The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes: An eSpecial From Riverhead Books Read Free Page A

toe. “When I wear this I don’t have to react to you in any way. Nobody knows what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s great. I can be in my own little world in here.”
    “I know exactly what you mean,” I say. “I was once at a Halloween party and I didn’t take off my mask all night. It completely eliminated all social anxiety.”
    “Sometimes I wish I never had to take the mask off,” says Urban Avenger.
    We begin our patrol through the nice, clean, well-to-do downtown San Diego. We pass bars and clubs filled with polite-looking young drinkers. A few take pictures of them on their phones. Others yell, “It isn’t Halloween anymore!” from car windows. Urban Avenger says he doesn’t understand how Phoenix is forever chancing upon crimes being committed. He’s so lucky.
    “What are the odds?” he sighs. “I almost never see anything.” He pauses. “Last October we got involved in breaking up some street fights.”
    “Five months ago?” I say.
    “We haven’t really seen anything since,” he says. “It’s been really quiet around here. Did you and Phoenix Jones patrol Belltown in Seattle?”
    “I believe we’re going to,” I say.
    “Google ‘Gunshots in Belltown’ and you’ll come up with a hundred stories of gunshots being fired in, like, the last year,” he says wistfully.
    Some boys pass us. “Want some reefer? Ganga? Weed?” they quietly murmur.
    “No, that’s all right,” says Urban Avenger, walking quickly on. The boys shrug and continue on their way.
    “Good thing I got all that on video,” Urban Avenger eventually calls after them, indicating a small camera attached to his shoulder.
    “Crack? Heroin? PCP?” the boys call back.
    “Did you really film it?” I ask.
    “No,” says Urban Avenger. We continue our patrol.
    “I noticed that you didn’t make citizen’s arrests on the drug dealers,” I say.
    “We didn’t have probable cause,” explains Mr Xtreme. “All they did is say something. If they’d shown us crack rocks or marijuana it might have been a different story.”
    “You could have said you wanted to buy some and then they’d have got the drugs out of their pockets and you could have arrested them,” I say.
    There’s a short silence. “That’s true,” says Urban Avenger.
    As we reach the end of the patrol we get talking about burnout.
    “I can relate to burnout,” says Mr Xtreme. “All the times I thought about hanging it up. But what would I move on to?”
    “The person under the mask really hasn’t accomplished much,” says Urban Avenger. “But as a superhero I can go out and do something. I can feel like a better person, kind of.”
    “If I wasn’t trying to make a difference in the community, I’d just be sitting around drinking beer,” says Mr Xtreme. “Watching movies, going broke, just being negative.”
    The real-life superheroes like to portray their motives as wholly benevolent, but if they were being driven purely by philanthropy they’d have become police officers or firefighters or charity volunteers. Something else is evidently propelling them—a narcissism. It’s an odd sort of narcissism, of course, when the narcissist disguises their face, but the lust for fame and glory is unmistakable.
    Only one of them, however, is achieving it: Phoenix Jones.
    Back in Seattle he said he knew why he, alone, has captured the public’s imagination. It’s his bravery amid a community of superheroes who talk the talk but in practice basically don’t do much more than hand out food to the homeless.
    “When you wake up one day and decide to put on spandex and give out sandwiches, something’s a little off,” he said. “I don’t call them real-life superheroes. I call them real-life sandwich handlers.”
    In fact there’s only one other crew out there actively looking for dangerous scrapes, and that’s the NYI—the New York Initiative. And so, in the days before returning to Seattle, I email to ask if I can join them. I receive a