The Introduction (2nd Version).

In April of 2010, I completed principle writing of my first manuscript, 100,000 Years in Detention. As much as it felt rewarding and as though I’d had a weight lifted off my shoulders, there was a nagging mosquito, a dry heat in my brain, worrying that I hadn’t started another project. I’d casually mentioned to my wife a book about the four years my family lived in Maui, and had even penned a story or two for it, but I had no outline, no plan and no desire to exorcise those demons just yet, and especially not while we had a newborn in our house.

So I worked my 40 hours a week in retail management, or sat with my wife and our daughter on my days off, and felt more than a bit insecure about continuing my career as a writer. I worried that every day I didn’t write, I was losing what talent I had, wasting my free time away playing video games and watching movies.

Finally, another new father, who we met in birthing classes before the babies were born, called and said he wanted to go on a ManDate to see Kick-Ass and grab dinner at O’Faolin’s, an Irish Pub in the same strip as the theater. We were both a little excited to get out of the house for the first time post-partum without bringing a diaper bag, car seat and stroller along so we picked a night off and I met him in the parking lot.

We ate bangers and mash and shepherd’s pie and talked about debt, Jameson and babies. Then we walked across to the theater and saw the movie. It was brilliant. It details the story of a normal teenage comic fan named Dave Lizewski who decides to buy an outfit and become the world’s first real-life superhero: Kick-Ass.

In one early scene leading to Dave’s decision, he asks his friends Marty and Todd why nobody ever tried to be a superhero in real-life, and they remind him of the inevitable hazards of the job. Risking beatings and killings, he decides to go through with it anyway. Arguably realistic complications arise throughout the rest of the film, which we loved, but after the movie we kept asking the same thing.

“There’s gotta be one guy,” my friend Cord said. “Right?”

“I’m pretty sure there is. I was watching some features on like the Watchmen Blu-Ray or The Dark Knight and one of them had a thing on vigilantism, and I thought there were one or two guys on there who do the superhero thing in the streets. Somewhere up in New England, I think.”

Then we got quiet. I was the first one to speak, after several moments.

“Y’know, it probably would make a good story to throw in the middle of my next book. I could just do a couple thousand words on one of those guys and how close to – or far-removed from – the Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne image of the 'hero with no superpowers' they really are.”

In my next free afternoon I started researching. I combed through my comic-based-film Blu-Rays and found “Real Super Heroes: Real Vigilantes” on Watchmen. I watched it again and took notes.

The Guardian Angels, I wrote.

Bernard Goetz.

Ecliptico.

Google led me to his MySpace and I wrote to him and requested an interview. I didn’t even know if he’d write me back. My sole qualification at the time was a BA in journalism from a state university in Georgia and a thin portfolio from its school paper, which I’ve since found can’t get me a job in a mail room, let alone a newsroom. I’ve never been comfortable digging into my past as a writer, as I was approaching my sixth year out of college before I earned a dime off any of it.

So, days later, when I had an e-mail in my inbox from Quest Blackthorn, I was surprised. We talked about an interview and I started punching up questions. The day came fast, and I cleaned up, got a drink and dialed his number. I had no idea what to expect. If anyone would have told me, I would’ve called them a liar.

Kick-Ass. Dir. Matthew Vaughn. Lionsgate Films 2010.

Watchmen. Dir. Zack Snyder. Warner Bros. 2009.

"Real Super-Heroes: Real Vigilantes." Producer Anna Obropta. Warner Bros. 2009.

The Detective (2nd draft).

Interview #2 – Fear

Tuesday, May 18, 2010; 6:12PM EST

I was relieved that Fear wrote to me and expressed interest in speaking with me about being a Real-Life SuperHero and I was even more relieved when I learned his story was so different from Ecliptico’s.

Fear is 25 years old and has a fairly athletic build. He ran track when he was younger, regularly utilizes a cardio workout and practices several different forms of martial arts – in one of which he has a black belt – and he learned street fighting from the life he lived before becoming an RLSH.

“I was basically a low-level criminal in Philadelphia,” Fear told me. “There were some drugs and crimes…I lived kind of a shadowy past. The experiences I had and things I learned and knew from that led up to the development of myself as the so-called personality of Fear.

“I got into some trouble; I was caught doing something illegal which opened a door and shed some light that that type of lifestyle was not the right way to live, and that it wasn’t going to get me anywhere and was only hurting others and myself.”

Fear kept himself out of trouble for “a while” before realizing that wasn’t enough. He decided he wanted to bring others around to seeing that living an unlawful life is wrong and to stop it if he saw it. Following his run-in with the law, Fear was homeless and lived in a three-wheeled van on cinders in someone’s backyard. He told me that seeing homelessness and desperation from that situation is “very eye-opening.”

“I’d rather people become functioning members of society than learn to be better criminals, and beating them up and arresting them isn’t necessarily going to do that,” he said. “We need to impede that flow of crime in a real way, not in a short-term process.”

Over the last two years Fear has been directly involved with the RLSH community. After seeing a news report about an RLSH and realizing people were out in the streets trying to make a difference, Fear came to believe that what he was doing could be adapted and done better.

“In all reality I started out very green,” he said. “I thought of it in a typical superhero way and that’s wrong – that type of mentality will get you nowhere. Walking the streets of Philly in a mask is not a smart thing. You can’t just go out and assume you can fight, or you’ll end up like in the beginning of Kick-Ass and get the shit beaten out of you.”

An avid comic fan, Fear’s admiration for Batman as the “World’s Greatest Detective” helped shape his undercover persona but doesn’t rule his personal life. Fear is a cook by trade and enjoys reading, studying and psychology.

When he started, Fear patrolled his streets, as most of the RLSH do, but one of his first unique traits is that Fear is in the small minority of RLSH who don’t wear a mask. “I started out wearing a mask all the time, but now I feel like if I’m really being an RLSH, the mask meant nothing. The mask is the form of anonymity you desire when you’re out, but then I started questioning whether I was drawing more attention to myself when I’m wearing it than when I’m not.

“One of the RLSV – the Real-Life SuperVillains – said ‘removing the mask doesn’t remove the purpose’ and that’s 100% true. Not having a mask doesn’t mean you’re off-duty and it doesn’t define what you do; your mask is just part of your whole gimmick.”

Despite doing most of his RLSH work with his face showing, he never displayed any real disdain for mask-wearers while we spoke. “I like the more creepy, darker version of a mask that a superhero would wear. Despite the fact that I don’t go out wearing a mask, I enjoy making them. It’s more of a hobby than anything; I just don’t wear them on patrol. I do bring one in case I need it. It’s necessary at times, like when I’m interfering with a situation like a scuffle between other people, a mugging, a rape, burglary or whatever when my identity would come into question, but walking the streets in the town I live in in Arizona I do not see the need to wear a mask, especially since the mentality of the law here is very conservative. I’d get stopped more times than would be worth it in a mask.”

Fear works deep undercover for his focus as an RLSH doing investigative work. While he still patrols four to six hours straight on three or four nights a week in the high-crime areas of town, the focus of his work is sting operations. “I still believe in patrolling, but I believe I do more good [for the world] in investigations.”

Fear’s investigative work is mainly directed towards drugs and fighting drugs and dealers. “I have a very avid belief against the drug problem,” he told me, “and I will do what I can, how I can, to get rid of that problem.” As he found it, drugs are transported up to Arizona via mules from Mexican cartels, and Fear said he’ll do whatever’s necessary to stop them.

I could feel our interview picking up steam – using its own inertia to proceed. Fear continued explaining his methodology in setting up stings in his community to eradicate the drug problem.

“Homeless people offer the best info in finding drugs. Just talk to them and give them a couple dollars and ask where you can score some coke and they’ll pass you in the right direction. They’ll tell you what types of people to look for, or you just take that extra step yourself to notice people’s habits. If you see six or seven people in different areas all doing the same thing, that’s probably something to look into.”

“But how do you judge those characteristics?”

“In Philly, dealers that work on the streets wear the same attire – white t-shirt and blue jeans – so if anyone calls the cops they can disappear and blend in because that description is really general. They just turn a corner and disappear. So you study and learn on a planned, plotted patrol. You learn how to track them without being noticed, how to blend in – you can’t track someone if you’re wearing a mask and brightly-colored suit.”

“What do you do, as Fear, once you’ve successfully ID’ed someone who might be a low-level dealer?”

“Right now I’m working on a case of a local drug dealer and trying to find the person that’s above him. For me to be willingly, knowingly welcomed into a dealer’s house is not illegal. In a lot of ways I regret and take pride in the fact that I’m capable to gain access. I could walk into a room full of dealers and feel no fear; I could sit down with them rolling blunts and sniffing coke off a table and not feel threatened. Using infiltration, I go undercover without their knowledge of what I do – obviously they have no idea I have any involvement with the RLSH. You get in their circle, in a sense, but you have to be careful because you can implicate yourself in a crime. I work alongside them to build evidence and get audio and video without them knowing. I took a picture of a dealer sitting at a table holding a giant bud in front of his face with a smile and a thumbs-up – he willingly let me take that picture.

“[Legally] the idea behind that is that, at this moment, I’m building evidence. I’m getting license plates, descriptions of cars, names, visual descriptions of people, all the info on that dealer I can. I work my way through stages and build a rapport with them as well as building evidence files. I should be able to act on it, but that would be in conjunction with the police – to act on my own, unless 100% certain about it, can cause unnecessary problems.”

This methodology has succeeded in Fear playing a part in the arrest of five mid-level drug dealers in Philadelphia. He gathered evidence, gave anonymous tips to the police, handed them his information and gave them descriptions of people, addresses and several cars’ makes, models and plate numbers. When he got to Arizona he hit the ground running as well.

“The moment I got down here I started to try and find my first case and I found it. I went out with a few people, somebody asked to stop at a house and I knew what was going down. I gathered the evidence and turned it into the police. I’m waiting to see if the guy gets busted or not.”

Fear not only patrols and investigates in plainclothes, but also wears headphones without any music on them. He says this often awards him leads he wouldn’t have otherwise, as people assume he’s not eavesdropping.

“I can’t count how many times I’ve overheard people on the phone talking about deals. Hell, I was sitting in a Mickey D’s in South Philly, corner of Broad and Snyder, and the guy on the phone behind me was talking about where he was going to pick up a few ounces of weed after he finished his burger. As soon as he left I made an anonymous tip to the cops to be there in the next 15 or 20 minutes to make a drug bust. I’m not sure what happened, but I know I still did the right thing. You’re always on duty. And you never stop learning. If you think you’re doing enough or doing everything to the best of your ability, you’re lying. You can always adapt to become better.”

Earlier I spoke about the genesis of Fear’s alter ego and image being a parody of society’s fear for its own members. “People know and care what’s going on but don’t want to take that extra step because of their own fear, apathy and natural sense of self-preservation,” he had said. He and I had e-mailed each other before our interview and he was very eager to discuss his philosophy of crime-fighting with me. Before I interviewed him, I was cautious about letting one hero or another soapbox about his or her personal mission, but I knew I had to get to the bottom of the superhero mentality come Hell or high water so at this point in our interview I put down my questions and told him to hit me with it, as it seemed to be involved in every aspect of his efforts as a detective.

“A lot of the mentality that should be given to what we do is to stand up for what’s right. To sit by and watch something happen is purely unacceptable; we were all raised better than that. It’s an anonymous act of citizenry – not costumed or masked, just remaining anonymous in a lot of ways. There are those who do this to boast their names and deeds, and that’s not me at all. I’m interested in getting the word out about citizenry.

“The name Fear is not in the respect that a lot of people think. It’s not always that people are apathetic; sometimes they’re afraid of their common man and fear for their own life. In Philadelphia there’s a mentality of ‘stop snitching’ and it’s one of the biggest problems in Philly – and a lot of it has nothing to do with people condoning crime; they’re afraid to say anything because they fear the fact that they’ll be the next one shot, attacked, stabbed because they stepped up to help their common man.

“If I were walking down a street with a group of my friends and saw someone getting mugged…first off, it’s strength in numbers – fear should not be there. Second, it should be the desire to want to help despite your own personal safety. It’s sad and deplorable that people do not find the means and way to co-exist with one another. I’m not a pacifist by nature, but I guess I am an idealist.

“I think that leads to the general philosophy about what I and the others in the RLSH community are involved in. What we do is something that everybody should be doing. Everyone should have the desire to help, from checking on their neighbor, going down and looking around their block, taking an assertive nature with the intention of always wanting to help someone else in every respect – the charity RLSH, the crime fighters, etc – this is not something that makes us superheroes, which is why I don’t use that term. This is not heroic; so much has been lost over the years of ‘being there for someone.’ At the very least, if you see someone being attacked, call the police – don’t just stand back.

“It’s a disease that needs to be cured. I’m not a symbol – I am but a man, but I’m a man who wants to help. I’m not proud of my past, and what I do now is not a redemption; it’s just a realization that what I was doing was wrong and that I have to help people however I can.”

Fear also attests that he rarely comes across crimes to intervene on at all. “It’s not as often as people think,” he said, “or as often as some RLSH claim it happens to them. People assume it’s like in the comics where you go kick a door in and kick the crap out of someone; I learned very fast it’s [often] quite the opposite. There are RLSH who have never come across any crime, which is not a bad thing. It’s not fun or exciting to be in a fight, and those who think it is are doing this for the wrong reasons. If you walk around looking for a fight, eventually you’re going to find one.”

In the course of his life changing from criminal to crime-fighter, Fear’s relationship with his local law enforcement turned a 180. “I began looking at things through an investigator’s eye, like a cop – I learned how to gain information and build evidence to submit to police that they can use.

“I’m strictly anonymous and dropping off tips that way. It’s very hard to prove what we’ve done – I’d have to go into court and testify. I’m perfectly content being completely anonymous; it saves me the trouble of having to talk to and deal with them. Once I’ve found a dealer worthy of stepping forward and saying who I am and what I’m doing, I will, but I’d like to stay anonymous because it’s not about me. It doesn’t matter who’s doing it as long as they’re getting dealers off the streets.”

Both heroes I’d interviewed at this point lived, breathed, ate and slept crime-fighting, but distinctions were starting to arise. Ecliptico mentioned case-building against drug dealers and pedophiles at a handful of opportunities in our interview, but Fear spent nearly his entire time with me outlining his long-standing casework and undercover efforts. Fear’s “bigger picture” mentality started to show by this point and so I steered our discussion towards morality and crime-fighting.

“Morality enters a lot of it, since we don’t have guidelines, so it comes down to personal conscience when you’re getting done what you need to accomplish,” he said. He informed me that a lot of RLSH are very “red white and blue Captain America types” and others live outside the law to get the job done. “As long as they’re ok with it and it doesn’t cross the line of breaking the law itself, I understand that. I’ve had to cross my moral line myself – I don’t want to be around drug dealers anymore but in order to accomplish what I need to, I have to be. The average corner dealer will sell to anyone, and they’re a problem but getting rid of them is temporary. You need to get rid of the suppliers […] who are putting the drugs out on the street in the first place. Even if it’s not morally right, since I’m not befriending them to gain access to drugs it’s sort of an ‘ends justify the means.’ In order to get rid of them, I have to do it.”

Fear’s analysis of morality was related very closely with his feelings on corrupt cops. Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph “Joe” Arpaio may tout himself as “America’s Toughest Sheriff” but many controversies surrounding him, including allegations of profiling and abuse of power, earned him the title “America’s Worst Sheriff” by the editorial staff of the New York Times. Fear pointed me to some of the news articles surrounding Arpaio’s alleged law-bending (or breaking) and discussed him at length. “It’s hard [for other people] because he’s so corrupt but gets the job done,” Fear said. “It’s like Frank Rizzo in Philly, who had connections to the mob but became a symbol for stopping crimes in the city. I really don’t condone them – I believe just as much good can be accomplished without throwing the bad in. There are certain lines in morality that can be crossed but there are others that can’t. The law here has crossed quite a number of those lines on a lot of occasions. I mean, why do you think there are whole websites dedicated to ousting Arpaio on his corruption?”

Finally, with our conversation working its way around to personal judgment of public figures, curiosity got the best of me and I felt I had to ask about the critics. I was a bit concerned about pissing him off, but it seemed to be a question worth asking. “How do you feel about people who criticize or heckle the RLSH lifestyle?”

“If you’re not actively out there helping others genuinely for the sake of doing it, then shut the hell up,” Fear said. “If you’re gonna sit there and criticize someone for trying to help others and make a positive difference - regardless of whether you agree with them wearing a costume or not – then you’re an asshole.

“This is a mindset – a complete way of life. Helping never stops.”

Duo.

On Thanksgiving weekend in 2009, my wife and I visited my parents for Thanksgiving then drove back to the D.C. area so I could get back to work for a Friday shift. My brother stayed until sometime that weekend and they drove him to the airport and he caught his flight back to LaGuardia.

As they drove back home, my parents spoke of this and that: how the weekend had gone, what the Christmas plan was and so on. When they turned into their subdivision they saw a four-door sedan that had gone off the road and hit a tree head-on hard enough to start a fire under the hood. There were at least three other pedestrian cars on the scene, their passengers standing outside staring at the car and the four unconscious bodies inside.

The tire tracks in the grass told the story leading to the collision. Their length and angle indicated a possible drunk driver driving 50 miles per hour in a 35 zone who had likely misgauged a turn, fallen asleep at the wheel or swerved to avoid a deer in the road – their neighborhood is swarmed with deer – and gone into the trees that were only separated from the road that ventured into the neighborhood by a 20-foot wide grass embankment. When the front of the car impacted, all four passengers were knocked unconscious and the driver’s side was blocked against another tree.

By the time my folks arrived, a half-dozen people – including parents with children – stood and stared, waiting to see God knows what. The police were on their way with the fire trucks but dad stopped as a man held his arms out to their car. “Get away, get away!” he said. “Everyone needs to get back; this car could blow at any minute!” Mom and dad looked at each other and mom rushed to help the victims while dad parked the car.

Another man ushered his daughter back into his car and they drove off. Dad parked the car with some difficulty – yet another car was stopped, gawking at the wreck – and grabbed a blanket to put on the fallen autumn leaves that were burning from the wreck.

“We couldn’t have been carrying or dragging these people away from a car if the ground under our feet was on fire,” dad said.

Mom helped the front passenger-side victim get out after she had pulled her door open. The woman was dazed, half-awake, and mom walked her away from the car. She came to, for the most part, but wasn’t making any sense. She had a large gash on her head and was bleeding profusely from it. Mom talked her down and convinced her not to stand.

The driver had gotten out of the car somehow and was walking around in a haze, begging everyone to help his wife, who mom had already gotten out of the car. By this point dad arrived with the blankets and he and another man who had decided to help were trying to get the rear passengers out of the car when the police arrived.

My father, the other good Samaritan and the cops helped remove the final two passengers from the car and get them away from it. The police used four full fire extinguishers and still couldn’t put out the flaming hood of the car. An ambulance with two EMTs arrived then and saw the nearest two victims – the last two to be removed – and looked at my dad, confused.

“I was told there were four victims,” one EMT said.

“There are. This guy and his wife are over there,” dad said, pointing at the stumbling driver and the woman mom was with. Both the driver and his wife were covered – “I mean, covered,” dad said – with blood. “It wasn’t like one straight line, y’know, like they’d each had a cut that dripped down their shirts. They were soaked.”

It was enough to shock the EMT, who exclaimed “Oh shit!” and ran back to the ambulance, already calling in backup. “I have four red, repeat four red right now!” The fire trucks came and once my parents realized the professionals didn’t need them anymore, they got in their car and went home.

“This woman’s blood was all over me,” mom said. “My hands, my jacket, my shirt and pants…we just couldn’t believe it.”

They were notified months after this that someone on the scene had gotten dad’s license plate number or name and the police wanted to honor them at a police officers’ banquet in September. An announcer told their story briefly and the police chief presented my parents with a plaque.

But before the banquet, before the plaque and the free dinner and the round of applause for my folks, Kristy and I visited them about two months after the whole incident. As the ladies fine-tuned dinner, dad and I sat in their family room with some music on in the background and we were talking about the whole thing over a beer each.

“What was the spark that made you and mom realize you were going to go help those people?”

“Well, we couldn’t just leave ‘em there,” dad said. “As soon as the guy was telling us to get back, and we looked and saw that there were people in this car who were at least too out of it to get out of the car if not unconscious, it was like, ‘Well, we have to go. They could die.

“We…couldn’t just leave them there.”

* * *

I felt something changing inside myself. Where once hid a ridicule and contempt of a sub-culture I couldn’t fathom grew instead a drive to understand, and even a vague admiration or respect for the hearts and minds who truly thought out their lives making an enemy of apathy, of fear, of isolation.

The days got hotter. May drew on like a blade and air-conditioning bills swelled as I awaited reply from my next two contacts. We drank four glasses of ice water each per day and as many cans of Coke. I’d taken to walking around shirtless, only opening our balcony doors at night to let cool air in.

In school they always told us not to let a source dominate an interview…but the more I listened, the more I wanted to listen. My interview with Fear was almost three and a half hours, initially, and we’ve talked several times since then.

By the time Fear asked me if there were any other heroes I’d like to speak with, it was hard not to respond, “Everyone.” I didn’t want to be biased in their favor and lose my perspective. I didn’t want to be biased against them, either; they deserved a fair shot at representing their stories to me. I just wanted to know. In the end, he helped me speak to Amazonia and Geist, both of whom I e-mailed in the same afternoon before running out the door for a night shift at my last job.

I may have been beginning to paint a portrait of the “average” masked citizen, but I still knew nothing about their codes of conduct or if their ship had a captain. When my allotted time to interview Amazonia finally came, I embraced the black unknown to once again confront my fear of it. It was like walking into a thick fog, not knowing where it was taking me. I booted up the computer, put my phone on speaker and sat it next to me as it dialed her number and rang.

The Philanthropist.

Interview #4 – Geist

Monday, May 24, 2010; 9:10 p.m. EST

A day trip to Twin Cities, Minnesota, brought Geist’s current look into the world. Initially out for a Green Hornet-inspired image, he came across a cowboy-style hat while shopping and picked it up. With it, another style entirely started to form in his head. He added two coats – a duster and a British Army coat – and a pair of buckle-laden boots to the heavy, outermost layer of his outfit, followed by cargo pants, then a pair of sunglasses reminiscent of first-generation Oakley X-Metals and half-gloves. “The half-gloves are because I really need the dexterity for the things I have and for what I do,” Geist told me.

“The mask…I sorta got criticized early on for the mask,” he said. “Usually I wear it down around my neck when I patrol and meet people – I wanna smile. But if any press/photography comes around, the mask goes up.

“It became a cowboy, kinda accidentally, but it’s got kismet,” he continued. He told me that one of his favorite actors is Dean Martin, especially as Dino starred in cowboy roles in Westerns. “I’m not hung up on Westerns [in general], but the thing about the cowboy as an American hero who is usually solitary and lives by his own creed and honor, I think that’s pretty noble.”

The dominant color scheme of Geist’s outfit is green. “It’s sort of a camo deal – black and khaki green, which works well because I patrol a lot of parks and I want to blend in,” he said. “Well, a little bit – as if I’d blend in anywhere.”

Geist told me that when he first entered the online RLSH community and met a friend, Entomo the Insect Man from Naples, Italy, Entomo saw Geist’s picture and said “Finally! America now has the first cowboy hero! The emerald cowboy!”

His voice and laugh were infectious. They were near raspy, but without a smoker’s hack; experienced without sounding old. And my Lord did he love to laugh. After many anecdotes, especially when referring to himself with a genuine humility, he laughed – here, for the first time.

Another point of Geist’s pride about his outfit is its functionality, even putting the camouflage aside. “The cargo pants have lots of pockets, which are good to have – same with the coat. There are a lot of things I carry.”

Geist’s arsenal includes newer-model bolas, which he says are more streamlined and discreet – and less goofy-looking – than older models; pepper spray; a classic baton; a stun baton; a mini-stun gun; a horseshoe stun gun; leather gauntlets, for defense; smoke grenades; Minnesota-legal pyrotechnics; lots of portable lighting – and marbles.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he told me. “If someone’s running at you, throw marbles at their feet; see what happens.

“But my costume still has some surprises built into it,” he added. “The hat, the coat, etc.” He was quick to add that he can’t and wouldn’t want to take everything with him on every patrol. “A lot of times it’s not applicable and there’s only so much you’d want to bother carrying.” He ballparked his entire ensemble at 30 lbs.

“Where do the backing and capital come from to finance your outfit and tools?”

“I have a safety deposit box where my best comics are, but I sold my mid-range old Spider-Man and Fantastic Fours to start it.

“As a collector you never want to get rid of anything. I thought the metaphor of ‘selling these dreams to make the dream real’ is kind of appropriate. You could take the stories of heroes and become a ‘hero’ and I just thought ‘Well, what better purpose?’”

How did it all start?

“I’ve got about a dozen reasons, and I’ve probably given half a dozen answers to that and they’re all true,” he said. “There are so many reasons, y’know, the brush with crime in my youth, watching unsolved crimes on TV, the incidents on September 11^th had a personal effect on me, watching the growth of gangs and lawlessness, the troubles that the police have in trying to keep law and order.” Geist frequently exhibited respect and sympathy for the police. “So many of us had just watched the news and said ‘This is not enough; innocent people are being harmed, people are homeless or hungry, children are being hurt, women are stuck in abusive relationships, animals go hungry.’ There are so many problems and all of us want to step up and don’t quite know how. This [the RLSH] is an unusual answer, but we figured ‘Let’s just see what works,’ and it has to a pretty good degree.”

On August 19, 2007, just four months into Geist’s RLSH career, a flood rocked Stockton and the surrounding areas of southeastern Minnesota (Meryhew). It was Geist’s first year as an RLSH and he arrived the following morning to help. “This was when I’d just sold my boxes of comics and gotten all that cash, so I realized they needed bottled water, cleaning supplies, fresh clothing, mops, sponges, food – anything that was clean,” Geist said. So he went to the store and loaded up a truck full of supplies. His town wasn’t very strongly affected by the flood so he drove east to the Stockton / St. Charles Flood Relief Donation Center.

I felt, for the second time this month, as though the story was driving itself – that had I stopped taking notes and typing, the pages would fill themselves in. Maybe the book has its own agenda, or its own inertia. As Geist regaled his flood relief tale to me, I felt as though I was the passenger, not the wheelman, and our conversation was like fuel, forever burning to bring me a distant horizon, closer to the answer to a vague question about the RLSH I’d barely even asked myself.

“Stockton was a mess; everything was caked in mud,” Geist said. “There were people who had everything they owned in their front yards and it was trashed. I stopped at the donation center and pulled up my truck and saw a state patrolman crossing my way – I was on foot and caught his eye. He put his hand on his taser and I asked where I could put my donation items; he looked me up and down and told me where to go. He asked if I wanted a hand and I said ‘No sir; I’m a superhero.’”

And he laughed.

“I made a number of other visits with more supplies and different ones to Stockton, Lewiston, St. Charles and Rushford – I couldn’t get into Rushford but there were drop-off points; it was one of the worst towns hit.”

In the months to come, Geist befriended several Stockton residents trying to rebuild their homes and he brought them lumber and building supplies. He also founded relationships with some key leaders and grassroots citizens who he helped rebuild Stockton and who eventually asked him to show up at a benefit event for their town.

“I went in, made a quick speech about the townspeople being the real heroes and got out.”

Another major event in Geist’s three years helping others was a fire in St. Charles, MN, on April 17, 2009 (Collins). In the early afternoon, Minnesota Public Radio announced that the town of St. Charles was being evacuated, as had just been reported in Winona, MN-based Winona Daily News (qtd. in Collins). Geist heard about the evacuation almost immediately, though he was at work at the time.

“It was getting worse and worse,” he said. “When the order to evacuate the town was given I said ‘I haven’t taken lunch today and it’s like 2 o’clock, so I’m gonna take lunch…could be a long one; got some things to do.”

And he laughed.

“So I drove to the town and there were police roadblocks. The town was in danger of blowing up because there were five tanks of anhydrous ammonia that were in the midst of a plant on fire, so the firemen were taking care of it.

“My goal was to get into town to see if anyone had not been evacuated and get in and get out.” Here, his trademark laugh had vanished, replaced by a somber remembrance. “The town was completely…smoke everywhere. Incredible; I’ve never seen anything like it. It was like driving through the thickest fog you’ve ever seen – and yet this is a small town; residential.”

In the end, Geist had to sneak into town, as the police were stopping people at a roadblock. He told them he wanted to volunteer to help evacuate, and a patrolman had him pull over to the side of the road until traffic had dissipated. Geist took a back road instead and found his way into town around the roadblocks. Apparently the police had barricaded the main roads but not the smaller side roads.

“I pulled around a corner and there were firefighters fighting this huge blaze. I’m a huge believer that experts know what they’re doing – cops, firefighters, EMTs, so I don’t need to mess with that.”

After finding a police officer to direct him to the command center, Geist arrived there and asked for a job. “The guy gives me something to do, and he’s [on his radio] saying ‘Oh, so there’s five gas tanks? And if they blow, everything within 300 yards is gone – 500 yards is dead? Ok.’ So he gives me a job in traffic, to relieve an actual highway patrolman, and my instructions were ‘If it’s an emergency vehicle, they pass through; if it’s a civilian, turn ‘em around. If it’s media, they’re in that parking lot over there.’ So I got to direct traffic over there.”

Once things dissipated, he went back.

Fortunately, there aren’t major natural disasters in Minnesota every day of the year, so despite the Herculean tasks of flood and fire volunteering, Geist’s focus spreads beyond catastrophe to better his local area and in Minneapolis as he can using his choice of handouts, patrols and benefits.

“It’s hard to narrow down, because there’s so much need in the world,” he said. “I fight for the forgotten. The average homeless family seeking shelter, kids, anyone who’s slipping through the cracks, who nobody seems to care about – that’s who I care about. Anyone who’s overlooked by society, including animals.

“If something comes up, I’m well aware of it and try to answer specific needs to the community. My local pets shelter recently has more cats than they’ve ever had, so I’ve been buying cat food and I’ll knock on their door and they’ll say ‘Hi Geist, what do you have for us today?’ 99% of people in my town here have no idea who I am or that I exist, and I like it that way. However, the homeless shelter knows it, the pets shelter knows it and the Ronald McDonald House knows it. I’m greeted by name when I walk in with an armful of supplies.”

Geist also has an arrangement with a local comics shop, and after last year’s Free Comic Book Day, he was given a tall stack of free comics and other things from around the shop. He walked in in-costume and told them where the comics are going (“The Interfaith Charities Network, Ronald McDonald House – anywhere there’s kids,” he said) and gave them all away to charities in his town and to People Serving People in a nearby town. “It’s a shelter for entire families I’ve been to three or four times,” Geist said. “There are kids there all the time that are economically challenged, trying to find a haven from an abusive relationship, but kids are kids and want comics – especially about heroes.”

Regarding crime-stopping patrols, Geist’s philosophy is that most situations are best resolved without fighting. Most situations can be and have been talked down, in his experience. “There are people who could’ve gone to jail or been handcuffed if I were a policeman, but if I can talk to someone and quiet a situation, I’d really much rather do that.”

He told me it was actually rare to come across a crime on which he can intervene. “Think about a cop – how often do they pull their gun? You hear about cops retiring who have never pulled their gun. I’ve never pulled my stun baton on anyone. My martial arts instructor said that he’s never had to use his abilities; he’s never gotten into a scuffle with someone on the street. It just doesn’t happen. Anyone who wants to get into that kind of scuffle shouldn’t be doing this.”

Nevertheless, Geist, a fan of The Shadow, hopes that the criminals in his city will hear of him and be less inclined to go out and commit crimes. “I hope the criminals think I’m a loose cannon who can do anything, that I’m crazy to dress up in a costume – that maybe I don’t follow the rules, that maybe I don’t have ethics,” he said. “I love that; that doubt, that fear. That’s probably our superpower – they don’t know what we’re gonna do. We’re a bunch of loose cannons, whatever.”

Geist patrols at least once a week locally, and says that it takes a while to get suited up, so once he is, he might as well stay suited up for awhile. The week before our interview he drove to meet his RLSH partner, Razorhawk, for a long patrol. “Last Friday I left the house at about 6 p.m. and came home about 3 a.m.,” he said. “There’s an hour and a half drive each way in that time too. Razorhawk and I tried to make a good night of it, and you drive to get there so you try to put the time in and do what you can. He also realizes I can’t fall asleep on the way back so it doesn’t always last too late. We’ve patrolled until 4 a.m. before, but it’s safer if we patrol until midnight.”

Geist, like Fear, embraces a comfort with self-improvement in his RLSH practices. He told me a story he had written up on his MySpace page well before our interview that he jokingly told me to call “Geist’s Misadventure” upon writing it. Geist was on his way back from the airport, having dropped off another RLSH figure who was departing Minnesota, and decided to paint over some gang graffiti near a bridge that crossed over a river.

“I take care of gang tags. If you use a neutral grey spray paint, that’s legal. You can’t paint ‘Geist’ but painting over a gang tag is also a lethal insult to a gang. It’s nothing I mind doing at all.”

“What about artistic graffiti?”

“I dig it; that’s cool,” he told me. “If it’s art, it’s art. There’s a definite difference between someone expressing themselves – legally or not – and criminality, saying ‘This is my turf; we own it and you don’t belong; I’m the boss.’ They don’t own it; they’re not the boss and that’s what I want to express to them.

“All I would’ve needed to get out of there is a stepladder, which I have, but I went down there thinking ‘If someone went down there, they got back up. I can do the same thing; I’m a superhero!’”

It wasn’t until after he got down on the riverbank that he realized how the spray painter left the area. “I wasn’t willing to risk my life to see if the water was shallow enough to step around to the other side of the bridge. I called the fire department and police to save me. They were pretty specific, of course, asking for details.”

Geist assured the police he’d give them his real ID when they arrived on-scene, and that he was a Real-Life SuperHero named Geist who was painting over graffiti. “It was so amusing and embarrassing,” he said. “The irony was not lost on me at all.”

Two fire trucks and several police cars arrived and Geist did his best to ensure them he was in no danger, just stuck where he was. The fire department called in a boat they had on the river, which came and picked him up. He apologized to them and explained himself and they got him onshore. He obliged their request to wait and speak with an officer, to whom he presented his ID and explained himself again. Geist had taken before-and-after pictures of the graffiti to the officer, who spoke with his commanding officer for some time.

“He was a very nice guy – all the cops have been,” Geist said. “This is my third or fourth encounter with the police in my town. They know who I am; they know Geist the crazy kooky guy who tries to do a good thing and they know my real name and occupation. I wasn’t cuffed; I could’ve run but I always opt to cooperate.”

The officer came back and informed Geist that technically he had been trespassing, but he was free to go. “The cops get it, sort of, but they want me to be safe about it and that’s what he told me too. ‘If you wanna do something like this again, give us a call ahead, for your own safety.’”

Still a bit chagrined by the story, Geist was immediate to add, “There’s always something new to learn.”

Often on graffiti-removal outings Geist uses what the RLSH refer to as an oracle – a home-based partner to act as support and lifeline to patrolling RLSH. Sometimes they are other RLSH, sometimes not – like Ecliptico’s wife, who stands at the ready to alert authorities in case he’s overmatched. Sometimes the oracles are local, and sometimes not. “One of my favorites has been Doc Spectral,” Geist said. “He’s not an RLSH and yet he is someone in the community and well-known, well-liked, very funny guy, smart too. He has looked up the meaning of gang graffiti for me, has looked up license plates for me, addresses; he’ll get on MapQuest or Google Earth and know where I am and when I’ve gone under a bridge to paint over gang graffiti. He says ‘If I haven’t heard back from you in 20 minutes I’m calling you, then I’m calling the cops.’”

Attempts to reach Doc Spectral for an interview proved unsuccessful.

In addition to working with Razorhawk and an oracle, Geist is a member of the Great Lakes Heroes Guild, a Minnesota-area RLSH group. He also patrolled with Golden Valkyrie on her first patrol in early 2010. “She brought brownies on her first patrol,” he said. “She told us ‘My parents thought this superhero thing is great!’ She’s probably 19, 20. You do find this mixture, even among us, of innocence, idealism, some cynicism, some heroes who have been through some bad crap in their lives [before becoming RLSH].

“Then there are some…some people have some issues and possible retribution that they’re trying to avenge. There are some dark individuals with some great intentions.”

I wanted to know more about life behind the mask, so I asked Geist at last about his civilian life blending with his efforts as an RLSH.

“I had an elder family member who I just had to tell, because I didn’t think he’d be around for too much longer. He liked it. I can’t say he totally got it, but he understood and I’m very glad I told him before he passed on. I do have family who I keep it from, who have never heard of Geist. Will they by next week? Maybe. I have close family who cannot know, and if they were to know it would be so bad I’d have to deny it up and down.”

“What about non-family? Any hardships with separating Geist from your legal identity?”

And with that he laughed one final time – knowingly, almost forcedly, but not deceptively. “The hardest part about being an RLSH is…When people ask you what you’ve been up to – your dentist, your cousin, hairstylist, co-worker – you have to say ‘Not much; how about you?’”

I imagined by his tone that somewhere in Minnesota, at that moment, his eyes were gazing off in the distance, recalling those instances in which he’d shrugged off any interesting activity to his friends at work while further memories danced behind those same shrugging eyes – memories of rebuilding Stockton, of feeding and clothing the less fortunate. All his warmth, humor and honesty on the phone seemed so distant from the unmasked man I imagined to be wearing jeans and a polo shirt, feigning stoicism to keep his identity a secret from his co-workers, from his barber.

“And they ask you ‘No really, how have you been spending your time?’” he said, “and you have to bluff.

“I’ve become a lot less interesting to them.”