from My Day with Geist
11:00 A.M.—GEIST’S HOUSE
My first impression as I sit down across from Geist is Gosh, this guy’s older than I imagined.
“I’m in the second half of my forties,” is the way he puts it.
We’re sitting at a table on a screened-in back porch on a pleasantly warm late-summer day. Reginald, a fairly average-looking guy who’s in pretty good shape for someone in the second half of his forties, is having a cigarette, a vice not too common among comic book superheroes. But then, apart from the costume, Geist doesn’t have all that much in common with the superheroes most people know. For one thing, he’s not rich. He’s firmly entrenched in the middle class, even complaining at times of the difficulty paying bills every month, putting him much more in the vein of Peter Parker than Bruce Wayne, Tony Stark, Oliver Queen, or any of the dozens of other superwealthy superheroes.
“I try to pay most of my Geisting expenses out of the Geist Fund,” he tells me. My first hint that he uses his chosen name in much the way the Smurfs used theirs. “How does Geist make money?” I ask.
“Well, I used to have a pretty extensive comic book collection, but I’ve sold most of them through the years to pay for Geist-stuff. I still have a few valuable ones, but they’re tucked away in a safe-deposit box. I’m trying not to touch those if I don’t have to.”
Reginald stubs out his smoke and leads me back into his house, a nondescript wooden single-story decorated with an eclectic mix of art deco pieces and African masks and weaponry, resulting in the general impression that Jay Gatsby and the Black Panther both went broke and had to move in together.
I take a seat on the couch and a black cat approaches me, warily.
“That’s Sheba. She bites.”
Undaunted, I extend a hand in friendship and immediately learn to listen when a person tells me something about his or her cat.
“Sheba…bad girl.”
“That’s okay,” I say. “You warned me.”
“I’m going to go Geist-up. Here’s my jacket, if you want to check it out while I’m getting ready,” he says, handing me a full-length coat in standard army-issue green. It feels like it weighs fifty pounds.
“I probably won’t be wearing it today since it’s so warm, but you can check out the pockets and get an idea of what I usually carry with me,” Reginald says, before heading into the other room to Geist himself.
I pick up the coat, but I’m hesitant to rifle through a stranger’s pockets. That’s usually frowned on in polite society, and if there’s one thing my mother taught me, it’s to be polite. After a few seconds, and for some reason checking to make sure Geist isn’t about to return and catch me doing exactly what he’s just explicitly told me to do, I slide a hand into a side pocket. It’s surprisingly deep, and after getting in about halfway up my forearm, I finally feel something not unlike a can of soup. I pull it out, and it’s a large smoke bomb. Green, of course. I soon discover there are a surprising number of pockets in the jacket, all filled with random superhero accoutrement: a slingshot with metal ammo; miniature strobe lights, a flashlight (with three settings: regular, laser pointer, and a very “we’re trying to simulate night vision on a budget” shade of green); more smoke bombs; and random bits of white paper, all blank.
Having exhausted the pockets, I inspect the outside of the jacket: there’s an aftermarket collar—large, round, and opalescent green—and a custom Geist patch sewn onto the chest.
“I had Jack make that for me,” my host says, returning from the bedroom more Geist than Reginald in his trademark green pants and striped green shirt.
“Jack?” I ask.
“He’s the guy who runs Hero Gear. He makes a lot of stuff for us,” he says, referring to the RLSH community.
Geist quickly crosses the living room and shuts the blinds before taking a seat across from me.
“I have some nosy neighbors,” he explains. “I don’t want anyone to see me Geisting-up.” As he speaks, he laces up his boots, then straps on a pair of leather bracers.
“Those look like you got them from—”
“A renaissance fair, yeah,” he finishes, displaying them proudly. “I’d been looking for something like this, and they were green, so it was perfect.”
The overall effect is slightly more patchwork than it seemed in the pictures I’d seen, but he still looks like someone with a mission. What that mission happens to be may be inscrutable from his appearance, but it’s a mission nonetheless, which is more than most people can say. I notice what appears to be three ropes with tennis ball-sized rubber balls on the ends hanging from his belt.
“Is that a bolo?” I ask.
“Bola,” he says, correcting me.
“Oh, is that how you say it?”
“Well, that’s what it said on the Internet.”
“No, you’re right. A bolo is one of those skinny ties like country singers wear.”
“Yeah, I’ve got some of those, too.”
“Nice.”
“Here, let me show you some other stuff,” he says, as he pulls out a cigarette pack and removes a small rectangular device from it.
“This is a minitaser. It’s designed to be hidden in a pack of cigs like this. I use it more in my civilian life. I make sure Suze uses it, too,” he adds, referring to his girlfriend, Susan.
“What was her reaction to your decision to do the superhero thing?”
“Oh, she was great. Totally along for the ride, just as long as I did it safely. She’s the one who insisted I take self-defense lessons first.”
“Like karate or something?”
“Kinda, but please don’t call me a martial arts expert. That’s happened twice already in different articles, and it’s not true. If I was, I probably wouldn’t need this,” he says, putting down the taser and picking up a large black nightstick. “It’s a stun baton.”
He pushes a button on the weapon’s handle, and wicked-looking blue arcs crackle to life between two metal nubs on the end of the club.
“Sweet.”
“Yeah,” Geist says, “now what else?…Oh yeah, the glasses.” He pulls out a pair of what appear to be common, ordinary sunglasses, but which are surely equipped with ultraviolet, infrared, night-vision capabilities.
“They’re Oaklies that I’ve spray painted green. These have kinda green reflective lenses. I have another pair with black lenses.”
“Oh,” I say.”
“Well, they’re fake Oaklies. I have real ones, too, but I didn’t want to paint them.”
“Well, yeah.”
“I
