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The Dark Avenger Begins - Chapter 3
I could have avenged parking my entire career and been
happy. I could have remained an anonymous do-gooder with the power of a towing
company, freeing up reserved spaced for the tired, broke, aggravated masses. It
would have been a good life, a quiet life. I sometimes wonder if it would have
been a better life.
The chance for life died with the beginning of my senior year. The garage gig
was slowing down; my rep had grown. DCU students knew "Parking
Services" had stepped up towing violators. They knew it cost nearly $1500
to get a vehicle back from Vinny the Towing Guy. They stopped stealing spaces.
Most nights I was lucky if I could find three or four violators, down from the
twenty night days of my sophomore year.
The biggest garage excitement during my last year at Duke City University came
when I saved the Songbird from her attacker. You remember Songbird from the
bloated, overwrought third-person narration at the beginning, right? She was
attacked and I saved her. It is the only time in the history of my career where
I let a punk and a mark see my face. I was in black jeans and a black t-shirt,
and I had a black knit cap, but it was before the mask. Before the bunny.
Damnit, that bloated narration's fucking with my head. What was I talking
about? The suit. Right. The suit. The man. The legend.
Crap.
Anyway. We were seniors and still sharing the suite with Ivan. I still didn't
like him. The dude just grated. Every semester was a different affectation:
hippie, hipster, hip-hopper. At the time, I didn't get it, and I didn't get his
compulsion to join every esoteric club and student organization on campus: He
was secretary of the Decomposing Languages League, vice chair of the Fencing
Fencers and student senate representative for the Junior Masonite and Linoleum
Symposium.
Afterwards, it became apparent he was angling for the student senate the entire
time. He joined groups and sat on boards so that one day, he could earn his way
into the senate without having to run for office. And when he was in office,
the first thing he did was...
get himself appointed to chair the residents colleges' Halloween Costume Ball,
the social highlight of the autumn quarter. And by "social highlight"
I mean "a quarter century tradition of drunk co-eds."
"He's been sitting on the Students Against Book Abuse board for three
years so he can run a dance?" Darin asked after Ivan made his grand
announcement. "I don't get it."
"Something's fishy," I agreed. "He doesn't speak Latin, he's not
in the architecture program, he doesn't actually own a book..."
"Just to get into the senate," Darin nodded. "Something's
up."
"Probably just his penis," I smirked. Ivan fancied himself a lady
killer; liked to brag he ran through girls like Kleenex. We didn't discuss it
again for a week.
Ivan didn't get the memo. "It's going to be awesome, man!" he said on
the Tuesday before the party. Darin and I were constructing a trebuchet out of
duct tape, a curtain rod, pizza boxes and a lemon lifted from the dining hall
and didn't bother paying him any attention.
"Listen to me," he said, picking up the roll of tape I was reaching
for and spinning it around on his finger. "This party? Is going to be so
awesome. Even two nerds like you are guaranteed to get laid."
"Really?" Darin said, keeping his attention focused on precision
super gluing. "And how can you make such a tempting promise?"
Ivan crouched so he could be eye-level with us. "Because I've got it all
planned, man. There is no way any guy who's willing isn't going to get any tail
this weekend."
We traded glances and shrugged. "Alright," I said, looking up.
"I'll bite. What's the plan, then?"
Ivan dug into his pocket and pulled out three wristbands. "And we're
looking at?" Darin prompted.
"All the dudes get the white bands," Ivan said. "And all the
dudes will be served in white cups. Now, one of the guys on my team has spent
the entire quarter going through the student I.D. database separating the hot
chicks from the dogs. Hot chicks get the red bands, because red equals hot.
Dogs get the blue bands."
He grinned and nodded, the smug bastard, waiting for our reaction and fawning,
but I couldn't piece together the idiot's thought process outside of, "So
the hot chicks get red cups and the 'ugly' girls get blue cups?"
Darin smacked the side of his face. "Ivan's worked out a devious scheme to
help dorks like us pick out the pretty girls."
"Thank God!" I shouted. We were both on our feet, bouncing up and
down. "I've been saved from the humiliation of liking a girl for her
personality! Praise be to Ivan!"
"PRAISE!" Darin shouted, toasting him with his Mountain Dew.
"Would you too nerds knock it off?" Ivan asked, kicking over our
engineering project with the toe of his Birkenstock. "It's not just the
armbands."
We paused, mid-hop. "It's not?"
"It's the cups," Ivan said. He sprawled across the couch, tucking his
arms behind his head and kicking up his feet. "Since April, I've been in
the lab with my buddy the biochem major, and we've been cooking up the greatest
party drug of all time. It's like the most potent dose of ecstasy combined with
the mind-wipe of a roofie. These chicks won't know what hit 'em."
"You're going to put these drugs in the cups?" Darin said. I couldn't
get past my rage to form sentences. "The red cups?"
"And the girls are going to go insane," Ivan nodded. "The Ivy's
will make these girls hot for some kind of action, any kind of action. All the
guys are guaranteed to score. And the best part is, when the girls wake up in
the morning, they won't remember a thing. A thing." He sat up and tousled
my hair. "So you just come in costume on Saturday and look for a girl with
a red wristband. Any girl. And don't forget to thank your Uncle Ivan."
"And what about the girls with blue cups?" I asked.
"Oh, they'll get it too," Ivan said. "But they'll be tagged with
the blue band, so a guy knows what he's getting into. It's all about the tail,
gentlemen." He bounded out of the suite, slamming the door behind him. I
frowned at Darin. He scowled at me. I thought of Songbird, and the look of
terror on her face when she thought a stranger was going to sexually assault
her and imagined how every woman on campus would feel when they woke up in a
strange place on Sunday morning. Afraid, with no memory of what happened.
Roaming parking garages didn't seem as important anymore. It wasn't important.
"So, Darin," I said as I began picking up the remains of our
trebuchet. "Feel like going to a party?"
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