It was time to retire. He had spent the better part of his youth trying to make a go of it, but it never really gelled into a viable occupation. Briefly, in the beginning he’d been a lot better at masking his contempt for the thankless task but as time went on he found it harder and harder to pretend that he cared. Others knew. They could feel the boredom that radiated from his every move. The passion just wasn’t there.
Joe wasn’t cut out for super villainy.
One of the main problems was that technology had advanced so much over the years that anyone could easily do the things that he had once held dear. Having powerful computers in your pocket used to be special. Now school children had this technology and they used it to play games and call each other fags. It was a waste.
People didn’t care that he was ransoming the moon or controlling the tides with his weather machines because they were afraid that the banks were going to take their homes. Super villainy worked best when times were good, and times had not been good in a long time. How could you terrorize a man that had already lost his job to downsizing? That man has a family to feed. He doesn’t care about your army of spiderbots.
Joe felt like no one ever really cared about his spiderbots.
Once the ray guns and the costumes were safely packed away, Joe set out to live as normal a life as possible. He found himself a modest apartment in the “hip” part of town. Rather than the thrones and gold plated accents he’d become accustomed to, he took a U-haul truck to the nearest Ikea and bought various multicolored furnishings. He even gave some thought to being one of those people that brags about not having a television, but he remembered how annoying those people could be and bought the largest plasma screen he could fit into his single bedroom apartment.
He found a job as a sack boy at a nearby grocery store. This was the first time he’d ever been in the position of having others tell him what to do. After the initial reaction of wanting to skin his superiors alive, Joe fell into a nice routine at the corner grocery. Eventually, he realized how nice it was to have someone else making all of the big decisions. He just arrived, did his job, spoke to a few regular people, then returned home.
Was this what he’d been missing out on all of this time? Was this what life was supposed to be? It was honest work with no real worries and making people happy began to feel quite rewarding to Joe. Sure, there was a time when he had been the leader of one of the most sinister organizations of criminals in the world. The Clan Destine had controlling interest in every technological and biological weapons innovation that had occurred over the last 50 years. As leader, Joe was in a position to have anything and everything that he ever wanted. He made moves and called shots. World Leaders never did anything without first considering how Joe would react to it. It was a good time to be evil and Joe was the evilest. But he was bored.
So now, Joe found his bliss at the grocery store. He felt like he’d been missing out on real life all of this time. There was still time, he thought, to make up for it. There was still time to atone for the things he’d done and there was time to find happiness in the simple things.
His first payday was a momentous occasion. This was the first money he hadn’t taken by force. It wasn’t much. He would actually lose money if he took the time to go to the bank and cash it, but he’d earned this money fair and square. It was a beautiful feeling.
To celebrate his first “payday”, Joe hired a harem of busty blonde women to pretend to be cats whenever he returned home.
There were still dreams to be had...
J’Mel Davidson is the founder of a local improv comedy troupe called The Feminist Debutante Guild. You can send him the love—or some Flubber—via editor@bhamweekly.com or heinousclown@gmail.com.
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