Wiretap - Real Life Superheroes

Episode Date: July 27, 2020

Kids share their fan letters to Batman and WireTap's go-to party animal, Cookie, reveals her favourite superhero.

My group chat thinks I'm the smart one, but I have a cheat code. I take 10 minutes each morning and listen to World Report. Knowing what's happening in the world helps me feel connected and make better informed decisions. But endless doom scrolling is not my idea of fun. So I just listen to World Report on my commute, get informed, and get on with my day. World Report, the day's top stories in 10 minutes, wherever you get your podcasts. is a CBC podcast. You're listening to Wiretap with Jonathan Goldstein on CBC Radio 1.

Today's episode, Real Life Superheroes, in which a masked man battles crackheads, a young boy fights J-Walkers, and Cookie Defends Santa Claus. Hello? Hey, Mom. Johnny? What's the matter? Nothing's the matter. I was just calling to say hi. Oh, hi, honey. How are you? I'm fine.

Good. Actually, I was also calling to ask you something. What? I'm doing a show this week on real-life superheroes. Okay. And I wanted to know what you think is sort of a real-life hero. A real-life hero does what he has to do every day and doesn't complain. Just does what he has to do.

What's expected of him and what he knows is right. It sounds like you define being a hero as something a little less flashy than being someone who's in a pair of tights and cape. Yes, that's right. I think my father was a hero. He went to work over 50 years at a job that he didn't really like. He just did it because he had to feed his family. Yeah.

That's a hero. When you're able to put somebody else's needs and feelings ahead of your own. Uh-huh. In the same way, I mean, do you think of Dad as a hero? Or let me put this another way. Have you ever seen Dad behave heroically in order to protect your honor? No, I haven't. No?

Do you think he'd see it differently? I don't know. It's interesting. You'll have to ask him. Is he at home right now? Buzzie! Pick up the phone! Buzz! Hello? Hello?

Dad? Hi, Johnny. I was just talking with Mom about what it means to be a hero. Yeah. And I was asking her if she could think of any moments where you kind of acted heroically in order to defend her honor. And she couldn't remember any. I never really had any opportunity to actually defend our honor when she was, you know... Nah, in restaurants when I have an argument with the waitress, he sawed with the waitress.

Oh, here we go. You know, your mother can get very aggressive with it would have waited. And I know these poor people work very hard. And he reprimands me in public, and I don't want to say. They didn't repriman. You do. Oh, yeah. I say, you know, cool it.

But maybe he's maybe like a real hero. He's just on the side of right of justice. That's a thought. He should be on my side no matter what. Just like my father, the hero, the superhero is always on the side of justice, but with masks and Unitards. Reporter Joshua Baerman recently spent some time with a real-life superhero, a man who's dedicated himself to becoming as much as possible, like one of those do-gooders who inhabit the pages of comic books. But living in the real world, it turns out, means how. having to do battle with a lot more than

supervillains. It means having to contend with all the trappings of being a mere mortal, while at the same time doing your best to become a legend. I've been sent by Rolling Stone magazine to Orlando, Florida, to report on a real-life

superhero who calls himself Master Legend. Master Legend here, International Real-Life superhero. After a quick phone chat, we agree to meet, and now we're driving around town in the 1986 Nissan with the missing rear window that Master Legend calls the battle truck. Shouting above the engine, he proudly explains to me his costume. His arms are covered with soccer shin guards that have been painted

silver to match his mask. It won't stop a bullet, he says, but it will deflect knives. Master Legend was one of the first real-life superheroes, but in recent years a growing network of similarly homespun Caped Crusaders has emerged. True to comic book tradition, each real-life superhero has his own aesthetic. The eye takes his cue from the primordial era of Detective Comics, prowling Mountain View, California in a trench coat, goggles, and black fedora. And the superhero known simply as superhero is a former wrestler from Clearwater, Florida, who wears red and blue spandex. Then there's Master Legend's very own crime-fighting group, the Justice Crusaders, made up of men like The Image.

genius Jim, and Master Legend's brother, The Secret Weapon. A few real-life superheroes are outright delusional, but the community's mainstream, which includes Master Legend, is made up of people you might call functionally eccentric. They know it's strange, but this is the form their dedication takes. To boil it all down, I'd basically like to destroy evil wherever I see it. Anything that wants to hurt the innocent, that's what Master Legend doesn't like. Evil can never win.

Good will always prevail. Master Legend is not an orphan from a distant dying sun or the mutated product of a gamma-ray experiment gone awry. He is not an eccentric billionaire moonlighting as a crime fighter. He's just an ordinary guy, albeit one driven to create an alter ego, assemble an elaborate costume to go with it, and dedicate himself to.

and making the world a better place. In 1954, psychologist Frederick Wortham described this state of mind as the Superman complex. Children, Wortham wrote in his bestseller, Seduction of the Innocent, were being fooled by the false dream of comics into developing an unhealthy sense of responsibility, a constant need to save others. With 100 million comic books printed a week, Wortham testified before Congress that a generation of real-life comic book characters was in the works. And 50 years later, this prophecy may have just come true.

Time to head into the shadows, cries Master Legend, his long, unruly hair flowing behind him as we cruise along through the streets of Orlando. If there existed a Master Legend issue number one, it would flash back 26 years to his origin story in New Orleans, where the young hero's identity was forged in the crucible of childhood trauma. My mama and daddy were bad people, he says. Through them, I saw how cruel the world can be. As a young kid, I was badly abused.

And my daddy was a Ku-Kat clan man. And that was when Master Legend and the young kid knew that being a grown-up didn't always make you right. When young Master Legend found some comics in the neighbor's trash one day, they became his blueprint. In second grade, he made himself a rudimentary. costume with a t-shirt, magic marker, and some old shoelaces, which he donned while protecting classmates from the school bully. There was a bully, and he was just beaten up on kids and punching him in the stomach and pouring milk on their heads, and so I had to figure out a way to fight the enemy but not get in trouble.

And so I made myself a mask and jumped out into the crowd and got him, beat him up good. And he was laying there, bloody nose and all that. I ran away. I never found out who the mask. man was. Years later, as a 16-year-old street busker, Master Legend was playing guitar in the French Quarter when a purse snatcher appeared.

Master Legend instinctively tore after him through the alleys where he finally retrieved the purse. The next day, Master Legend's grandma ran across a headline in the newspaper. Masked Man Saves Woman, it read. And by then, he says, the legend was born. For someone whose profession depends on a veil of secrecy, Master Legend makes quite a conspicuous impression. When we stop in at a local pizzeria, the cashier giggle slightly, as Master Legend orders a beer.

Master Legend thanks you, he says, reaching out a gauntleted hand for his can of beer. After a few more beers, Master Legend announces that he must attend to some business back at the Secret Hideout. Unfortunately, I am not allowed to join him. As we head downstairs, he stops to thank the staff. If any trouble arises, he says, you can count on me. The next day, I gingerly convinced Master Legend to let me visit his secret hideout. He gives me directions. Or rather, he gives me directions to a nearby liquor store,

and in one last step of cloak and dagger maneuvering, he pilots me the final few blocks in the battle truck. Compared to the Fortress of Solitude, with its alien zoo or the Bat Caves, Techno-enhanced Crime Lab, his is a modestly appointed super headquarters. Master Legend lives with his roommate, a middle-aged man he refers to as his sidekick, the ace, in a dilapidated clapboard house in a seedy neighborhood. In the back of his home is a workshop, a converted garage where he develops various weapons. I have the iron fist that I break the cinder blocks with, and I have my cannon, the master block,

which is all-purpose cannon, I can shoot all kinds of things out of it. It's like ice grenades. I shoot them out of the cannon, and then they explode on contact. As the real-life superheroes see it, the fact that they can't project energy bolts or summon force fields only adds to the purity of their commitment. Their heroism, in a sense, derives from their lack of powers. What they have instead is the power to craft themselves anew

as warriors in the fight against crime. But it's hard to know how much of their lives. But crime-fighting accounts are true. Some of Master Legend's tales are plausible, like retrieving a friend's stolen money, while others are quite outlandish. There was one time I was fighting a big-time child molesterer in a giant. It was like fighting Paul Bunton. But I fought him and his gang of crack kids. I wasn't going to let him get any more kids.

When I got word on that, I assembled the Justice Crusaders, and we went over there to handle some business. It's easy to be skeptical about some of these tales. For one thing, doesn't it seem like you'd have to be one charismatic child molester to attract an entire gang of crackheads to do your bidding? But Master Legend assures me he has in fact helped put a few criminals behind bars. And one of his most prized possessions is a framed certificate of commendation from the Orange County Sheriff's Department. For the time he and a superhero called the Disabler

snapped into action after Hurricane Charlie, helping to clear the roads and rescue people from the wreckage. We were on the news and everything, Master Legend says, and the police recognized what we did. Since then, Master Legend claims that he has developed a police contact on the inside, his very own Commissioner Gordon. Saving the world, of course, requires personal sacrifice, and the first casualty of the superhero lifestyle is career advancement.

Unlike Peter Parker, Master Legend has no cover job. He can't hold down a 9-5, he says. because a life on the precipice of action means always being available to answer the call. I'll walk right out the door if someone needs me, he says with a laugh. So he gets by working odd jobs like tree trimming, roofing, and assisting the elderly. The second casualty of the lifestyle is emotional attachment. Few real-life superheroes have families, and those with women in their lives often find that their higher calling can cause rifts.

Master Legend has seen a lot of relationships go sour, starting with his wife who divorced him 10 years ago. It didn't last long. You know, things just didn't work out because I wasn't about to abandon what I do. An adventurous woman is what I'm looking for. There's some good female superheroes out there. There's a nice girl known as showstopper.

Then there's danger woman, you know. She's a nice lady. And, you know, there's a lot of them out there. But I haven't tried to put any moves on them or anything like that. I'm just taking a break. Just being Master Legend is all that matters to me. Being Master Legend means sacrificing his own happiness to help those who are less fortunate.

His last big mission was on Christmas Day last year. The battle truck was filled with supplies he'd bought. When he and the Justice Crusaders arrived on Skid Row, they were mobbed. Master Legend reckons that they gave something to every single homeless person in Orlando, toothbrushes, razors, soap, blankets, hand cleaner, canned goods. They even had a small supply of the good stuff, cigarettes, beer, and candy. Master Legend felt like he was holding a bottomless Christmas stocking, as he just kept reaching in for more goodies.

See, everyone needs to do their part, but I think people have this mentality that someone else is just going to do it. When they see somebody starving, there's a place that feeds them, you know, a person's starving right in front of you. They help them. You better jump into action. Well, that's the way I've always thought. But a lot of people, they just don't care.

They just don't tear one bit as long as the gravy's on their plate. Not me. I do what I can. For those, I can. We all want to be part of a better tomorrow, the superhero known as superhero once told me. And for that matter, a better today.

This may be the real reason Master Legend inhabits a never-ending comic book in his mind. This may be why he assigns everyone a character in the grand narrative of his life. Master Legend turns his roommate into a sidekick, his mechanic into Genius Jim, and his own brother into the secret weapon. And so the reality of Master Legend's hard life and tough circumstances is transmuted via secret decoder ring into a never-ending tale of heroic outsiders

overcoming the odds and vanquishing enemies. Being a real-life superhero means that Master Legend can get into his Nissan pickup and call it the battle truck. He can tape together a potato gun and call it the Master Blaster. He can stand in the porch light of a disintegrating clapboard house and behold a glorious clandestine citadel. And who are we to tell him otherwise? Okay, Super Friends, there's evil to fight. Master Legend must go now. So we finally found a podcast that speaks to you, pure bliss.

It's so good that when you finish the final episode, it leaves a hole in your heart and your schedule. What now? Personally, is here for you. It's a collection of true stories that explore what it means to be, well, human. The best part, there are six incredible seasons to dive into, with more on the way. Personally, get lost in someone else's life. Available now, wherever you personally get your podcasts. In 1966, Bill Adler published a collection of letters, mainly written by children, to Batman.

It's called Funniest Fan Letters to Batman. and it contains letters like this one, from Janice J. in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dear Batman, I think Robin the boy wonder is keen, but why does he always say things like holy popcorn, holy helmets, and holy Fourth of July? I'm not criticizing. I just want to know so I can explain to some of the smart Alex at school. Or this one, from a boy named Alex. Dear Batman, I would like to have the private number of your Batman, phone so I can call you if I have any trouble. I have three big brothers, and I always have

lots of troubles. The book is now out of print, and Bill Adler, the book's editor, wasn't feeling strong enough to talk, but I was able to get a hold of his son, Bill Adler, Jr. Batman was hopeful. I mean, Batman, you know, even back in the days of innocence, maybe kids knew about crime and they knew about war, and they would hear about these things. the bad man was the solution. And unlike today where maybe there are lots of different solutions, the kids could put all their hopes on a superhero. And Batman really stood out as something that you aspire to

or which holds hopes and dreams. Yeah, I mean, the superheroes of today don't seem quite as approachable. They seem sort of scary. Yeah, they are a little scary. In these letters, I mean, they're talking to Batman, you know, as they would to a friend. Right. You know, Batman, I think, was very accessible to kids,

partly because, and Robin, too, because anybody could be Batman, anybody could be Robin, unlike some of the other superheroes. Batman was just a regular person, and so kids really relate to that. And in the book, one of the letters are from you, right, when you were a kid. Let's see, I must have been,

11, 12, roughly? Can you read it for us? Sure, because this is radio so no one can see me blush. Dear Batman, I've got a good idea to improve your show and get more popular. Someone should discover your identity and then die. Also, you should make your show scary by a criminal making a robot and injure you. If you do these things, it would make your show a lot of laughs. I'm a fan of yours.

Billy Adler. I can see sitting down and actually writing that letter in my own kid's terrible handwriting. I wanted to be Batman. I had my cape. I think I had my belt, too. I only wish it fit me still. Even today, when I see something having to do with Batman, and I get sort of drawn back into my childhood again.

I mean, I feel myself partly being a little boy, which is a really nice feeling. Dear Batman, how are you? I'm fine. How is Robin? I hope he's fine. Write me a nice letter and tell me how you both are. I am eight years old, and I worry about.

a lot. Alvin H. Topeka, Kansas. Dear Batman, your television program is keen. The greatest thing is your theme song. Could you please tell me which opera your theme song is from? Yours truly, Barbara L. Long Beach, California. Dear Batman, have you ever considered finding a bat girl and teaming up? I'd like to apply for the job. I'm enclosing a snapshot of me. Don't mind the braces and the glasses. To look at me, you may not think I make a nice appearance,

but that shouldn't bother you either. As Batgirl, I'd be wearing a mask, wouldn't I? Dear Batman, I sure envy you. Joker, the penguin, Mr. Frey's, Mr. Zero, and the Catwoman? You get to meet all the grades. Sincerely, Marge B. Dear Batman, how did you get the name Batman? Were you baptized with the name Batman?

I would like to change my name to Batman, but my mother isn't too keen about the idea. She likes my name. My name is Herman. Dear Batman, I think Robin is a living doll. Dear Batman, don't you think you should be? should give the Joker a second chance?

Dear Batman, please send me a Batman suit to wear the church. Dear Batman, I would give anything to have a lock of your hair for my scrapbook. Dear Batman, I like everything on the Batman TV show, except the Catwoman. I hate girls. Dear Batman, quick, send me a bad rope. I'm planning my escape from this place. Dear Batman, I hate crime just like you, and I fight it whenever I can. If I see somebody jaywalk on the street, I holler at them.

Go back! Go back! Maybe you can tell me other ways I can continue my fight against crime. Dear Batman, I want to be just like Robin. I imitate him all the time. I say Holly Sukhattash and Golly Gee and lots of things like that. They call me Boy Wonder of my school. Your pal, Frank C. Dear Batman, you're better looking in comic books than you are on TV.

I think you better get a new makeup man. Dear Batman, here are the names of the big crooks in the Bronx. Jerry Feldman, Mike Harris, Stanley Wolfe, David Parris, Paul Hyman. They are all in my class. Get them. Dear Batman, do you think that you could make little rubber people of Batman and Robin? I like rubber people better than real people. Dear Batman, please send me to you.

all the necessary instructions for building a Batmobile in my spare time. P.S. Please also send me all the parts and gas. Dear Batman, I would give anything to have you call me on your bat phone. I live all alone, and I'm a widow. Nobody ever calls me except the wrong number. Sincerely, Mrs. Wilma M. Dear Batman, could you please get me the autographs of the Joker, the Penguin, or Mr. Freeze? I have autographs of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and lots of baseball players, but no autographs of crooks. Dear Batman, you have enriched all our lives, like Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Jonah Salk.

Sincerely Agnesty Dear Batman I only have one question Are you for real My favorite? My favorite superhero Simple, Aquaman Because

Think about it, he can drink as much as he wants If I always think about it, if I could be Aquaman, man, I would live in vodka. And then you could just, like, move and drink at the same time. I don't know that he's drinking. He could breathe water. Yeah. Oh, you're telling me fish don't ever get thirsty because they live in the water?

I would be Aquaman living in vodka. And then I would not have to always have to go get vodka because I would be living in vodka. I'd be surrounded by it. I've had vodka gills. Vodka gills. Mm-hmm. But, I mean, you'd have a hard time fighting crime if you were constantly drunk.

But if everybody else around me also lived in vodka, there would be no crime because everyone would be too drunk. There'd be a lot of making out. But, okay, so let's say this living in vodka plan wouldn't work. Let's say he would just kill even a superhero. Mm-hmm. What other superhero would you want to be? Like, not Wonder Woman?

Santa Claus. Sorry? Santa Claus? He's very powerful, and I like that he only works, like, once a year. Right, though he's not, I mean, technically he's not a superhero. What are you talking about? Of course he's a superhero. He's like the King of Retribution.

He keeps a list of everyone is bad. Then he goes down the chimney, and he kills him every year. That's why his suit is red. Santa Claus, right? Yeah, I think maybe you're confusing him with, like, the Punisher or even the... He leaves coal. What do you think happens if you eat coal? You think you're going to live a happy life?

No, you die. He flies all around with eight reindeer, all of whom are so quiet that you can't even hear them when they land on your roof. I remember last year I stayed up until dawn, and I never heard the reindeer hooves on my roof, not once. Wait, last year. This year I'm going to also stay up. Well, I mean, Cookie, you don't, you don't still believe in Santa Claus. No, I mean, I know he's gone. He probably tried like 100 years ago easily.

Tradition continues. Every time he turned around, there's like a guy dressed up like Santa. Right. He exists in so many different forms. And every year I make out with one. On Wiretap today, you heard Buzzendina Goldstein, Joshua Bearman, Bill Adler Jr., Laura Cookie Craft, and Master Legend. To help Master Legend in the fight against evil, visit Justice Crusaders.webs.com. Special thanks to the Wiretap Girl and Boy Wonders for reading the letters to Batman.

Wiretap is produced by Jonathan Goldstein with Mira Bertwintanick and Crystal Duhame. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca.ca slash podcasts.