DIAL H FOR....HERO?

Copyright Pike


The other night – I forget which night; it may have been a Tuesday - while watching Batman Begins for the umpteenth time, I had an epiphany. Well, two actually. The first was that I needed some new shirts for cocktail hour – the pink craze for men being so over.

The second was this: my home city, my beat, the gorgeous, famous ‘city that never completely wakes up’, Cape Town – had no super-heroes. Not a single caped crusader, web slinger or alien super being watches over this seaside metropolis! Given the crime stats, I decided the situation needed immediate attention.
I mean, this was a serious gap in the local market.
So I called up my old friend Shane, whose career of choice is operating a comics library out of his parents’ garden shed in Pinelands, and I said ‘Shane: you’re 32. It’s time to get serious about your future; and have I got a proposal for you...’

We stayed up until 10pm that night, brainstorming this grand plan to bring real superheroes to South Africa and listening to the Mighty Mouse theme tune on repeat. Shane knitted, sewed, cut and pasted all sorts of stretchy threads we had picked up at MOTH; I wrote up our mission statement and assigned roles to each of us, within our about-to-be-born super duo: (Me: captain, Shane: sidekick).

The next morning, we were ready – but was the world ready for us? I stood resplendent in my gumboots, green tights and creaking wing harness. No longer was I Gareth Pike, everyman sub-editor at Design Life. I had become something greater, something purer; I was.... Power Pigeon! Squinting in the morning sun, I looked over at my faithful lackey, Shane. He peered back at me through slightly foggy swimming goggles. His arms stuck out in a T-shape, due to the too-small wetsuit we had filched and adapted from my brother’s room. Nevertheless, with giant superglue squirters stuck to his gloved palms and booted feet, and his detachable, radio-controlled attack tail trailing behind him, he looked every inch the hero. No longer was he Shane, mall trawler, junk mail collector and comic freak. He had become…The Gecko!

My powers would be, of course, to rain winged doom down from the skies on unsuspecting prey, in the form of (possibly) mud pies.
I also had intentions to train my namesakes, Cape Town’s neighbourhood flocks of troublesome pigeons, to become my private army and messenger service. O.K., so I couldn’t fly more than about 10m yet (depending on the Cape Doctor), but it was only a matter of fitting a workable pedal system to my wing harness.

While I ruled the skies, my trusty sidekick would work down amongst the streets themselves, combing alleys and sidewalks for would-be wrongdoers. His powers would be to stick to the sides of buildings using his superglue pads. For as long as possible.
He could also detach his tail in a situation of immediate danger.

Straightening my giant fibreglass Pigeon head, I turned again to Shane and said, with an emotional quaver in my voice, “So my trusty inferior ego-booster, shall we begin our mission to keep the Cape safe for pensioners, fashion critics and night club owners?”
He said, “What? I can’t hear you at all inside that mask, it’s like just hrrrmmmbrr rreereeamog.” So I decided to lead by example instead and leaped from the front porch - to land in a dusty feathered heap on the neighbours’ bed of succulents.
South Africa’s age of heroes had begun.

Now crime-rattled citizens could sleep in peace, knowing that evil would be thwarted whenever I, Power Pigeon, and my trusted sidekick, The Gecko, were on patrol (including most evenings, apart from when Amazing Race is on… or Monday nights, when The Gecko has pottery class).

We were ready for destiny. But before setting off on our first patrol of Cape Town’s tourist-thronged environs, The Gecko and I decided to log onto Google and www.superherohype.com, just to note down any useful pointers for novice superheroes. After twenty minutes of terse mouse wrestling, we happened upon the following, which we printed out and stuck on the wall of Hero HQ:

FIVE GOLDEN RULES OF SUCCESSFUL HEROICS
By The B.E.E.Keeper

1. Choose identities that won’t date: Both Dazzler (roller-skating disco heroine) and Firestorm the Nuclear Man were out of date by the early-90’s.

2. If you are allergic to anything – nuts, cat fur, Kryptonite – tell nobody, because inevitably the next super villain to turn up will be a former best friend who now owns a nut factory or cat shelter.
3. Be wary of team members who secretly wish to usurp power from their leaders (I fixed one beady eye on The Gecko at this point, who was studiously trying to detach the computer’s mouse from his left sticky-pad).

4. Maintain a reliable pension investment; you may be invincible but you’re not immortal. Life insurers may demand a higher premium from you due to your potentially hazardous lifestyle. Rather tell them you’re a town planner.

5. Get yourself a sponsor who can fund superhero cars, rockets and gadgets. Unless you are the orphaned heir to an industrial fortune.

A tiny light bulb blinked on in my mind at point number 5.
A sponsor...yes...cars, rockets. Gadgets! My 1983 Ford Escort hardly qualified as a hero cruiser; nor did Shane’s (sorry, The Gecko’s) skateboard. “Gecko”, I said to the wetsuited shape now clinging precariously to the ceiling, “we need to get ourselves a sponsor!”

He dropped headfirst into a pile of my spare feathers (he was still working on his landings) and said, “I know, I know – the cell phone companies. They must have loads of cash! These days the Sunday papers are always full of cell phone ads! They own half of Nigeria!”

I considered for a moment. A cell phone company would certainly be a useful sponsor for our communication devices, but we also needed fast cars / babe magnets, an Earth-orbiting satellite HQ and open access to the United Nations briefing room. We needed a lot of backing from big business – and there was just one way to get it:

We would have to thwart the schemes of a villain so nefarious, so feared, that the world would forever afterwards flock to our doorstep with film offers, sponsorship packages and free spandex…even in a recession. We needed, in short, an arch-nemesis, and my short-tempered neighbour with all the BUMP CD’s and the mega-wattage car sound system just didn’t cut it.
While The Gecko settled down to watch Catwoman once again (he had been outraged at its unfair Oscar snub) a cunning plan began to hatch in the nether regions of my birdbrain…. clearly, to get any sort of financial windfall, we needed to


A) Save the world (or at least Milnerton) from an
evil super-villain.

That was it really; point A). That’s all we needed to do. Problem was, super-villains were looking pretty thin on the ground.
The dastardliest individual we had come across thus far was The Gecko’s mom’s boyfriend…this Terminator-like real estate agent called Rikus, who was hell-bent on selling off Shane’s childhood home for a fortune. Clearly we would have to cast the net wider than our immediate location. We’d have to go…south? Too wet. Nothing but ocean. North? Namibia held little promise of action. Or…inland!
Surely somewhere beyond Obs, in the wilds of fruit and wine country, we’d be able to find some sort of fiend, up to something ungoodly. It would also give us a chance to do some good trout fishing near Elgin, before we got down to serious city-based gritty heroics. After all, all work and no play…
Preparing to see, for the first time, the world beyond the stinky towers on the N2, we dashed over to Shane’s house, sweet-talked his old lady, grabbed the keys and soon we were headed out of the fragrant armpit of Cape Town.

After an uneventful trip, apart from some difficulty getting my wing-harness into the back of Shane’s mother’s VW, The Gecko and I found ourselves meandering among fuzzy-felt green hills and herds of grazing sheep. The gritty cityscape was behind us and we could – aaah! - breathe in that fresh air and even, should we wish it, stop to smell the flowers.

However, it was not long before we espied our first crime-fighting opportunity, and never ones to shy from the dangers of combat, we screeched to a halt and sallied forth in a flurry of wings and sticky pads to confront – a goat.
A very intrepid and malicious goat that had patently escaped the confines of its field and was now munching contentedly on a canvas banner rigged between two trees, which now read Fairy Glen, ceramics, wind chimes & dreamcatc- the last part of the wording having been relegated to the digestive tract of said goat.

“Halt!” I cried, fixing the beast with my dinosaur-like glare. The Gecko meanwhile, had circled around to try and catch the monster unawares from behind.

Not surprisingly, the goat declined to stand down, instead lowering its head to me in a most threatening manner. The next ten minutes were a blur of confusion, as this malcontent, this shirker of the law, proceeded to thrust and buck and kick at both The Gecko and myself, as we ducked and dived and gradually, with much puffing and yelling, wrestled it to the rich earth of the Appletiser Valley.

It was then that we were startled to notice two people staring at us from the edge of Fairy Glen’s dusty in-road; one a thin bespectacled young man with what I believe are termed ‘dreadlocks’ in the vernacular, and a pretty woman in her late twenties, wearing some sort of tie-dyed outfits.

“You there!” I called out, over the bleating of our defeated enemy, “Are you in league with this villain? Be you heinous?”

The man scratched his head and said, “No dude, I’m Terry and this is my girlfriend, Charlotte. That there is our pet goat, Cockroach. He like...eats anything.”

I looked over at The Gecko, his black stealth suit somewhat sullied as he leaned down on the haunches of the still-energetic goat.

“In that case, I apologise for the disturbance!” I boomed in my best hero voice. “We were under the impression that this fellow intended damage to your property! ...Gecko: release the captive!”

It was with some relief that my partner in anti-crime leaped back from the possessed creature, only to have it rear up and charge him down until he sought refuge in the boughs of a nearby apple tree, his sticky pads scaling him quickly to a safer height.

“Dude”, said the man, “those are some serious outfits. Are you like...angels? Or demons? Are you with the DA?”
He turned slowly to his female companion at this point. “Baby...what was in that tea?”

It took some time to explain to the bemused couple that we were in fact Cape Town’s one and only crime-fighting hero duo, at present on a team-building exercise in the wild.
Then followed another half an hour of coaxing the angry goat away from The Gecko’s tree and off to its pen, which it shared with two horses and what seemed to be a type of Llama. Declining the couple’s invitation to herbal tea and a peace pipe, The Gecko instead decided to go and sulk in the car. This sort of behaviour, you see, is why I unanimously elected myself leader of our outfit.
I mean, really.

The young couple was most accommodating, even going so far as inviting us to erect our temporary HQ in their rambling back yard.
This we did, with discarded planks and various materials which were scattered in a generous way about the back porch of Fairy Glen.

By nightfall, I had gently coaxed my side-kick out of the car, and led him down the drive to our new base of operations. This journey was disturbed only by a loud bray from behind a nearby shrub - and the Gecko’s resultant scream. We had not yet learned of Fairy Glen’s resident donkey, Stompie.

As the moon slowly rose into the sky between wheeling constellations, The Gecko and I sat down to roast some marshmallows over our blazing campfire, brainstorm our further exploits in the hinterland and for a short while, just enjoy being off-duty heroes on holiday.

From Terry and Charlotte’s den came only the sound of tinkling chimes, the melodies of Cat Stevens and some sort of very fragrant smoke. The brief sense of calm we were enjoying would ultimately prove to be, alas, so to speak, very much the calm before the storm. You see, unbeknownst to us, something truly evil was at that moment heading for Cape Town; a true villain. Someone who would, upon our glorious return, prove to be our greatest challenge.

All too soon, the Gecko and I found ourselves barreling back into the burbs, with nothing but a dream catcher, some guinea fowl feathers and a crate of Panicking Dassie Pale Ale, to keep the holiday memories alive.
Not a single super-villain in our possession. Not that we had looked too hard. And we had vanquished one times evil goat.
After unpacking, the Gecko and I immediately donned utility belts and walkie-talkies, and split up to ensconce ourselves in our new crime look-outs: The Gecko on top of his mother’s roof, and I, Power Pigeon, perched precariously up a nearby fir tree, oblivious to the hoots and jeers from disrespectful local school children passing by. Heroism means being noble in the face of ridicule. Like Chuck Norris. And of course, Cape Town, unlike New York, or even London (Captain Britain – heard of him?), was not used to seeing brilliantly spandexed, muscular demi-gods watching over their well-being.
That morning, I suppose I was expecting the usual routine…maybe a cat rescue here, a jaywalker cautioned there…you know; just another day. But fate, that slippery trout, had other ideas. We had wished for a villain and maybe this was it…
I was awoken out of my pleasant torpor by the sudden ‘bip – bip!’ of my walkie-talkie. The Gecko’s voice was strained:



‘Uh, captain – you better come have a look at this. Over?’ I dashed down the tree, vaulted Gecko’s mom’s hedge, evaded the growling jack Russell, ‘Muisvoel’, and heaved myself up onto the roof. Gecko handed me the binoc's. It was with amazement that I viewed the apparition hovering above central Cape Town: a huge blue and green blimp, with a massive legend emblazoned upon it:
“Sergeant Cellphone touring South Africa April 2009!
The Hoff in support.
Proudly brought to you by Ashanticom!”
I sighed. How could this be? Sergeant Cellphone is, as any geek will tell you, the world’s greatest ever super hero, a Swede blessed with the power to literally surf the radio waves between any two cell phones worldwide, in seconds. Having hip network Ashanticom behind him as official sponsor, he could also probably boast the entire island of Jamaica as his personal HQ, three stealth bombers converted to flying operational bases, and a fan club numbering in the millions.
There was simply no way to compete with this sort of mega-popularity. How were the Gecko and I ever to win the hearts of the public, and the deep pockets of the city council, when they had the megastars of the hero world to drool at? Seeing that blimp hanging over us, like a big fat question, was an immediate wake-up call.
We immediately staged an emergency hero summit on the Gecko’s mom’s back porch. “Gecko, I said: the time has come to face facts. We have no sponsors. Our budget is in the red. No one’s heard about us, after hours of derring-do. And we don’t even have a super-villain to fight! It’s time to call it quits!”
With that, I flung my fearsome Pigeon mask to the ground, where it looked up at me in mute incomprehension. After shaking my cohort’s hand fiercely with one regretful claw, I marched promptly out of the door, afraid to look back and see the disappointment in young Gecko’s bulging eyewear.
I walked home, my wing harness bumping against the parking meters, through a golden sunset broken only by the vast, slowly drifting shadow of Ashanticom’s blimp. Then suddenly, a call for help, echoing down Lansdowne Road. And again. I stopped. Turned. Sighed.
Then, resigned to the specter of a life of unrecognized greatness, I clicked on my walkie-talkie. “Power to Gecko. Power to Gecko. Alpha to Tango. Look…sorry about that. Bring my Pigeon head. Cape Town needs us, my friend. It just doesn’t know it yet!”
Meanwhile, at the same time, in a valley nearby, in a time of chaos, not far away, etc etc. – a voice cackled in the darkest, deepest chamber of the Koeberg Nuclear Reactor…no one heard it but the quarks and nano…thingies – but it cackled nonetheless. Those who had been lobbying for alternative energy were about to get a nasty surprise…
And how do I know this, given that I am not Unguru the Holistic Headman? A little bird told me. A pigeon.