and carried her ground-wards to safety. The crowd cheered.
Musk shook his head.
“Paedophile.”
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