The Matchman“I’m having a really wonderful time, Scott,” the blonde girl in the polka-dotted dress said. The two of them were having coffee at a small place in the East Village with outdoor seating. It was a pleasant summer evening, cool and lucid. The moisture in the air turned blue as the sun prepared to descend and the streetlights came on.
“Me too,” Scott Suffix said as he sipped. “I hope you liked the movie.”
“Oh, I just adore movies about superheroes\!” she gushed. “But I’ll bet that the average super-hero’s career isn’t anywhere near as exciting as being a research chemist uptown\! Good-looking and brains too\! My, your parents must have done a stellar job of raising you properly\!” She had a slight Southern accent that greatly enhanced her overall attractiveness. She had moved to the city six months ago from North Carolina to further her stage career. She had met Scott through a personal dating service. Their dinner-and-a-movie first date had so far exceeded her expectations enormously. They were both enjoying themselves.
“Well, it’s funny that you should bring that up,” said Scott. “My family environment as a child wasn’t exactly all peaches and cream. My parents fought a great deal. Somehow, I got the impression that they were disappointed in me as a person. Children are so fatally easily to impress with a sense of inferiority, whether it be physical or mental. Neither of them actually said or did anything directly to me, but…”
“Oh, you poor thing\!” she exclaimed, reaching across the small café table to hold his hand. She was genuinely, Southernly, sympathetic. The words welled up out of him like water.
“My father and mother used to have these huge shouting matches on a regular basis. My father would storm out, slamming the door behind him, and not come back home for two or three days running. In the meantime my mother would cry her eyes out, and as a little kid I had no means by which to comfort her. What do you do when one of the two omnipotent characters in your early life is revealed to have a weakness after all? How do you help those more powerful than yourself? I dreamed of becoming powerful enough to help them both. My mother, and my father too.
“Especially my father. I worshipped him. He was big, powerful, and, when he wanted to be, very loving and attentive. I used to watch him in the mornings, when he went to work, and in the evenings when he returned from the office. I idolized that man.”
He paused, briefly, as if temporarily unable to articulate his story. She turned her soft gaze upon him, as if urging him to continue. She bathed him in her quiescent understanding. He went on:
“Well, my father drank a lot of coffee. Somehow I managed to conceive the idea that in some peculiar way the act of drinking coffee” - he took another sip from the cup currently at hand - “was what made him what he was. I mean, here is this hot, black, potent bitter beverage - one that no child could possibly enjoy upon their first taste of it, I might add - that only adults are allowed to drink. What better explanation for my father’s qualities, to a child’s mind? I used to watch him drink several cups every morning before he went to work. I memorized the routine. I gave the coffee maker careful study. I knew, in theory, what to do.
“And then came the day of the last great fight. My father left the house in a rage, never, ultimately, to return again. My mother lay sprawled in the front hallway, sobbing at the door. I knew at once what I had to do. I knew how to gain the power to bring my parents back together and to make them love each other once again. I could restore them, somehow. I could restore them and everyone else in the world. I could bring people together. No one need ever be lonely or miserable ever again. I got a chair, put it against the kitchen counter, and began to fill the coffee maker with water.
“Unfortunately, I was a bit hazy on the details of operating the coffee maker. While I refilled the water reservoir, I neglected to put in fresh coffee grounds. The thing had been sitting idle for a week -- there had been significant domestic disturbance, and my father had been reduced to getting his coffee at the office -- and the used grounds that were still in it must have been, in fact were, thickly coated with an astonishingly varied and luxurious garden of molds in several bright primary colors. So when I turned the coffee maker on, the resultant pot of “coffee” was not indeed coffee at all, but a sort of mystical elixir that was the result of filtering boiling water through all of these unknown growths. It was a fluid so rare and quintessentially vile that it did not even a have a name. But what did I know? To me it was coffee, to make me potent and adult. I poured myself a steaming cup of this nameless fluid.
“And I drank it.”
She looked across the table at him, having let go his hand and leaned back in her chair. She had no idea what to make of this unsolicited detail in his story of childhood. She had never heard anything like it before. Mixed waves of pity and nausea rolled across her face like beach break. “So what happened?” she asked softly. “Did you throw up?”
Scott sighed and shook his head. “No, not exactly. There was a soft ‘poof’ sound and I found myself turned into a muscular super-hero named Matchman with super-powers including, but not limited to, incredible strength, a degree of personal invulnerability, the ability to fly, and my MatchSpider Radar that allows me limited personal telepathic and precognitive ability. That’s where this whole anecdote was going. I’m trying to tell you that I really am a super-hero. That’s why I took you to that movie tonight. To gauge your reaction to the genre, and to see if you could possible find it in your heart to care for a real-life ‘caped crusader.’”
An uncomfortable silence descended across the café table. Scott didn’t know what to say. She had an expression on her face that indicated that she thought that either he was deliberately handing her a very peculiar line, or actually believed the nonsense that he was communicating. She looked at him carefully for a full minute as she made her decision, so completely that the process was almost audible in the warm air of their ruined summer evening. Then she rose abruptly from the table. “You are a card-carrying lunatic,” she hissed briefly. “And if you ever call me again, I’ll slap a restraining order on you so fast that it’ll make your head spin.” She grabbed her purse and sashayed out of the outdoor café area, her polka-dotted dress swimming before his eyes.
Scott put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands, and sighed. He wondered if perhaps his timing was off, if he should wait, say, until the second or third date to divulge his personal odyssey of coffee and supernatural powers. He wondered why, of all the people that his powers could bring together, he himself remained alone, outside of the scope of his MatchSpider Radar. He wondered if other, more famous super-heroes had this same problem.