Less Than Hero (35 page)

After another hour of earning less than minimum wage, I gather up my money, put on my hat, toss my sign into the nearest garbage can, and pick up my prescription vouchers at Duane Reade. With a little over an hour to kill before meeting Sophie, I take a walk through SoHo and Little Italy and Chinatown as the sun heads for New Jersey and the nine-to-six crowd transitions from work to play.

I wander along the streets, past stores and restaurants and subway stations, past men and women and teenagers, laughing and shouting and minding their own business. Some of them happy, some of them sad, some of them destitute—either because of their own failed choices or bad luck or because life dealt them a shitty hand.

A homeless man talks to himself on the corner by Famous Ben’s Pizza.

A woman moves her belongings down Wooster Street one bag at a time.

A drunkard lies passed out on the sidewalk near Tribeca Park.

Any one of them could have been me, given the right set of circumstances. Or the wrong ones. Had Sophie not rescued me three months ago or five years before that, I might have ended up as one of New York’s anonymous homeless, lost and forsaken, stranded on the streets with no one to care about me.

I walk past a homeless woman sitting out in front of the Burger King on Canal Street, no sign asking for help, just a pleading look on her face. No one who walks past offers her anything, and most just ignore her, so I stop and ask her if she’d like something to eat.

“Bless you,” she says with a smile, her voice soft and sweet, as if I’m offering to solve all of her problems.

I order a TenderGrill Chicken Sandwich meal, with fries and a vanilla shake, along with a large Coke for me, paying for it with my panhandling earnings. Sophie would probably encourage me to find something vegetarian for the woman, or at least something healthier, preferably gluten-free, but I’m focusing on
carbohydrates and protein and sustenance rather than lifestyle choices.

When I walk outside and hand the bag of food and the milkshake to the homeless woman, she thanks me and reaches into the bag, her hand coming back out holding two French fries, which she eats as though they were a rare confection. I stand there a moment and watch her, then reach into my pocket and give her the rest of the money I earned in Washington Square Park.

She takes the money and gives me another smile. “You’re my hero,” she says, then takes a bite of her sandwich.

That’s the first time anyone’s said that about me in months.

I walk away wishing there was more I could do to help her, wanting to make sure she’s taken care of and protected but knowing I can’t do everything for everyone. In this case, at this moment, I did what I could. And maybe that’s all I need to do in order to make a difference: show some warmth and compassion to the people who need it the most. I don’t need to have a supernatural superpower to be a superhero. I just need to care.

Inevitably I find myself visiting several locations where Frank, Vic, Charlie, Randy, and I performed our own inimitable brand of community service that involved more than being fast-food heroes. I meander through Foley Square and Columbus Park, stopping for a moment to reminisce, remembering every moment, right down to each nap, rash, and seizure.

I’m getting sentimental again.

I make my way through Chinatown and stop out in front of Bayard Street Obstetrics & Gynecology across from Charlie’s old place, thinking about friendships and superheroes and destinies.
I wonder if Charlie’s destiny was to end up paralyzed by a stroke or if Vic’s destiny was to lose his memory or if Randy’s destiny was to die while battling a supervillain. Considering all the good the three of them accomplished, it doesn’t seem fair that they drew the short straws when it came to fame and fortune. But like Randy said, maybe in order to be a superhero you have to be willing to make some sacrifices. Otherwise you’re just a guy in colored spandex and a satin cape.

Sophie texts me to find out what time I’ll be home. Tonight is date night and Sophie’s making spicy peanut butter tempeh and brown rice. I text back that I’ll be home in ten minutes and then head up Elizabeth Street, wondering if there’s someplace I could grab a steak along the way.

At the corner of Elizabeth and Hester, I stop outside of the Ho Won Bake Shoppe and consider going inside to grab a couple of pineapple buns for dessert. Sophie won’t be happy about it, but I’m craving a pastry and their pineapple buns are the epitome of my confectionery desire.

While I’m contemplating the fallout of bringing them home, I notice a couple of young trolls standing across the street and whistling at girls as they walk past, calling out to them, making suggestive comments. With daylight lingering and witnesses around, they’re inclined to stick to verbal harassment. But when the moon comes out and shadows rule the streets, they might decide to escalate from verbal to something else. I don’t know this for sure. It’s just a look they have.

Someone needs to teach them some manners.

As if some cosmic force is tapping me on the shoulder to remind me of my path, Sophie texts again and asks me to pick up
some toilet paper on the way home. This is followed immediately by another text that simply says,
I love you, Lollipop
.

I smile and think how lucky I am to have Sophie and how much she means to me. More times than I can remember, I’ve wondered what I would do without her. She’s the best thing that has ever happened to me.

The two creeps harass another woman and leer at her as she walks past, causing her to quicken her pace. They watch her go, then look back at one another and exchange a nod and a smile before they slink off after the woman in the growing shadows. I watch them go and think about Charlie and Randy and Vic. I think about everything they sacrificed in order to try to make the world a better place. I think about what they would do if they were here instead of me.

I’m waiting for another cosmic tap on the shoulder but when it doesn’t come, I take out my wallet and remove the fortune from the Buddhist temple and unfold it, reading the words that I know so well.

In true love, destiny awaits.

Sometimes I do this to remind myself of my destiny and how much I love Sophie. Other times, I take out the tattered fortune and read it and wonder if destiny is something you pick out of a basket for a dollar and read every now and then to help you to stay on your path. The more I think about it, the more I believe that destiny isn’t a combination of five words written on a piece of paper. It’s something you feel. Something you own. Something you create for yourself.

Man creates his own destiny. The path you seek is your own.

I take one more look at the fortune in my hand, the paper wrinkled and frayed at the edges, the words solid and black and poignant. My own personal destiny. After a few more seconds, I close my hand around the fortune and wad it up into a little ball and throw it in the garbage can before I follow the two assholes down the street.

In order to be a superhero, sometimes you have to be willing to make personal sacrifices and lose something you care about. Otherwise you’re just a guy in colored spandex and a satin cape. And I don’t look good in spandex.

T
hey call me Dr. Lullaby.

Back in October 2003, around the same time I was discovering the ideas that would eventually evolve into my first two novels, I saw an advertisement on television for a new drug that promised to help cure abdominal cramping, with one of the side effects of the drug being that it might
cause
abdominal cramping.

Intrigued by the comical irony, I wrote the gist of the commercial down in my journal and filed it away, but I didn’t come back to it until 2009 after reading about people who made their living on the fringes of society by testing drugs in clinical trials. That’s when the idea for a superhero story about professional guinea pigs was born, although it would have a long gestation period while I wrote my third and fourth novels.

While
Less Than Hero
is filled with social commentary on the proliferation of pharmaceutical drug use in the United States, it’s also a story about figuring out what it is you’re supposed to do with your life. That’s a common theme in my novels. Finding your role. Your purpose. Your reason for your existence. It’s not something I set out to do when I sit down to write. It just sort of happens.

There’s also a running commentary on fate and destiny in this novel, which was also the major theme of my second novel,
Fated
. Because both novels are set in Manhattan, I thought it would be fun to have the stories and universes overlap in a few places. For those of you who’ve read
Fated
, hopefully you enjoyed (or will enjoy) encountering some of the familiar characters and scenes that I incorporated here. For those of you who haven’t read
Fated
, it’s not required reading.

Now, on to the acknowledgments.

I’d like to thank the following people who helped to make this book possible:

Michelle Brower, my agent, for her continued guidance, and the team at Folio Literary Management for all of their support.

Ed Schlesinger, my editor, for his invaluable feedback, and the gang at Gallery Books for all of their hard work.

Clifford Brooks, Ian Dudley, Heather Liston, Lise Quintana, and Keith White for their ruthless and honest criticism.

I’d also like to thank my parents, my family, and my friends, who have all been instrumental and supportive in my writing over the years. While there are too many to name, hopefully you all know who you are.

Finally I’d like to give a big shout-out to my readers and fans. Thanks for the love. You are awesome.