Saturday, December 17, 2011

You Still Don't Know Dick

ID: You’ve previously waxed poetic about Dick’s positive effect on your life. What’s the worst moment he helped pull you back from?

B: When the Joker murdered his replacement, things got pretty dark for me. I felt like I’d failed him, that if I’d only trained him better… I wanted to murder the Joker, and then quit.

And I might have done it. By then Dick was Nightwing, and we’d had a pretty big fight about his replacement; he wasn’t living in the Manor anymore, and I wasn’t going to find him to talk it over. But he found me. He tracked me down- despite the fact that I didn’t want to be found.

And he told me that we were all mortal. That he and I, we’d survived for two reasons: the first was that I’d put us through Hell, a training regimen that burnt the imperfections off of us. And the second was luck. Dumb, stupid, thoughtless luck. That we were alive only because chance hadn’t claimed us yet, because we were always only one lousy ricochet or one missed landing away from death.

And I’m not explaining it well. Let me see if I can remember the part that really got me. He said, “We’re in a war. We fight every day for a better world, one where children don’t lose their parents. And when we fail, we mourn our losses, and we fight the next day harder for them.”

He gives a hell of a speech. I was never good at those, not like he is; you have to love people to really reach them the way he does, in a way I’ve never been good at. I care but… love is a vulnerability I’ve rarely allowed myself. It’s one of the many reasons I tell people my son is a far better man than me. Because he isn’t scared to love people knowing what it could cost him. It makes him a better leader. And it also means that he feels his losses even deeper than I feel mine. And I knew if he could do it, if he could look past the reasons we’d been fighting, if he could look at the world with optimism for everything we’d seen, then I could keep going, too.

ID: Fighting the good fight?

B: And doing it the right way. Joker had to be brought to justice. Though I’ll admit, since then I hit him a hell of a lot more than I used to. Not that that’ll ever even things out. I could keep him tied to a chair in the Batcave, and beat him until my fists bled, every damn day, and even if he lived to a natural old age, he could never live through that long enough.

ID: Yeah. I wanted to know about what I think is probably the most controversial Dick-related decision in your life. This is actually the second time you’ve retired. Last time, you passed over Dick to take over for you, in favor of a sociopathic brainwashed zealot. Why?

B: Because Dick Grayson was Nightwing, who by simple right of having done the job longer than anybody else, should have been given the job- at least offered it. But Dick Grayson was also my son. And I was afraid of Bane. He destroyed me, almost completely. If it hadn’t been for Barbara, at least at first, and later the rest of my family and friends, he would have succeeded. And I couldn’t bear having that happen to Dick; I couldn’t stand the possibility.

My first successor- whose name isn’t among those leaked by Lex News, so I won’t be dropping it here- wasn’t Dick. I mean no disrespect, but he couldn’t be. Dick had been doing this his entire life, from a boy. My replacement… he was prepared to do it most of his life, but it was a different system. It wasn’t experience. It wasn’t living years of his life on the streets.

But there was a… ferocity in him. If, no, when, Bane was provoked by the appearance of a new Batman, I thought he stood a better chance of surviving the encounter. Or maybe I was scared of him, too, and I just hoped my two fears could cancel one another out.

ID: Like kill each other?

B: Nothing like that. If I’d really thought my replacement was still capable… he tried to reform. Looking back, I think he had a similar upbringing to Damian, and like my son, he tried to combat the horrors done to him in his childhood. But unlike Damian, he wasn’t quite so adept at conquering his demons. I don’t blame him. I think, on some level, I knew he wasn’t ready, wasn’t tested. I hoped he would gain what he needed on the job, but… the mistake is mine. The failure was mine.

ID: And the deaths that occurred on his watch?

B: Are regrettable. But, I weigh it against the lives that would have been lost if he hadn’t been in the cowl. And maybe… it’s actually the fulfillment of an old fear of mine; I always worried being close to people, loving them, would make me make poor decisions, and I think my fears drove me towards this one. But my replacement did take down Bane, at the height of his powers. And I don’t know if that’s something Dick could have done, then. Now, I have no doubt, but then? I’d still be loathe to push it.

ID: I fear we’re getting a little too dour for our own good. What was your funniest Dick in costume moment?

B: There have been a few. Probably the funniest stretch was when he was going through puberty. And like most teenagers, he was gawky, had acne, and his voice broke. And there are few things more comical than a bunch of hardened criminals running away in a panic from a small boy whose voice is cracking as he yells for them to stop.

But I think the funniest in costume moment, and he’s going to hate that I’m telling this story, but it was the first time he was dealing with Poison Ivy

ID: That’s plant-lady doctor, Pamela Isley.

B: But it was their first encounter after he became a man.

ID: Mazel tov.

B: Ivy doesn’t wear a lot of clothes, and she uses pheromones to manipulate men, um, sexually. Well, she had us caught, but she figured since we were who we were, it wouldn’t last for long, so she had this concentrated form of the pheromone that she’d made into a lipstick, that she said would turn us permanently into her slaves. She kissed Dick first. And I guess it must have required prolonged contact because it lasted a while, and after a moment he joined in, and being the overly enthusiastic boy that he was, there was way too much tongue. It was awkward, watching that.

And when she pulled away, he’s pitching a tent in his tights. She turned red; I didn’t know before that through the chlorophyll skin she still could, but she turned red, or maybe a darker shade of green with just a hint of crimson. She said, “Now I feel dirty about this. I think I have to go.” And she just left. I mean she had us dead to rights, held captive by her Venus mantraps, and in the middle of her crime, she just walks away, because being Mrs. Robinson creeped her out too much.

Dick was pretty embarrassed. So to try and relieve some of the tension, I asked if he thought we might be able to get the same reaction from the Joker. And he said, “Not worth it if I have to tongue kiss him.”

ID: I have, in my prurient personal moments, wondered about that. The women in your world seem to wear rather… tight clothes when they deign to wear anything at all. And be otherwise in the kind of physical condition Olympic swimmers and gymnasts are envious of. And your clothes don’t seem to leave any place for, uh, discretion.

B: It’s weird all of a sudden you being the discrete one.

ID: I get awkward around discussion of adolescent boners.

B: But remember the crotch padding I talked about in my costume? Excellent for keeping that kind of thing in check. It was because Robin was constantly growing that his suit on that particular night didn’t have the padding; in fact, I think he was wearing an older suit while Alfred let out his current one, so it was even a little extra tight.

And Ivy’s usually such a fan of growth.

ID: Thank you and good night.

Saturday, December 10, 2011

You Don’t Know Dick

ID: Your first adopted son is Batman. I’m not the first person to say this. It’s been making the rounds for a few weeks, now, primarily from a Lex News report. But when we talked about him previously this news wasn’t out in the open, so you had to be taciturn. Because you had to wall off an entire clump of who he was and is to you. I tacitly agreed to that, by not asking the obvious questions. So we’re going to take a spade to that unplumbed depth. When did you decide to take Dick Grayson on as an understudy?

B: Well, it was an evolution. At first, I didn’t think he’d even want a part of my, mission, I guess. It had always been such a specific, personal thing to me up until that point, so it didn’t really even occur to me that Dick would want it.

But he was a gymnast, and I had a lot of gymnastic and acrobatic equipment and facilities in the cave. So at first, he’d just train with me. And then he’d see me doing my katas, or doing strength training, and he’d join me in those things. Honestly, at the time, I thought we were just exercising together, in a way that was helping him to get past what had happened to his parents.

And then one day he showed up in the cave when it was time for me to go out for my patrols, and he’s in costume, and wants to go along. At first I told him no, in no uncertain terms. And he threw a little bit of a fit, and stormed up to his room. Of course, Alfred overhead the whole thing, and said, “Would you have listened?” And we both knew the answer to that; it was a long series of me not listenings that led me to being Batman.

So I had Alfred design him a costume, with maximum armor without limiting mobility. And it was dark, blacks and crimsons.

ID: That’s always bugged me. Your costume’s black and gray, fairly camouflagey. Your sidekick, his costume looks like the 1980s threw up on someone.

B: You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that. See, the costume he was wearing that night was basically a slightly altered version of the one he and his parents performed in. He wanted to wear it to keep their memory alive.

ID: I’ve always wondered what my foot tasted like; fishy, but with earthy overtones.

B: That might be something that warrants a doctor’s visit. But we fought about it. Like crazy. I forbid him from going out, because I thought, like you’ve said, that his costume made him a flashing light for gunfire, and even just attention can be deadly, you know, when you’re swinging from rooftops, because somebody hurls a brick, or just makes a loud noise, anything that screws with your concentration can be a problem.

But he was able to break into the Batcave without even really trying. There wasn’t anything we could do, at least nothing that wouldn’t count as child endangerment, to keep him locked up. And we tried. About the only true success we had was duct tape, Alfred used about five rolls to really make sure he wouldn’t get out of it. And he still did. Took him hours of wriggling, and later I figured out he’d pulled a Houdini, made sure to keep his muscles tensed up while Alfred was taping him, so that he had a little room to maneuver. He got out and tracked me down for about the last hour of my patrol.

And we’d all but given up when he stopped. He was asleep in his room when I left for my patrols, and still asleep when I’d get back. He shadowed me for almost a week before I realized he was still following me on my patrols. So I trained him to stay in the shadows, keep his distance. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have someone watching from above, who could tell me if, say, a car full of armed thugs was emptying at the end of an alley while I was preoccupied fighting.

And I was fooling myself the whole time. Dick wasn’t going to stay out of the fight any more than I would have. Any time I got into trouble, he was there to bail me out. But what I really quickly realized, is in doing so, he usually put himself in even more danger, having to act quickly and recklessly. So I grounded him. For two months. And told him that if he followed my every instruction, to the letter, to the detail, for that time period, I would let him patrol with me for real.

I put him through Hell. ‘Bruce Wayne’ took a ski vacation through Europe- a body double I’ve used before- and I spent eighteen hours a day preparing him. I kind of thought he’d lose interest after a week or two. But on top of that, Alfred and I were pretty inventive with stupid requests; he scrubbed every single toilet in Wayne Manor with a toothbrush, and didn’t complain. Okay, he complained a couple of times when I wasn’t in the room, but I can’t fault him for not finding the recording devices then; it was still pretty early in his training.

ID: You had recording devices in your young ward’s room?

B: Just audio. And, you know, we didn’t listen if he was doing any of those things young boys do that their parents don’t want to think about.

ID: Like voting Democrat?

B: Among others.

But he didn’t give up. We assigned him some crazy tasks, absolutely designed to break him. The best example was the last thing we did, his final test.

Dick’s family were part of a traveling circus; they didn’t even own a car, so he knew nothing about cars. Alfred and I placed an ‘explosive’ device inside my car, and told him he’d have to find it and disarm it while I dealt with a threat outside the cave.

I told him that to get at the device without setting it off he’d have to pull the car apart- entirely apart. And of course, since it was a bomb, and we didn’t know how long we had before it went off, he couldn’t rest in the meantime.

This was really before the internet was big. The computer in the cave had a lot of references filed, so there were diagrams and guides. But you know if the Chilton’s guide didn’t do it for you, you were out of luck.

Needless to say, there was a lot of trial and error, there, a couple of times where, as a parent, I was terrified he was going to drop the engine on himself or something. He was up for forty some hours, and Alfred and I took turns watching on the monitors to make sure he didn’t cheat- or worse, do something that would have been unsafe if there actually had been a bomb in the car.

I gave him strict instructions about how to handle the bomb once he found it. I had a bomb disposal robot, one of the early prototypes, and he used that to remotely take the bomb into a vault that we had, and locked it in. I told him I’d help him with it when I got back. He followed my instructions entirely. I told him to signal me when he got that far, so I could come and help him, and in the meantime to start putting the car back together.

Reassembly never takes as long, but it was still hours he was working on that car. And there was one time he sat down, and we thought he might quit and take a nap, so I’d radio in to tell him that something came up, but I really needed the car ready when I got back. So he went back to work, and the moment he got it started I ran around to the front of the house where I had my bike and drove back around to the cave.

I made a big show of talking him into the proper bomb disposal gear, then walking him through safely entering the vault, and cautiously approaching the bomb. Then I told him all it would take to disarm it was twisting it at the hinge. Inside, rather than an explosive, he found a key.

And I told him at the back of the vault there was a case, that the key would fit into. And inside it he found the costume that Alfred had designed for him, but redone in his family’s costume colors. He hugged me and cried. I’m sure some of that was the sleep deprivation.

ID: Then what’s your excuse?

B: I don’t get a lot of chances to reminisce about being a dad. And I guess it’s easy, going from one life crisis to another, to overlook how special the little moments were. But now my son’s Batman. How much prouder could a father get?

[NOTE: this interview ran overlong, so I’ll be running it over two weeks instead of one]

Saturday, December 3, 2011

Revelations

ID: I want to thank you for coming back. After last week, I wasn’t sure you would. But you’ve made me out to be an ass. And a homophobe.

B: You usually do a fine job of doing both on your own, actually.

ID: See, I talked to Dick. And I’d been under the assumption that your AIDS nee HIV came from unprotected sex, quite possibly of the homosexual variety.

B: Which is a pretty homophobic assumption to make, honestly.

ID: But you did nothing to dissuade that notion. At all.

B: Force of habit. It can be useful to have people underestimate, or in your case, misunderstand, you.

ID: Okay. Well enough of that. I want to understand. And frankly, you owe it to our audience to help them understand. Because your illness is not a product of unprotected sex, period.

B: And it’s not from needles, not even venom injections.

ID: Or a transfusion. That ticks the usual boxes. So are we done dancing around the subject?

B: It’s a strange circumstance. But I’ll start at the beginning. Keep the suspense up a little longer- I know how much you love that.

I was on a patrol. This was before the cataclysmic earthquake, so before all of the buildings were seismically retrofitted. And do you know the old Gotham National Bank building?

ID: No.

B: Had a lot of personality, that building. Art deco architecture, some gothic gargoyles. I was perched on top of one of those, when the building buckled underneath me. I’ve been involved in enough building destroying events to recognize when a building’s supports are going beneath me. There was a large fire across town, so most of the emergency services were tied up there.

The only person in the building was a little old lady who cleaned up the offices on the upper floors. She brought her cat into the office with her, and didn’t want to leave it, but the cat wouldn’t come out from behind the cabinets. In retrospect, if we’d made it into the stairwell, the way the building came down, we probably would have died- so in a strange way that cat probably saved my life. But I was still standing in her in this file room when the building started to fall. I grabbed the woman and leapt out the window, and this cat clambers up my leg, claws out, like I’m a pine tree.

I managed to get a line wrapped around one of the gargoyles, which broke our fall, but about half the top floor came down on us. The three of us were basically all right, but cut up all to hell.

And that’s when I saw the boy. A street walker, I knew from the clothes. He hadn’t been so lucky, and the building collapse had seriously messed him up. I managed to get him clear of the rubble, but he wasn’t breathing.

But he was sick. I recognized Kaposi’s sarcoma, and I knew what that meant. But there was no one else there. I was cut up all to hell, and even the usual gloves and breathing barriers I carry with me were perforated. I knew what I would do to myself if I resuscitated him, the consequences that could have for my life, for my mission.

But he was Dick’s age. Under the bruising, the swelling, the blood, he could have looked like Dick. I couldn’t look at him and not see Dick, not see my son dying on the sidewalk at my feet.

There wasn’t even a decision- that made it for me. It took forty five minutes for paramedics to arrive; by then my lungs burned, and I could barely keep up compressions. I mean, I’d had a building fall on me. But before I let them take over for me, I told them, “He’s positive.”

And they were shocked. The paramedics tried to shove me in the back of the ambulance to start disinfecting me. But I wasn’t even thinking clearly any more. I’d been operating beyond my limitations since the building collapsed; keeping that boy alive had become everything in those moments, and I pushed them back, and said, “Him first.” And I think that brought all of us back to our senses. They gave me the antiseptics they had in the ambulance and took him away.

I went straight home after that, and bathed in alcohol. I started antiretrovirals immediately. I had my blood tested, every week, knowing it was only a matter of time before it came back positive. And eventually it did. It was almost… almost a relief. It’s amazing how psychotically the brain will cling to hope. But knowing… it let me get back to my life. Not living in anticipation of its end.

ID: That’s… shit.

B: Don’t look at me like that. I did what I’ve always done, what I’ve always said I was willing to do. And I just happened to be the man who was there, that day, to do it. I have no doubt that in the same circumstances, the Flash, a Green Lantern, most of the people in the League wouldn’t hesitate to do the same. And those who wouldn’t, I don’t fault them. That job already asks a lot. I can’t fault them for drawing that line.

ID: But… shit.

B: You need to be a prick to me. It’s part of your process- part ours. You need to be a prick so you can challenge what I say, challenge me. So quite with the puppy dog eyes.

ID: But… shit.

B: Okay. Maybe I have to keep the ball rolling this time. And in this spirit of openness, I hear you got outed by Lex News yourself.

ID: Yeah, um, as in outed as the reporter concealing his identity to conserve the integrity of this interview, not in the sex with dudes kind of outing. So you can breathe easy, mom.

B: But your name, specifically, has been linked up to your nom de plume. And in this Google age, that means it’s out. Period.

ID: Right. I’m Nic Wilson. Way back when, I wrote for a culture and arts magazine called Dangerous Ink, before it went tits up, and I liked that those initials reversed garnered ID, short for identification, and I thought it was clever, in an interview about Superman’s secret identity, that that would be my handle. That’s pretty much it, in a nutshell.

B: But doesn’t it feel good to get that out in the open?

ID: Not really. I don’t like being the subject. It feels icky.

B: Yep. Pretty much.

ID: Kind of makes me rethink that whole wanting to be notable thing. But how do you like sitting on the other side of the table? Being the bad guy, or at least playing devil’s advocate?

B: It’s kind of fun.

ID: I’ve created a monster, haven’t I?